Tuff
“I’m talking to my girl.”
“My flyers better not be in the Dumpster, nigger.” Winston spat. “You vote?”
Marvin shook his head and tried to gauge Winston’s mood. Tuffy looked calm, but he took a step back just in case. “Didn’t I register you at Papo’s spot?”
“Uh-huh, you stepped on my jumbo too.”
“That was an accident.”
Marvin pursed his lips and shifted them from side to side.
“It was, nigger.” Downcast about the memory of his lost crack rock and allowing Winston to punk him in front of his girlfriend, Marvin stared at the ground. “Listen, you go vote, I’ll give you your twenty dollars back.”
Marvin hurried through the entrance, the school’s thick metal doors closing slowly behind him. Winston turned to the girl. “That nigger not for you, hear me?” The girl remained standoffish, her hands on a set of bony hips cocked at an angle.
“She waiting for her tip,” Yolanda said.
“I should’ve never told Marvin I was giving him twenty dollars. I should’ve just threatened to beat his ass.” Tuffy handed the girl twenty dollars. She walked away, switching her nonexistent behind like an anorexic flapper full of whiskey.
“They growing up fast.”
“How much of that money you got left?”
“Enough for the movies.”
Marvin poked his head out from between the doors. “Tuff?”
“What you doin’ out here, man? You supposed to be voting!”
“I don’t know your real name.”
Winston chuckled. “This shit’s insane.” Climbing the stairs, he held the door open and said, “Foshay. Winston Foshay.”
The voting booths were downstairs in the cafeteria. Bendito, on election day duty, leaned against a soda machine, looking bored. He spotted Winston first. “Truce.”
“Truce.”
Inez stood behind the volunteers, looking over their shoulders like an exam proctor. Yolanda checked in and headed to an empty booth, leaving Jordy with his father.
“Lighten up on them, Ms. Nomura, dag.”
“Winston, you have no idea what the city will do to rig the election. I just came from the polls at P.S. 57 and they’ve got six cops standing out in front of the place. Now people in this neighborhood, especially the people who’d vote for you, wouldn’t walk through six policemen to get free beer, much less vote.”
“Come on, now, Ms. Nomura, it can’t be that serious.”
“Oh, it can’t be that serious? Before that I was at Carver projects next door to the old folks’ home. Do you know where the voting booths in Carver projects are located?”
“No.”
“They’re in the rec room on the eighth floor.”
“But the elevator in Carver ain’t never worked.”
“Exactly. You think those old people who were so proud of you at the debate are going to walk up eight flights of stairs to vote?”
So the volunteers wouldn’t hear, Winston mouthed, “How many votes I got?”
Inez flashed her fingers in sets of ten. It was either sixty-four or seventy-four, Winston having lost count.
With a sharp pinch Yolanda let him know the booth was ready. Winston, Jordy in his arms, entered the booth and closed the curtain behind him. He primed the ballot by moving the red lever to the right.
“Tuffy, that you?” It was Marvin whispering from the booth next to Winston’s.
“What up?”
“How you spell your name?”
“W-I-N-S-T-O—nigger can’t you read?” Exasperated, Winston began directing Marvin in a voice loud enough to lift the heads of the volunteers from their rosters. Following his own directions, he showed Marvin how to vote. “Put your finger on the top box in the first row of boxes.”
“Okay.”
“Go down to the third box.”
“All right.”
“See the little metal lever next to the box?”
“Yup.”
“Pull it down.”
“Done.”
“It’s a little black X in the box?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Pull the red handle to the left.” Without pulling his lever, Winston listened for the loud kerchunk of Marvin casting his vote. “There you go, son. You just voted.”
“That was easy. I should vote more often. When you running again?”
“Hopefully, never.”
“Winston.” Marvin’s voice had returned to its original hush. “About that twenty?”
“I’ll get you tomorrow. Come by the crib.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah, nigger.”
“Don’t be like the rest of them politicians, making promises you can’t keep.”
Winston didn’t worry about breaking any political promises. He figured there was no way for him to win.
Tuffy puzzled over the rest of the ballot. He examined the judge-ships, then voted for the surnames he thought sounded Jewish. He let Jordy flip the rest of the poll’s switches. In a local election with a pitifully low voter turnout, the baby’s whims would go a long way in determining the outcome of the assorted city offices, propositions, and referendums, the particulars of which Winston understood as much as Jordy. When he stepped out of the booth Yolanda looked so proud that for a moment he thought he had a chance to win.
Man, if I won, I wouldn’t even know where to show up for work.
23- THERE WAS A FATHER
The Foshays were sitting in the back row of a small art-house theater, sipping herbal teas and watching an Ozu film. The film, There Was a Father, was an early work and so absent of dialogue it might as well have been silent. From Yolanda’s perspective the slow-moving tale with its static camera work might as well have been a still photograph. “Winston, this movie’s awful. Ain’t shit happened since the kid drowned in the lake, and that was just a glimpse of an overturned boat in two feet of water.”
“Lots of things is happening. You just don’t how to look for them.”
“What, the old man getting even older? His son talking even less then he did when he was a boy? Long shots of stone statues? If nothing’s happening, then there’s nothing to miss.”
A brave viewer shushed the couple. Winston ignored the reprimand and explained the movie’s subtext to Yolanda. “You supposed to be a psychologist. Can’t you see the father going through some heavy shit? Nigger in crisis. He’s lonely. His wife been dead for who knows how long. His student died, he feels responsible, now he afraid to raise his son. The kid feels abandoned, but still got mad love for his pops. When you watch these shits it’s not about what’s happening, but what ain’t happening.” Onscreen, the father and son were fishing in a shallow stream, casting their lines, their poles moving in perfect sync, like windshield wipers. Without turning to face the boy, the father said, “I’m sending you away to school.” The boy stopped fishing while his father kept snapping his line into the water. “That’s deep as fuck,” Tuffy said in a loud voice. The audience launched a chorus of “Shhh”s and “Be quiet”s in his direction. But Winston was unshushable, and the chiding only encouraged him. “What you all crying about? None of y’all can’t understand Japanese no way.” His benshi-like exegesis continued unabated. “If you think about it, Landa, all I have to do is kill you and this movie be just like me and Jordy’s life. Father and son against the world.” Yolanda playfully slapped him across the jowls. A couple of patrons stormed out to alert the theater manager.
Winston looked at his beeper. Nothing from Fariq. He imagined Fariq and the others joyriding in the stolen Dodge, convinced the traffic helicopters flying overhead were the police radioing their whereabouts to the ground forces. They had rehearsed the plan of escape many times on the stoop: Drive by the airport, where the helicopters aren’t allowed to violate the airspace. If they weren’t near an airport, drive to the nearest college campus, park the car, and pile out. From five hundred feet up they’d look just like students.
Winston turned his
attention to the film. The father was on his deathbed, the now full-grown son at his side, fighting back tears for a man he never really knew. As the father passed away quietly, the son left the room and began crying uncontrollably.
Winston’s eyes were moistening when Yolanda whispered in his ear: “Smush and them all right?”
He shrugged.
“You crying?”
“Naw.”
The son and his new bride were on a train to their new lives. The son suggested to his wife that she invite her father and her brother to move in with them. The woman sobbed into her hands at her man’s kindhearted resoluteness. Yolanda shook her head in disgust. “This movie is a trip. Japanese people must cry at the drop of a hat. They could never live in the ghetto. They’d be a fucking wreck.”
“Ms. Nomura live on the block, and she do all right.”
“Well, when the next movie start, let’s move up to the front a little bit?”
“We can’t. I have to sit behind my seat.”
“What do you mean, your seat?”
“I’ll show you in a sec.”
When the houselights slowly brightened, Winston tapped a small metal plate stapled to the seat back in front of him. Yolanda ran her hands over the silver-plated tag and sighed, “Unbelievable.” Neatly engraved into the plaque was WINSTON FOSHAY—PATRON OF THE THEATER FOR CLASSIC CINEMA. “That’s where all Ms. Nomura’s money went? How much that cost?”
“Two thousand dollars.”
“Winston, how much money is left?”
“About fifteen hundred.”
“Where the rest go?”
“I don’t know—beer, your tuition. And I gave Spencer five thousand.”
Yolanda stood up. “For what?”
“He’s going to be my screenwriter.”
Reentering the theater, the pack of disgruntled patrons pointed Winston and Yolanda out to the manager. Yolanda sat down in a huff, ready to take out her anger on the manager. “That’s them. Those two right there.” The manager slid into the seat next to the troublemakers. “How you doing, Mr. Foshay? Good to see you again.” The men shook hands and Winston introduced Yolanda and Jordy. “How did you like the film?” the manager asked. “Have you seen the next one, What Did the Lady Forget? It’s about a henpecked husband and how he regains the upper hand in his marriage.”
Winston groaned, “Oh, man, I seen this one,” then raised an eyebrow at Yolanda, who, fed up, had pulled out a psychology text, deciding she could study during the intermission. “He hits her and she straightens right up.” Yolanda ignored him and highlighted a passage with her fluorescent orange marker.
Tuffy looked around suspiciously, making sure no one was eavesdropping, then tugged on the manager’s shirtsleeve. “Look, forget about Ozu for a second,” he whispered. “Listen to this idea … Cap’n Crunch—the Movie.” The manager bolted upright, covering his open mouth with his hand. “My God, that’s brilliant!”
Now it was Winston’s turn to shush for quiet. “Calm down, yo. I got a guy who writes for the paper working on the screenplay. If you want in, let me know.”
When the manager had left, Yolanda spoke without looking up. “You pitching that idea to every white man you know. And one of them going to steal your idea.”
“I know, but I don’t care—I just want want to see it get made. Look up at the screen and say, ‘Yo, there go my idea.’ ”
“Wouldn’t it be better to look at the screen and say, ‘There go my idea and I made crazy dollars off it’?”
“That’s why you going to college. You the one who going to be making the money in this family.”
“Shit.”
Winston stuck his head in her lap. “What you studying anyway?”
Yolanda tapped a finger on a chapter heading that read, “Perception Psychology—Gestalt.”
“What’s that?” Winston asked.
“It like studying why the brain perceives things a certain way. Like how come certain colors make us feel a certain way.”
With a sly expression Winston cupped her breast and said, “Like what is it about your fine ass that make me feel so good?”
“Something like that.”
“And who is Guest-alt?”
“Ge-stahlt.”
“Ge-stahlt.”
“Gestalt is a theory of perception. When we see something that is divided up in parts, we tend to see the whole thing, not the individual units. Say you order a large pizza pie, you see a circle not six triangles.”
“Eight.”
“However many.”
“Like when I look at those little bumps around your nipple I see a circle?”
“Exactly.” Winston started to get grabby and Yolanda elbowed him off her. As the houselights dimmed, he leaned back in his seat and lit a cigarette. “You know if I went to college what I’d take up?”
“What?”
“Space.”
Inez trudged up Second Avenue to Park East High School. It had been a long day. Streaks of sweat pasted her shirt to her spine and the small of her back. Her feet ached from hiking from poll to poll challenging voters and monitoring the clerks. She entered Room 202 in a dither. She brushed away the strands of hair stuck to her face and looked up at the clock—ten-thirty-five. Shit, I’m late. She’d sworn to herself there would be no ballot stuffing this election. That repeat of the great voter fraud of 1977 would not happen on her watch.
There were four other people in the room. At the teacher’s desk, behind the small pile of remaining ballots, sat the district inspector and a clerk. Seated at a student’s desk in the front row was one of German Jordan’s lackeys. And in a back corner of the room, Bendito Bonilla, still in uniform, was absentmindedly spinning a globe.
The inspector, a dumpy woman about Inez’s age, wore a lime-green pants suit and a string of black pearls. She picked up a ballot and said, “Collette Cox.” The clerk, probably her husband, pressed his pencil hard on the tally sheet, dutifully tabulating the vote. “Collette Cox,” he repeated, pulling on the crew neck of his T-shirt. “Hace calor, coño.”
Inez took a seat next to Jordan’s flunky.
“German Jordan.”
“German Jordan.”
The clerk’s pencil broke. The snap echoed for a long moment. The clerk got up to sharpen his pencil, and Inez interrupted the proceedings. “May I ask your name?”
“Lourdes Molina.”
“Ms. Molina, may I request an announcement of the results as they now currently stand?”
“You’ll have to wait until all the votes are counted.”
The hireling hunched over the piece of paper on his desk like an overachieving pupil unwilling to let anyone cheat off him. Inez whistled, looked at her fingernails, then snatched the sheet of paper. It was an official tally sheet missing only the bottom right-hand corner, which was still in the manservant’s hand. Inez scanned the columns. The clerk returned to his seat and the count resumed.
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
It looked to be a two-person race. Quickly, she counted the votes. Wait a minute.
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
Holy shit.
“German Jordan.”
“German Jordan.”
Inez handed the sheet back to the minion, and took out a thick mimeographed copy of the State of New York—Election Law; Rules and Regulations.
“German Jordan.”
“German Jordan.”
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
Tuffy wasn’t winning, but it was close. She looked up at the desk. The pile of votes was shrinking. There looked to be only five or six left, and a stack of about ten absentee votes still in unopened envelopes.
“Wilfredo Cienfuegos.”
“Wilfredo Cienfuegos.”
“Margo Tellos.”
“Margo Tellos.”
The absentee ballots reminded her of Winston’s Rikers Island wh
istle-stop, a prison cot serving as a campaign stump.
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
But even if all of the remaining votes were for Winston, they wouldn’t be enough for him to win. However, Inez didn’t know if Jordan had enough votes for a plurality. She hurriedly flipped through the book, looking for the requirements for a run-off election. “German Jordan.”
“German Jordan.”
“German Jordan.”
“German Jordan.”
Fuck. There was no run-off for City Council seats. It was majority wins.
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
The inspector slapped the last ballot down on the desk. And with a sharp fingernail slit open the first absentee ballot.
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
The envelope fell to the floor, sliding under Inez’s seat. There had to be a loophole somewhere, but there were almost four hundred pages of picayune New York State election law to pore over. She needed more time.
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
Inez was about to ask if the total number of votes counted matched the number of ballots cast but she didn’t have the energy. She looked down at the envelope under her desk. The return address was for Rikers. She smiled, sat back in her chair and closed the book of election laws with a satisfying thud. Instinctively, she reached into her bag for her bottle of rum. She kissed the label, and took a long sip.
“Winston Foshay.”
“Winston Foshay.”
The rum went down easy. Inez lightly stamped her feet, enjoying the tingle in her toes. For a grassroots campaign in a community with no grass, Team Tuffy had done well. Now all that had to be done was to make sure Tuffy would live to see his twenty-third summer. Just one more sip. Inez raised the bottle to her lips, whispering a toast. “Gambate, Winston Foshay, gambate.”
Paul Beatty, Tuff
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