Tuff

10- PARADISE EX NIHILO

On 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.

…

The 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.

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.

I’m just a bill. Yes, I’m only a bill

And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.

It’s a long, long journey

to the capital city

It’s a long, long wait

While I’m sitting in committee

But I know that I’ll be a law someday.…

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.

At least I hope and pray that I will

But today I am still just a bill.

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.”