Tuff (6 page)

Winston laughed, leaned over the countertop, and shouldered his way into her life. “You from Queens.”

Normally Yolanda would ask a customer to step aside so she could take the next order. Now she glanced from Winston’s face to his hands, marveling at the smoothness of his skin. “How can you tell?” she asked.

“The dolphin earrings, the cellophane-crimped bangs, more silver than gold on your wrists. Might even have a little Long Island in you.” Though Winston’s deductions were correct, Yolanda pretended to be unimpressed with a sassy “Sooo.”

“Where at? Hollis? Kew Gardens?”

“Queens Village, near the track. That okay with you?”

“Long as you ain’t from Brooklyn, I’m straight. You got a man?”

Yolanda held up her hands, showing off her collection of department-store promise rings.

“But can he be burnt?” Winston asked.

“Light a match.”

Holding trays of lukewarm burgers in wax paper and brimming with more jealousy than they’d care to admit, Winston’s boys chided him into hastening his mack.

“Let’s be out, Chubbsy Ubbsy.”

“Oh, Miss Crabtree, I have something heavy on my heart.”

“You going to have something heavy on your lip in a minute.”

“Baby girl going to have something heavy on her lap in minute.”

Winston struggled to resist the gravitational pull of his boys. He didn’t want to succumb to the forces of friendship physics, huddle up and get into a bitch-this-and-bitch-that round-table synopsis. Yolanda rescued the conversation by acknowledging the nappy-headed ballast hindering the weightlessness of puppy love. “Your team cock-blocking and shit.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your name?”

“Winston.”

“What they call you on the streets?”

“Tuffy.”

“Yolanda.”

Yolanda slid Winston a brown tray overflowing with food he didn’t order. Jammed into a forest of french fries, a two-inch figurine of the Burger King surveyed his cholesterol domain. Impaled on the king’s lance was the receipt with Yolanda’s phone number scribbled over the subtotal. Winston dropped a bundle of crumpled bills in her hand and assured her of a phone call that evening. A macho “All right then” and he was off to share his spoils with the homies, forgetting the change. As Yolanda watched him plod away, she wondered what her friends would say when she showed up at the club with a big-boned roughneck. She could hear Tasha now: “That huge nigger sure is ugly, hope he can sing.” With a smile at her musing, she called out, “Next,” and without looking back Winston answered, “Me, goddammit!”

Their first and only date was a Christmas Eve boat tour circumnavigating Manhattan. Yolanda and Winston met at the Battery Park marina, Winston punctual for the first time for an appointment that didn’t involve a court proceeding. Yolanda arrived an independent woman’s mandatory fifteen minutes late. Winston flashed the tickets he’d bought a week in advance and the giddy couple ran down the gangplank, elbowing past the out-of-towners and racing up the spiral stairs to the upper deck. Yolanda sat next to a porthole window and Winston squeezed in beside her.

“Got enough room?”

“Plenty.”

Winston lifted Yolanda’s curls and a cold sea breeze raised goose bumps on her neck. She braced for a kiss; instead, Winston slapped a Dramamine patch behind her ear. “What’s that?” Yolanda asked.

“In case you get seasick.”

“Thanks, but the boat don’t go but two miles an hour.”

“Knots.”

“I know.”

As the boat chugged around snowy Gotham, they talked over the droll tour guide, defining the landmarks for themselves. “See that building?” Yolanda asked, pointing at a limestone-and-steel skyscraper, “I used to work there two summers ago—thirty-second floor, in the cafeteria.”

“For real? You know that tan building right next to it? I used to slave there, Strudder, Farragut, and Peabody.”

“What’d you do?”

“Kept the fax machine from getting clogged.”

“That’s it?”

“My shit was high-tech, right? I lasted two whole days on that one.”

The roof speaker crackled, “Ladies and gentlemen, I know it’s a cloudy night, but those of you with binoculars can see the Rikers Island guard towers just past the Triborough Bridge. Commissioned in 1936, Rikers Island jail is the former residence of nefarious felons such as the Son of Sam, alias David Berkowitz, child-killer Joel Steinberg, the Cosa Nostra don John Gotti, and Harlem drug lord Nicky Barnes—”

Yolanda stood up and waved at the distant jailhouse. “Ahoy, Luscious and Tabitha! Jasmine, what up, girl?” Winston hissed and looked down at his feet. “You okay?” Yolanda asked, knuckling the brooding boy on the chin. “You know somebody in Rikers?”

“Please, I know much niggers on the rock.”

“ ‘Many niggers,’ or ‘a lot of niggers,’ ” Yolanda corrected.

Winston nodded, blinking to hold back his tears and a slew of sins past, present, and future. “You got bad memories?” Yolanda asked. Winston kept looking at his feet. Yolanda pulled on Winston’s earlobe, stroked his eyebrows, looking for the hidden lever that spins the bookcase, revealing the secret room. Winston raised his head and took a deep breath. He unlocked his chest plate and removed his armor piece by heavy piece.
Fuck it
. Winston started with his first arrest at age thirteen after a summer’s day spent shoplifting and chain snatching with every teenage boy from the block. At dusk, he and the posse were walking down Forty-fifth Street, nineteen deep—pissy drunk, brash and boisterous as soldiers on a three-day pass. Someone shouted “Pockets!” pointing at a man exiting the movie house. Before the sex fiend noticed the red-eyed wolf pack surrounding him, they were on him. Four kids grabbed a pocket and yanked. With a loud Mama-making-Sunday-morning-dustrags tear, the man’s pants fell apart at the seams. His billfold dropped to the ground and vanished before he had a chance to shout “Hey!” Coins and peep-show tokens clattered onto the sidewalk and raced around his shoes. The man scrambled after what remained of his belongings, trying to hold up his shredded pants, and fight off the boys, who descended upon the coins like pigeons upon breadcrumbs.

Somehow, one boy, Dark, a fresh-off-the-Greyhound-bus émigré from Duarte, California, left the robbery with pearls of errant masturbatory
ejaculate in his hot combed hair. Eager to diffuse the taunts of the other boys and prove that his thick pigtails were “gangster” and not “sissified,” he backtracked four blocks and found the victim reporting the crime to two patrolmen. Ignoring the officers, Dark began pummeling the man, shouting, “You got sperm in my perm, now I’m full of germs.” Winston was rolling on the sidewalk in a fit of laughter when the police handcuffed him. He snickered all the way to the police station: “AIDS in my braids, now I’ll never get laid!” Giggled through the fingerprinting: “Nut on my haircut, like I been butt-fucked!” The city went through a roll of film before finally settling on a mug shot of him sporting an Uncle Ben smile, tears running down his face.

Things ceased to be funny when the cops refused to believe that a boy Winston’s size could be thirteen, and since budget cuts had made night court a liberal memory, he’d have the weekend on Rikers to prove his identity. It didn’t take long. Winston disembarked from the bus, suffered through the indignities of a strip search, and strolled into building C-64. There, playing toilet-paper checkers on a bunk underneath the clock, was a double-jumping birth certificate: his father. Father and son played checkers with rolled-up balls of toilet tissue, arguing about who would call the wife, the mother. “I haven’t spoken to you or her in three years, I didn’t go to your sister’s funeral, so phone her, boy.”

“Fuck you. King me, bitch.”

Unlike Winston’s father, Patrice Foshay kept her promises. The last one, delivered behind an ironing-board pulpit, was: “Winston, you keep getting into trouble, I’m not going to kick you out the house, I’m going to leave my damn self and you’re not coming with. You’ll be living on your own. Understand?” Monday morning Mrs. Foshay posted bail on the two delinquents. She dropped Clifford off at his girlfriend’s, raised a “Power to the People!” fist in the air, and moved to Atlanta, assuring Winston she’d send rent and food money until he turned eighteen.

It took Winston two years to move his belongings into his mother’s bedroom. When the phone rang every two weeks at precisely ten o’clock, after the black sitcoms went off the air, his mother would ask why he couldn’t be more like “those nice boys on TV.”

Winston was just finishing the tale of his dysfunctional upbringing with a blasphemous “Fuck a Cosby” when an immense marble-white yacht christened
Jubilee
in bold black letters sailed alongside the tour boat. With sleek helicopters perched bow and stern and a radar dish spinning
above the bridge, the boat looked more like a war vessel than a luxury craft. “So you’re all alone?” Yolanda asked. Winston shrugged, his gaze cast out toward the bay. Yolanda knew the right thing to do was to put her head on Winston’s pillowy shoulder and say, “No, you aren’t.” But she had long since learned to let the man make the first conciliatory move. Instead she filled the uncomfortable silence with cynicism: “Every nigger’s father say they was in the Panthers. And if they was, they didn’t do shit but hand out flyers.”

“Crazy? Nigger was down.” Winston flipped open his wallet and showed her a photo of a goateed black man dressed beret-to-boots in black, crouched behind a Volkswagen Beetle, his leather-gloved hands positioned over the hood, aiming a shotgun at some unseen enemy of the Revolution. Yolanda grabbed the wallet and fawned over the Polaroid. “Yo, your pop groovier-than-a-motherfucker. Look at those pointy kicks and the tight-ass straight legs.” She flipped through the rest of the wallet, pausing at the food-stamp ID card to verify that Winston wasn’t lying about his age. She studied the more recent photos of Latino and black boys grouped around firearms, posing in front of London-gray school lockers. Interspersed with the group shots were portraits of the same solemn-faced teens at the steering wheel of the communal vehicle or the local arcade, looking directly into the camera, holding the pistols to their temples. Winston introduced the boys on the block by proxy: “Rude, Kooky, Shorty-Wop, Point Blank—right there’s my ace, Fariq.” Going through the contents of Winston’s wallet, Yolanda realized what made him attractive, other than his cute button nose. He was comfortable with who he was and wasn’t. You don’t meet too many casual black people. Winston was honest—maybe not with the rest of the world, but he was honest with her and himself. He didn’t embellish or rationalize his exploits, talking in pipe-dream slang about him and the crew “coming up,” “blowing up,” “bubbling,” and “living large.” No sob-story brooding about inner-city lassitude—“You can’t understand, it be mad crazy stress on a nigger”—as if Yolanda were on the outside looking in on a black man’s world. She understood self-pity and self-doubt; there was no need to talk over her dookie-braided head.

Yolanda tapped a purple-and-pink fingernail on the food-stamp ID and said, “You mind?”

“No, everybody at the store know me. Go ahead.” As she slipped the card from the plastic holder, Yolanda noticed there was another photo
tucked underneath it. Oh, my competition, she thought; then she noticed it was a picture of a gray-haired woman who looked to be in her late fifties. She was standing in front of the Apollo Theater. Snuggled next to her, a young Winston, his nappy head resting atop her pageboy.

“Who’s this Oriental lady?”

“Asian.”

“Who is she?”

“Ms. Nomura. She’s my unofficial guardian. She looked out for a nigger after Moms jetted.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Yolanda handed the billfold back to Winston and turned her attention to the partygoers dancing on the
Jubilee
’s poop deck, one ear cocked for the explanation. “Yolanda, you ain’t got nothing to be salty about—Ms. Nomura like my auntie. She live right across the street, knew my father when he was in the Panthers. I told you, she’s like my second mother. If you jealous of a sixty-year-old, you got issues.”

Yolanda folded her arms and peered out the porthole window. “Fucking boat move too slow.” Winston pulled a bright orange life jacket from underneath the bench and carefully slipped it over Yolanda’s head, fastening the buckles across her chest and knotting the cotton straps behind her back. Yolanda’s shoulders visibly relaxed. Oh, this fat motherfucker smooth, she thought.

Winston flamboyantly doffed his jacket and cloaked it over Yolanda’s shoulders. He was entering player mode and about to unleash his rap, the rap being the black man’s equivalent of a lion tamer’s whip crack to straighten out a headstrong feline, or a Buddhist monk’s koan to further confuse a disciple. What’s the sound of one man rapping? “Yolanda, stop fronting. I can tell by your reaction you in a brother’s corner. That’s on point, but let’s not play no games. We all need to be rescued to some extent. You going to school, that’s rescuing yourself. Just seeing a strong black woman such as yourself going head-up with the bullshit makes me wonder what can I do to straighten my game out. So listen here, I ain’t now, and never will, trip off nothing in your life that makes your life better. That’s not a promise, that’s factoid, baby. Like the sky is blue, the summer’s hot, and you fine as hell. No question. Ms. Nomura is like this life jacket, kept me afloat when times was hard. But I was just bobbing up and down in the stormy sea of the streets. You’re my rescue ship plucking me out of the water—all ahoy-and-shiver-me-timbers like.”

Yolanda put the palm of her hand in Winston’s face. “Save it. You’re right, I like you—more than I should, but let’s not get into it tonight, we got the rest of our lives to kiss and make up. Let’s be carefree, like those white folks on that boat. Look, they kicking it.”

Winston reached into his backpack, pulled out a frosted black bottle of Freixenet champagne, two paper cups, a brown teddy bear with a hot-pink ribbon knotted around its neck, and a Christmas card. “Shit,
we
kicking it.”

Sipping her champagne, Yolanda opened her handmade card. On the cover was a surprisingly decent watercolor of a black couple sitting on a mountainside outcropping, hugging and kissing to the amusement of a brood of sad-eyed Disneyesque forest animals. On the inside, written in twiggish block lettering, was the following inscription: