Tuff

11- WHERE BROOKLYN AT? WHERE BROOKLYN AT?

Brooklyn 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.

“When we sign our record contract, we going to be so big. Oh my God! I’m a buy a car, set Moms out. Damn, I can’t fuckin’ wait!”

“You iggin’, girl, we need to write some songs first.”

“We don’t need no songs. We don’t even need know how to sing. All we need is an image, some dance steps, and a good name for the group. The music comes last, yo.”

“So what’s our group called?”

“I was thinking of B-R-A-T-S.”

“What’s that stand for?”

“Being Real And True Sisters.”

“Hell naw, that’s too soft. We gots to come hard, know what I’m saying? How about S-H-I-T — Some Hos In Trouble?”

“We can’t be a cuss word. How we going to get any radio play. ‘Here’s the latest single by SHIT.’ I ain’t never going to get a pearl-gray Jaguar like this.”

“What about C-R-A-P, Coming Real At People?”

“That’s wack, we should be called A-S-S. We get on Soul Train, and the host’ll say, ‘All the way from Brooklyn, put your hands together for ASSSSS!’ ” The girl leaped off the car, danced a quick heel-toe-jig butt-shaking routine, then, clutching a microphone as real as her singing abilities, conducted the postperformance interview. “ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Felicia.’ ‘Felicia, I hear you’re the choreographer for the group, is that true?’ ‘I put together a little something something. Get the people excited.’ ‘And where do you hail from?’ ‘Brooklyn. Hey, Brooklyn in the house, y’all.’ ‘ASS has the number-one single on the charts, but everywhere I go people ask me what does ASS stand for, what should I tell them?’ ‘Tell them it stands for Always Singing Sisters.’ ”

One girl lifted her chin in Winston’s direction, alerting her friends to the presence of an older boy. As the would-be divas eyed him, Winston’s posture straightened and his face softened. Stopping within speaking range of the young ladies, he patted his stomach and ran his tongue over his teeth. The choreographer, at thirteen years old the doyenne of the group, closed the gap with two bold, hands-on-hip steps toward him, her egg-sized breasts violating his personal space. Tilting her head at the obtuse angle one uses to make sense of an abstract museum piece, she said, “Mmm, you fine.” The backup harpies slid off the car fender with all the seductiveness bony twelve-year-olds can muster.

“Where Antoine at?” Winston asked, looking skyward to keep from flirting, the tag line to male adolescence ringing in his head: “Old enough to pee, old enough …”

“He upstairs,” the choreographer answered, brushing her bangs from her forehead, then pointing toward the red window. “You going to get your dick sucked? You don’t look like no fag.”

“That’s my cousin.”

“Your name Tuffy?”

“Uh-huh. How you know?”

“He said you was coming by tonight. Antoine be talking about you. Told me you was his bodyguard. He said you be running up on niggers, for real.”

“Naw, it ain’t like that.”

Felicia was referring to the nights when Tuffy used to escort Antoine to the cab stand after long nights of working the peep show and fuck booths. Winston would tromp up the lighted spiraling stairs of the XXX Sex Palace to find his cousin on the second floor sitting on a bar stool, wearing high heels, a tight miniskirt, and a lavender bustier, striking pinup poses. After a 360-degree spin on the stool, Antoine emerged looking ready to be posted up over a homesick GI’s bunk.

“Who’s this?” he’d ask his coworkers, nose pointed to the heavens, back arched, hairless legs crossed with one hand resting limply over one knee. He’d flick one bra strap seductively off his shoulder, part his thin red lips ever so slightly, and flutter his eyelids. “I said, who’s this?”

“Betty Grable!”

“Jane Russell!”

“Susan Hayward!”

“No. No. No. How stupid can you be — I’m Ida Lupino!”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“You bitches better learn your history.”

“Let’s go, Antoine!” Winston would snarl, snatching his cousin’s rabbit-fur coat off the wall hook and, with a matador snap of the jacket, coax him off the stool and into the night. “Vámanos, goddammit.”

“Winston, don’t call me Antoine. Here my name is Mons Venus, you know that.”

For thirty dollars in sticky one-dollar bills or fifty dollars in peep-show tokens, Winston’s job was to march Antoine past a sign reading

GIRLS!

GIRLS!

GIRLS!

(with penises) All sex acts non-refundable.

then guide him through a gauntlet of sexually frustrated and bewildered men. Men who after fifteen minutes of awkward light petting through a small window in a Plexiglas partition reached for the phone to negotiate the price of a vaginal display. Antoine would stall for time, prudishly suggesting that it was his time of month. Nervous, he’d scratch the razor stubble on his cheeks, his reluctance to “show some pussy” and the amplified rustle of his five o’clock shadow arousing the customer’s suspicion. The client would begin to panic. Eyes jumping from titties to Adam’s apple, back to titties, over to the hands and feet, and back to the titties. The man would jabber in clipped sentences, his anger and shock fusing the declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative into complete thoughts that accommodated any form of sentence punctuation. This bitch got a beard? This bitch got a beard! This bitch got a beard. “I demand to see the manager!”

After being shown the sign and laughed off the premises, the traumatized men lined Eighth Avenue, questioning their sexual orientation. With Winston as his escort, Antoine paraded past them like a debutante as they demanded recompense, threatened vengeance, and sometimes proposed marriage.

Felicia snapped open her lipstick case, then buried her face in the passenger’s-side mirror of a nearby car. She slowly applied the frosted-white wax with the expertise of a thirty-year-old. “Exactly like Antoine,” Winston commented. “Little girl, you need a new role model.”

He was about to enter Antoine’s building when he heard the tinny ringing of a bell. He turned just in time to see the smallest girl slither between two parked cars, yell a war cry, then charge toward him. Lurching forward, Winston stamped a hiking-boot-shod foot into the ground. The loud thud stopped the emaciated bell cow in her tracks, and she teetered like a nodding dope fiend trying to keep her balance. He recognized her immediately: it was the moppet who lived down the hall from the Brooklyn drug spot. “What are you doing here, you little thief?” The child averted her gaze and pointed at the red light in the window. “If you want to go upstairs and start pickpocketing faggots and transvestites, you in trouble, because they either wearing dresses or tight pants.”

The girl folded her prehensile arms tightly across her chest. The doleful expression on her face made the gesture seem more a self-hug than the intended show of disdain. “Fuck you, you fat motherfucker.” Winston had already picked out a spot on her leg to kick when the girl began crying, the sobs convulsing her skinny frame and causing the tiny bell to jingle eurhythmically. Winston cursed and spat at the ground, “Damn.” He looked at the child hard. She was even dirtier and thinner than he remembered. “Y’all know her?” he asked the older girls, wondering what about him set off such a violent reaction in the youngster. Winston tucked in his shirt. “Naw, some lady dropped her off out here and then went inside.”

The symptoms of poverty are timeless, and Winston knew exactly who the weepy kid looked like: an extra from John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath. A Brooklyn Joad, sullied from head to toe with the grime of parental and societal neglect. She wore a pair of tattered running shoes, the frayed laces tied through every other eyelet. Bands of dirt ringed her droopy white socks. A pair of knobby knees extended from the legs of her denim cutoffs. The grease-stained pink T-shirt was too small, and her bare midriff was bracketed by the bony ribcage of a lion cub starving in an African drought. Tufts of unkept sun-reddened hair flamed atop her head like a brushfire. The little girl pounded a small fist on her thigh and bit down hard on her bottom lip to control her crying. Samaritan that he was, Winston fished in his pocket for a piece of bubble gum. The confection disappeared from his hand before it was even offered. She chewed quickly, as if she were afraid Winston might reach into her mouth and take his gum back. “What the fortune say?” he asked, and she held the wrapper out for him to read. “Whoever said ‘Words cannot hurt me’ never got hit in the head with a dictionary.” That ain’t no fortune, Winston thought, turning his back on the girl and lumbering up the stairs. That’s a saying or a phrase or some shit.

The older girls resumed dreaming of success, imagining journalists writing rave reviews of their debut single and conducting fawning magazine interviews. “Yeah, I’m going be up in the magazine cruising through the neighborhood in my Range Rover. Waving and saying whud’dup to people on the street. Talking about, “These are the niggers I used to know.”

“I got a name! I got a name! We could be B-U-B-B-A — Blown Up Big By Afternoon.”

“How about N-I-P-P-L-E — Naked In Public Places Like Escalators?”

The quiet little girl tried to blow a bubble that would turn her world a chalkish pink. A bubble so big that when it popped, it would startle the gods and stick to her ears. As soon as the gum was moist enough for bubble blowing, she flattened the wad against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Then with a loud, wet tongue cluck she broke the suction and shifted the disk so its outer edges lined the insides of her incisors and the meat of the gum covered her inner lips. Slowly the girl parted her teeth and lips with the tip of her tongue, while taking a deep world-record-bubble-gum-blowing breath. Her breath control was excellent. The meditation-smooth exhale produced a nice clean softball-sized but rapidly thinning bubble. The girl panicked. She didn’t have enough gum. Her breath came in stops and starts. Just one more puff of air … but her next blow was too strong and the entire wad flew out of her mouth and landed in the street, a pink waste of still-juicy, sweet, and sticky bubble gum.

Winston entered the foyer and touched knuckles with the doorman, who parted a burgundy curtain and bade him enter. Dancing couples packed the front room. Hands thrust out in front of them and eyes closed, they wafted in the crashing breakers of bass-heavy funk rolling over them. Submerged in the music, the dancers swam in syncopation like a school of fish, suddenly twisting, changing direction at some hidden signal in the vibrations.

Normally in such a setting Winston would scan the dance floor watching the rumps shake, timing the pelvic thrust of a shapely rear end so he could slide behind a cutie-pie, align his zipper with the groove in her behind, and ride her ass until he needed a beer. But there would be no dancing tonight, because to Winston’s thinking, It’s crazy faggots up in this here motherfucker. Winston checked his hands for signs of contagion. The red light turned his brown skin a mossy green. The pungent tobacco smoke, incense, and the saccharine stench of women’s perfume on sweaty men combined to form a swamp gas that immediately saturated his clothes. Winston wanted a beer, but the wanton looks of the men embracing in the dark corners, the come-hither stares of the unattached wallflowers leadened his limbs. Aghast at the homosexual brazenness, Winston was hard pressed to move.

He asked around for Antoine, and a partygoer directed him to the VIP lounge in the basement. When he reached the foot of the stairs, the crew was waiting for him: Fariq, Charley O’, Nadine, Armello, and Moneybags, the niggers he still knew. They occupied the far corner of the bar, sipping cans of Budweiser and silently watching a video on the overhead television. At the near corner six women stirred their drinks with the repose of regulars.

Trying his best to look like an overworked hostess, Cousin Antoine tended bar. Bar rag tucked into his waist, he scurried from the blender to the beer cooler, flipping his long ponytail, blowing the bangs off his forehead, and sneaking peaks at the TV screen. Behind Antoine, amongst the neon and mirrored advertisements for import beers the bar didn’t stock, was a neon sign: the FTD logo — Mercury, ankles winged in mid-arabesque, delivering a bouquet. Antoine looked up from a Brandy Alexander. “Tuffy!” he yelled, scampering from behind the bar in a straight-legged wind-up-doll trot, his house slippers sloshing through the sawdust on the floor. “Damn, it’s good to see you! I thought by this time you’d be upstate doing twenty-five-to-life. You ain’t killed nobody yet?”

Winston pointed to the pair of hip-hugging dungarees that crushed his cousin’s genitals into near-oblivion, and delivered his retort. “You ain’t got a vagina yet?” The regulars at the bar laughed, and Winston noticed that two of the six women laughed like pirates, with guttural “hardy-har-har”s that belied their svelte bodies: the one in the turquoise blouse and Ms. Thing with the beehive hairdo and red halter top. He reminded himself no matter how drunk he got, to stay away from those two — they probably owned penises bigger than his.

The cold snapping spritz of a newly opened Budweiser called Winston to the end of the bar. There the television loomed over his head at an angle that reminded him of being in a jailhouse day room. A beer can on a collision course with his own slid toward him. Fariq hobbled over and intercepted it, crutches swinging from his arms like pendulums. “Much faggots up in this piece, yo. I was surprised you suggested this spot, this being Brooklyn and all. Faggots and all. You right, though — ain’t nobody going to look for us here.” Fariq blew a kiss to Nadine, then raised his voice. “It was kind of tight coming through the disco, though. I remember back in the day when a motherfucker you didn’t know looked you in the eye, you’d be like ‘Hey my man, Fifty Grand, what’s happening? Stay safe.’ Now a motherfucker look you in the eye it mean he want to shoot you or stick his dick in your ass. Times is changed.” The rest of the gang thumped their Budweiser cans on the bar to show their approval of Fariq’s commentary. From the far end of the bar in a testy voice Antoine said, “How come boys always think that anal sex is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them?”

“I can think of something worse than being booty-busted.”

“What, Fariq?”

“Having a dick in your ass and one in your mouth!”

Though he found Fariq’s quip funny, Winston didn’t laugh as hard as he normally would. The feeling of being an outsider again crept up on him. He was within an arm’s length of his best friends, and yet he felt as if he were back atop the Empire State Building looking down on them through the reverse end of the telescope. They were in focus but very far away.

His discomfort had only a little to do with his antipathy for Brooklyn and being surrounded by men in search of ovaries arguing about whether or not they were homosexuals. It stemmed more from the fact that by bringing Spencer into his life and accepting Inez’s money he’d made a half-ass commitment to his life. He knew his friends saw him as turning his back on them, but that wasn’t the case. In the war zone that was his neighborhood Winston wanted to be a neutral nigger. He wanted to call time out, steal a Popsicle from the corner store, and rejoin the game when he felt like it. But for Tuffy there was no middle ground. He was either real or fake. Down or invisible.

He’d felt this way before, during a Rikers shakedown that didn’t involve him. During a cell-block search someone had handed him some contraband. He didn’t know what to do with it: swallow it, tuck it under a roll of fat, or give it back? He ended up with two months added to his sentence.

Watching his friends guzzle beer and chat, Winston wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He had a notion to call Spencer and seek some Big-Brotherly guidance. But the phone was near the transsexuals, one of whom was flitting his tongue like a disturbed snake. Winston let out a cry of frustration. “What’s wrong with you, son?” asked Armello.

“You niggers seem different.”

“Fuck, you talkin’ ’bout?”

“I don’t know, Whitey, it’s like tonight I don’t know y’all.”

Fariq moved from behind Nadine. He was a little drunk, and held his beer unsteadily, his middle finger off the can and pointing at Winston. “Nigger, you the one changed. Got a Jew and Ms. Inez running your fucking life. Man, I wouldn’t run for no white man’s City Council for no amount of money. Not fifteen thousand or fifteen million thousand.”

“Easy for you to say, you got money in the bank. You got ideas.”

Standing abreast at the bar, Fariq, Charley O’, and Armello looked to Winston like the Three Stooges in an army episode, lined up for inspection. He knew what happened next: the major would ask for a volunteer for a dangerous mission and they’d take one step backward. He’d be left standing alone having “volunteered” for who knows what. The Fourth Stooge assed out like a motherfucker.

“And don’t be handing us that”—Fariq was signaling for another beer and talking to Winston at the same time—“ ‘You niggers seem different’ bullshit. That sound like whitey talking.”

“What? I didn’t say nothing.”

“Not you, Charles. I mean real white people. You know how they always want to make like there’s friction between niggers. Niggers can’t coexist unless they on one fucking wavelength. Divide and conquer. These niggers are different from these niggers. Fuck that. Winston, you want to act a fool and hang out with a black fucking rabbi and playact like you running for City Council, that’s your fucking business. You always have been, always will be my and our nigger. So don’t come to me with that ‘Y’all seem different’ sad-song bullshit.”

Winston’s face flushed. “That’s on me, son. You talking good shit. Respect, nukka.”

“Tuffy, long as you don’t come between me and my money green, we will always be boys.”

Winston didn’t think the gap had been quite closed shut. But he knew that this sense of otherness wasn’t something to dwell on. He lifted his beer can off the bar. The condensation from the can left a wet ring on the wood. He thought of Musashi’s oneness with the universe, and knew no matter how different he felt, or was treated, he would never be different or removed. Not from these niggers at least.

Charles slung an arm around Winston and pressed a cold can of beer into his hand. “I’m saying, son, you runnin’ for office, that shit inspirin’, B. You thinkin’ big. You ain’t goin’ to win, but that don’t make no nevermind. Because we all thinkin’ big now.” Winston soon found himself drowning in an affirmative tidal wave of “uh-huh”s “word”s, and “true, true”s. From the earnestness in their voices, the greed in their grins, the way Moneybags had his back turned away from the group and was peering into the pour spout of his Budweiser, Winston could sense that some grand scheme was afoot. Something bigger than the three-card-monte con they’d all come to Brooklyn to learn, some score that couldn’t be discussed in public. He played coy, and looked up at the television screen. “You niggers ain’t shit. I need some new cellies. Antoine!” The loud hail for someone outside the clan signaled to the rest of the bar that the meeting of the East Harlem Thieves’ Guild was adjourned. Moneybags lifted his head. Forthwith all conversation was public domain, and the regulars turned the volume of their causerie up a notch. Tuffy continued to bellow. “Antoine! Why you showing this movie?”

The movie in question was Lord of the Flies. The troop of stranded boys was balkanizing into the savage and the civilized, and the bespectacled fat kid was vainly trying to maintain a semblance of prep-school decorum. “I have the conch. It’s my turn to speak.” Tugging on Tuffy’s shirtsleeve, Armello mocked the fat kid’s plea. “ ‘I have the conch’? Of course nobody is listening to his roly-poly ass — he’s carrying around an abalone shell like he crazy. Who’d want to hear what this fool has to say? ‘I have the conch.’ Please!” On the screen, the leader of the rebels eyed a nearby boulder. “I love this movie,” said Antoine.

“You would, you sicko. All excited over little white boys running around the jungle half-naked, ain’t you?” snorted Fariq, slipping his arm around Nadine’s waist.

“The leader — what’s his name, Ralph? — he got some muscles on him for a twelve-year-old. Look at those abs.”

“Change the channel,” Winston pleaded. “This one is exactly like the original.”

“I’m sure it isn’t exactly like the original.”

“You right, the original was in black-and-white and they wasn’t wearing designer drawers, that’s the only difference.”

“Look at the peter muscle on the redheaded boy with the spear.”

“Oooh!” the entire bar gasped. Jack, leader of the primitives, caved in the chubby boy’s head with a boulder, ending his filibuster and his life. “I have the rock!” Armello shouted gleefully. “Now that’s how you get people to listen!”

Winston pounded the bar top. “Man, I’m tired of the fat kid always getting fucked up. Why the fat guy always gots to be the star’s best friend? If you the star’s best friend, fat, and getting laughed at, you going to get fucked up. Plain and simple.”

“At least there’s fat people in the movies,” Fariq said. “If by some miracle a handicap person is even in a flick, he’s in a wheelchair plotting to take over the world, snickering like a fucking maniac. And I ain’t never seen a movie with two handicapped motherfuckers in it. You might see two obese motherfuckers, twins or some shit.”

Winston laughed, “Because you can’t have two crippled motherfuckers in the same room. Don’t think when the handicap van pulls up in front of the center I don’t see you trying to stare down the deaf and retarded waterhead niggers.”

“Very funny, son. But I’m sayin’, if it’s a handicap in the movies, he’s a bank-robbing mastermind.”

Nadine shushed Fariq. “Be quiet, Smush, you trippin’?”

“My shit,” Fariq apologized, quickly setting about covering his slip by harassing Antoine. “Hey, Antoine, would you consider yourself to be an expert on fagness?”

Winston rolled his beer across his forehead, trying to mollify his frustration with the can’s coolness. Charles’s we-got-to-think-big-now remark and Nadine’s admonishing Fariq for his “bank-robbing mastermind” comment made it obvious to him that one of the many golden nest eggs laid on the stoop was beginning to hatch. These stupid niggers fixin’ to rob a bank. This beer ain’t cuttin’ it. Leaning over the bar, Winston nimbly fingered a bottle of Idaho vodka off the shelf. Fariq and Antoine continued to flirt with one another.

“Yeah, I know a thing or two about fagness. Fagocity. Fagology. Fagistics. You want me to give you a lesson?”

Nadine placed her hands on her hips and looked Antoine up and down. “I don’t think so, not with my man, you fucking maricón.”

Antoine rolled his eyes. “Shoot, I’ll show you something too, young lady.”

Winston unscrewed the cap and sneakily filled his voluminous cheeks with vodka. The swallow produced a concussive sound in his head that clogged his ear canals, cleared his sinuses, and stiffened his fingers. While he was on top of the Empire State Building talking campaign strategy, his boys had planned something without him. After sixteen years of being consulted on everything from the rules for an afternoon game of kick-the-can to the proper attire for an evening of teen skulduggery, his friends had planned a robbery without him — a bank robbery, no less. It hurt that he wasn’t part of the heist’s planning, but he was also glad he hadn’t been. One less thing to worry about. The second swallow momentarily ceased all of Winston’s brain activity, dousing his synaptic impulse for bitterness and fusing his short-term and long-term memories into a lump of neurons concerned only with the here-and-now and the never-was. Good luck to you motherfuckers.

“I was down in the Village the other day, all these lesbos was holding hands.”

“You never see none uptown holding hands.”

“That’s because they’d get lit up. And Whitey, don’t interrupt me.”

“Winston, do you and your friends go around bashing gay people?” asked Antoine.

“Man, what you saying? If I recall correctly, when I was little you and your little crew of faggots used to tease me and then beat me up. I was one who was bashed. You always hear of violence against fags, but you don’t never hear of fag violence against straight motherfuckers.”

“Fuck you, Tuffy.”

“Then don’t start. I ain’t about to take your side just because we cousins.”

Fariq began screaming, “Will you all, please, stop interrupting me and let me finish my story?”

The others quieted down. “Go ’head, nigger, damn.”

“Right. What the fuck was I talking about?”

“Lesbians.”

“Right. To each they own, know what I’m saying? But what I want to know is why lesbians dress so fuckin’ bad? I mean, they dress like they going to a cookout to roast frankfurters and eat discount potato chips. What they carry in their purses? Paper plates and plastic forks? Tan shorts, hiking boots, purple socks, and a fucked-up haircut. Look like they ready to pitch a tent and have a potato-sack race at a moment’s notice. How come these bitches ain’t got no style? I mean, I know all these bitches ain’t working construction?”

Antoine sucked his teeth. “Smush, you need to be more sensitive to the homosexual community. Especially since you, you know, is crippled and all.”

“Now what, I got to suck dick to be politically correct?”

“Ask Tuffy, he a politician,” suggested Nadine.

“Am I?” Winston asked, forcing another burning swallow down his gullet, and not so subtly sliding the vodka back on the shelf. By the gnarl in his voice it was evident to Fariq and the others that this drunk was going to be an introspective one for Winston. They almost preferred his mean psychosexual binges, when he would rampage through a club robbing men pressed up against the urinals, stand in the middle of the dance floor conducting the DJ by waving his penis like a flaccid baton. “Y’all better get off the politician thing. I ain’t never said I was a politician — even if I did say I was, it wouldn’t make me one. Whatever you seen me doing, that’s what I am.”

Armello raised his can in Winston’s direction. “So right now you a drunk motherfucker?”

“Yup, and ain’t ashamed of it neither. I ain’t like them cabdrivers. You get in the cab the driver try to start up a conversation, not because he a friendly guy, but to see if he fucked up and let the wrong nigger in his cab. ‘Hello, my friend. Back in my country, I am scientist. I am doctor.’ Motherfucker, shut the fuck up, you cabdriver!”

“But I bet if you was back there bleeding to death, you’d be hoping he’d be saying ‘I am doctor,’ Fariq said, waylaying Winston’s Sophoclean complaint. “Come on, y’all, let’s do what we came to do before Tuffy end up doing something stupid.”

Everyone agreed, reaching for their beer cans to take to the back room, mulling over which of the identical cans belonged to whom, their hands circling over the cluster of containers, wary of picking up someone else’s backwash. His lips pursed and making childlike airplane noises, Winston’s thick, flattened hand buzzed over the other hands; then, to the screeching whistle of a dive bomber making a pass, pitched and yawed its way through the other hands, swooping up a can from the middle of the pack. Satisfied, he scooted toward the back room, happily chugging his beer. “Nigger, how in fuck you know that’s your brew?” Armello shouted at Winston’s back. Winston flipped the now empty container over his shoulder. “Man, I twist the thingamajig on the lid.” Nadine reached out to catch the can. The pull tab was cleverly twisted to three o’clock. “Oh snap, that’s pretty smart.”

“I thought you motherfuckers was supposed to be ghetto,” Winston said, disappearing into the darkness of the back room.

Moneybags blocked his actors around the card table, which was nothing more than a cardboard box propped up on a milk crate. Though he was speaking in a barely comprehensible drunken brogue, Moneybags was more lucid than Winston had ever seen him. With the efficiency of a Broadway taskmaster, he rehearsed everyone for their roles in a three-card-monte production set to open in one week’s time. Armello, the leading man, stood behind the box, his magician-quick hands making the cards flip and leapfrog at will. Nadine was to play the ingenue. It would be her job to lure the marks to the game with a subtle squeeze of her breast, a slow lick of her upper lip, a foolhardy hundred-dollar bet. “Nadine, you have to sell that line: ‘Fuck, I’m losing my daughter’s birthday money.’ Make a man want to come and stand next to you. A whale with deep pockets, who thinks he can show the lady how it’s done — win some money and take you home.” Charles and Smush would be the supporting players, shills whose duties were to purposely obscure the mark’s view of the table, arousing his curiosity. Having enticed the mark into the game, the duo would advise him on its finer points, explaining that if they united in their efforts, they could turn the odds against the dealer. Charles was especially good at this. Winston remembered the time they’d stolen boxes of perfume from a broken-down van on FDR Drive, unloading it for five dollars a bottle in midtown, Whitey pitching the shag in an impeccable British accent: “Straight from France and Italy, the finest scents for your mum, your luv, and for you git wanker puftahs, your mates. Sixty dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue, five dollars at just Fifth Avenue.” Upon hearing the princely argot of the United Kingdom, West Indians on their lunch breaks fought each other to purchase bottles of perfume from the benevolent Brit.

Typecast as the heavy, Winston played the same part in the sham as always: he was to be the stick man — a bit player who stayed away from the action, vigilant for the police and the suckered, who having lost face in front of their girlfriends invariably returned demanding a refund. After he lobbied for a speaking role, Moneybags gave Tuffy a tryout as the lead shill, directly across from Armello. But Winston was in Armello’s light, and as Moneybags said while shunting him once more to the side: “Tuffy, you too big. Can’t nobody see the cards!” Winston kicked the milk crates, scattering the cards to the floor. Only Fariq deigned to speak up. “Look, Tuff, every nigger got to do what he do best, and motherfucker, can’t nobody regulate like you!”

Winston brusquely stepped past Fariq toward Whitey. Reaching into Charley O’s trouser pocket, he pulled out a sack of weed and dangled it in front of his nose. The curl in the corner of Whitey’s mouth gave Winston tacit “But don’t smoke it all” approval, and he sauntered out of the room.

“What’s wrong with you?” Antoine asked.

“Nothing,” Winston replied, gazing up at the television set. Antoine laughed through his nose. Though he hadn’t seen his cousin in nearly two years, he hadn’t changed very much. “Tuff?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you sit?”

Winston backed onto a bar stool. When he was younger, he thought the television screen was a mirror: a telepathic reflecting glass that sucked the thoughts from his mind, then played them back, so that he would know what he was thinking.

“Antoine?”

“What?”

“Movie is this?”

“You don’t know? Get out, I thought you’d seen everything ever made! It’s one of Carl’s movies, The Green Berets. John Wayne joint with this big-eared motherfucker as a nosy reporter. Sulu from Star Trek plays an Uncle Tom Vietnamese.”

“I hate war movies. Especially ones with a reporter or a writer in it, always too good to shoot at the enemy until the very end, then they pick up a gun. Like if a writer has to kill, then war must really be horrible. And they never get killed. The writer never dies.”

“Nigger, you must hate your father. Fuck was Uncle Clifford doing to you, man?”

Both men watched the war reporter, David Janssen, smash a machine gun against the trunk of a tree. Winston giggled. “White people so fucking obvious.” He eased the bottle of vodka off the shelf and held it next to his leg. “Antoine, is there somewhere I can be alone in this place? I ain’t trying to hear John Wayne right now. I just want to smoke my get-high and chill, know what I’m saying? Carl still got them crazy videos?” Antoine handed Winston the key to his brother’s room upstairs. When Winston pinched the key’s blade, Antoine held tight onto the bow. Little Tuffy was growing up; he was just about at the age when cousins go from being trusted playmates to near-strangers seen only at funerals and on errands to the post office. Antoine let go of the key. “Thanks, cuz.” Tuffy headed for the stairs, keeping the bottle of vodka out of Antoine’s sight. “How Aunt Ruthie, by the way?”