Tuff (16 page)

“That’s right, run to your leader,” wisecracked Spencer, seeing that Winston wasn’t entirely on Fariq’s side.

“This nigger ain’t even Muslim,” said Winston, pointing to Fariq’s crutches. “The Muslims don’t want this motherfucker. He too crippled. Neither Muslim headquarters or Mecca has handicapped parking.”

“Fuck you, Tuff!”

Winston turned to Spencer. “But Smush do raise a good point. Why are you here, Rabbi, for reals?”

Spencer looked shamefully down at the floor and confessed, “I became a Big Brother so I could write a feature article on ghetto youth for the newspaper. I didn’t know any ghetto youth, so …”

His honesty was welcomed with palpable resentment. Yolanda no longer felt the need to use Spencer as a sounding board for her problems with her husband. Under his breath Fariq spoke of a consortium of Jews controlling the world’s media.

“I’m sorry,” Winston and Spencer mumbled simultaneously.

“Winston, what are you sorry for?” Yolanda snapped. “Don’t apologize when you haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I know. But I just feel sorry.”

Yolanda and Fariq waited for him to ask the clergyman to leave. After all, Spencer was his guest. Winston stayed on the couch, hands clasped behind his head, lips pursed, eyes closed. Spencer’s deceit left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth, and Jordy ran around the room in circles, a cherubic ladle stirring the soup of bitterness, disillusionment, and summer heat.

On his fourth circuit he picked up his See ’n Say, pulling the string on the plastic toy designed to teach toddlers the rudiments of farm-animal communication. “The cow says, ‘Mooooo!’ This is how a dog sounds—‘Woof! Woof!’ This is how a turkey sounds: ‘Gobble! Gobble!’ ” After each bark or bellow Jordy would stop in front of his father and try to reproduce the animal’s characteristic call. His quacks and meows were a welcome distraction. For a moment Winston forgot about the dreadlocked rabbi’s duplicity. “The rooster says, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ What’s the rooster say, Jordy?”

“Thabba-thubba-ooo,” mimicked Jordy, yanking on the string.

Winston wondered, if the machine imitated a person, what would be the human equivalent for cock-a-doodle-doo?

Spencer, hoping to make one final stab at a partnership, broke the silence. “Anyone seen any good movies lately?” And Winston had an answer to his question.

“Jewboy, don’t you know when to be quiet,” Fariq said, his patience run dry. “Better yet, leave.”

Tuffy opened another beer. “Ain’t no such thing as a good movie. At least not since the price of a ticket went past seven dollars.”

“Oh, God, now the nigger going to start talking about ‘the film.’ ”
Fariq said “the film” in one long wispy breath, as if enunciated by a Public Television cinéaste. Then he returned to passing his magnifying glass over the counterfeit money, occasionally scissoring slivers from spools of blue and red thread, arranging them haphazardly on a bill, and dusting the money with a coat of spray-on polyurethane. “ ‘The film.’ ”

Yolanda whisked Jordy from his aimless rounds and sniffed his diaper.

Spencer could see in the sparkle in Winston’s eye and the wry smile a subtle erosion in the rocky landscape that separated them. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Why do most people go to the movies? To be entertained, right? Maybe to learn something. But most motherfuckers go to guess who the fucking killer is. And it’s always the same person.”

“Who?”

“The motherfucker you least expect, of course.”

“So why do you go? Why waste your money?”

“I don’t even know. I knew when I was little. I went to the show to see some famous movie star’s titties. Now movies is so bad they’ve even ruined that simple pleasure.”

“How?”

“You sit down, popcorn in one hand, soda pop in the other. You wait a bit, look at your watch, and say, ‘Forty-five minutes, and this bitch ain’t showed no titty? This flick sucks.’ If she flash her chichis
before
forty-five minutes, then the movie
really
sucks.”

“So any film with a female lead is a bad film?”

“Except for
La Femme Nikita
. Some of them old Natalie Wood shits is all right too. That bitch was fine.”

“And if the lead is played by a man?”

“If it’s a man, especially if it’s a white man—and it usually is, even if a nigger is the star—then the film has to be about right and wrong. And whiteys is the last motherfuckers on earth to be teaching me about right and wrong. Much less charging me for the lesson.”

“But why do you go?”

“I go for the disappointment, I guess. I’m used to being disappointed, and I know I’ll find it in the movie theater.”

Spencer reached for a unopened beer. Winston didn’t mind.

“Winston, can I ask you something else?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you call Big Brothers of America?”

“Suppose I knew I’d be disappointed.”

“Maybe subconsciously you did, but that’s not the reason you made the call.”

“True. I guess I really called because I’m looking for someone to explain shit. I don’t understand nothing about life, me—nothing.”

“Kind of like someone to say, ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch …’ ”

“Yeah.”

“You know, when the Japanese used to show silent films the theater owners paid someone to stand next to the screen and explain the action.”

“For reals? Didn’t they have those cards?”

“Intertitles. I supposed they did, but, you know, sometimes those aren’t enough.”

“That’s true. Whenever I go see one of those silent jammies, Charlie Chaplin or something, I be trying to read the lips. Figure out what’s really going on. So they had a motherfucker lip-reading or some shit?”

“The guy was called a
benshi
. They’d show
Battleship Potemkin
and he’d say, ’Note Eisenstein’s simple yet masterful contrapuntal statements in this scene. The rectangular lines of sailors and officers standing on the quarterdeck, bisected by the battleship’s guns—the state’s guns, if you will.”

“I seen that. ‘All for a spoonful of borscht.’ Baby carriage going down the stairs. Good fucking movie.
Benshi
. That’s deep.” Winston was stalling for time. He was enjoying the conversation. Here in front of him was the only person he’d ever spoken to who’d also seen
Battleship Potemkin
and was willing to discuss it in detail. But that was no reason to let a dreadlocked Yankee into his life. He asked Spencer why he knew so much about film. The rabbi told him the role of Jews in Hollywood was one of his lecture subjects. He then proceeded to assert that the recent independent film explosion was a Gentile assault on the perceived Jewish domination of Hollywood. This proclamation was followed by a thin segue into the argument that the popularity of the remake was more than a function of the dearth of Tinseltown originality; it was the movie industry’s veiled attempt to recapture its image as art. Moviemaking, once a highbrow craft associated with the creative goyishe genius of Tennessee Williams, Nabokov, Dalí, and Faulkner, was now painting by numbers, dependent on the guile of moguls, computer geniuses erasing the distinction between actor and animation, and a slew of out-of-work nephews.

Winston was having some difficulty following Spencer’s argument—not because he didn’t understand the artistic references or failed to see what Jewishness had to do with what Spencer was saying, but because he was having an epiphany. He interrupted Spencer’s speech. “Hey, Rabbi. Meanwhile, back at the ranch …”

“What?”

“You remember when I told you I was looking for understanding?”

Spencer nodded.

“I now understand that understanding is not something you look for, it’s something that finds you. You understand?”

“What made you think of that?”

“You was talking and for some reason I thought of
Fugitive from a Chain Gang
. You ever seen it? Paul Moody.”

“Paul Muni.”

“So you seen it?”

“No.”

“Paul Muni down South, running from the police for a murder he didn’t commit. Gets caught and put in prison. Right there, you know I can relate. But one scene fucks me up. It’s late at night, he’s on a wagon with a bunch of white boys coming back from breaking rocks or picking cotton, and as he comes back to the jail, there’s a wagonload of black niggers about to go out to pick cotton, break rocks. And Muni and this pitch black motherfucker catch eyes for about two seconds. Oh, the shit is deep.”

“That’s it?”

“Hell, yeah, that’s it. Muni give that nigger a look like ‘Damn, now I understand the bullshit you black motherfuckers go through. People falsely accusing you of shit you ain’t done. Forced to pick cotton.’ But he don’t start crying. He don’t call nobody ‘brother’ or wish him luck, try to shake his hand, or talk about how they’ve got to unite. He don’t say not one word. Just gives Money a look that says, ‘I feel you, homey, but I gots to get mines.’ That’s real. That’s how it be in jail or in life. Sometimes you catch yourself feeling close to motherfuckers you not supposed to feel close to, but you can’t afford to play the humanitarian role. But I realized I’m waiting for someone to look at me like that or for me to look at someone else like that. I’m not sure which.”

“Didn’t I look at you that way when I came in?”

“No, Rabbi, you looked at me like you felt sorry for me.”

“And what’s wrong with that? I do feel sorry for you.”

“You need to also feel sorry for yourself.”

“You’re saying I’m hollow, shallow, like today’s movies.”

“Nothing wrong with being shallow, just shouldn’t be shallow when you trying act like you about something.”

Spencer felt shamed, but there was no lingering anguish pressing on his shoulders, forcing him to his knees to beg for forgiveness or spiritual guidance. He begged his religion for a sign of contriteness. And his heart began to pound, the hairs on his arms to stand on end, his knees start to shake. “Did you feel that?” Spencer asked.

“Feel what?”

“A buzz, an ethereal presence in the room, like something was passing through.”

“That’s the malt liquor talking to you. You getting fuzzy-faced. Take a piss, you’ll feel better.”

“Shit, I was hoping God was about to say something to me.”

“God ain’t never spoke to you?”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“You’re a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?”

“It’s what’s so great about being Jewish. You don’t have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish.”

Winston had a strange, slanted smile on his face. He threw his arm around Spencer’s shoulders and escorted him to the door like a kind bouncer saying good night to the village drunk. “Rabbi, let’s start next week. I’ll put you on six months’ probation, but I ain’t making no promises.” Here would be the monk Winston needed. He had dreadlocks, but so what? He’d have a person in his life to whom he wasn’t emotionally attached. Who knows, Spencer could be an impartial voice-over that would cut through the white noise of Yolanda’s bickering, Fariq’s proselytizing, and Ms. Nomura’s good intentions. “Can I ask one thing before you go?”

“Sure.”

“What’s borscht?”

“Borscht is beet soup.”

A
fter shutting the door behind Spencer, Winston sat down on the couch, took out his marker, and drew a circle on his palm. Inside the circle he wrote his name. Yolanda stopped scouring Jordy’s anus and
was about to place a fresh diaper, then the baby, on Winston’s lap, when he shot up and ran to the door. Spencer was ten paces past the threshold, trying to figure out how a young man with a child to support, living in an apartment with bedsheets for drapery and mayonnaise jars for glassware, could afford to see so many films.
Maybe he walks in backwards
, he thought,
like Cacus stealing the cattle from Hercules
.

“Yo, Rabbi!” Winston’s head was sticking out of the door. “Since you thought you were going to be a Big Brother to an eight-year-old, what were you planning to do with me this afternoon? Take me to the zoo?”

Spencer reached into his haversack and whipped out a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, which he expertly flung at Winston at warp speed. Winston laughed, and swiftly slammed the door. The disk bounced off the metal door frame with a thud and skidded to a wobbly stop at the feet of a young boy. The boy picked it up and offered it back to Spencer. “Keep it.”

Spencer Jefferson walked to his car feeling as if he’d just interviewed for, and landed, a job as an urban mahout. He’d walk alongside the elephantine Winston Foshay, beating on his rib cage with a bamboo cane, steering him past life’s pitfalls, prodding him into performing the tricks required by respectable society.

T
here’s a certain quixotic calm to an empty school hallway. Even though he wasn’t enrolled in Ramón Emeterio Betances Community Center and Preparatory School, Winston felt privileged. Cruising the hallways while class was in session was as close as a city kid got to experiencing the serenity of Huck Finn guiding his craft down the Mississippi.
Thank God I’m not in one of those classrooms. And summer school to boot?
The baby stroller squeaking, Winston wheeled Jordy down the halls on his way to a meeting Spencer had organized on his behalf. On the phone, Spencer had compared the meeting to a football huddle. Winston and the important people in his life would get together, discuss the best strategy for scoring a touchdown, then execute the play. “Winston becomes a success, on five, ready, break!” Spencer had said. Winston doubted it would be that simple.

He stuck his head into a second-floor room. Inside, a teacher stood in front of a pull-down map of New York City, reviewing the day’s social-studies lessons. “How many boroughs in New York City?”

“Five! Staten Island, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan!”

“Which ones are islands?”

“Staten Island!”

“And?”

“Manhattan!”

“What’s the northernmost borough?”

“The Bronx!”

“Now, which way is north?” Every student in the class thrust a finger high in the air, pointing toward the heavens. The beleaguered teacher’s head dropped slowly into his hands. “No. No.”