Tuff (20 page)

“Inez, don’t encourage the boy,” pleaded Clifford. “He’s going to think you mean it.”

“The election is a little over three months away. Let’s see—that’s five thousand dollars a month.”

Inez’s eyes locked with his. She was serious. “It might be fun.” Winston stole a glance at Yolanda. She looked skeptical.
She don’t like
Ms. Nomura nohow
. He shifted his gaze to Fariq. Smush would eventually come up with some nefarious plan to make money this summer. It depended upon the riskiness of the venture, but at best Winston’s end would be between four and five thousand a month.
Ain’t that a bitch, crime and politics pay about the same
. “Ms. Nomura, I want all the money up front.”

“Done.”

Inez sighed. No one else said anything as they waited for her to come to her senses and renege on the offer. The phone rang. Winston pressed the Speaker button and snapped, “Who this?”

“Winston, is that how you answer the phone?”

“No ma’am.”

“Okay, then. What did you decide to do?”

“I’m running for Congress.”

“City Council,” hissed Yolanda.

“That’s nice, son, you have my blessing. Take care.”

“Thanks, Mama, you always there for a nigger. I mean, you wasn’t really there for me, but yeah, thanks. I’ll call you soon. Bye. Love you.” Winston picked Jordy up off the floor and dangled him over the phone with one hand and tickled his stomach with the other. “Say goodbye to Grams, Jordy.” Jordy purred a slobbering gurgle into the phone.

Clifford backed away from the table. “Inez, is the auditorium ready?”

“Ms. Dunleavy is taking care of everything, but we should get going. I’ll be there in a minute.” While Clifford gathered his books and strode into the hall, Inez walked up to Winston and gave him a long hug. “You know what we haven’t done lately?”

“Naw.”

“Gone to the top of the Empire State Building. Let’s meet next Sunday. Spencer, you come too.”

“Sure.”

“Winston, you mind?”

“Naw.”

“Coming to listen to your father read?”

“Maybe.”

Winston rose from the table, began cleaning up his mess. He crumpled Collette Cox’s campaign flyer and tossed it with the food scraps into a wastebasket. “Ms. Nomura?”

“What?”

“You think my pops would’ve come to this meeting if he didn’t have this reading scheduled for today?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better vote for me.”

“You have to earn votes, Winston. You can’t strong-arm folks into voting for you,” Inez said, scooting out into the corridor.

As he buckled Jordy into his stroller, Yolanda eased up to him and rolled his T-shirt over his beach-ball paunch. “You look hot, baby. You bring an extra shirt?”

“I forgot.”

Yolanda hiked the shirt to Winston’s underarms, exposing his chest. “I don’t like how Ms. Nomura looks at you.”

“Now who paranoid? You notice my father didn’t even say goodbye?”

“I noticed.”

With two fingers Yolanda skied a path down Tuffy’s breastbone, jumping moguls of fat, slaloming in and out of his carbuncles and assorted battle scars, leaving wavy tracks on his sweaty skin. Winston’s stomach quivered as her fingers schussed around the rim of his navel. “What did you mean when you said I don’t have a choice—that I have to support you if you run for office?”

“You my girl—if I do something, you follow. And vicey-versey.”

“It’s much easier following a nigger who got fifteen grand, I know that much.”

“Ain’t that a bitch. But
no te preocupes
, I’m just going to take the money and run.”

“Thought you said you wasn’t going to run?”

“You know what I mean. Ms. Nomura wanna play social worker, I don’t care.”

Fariq grabbed Spencer by the elbow and guided him out of the room. “We be right out here, all right?”

“All right,” answered Winston.

Yolanda cleared the layer of perspiration off Tuffy’s chest with her hands, then blow-dried each nipple, watching his skin fill with goose bumps. “Yolanda, what are you doing?”

“You ever think we married too young?” she asked, driving an index finger into the abyss that was his navel. Her finger two knuckles deep into his belly button, she probed for the pressure points in her husband’s soul.
She wanted to arouse the real nigger within, hear him scream, and beg her, and only her, for mercy. Winston clenched his abdominal muscles, causing the walls of his belly button to clamp down on her finger like a set of fleshy Chinese handcuffs. “Landa, you not going nowhere, so stop fronting.” Yolanda tugged violently, trying to extract her finger from Winston’s suction hold. “Tuffy, stop playing!” Winston exhaled and released her finger. It was moist. She smelled it before wiping it dry on Winston’s pants. Yolanda lifted her shirt and they hugged, their sweaty bellies stuck together like wet tissue paper.

Outside, Spencer turned to Fariq. “Are Winston and Inez serious?”

“Jewboy, I don’t know about Ms. Nomura, and I doubt Tuff will be out there campaigning and shit, but I know when he was talking about who he know in the neighborhood and all, he was coming from the heart. He only has two emotions: serious and serious as fuck, straight up. Only time I ever heard the nigger tell a joke was when we was working in Brooklyn, that shit was just a freak thing. Even when Tuffy jokin’, he bein’ dead real. He a sensitive nigger. You know how niggers be snappin’ on each other, ‘You so ugly,’ ‘so black,’ ‘so stupid’? Don’t no one get into it with Tuffy. Not since him and Carter got into it. One day we was comin’ from the beach and Carter was all over Tuffy, ‘Nigger, you so fat, you jumped into the sky and got stuck. Motherfucker, you so big, you wear pillow cases for socks. You so big, you shit cannonballs. You so fat the only things on earth the astronauts can see from space is the Great Wall of China and the crack of yo’ ass.’ This wasn’t no when-you-sit-around-the-house, you-sit-around-the-house, seafood-diet bullshit; this session was heated. Carter was rockin’ that nigger, and all Tuffy could do was take the blows. But Tuffy can’t play the dozens, ’cause he can’t lie. If he ever say to a nigger, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ that boy will have fewer friends than Israel. So Carter breaking on Tuffy so hard he has to stop and catch his breath. Tuffy, tired of Carter fucking him up, right out of the blue says, ‘Yeah, nigger, like I fucked yo’ mama.’ Now normally when a nigger go into the ‘I fucked your mother’ bag, the other niggers start groaning, saying, ‘That shit’s a dud.’ But in this case they start laughin’, fallin’ off the stairs, runnin’ into traffic, giving each other pounds—niggers is straight dyin’.”

“Why?”

“Because they knew that if Tuffy had said it, then he’d really fucked Carter’s mother.”

“Oh, shit.”

“ ‘Oh, shit’ is right. A nigger who honest as Tuffy just said he fucked your mother in front of your boys? You gots to fight. Tuffy should’ve just let Carter hit him, he don’t weigh but a hundred twenty pounds. But Tuff play for keeps. Nigger hit Carter so hard—you ever see a matador stab a bull? Bull staggers for a quick second like, ‘Goddamn, this punk motherfucker stabbed me,’ then just fall to his knees. That’s how hard Tuffy hit Carter. Nigger dropped to his knees
olé
like a motherfucker. His nasal passages is all permanently crushed. The poor guy got to keep his mouth open to breathe. You give that nigger a lollipop and he’ll die.”

Fariq’s gaze shifted and Spencer looked over his shoulder to see Winston and Yolanda standing arm in arm behind him. Spencer now understood why little boys ran to Tuff in the streets, tugging on his shirt, begging to be “put down” on some invisible ghetto roster of the terminally bad. He knew why his hubcaps were still on his car after that initial visit to Winston’s apartment. Winston Foshay—a living African-American folk hero whose mythos lay somewhere between that of the angelic John Henry and the criminally insane Stagger Lee. Spencer had his newspaper story.

W
inston paused at the auditorium’s entrance. The stragglers hurried by, and he saw very few neighborhood faces. Whatever their ethnicity, these were people who only came uptown for the meager portions of soul food at Sylvia’s Restaurant, or to hear a career Negro such as his father pontificate on the challenges faced by black Americans and those enlightened few genuinely sympathetic to the cause. Each loyalist mention of his father’s name from a patron’s lips was preceded by a slew of adjectives that convinced Winston that if he ever wanted to get to know his father, he’d have to read his books, because the dynamic, insightful, devoted Clifford Foshay was a man he didn’t know.

“Tuff, you coming, yo?” asked Fariq. “Popduke be dropping bombs.”

“No, y’all go ahead.”

Yolanda and Fariq eagerly sought out seats in the small but crowded auditorium. Spotting Spencer about to settle into a front-row seat, Fariq called out, “Hey, Jewboy! Wait the fuck up! Save me a seat, can’t you see I’m crippled?” Yolanda shoved Fariq ahead of her. “Do you have to say ‘Jewboy’?”

“You sensitive to the word ‘Jewboy’?”

“No, I’m just tired of hearing you say it.”

“What else is there?”

“I thought you were a follower of the Nation? What about ‘Hebe,’ ‘kike,’ ‘hymie,’ ‘Yid.’ Anything but ‘Jewboy’ all the damn time!”

“ ‘Yid,’ ” Fariq said thoughtfully, smacking his tongue as if he were tasting a fine wine. “I like that one.”

Winston stood just inside the exit. On stage, Clifford’s band was in the middle of their preperformance primping. Sugarshack tuned his saxophone with puffs of sound, peering down the bell and then shaking the horn every few notes, hoping to dislodge some invisible clog. Gusto sat behind a small drum kit practicing his licks and his distorted drum-solo faces. Duke adjusted and readjusted the congas propped between his legs. Winston recalled how he used to drive Duke crazy by asking him to explain the difference between congas and bongos. Dawoud rummaged through his duffel bag of percussion instruments, his choices for the evening’s entertainment seemingly based on nonmusical attributes such as blatant Africanness and the dexterity required to play them.

Pointing Jordy’s finger for him, Winston followed the nervous pacing of his father. “That’s your grandfather, Jordy. He’s an asshole.” Clifford Foshay had changed into his poetry garb. The black fakir was resplendent in a Bengal tiger–patterned djellaba, topped off with an intricately woven macramé kufi, accessorized with wooden beads and yellowed lion’s teeth. Unintroduced, Clifford strode across the rostrum, carefully set his watch on the lectern and produced a shotgun, which he fired into the air, silencing the crowd. “That’s for Huey.”
Blam!
“That’s for Fred Hampton.” He opened the barrel and inserted two more cartridges into the breech.
Blam!
“That’s for raping my great-grandma.”
Blam!
“And that’s one to grow on.” A sleet of particleboard and ceiling plaster began to fall. The audience leaned forward in their seats.

When Winston was younger and forced to attend his father’s readings, Clifford’s ostentatious militancy embarrassed him. He would return home obsessed with one question: what would happen if his dad turned white overnight? One day his father was a panelist on a Sunday-afternoon television news forum. The guests, no matter their political bent, argued, threatened, and insulted one another. Winston realized that every guest reminded him of his father and that if his dad had been born white he would be the same person, bellicose and belligerent, spewing his rhetoric from overstuffed recliners and television-studio swivel chairs instead of prison cots and bar stools. When his father called him later that day asking if he’d seen him on television, Winston said yes, then asked his father
why, if he talked so much about the glories of Africa and the repressions of America, he didn’t drop his slave name for an African one. Clifford replied, “Because then you can’t cash the checks.”

After invoking the requisite Yoruba spirits, Clifford was finally ready to read. There was a cannonade of shotgun fire, and Winston turned to leave. There was no purpose in his staying; he knew the program by heart. Poems about Clifford’s expatriation to Cuba: repetitive paeans layered with images of mangos, rusty automobiles, sugarcane, and raven-haired beauties who like to fuck until the roosters crow. To break the revolutionary reveille there would be some poems about basketball, drums, and of course John Coltrane. The freedom suite would be followed by intermittent tales of how Clifford, drunk on Cuban rum and missing his mama’s cooking, made a pontoon out of coconuts and fishnet, waded into the waters of Matanzas Bay, and extradited himself to Florida. For an encore Clifford would read an ode dedicated to Winston and his dead sister, Brenda. The poem would rumble incessantly onward, like the
Iliad
read aloud by a summer-school teacher on a gorgeous August afternoon. The first canto was the story of Clifford sending cross-country for Winston and Brenda when Huey P. Newton died tragically in the streets of Oakland, California. It would be read with dramatic caesuras inserted, not between musical phrases, but between poignant images, for maximum pathos. After a three-day bus ride, Winston and his sister arrived the day of the funeral. Winston, lacking a pair of clean underwear, was forced to attend the burial wearing a pair of his sister’s panties. How he cried—not because the snake head of black-American rebellion had been severed from its body, but because his undergarment was thin, pink, and had “Tuesday” handwritten just under the waistband.

Canto 2 retold in quatrains how Clifford discovered his daughter was dead when the amount of the court-ordered alimony payments that followed him through four address changes had been halved. The third canto was a recounting of young Winston’s African-American-warrior training. His thirteenth birthday present the very same twelve-gauge shotgun balanced on Clifford’s right hip. The hunting trips took place in the swampy reeds of Wards Island, where shotgun fire scattered homeless men like park pigeons. Winston was made to fetch the kill, mostly buckshot-shredded possums and cats.

Tears of regret would pour down Clifford’s face, and he would remove his reading glasses, take a sip of water, and read the poem’s envoi,
hammering home the point of how in fighting the war humane he’d sacrificed his humanity. Then Winston’s father would bow his head; the audience, unsure if the poem was over, would remain silent. After the whispered “Thank you” into the microphone, everyone would stand and applaud this lyrical airing of dirty laundry. Clifford would scan the crowd looking for his bereaved son. Finding him, he’d ask Winston to stand. And the crowd would then turn toward Winston and smile, their clapping growing even more intense in recognition of the revolutionary’s son who wore pink panties to Huey P. Newton’s funeral. Finally, when his father had finished signing all the books, exchanging phone numbers with all the agents and groupies, the redeemed freedom fighter would make his way to his son and heartily embrace him, fooling Winston into thinking they might head into the night together, Ajax and Telamon after the siege of Troy.
I love you. No, you can’t come with us, we’re going to get some drinks. Call you tomorrow. Love you
.