Tuff

16- FREE PARKING

Spencer hadn’t seen much of his supposed disciple in the two weeks since his profile of Winston appeared in the paper. When he handed him a copy of the Sunday edition over a game of Monopoly, Winston glanced at the unflattering photo of him swathed in a sumo belt, read the headline, THE HIP-HOP POPULIST, and handed it back.

“Don’t you want it?”

“Why I want a paper I never read?”

“Put it in your scrapbook and show it to Jordy when he gets older. Besides, you should read the paper.”

“I read it once.”

“I don’t mean the tabloids, I mean the paper.”

“I know what you mean. One day I was on the train and somebody left it in the seat next to me. I picked it up looking for the comics and came across an article on Stanley Kubrick. Loved that nigger, good article too. I folded the paper like the Wall Street motherfuckers do on they way to work. I swear to you, white people was looking me at different. Smiling and shit. Like they wanted to come up to me and ask, “What a nigger like you doing reading a paper like that?”

“If you want to know what’s happening in the world you have to read the paper.”

“I don’t want to know. And Smush and them don’t want to know neither, so don’t go showing them that picture, okay? Got enough problems with them clowns as it is now.”

Winston rolled, moved his game piece, the iron, to Kentucky Avenue. “Shit, I never land on Free Parking.”

“Let’s see, with three houses that’s seven hundred bucks.”

Winston paid the rent in small bills just to be annoying. “Rabbi, now that you’ve written the article you going to stop comin’ over?”

Spencer, counting his earnings answered, “No, it’s a three-part feature, so I’m in it for the long haul.” The money counted, he lifted his head and smiled. “You’re short twenty dollars.”

Tuffy flung two blue Monopoly-money tens at him. “Here, goddammit! I’m tired of this slow-death bullshit. What kind of asshole only puts three houses on a property? You got more money than the bank. Just put a hotel on these shits and get the game over with.”

“Quit.”

“No, you coming around on my streets. You in the ghetto now, yo. Light blues and purples like a motherfucker.”

Spencer rolled double fours and, to Winston’s delight, tap-danced his shoe to Oriental Avenue. “Oriental Avenue. Let’s see, two tenements …”