Tuff

  Winston turned, threatening to smack Armello. Armello flinched. “Stop it, Tuff.”

  “Record company—you thinking small, yo,” said Winston. “Niggers own bigger shit than a record company.”

  “I know. I know. You right.”

  Armello was the only member of the crew ever to have any of what they considered “real” money. As a high-school senior Armello was a twenty-year-old all-city shortstop and fourth-round draft choice of the Toronto Blue Jays. To boost his worth, Armello’s agent had him shave three years off his age and pretend he was a seventeen-year-old hurricane refugee who spoke no English and grew up on the dirt roads of Barahona playing ball with a chocolate milk carton for a baseball mitt. The ruse worked. The Blue Jays, thinking they’d found the next barefoot phenom, offered Armello one hundred thousand dollars to play minor-league baseball in Knoxville, Tennessee. Five years, four hundred ninety-two errors, a career batting average of .074, two hushed-up charges of statutory rape, and one very public conviction for battery of a third-base umpire later, all Armello had to show for the bonus money was a worthless laminated baseball card of himself, the lime-green Kawasaki Ninja parked a few feet away, and an overabundance of I’m-not-going-to-blow-my-next-opportunity determination. “I’m with you, Smush, we can do this. All we need to do is focus. Shit, I remember playing Chattanooga in late August, we were down two–one, bottom of the sixth, man on second, two out, I steps to the plate—”

  “Strike three!” Yolanda yelled, jabbing a fist past Armello’s chest and pointing at an imaginary dugout somewhere near the El Tropical social club. “Armello, you ain’t giving no Hall of Fame speech, so shut the fuck up.”

  While Armello sulked, Yolanda impatiently extended an upturned palm to Fariq and said, “Well, nigger, you got the floor, the steps, whatever.” Fariq looked over at Winston. “Damn, nigger, you need to check your girl.”

  Winston shrugged. “What you waiting for, Smush, a drumroll? Get on with it.”

  “The number-one black company in America is”—Fariq paused, locking eager eyes with the rest of the crew—“TLC Beatrice International Holdings.” The gang’s chests sank in a collective exhalation. Everyone had expected to hear the name of a familiar conglomerate: Texaco, Colgate-Palmolive, Zenith, Schlitz beer, thinking niggers must own something they’d heard of. Seeing the crew’s racial pride crash and burn, Fariq tried to swell their deflated egos. “The company is worth two billion dollars.”

  “So,” snorted Yolanda. “Who ever heard of TLC Beatrice? What in hell do they make?”

  Fariq explained, “TLC makes orange juice. They distribute groceries all over Europe, especially in France. International foods, supermarkets, know what I mean?” Fariq immediately realized he’d set himself up for ridicule by mentioning such a staid venture as the supermarket. He steadied himself for the inevitable pillory.

  “What, nigger, you expect us to go to France to deliver and sell groceries all summer? This is going to make us rich?”

  “Remember eggs and bread go on top.”

  “Manager to register seven, I have an overring. I need the key. La llave, por favor.”

  “Shit, none of us even speaks French.”

  “Speak for yourself, nigger.” Yolanda said. She stood up, whipped her braids behind her back, and started singing the chorus from an old soul classic into her hairbrush. “ ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir.’ ”

  “We going to be broke this summer.”

  “Dead and stinking.”

  “ ‘Gitchi gitchi ya ya da da.’ ”

  Shaking his head, Fariq bemoaned the shortsightedness of his friends. “That’s why niggers don’t have shit. You know, the average white man holds on to a dollar for one-point-six-five years. Guess how long stupid niggers like yourselves hold on to a dollar?”

  “How long, motherfucker?”

  “Thirty-eight minutes.” Fariq wearily leaned back against the sloping stairs. He lifted his head and said, “My people … my people,” hoping someone would see fit to put him out of his misery. From the bottom of the stoop, Charles O’Koren, who’d remained silent until this point, willingly delivered the death blow. “TLC Beatrice ain’t even a black-owned entity.” He waited for the gasps of disbelief to subside, then continued: “I seen a special last week—the brother who owned it been dead for years. Money was worth a couple hundred mil at least. Hear me, ‘Money was worth’—ha, ha. I got jokes, right?”

  Charles “Whitey” O’Koren was an American anachronism, the last of a dying breed: the native, destitute, inner-city white ethnic. The O’Korens moved to East Harlem in the mid-twenties when it was still a haven for scab labor. The slack-shouldered Whitey lived on 111th and Third Avenue with his mother, Trish; stepfather, Felix Montoya; and Grandpa Mickey. During the postwar forties Mickey O’Koren had watched tidal waves of REO Speedwagon trucks crash upon the streets, then recede into night, leaving wiggly hordes of indistinguishable young Puerto Ricans skittering and writhing on the streets like exposed grunion. “Better than more wops,” he’d say optimistically, waving goodbye to the Giamattis, the Lambresis as they closed the doors to the Packard and headed for the lily-white sanctuary of the South Bronx. Soon the package stores were called bodegas and the food stocks on the local shelves were unpronounceable. Cables of cured brown longaniza puerpoiquena replaced the red links of kielbasa and bangers. In the clash of cultures pidgin arguments with Spanish tenderos in blood-splattered lab coats were commonplace. “Listen, jocko, I want yellow bananas, not these unripe, snot-green plátanos. Who do you think you’re calling ‘Mofungo’? And give me a pound of papas, Chico.”

  The headstrong patriarch ignored pleas from friends and family to move. So long as there was a local barbershop that cut “non-burrhead” hair and Guinness came in the can, Mickey saw no need to relocate. When his grandson was born, Mickey wrapped him in a green, white, and orange blanket and lobbied for a Gaelic name—Eamonn, Colin, or Paddy. Trish, wanting something less Hibernian, plied Grandpa Mickey with creamy stout and stated her case for a soft euonym, español perhaps, a name that sang racial armistice, so the boy wouldn’t feel so different from the other kids—Miangel, Panchito, or Ramón, she suggested. After three weeks of debate they settled on the classically safe Charles Michael O’Koren. It was the neighbors who revived the old Anglo-American sobriquet and dubbed the boy Whitey.

  Whenever a stranger asked Charles whether he found the ethnic blatancy of his nickname a hindrance, the hard-hearted, freckled boy of nineteen replied, “It makes me no nevermind.” In private he preferred to be called C-Ice or Charley O’. But there were paranoid tendencies lurking underneath his b-boy scowl. Often while walking the streets of Spanish Harlem minding his business, Charles flinched upon hearing a frustrated local curse the living gods with a “Fuck whitey!,” forcing him to ask what he’d done wrong. Charles implored his friends not to call him Whitey, and they begrudgingly agreed. However, old-timers such as Winston, Fariq, and Armello sometimes slipped and called him that, out of equal parts habit and condescension.

  “For real,” Winston asked Charles, “a black man don’t even own the business?”

  “Word. A nigger used to own it, but like I said, the nigger dead, now his wife running the company.”

  Winston could almost see the word “nigger” come out of Charles’s mouth. Normally Winston chastised him with a punch to the chest for using “nigger” in his presence, but he didn’t know this dead executive, and he let the trespass slide. “His wife ain’t black?”

  “No, Tuff, the bitch is Filipino or some shit.”

  “Filipina,” said Yolanda, angrily snatching the magazine from Fariq’s hands. She scrutinized the chart as if she were reading the bylaws of a clearinghouse sweepstakes to decide if she’d really won ten million dollars. “You mean the largest black company in America is owned by an Oriental bitch?”

  “Asian.”

  “Shut up, Winston. Where’s the sense in that? Just because a black man used to own the business,
to act like the shit is still black! If that’s the logic, then the damn Indians still collecting rent on all this,” Yolanda spouted, sweeping the cement expanse of 109th Street with a real-estate-agent wave of her hand. “I swear to God, niggers is retarded.”

  Armello didn’t like the defeatist tone Yolanda was setting and tried to put a positive spin on the proceedings. “Come on now, no need to be upset—so the largest black company is owned by a Chink, so what? We still got the number two company. What’s número dos?”

  Yolanda scanned the full-page chart; sucking her teeth in disappointment, she tossed the magazine back in Fariq’s lap. “Norman Kearny’s Automotive Group. A goddamn car dealership in Detroit is the largest truly black-owned business. This is sad; I feel like crying. A fucking used-car salesman! The next business down is probably them African niggers selling fake Rolex watches at the Statue of Liberty.”

  Fariq looked crestfallen. Nadine slung a sympathetic arm around Fariq and glared at Yolanda. “Well, bitch, at least my man trying. Ever since they almost got shot everybody been like ‘Life too short. I got to get paid, now.’ What ideas your man got?”

  All heads swiveled toward Winston, who had tuned out soon after the “Asian” “Shut up, Winston” exchange and was now busy filling out a wrinkled pink form with the short green lottery pencil, using Charles’s back for a hard surface.

  “Tuffy, what the fuck you doing?”

  “Filling out my unemployment sheet. It’s obvious dealing with you estúpidos, I’m going to need the two months I got left. Anyway, I got my own program in the works. I don’t need y’all. I’m just out here for the camaraderie and the excitement. Let’s see, ‘Date of Search’—last Tuesday.”

  Armello snorted, “Coño, why you got be so negative, Tuff? The city going catch you in a lie—last Tuesday you was sleep all day because we broke night Monday.”

  Winston licked the point of his pencil and scribbled on. “ ‘Name and/or Title of Person Contacted’—Lester Muñoz’s—no, wait, Maldonado’s Auto Body, 5881 West 147th Street, Harlem, New York.”

  Charles started to straighten up. “The numbers on Forty-seventh only go up to five hundred something.”

  Winston cuffed Whitey sharply on the back of head. “Stop moving, nigger.” Charles placed his elbows back on his knees. “ ‘Contact Method’—C-lo game in back room. ‘Work Sought’—speedometer adjuster, stolen parts inventory taker.”

  “You playing yourself, Winston.”

  “Resultado—offered position, but unable to accept position because I’m too fat for the available jumpsuits, also allergic to carbon monoxide/dioxide, whatever.” Winston folded up the sheet and slipped it into his back pocket. Yolanda scooted away from the banister, putting a bit of distance between her and her lazy man. “Winston, why you acting like this?” she whined.

  Reaching into Yolanda’s purse, Winston pulled out the Raven .22 automatic and flashed an evil sneer. He wondered if he was once again challenging his destiny on the stoop of 258 East 109th Street. “We need to get back to what we do best, the roughness. I’m feeling scandalous, like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, fixing to push the old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs. I about get my hustle on. I know my life was spared because I’m destined for a higher purpose.”

  “You bugging. After it happened you couldn’t even imagine a higher purpose. Now listen to you.”

  Winston held the pistol to his mouth, fogged the muzzle with a gust of hot breath, then began polishing with the underside of his shirt, rotating the gun in the sunlight. “Man, these things are instant imagination. It’s like having a good idea, but you don’t know exactly what it is yet.”

  5- INEZ

  The gun altered the general mood of the gathering. Charles and Nadine reacted to the pistol in much the same way a childless couple reacts to another person’s baby. “My boy, where you’d get that? That shit is nice. Yo, son, let me borrow it.”

  Yolanda and Fariq maintained wary yet indifferent cool, respectful of the gun’s power, but knowing that without any immediate provocation there was no real cause for alarm. “Tuffy, that’s Demetrius’s gun. You stupid? You know that piece got bodies on it.” Chambering a bullet, Winston pointed the gun at three uniformed men and a dog about thirty yards away, cavalierly approaching the stairs. Armello panicked and let out a bluesy moan. “Ooooohhhh. Fuck you doing, Tuffy? Drawing down on some cops! Why didn’t you tell me you was dirty? You know I’m on probation, man. I’ll get a bid ’cause your fat ass traveling dirty.”

  Armello turned to Fariq, speaking quickly and with a note of urgency in his voice: “Smush, I ain’t trying to go back to jail. I didn’t know Winston was carrying that piece, you my witness, right?”

  “Relax, Armello, it’s only Bendito and them.”

  As the three men and a dog came closer, Winston lowered his arms, frowning as he hid the gun under his leg. “Thought you were afraid of guns?” whispered Charles.

  “Yolanda been working with me. I’m confronting my fears. Doing things to get me used to the piece a little bit at a time. What’s it called, Boo?”

  “Phobia densensitization,” said Yolanda, happy to show off one of her Introductory Psychology terms. “But I can tell guns still make you nervous. You’re perspiring and your eyelid is twitching. Wish I had my galvanic skin response equipment from the lab, then I could measure your progress with some objectivity.”

  The Bonilla triplets, Bendito, Miguelito, Enrique, and their brown, pink-nosed pit bull, Der Kommissar, stopped at the foot of the stoop. The brothers grew up on 109th Street, two buildings down from Winston; their complexions and politics covered the Hispanic spectrum. Bendito was as handsome as novela’s leading man: gigolo white, his dirty-blond hair permanently tousled by a tropical breeze that seemed to follow him wherever he went. He was enough of a nationalist to spurn the annual Puerto Rican Day parade as an affront to la patria. Every July he’d say, “When we march up Fifth Avenue with guns, like young lords preaching Taino love, then I’ll sing ‘Oye Como Va.’ Tú sabes?”

  Miguelito was a swarthy Cuban-boxer black, but a loyalist to his supposed Spanish Majorcan roots and to the United States. He felt Puerto Rico’s admission to the Union would dignify his beloved isle: “We’ll no longer be dirty. We’ll be exotic, como Hawaii,” he liked to say.

  The middle triplet, Enrique Bonilla, suffered from vitiligo. His skin was a splotchy calico of every shade on the melanin palette, and his politics were as convoluted as his complexion. He waffled between all three Puerto Rican destinies: independence, statehood, and its status quo as a United States protectorate.

  The triplets were, however, united in their hatred for Winston. The animosity between him and the Bonillas started in elementary school. One day Tuffy noticed Enrique’s face looked like a beginner’s jigsaw puzzle of a map of the United States. He shoved young Enrique into the custodian’s closet and with a felt-tip pen placed a black dot in each sector of Enrique’s face, scribbled a state name in each patch of skin, and labeled every dot with all the capitals he could remember: Sacramento, California, was near Enrique’s right ear; Topeka, Kansas, under his right eye; Indianapolis, Indiana, beneath the left; and Tallahassee, Florida, on the lower left jaw. Winston turned his human political map into the teacher as a makeup assignment for a missed quiz, explaining that the squiggly black line running down Enrique’s forehead, over the bridge of his nose, and ending at the cleft in his chin was the Mississippi River. The feud was set in motion, and thereafter Winston honed his pugilistic skills on the Bonilla triplets.

  Despite the Bonilla boys having enrolled in every karate and boxing school in Manhattan, Winston beat the brothers viciously and regularly, pulverizing every zygotic permutation: individually, Bendito and Enrique, Bendito and Miguelito, Enrique and Miguelito, all three at once. Like many bullied city kids, the Bonilla brothers had become auxiliary police officers right after finishing high school. Their civil servitude stemmed not from any sense of social justice; rather, it was
a state-sanctioned training course for a job that would serve as an outlet for their vengeance and pent-up rage. Armed only with handcuffs, a flashlight, and a ticket book, the Bonilla brothers had a well-deserved neighborhood reputation for being the last ones on a crime scene, sucker-punching the suspect in a chintzy display of cop solidarity.

  The Bonillas and their dog stopped in front of the stoop. The two factions, police and policed, looked at each other in silence for a few moments. Bendito, the oldest brother by three minutes, placed one shiny patent-leather shoe on the bottom stair. The hellhound, Der Kommissar, followed with a stumpy paw. Winston spat, the globule landing inches away from the tip of Bendito’s shoe, and the dog’s paw snapped back to the sidewalk.

  “Afternoon, morenos,” came the greeting from Enrique.

  “Buenas tardes a los tres pendejos. Ahora, vete por carajo,” answered Winston. Der Kommissar, whose Spanish was better than the Bonillas’, growled.

  “Yo, Tuffy, you better be glad this dog is on a leash, else you’d be in trouble, bro,” cautioned Bendito.

  “That dog is leashed for its own protection, because I’m a dangerous nigger. He comes near me, it’s over for him.”

  “Don’t you people see the No Loitering sign?” asked Enrique, using his flashlight to point out a rusty metal placard that since the turn of the century had been ignored by the poor and used by the police as an excuse for harassment. Both parties overlooked the broadsides sloppily wallpapered beneath the No Loitering sign. Still wavy and wet with paste, the block of posters read: ON ELECTION DAY EMPOWER YOURSELF AND YOUR COMMUNITY—VOTE FOR MARGO TELLOS DEMOCRAT COUNCIL-WOMAN DISTRICT 8—LIMPIANDO NUESTRAS CALLES.

  Fariq made a halfhearted peace offering to the officers. “We’re not loitering. We’re having a board meeting. Planning how to make money this summer.”

  “That wouldn’t include drug dealing, would it?” asked Miguelito, both hands tugging at Der Kommissar’s leash.