Tuff

19- FEELIN’ GROOVY

Winston writhed in the passenger seat of Spencer’s Mustang. The whiny harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel were torturous. He rolled down the window, gasping for air and the inveterate New York City funk. “Come on, Rabbi, you gots to change this, I’m dying here.”

“Listen to the melody, Winston. Forget Paul Simon. Listen to Garfunkel, man. Garfunkel! Doesn’t it make you feel wonderful?”

“No, it makes me feel like I should be skipping barefoot in a meadow. Holding hands with a hippie white girl wearing a see-through dress and daisy in her hair. Please, yo, turn this off, G.”

Spencer turned the volume down a bit. Winston shifted in his seat. Arm propped in the window, he took in the passing streetscape. Traffic was heavy. The car nudged forward in stops and starts. There was no conversation from Forty-ninth Street to Sixty-third. Winston had suffered through “The Sounds of Silence,” “I Am a Rock,” “Mrs. Robinson,” and “Cecilia.” During “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” he almost bolted from the car to seek respite in a turkey-and-cheese deli sandwich.

“What these people want from me?”

“What?”

“Bruce and the rest of those weirdos.”

“They saw the article and wanted to meet you. I suppose it makes them feel like they have ties to poor people. They call me up, ‘Loved your article. The hip-hop community is exactly who we need to communicate our message to. It’s so exciting to see an authentic inner-city representative,’ blah, blah, blah.”

“ ‘Hip-hop community’? What the fuck is that?”

“Young urban African-Americans — preferably bald-headed.”

“ ‘Hip-hop community.’ Where the hell is the opera community? The heavy-metal community? How the hell you define people by the kind of music they listen to? And man, to be honest with you, I don’t even like rap music too tough. Inner city. Don’t get me started.”

“Too late for that.” Spencer sighed.

“And how come you never hear about the outer city? Tell me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t there only be one inner city per city? In New York City there’s umpteen thousand ‘inner-cities,’ none of them nowhere near each other. Where the fuck is the outer city? Anywhere niggers like me ain’t? ‘Inner city.’ ‘Hip-hop community.’ Give me a fucking break!” Winston mimicked Bruce’s midwestern twang: “ ‘We’re in the struggle together.’ Then how come whenever I’m strugglin’ I never see motherfuckers like Bruce around? Don’t get me started.”

“That’s the second time you said that. Admit it to yourself, you’ve started. Now let’s see if you can work on finishing.”

“I know, but I’m sayin’, though, I have had it.”

“Winston, I think the real question you have to ask yourself is, why do you come to the meetings?”

“I’m not going to any more dinners.”

“But you could’ve said that after the second or third one. Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. The food. All Smush and them is talking is this stupid bank—” Winston caught himself. “Yolanda on my case about how much of the fifteen thou I got left, Ms. Nomura in another world, acting like I’m really going to win.”

Winston dug his hand into his belt line and pulled out his automatic. “Sometimes it’s just easier being with you and those stupid people. Y’all don’t know me. I don’t care about y’all. So nothing that anyone says or does can really upset me, you know? I just have to listen and pretend.”

Spencer was hurt. Did Winston really not care about him? He didn’t dare pose the obverse question: did he really care about Winston? “I learned something, though. Belgian beer. Some alternative political shit. And you know what’s a trip? In some ways these third-party motherfuckers are the only people that take me seriously.”

Winston opened the glove compartment, placed the gun inside, and closed the door. After two choruses of fidgeting through “El Condor Pasa (If I Could),” he opened the compartment and stuffed the gun back into his pants. He looked at Spencer’s doleful expression and waited for him to say something. Spencer eased the car into a right-hand turn onto Seventy-second Street and drove east through Central Park, softly singing along to “The Only Living Boy in New York.”

“Rabbi, you not going to say anything about my gun?”

“If I say get rid of it, are you going to?”

“Probably not. But you could show some concern.”

“Winston, do you ever take any of my advice?”

“I finally rented Schindler’s List.”

“That’s a start. And?”

“The shit was terrible.”

“Yeah, the Holocaust was,” Spencer said, turning left on Madison Avenue.

Tuffy continued his review. “I mean, the movie was terrible. I couldn’t get past that there were no Jews as tall as Schindler. In all of Germany the tallest Jew went up to Schindler’s belly button? Come on, man, too fucking easy. The flick’s unbelievable right there. Manipulative Hollywood bullshit.”

“Poland,” Spencer said, his voice unable to hide the testiness he was feeling.

“Poland? The movie ain’t Polish.”

“The people portrayed in the film were Polish Jews.”

“Fine, Poland, whatever.”

Spencer looked for a street sign. Eighty-first Street — twenty-three more blocks and this black-hearted monster would be out of his car.

Winston continued with his film review. “And the scene where the Nazi on the balcony just shootin’ at people? Don’t get mad, Rabbi, I know I was supposed to be like, ‘Ooooh, this is an evil motherfucker,’ but I didn’t understand it.”

A taxicab nosed its way into Spencer’s lane and he slammed the brakes, narrowly avoiding a collision. “You stupid fuck!” he yelled out the window, leaning on the horn for good measure. The outburst relaxed him and he loosened his grip on the steering wheel. “When one dog barks, he easily finds others to bark with it,” he said in dreamy, far-off voice that scared Winston a little bit.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s a quote from the Midrash. It popped into my mind … just seemed like the right thing to say.”

“You think I’m prejudiced.” Winston placed his chin on his forearm and spoke to his reflection in the side-view mirror. “Because I didn’t like Schindler’s List that mean I don’t like Jews, or some shit, huh?” Winston rubbed the butt end of his pistol and mumbled, “I don’t know, maybe it does.”

“You upset with me, Winston?”

“I’m upset with people trying to tell me how to think.”

“Why?”

“Because now I’m thinking.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That’s the fucking problem. And nothing.”

“I think the scene on the balcony was meant to convey the Jews’ powerlessness. How unreal the Holocaust must have been. André Breton once said something to the effect that the epitome of surrealism was shooting into a crowd.”

“No, that’s backward. The most surreal thing is being in a crowd getting shot at. Now that shit is bizarre.” Winston ducked back inside the car and leaned against the headrest. “I guess I seen too much fucked-up shit in my life. You say the movie supposed to show how unbelievable those camps was, but man, I already believe it. I seen niggers set motherfuckers on fire. I seen niggers hold a gun to a mother’s head and piss on her babies because her man didn’t pay on time for some consignment rock. People are fucked up? Man, tell me something I don’t know.”

The last weepy notes of “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” were losing out to the uptown din. “Make a right here,” ordered Winston. Spencer wheeled the car onto East 102nd Street. To his surprise the block was quiet. Rows of renovated brownstones and thin churches lined both sides of the street. The end of the block was dark, sealed off by the trestle for the Metro North train, which once past Ninety-sixth Street runs aboveground along Park Avenue. Branches of an overgrown oak diffused the streetlight, breaking it up into rays of imitation moonbeams. At the corner, on the right-hand side, barely visible through the oak in its front yard, was a decaying silt-brown building that loomed over the rest of the block like a haunted house. “Stop at the corner.” Winston got out of the car and vanished around the corner, entering the building through a side entrance.

Spencer couldn’t decide what tape to play next; it was between Bread’s greatest hits and Harry Chapin’s. A commuter train rumbled slowly past, the slogging clack of the cars almost lending an aura of rusticity to the setting. Harry Chapin’s gritty warble clattered out into the darkness, buckled itself to the tracks, and took out after the departed Metro North train like a noisy caboose.

When Winston finally emerged from the building, his eyes were bloodshot and an indelible smile creased his face. In his hands was a shoe-box full of marijuana and explosives. “Sorry about that, Money, but you know how it is when you doing business.” Winston held up what appeared to be a small stick of dynamite and examined it in the amber streetlight. “Besides, I ain’t been in that spot since I was twelve years old. Much memories up in there, boy.”

“What is all that?”

“Weed, nigger.”

“I mean the other stuff.”

“Ain’t nothing. Some M-80’s and cherry bombs, two half-sticks, but mostly smoke bombs.”

“Smoke bombs?”

“Yeah, I know some niggers who thinking about deprivatizing a bank, and supposedly the smoke bombs will fog up the surveillance camera.”

“Winston, I’m going to have to insist that you never get in my car again with the intention of doing something illegal. If I find out that I’m taking you to or picking you up from some dope deal or something, then the Big Brother thing is over.”

“Chill out. Don’t get all self-righteous on me, when you just pick me up from playing three-card monte to meet with Bruce of the New Procession Party — but that served your purpose, so it was all right, I guess?”

“Progressive Party.”

“Whatever. Man, I would never put you in no situation. Nigger, you’d be in my way.”

Spencer started the ignition and asked his passenger to shut the door. Winston didn’t budge. “Just pull out, getaway-style,” he said. Gunning the engine, Spencer hit the gas and threw the car into gear, the momentum slamming the door shut just as the car rounded the corner onto Park Avenue.

The Mustang idled in front of Winston’s building, neither man moving until Harry Chapin’s son had grown up just like him. “You still want me to come over tomorrow and help you prepare for the debate?”

“Yeah, do that. But Yolanda got finals, so we have to do it outside.”

“We’ll walk around the neighborhood or something.”

“Cool. One thing though, Rabbi — don’t wear those shoes you got on.”

“These? The clogs?”

“Yeah, nigger, the clogs. Don’t wear them. If you think I’m going to be clippity-clopping merrily up the ave with your ass, you crazy. How much them things hit you for anyway?”

“One hundred and forty dollars.”

“What? And they sweat us for buying sneakers that cost that much! It’s the spending habits of you bougie niggers they need to address. A bill and a half for some wooden blocks! Shit, I’ll cut up a two-by-four in two pieces, glue on some socks, and sell them to you for fifty bucks, yo.” The belly rolls of laughter eventually rocked Tuffy out of the car. He stuck his head back in and offered his hand. Spencer hesitated, not sure if Tuffy was proffering the traditional or the soul shake. They shook quick and firm like dignitaries departing for their respective helicopters. “That’s the diff between a nigger like me and a nigger like you,” said Winston, backing out of the window. “One forty for some clogs or some tennies.”

“White people can’t tell the difference, though.”

“True indeed.”

“But it really hurts when other black folk can’t tell the difference. I expect the white people to clutch their purses, and cross the street.”

“Yeah, back in the day if I saw you coming, Rabbi, I’d cross the street too, but I’d be coming over to your side to take your money.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Well, Rabbi, at least you sound white. You got that going for you. You spend the rest of your life on the phone, your shit be straight hunky-dory. But I got one for you, though. What’s the difference between white people and black folks?”

“Is that a riddle?”

“No, I’m serious.”

“White people eat ice cream year-round, even in the winter. And when they give you a ride home, they drop you off, then drive away as soon as you get out of the car. Black folks wait until you’re safely inside.”

“Thanks for the lift, Rabbi.”

“Easy, Winston.”

“All right then.”

The boys standing in the vestibule parted like canal locks; Winston floated through, and they closed ranks behind him. Spencer waited a minute or two, then drove off with a tire squeal, closing the passenger door getaway-style.