Tuff

12- THE LITTLE BELL

Carl’s room, the cupola of the brownstone, was cramped with war memorabilia. Winston bypassed the swords, Nazi flags, Croix de Guerre and went straight to the army footlocker stuffed with videos. He rummaged through the pile, reading the labels, then tossing them aside: AC/DC Live at Budokan; Faces of Death; Lynyrd Skynyrd; The Maginot Line; GG Allin; All-Time Greatest Hockey Fights — The Probert Years; Fuckman #144. “This one looks good,” Winston said, inserting a tape labeled Any Niggers Who Ain’t Paranoid Is Crazy — The History of Conspiracy into the VCR.

The video opened with a washed-out fourth-generation dub of the Minister of the Nation of Islam standing behind a podium, dabbing his glistening brow with a meticulously folded handkerchief and addressing an auditorium filled with true believers.

The history they teach us is incomplete! If you believe them, the black man wasn’t invented until the first day of slavery. The red man didn’t show up on the planet until Thanksgiving, the brown man until the Alamo, and the first time they set eyes on the yellow man he was dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor. You want to get somewhere in this world? Then you have to learn about them, the white man. I don’t know why black children do so badly in school, their version of history isn’t very difficult. Lesson One: The white man was the first to do this and that. Lesson Two: The white man is the best at such and such. If you’re lucky they tell you, then quiz you on the white man and the black man. And all you need to know is the white man did X, Y, and Z to and for the black man on such and such a date. But they’ll never teach what the black man has done independent of the white man. No multiple choice, true-or-false questions on the history of the black man that have nothing to do the white man, his wars, his foibles, his laws. And they definitely don’t … won’t teach you about the relationship between the white man, the black man and the sharks in the Pacific Ocean. What they don’t … what they won’t tell you is that sharks are in the Pacific Ocean because they followed the slave ships from Africa, eating the Africans as they were thrown overboard.

Settling back in a desk chair, Tuffy made a makeshift marijuana pipe by puncturing the base of a stray beer can with a bloodstained bayonet. He pushed the Minister’s slave-trade lesson from his mind. Fuck this nigger talkin’ ’bout? Critical thinker that Winston was, it wasn’t the historical implausibility of slave ships sailing the Pacific, when the middle passage was a transatlantic voyage, that caused him to dismiss the Minister’s claims. His ghetto cynicism was bathyal. A deep nigger-you-ain’t-said-shit doubt that looked below the ocean’s rolling surface. Come on now, sharks in the Pacific ’cause they was following slaves, that’s bullshit. Why the sharks still there then? What, they swimming in circles talking about “Gee, Harold, ain’t been no niggers around in a while — hell, they was good eating”?

Needing an ashtray, Winston turned a Nazi SS helmet on its crown. “I’m good to go now.” He covered the mouth of the can with his, lit the mound of weed in the dented chamber, and took a long pull. Through the exhaled smoke he watched the Minister’s left arm reach past the border of the screen and reel in a heavyset, middle-aged black woman. The tight embrace wedged the woman’s left side into the Minister’s underarm, creating the impression that the two were Siamese twins. The Minister introduced the woman as an embattled victim of the Philadelphia justice system, and the crowd received her with an empathetic warmth. His voice boomed throughout the hall. “Now you all know that this kind, beautiful black woman”—the handkerchief made another cameo—“a teacher of beautiful black children”—the woman nodded her head in agreement, thankful that someone cared enough to defend her honor—“a highly trained educator, did not hit that white woman like they say she did. How dare they accuse her of beating that devilish woman to a pulp?” The woman looked down and demurely covered her mouth with her hand, but she was unable to prevent a grifter’s grin from breaking out across her face. Instantly, everyone in the auditorium knew she had hit the anonymous white woman. Titters of laughter reached the podium. The smile on the Minister’s face broadened, and he hugged the woman even tighter. “And even if she did …”

Winston’s own cannabis-coarsened laughter drowned out the guffaws somersaulting out of the television speakers. Maybe I can learn something from this clown, he thought, “My niggers, right or wrong.”

The marijuana was potent, an indica strain. Winston blew smoke rings and watched them expand. There was a twinge in his neck; then suddenly he lost his sense of touch. The state of insensation lasted only for a few seconds, but he enjoyed the feeling of being unable to differentiate his body from the rest of his surroundings. Yo, I feel like I’m the air. No, no, the air is me. Niggers are breathing me. Hold up, I’m breathing myself. Take a deep breath, yo, you buggin’ the fuck out.

Winston karate-chopped the last few smoke rings still wafting in front of him and returned his concentration to the television. The Minister vanished under a blizzard of television static, and a well-dressed white man announced the existence of a secret society called the Illuminati. According to the nasal-voiced host, the Illuminati, all graduates of an institution known as the Invisible College, had surreptitiously ruddered the course of world history since 1500 B.C. The University of Sumeria — Ur Campus was the alma mater of its founders; current members received their training in a basement lecture hall at Yale. Pythagoras, Mohammed, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, the Logical Positivists of Vienna, Umberto Eco, and every American president excepting Taft, Carter, and Reagan (pawns) were alumni of the Invisible College. The crucifixion was a fraternity stunt that received an unanticipated amount of publicity, resulting in the forced spiriting of Jesus to France and the publication of his Master’s thesis in creative writing, Sermon on the Mount, the text now known as the Bible. World War I was a practicum for honors students Mao Zedong, Lawrence of Arabia, and the mustard-gas manufacturers. Using the Nazis as patsies, World War II was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to set up a showdown between communism and capitalism. The Illuminati’s machinations were responsible for every late-twentieth-century conundrum, including the energy crisis of the 1970s, the chain letter, and Buster Douglas’s improbable knockout victory over Mike Tyson.

At the mention of Buster Douglas, the paranoia adjunctive to good marijuana kicked in and kicked in hard. Winston could hear the footsteps and muffled voices of the Illuminati’s henchmen speaking in cipher behind him. The true world-beaters were coming to get him and he would remain conscious throughout the plotting, the interrogation, and the torture.

“Tuffy, that boy.”

“What you watching?”

“That weed fucked your shit up, didn’t it?”

Winston said nothing, cotton mouth having starched his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Fariq, Nadine, and Armello sat on the bed. Charles seated himself on the footlocker. “Smush, tell him about the bank job, kid.”

“Tuff, you know the new bank on Sixth and Second, around the corner from Kentucky Fried?” Winston nodded. He was interested in the heist, but his focus was on the television. A new white man entered the screen stage-right. The host stood in front of a paneled wall and pulled down a retractable movie screen, tugging at the bottom a few times to make sure it locked in place. “Since November twenty-two, nineteen sixty-three, the United States government has defrauded the American people concerning the truth about the Kennedy assassination. I know the truth. And soon you will know the truth.…” Winston leaned forward in his chair, trying to find the threshold in his immediate airspace where Fariq’s and the conspiracy theorist’s voices ceased to overlap. The best he could do was to turn sideways, the television broadcasting to his left ear, Smush to his right, their voices fading in and out like two distant shortwave radio stations on the same frequency. “I went in there with Charley O’s moms. Wednesday she hit the number at the travel agency, playing two thirty-seven — some Met’s batting average, Marvelous Marv Throneberry, or some motherfucker I ain’t never heard of. Anyway, me, her, and Whitey chilling on the roof smoking reefer. You, I don’t know where you was. Charley’s moms listening to sports talk radio, trying to figure out what she going to do with six thousand tax-free dollars, when a commercial come on. Man talking real fast: ‘Experts predict that unrest in the Middle East, combined with the increasing use of farm equipment in the corn belt now that the drought has ended, will result in a rise in the price of oil. If the price of oil goes up as little as ten cents a barrel, an initial investment of five thousand dollars can expect a return dividend of twenty thousand dollars in the next six months.’ I seen her eyes get big and I marched her right down to the bank, explaining the difference between fixed-rate and variable checking.”

“The grassy knoll — bullshit. The book depository — hogwash. Oswald, Ruby, Oliver Stone — CIA subterfuge …”

“But peep this — Whitey’s mother walk in, ‘I want to open a high-yield savings account,’ and the new-account bitch like, Oh shit, a white lady, ‘Let me get my supervisor.’ The supervisor like, A white bitch in the bank, ‘Let me get the branch manager.’ In two minutes everybody in the bank falling over themselves trying to take care of Mrs. O’Koren. The branch manager is opening up the account and the security guard is pulling out a chair so she can sit down. You hear me? The branch manager opening up a savings account is like the president washing dishes in the White House. All that because Charley O’s mama is white. I’m like, ‘Somebody need to take these motherfuckers off. They sleeping. White bitch come in the place and they lose they minds.’ ”

“Who you calling a bitch?”

“I’m sorry, Charley, no offense. So what we going to do is go back to the bank, send in Whitey’s moms, and while they acting like she Princess Diana come back from the dead, rob the fucking place blind. But that’s more than you need to know, now that you running for City Council like a little bitch.”

“I’m going to run the Zapruder film. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, but you’ve never seen this, the new print blown up to thirty-five millimeter. What you’re about to see is more than you need to know, but everything you’ve wanted to know.…” The grille of Kennedy’s limousine emerged from the shadow of a Dallas overpass. Winston was so high the image looked three-dimensional. He felt as if he could reach out, lift Jackie’s skirt, and take a peek at her panties.

Winston turned around to look in the faces of his friends, gauging their resoluteness. To his surprise they looked half-serious. If he were to say, “You niggers is full of shit,” they’d probably rob the bank tomorrow just to prove him wrong. “You niggers full of shit,” he said. His friends looked as if they’d been slapped in the face. Fariq poked Winston in the shin with his crutch. “For real, son. On TV I seen a documentary on these fucked-up Japanese war criminals. They was using the drug knowledge they got from experimenting on the prisoners of war to rob banks and shit. They put on lab coats and ran up in the place telling the employees they’d been exposed to some poisonous gas and had to take an antidote. The antidote of course knocked them out, and boom, it was on. A white lab coat and white skin will get you in anywhere.”

Winston spoke very slowly in the lilting voice of the deeply intoxicated. “You going to poison the whole fucking place?”

“No, we just going to knock them out,” Nadine said. “Ain’t you listening?”

Armello clapped his hands, “I still got these date-rape pills from my baseball days. Roofies. Been saving them for something important.”

“That ain’t nothing new. It’s basically the chloroform dog-snatching bit. You on some coward shit, as usual.”

“It’s not cowardly, it’s slick. There is a difference. Want-to-be-brave, flex-they-muscles — type motherfuckers get shot. Like your boy Kennedy fittin’ to get.”

Turning back toward the television, Winston brushed the dust from the screen with his hand. The electrostatic crackle underneath his palm stood the hair on his arms on end. Kennedy’s limo was rounding the corner. Jackie’s left hand was atop her pillbox hat, keeping it from blowing away in the wind. The president was smiling like her right was buried in his groin. “All y’all, shut the fuck up.”

The dowdy white man halted the film and tapped the movie screen with a wooden war-room pointer. “Keep your eye on the limo driver. From this point on I’ll advance the film in slow motion, the chauffeur will turn around slightly, extend his right arm behind his head and over his left shoulder, you’ll see the gun, hear the shot, see a puff of smoke, and Kennedy’s head will snap back grotesquely. It wasn’t Oswald, the Cubans, the mob, it was the limo driver.” The film advanced frame by grainy frame. The driver turned his head. The driver’s arm reached back as if he were scratching the back of his neck. “Oh shit.” The report of a gun, the smoke, the snap of head, all the events unfolded exactly the way the man said they would. “Oh shit.” Amazed, Winston leaned in closer to the television, examining the fuzzy black blip the white man said was the gun. Is that a gun? That ain’t no gun. Fuck, I’m too high to see the gun.

Charles walked in front of the television. “That’s what’s going to happen to you if you run, Tuffy.” He held up the Fuckman #144 videocassette. “You mind?”

Winston shrugged, replaying the image of Kennedy slumped in the backseat of the limousine in his head. The echo of the shots reverberated, recalling his brush with death the last time he was in Brooklyn. Man, this politicking dangerous. If I won I’d be dropping so much truth, niggers would have to shoot me.

Charles backed away from the TV set, revealing a ponytailed middle-aged white man fingering a brunette who looked as if she’d been eighteen years old for all of ten minutes. Properly moistened with saliva and pillow talk, the young woman readied to receive the gray-bearded man, legs spread, eyes open. The lech, a saggy-skinned convulsion of grunts and grimaces, mounted the woman.

“You know he rolling, old man fucking with his socks on.”

“And his glasses.”

“But he ain’t doing no damage to the pussy.”

“Come on, bitch, get your feet into the fuck. Dig your heels in, girl.”

For the next few minutes the group watched the video in rapt silence, each caught up in a private pornographic peccadillo, Winston’s being that he loved watching a woman’s breasts bounce during sex. Armello, wringing his hands and bursting with the need to share, blurted out, “Ah shit, now she licking the asshole! Ever have your asshole eaten?” he asked, looking around, not really expecting an answer. “I did. I was in Memphis in a Budgetel. Mamí had me in the buck. I was the bitch, my knees all in my ears, her tongue showing a nigger’s anus much love. I completely forgot I struck out four times in that night’s game, twice with the bases loaded.”

Pointing emphatically at the TV, Fariq called everyone’s attention back to the video. “Now Fuckman working the pussy, that’s how you do!”

Whitey slapped Fariq in the back of the head. “Smush, what your scoliosis-crippled ass know about working pussy? You probably can’t even control your thrusts, flopping on the cock like a fish out of water. Bet you catch an epileptic fit on the pussy, talking about ‘Honey, did you spasm?’ ”

“Nadine, what you laughing at? When we get home, watch.”

“Look at this white girl, yo, she fucking like a wet blanket.”

“Any of you niggers ever tag a white bitch?”

Winston, beginning to sober up, spun around in his chair, raising his hand like a schoolboy. “I did.”

“Nigger, what? You ain’t never said shit.”

“You know me, before Yolanda I was sticking dick in all four inputs.”

The males nodded in agreement, though none of them, as they ran down the list of bodily orifices, could figure out exactly what the fourth input was.

“All right.”

“Word life, kid.”

“My boy.”

A quizzical look on his face, Armello stopped in mid-hurrah and began counting on his fingers. “Anal, oral, vaginal. Hey, yo, what’s number four?”

Winston laughed haughtily and said, “I be mind-fucking hos, stupid.”

“Where you meet this girl?”

“Remember in junior year we used to go to that underground spot in the meat district near the piers?”

“Uh-huh.”

“White bitch and black bitch about ten years older than us sipping Scotch near the speaker?”

“The redheaded freak?”

“You know when you see a white girl and black girl together at the club, the white one looking for some black dick, and black one wants to hook up with a white boy, ain’t no two ways about it. So I hit Red off with the digits on the sly. Trick called back and the next day I was up in her crib sucking titties and didn’t spend nary a dime on drink, dinner, or daffodils. What was her name? Holly, Markie, some shit. I think it was Holly.”

Nadine’s faced puckered. “Eeww. What’s a white girl like?”

“It was weird, man. She was so comfy all the damn time. She was a computer consultant. Had an office in the crib. I ain’t never been in no black person’s house with an office. I ain’t even heard a nigger say ‘I’m going to the office.’ I just let her carry on. Suck my dick right, you can talk about gigabytes and zip drives all you want. Then one day we chillin’, then out of the blue she start talking this ‘You know, when I was growing up I had a black nanny. I loved her like she was family. She loved me too. At her funeral her children told me so.’ ”

“She went there on you, kid?”

“She went straight plantation Gone with the Wind on a brother. My father used to tell me that every fool he knew who ever been with a white girl who was from even a little bit a money has heard that shit. Shoot, I was trying to be ‘peace and love, we’re all human beings’ with the bitch. I thought that madness my father was talking was old-fashioned. I’m like, ‘She white? Big deal, it’s the twenty-first century. People are people. So what if she brush her teeth with fennel-flavored all-natural toothpaste from Maine? So what?’ ”

“Wait a minute,” Armello interrupted. “What’s fennel?”

“Some nasty-tasting flavor.” Winston sighed, then continued, “ ‘Black nanny.’ Pissed me the fuck off. I’m like, ‘Why this bitch feel the need to tell me this? “Black nanny?” What, she think I want to know that shit?’ ”

“Why you think, God?” Fariq said, all too eager to answer Winston’s question. “What she was really saying was, your mother ain’t shit, and that you ain’t shit, because she’s the white princess who everybody loves and worships. She think she special because she was raised by a black woman.”

“Shoot, a black woman raised me too, but that don’t make me special. But I was in the cut behind that comment. Stuck in the back of my mind. We be having a good time, then I look at her and think, This stupid bitch, said that stupid shit.”

“You should’ve said, ‘Fuck her. Later for that bitch.’ ”

“If I could’ve would’ve should’ve, but you know how a white girl do. Ol’ girl was kicking out gear, jewelry, sucking balls. Set a nigger out with a pass to the entire New York Film Festival. One time that crazy ho grabbed my arm, cut me with some scissors, and started sucking my blood.”

“Come on.”

“I’m serious. Wiped her mouth, talking about ‘Now we are both Negroes.’ I was like, ‘Negro? You ain’t Negro, bitch, you delusional.’ ”

“That’s what you get for messing with a white girl,” Charles said, nodding his head knowingly. “I’m telling you, white women is evil. Why any motherfucker would fuck with a white girl is beyond me.”

“Charley, how can you say that? Your mother and your sister is white.”

“Then don’t you think I should know what I’m talking about?”

Fariq slapped palms with Charles. “Charley O’ right. Any nigger who marry a white girl is marrying her because she white and no other reason. Unless a nigger meets a white bitch because they the sole survivors of an airplane crash and stranded on a desert island, he marrying her because she white. I don’t give a fuck what he say about true love, pretty eyes, and a nice disposition.”

“Who said anything about marriage? Me and a white babe, picture that. Smush, what you looking like that for?”

“I’m picturing.”

“Don’t even feel it. None of y’all would even know what to do with a dark-skinned babe. Yolanda is … man, please.”

“You and Landa still fucking?” Fariq asked, somehow phrasing the question in an innocuous manner.

“Of course.”

“You know what I mean when I say ‘still fucking’? Is she invisible yet? I’m not talking about when you be fucking and thinking, ‘Why am I fucking this bitch?’ but when you be fucking and thinking, ‘Why am I fucking?’ That’s when your woman becomes invisible.”

“Come on now, we been going out for two years, married for one. The attraction piece there, but hey, it ain’t easy. Before we get down to business I be sitting on the edge of the bed sipping a brew or smoking some cheeb, sometimes both. Gettin’ primed, know what I’m sayin’? Yolanda looking at me all sad, holding her breasts like food, like she’d give them to me if she could, if it would make me happy. She say, ‘Why you have to drink and smoke that shit before we make love? Shouldn’t I be enough?’ and I’m hitting the joint for all I’m worth, talking about, ‘Yeah, bitch, you should.’ ” To show his precoital exasperation, Winston took two hard pulls on the imaginary marijuana cigarette in his hand, then said, “I be like, ‘Man, this shit ain’t hitting right.’ ”

When the laughter died down, Nadine tried to bring the conversation back to the lovemaking distinctions between the Caucasian and the Negro. “You never said, was there a difference in how a white girl fucks and how we do it?”

“It ain’t like I been with a whole bunch of white girls. All I know is Latin babes like to pull on your ears, but I’d say, no difference in the coochie — pussy’s pussy.”

“I fucked a woman who didn’t have a pussy,” volunteered Armello, reluctantly tearing his eyes away from the sex video. “Una vieja—bitch was about fifty. Met her in Zebulon, North Carolina. She didn’t have a pussy, had a hysterectomy when I got with her. Stuck my entire hand up in there,” Armello slowly opened and closed his fist. “So much room in that mug, I could feel the wind blowing. Coño, if I’d’ve had a flashlight, I could have made shadow puppets on the insides of her stomach.”

Using the light from the television, Armello illustrated his sexual escapade by producing shape-shifting silhouettes, substituting the bedroom wall for some aging southern belle’s cervix. Barking canines metamorphosed into jellyfish. Pachyderms transformed into craning swans. Finding Armello’s story a repulsive anaphrodisiac, Winston excused himself from the room. “Me voy. Smush, dame chavo.”

“How much?”

“A pound.”

Winston took the five-dollar bill from Fariq, and said his goodbyes. “Tell Antoine I’m gone.”

Making his way downstairs, Winston could see the party was winding down. The living room smelled of musty men and spilled beer; plastic cups were strewn across the sticky floor. The bay windows, fogged from the night’s activities, were beginning to clear. The few remaining couples held hands and made out in the corners of the living room. A tall man slow-danced by himself, spinning, dipping, and softly crooning lyrics to a saccharine love ballad.

Once out the door Winston saw the little Joad girl sitting alone on a car bumper, fingering her bell, the preteen divas having gone home for the night. “Your moms still ain’t come out?” Winston asked.

The girl shook her head no and asked, “Did you see her in there?”

“What she look like?”

“Like me, but a little older.”

Suddenly, Winston was in a hurry to get home. He held the door open and waved the girl inside. Crossing the threshold, the girl stopped and punched him in the stomach. Before she could scamper inside, Winston lifted her by the collar, ripping the bell from her neck before setting her down. “You don’t need to let her know you coming, you just let her know you there.”

On his way to the subway he hoped that Yolanda would still be awake when he got home. He pictured her wearing a sheer silk teddy, two sticks of Black Love incense burning, a bottle of baby oil resting on the nightstand.

To avoid the stifling heat of the subway station, he waited at the top of the stairs, ears cocked for the roar of the next Manhattan-bound train, eyes on a group of cornrowed turnstile jumpers hurrying past him into the bowels of the transit system. He thought about what Fariq had said earlier: how women become invisible. Sex becomes routine. A salvo of gunfire rang out on the street above him. Winston was looking forward to the routine.

Girl, you my shorty, my wisdom, my Earth.