Tuff (32 page)

Fariq stood up on his crutches. “And even if it is a dumb idea, you supposed to be down for whatever. Until Brooklyn none of us ain’t never vetoed an idea by saying it was stupid. If you think about it, whatever we do is always stupid. So stupid or not, you supposed to be there.”

Winston opened his book of sumo techniques, saying, “Man, I’m on some other shit now.” On page one was a sketch of two entangled Buddha-esque wrestlers.
Just as basketball is not only a matter of being tall, sumo is not simply about being fat and strong. The sumo novice often overlooks the mental aspects of the sport; a well-thought-out strategy and a level head will win more bouts than sheer brute force
.

S
pencer hadn’t seen much of his supposed disciple in the two weeks since his profile of Winston appeared in the paper. When he handed him a copy of the Sunday edition over a game of Monopoly, Winston glanced at the unflattering photo of him swathed in a sumo belt, read the headline,
THE HIP-HOP POPULIST
, and handed it back.

“Don’t you want it?”

“Why I want a paper I never read?”

“Put it in your scrapbook and show it to Jordy when he gets older. Besides, you should read the paper.”

“I read it once.”

“I don’t mean the tabloids, I mean the
paper
.”

“I know what you mean. One day I was on the train and somebody left it in the seat next to me. I picked it up looking for the comics and came across an article on Stanley Kubrick. Loved that nigger, good article too. I folded the paper like the Wall Street motherfuckers do on they way to work. I swear to you, white people was looking me at different. Smiling and shit. Like they wanted to come up to me and ask, “What a nigger like
you
doing reading a paper like
that
?”

“If you want to know what’s happening in the world you have to read the paper.”

“I don’t want to know. And Smush and them don’t want to know neither, so don’t go showing them that picture, okay? Got enough problems with them clowns as it is now.”

Winston rolled, moved his game piece, the iron, to Kentucky Avenue. “Shit, I never land on Free Parking.”

“Let’s see, with three houses that’s seven hundred bucks.”

Winston paid the rent in small bills just to be annoying. “Rabbi, now that you’ve written the article you going to stop comin’ over?”

Spencer, counting his earnings answered, “No, it’s a three-part feature, so I’m in it for the long haul.” The money counted, he lifted his head and smiled. “You’re short twenty dollars.”

Tuffy flung two blue Monopoly-money tens at him. “Here, goddammit! I’m tired of this slow-death bullshit. What kind of asshole only puts three houses on a property? You got more money than the bank. Just put a hotel on these shits and get the game over with.”

“Quit.”

“No, you coming around on my streets. You in the ghetto now, yo. Light blues and purples like a motherfucker.”

Spencer rolled double fours and, to Winston’s delight, tap-danced his shoe to Oriental Avenue. “Oriental Avenue. Let’s see, two tenements …”

T
he opening article had generated some interest in inner-city politics. Part two would detail Winston’s whistle-stops on the campaign trail and part three the election’s aftermath. The problem was, Winston’s campaign activities ceased, so Spencer decided some behind-the-scenes orchestration was needed. “It’s for the good of the politically disenfranchised,” he told himself. “I’m not going to be one of those journalists who write about starving children, then don’t give them any food.”

Whenever an interested political organization called asking how they could contact Winston, instead of protecting his source, Spencer volunteered to arrange a meeting, insisting he go along as an “independent observer.” Usually the meetings took place in a Times Square restaurant after Winston stopped working the three-card-monte games.

W
inston peeked out from behind the Broadway ticket booth and waved Spencer over.
“Ven acá.”

“Hey, Winston.”

“We still going drinking tonight?” Tuffy asked, looking past Spencer at the pedestrian traffic.

“Yeah, yeah, I promised to expose you to some real beer. Wean you off that malt liquor you drink.”

“Who is it tonight?”

“Bruce Walsh from the New Progressive Party.”

“Whatever. Give me about forty-five minutes, Armello hot as a motherfucker.”

Armello was standing behind a large upended cardboard box with a page from the newspaper’s financial section draped over it. Spencer sauntered over. Armello’s hands maneuvered three cards across the day’s stock quotes. His siren madrigals lured the Argonauts of the world to their financial ruin.

A Swedish sailor stormed away from the table two hundred dollars lighter, his shipmates laughing and pounding his back. In turn each of Armello’s confederates acknowledged Spencer’s presence with a subtle signal. Charles, dressed like a banker, straightened his suit jacket and twisted a cuff link. He placed a wad of “winnings” in a Gucci wallet, then nudged Spencer. “Easy money to be made here, chap. I don’t need the money, of course, I do it for the blasted thrill. For Christ sakes, lad, get in on the action.” Finished with his shuffle, Armello moved his hands away from the table. Three red-backed cards from a well-worn Bicycle deck lay on the table. Winking at Spencer, Nadine slid two fifty-dollar bills onto the table. “Don’t nobody jump in. This one’s mine. I got this money, yo.” A man sporting a Stalin mustache stepped into the spot where the Swedish sailor had stood earlier. Nadine turned over the king of hearts. “All right!” Armello paid her without complaint and began to reshuffle the cards. As the cards leapfrogged over one another he “accidentally” flipped the king of hearts, the money card, face up on the table. In picking it up, he bent its upper left corner. The crimp was clearly visible as he slowed the shuffle to a halt. “Point to it, girl,” he said to Nadine. “Point to it so I can win my money back.” Nadine turned over an unmarked card, unleashing a stream of curses. “That was ’posed to be the fucking card.”

Fariq, bedecked in a flowing white linen robe and a white knit kufi, yelled, “My money!” and threw down eighty dollars and turned over the three of clubs. Armello plucked the dollars from his hand, then flipped over the king to show the crowd the losers had lost their money fair and square. “That’s okay. I’ll get the next one. I’m thinking Jew-like now,” Fariq said, looking out the corner of his eye at Spencer. “By observing the Jew, I’ve learned how to magnetize my mind to money. Point my spirit in the direction of the tender legal.” He faked a sneeze on Spencer’s shoulder. “Ah-Jew! Sorry about that, sir. Anyone have a tissue?”

Armello’s hands were moving faster now, his movements a blur; the cards seemed to hop about under their own power, the hands just passing over them. Every few passes Armello held up the king to show the gathered crowd the golden fleece. Through all the shuffling Spencer tried to keep his eyes glued to the king.

“Who seen it?” Armello shouted, the crested cards facedown on the table looking like tract-house roofs viewed from the sky. “You seen it?” he asked Spencer, poking a finger solidly in his chest. Spencer shook his head no and backed a pace and a half away from the table. Dog-eared like a cropped Doberman pinscher, the middle card lay on the table screaming to be picked. “Who seen it? You? You? You? Point to it for free.” No one stepped up. Armello was about to redeal when Stalin’s hand shot across the table toward the bent card. Armello beat him to the card, but just barely. Holding the card down, he pressed the man to show him some money. Stalin took out a twenty. “I don’t play for twenty,” Armello said. “Show me a hundred, I’ll give you two hundred.” The man hesitated. Charles opened up his wallet and removed a stack of twenties. “I’ll take this chap’s bet.”

Stalin dug into his pocket, pulled out three crumpled hundred-dollar bills. “Oh shit,” the knot of onlookers gasped. Hands shaking, Fariq placed a small rock on the card, then quickly went through his pockets and soon fanned out six hundred dollars in bills of various denominations. Nadine unfolded Stalin’s money, slowly scooting it closer to Fariq’s edge of the table. Hands no longer shaking, Fariq slowly raised the rock off the card. Stalin turned it over: two of spades. He started screaming that he’d been cheated, that the cards had been somehow switched. “I demand a refund!”

“Refund?”

Nadine cooled the mark out, then turned to Fariq. “Give him a free shot. Slow it down. Let my man go for free.”

Fariq refused, stuffing the wrinkled bills into a money clip already filled with cash. “Hell naw, if he would’ve won would he have given me
my
money back?” he said, knowing that even if by some improbability the man had chosen the king, the only way he’d have received his winnings was at gunpoint, and the only way he’d spend them would be to shoot Winston. Nadine ran a finger down Fariq’s cheek. “Come on, baby.” Smush reshuffled the cards, held the king to the man’s nose, flicked his wrists and dropped the cards on the table, the bent king no longer available. “Pick, motherfucker!” Stalin’s hand paused over every card, finally settling for the one on the far right: three of clubs. “Now get the fuck out of here! I hate a sore motherfucking loser.” Nadine quickly lost a hundred dollars and the crowd, growing suspicious, thinned.

Spotting two beat cops coming up the boulevard, Winston cupped one hand over his mouth and in a muffled voice that went unheard except by those who were meant to hear it, said, “Ease up.” The game and its players disappeared from the street as if they’d fallen through a trapdoor.

W
inston, Spencer, and Bruce, the New Progressive Party’s representative, settled into a Theater District steakhouse. Winston pulled his nose out of a goblet of Belgian beer. The aroma was pleasant. Spencer suggested apricot with a hint of caramel. Winston disagreed, “Shit smell like alcohol to me. Maybe a little like Halloween candy.” Holding his glass up high, Bruce proposed a toast. “To Winston, forwarding the progress of American third-party politics like no one since Zachary Taylor.” Spencer seconded the toast with a hearty “Hear! Hear!” though he knew Bruce’s claim of Taylor’s being a third-party candidate was specious, Old Rough and Ready’s being a Whig at a time in American history when the Whigs and the Democrats were the two major parties in a two-party system. Tuffy raised his glass a centimeter off the table, grunted, and made a silent toast.
To the three weeks until election day going by with the serious quickness
.

During the past two weeks nearly every American third party had tried to wine and dine Winston over to their side. The gratuitous liberalism had added ten pounds to his frame. Sushi and alligator teriyaki compliments of the Green Party. Coq au vin, pâté fraîche, and lemon mousse with toasted coconut and blueberries courtesy of the Working Family Party. The Welfare Recipient Faction treated him and his “advisory staff”
to grilled Bay of Fundy salmon with Israeli couscous. The New Party spared no expense and insisted that Winston order a second helping of yellowfin tuna au poivre with Szechuan peppercorns. The New Alliance Party sat him down to a heaping portion of shrimp and okra étouffé.

The feasts followed more or less the same agenda. His hosts, often a white charter member and two or three colored officers, opened up with a statement that Party X was a multiracial organization. But if during the ensuing conversation Winston mentioned race, the dithyrambic chorus was quick to tell him that race was a dead-end issue. That if history has taught us anything, it’s that using ethnic oppression as the basis for social and political upheaval is doomed to fail. No matter what you do, racism will be still be, if not prevalent, at least present. Social and economic class must be the rallying points of the future struggle for democratic dignity. The next line would be “More Calvados, Winston?” and he would silently sip his ten-dollar aperitif as daintily as possible, intuition telling him that if racism was an immutable oppression, so was poverty.

Bruce was well past the color, gender, class, sexual-orientation trivialities. When the waitress placed the appetizers on the table, Bruce, who matched Winston in portliness, was already on his second dinner salad and waist-deep into the tautology of third-party politics.

So much as he understood the language of political rhetoric, Winston agreed with the litany of New Progressive principles. If the New Progressive Party’s platform was idealistic, it was an idealism worth advocating: a constitutional amendment that guaranteed every American equal rights to shelter, health care, and education; community control over both public and private institutions, permitting cross-party endorsement in all elections; a minimum living wage. The cold facts had been presented, and from being a fly on the wall at countless of Inez’s cell meetings, Winston was well versed in leftist liturgy. He knew that after the wish list came the emotional plea. Bruce addressed him in a voice so sincere it lifted his head from his plate of apricot-basted quail. “Winston, the New Progressive Party believes in you. And from all that I’ve read about you, heard about you, and witnessed this evening, the New Progressive Party is ready to have you as its next candidate for whatever city office you wish to pursue in the next election, because the New Progressive Party believes that ordinary people have the ability to govern themselves.” While on the surface Bruce’s avowal was a show of support, it was dripping with a political rectitude Winston found condescending; but in the spirit of coalition
politics, he kept his thoughts to himself. Why upset the man who’s buying bottles of the best beer he’d ever tasted at eight dollars a pop?
“Ordinary”?
thought Winston.
Who you calling ordinary? “Ability to govern themselves”? What you really saying is that people like me can’t run people like you
.