Tuff (31 page)

O
yakata Kinboshi watched his son-in-law Kotozuma amble onto the
dohyo
. Currently ranked at Maegashira 6, the former Seiwake was in free fall, tumbling down the ranks since his arranged marriage to Kinboshi’s daughter. His weak
taichi-ai
and lack of fighting spirit were becoming an embarrassment to the entire Satogatake stable. Kinboshi thought he needed a kick in the ass. Arms folded tightly across his chest, he stared at Kotozuma’s opponent, Tochinaru, who, seated cross-legged on the east side of the ring, was slow to get up. When Tochinaru caught his eye, Kinboshi made a slashing motion past his throat with his finger, the signal for a wrestler to throw a bout. Confused, Tochi furrowed his brow, since these were exhibition matches and nothing was at stake other than pride. The Oyakata shook his wrist and Tochi’s face cleared with comprehension. Slowly rising from his seat, he bowed to the referee, reporting that he would be unable to fight due to injury. He bowed again and walked back to the mobile dressing rooms, shaking his wrist. The referee scurried toward Kinboshi, nodding his head as the Oyakata whispered in his ear, then dashed over to the ring announcer. The ring announcer, very plainly dressed in a black coat and gray Japanese knickers, walked to the center of the
dohyo
and raised his hand for quiet. “As a show of goodwill between America and Japan and Spanish Harlem, Kotozuma is willing to fight a challenger from the audience. Are there any takers?” Fuming, Kotozuma kicked up a cloud of clay dust. He wanted to leave, but knowing the fine would be at least a hundred thousand yen, he held his ground and spit on the
dohyo
. He’d pay the thirty-thousand-yen expectorate penalty.

S
o mad was Kotozuma that he didn’t hear the raucousness in the stands as a few hundred of Winston’s neighbors yelled his name and fifteen friends and family members pushed and pulled him out of the bleachers. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a challenger.” As some attendants escorted Winston to the dressing room, Inez stood up and shouted,
“Gambate!”
Without looking back, Winston punched the air with a fist.

“
‘Gambate,’
you always sayin’ that. What’s it mean, Ms. Nomura?” asked Armello.

“It means ‘hang in that shit.’ ”

After a few minutes, Winston emerged from the dressing room. A sparkling white
mawashi
snaked around his body like a disheartened boa constrictor unsure of how to handle a victim whose girth was akin to that of a Parthenon column. The thick satin belt wound snugly around Winston’s waist, hoisting his paunch almost to his nipples, cleaving his buttocks, and firmly knotting itself behind his back. Winston strode toward the
dohyo
, his broad back and massive haunches lotioned to a shiny obsidian black. To his surprise no one in the crowd mocked him with diaper jokes or commented on how his thighs rubbed together. His boys trailed him like wizened corner men, clapping his back and massaging his shoulders as he climbed up the straw-bale steps dug into the side of the ring. Charles, looking across at the imposing Kotozuma, grabbed the nape of his friend’s neck and said, “Be careful, Tuff, this one look like he know karate.”

“But he don’t know me.”

Before Winston stepped into the circle, the translator approached him with a deep bow. He told Winston he must perform the ritual movements and to simply copy whatever Kotozuma did. He also assured him that he would be perfectly safe from harm; since this was a demonstration bout, the professional
rikishi
would take it easy on him.

The clay surface of the
dohyo
was warm and dry. On reflex Winston, with his big toe, scratched “Tuffy 109” into the light brown powder just outside the rim of the circle. The announcer’s voice boomed from the PA speakers, “Ko-o-o-to-o-zu-maaa!” Upon hearing his name, Kotozuma stalked into the ring, sprinkling a dash of salt on the
dohyo
and beating on the side of his
mawashi
with the heels of his hands. After a beat, a slightly garbled but deafening “Kuuu-rooo-ya-maaaa!” echoed throughout the park. The noble-sounding temporary
shikona
and the crowd’s cheers caused Winston’s left eyelid to twitch with nervousness. One long stride, a pinch of salt, and he was inside the ring of straw. The ring, about twenty feet in diameter, looked bigger than it did from the bleachers. Winston’s thoughts flashed to Musashi and the monk, but it was hardly time to contemplate oneness with the universe. Judging by Kotozuma’s glower, someone had forgotten to tell him that this was an exhibition bout. Facing each other, the two men squatted, clapped their hands, then swung their out-stretched
arms to their sides, turning their palms to the sky. The wrestlers stood up, and the limber Kotozuma slowly raised one foot above his shoulder, then the other. Trying to balance on one foot was somewhat more difficult for Winston, but he gamely locked his knees and raised his legs till his thighs burned, doing his best to keep his planted foot from twisting and his body from wobbling. Kinboshi stared at Winston’s broad feet. “Like snowshoes,” he said aloud to no one in particular. “He’ll be all right.”

Smirking, Kotozuma exited the ring and reentered flinging one last offering of salt. Kotozuma’s cockiness relaxed Winston.
Ain’t nothing but a fight. A little Friday-night scrap between men. Except that it’s Saturday afternoon and I’m butt-ass naked
. He gazed into the stands; Yolanda was holding Jordy high overhead, Inez was staring at Kinboshi, and Spencer was furiously taking notes. At the foot of the ring Fariq, Whitey, and Armello were giving him a thumbs-up. Winston scooped up a handful of salt and tossed it high into the air. It fell to earth like a fountain of dying firework embers. He stormed into the ring ready to do battle. The crowd stood and roared its approval. “Wax that ass, Tuff!”

“Don’t start none, won’t be none!”

“Uptown!”

Winston and Kotozuma settled into the hunkered starting position, one hand on the ground, butt cheeks touching the backs of their calves. Kotozuma’s puffy face was less than two feet away.
Goddamn, this motherfucker big
, Winston thought.
He so fat I can barely see his eyes. Eyebrows touching his cheeks and shit. Eyes look like apostrophes. I know this nigger don’t wear contacts
. As they slowly raised their haunches, Winston blew Kotozuma a kiss and watched his opponent’s ears turn red. At a silent signal privy only to the two wrestlers, their left hands dropped to the ground and they launched into each other with a crushing impact force that might have been Enrico Fermi’s inspiration for nuclear fission. Winston’s lungs emptied like two fireplace bellows, and a shoving Kotozuma slid him toward the edge of the ring. Winston marveled at the hardness of his opponent’s stomach; it was as if a layer of rubbery skin had been stitched over a giant tortoise shell. Strangely, Kotozuma’s warm, clammy skin had a familiar feel to it; where had he felt it before? Splaying his toes and digging his heels into the ground, Tuffy stopped his backward progress.
The beluga whale at the Brooklyn aquarium—this nigger feels just like that dirty white whale!
Deciding to take the offensive, he locked in
Kotozuma’s extended arms at the elbows, which forced him to straighten and negated his leverage. Winston marched him back to the center of the circle. Using his right hand he grabbed Kotozuma’s belt with an underhanded grip. With his left he vainly reached out for a grappling point as Kotozuma swiveled his hips, keeping that side of the
mawashi
just out of reach. With a sudden burst of speed and strength, Kotozuma freed himself and slapped Winston across his jowls so hard his vision doubled. If Kotozuma had done anything else—twisted Winston’s arm behind his neck and thrown him to the ground with a perfectly executed
kubi-nage
, or grabbed his wrist and kicked his inner ankle—Winston would have succumbed. But in the streets to be slapped in front of anyone who even remotely knows you is the ultimate insult. Mothers slap children, wives slap husbands, pimps slap hos, but nobody slaps Winston, and before Kotozuma could release a follow-up smack, Winston blasted him with a “What, motherfucker?” two-handed push to the chest that sent the
rikishi
reeling backward. Just as Kotozuma was about to regain his balance, Winston blasted him out of the ring with a well-placed shoulder tackle and belly bump. Kotozuma landed in a clump at his Oyakata’s feet. Unassisted, his jostled topknot resting over one eye, Kotozuma clambered back into the ring and squatted down. Winston did the same, returning Kotozuma’s slight bow.
“Kuu-roo-ya-maa no kaa-a-chiii!”

After the day’s festivities were over and Winston had changed back into his street clothes, Kinboshi and a few of the wrestlers went over to congratulate him. The wrestlers greeted him with firm soul shakes, the two Hawaiians accompaning their grips with American street slang. “Yo, my man, you rocked Homeboy.”

“Thanks, yo.”

When the backslapping was over, the Oyakata began speaking and everyone stopped talking. Without prompting, the interpreter translated. “They tell me your name is Winston Foshay. I’m Oyakata Kinboshi, I trained the fighter you beat. They announced you won by
yori-kiri
, frontal force-out, but it was really
yori-taoshi
, frontal crush-out, a more powerful technique. Your style is unorthodox but effective.”

Unable to hold the Oyakata’s stare without smiling, Winston looked down at the ground feeling like the unassuming hero in a martial-arts movie: trained by wind, trees, and the monkeys, the country bumpkin makes a name for himself.

“Is it true you are running for political office?”

Winston nodded, wishing it weren’t.

“Then not only do you win the match, but you probably won a lot of votes today.”

“There is a loosely enforced ban on foreign wrestlers entering Japanese sumo right now. The Sumo Kyokai is afraid of big black men dominating the sport. I don’t know why they are afraid. Whenever Japan gets a chance to prove its superiority complex, we cringe in fear. If you were Mongolian, or even an Argentinian Jew, I could get you in.”

The translator whispered something in the Oyakata’s ear, and the coach’s eyes widened. “That’s right, I forgot Sentoryu,” remembering the mediocre Juryo
rikishi
, a half-Japanese, half-black wrestler from St. Louis. “You aren’t part Japanese, or that loud woman who introduced you wouldn’t want to sign an affidavit swearing she was your mother, would she?

“I’m sorry, I go too far. You are a politician. Obviously, your first thoughts are for your people and community, and a proud man like yourself wouldn’t abandon his mission for selfish reasons.”

Winston studied the expensive Rolex and Movado watches banded around the thick wrists of the Oyakata and the other
sumotori
, their fine silk robes, and the retinue of attendants shading their heads with parasols. Clearly there was big money to be made in sumo wrestling. Tuffy wanted to say, “I could give a fuck about an election. Man, put me and mines on a plane and let’s do this. When do I get a couple of slaves?” But he recalled a television documentary he’d seen on the rigors of the Japanese school system. He pictured a college-age Jordy, a mathematics whiz but unable to think for himself. To survive on the streets of Harlem knowing how to factor polynomials wasn’t going to help much.

Kinboshi took Winston’s silence for a refusal of his offer and handed him a small book,
The Science of Sumo: The Seventy Techniques Diagrammed and Explained in Great Detail
. Winston thanked him and asked if the other wrestlers were ghetto kids like himself. The Oyakata smiled and said most of the
rikishi
were the sons of farmers and steelworkers, a few were Japanese-born Koreans trying to pass as “traditional” Japanese, and there was a sprinkling of college boys who would do anything to avoid the business world. There was a long, awkward silence as the two men pondered alternative destinies: Winston, a chubby Japanese boy pushed into sumo by overbearing parents. The Oyakata, a running buddy of Tampa Red, hitchhiking from town to town swigging whiskey from coughsyrup
bottles and playing a mean blues harmonica. He couldn’t get over how much Winston looked like Robert Johnson. Tuffy began to say something and Kinboshi expected the words to “Ramblin’ on My Mind” to tumble out of his mouth, complete with vinyl scratches and pops.

“Say, yo, what was the name they introduced me as?”

“Kuroyama.”

“What that mean?”

“Black Mountain.”

A
s city workers disassembled the ring and the bleachers, Winston was back on the stoop, listening to his friends rehash his bout with Kotozuma. “Tuffy said, ‘Blaw! I don’t play that, you Jap motherfucker. Remember Pearl Harbor. Bip!’ Even the police was clapping for you, son.”

“I ain’t seen Tuff that mad in a while. Nigger had on that berserko face. Tuff like to kill that nigger.”

Winston’s generic soda tasted funny and wouldn’t go down his throat. He spat the contents of his mouth onto the sidewalk and listened to the carbonation sizzle on the sidewalk. “Don’t call me Tuffy no more. I want y’all to call me Kuroyama.”

Fariq drew back. “What, son? ‘Kuroyama’? What the fuck that mean, ‘Fat Bastard’ in Japanese?”

The gang broke out in an avalanche of laughter that sent them rolling down the steps and into the street like brown boulders. Even Winston giggled, the paunch underneath his green shirt quivering like dessert gelatin. “Y’all not right,” he said, flinging his soda can out into the street. “Won’t even let a nigger dream. I could be in Japan tomorrow clocking mad loot.”

“You are dreaming.”

“Armello, like y’all ain’t dreaming with this bank robbery shit.” Winston’s voice took on a pouty tone. “We going to give tellers the potion, wave the magic wand, and we’ll be toodle-oo with the cash.”

Armello spread his arms to the side. “Tuff, I seen the documentary, it’s going to work.”

“Man, even if it don’t work, I think the shit will be fun,” Charley O’ said. “How many fools can say, ‘I robbed a bank with my moms’? That right there will be worth it.”