Tuff
Somehow, one boy, Dark, a fresh-off-the-Greyhound-bus émigré from Duarte, California, left the robbery with pearls of errant masturbatory ejaculate in his hot combed hair. Eager to diffuse the taunts of the other boys and prove that his thick pigtails were “gangster” and not “sissified,” he backtracked four blocks and found the victim reporting the crime to two patrolmen. Ignoring the officers, Dark began pummeling the man, shouting, “You got sperm in my perm, now I’m full of germs.” Winston was rolling on the sidewalk in a fit of laughter when the police handcuffed him. He snickered all the way to the police station: “AIDS in my braids, now I’ll never get laid!” Giggled through the fingerprinting: “Nut on my haircut, like I been butt-fucked!” The city went through a roll of film before finally settling on a mug shot of him sporting an Uncle Ben smile, tears running down his face.
Things ceased to be funny when the cops refused to believe that a boy Winston’s size could be thirteen, and since budget cuts had made night court a liberal memory, he’d have the weekend on Rikers to prove his identity. It didn’t take long. Winston disembarked from the bus, suffered through the indignities of a strip search, and strolled into building C-64. There, playing toilet-paper checkers on a bunk underneath the clock, was a double-jumping birth certificate: his father. Father and son played checkers with rolled-up balls of toilet tissue, arguing about who would call the wife, the mother. “I haven’t spoken to you or her in three years, I didn’t go to your sister’s funeral, so phone her, boy.”
“Fuck you. King me, bitch.”
Unlike Winston’s father, Patrice Foshay kept her promises. The last one, delivered behind an ironing-board pulpit, was: “Winston, you keep getting into trouble, I’m not going to kick you out the house, I’m going to leave my damn self and you’re not coming with. You’ll be living on your own. Understand?” Monday morning Mrs. Foshay posted bail on the two delinquents. She dropped Clifford off at his girlfriend’s, raised a “Power to the People!” fist in the air, and moved to Atlanta, assuring Winston she’d send rent and food money until he turned eighteen.
It took Winston two years to move his belongings into his mother’s bedroom. When the phone rang every two weeks at precisely ten o’clock, after the black sitcoms went off the air, his mother would ask why he couldn’t be more like “those nice boys on TV.”
Winston was just finishing the tale of his dysfunctional upbringing with a blasphemous “Fuck a Cosby” when an immense marble-white yacht christened Jubilee in bold black letters sailed alongside the tour boat. With sleek helicopters perched bow and stern and a radar dish spinning above the bridge, the boat looked more like a war vessel than a luxury craft. “So you’re all alone?” Yolanda asked. Winston shrugged, his gaze cast out toward the bay. Yolanda knew the right thing to do was to put her head on Winston’s pillowy shoulder and say, “No, you aren’t.” But she had long since learned to let the man make the first conciliatory move. Instead she filled the uncomfortable silence with cynicism: “Every nigger’s father say they was in the Panthers. And if they was, they didn’t do shit but hand out flyers.”
“Crazy? Nigger was down.” Winston flipped open his wallet and showed her a photo of a goateed black man dressed beret-to-boots in black, crouched behind a Volkswagen Beetle, his leather-gloved hands positioned over the hood, aiming a shotgun at some unseen enemy of the Revolution. Yolanda grabbed the wallet and fawned over the Polaroid. “Yo, your pop groovier-than-a-motherfucker. Look at those pointy kicks and the tight-ass straight legs.” She flipped through the rest of the wallet, pausing at the food-stamp ID card to verify that Winston wasn’t lying about his age. She studied the more recent photos of Latino and black boys grouped around firearms, posing in front of London-gray school lockers. Interspersed with the group shots were portraits of the same solemn-faced teens at the steering wheel of the communal vehicle or the local arcade, looking directly into the camera, holding the pistols to their temples. Winston introduced the boys on the block by proxy: “Rude, Kooky, Shorty-Wop, Point Blank—right there’s my ace, Fariq.” Going through the contents of Winston’s wallet, Yolanda realized what made him attractive, other than his cute button nose. He was comfortable with who he was and wasn’t. You don’t meet too many casual black people. Winston was honest—maybe not with the rest of the world, but he was honest with her and himself. He didn’t embellish or rationalize his exploits, talking in pipe-dream slang about him and the crew “coming up,” “blowing up,” “bubbling,” and “living large.” No sob-story brooding about inner-city lassitude—“You can’t understand, it be mad crazy stress on a nigger”—as if Yolanda were on the outside looking in on a black man’s world. She understood self-pity and self-doubt; there was no need to talk over her dookie-braided head.
Yolanda tapped a purple-and-pink fingernail on the food-stamp ID and said, “You mind?”
“No, everybody at the store know me. Go ahead.” As she slipped the card from the plastic holder, Yolanda noticed there was another photo tucked underneath it. Oh, my competition, she thought; then she noticed it was a picture of a gray-haired woman who looked to be in her late fifties. She was standing in front of the Apollo Theater. Snuggled next to her, a young Winston, his nappy head resting atop her pageboy.
“Who’s this Oriental lady?”
“Asian.”
“Who is she?”
“Ms. Nomura. She’s my unofficial guardian. She looked out for a nigger after Moms jetted.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Yolanda handed the billfold back to Winston and turned her attention to the partygoers dancing on the Jubilee’s poop deck, one ear cocked for the explanation. “Yolanda, you ain’t got nothing to be salty about—Ms. Nomura like my auntie. She live right across the street, knew my father when he was in the Panthers. I told you, she’s like my second mother. If you jealous of a sixty-year-old, you got issues.”
Yolanda folded her arms and peered out the porthole window. “Fucking boat move too slow.” Winston pulled a bright orange life jacket from underneath the bench and carefully slipped it over Yolanda’s head, fastening the buckles across her chest and knotting the cotton straps behind her back. Yolanda’s shoulders visibly relaxed. Oh, this fat motherfucker smooth, she thought.
Winston flamboyantly doffed his jacket and cloaked it over Yolanda’s shoulders. He was entering player mode and about to unleash his rap, the rap being the black man’s equivalent of a lion tamer’s whip crack to straighten out a headstrong feline, or a Buddhist monk’s koan to further confuse a disciple. What’s the sound of one man rapping? “Yolanda, stop fronting. I can tell by your reaction you in a brother’s corner. That’s on point, but let’s not play no games. We all need to be rescued to some extent. You going to school, that’s rescuing yourself. Just seeing a strong black woman such as yourself going head-up with the bullshit makes me wonder what can I do to straighten my game out. So listen here, I ain’t now, and never will, trip off nothing in your life that makes your life better. That’s not a promise, that’s factoid, baby. Like the sky is blue, the summer’s hot, and you fine as hell. No question. Ms. Nomura is like this life jacket, kept me afloat when times was hard. But I was just bobbing up and down in the stormy sea of the streets. You’re my rescue ship plucking me out of the water—all ahoy-and-shiver-me-timbers like.”
Yolanda put the palm of her hand in Winston’s face. “Save it. You’re right, I like you—more than I should, but let’s not get into it tonight, we got the rest of our lives to kiss and make up. Let’s be carefree, like those white folks on that boat. Look, they kicking it.”
Winston reached into his backpack, pulled out a frosted black bottle of Freixenet champagne, two paper cups, a brown teddy bear with a hot-pink ribbon knotted around its neck, and a Christmas card. “Shit, we kicking it.”
Sipping her champagne, Yolanda opened her handmade card. On the cover was a surprisingly decent watercolor of a black couple sitting on a mountainside outcropping, hugging and kissing to the amusement of a brood of sad-eyed Dis
neyesque forest animals. On the inside, written in twiggish block lettering, was the following inscription:
The essence of beauty is —
[pocket mirror]
you.
Yolanda saw her reflection framed by the sentimental bromide and succumbed to the wanton manipulation that is romance. With a cheery “Clink,” she touched paper cups with Winston. “Let’s make a toast,” Yolanda said, trying to hide her wistfulness. “A toast to love. A toast to the man who got me open with no promises, no handsome-muscle-flexing tight-butt-wiggling, and no money.”
Winston rubbed his chin, trying to determine if he’d been insulted or not, then raised his cup. “Then a toast to the woman who loves me for me, though she don’t know me from the next man.”
“Fuck the next man.”
“A toast to a woman who knows what she wants.”
Yolanda and Winston unclenched from that first kiss, tongues numb with champagne, sex organs swollen with lust, and the axes of their young worlds permanently tilted. Or as Winston so delicately phrased it, wiping lipstick from his mouth, “Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.”
“How did I fall for that bullshit, Tuffy? ‘Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.’ It’s all jibbity-jibbity, because you always drunk, you wino.” Yolanda was still carrying on, and Winston found himself on the living-room sofa, obediently enduring his censure. Listening to Yolanda denigrate him was like going to church Easter morning. He didn’t want to do it, but he sat still out of obligation, hands folded in his lap, hoping his headache would prevent the sermon from seeping into his brain.
As Yolanda edged toward the bookshelf, Winston froze. “Come on, Landa, don’t.” Yolanda’s substantial archives consisted of well-kept stacks of Essence, Ebony, and Chocolate Singles magazines crammed with articles entitled “Hypnotize with Pumpkin Pie,” “Atlantis, Unicorns, Black Love—Fact or Fiction?” and “Ten Good Qualities About Black Men Other than Penis Size.” Next to the periodicals were the self-help books, all written by short-Afroed women from Philadelphia: Sisters Doing It for Themselves—How to Masturbate to an African Orgasm; The Black Women’s Guide to Finding a Real Man; and Yolanda’s bible, Nigger, Please Please Me.
What bothered Winston about Yolanda’s choice of reading material wasn’t all the doctoral-cum-beauty-shop research—anthropology seeking the missing link between prehistoric Stepin Fetchit man and the genetically engineered Denzel Washington that fossilized him, or the parascientific diaries that monsterized him. I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into this lifeless thing at my feet.… I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open—behold, I, Dr. Eula Frankenstein-Barnes, author of The Good Black Man: Some Assembly Required, have created life!
What irked Winston was that Yolanda started buying this trash after they’d married, when the relationship was problem-free, at least in his mind. When Yolanda sat up in bed after sex reading The Black Woman’s Guide to Finding a Real Man, he’d explode. “What, I’m not a real man? How come there’s never any doubt about you being a real woman?” … And I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! Yolanda would try to calm Winston with a lecture about the problems unique to black-on-black love. Winston argued that there were no differences between black, white, Puerto Rican, or kangaroo relationships. “Problems is problems,” he’d say. “The difference is, black couples have their bedroom behavior studied by every stuck-up bitch with a degree and a word processor.”
Yolanda blithely ran her hands along the paperback bindings of her library, drawing energy from the fiction section, like an Irish-woman kissing the Blarney Stone. Winston swore on the graves of every relative he could think of that he’d change his behavior. Pulling a slim volume entitled Pimp-Slapped to Oblivion off the shelf, Yolanda opened to page 1 and cleared her throat. Winston cringed, grabbing the arm of the sofa and awaiting the literary castor oil. The words “Clockwork Orange” involuntarily escaped from his mouth. Yolanda looked up from her text. “Tuffy, I’ll work your clock. After I read this, you’ll know what time it is.” Yolanda began reading in a voice so strong it pressed Winston into the upholstery. He was feeling a special kinship with the useless button in the middle of the pillow cushion. “ ‘Chapter One.’ ” Yolanda licked her lips. “ ‘Giorgio Johnson knew better than to disrespect the pussy.’ ” Winston stood up and objected with a stamp of his foot. “There ain’t no niggers named Giorgio!” Yolanda sat him back down with the cut-eyed look. Winston wondered why he hadn’t married a woman who solved word-search puzzles on the train instead of reading this trash. Yolanda continued: “ ‘The pussy is mighty-mighty, and Giorgio Johnson was letting it all hang out, his supplication total. His prickly tongue spelunked into the nether regions of my hot, drippy pubes.…’ ” As Yolanda read, Jordy crawled along the floor toward Winston and latched onto his ankle like a koala bear to a eucalyptus tree. “Shit is awful, isn’t it?” Winston said quietly to the boy, lifting him to his knee and dandling him about. “Ever notice that none of the female characters have names? They’re called Sister Child, Mama Doll, Cousin Girl, Queen Auntie Woman Purity Love. All this we-are-family, sisterhood bullshit. Fucking books should come with needlepoint and kinte-cloth headwraps. Don’t worry, boy, I’ll read you some Pippi Longstocking later.” Jordy responded with a toothless smile. “Ah, you like that, hunh? You remember my girl Pippi don’t wear no panties.” Covering his son’s ears, Winston gave thought to countering Yolanda’s redemption literature with the authors in his canon. He imagined tearing the book from his wife’s hands, pinning her to the carpet, and haranguing her womanist sensibilities with some macho, gonadal writing. A dose of Iceberg Slim’s or Donald Goines’s pimp/ho prose would restore some gender-role balance to the relationship.
“Winston!” Yolanda yelled.
“Hunh?”
“Look at the baby!”
Jordy had burrowed under Winston’s shirt, suckling and kneading his father’s fatty left breast. Yolanda was livid. “See, boy a year old and he don’t even know what parent is what.”
“He know I’m his father,” Winston said, wiping the spittle off his nipple.
“Then he don’t know what a father is for, because you be gallivanting the streets at all hours.” Exasperated, Yolanda massaged the bridge of her nose. “Winston, what are you going to do?”
Winston said nothing and eyed Jordy, who was straddling his thigh, for manly approbation. But the look on his son’s face seemed to say, “Yeah, nigger, what are you going to do?” The child’s forlorn expression triggered some handyman impulse in the father. Winston had an urge to fix a leaky faucet, sweep the sidewalk in front of his building, maybe check to see if the window guards were all securely fastened to their mounts. He’d been warned that having a kid would change him. Make him more responsible. Less impulsive. Winston had vowed that fatherhood wouldn’t change him, at least not permanently. He knew for most young fuck-up dads the post-partum conscientiousness lasted a year. After that they reverted to the old ways with even more zealotry than before: I gots mouths to feed, brother, mouths to fucking feed. So what if the individual changed—what did it matter if his circumstances remained the same? An angel in hell was still in hell. He removed the Wilfredo Cienfuegos handbill from his pocket. He read the tag line: Stop the Violence. Why?
Yolanda ran her hands through Winston’s greasy hair and kissed him on the cheek. “You staying up?” Winston nodded. “Leave me some money on the dresser for the movies, okay?”
“Just don’t read Jordy that Pippi Longstocking—turn the boy into a white-girl lover.” Yolanda scratched the back of her head. “I can trust you with him tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
“No drinking, no reefer. Jordy is your son, not some nigger you know from your program.”
“It only happened once, go to sleep. One damn tattoo.”
As she turned to leave, Winston grabbed her by the sash, reeled her in like a yo-yo, and puckered up for a good-nig
ht kiss. Yolanda obliged. Winston’s lips mole-hopped from Yolanda’s mouth to her breasts with soggy pecks. Flicking a crusty nipple with the tip of his tongue, he covered the spigot with his mouth and took a long pull. A streamlet of milk coated his tongue. Yolanda moaned in soreness and pleasure. Winston sat back, a globule of milk pooled in the corner of his mouth. “You had arroz y abichuela con pulpo from Dalia’s for dinner, didn’t you?” Yolanda shook her head in disbelief and boxed his ear with a solid smack. Winston raised his arms, basking in self-adoration. “I know my breast milk. I should be on TV. I could suck women’s titties and say what they ate for breakfast. Now that would be a good-ass job. ‘Scrambled eggs with cheese and onions, blueberry pancakes, lightly buttered.’ ”
“Be careful with him tomorrow.”
“One tattoo.”