Tuff (22 page)

Winston’s eyes traveled west on 110th past the park, past the church of St. John the Divine, and down Broadway to what he approximated to be 96th Street. He struggled for an image of the area.
That’s not my people. I don’t know shit about the West Side. Don’t white people live over there? Fuck
. The Eighth District included Central Park, the lines of demarcation excluding the residential sides of its eastern and western borders. Though Central Park wasn’t a key voting bloc, the green was his jurisdiction. Right now Armello was playing baseball on diamond 10, nonchalantly scooping up hard-hit ground balls in the field and, after two feeble at-bats, being pinch-hit for in the fifth inning.
If I win the election I can pass a law saying Armello gets four strikes
.

“Ms. Nomura, it’s so big.”

“What is?”

“The district. I’m mean, I got the park, the West Side, everything but the fancy buildings on Central Park West and Fifth Avenue.”

“Well, East Harlem’s interests and their interests are different.”

“Don’t everybody pretty much want the same things—jobs, good schools, and shit?”

“Yeah, but they don’t want you in their neighborhood, much less having any say-so over their lives.”

Winston plucked a gooey tortilla chip from Inez’s plate, making sure to hook a slice of jalapeño. “Man, for a second there I was excited about this shit. But from here you see how many people live in the neighborhood. I mean, look at all the windows. In every one there’s a life being lived.”

Spencer smiled. “Winston, you don’t know it, but you’d be a really good city councilman.”

“Man, I don’t know shit about politics. No, wait, hold up, I do know something.” Winston swallowed his food and began singing in a shower-perfected baritone that rarely graced the world excepting in drunken soft lullabies to his son.

There wasn’t an American born after 1960 who hadn’t heard “Schoolhouse Rock.” Not surprisingly, Spencer joined Winston in singing the last lines of the chorus.

Winston grumbled. “I know that song. That’s it, thank God. If I really knew something, my stubborn ass might get some ideas and actually try and make a change.”

“But if you
could
make a change, what would you do?” Spencer asked, taking out his notebook. Tuffy glanced at his distant neighborhood, its dirt-brown facades barely visible, camouflaged in the smoggy haze. “First thing I would do is paint a yellow line on the ground that exactly matched the boundaries of the district. That way we’d know that the neighborhood is ours. ‘This is our shit, step lively’—you know what I’m saying?”

Winston went on to create a paradise ex nihilo, an idyllic shtetl of midnight swimming holes and hassle-free zones where denizens would be free to “drug, fuck, suck, and thug” to their heart’s delight. Where personal stereos wouldn’t shatter into plastic shards when you dropped them, but bounce back into your hands undamaged, like rubber balls. Where children would never have to know what it is to eat sugar sandwiches for breakfast, frozen broccoli for lunch, and sit down to dinners of Spam, canned corn, and moldy pieces of bread, listening to Mother say, “Don’t worry about the green stuff, that’s where penicillin comes from, it’s good for you.” East Harlem would be a Shangri-la of moist weed, cold beer, and zesty sofrito.

“Then I would put up a huge sign that read ‘Spanish Harlem’ in bright red neon lights that flashed one letter at a time and then all at once. Some shit that make this GE, Citibank, big-business bullshit look small. Something that would make these foreigners say, “Over there is the Brooklyn Bridge, and over there, there is Spanish Harlem!” Winston shook his head. “I’m tripping, right?”

“Winston, those are things people need to hear,” Inez said.

“Even that madness about fuckin’, suckin’, druggin’, and thuggin’?”

“Well, maybe not the thuggin’.”

Inez handed Winston a petition. “Here, this is the petition I have to turn in to the Board of Elections in three weeks.”

Winston looked it over. “Nine hundred names? That won’t be so hard.”

“But they have to be registered voters and it has be done in three weeks.”

“All we have to do is get a bunch of the registration forms and register motherfuckers as they signing the petition. Many times as I been caught up in the system, I know how it works, they’ll never know.”

“That’s a good idea,” Spencer said, wrapping his arm around Winston’s shoulders, “You’re feeling it today, huh?”

Winston shrugged off Spencer’s hand. “You know, ever since I decided to run I’m thinking different. I can feel my brain working. Y’all remember those cards with the dots on them? You’d hold them up about six inches from your nose and stare at it, then real slowly a 3-D image appears. That’s what’s happening to me. My mind is slowly seeing the pattern. I hope it’s not a fad like them cards were. What were those things called?”

“Magic Eye, I think.”

“Then I got the Magic Eye. Woooo!”

Winston read the petition aloud. “We, the undersigned, do hereby state that as duly enrolled voters of the Eighth Council District and entitled to vote in the next blah, blah, blah to be held on blah, blah, blah, appoint Winston L. Foshay for City Council Eighth District. In witness whereof, we have hereto set our hands. Signed, Inez Nomura, Fariq Cole, and Yolanda Delpino-Foshay.” Winston thrust the piece of paper back into Inez’s hands. “Yolanda using her maiden name now? What the fuck is up with that? And my father—what, he don’t want to sign?”

“He said, ‘Why waste good ink on a lost cause?’ ”

“He’s probably right.”

Inez grabbed Winston by the wrist, saying, “Come with me,” and dragged him to the southeast corner of the observation deck. Spencer followed at a distance. Tourists excitedly taking photographs of the Statue of Liberty filled the corner, jostling for vantage points. Elbowing and cursing her and Winston’s way to the precipice, Inez was worried. There was an uneasiness in Winston she had never seen before. Why had she pushed
him? Had she overreacted because he’d finally hinted he wanted to channel his natural leadership in a positive direction? Maybe she should have suggested he coach a Little League team instead.
“Here’s fifteen thousand, run for City Council.” What was I thinking?

Inez watched the ferries shuttle people to and from Liberty Island, remembering the days when she knew exactly what was right and what was wrong. In 1977 it was right for her and the Puerto Rican National Activists to seize Lady Liberty in the name of
libertad
and political prisoner Andrés Cordero. Shoving Japanese tourists and schoolchildren aside, they slammed the door in the statue’s sandal and draped a Puerto Rican flag from the crown. Press releases fell to the ground like confetti. It was wrong of the men in the group to feel up the latticework under Lady Liberty’s dress and harass the women by asking one another, “Have you ever been inside of a woman? No, I mean
really
inside of a woman.” It was right for Nolan Lacosta to climb the stairway near Liberty’s vulva and insert his penis into a rusted-out orifice and say, “Hey, look, you guys, I’m fucking America!” It was wrong for her husband, embarrassed by the publicity, to leave her the next day to raise the children in Philadelphia, satisfying their filial curiosity by telling them their mother died in an explosion while making a pipe bomb.

Inez elbowed Winston in the ribs, then pointed out over the river. “I know I told you about the time we arrested the Statue of Liberty for false advertising.”

“You showed me the photos.”

“Winston, there was a time when I could make a call and evacuate any building in the city.”

“Mmm.”

Winston dug his hands deep into his pockets and leaned against the ledge next to Inez, his back to Lady Liberty. He studied her out of the corner of his eye. Inez looked tired but hopeful. She was developing bags not only under her eyes but over them. If nothing else, the Revolution was exhausting. She looked like an ex–prohibition-era pug: punch-drunk, permanently welted, stumbling from gin mill to gin mill rambling on about a promised shot at the title, a victory for the common laborer. All around, faces stared into the horizon.
Fuck everybody look so optimistic about? That’s why she brought me up here. Catch some of that on-top-of-the-world fever
.

Calling out to Inez and Spencer, Winston nodded toward the line
waiting for the elevator. “Let’s go. I’ve got to meet Smush and them in Brooklyn.”

After a long wait the trio squeezed into the elevator. Winston tossed a piece of bubble gum into his mouth so his ears wouldn’t pop on the way down. The fortune read: “You are a responsible person. When something goes wrong, people always think you’re responsible.” With a loud pop he sucked a pink bubble back into his mouth.

“Ms. Nomura, you really going to give me fifteen K?”

“I’m cashing the check Monday morning.”

“Damn, a nigger goin’ to be liquid. I ain’t got to do nothing, right?”

“All I ask is that you make two appearances: the sumo exhibition in the park, and the debate a week before the election.”

“So should I be a Democrat or Republican?”

“You have a preference?”

“They all the same to me. I really don’t want to be neither.”

“Then don’t. But if you run as an independent, your party needs a name.”

“What, start my own party?”

“Why not? All you need is a name.”

“How about ‘The Party’?”

“Where did you get that?”

“I remember all them freaky-looking people rollin’ up in your crib talking about ‘The Party says to do this, and The Party says we should do that.’ ”

“Winston, ‘The Party’ has connotations that have nothing to do with you. Besides, it’s someone else’s thing. You need your own thing.”

“What about ‘A Party’? That shit sound kind of good. ‘A Party.’ Sounds like we having fun. Niggers will like that.”

A Party. Inez mulled the phrase over. A Party. She liked the way the name shifted between egalitarianism and hierarchy: A Party, one political party out of many; A Party, as opposed to B Party and C Party. “Niggers will feel that,” Winston insisted, “believe me.” Inez believed.

“Winston?”

“Yeah?”

“You know, your father was a beautiful man.”

“If you say so.”

“If you’d known him during the movement. Most men look stupid in a beret, but Clifford pulled it off. He used to stuff his natural into
a black felt tam, tilt it so that one edge hung just above his earlobe. If you were to ask him what he did for a living, he could have said anything—revolutionary, concert pianist, poet, painter, professional Frenchman, dancer—and you would have believed him, and thought he was the best at whatever he said he did, even if you’d never seen him do it.”

“Ms. Nomura, you and my father have something going on back in the day?”

“You know, I think deep down Clifford is very proud of you, Winston.”

“You not answering my question.”

“On the grounds it may incriminate me.” The elevator doors opened. “Aren’t you supposed to go to Brooklyn?” Inez said, and then, feeling like Sisyphus, pushed Winston into the stream of tourists flowing toward the revolving doors. Inez waved and under her breath said, “
Gambate
, Winston.”

Winston refused Spencer’s offer of a ride to Brooklyn but walked him to his car. On the way Spencer asked if he had something to fall back on in case Inez failed to come up with the money. Winston had it covered. “That’s why I’m going to Brooklyn. I ain’t too sure Ms. Nomura going to be able to cash that check, that shit older than baseball. So I’m about to learn some card tricks.”

“You’re going to be a magician?”

“Something like that.”

B
rooklyn was in the throes of a muggy yet festive Saturday night. The borough, at least the area surrounding the Fort Greene projects, was one big outdoor juke joint, and the party was in full swing. There’s a weekend adage Brooklynites utter on nights such as this: “It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.” But Winston, feeling the effects of his Brooklynphobia, had no idea where he was at. He was nauseous and disoriented. Somewhere, a few blocks back, the east end of Myrtle Avenue had flipped up and attached itself to the west end, encircling Winston in a concrete band. The street began to spin. Dance-hall music boomed out of slow-moving sedans, and triplets of red and green dice bounded off brick walls. The ghosts of Demetrius, Chilly Most, and Zoltan circled overhead, spooking him into dropping his bottle of malt liquor. Winston was back in Coney Island’s Hellhole.

He took corrective measures. He truncated his gait and slowed his pace to a chain-gang plod. The appropriate amount of bounce was applied to his diddy-bop, just enough spring in his step to rock his torso and head in an autistic half-beat. His shoulders rolled so that his arms paddled stiffly through the humid air like oars to a cruising Phoenician warship. His face arranged itself into a Noh scowl: eyebrows cinched tight like zipper teeth, eyes squinted, jaw jutted to a position not seen on a hominid
since
Homo erectus
. No oncomers held his stare longer than it look to think,
Who that ugly motherfucker? Nigger look crazy
. The street stopped spinning. His demons fled.

If he couldn’t help looking like an outsider, it was best to look like a dangerous one. Stopping at each intersection, Tuffy suspiciously looked both ways, as if he were on the lookout for the police when in reality he was searching for a landmark that would jog his memory of where his cousin Antoine lived.
Where that nigger rest at? There was a post office, a laundermat kitty-corner from that, and a basketball court down the block. Cool, there go the laundermat
. Relieved, he turned left and walked to the middle of the brownstone-lined block, stopping under an oriel window with a debauched red glow. Three preteen girls sat on the hood of a car parked out front, dreaming aloud, daring the world to listen. But the only person paying attention was a delighted little girl, elbows on the fender, chin in hands, a small tinker bell attached to a red nylon choker wrapped tight around her neck.