Tuff
Big Hug,
Agent #9906 M.I.D.
P.S.
By the time you read this, the Knicks will have beaten the Cincinnati Royals by five points, and Malcolm X will be dead.
The day Malcolm was shot, Inez drank herself numb at Showman’s Tavern, listening to the jukebox shuffle between Lunceford, Holiday, Eckstine, Parker, and twenty nickels of Etta James. The regulars commiserated over long-neck beers, thankful they still had Martin Luther King Jr.’s persistence and Father Divine’s ten-cent dinners. Told you they’d get that nigger. Shit, I give the playboy reverend four years tops. He talking about poor people and Indochina—that’s fucking with The Man’s money.
Returning home, Inez drunkenly stumbled through the Theresa’s lobby. The once-lavish hotel struggled to hold on to its glorified past. Its cracked and pitted marble pillars barely supported the sagging ceiling; a cave-in looked inevitable. If the structural decay didn’t bring the walls down, then the newly integrated downtown hotels would. Now that Malcolm had been shot, the secret was out: more than the spokesperson for black pride had been slain; Harlem itself was dead.
Inez followed a rutted trail that swathed through the faux-Turkish carpet to the lounge for one last gin-and-tonic to brace her against a temperamental radiator and a thin blanket. On the white Philco television Ed Sullivan was introducing a wonderful, wonderful entertainer, a Texan who’d be a really, really big star. Shyly Trini Lopez strode on stage wearing a rhinestone jacket and a warm smile, the oversized electric Gibson guitar held to his breast like a six-string shield. In a soft, chirping voice he began to sing. I like to be in A-mer-i-ca!… Ev’rything free in A-meri-ca! Inez decided she too would like to be in America, start a community center in Harlem. Find the next Malcolm in Harlem.
The laughter had died down. Now Winston was sitting two steps below Yolanda, her crotch serving as his headrest. “Ms. Nomura?”
“Yes, Winston?”
“You like my Cap’n Crunch idea?”
“It’s ingenious, but impractical and scary. When are you going to call me Inez?”
“Inez? What kind of name is that for a nigger?”
As Yolanda toyed with Winston’s eyebrows, his shoulders began to sink from his earlobes. To Inez he looked a spoiled seraph—Lucifer a week before the fall from grace.
“I’m not a nigger,” she said.
“You used to be.”
Two years ago, before he met Yolanda, Winston and Inez were in some ways closer than he and Fariq. After a neighborhood scrap or a bad day at school, he’d often seek her out for solace. They’d walk into the bowels of Central Park, Winston cursing a storm and working off his anger with sets of chin-ups on a thick cottonwood branch belonging to his favorite tree. Finally he’d drop to the ground, more tired than angry, and tell stories about the tree. It was underneath these boughs a ten-year-old Winston watched a group of boys rape and beat a jogger, kicking her motionless body into the mulberry bushes and leaving her for dead. When he was a little older he nearly decapitated bicyclists by knotting the ends of a section of fishing wire to carpenter nails, stretching the filament across the footpath, and hammering the nails into the trees about shoulder high. At night the line was invisible. An unsuspecting cyclist would pedal past the trees and the fishing line would catch him under the chin, lifting the biker off the bicycle so cleanly, the riderless bike would coast straight down the hill and into the waiting hands of Winston and his friends. There they’d pile on the bicycle, one on the seat, one on the handlebars, one on the rear lug nuts, two on the frame, a troupe of Chinese acrobats forming a jittery pyramid and riding into the night. Then Winston would begin to cry. It was under this tree Winston had shanked Kevin Porter. Holding his hand, Inez would ask what it was like to stab someone. “It’s like putting your hand into shower steam. Weightlessness. Nothing on the other end of the knife but a nigger’s sticky body heat.” Winston would read the disappointment, envy, and fear in Inez’s face, and would feel the need to ease her conscience with the rationalization: “You know, it’s not the stab wound that kills them, it’s the bacteria. Most motherfuckers that get stuck die from septic poisoning and shit.”
From the bottom stair, Charles pulled out a cigar and looked up through the ghetto’s version of the glass ceiling. Winston, Fariq, and the rest of the colored executive board were still debating exactly what would be this summer’s business venture. Using his box cutter, Charles dissected the cigar lengthwise, spilling the tobacco onto the sidewalk. While he peeled away the inner leaf to thin the wrapper, the iridescence of the diamond stud in Fariq’s ear caught Charles’s eye. “Fariq, how you get that earring?”
“Scrambling, nigger, you know that.”
Charles nodded. “Okay, then can we cut dreaming about this Cap’n Crunch, Black Enterprise madness and talk about how we really going to make some ends meet this summer?”
Winston knew what Charles was hinting at: a return to drug dealing, this time him doing more than steering customers. “Stop right there, I ain’t selling no drugs this summer.”
“We don’t sell no heroin or coke. We’ll sell this shit.” He held the bag of marijuana in the air. “Won’t make as much money, but hey.”
Charles sprinkled marijuana onto what remained of the tobacco casing. Rolling the blunt tightly, he expertly licked an edge, applying just the right amount of saliva, and sealed it like an envelope. “Pharmaceutical’s good money, kid. Tuffy, Brooklyn got you shook, son? Shit, some niggers bum rush my spot and put a gun to my wig, I’d be jumpy too.”
Winston bristled at Charles’s suggestion that he was scared of drug dealing. “I told you, no. Just the drug thing is embarrassing. There’s no dignity standing on the corner saying ‘What’s up?’ ‘What you need?’ to every person who passes by, like I’m really a friendly motherfucker. ‘Smoke? Smoke? Red Top. Jumbo. Double Up. You straight, my man?’ People ignoring you, pretending you’re invisible, stepping over and around you like you a piece of dog shit on the sidewalk. But you be caught up, chasing that dollar. Raising your eyebrows at everything that move. Pushing product on kids, stray cats, and old women on they way to church. And every now and then one of them old holy-rolling bitches bites, be like, ‘Hit me off with a twenty.’ Man, that shit depressing as fuck. The worst is when these rides with out-of-state plates pull up packed with twelve white boys, like a damn Ringling Brothers clown car. ‘What’s up, you got that rock, bro?’ ”
“Hate it when a white boy call me bro,” concurred Armello, to the head-nodding agreement of Fariq and Charles.
“True indeed. They only call you bro when they want something,” Fariq empathized.
“I be wantin’ to stomp them fools. Why you got ask me for drugs—I look like a dealer because I’m black?”
Nadine frowned. “But you was dealing, Tuffy.”
“That makes it all the worse. I am the stereotype, angry about being stereotyped. Then when five-o blow up the spot, they treat the white boys like day campers. ‘You fellows go home, you don’t belong out here, it’s dangerous. These people will eat you alive.’ Turn to me like I’m a cannibal shaking salt on some white kid’s leg—‘If I see you out here again, chief, you gonna go down.’ My pathetic ass strugglin’ to get out an understandable ‘Yes, sir’ because I’m gargling crack rock wrapped in cellophane, tryin’ not to swallow unless absolutely necessary.”
Winston grabbed the joint from Charles, inhaled, and began to speak without breathing. The words seemed to come from his nostrils: “I ain’t selling no drugs.”
Inez was in disbelief: Tuffy refusing to deal drugs? Maybe her homilies suggesting how Winston should channel his street savvy into political action were finally sinking in. This was a different boy than the one who at the mention of Che, Zapata, and Gandhi would screw his face and say they didn’t sound like revolutionaries but like soccer stars.
“Come on, Ms. Nomura, why you keep looking at me like that? Wipe that smile off your face—it’s not like I’ve seen the error of my way
s and shit. I’m still the same nigger. No shame in my game.”
“That’s right, no shame in his game,” echoed Yolanda, though she, too, was relieved that Winston had renounced dope peddling.
“I haven’t changed, y’all. You remember how in junior high you used go into the bathroom and there’d be one bold-ass, foul, don’t-give-a-fuck nigger taking a massive shit in a doorless stall and smoking a cigarette? Well, that nigger was me. No shame in my game. I’ll still mug a nigger, take a dump in a public toilet in a second.”
Charles rose to his feet. “Don’t play yourself, Tuff—how you think Derrick opened that Laundromat? Tito, that shitty tacquería? I say we ask Diego and them to put us down.”
Armello waved Charles off. “Whitey, I’m with Winston on this one. You ain’t got shit to say, because every time we get popped you don’t never no real time. You get reprimanded to your mama’s custody. Besides we ain’t got to do the drug thing nohow. Do we, Smush?” Armello hit the joint. The marijuana’s potency doubled him over with a hacking cough. A plume of smoke spewed from Armello’s mouth, immediately followed by a violent eruption of a clear, viscous slime that fell to the sidewalk in globs. Armello wiped his mouth, beamed, and handed Fariq the weed. “Hit this, G, my God.”
Without puffing on it, Fariq handed the joint to Yolanda. “I’m going to talk to Moneybags, y’all. Come up with a hustle somewhere between dope selling and banking.”
Nadine asked Yolanda for a puff, but Winston intercepted the pass, lipped the blunt, took a strong hit, then handed it to Nadine. “Damn, nigger, you got it all soggy.”
Bleak, he thought, my shit is looking bleak. Damn, that is some good-ass weed. Involuntarily his eyes closed. His brain seemed to solidify like drying cement, and his head grew heavy. A passing cloud blotted out the sun. Even with his eyes closed Winston noticed the sky darken. “You know what would be cool right now?” he said in a dreamy voice. “A fucking solar eclipse.”
“Whatever, nigger.”
Tuffy imagined being camouflaged in an umbra that matched the pitch blackness of his skin, the abysmal blackness of his mind, and the mysterious blackness of space. He took one more puff. I’d be lost in space then. I could disappear like a motherfucker. Harlem, we have liftoff.
ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND LIGHT-YEARS: The Milky Way looks like a discarded hubcap by the side of the night road.
ONE MILLION LIGHT-YEARS: All quiet on the eastern edge of the universe, 109th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. The front line of the war on everything, and the end of creation. In space no one can hear you scream. In New York City everyone can hear you—but will anyone pay attention?
6- THE BICYCLE THIEF
My purse! He stole my purse!” The shout shattered what remained of the afternoon’s fragile tranquillity, a rock thrown through an already broken window. And pedaling in its wake was a skinny, graham-cracker-colored black boy. Shirtless and wearing only sneakers and a pair of denim cutoffs, the boy weaved his mountain bike through the stickball game. He held a leather purse to the handlebars, the cleaved straps flapping in the wind like streamers. Running down the middle of the street giving chase was a husky woman taking short, lung-burning, end-of-the-marathon strides. “That’s Big Sexy,” remarked Nadine, biting her nails. “That boy stole her purse.” The last time Winston had seen Big Sexy was at Jordy’s baby shower. She’d been thoughtful enough to buy Jordy pajamas that he’d grow into. Her daughter Lydia DJ’d, mixing salsa, merengue, and hip-hop into a seamless concerto that glued her mother to the dance floor the entire night. A pink Spaldeen sailed past the cyclist’s head. “Fuck you doing, man? You fucking up the game.” The purse snatcher bunny-hopped the bicycle onto the sidewalk, nearly knocking over Inez and Armello. Winston glanced over at the Bonilla brothers, who sanctioned the crime with their idleness. “Anyone know that nigger?” Winston asked. No one said anything. In painstakingly slow slow motion, Winston dug his gun from his pocket, cocked it, then slipped the small pistol onto his trigger finger like a wedding ring. “What the hell this fat fool doing, Smush?” Nadine asked. “I think he thinks he’s starring in one of those Chinese gangster movies. You know how they move in slow motion for no apparent reason.”
Slapping Armello on the butt, Winston nodded at his friend’s motorcycle. “Uncle, but still. Let’s go.”
Armello acknowledged his orders with a snappy, Cantonese-accented “Yes, sir!” and the vigilantes leapt onto Armello’s motorcycle. Armello stomped the kick start and gunned the bike into gear. Winston placed one hand on Armello’s hip and with the other held the gun aloft. Firing a round into the sky, he yelled, “You can’t get away with the Crunch, because the Crunch always gives you away! Il ladro! Il ladro!” The quip was barely audible over the screech of the skidding rear tire as the motorcycle peeled off into the street. Big Sexy pumped her fist, too exhausted to deliver any words of encouragement.
Inez appeared a bit worried as the two-man posse leaned into a left-hand turn and ran a red light, disappearing into the Lexington Avenue traffic. Yolanda offered her the joint roach. Inez refused, and removed a bottle of Bacardi 151 rum from her handbag. “Ain’t that warm?” asked Yolanda.
“I don’t give a fuck, I need a drink.”
Her thumb on the nozzle, she shook the contents, then took two strong gulps that wrinkled her nose. The roar of Armello’s mufflerless motorbike could be heard in the distance. What if Tuffy managed to catch the boy? Would he shoot at the kid just for appearances’ sake, to show the block he’d completely overcome his fears: guns, jail, the sunrise? “Yolanda, you’re not worried?”
“About what?”
“Winston.”
Yolanda shrugged.
“Ms. Nomura, they’re just bored and broke. Armello can handle that bike. Plus, ain’t no use worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet. Right or wrong?”
After a few minutes there was a war whoop from the far end of the block. Winston was twirling the recovered purse overhead like a Pony Express rider. He flung the bag to Big Sexy, the bag flying over her head and landing in a pile of discarded furniture. Winston hopped off the motorcycle before it came to a complete stop.
“Nigger, you ill.”
“You shoot that man?”
“Nah, it was mad weird, yo. I thought about it. Pointed the gun—‘Yeah, nigger? What? What? Playing stickup, kid? On my block? What?’ But I felt stupid. Shoot no nigger for no purse. I felt like a dog chasing a car. What am I going to do with it if I catch it, know what I’m saying?”
Armello dismounted, swaggering over to the stoop, narrating his way up the stairs. “So I pulls alongside that fool and nigger’s eyes like to pop out his head. Tuffy sidekicked the bike in the sprocket and B slammed headfirst into a parking meter. Wasn’t no resistance from Papi after that. Where’s that dank at?”
Charles handed Winston a freshly rolled blunt.
“I never could figure out,” Ms. Nomura pondered aloud, “when do you call somebody G and when you call them B?”
“You call a moreno you don’t know Papi, B, or G, but Puerto Ricans is strictly B, whether you know them or not. A Puerto Rican rarely calls another Papi in public, but a non-Rican trying to be down can call another Rican Papi and maybe get away with it.”
Der Kommissar ambled up to the group, his leash taut from dragging the deadweight of his three masters. The dog wheezed and panted like a diesel engine pulling slag. Miguelito pointed his fingers at Winston and Armello. “You callejeros think you the police? Why don’t you go down to the precinct and pick up an application? You sucias, también. The department needs a few good men.”
“¿Qué jodiendo?” Nadine asked, flipping a middle finger at the brothers. She glared at the Bonillas. “You cabrones didn’t do a damn thing. What if one of these two had been hurt doing your dirty work?”
Winston blew a dense puff of marijuana smoke in Der Kommissar’s face. The dog snapped at him, its jaws closing with the force of a sprung animal trap. Winston slapped Der Kommissar
across his foamy jowls with the butt end of the handgun. The dog barked and turned in frantic Chihuahua circles. “Y’all want to hear a joke?” Winston asked his friends.
“Yeah,” they answered in unison.
“Why do cops hang out in threes?”
“Why?” asked Enrique to the chagrin of his brothers.
“One to do the reading, one to do the writing, and the other just likes to be around intellectuals.”
Bendito slackened Der Kommissar’s leash and the dog leapt for Inez’s forearm, its yellowed incisors just missing Jordy’s face. In a blur of reflex, Winston caught the dog in midleap by the collar and body-slammed him off the stairs. Der Kommissar yelped but didn’t stop struggling as Winston pinned his stocky carcass to the sidewalk by kneeling on the dog’s hindquarters and neck. Jamming the barrel of his gun into the dog’s ear like a metallic swab, Winston drilled until the muzzle disappeared. Without being asked, the Bonillas backed off. The dog squirmed and simpered.
Again a crowd gathered around the stoop to watch the Bonilla–Foshay rematch. “That motherfucker ain’t barking now,” commented a little girl who’d gathered to watch the skirmish, “he going, hmmmm himmm mm himmmm. I wonder what that means in dog talk?”
“That means ‘Somebody get this fat motherfucker off me,’ ” Charles joked.
“Ever notice dogs in movies never die,” Winston asked the crowd, pressing his knee into the dog’s groin. Der Kommissar yelped. “People be drowning, burning alive, tornadoed, laser-beamed, and the dog always lives. Fucking mutt runs through a wall of flame, gets crushed by a falling car, rammed by a runaway ocean liner, and the dog comes out wagging its tail. The audience goes crazy. That’s manipulative Hollywood bullshit. But this ain’t Hollywood, this East Harlem, the fuckin’ barrio.” There was a muffled crack and Der Kommissar’s carcass bounced once on the sidewalk: a forced sneeze spewed a mist of blood and mucus from his black nostrils. With some effort Winston yanked the gun from the dog’s ear. He swabbed the ear wax and blood-clotted gun barrel on his pants leg, then punted the dead dog into the gutter. “Bet you won’t be snapping at little kids no more.”