Tuff

  Yawning, Yolanda disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. “Good night, Tuffy.”

  “Don’t be dreaming about Giorgio Johnson.”

  Winston adjusted Jordy on his pelvis and pointed the remote control at the dark television set. The screen lit up with a satisfying instantaneous pop. A frail-looking white boy was playing catch with an offscreen partner. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Two features dominated the boy’s sullen face: a set of knobby cheekbones and a pair of fly-wing-thin varicose eyelids. His shriveled head was covered with a baseball cap five sizes too big. The camera zoomed out and someone lobbed the kid a baseball, which, using two hands, he clumsily caught in the palm of his brand-new mitt. After tossing the ball back, the boy turned to the camera to make his plea. “Hello, my name is Kenny Mendelsson. I’m ten years old, but I have the brittle hips of an eighty-seven-year-old woman and the hairline of a chemotherapy patient.”

  “You got a sense of humor too,” Winston said, turning to Jordy. “That nigger got—what’s that disease called? Geezeritis or some shit.” Winston gingerly lifted each of Jordy’s limbs, checking behind the joints, in the concave pits, for skin blemishes or irritations that might be a sign of some such congenital malady. “I feel you, G,” Winston said to the television. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to get old before your time.” He ran his hand over his son’s back, reading the ridges and fatty folds in his soft skin like a familiar braille. Winston stopped at the right clavicle, where the lizard-green block letters embossed on Jordy’s Kahlua-brown skin read, DA’ BOMB. He sighed. Da’ Bomb. Man, nobody don’t even say ‘Da’ Bomb’ no more. Hopefully, it’ll fade as he gets older. And anyway, these light-skinned babies get darker when they get to be about five or so.

  The next public-service announcement was for the Big Brothers program. A bald-headed black actor Winston was familiar with from some bit parts in a long-canceled television show walked down a tenement row in measured, authoritative strides. Speaking in a dinner-theater baritone, the actor strode up to a young black boy in a striped polo shirt. He clamped his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Providing guidance in an environment bereft of direction is the moral mandate, nay, the incumbent duty of African-American men. Isn’t that right, Clarence?” Clarence looked up at the man’s chin and smiled. “Yes, sir!”

  “Show them what I taught you.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Once upon a midnight dreary,” Young Clarence began reciting an extremely abridged version of Poe’s “The Raven,” doing a laudable job with just the slightest hesitation at the word “surcease,” and delivering the last lines with the appropriate morbid panache: “And my soul from out that shadow that lies / floating on the floor, / Shall be lifted—nevermore!” Clarence took a deep bow and the actor, his eyes welled with tears, looked into the camera and said, “Isn’t he the little Eliza Doolittle? Make a black boy’s dreams reality, call now.” Winston concentrated on memorizing the number sailing across the bottom of the screen.

  Serenaded by the canonical poesy, Jordy had fallen asleep. Winston pressed his ear to his son’s heaving chest and listened to his heartbeat. “You know, little nigger, you was almost fatherless today? A hot second away from growing up to be one of those hard-to-handle motherfuckers. Having to listen to your mother whine, ‘Oh, ever since your daddy died you’ve been impossible.’ Yeah, I saved you from much grief. You’d be crying at night, cursing me because I left you. But I ain’t going nowhere, dog. I got a plan to get my shit together. Put all my caca in one big pile.”

  Lifting his right pantleg, Winston scratched the surface of his tattoo: a cherry-red heart, ventricles and all, looking as if it could really pump blood, sitting atop a flaming Grecian torch, coiled concertina wire binding the disparate items together. The tattoo sat about an inch above his ankle and just below the tan line created by cotton crew socks—next to his palms and the bottoms of his feet, the lightest places on his body. Above the heart, in an elegantly smooth cursive, flowing like a solitary ribbon trailing a Red Square gymnast on May Day, was the epigram: BRENDA—I KNOW YOU DIDN’T LEAVE ME ON PURPOSE. I AIN’T MAD AT YOU. Winston told the tattoo artist that he wanted the words legible. “You know them notes in the old black-and-white movies? The star never opens the note and starts squinting, and moving the paper every-which-away, going, ‘What the fuck does this say?’ ”

  Winston pressed gently on the borders of his handiwork, as if the skin were still reddened and tender. “What you think about an uncle, Jordy? Get a Big Brother who’ll teach me how to spell, so I can be a movie critic. No, wait. That’s out. You never see no black movie critics. Matter of fact, you never see niggers talk about anything that don’t involve other niggers—well, there’s that fag weatherman on Channel 7. ‘Scattered clouds and drizzles through early morning, oh joy.’ But that’s the move though. Get a designated nigger in my life. An educated motherfucker who’ll provide me with some focus and guidance and shit. Channel 7 will have a real nigger doing the weather. ‘Yo, it’s brick out there today. Cold as hell. You niggers with security jobs dress warm or sneak in the lady. Better yet, quit.’ And Jordy, whatever I learn from my Big Brother I’m going to pass down to your ass. Boy, your father going to be one of those pipe-smoking, Wall Street Journal–reading motherfuckers, because I’m tired of being one of these bummy Raisin in the Sun niggers.”

  4- THE STOOP

  The clicks and buzzes of the lottery machine conveyed an almost telluric importance as it hiccuped the pastel-colored tickets into the operator’s hand one by one. It was as if its grinding sounds somehow helped to keep the world spinning on its axis, or least the neighborhood from collapsing into total ruin. “Okay, 2-2-1 dollar box, 8-4-7 dollar straight, 3-7-3-1 both ways a dollar.” The operator dutifully punched in Winston’s numbers. “5-2-2-4 dollar straight, fifty-cent box.” Yolanda knocked the operator’s hand away from the panel. “One second, Denesh. Winston, where did you get these numbers from?”

  “I told you, I’m changing my life. And I’m starting with changing my numbers.”

  “But you’re changing my numbers.”

  “Our numbers, baby.”

  “How much did you put in the pot?”

  “Two dollars.”

  “Okay, then you get to change two dollars’ worth of numbers.”

  Yolanda handed Winston a stubby green pencil and a computer punch card and shoved him away from the counter. “Winston, fill out this week’s Lotto, and stop messing with my numbers.” He pretended to reel from Yolanda’s push and stumbled toward the rack of vacuum-sealed pastries. “I hate these stubby fucking pencils, they don’t have any erasers. If I fill in ‘44’ instead of ‘45,’ I might fuck up the rest of my life because these stupid pencils for midgets don’t have erasers.”

  Yolanda laughed. “You thought you were slick, ‘5-2-2-4 dollar straight, fifty-cent box.’ Like I wouldn’t care because it was only a fifty-cent play. Hoo boy, between you and this Big Brother crap and changing my numbers.”

  “Almost had your ass, though.”

  “You didn’t have shit.”

  “Shit, for a second you was like, ‘Hmmm, I like when my man is assertive. Listen to my nigger, “Fifty-cent box.” Doing his thing.’ ” Winston stuffed a cupcake into his mouth and hurriedly filled in his application for a worry-free future. Fariq and the rest of the gang were waiting.

  Fariq sat atop his concrete rostrum, the top stair of his 109th Street stoop, poring over a magazine. His eyebrows gull-winged in concentration, Fariq spat business jargon from his mouth like the morning remnants of last night’s tortilla chips. “Earnings per share, decent. Median operating margin, about average. Market value, twenty-four-point-six mil. Profits as of … nothing special. Stockholder’s equity, fifteen-point-seven percent, no shit?” Fariq’s girlfriend, a thin, swaybacked woman named Nadine Primo, slid in closer to him, deposited her chin on his shoulder, and, pointing to the page, said, “This one has a nice employee-to-sales ra
tio.”

  The three men lounging on the stairs below were growing impatient. “What the fuck you talking about, Smush?” asked Armello Solcedo, a lanky half-Dominican, half–Puerto Rican. “I didn’t come out here to waste my Sunday watching you read a magazine, entiendes?” Jabbing a thumb at their skeptic friends, Nadine said to Fariq, “Show them.” Fariq removed the magazine from his lap and, with the infinite patience of a kindergarten teacher for his charges, panned it slowly past the blank faces of his boys. “My brothers, this is what we need to be about this summer—major dollars. Economic self-reliance.”

  “What the fuck you tripping on?” Asked Winston, rolling down the sidewalk, hand in hand with Yolanda, cradling Jordy like a football. “Your crippled ass still reading them kung fu mags? I don’t know why you all excited, they been printing the same articles since I was five. ‘Bruce Lee’s One-Inch Punch and Other Powerful Jeet Kun Do Techniques Revealed Here—for the First Time Ever.’ With a picture of him doing a one-finger push-up.”

  He stopped at the base of the stoop. Every important decision Winston had ever made had been made while sitting on this stoop, from saying yes to his first beer to deciding not to ask Yolanda to get an abortion. He looked over at the kids playing stickball in the street. A boy who had just finished legging out a triple used the last of his breath to gloat in front of the third baseman: “I’ll hit your pitcher all motherfucking day!” If all the world’s a stage, the stoop at 258 East 109th Street was his proscenium of Ghetto Tragedy. Yolanda guided her sheepish man by the elbow. “C’mon, Tuffy, let’s sit.” The couple, dressed alike from sneaker to fisherman’s hat in matching green-and-blue-striped cabana suits, worked their way up the stairs, gingerly stepping over and around the bramble of knobby knees and spindly legs until they settled in a space next to the wrought-iron rail reserved for them. Pleased to see them, the crew, excepting Fariq, greeted Winston and Yolanda with handshakes and cheek kisses. Fariq frowned, looking down and away from the tardy pair. Winston drew his friend’s attention with a smack atop his head. “Never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow.”

  “Man, you an asshole.”

  Winston continued, his voice taking on a clichéd Chinese lilt. “It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon: don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

  “Enough with Enter the Dragon bullshit. You late. And this ain’t a copy of Karate Illustrated.” Fariq held the magazine in the crook of his arm like Moses on the mount holding the commandments. “This is the June issue of Black Enterprise.”

  “No, not the June issue, my bad,” Winston said, sarcastically dipping his head in apology. “What so special about the June issue, son?”

  “The June issue lists the one hundred largest black businesses. If we going to make some real money this summer, we need some inspiration, and here”—Fariq slapped the magazine with the back of his hand—“are one hundred moneymaking entities run by punctual niggers who’ve achieved something in this doggy-dog world.”

  “ ‘Dog-eat-dog,’ ” Yolanda corrected.

  “Don’t mock me, Yolanda,” Fariq said, continuing his harangue, “Money and Allah are the keys—the keys that open the chains wrapped around our hearts and minds. The Koran teaches one how to be a locksmith, and money allows one to buy the tools a locksmith needs. Then you can make the key to freedoms.”

  Yolanda’s lip curled into a lioness’s snarl. “ ‘Freedoms,’ the plural?”

  “Hell yeah, the motherfucking plural.” Fariq rubbed his chin, searching for an example. Finding it, his hands chopped the air, accenting each word. “When Lincoln gave the slaves their freedom, singular, could they vote? Own property? Fuck who they wanted to fuck? No. So it must be more than one freedom.”

  “So now it’s ‘the right to truths, justices, and the pursuit of happinesses.’ ”

  “College fucking you up, girl. What’s your major, anyway?”

  “Undecided.”

  “See, them crackers bending one of your free wills right there. Undecided. Black people ain’t got time to be undecided. And at the college you go to it’s only two majors anyway, undecided and tricknology.”

  “Trick who?”

  “Anyway, we, and niggers in general, need to keep everything in the community—lie black, die black, and buy black. Emulate the Jew.”

  Growing incensed, more so at Fariq’s rhetorical illogic than at his religious insensitivity, Yolanda glowered at him and asked, “ ‘The Jew,’ singular?”

  “Yes, singular. Jew.”

  “You mean there’s one huge Superjew out there?”

  “You know what I mean, Little Miss Grammar. The Jew is like that—Tuffy, what’s the name of that three-headed monster that be fighting Godzilla?”

  “Ghidrah,” answered Winston.

  “The Jew is like Ghidrah—three heads, one body working toward the same goal: kicking Godzilla’s ass.”

  “And who’s Godzilla—the black man, I suppose?”

  Fariq rolled his rheumatoid eyes at Winston. “I told you we shouldn’t have brought the women. Women don’t know shit about making money.”

  “Fuck you, Smush,” Yolanda said, looking to Nadine for gender solidarity.

  Nadine shrugged her shoulders. “He’s right.”

  “You know I’m right. Moneybags will back me up. Ain’t that right, Moneybags?”

  At the mention of his name, Moneybags, momentarily aroused from his stupor, sat upright. His soiled and skinny frame was crammed into the width of one mid-stoop stair, knees folded tightly into his chest, and the spongy souls of his flip-flops overlapping the stair like owl talons around a redwood bough. “Ain’t that right, Moneybags?” Fariq repeated. Mummified from a life of failed business ventures, crack, and old age, Moneybags stiffly raised his paper-bagged pint in agreement. “Ain’t but two bitches ever made money on they own—Oprah Winfrey and—I forget the other bitch’s name. Bitch invented the hot comb or some shit.”

  It was through Moneybags’s curbside lessons in big business that Fariq had learned to decipher the stock pages, when to lowball a buyer, and if he were dumb enough to pay taxes, how to leap through the gaping loopholes. All Winston knew about the supposed oracle of commerce was that he didn’t dress as sharply as he had in the past. Moneybags made his early fortune selling milk-crate seating for a dollar a pop to overflow crowds during the legendary basketball tournaments held at Rucker and West Fourth Street parks each summer. Despite Fariq’s claims that Moneybags possessed infinite economic knowledge, Winston had never seen him offer any jewels of his wisdom other than the semiprecious baubles he’d snatched off the necks of groggy subway riders. Only once had he heard Moneybags engage in a coherent conversation. Two years ago, upon leaving a retrospective of Italian comedy at Lincoln Center, Winston spotted Moneybags’s showroom, a one-man open-air bazaar on the corner of Broadway and Sixty-sixth Street. Dealing in vacuum-wrapped electronics, Moneybags hopscotched over his smorgasbord of off-brand home phones, answering machines, and cassette decks to barter with the tourists. Winston was about to nod a covert hello when a potbellied black man pointed at a video camera box sealed in seamless cellophane. “How much?” the man asked, picking up the medium-sized carton, examining each side as if the sharpness of the corners conveyed something of the product therein. Moneybags smirked, answering the buyer sotto voce, “Crazy?”

  “Naw, man, how much for the camcorder?”

  “This merchandise ain’t for the brothers,” Moneybags said, grabbing the box from the man’s hands and placing it behind his back as if he were a suitor hiding a bouquet of roses, searching for an excuse to renege on an ugly blind date. The man backed off, a glint of understanding spreading across his face. “Your kindness is appreciated, brother.” Walking downtown, the portly man took one last look at Moneybags haggling with the bargain hunters. He guessed the tourists would be returning to Munich, Osaka, and Rome, arms laden with gifts: transistorless radios and red clay bricks wrapped in ne
wsprint.

  Government attempts to revitalize minority small business through free trade agreements and tax breaks had failed Moneybags. He was no longer a one-man electronics warehouse. The effects of trickle-down economics had reduced him to peddling ghetto bric-a-brac: stolen cheese, browning meats, and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. It wasn’t uncommon for East Harlem residents to see Moneybags zigzagging across Lexington Avenue hawking a small bottle of red cough suppressant: “I got that Robitussin, baby. Got that Robitussin. Cough syrup. Cough syrup.”

  Today it was flimsy wooden picture frames. Moneybags placed a heavy mahogany frame around his neck. He was preparing to leave. As he squared his shoulders toward Fariq, the sun silhouetted Moneybags’s dark profile against the partly cloudy sky. For a moment, the sickly sheen on his face and the graying mustache made him look like an oil portrait in the boardroom of a multinational corporation come to life. Moneybags excused himself. “I need to be going. Apparently none of you boys has any crack rock. But if I hear anything happening where you all might make some loot, I’ll let you know.” The proud CEO of nothing walked away from the stoop, steering a metal pushcart, one wobbly rear wheel alternately turning and sticking.

  “I admire that motherfucker,” said Fariq. He shouted at the slouched back of the wiry tradesman, “Moneybags, stay up, God.”

  “Why do you admire him?” Armello asked.

  “Nigger could be out here selling drugs, doing something negative like the rest of us, but he’s down with the downtrodden, bottle hustling, redeeming aluminum cans and souls at the same time. Allah be praised. All praise due.”

  “Fariq deep today,” commented Nadine.

  Fariq began thumping on the magazine again. “This list is going to give us some ideas. This summer we ain’t fucking around, it’s time to build the foundation. Let’s get this money, hear me?”

  Armello, sitting to Winston’s right, said, “Word is bond, son. What the first company on the list, yo? Bet money it’s a record company.”