Tuff (21 page)

Winston lay Jordy in his stroller and backed quietly out of the room, leaving Clifford on a Dadaist roll, turning wordplay riffs on Fidel Castro:

Winston decided he would celebrate his candidacy at the movies. He bought a pint of gin and a bottle of lemonade, then flagged a livery cab.

The burgundy Buick Electra sailed down Second Avenue like an obsolete dreadnought full steam ahead on its way to the dry dock. Father and son poked their heads though the sunroof. Shirtsleeves flapping in the downtown traffic sirocco, they ahoyed everything from the prostitutes to leashed Pomeranians. “Vote Winston Foshay—City Councilman!” Winston shouted, his arm stretched into the dusk in imitation of Debs’s pleading pose. “Vote Winston Foshay—City Councilman!” He didn’t have anything else to say. He didn’t have a political platform—no programs for reform, no admonitions for society. “Vote Winston Foshay—City Councilman!” As people turned to see who this crazy man yelling from an old
Buick was, he could almost see his words drifting away in the slipstream of the muggy city air, like skywriting. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” He laughed, took a sip of his drink, then screamed, “All for a spoonful of borscht!”

“H
ere?” asked the driver, cruising the car past the multiplex. The marquee displayed six films, none of which Winston had any interest in. It was the usual dreck: a low-budget music video passing itself off as an African-American feature film; the summer blockbuster chock-full of special effects; three white independent “mosaics” of risqué subject matter, flat asses, dime-novel plot twists, and lots and lots of driving; and one big-budget masturbatory vehicle written, directed, and produced by an aging white Academy superstar playing a vile, bitter, successful old curmudgeon who finds humility and understanding for his fellow man in the arms of a young nubile.
Fuck this garbage
. He said aloud, “Take me to Chinatown.”

There is nothing darker than a Chinatown movie theater, and for a moment the gloom fooled Winston into thinking he was dead. After checking to make sure his heart was still beating, he groped his way down the aisle, his hand going from seat back to seat back, occasionally touching the sweaty neck of a sleeping old man. He found found two empty seats and rubbed the worn velvet cushions, checking for freshly chewed gum. Out of blankets and two small stuffed animals he made a pallet for Jordy, who quickly fell asleep, a parakeet in a covered cage.

Winston slouched in his seat and peered through the swirling cigarette smoke at the giant screen. Two Hong Kong brothers, obviously on different sides of the law, were arguing over who’d make the penultimate sacrifice.
I’ll kill for you. No, I’ll die for you
. Winston left the theater wondering if he would’ve thrown himself in front of the bullets that claimed his sister, dying in her arms with a noble look on his face. He headed north on Bowery singing the theme song to the second feature,
Once Upon a Time in China
, a picture he’d seen at least a dozen times. He was still singing when he walked into a pet store two blocks up from the theater.
“Ao qi mian dui wan chong la-a-ang. Re xie xiang na hong ri gua-a-ang!”
The proprietor greeted him with a smile and finished the chorus,
“Dan si tie da-a-a
. That’s a great movie.”

“The best.”

Winston asked to see the baby turtles, and the storekeeper placed a fishbowl full of dark-green inch-long turtles on the counter. Winston picked out a turtle and placed it in Jordy’s palm. “What do the words in that song mean?”

“ ‘Stand proud when you face wars. Hot-blooded like the red sun. Courage like iron.’ ”

“That’s good advice. How much them turtles?”

“One for a dollar, ten for eight.”

Hunching over the counter, Winston whispered into the owner’s ear, “You got them piranhas?”

The man looked around suspiciously, called for his attendant to watch the cash register, then headed to a back room, returning with a menacing-looking fish in a sandwich bag.

“That’s what I’m talking about! Let me get some of those little rocks, too—blue ones.”

When Winston got home, he placed the rocks into a corner of the casserole bowl that held his goldfish, sticking a plastic palm tree in the cobalt-blue mound, forming a makeshift tropical isle. He pried open Jordy’s hand and resuscitated the dried-out turtle with a globule of saliva, then dropped it into the water with the goldfish and a dead fly that was floating on the surface. Waving the sandwich bag over the casserole dish, Winston teased his pet, “Fishy, come out to play! Dustin, I want you to meet Sir Laurence Olivier.” The piranha swam out of the Baggie and into its new environs. “Is it safe? Hell naw, it isn’t safe.” The turtle scrambled for the rocks. The goldfish backed into the corner, cautiously eyeing his new neighbor. The piranha ate the dead fly. Winston took Jordy to bed, chuckling in his Ming the Merciless laugh.

O
n a low-visibility day, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the Manhattan skyline looked like a giant histogram, the lofty edifices stretching upward along the X axis of greed. Beyond the midtown skyscrapers lay the meaningless statistical outliers, the barren flatlands of East Harlem. Tuffy looked back at Inez and Spencer, who were busily noshing on a plate of hot Empire State nachos, letting Winston have his moment.

The view always evoked mixed emotions in Winston. This high off the ground at the base of the clouds, he experienced the dissonant symptoms of social vertigo. He didn’t know whether he was flying or falling. Today, the view was more apropos of Tuffy’s life than ever before. Since declaring his halfhearted candidacy for public office, he’d begun to look at his neighborhood from the outside in. When he visited friends, the overwhelming stench of buckets that served as toilets for the people who lived on the top-floor landings no longer caused him to gag and laugh in ridicule, but to daub his stinging eyes in shame. At night from his bedroom window, he counted the buildings on his block, stupefied that abandoned dwellings outnumbered occupied ones by two to one. He fell asleep watching the nocturnal drug addicts flit out of the concrete caves like bats, and the diurnal homeless return to burrow into the dilapidated warren.

.  .  .

T
he foreign tongues, drawls, and dialects of the tourists buzzed in Winston’s ears like forest mosquitoes. Their gaiety almost fooled him into believing that he too was a foreigner to the urban chaos down below. A gale of hot wind rustled the city map he was holding. Winston struggled to hold it at a readable angle. A German tour guide and his group surrounded him.
“Im Norden liegt Harlem,”
the tour guide said, his hand raised for attention,
“… die Heimat des schwarzen Amerikas.”
The German language made his epiglottis itch, but Winston distinctly heard “Harlem” and wondered what the tour guide was saying. He knew the man wasn’t saying anything about his Harlem,
Ost
Harlem.

There was little East Harlem folklore. There had been no Spanish Harlem Renaissance, only Ben E. King’s catamitic reference to a rose in his soul song “Spanish Harlem,” three poets of some renown (Willie Perdomo, Piri Thomas, and Doug E. Fresh), and a playground basketball legend (Joe Hammond). It would be impossible for any tour guide to convey the absurdity of daily life in the neighborhood. How could one even translate Winston’s chaotic morning?

The East Harlem dawn bathed his casserole-dish aquarium in reddish-gold light.
Beautiful
, thought Winston.
Shoot, my set up lookin’ kinda tropical
. But when he checked up on his beloved piranha, he found the metaphor of his election campaign floating on its side, dead; the goldfish and turtle frolicking around its corpse.

East Harlem was where the real excitement was, but black Harlem seemed to have better marketing. Tour guides with a textbook knowledge of Harlem weren’t the only ones to profit by its mystique. Before the sanitized tour companies invaded Harlem with their double-decker buses and walking tours, Winston and Fariq provided services to European tourists. They plied their trade outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Near the cab stand they’d wait for a couple of tall, pale youths who displayed that distinctive European mien of being descendants of the great civilizations, along with cowlicks, black jeans, and a backpack, to stagger wearily out of the station. At the crinkle of a map unfolding, Fariq would break out his shortwave-radio-soccer German. “
Achtung
, motherfuckers!” he’d say, wobbling over to the youths, gold teeth glinting in his “Welcome to New York” smile. “
Nicht scheißen! Nicht scheißen!
Just kidding.”

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
the tourist would ask skeptically. “A little,”
Fariq would reply. “Check me out:
Bayern München gegen Kaiserslautern; zwei zu eins. Borussia Dortmund gegen Herta BSC; eins zu null
.” The tourists would back away, unsure of how to respond to the irony of a crippled American boy who loved
Fussball
. If there was a piece of trash about, with a swing of his crutch Fariq would “kick” it between two rubbish bins, then exclaim,
“Klinsmann mit links—Tor!”
—a pinprick in the travelers’ Social Democratic sensibilities. “Do you need any directions?” Fariq would volunteer. “Where you going? What are you planning to see? Have you thought about Alphabet City, or the Botanical Gardens?” “Botanical Gardens” was Winston’s cue. “Harlem. What about Harlem?” he would say robotically, his voice barely audible over the Ninth Avenue traffic. It was his only line. Whenever he complained to Fariq demanding a bigger role in the con game, Fariq would explain to him that he had to say the line. “You big, black, and ugly. You everything they’ve ever imagined Harlem to be.” “Yeah, great idea, Tuff. What about Harlem? Have you guys thought about Harlem?” At the mention of the magic word the European wayfarers would fidget like naughty children about to accept a dare. Soon the tourists would be purchasing fake tickets to a nonexistent Motown revue at the Apollo. If they were especially gullible, Fariq would bid Winston load their luggage into the cab, while he asked where they were staying, then relayed the information to the cabdriver. “Let’s see, the Upper West Side will be twenty-five dollars. You give us the money and the driver will take you where you want to go.” After a while the con stopped working. The new Eurotravelers were a wiser breed. They’d look at the counterfeit tickets and say, “James Brown never recorded for Motown.”

The German tour guide was pounding and kicking the telescope. He cuffed the telescope with the heel of his hand one last time.
“Eine scheiß Optik.”

Tuffy’s gaze shifted back and forth from the distant rooftops of his neighborhood to the section of map Inez had marked off in red marker as his electoral district. While the German sightseers gawked at the lights of Times Square, his eyes traced the jagged borders of the unremarkable Eighth District. His mind filling in details invisible from eighty-six stories up and three miles away. According to Inez he needed nine hundred people to sign a petition that would place his name on the ballot. No one knew the district and its constituency like he did. The eastern boundary bisected the East River from 96th to 129th Streets, and Winston knew
that somewhere along the concrete banks of the river, maybe by the 103rd Street overpass, crazy old Siddhartha Jenkins was minding rod and reel.

Today, like every day, Siddhartha was fishing for fluke, porgy, and the occasional albacore, wildly wrestling with his pole as if he’d hooked Hemingway’s giant marlin. “I wish the boy were here with me. Blessed Mary, pray for the death of this fish, wonderful though he is. I wish the boy were here.” If Siddhartha would sign the petition, Winston would be the boy.

The northernmost outpost of the ward was the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 129th Street. Winston envisioned constituent Jaimito Linares standing in front of Manny’s Superette, sipping on fifty-cent cans of malt liquor, hissing at any female who strayed too close to his lair.
Psst, Mamí, com’ere. No, I really like you, you make me want to settle down
. Next to him, in the shade of an orange beach umbrella, Wilma “La Albina” Mendez. Legs cocked open like a bronco-busting cowboy on break, Wilma would be running her pink-margarita eyes over Jaimito’s spillover. Her quasar-white skin set off with sparkling twenty-four-karat gold necklaces and dental caps, she would be searching for lesbian tendencies in the faces, walks, and haircuts of those who rebuffed Jaimito’s advances or talked to him but couldn’t keep their eyes off her. Wedding rings be damned.
It’s fucking hot, right? You want some cold wine cooler. Come on, don’t be that way, tómelo. Come sit in the shade
. Jaimito and Wilma would sign just to impress the ladies with their political savvy.

Down Lexington to 110th Street the streets would be lined with locals seeking relief from the heat. Some would have washrags dipped in ice water pressed to their foreheads, moving and speaking only when absolutely necessary. Others would be sitting on the porch listening to the block’s interlocutor provide the latest “
Oye
, you heard about” gossip, basking in the air-conditioning of someone’s problems. Up and down Lexington, youngsters would keep from stalling in the heat by lubricating their idling engines with various coolants, both legal and illegal. On 121st Street, next to the record shop, Carl Fonseca would be tending his quarter-acre vegetable garden, bragging that the only thing that matched the size of his tomatoes was the size of his balls. Between 114th and 115th Streets a pair of towheaded Mormon boys would be knocking on doors, clicking open attaché cases like movie hitmen, threatening the local heathens with their pamphlet weaponry. Maybe, Winston thought, he could use the Mormon evangelism to his advantage. He’d let the Mormons
open the doors, get the doomed descendants of Cain talking, then he’d swoop in and, catching the hosts in be-polite-in-front-of-the-white-man mode, have them sign his petition.