Tuff

2- PAQUETES DE SEIS DE BUD

Like prairie dogs fresh out of their burrows, welcoming the cool desert night, the duo popped out of the subway station and stood motionless, gazing at a Spanish Harlem just emerging from its early-evening siesta. A foursome of sturdy tank-topped old-timers played a staid game of dominoes in front of the Laundromat. A frenetic salsa fell out of an upper-floor window like a Boriqua waterfall. Winston, roused from his momentary trance, giddily splashed around in the Latin percussives, stutter-stepping, shaking his hips, and singing the lyrics. No tengo miedo, tengo bravura, tú y yo, tenemos amor pura. Winston was back on the block.

“That’s Hector Lavoe.”

“You say everybody’s Hector Lavoe. That’s the only Spanish singer you know. It might be Marco Manteca from down the street.”

“Just change your drawers, son. You smell.”

Fariq pulled out a spare pair of underwear and walked into Kansas Fried Chicken to use the bathroom. Winston headed straight for the T&M Tienda, “Dos paquetes de seis de Bud, por favor,” then reimmersed himself in the nighttime bustle, snapping the gray hood of his sweatshirt over his head. After Fariq finished tidying up, the duo headed east toward Third Avenue, Fariq insanely jealous because Winston could walk and drink, while Fariq had to wait until they arrived at their destination before he could sip his beer. Winston stopped and held the can of beer to Fariq’s lips. Fariq took two gulps.

“My brother.”

“Tastes good, don’t it?”

“True, that.”

With a firm brush of his thumb Winston removed the suds from Fariq’s mouth. He considered telling Fariq about the gun but decided against it. Once people knew you had a gun, it was like having a car — everyone begging to borrow it, wanting you to use it to make their lives easier. Winston pointed to their usual drinking spot by the empty pool in Jefferson Park. They liked to sit on the edge, their legs dangling in the void, reminiscing about taking turns feeling up Henrietta Robles in the shallow end. Even Fariq risked rusting his leg braces for a few blind gropes.

Winston figured four, maybe five beers and Fariq would agree to lend him enough money to get him through the rest of the month. There was a pulse against his hip and Winston peered down at his beeper, illuminating the numbers. Fariq knew, from the sour look in Winston’s face, who was paging him. “You better get home, nigger, you a father now.”

“Mmm.”

Winston shut the beeper off and wrested another beer from the plastic ringlet, and thought back to that Sunday years ago at Coney Island, walking away from the Hellhole, crying and cursing his cousins. He recalled his father soothing him with promises never kept. That day was the last time he’d cried, the last time he’d held his father’s hand.

The beer slid solidly down Winston’s throat and bubbled in his nose. Winston pointed the half-empty can at the diving board. “Remember when Raymond Vargas dove off that fucker and smashed his mouth on the edge of the board?”

“Yeah, he used to talk about diving in the Olympics. Toe the edge of the board and say, ‘This is a Dominican Escape-from-the-Ghetto Inward One-and-a-Half Twist with a Cry-on-the-Gold-Medal-Stand-During-the-National-Anthem Pike. Degree of Difficulty: the fact white people think niggers can’t swim.’ Then, blam, the kid was at the bottom of the pool unconscious and toothless. Didn’t you go to the bottom and drag him up?”

“Uh-huh. Rebroke Raymond’s jaw a month later when he said that when I swam I looked like a big black oil spill.”

With some effort Fariq lifted himself to his feet, finished his beer, then, with one crutch, golfed the empty can toward the far end of the pool. It nestled about two feet from the drain and Fariq mimicked a golf announcer’s whisper: “That leaves Fariq Cole a short putt for a birdie.”

“Sit, you’re making me nervous.”

Fariq sat back down. “Tuff?”

“What?”

“Golf a game or sport?”

“Goddamn, you’re restless. Don’t you ever stop and chill? Look up at the stars? Look, if you can wear a watch at the professional level — golf, tennis, bowling — it’s a game or a pastime, not a sport.”

“I just wanted to say, good looking out today. Thanks, that’s all.”

Winston returned Fariq’s gratitude with an embarrassed nod. Taking his own advice, he lay back over the pool’s edge, gazing up at the twenty or so stars visible in the hazy New York City night. Using the can propped on his stomach as a sextant, Winston charted a course through the black sea above him, navigating an out-of-body escape from the madness.

TEN YARDS UP: I’m floating next to a middle-aged woman looking out her third-story window, elbows folded on a bath towel, and wearing nothing but a flimsy white slip, looking over the block like an urban hoot owl.

TEN THOUSAND YARDS: I’m riding a double-seater bike with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I’m in the back, E.T. steering through some thin cigarette-smoke-looking clouds. I tell him, “Pedal faster them pesky white kids gaining on us.”

OHE MILLION YARDS: The earth’s surface looks as if it’s been smoothed with wood-shop sandpaper. The Himalayas are the same height as the Indian Ocean and the Grand Canyon. The whole planet look like it’s been shellacked with sunlight.

OHE BILLION YARDS: I’m on the moon. I hot-wire the lunar buggies and joyride from the Sea of Tranquillity to the Bay of Rainbows.

TEN MILLION MILES: From here the earth is one of many small moth-eaten holes in a raggedy interstellar theater curtain. When does the show start?

ONE HUNDRED MILLIOH MILES: Allergic to the space dust in the asteroid belt, I sneeze. Fifty years from now a meteor will land in the desert with traces of mucus on it and scientists will lose their minds.

ONE BILLIOH MILES: The tilted ring around Saturn is the felt brim on the gaseous head of the solar-system pimp. Those bitches Venus and Uranus betta have my money.

TEN BILLIOH MILES: From here the sun is the size of a flickering match two football fields away. Goddamn, it’s cold.

ONE HUNDRED BILLIOH MILES: Set the boom box adrift, tune in radio static. Me and the constellations listen to an aircheck from 1937. Good evening to the East Coast, and to the West Coast, good morning. This program of ultramodern rhythms comes to you from the Savoy Ballroom, known as the Home of Happy Feet, located in Uptown New York City. It’s Count Basie and His Orchestra featuring Billie Holiday, and here’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” The constellations jitterbug, entrants in a dance marathon that’s been jumping since the dawn of time. Orion swings Cassiopeia around his hips. I slide Andromeda through my legs.

ONE TRILLION MILES: Color disappears. Everything is black-and-white. My mind and the universe are the same size. My father is holding court in a faraway lounge, conferring with ancient poets, saying, “See I told you so, everything is everything.”

ONE LIGHT-YEAR: The time it took for Daddy to send that first child-support check.

ONE HUNDRED LIGHT-YEARS: Depth perception disappears. Nothing in the universe seems more than an arm’s length away. The universe must be handled gently, like the oldest vinyl record in the collection. I pull it slowly from a worn cardboard jacket. Holding the universe by the edges, I blow on its scratchy surface. Flipping the universe over, another puff and the dust from side B is a new galaxy. If you could play creation on a turntable, what would it sound like?

ONE THOUSAND LIGHT-YEARS: I see the souls of Demetrius, Zoltan, and Chilly Most trying to find the happy hunting ground. “Where are we? Alpha Centauri? Nigger, we want Alpha Cygni! Give me the map, motherfucker!”

“You see your heaven up there?” Fariq was propped up on his crutches, which formed a makeshift cruciform on the chain-link fence behind him. Ankles crossed, arms to the side, a can of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, Fariq began yelling, his voice carrying throughout the empty park: “Beer and fish for everyone! Who sold me out? Judas? I knew it — greedy bastard! Before I die I leave you with this last holy piece of advice: Never, never let a nigger kiss you in public.”

Uncapping his marker, Winston jammed his forearm into Fariq’s throat and scribbled on his friend’s wrinkled brow. He stepped back to admire his work. “There, now you’re Jesus.” Fariq wet his hands with beer and tried to rub the inky scrawl from his forehead. “Come on, man, what’d you write?”

“I-N-R-I.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, but it’s always at the top of any Jesus-on-the-cross painting I’ve ever seen. A Rasta once told me it means, ‘I Negro Rule I-ternally.’ ”

Fariq stopped rubbing his brow. “ ‘I-ternally’? Now what the fuck does that mean?”

“No idea. I thought you would know — sound like that crazy Five-Percenter ‘White man is the devil’ madness you be talking.”

Fariq pirouetted on his clubfeet and removed the crutches from the fence. He was about to right himself when he lost his balance, teetered, and fumbled away his walking sticks. Before he could pick them up, Winston scooped the metal stabilizers off the ground and waved the poles in Fariq’s face, snickering, “Drunk?”

“Drop my shits, fat boy. I can pick ’em up myself.”

“Fat boy?”

Winston tossed the metal poles about ten feet away from Fariq’s twisted legs. “Fetch, punk. If Jesus Christ could walk on water, a fake Jesus can at least walk on two legs.” Without hesitating, Fariq released the fence and boldly ambled forward, his feet pointing inward at an angle that made his toes touch, his thin legs bent at the knees, forming an X. Feet never leaving the ground, Fariq took three wobbly steps, stopped, and exhaled. Winston couldn’t restrain himself. “Why are you holding your breath? You’re not swimming underwater — breathe.”

“Don’t be watching me walk,” Fariq cautioned Winston. “I hate it when motherfuckers be watching me walk.”

“You ain’t walking, nigger. You ice-skating or something. You so shaky it looks like there’s an earthquake but you’re the only one who can feel it.”

Reaching out for his crutches, Fariq pounced on them like dollar bills in the street, clutching the supports to his chest before they could blow away in the wind. “Told you I could walk.”

“You better quit bragging, track star, before I call Social Security tomorrow and tell them to stop sending you them disability checks. Let’s go get some more drink.”

They headed back to the store in silence, listening to what passed for a quiet night in the city. A streetlight sputtered and hummed. Rats scaled mountains of trash bags. Caught up in the headwind, sheets of loose paper and debris blew past the boys’ feet. A campaign flyer for the upcoming election plastered itself to Winston’s chest. He peeled it off. The handbill read: VOTA WILFREDO CIENFUEGOS, DEMOCRAT POR COUNCILMAN DISTRITO 8. SEPTIEMBRE 9TH. ¡PARE LA VIOLENCIA! Pare la violencia: Stop the Violence — a phrase that prior to the Brooklyn incident was part of the ecumenical white noise he’d heard and seen since grade school. Don’t Smoke. Just Say No. Safe Sex. Be a Father to Your Child. Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk. Pare la violencia. Winston didn’t have a problem with Mr. Cienfuegos’s advice, though he didn’t find it very practical. How? he wondered. Would an impassioned plea from a politician turn Winston into a pacifist? Could Wilfredo Cienfuegos have convinced the Brooklyn henchmen to put away their guns and allow a cripple and a sluggard to walk off with Bed-Stuy’s money in their pockets, beneficiaries of the ghetto’s free-market economy?

But Winston had the power to stop the violence. Oftentimes when he came upon a scene of aggression the combatants stopped pummeling each another, unsure on whose side Tuffy, the neighborhood superpower, might intervene. Winston imagined himself dressed in a suit and tie, his face superimposed on the political circular. But the daydream quickly slipped away from him. In his mind the handbill yellowed into an Old West wanted poster. “Wanted for Councilman Eighth District — Winston Foshay. Start the violence!” Winston released the flyer into the slipstream. I’d be a good-ass politician, though. The sheet of paper boomeranged in the wind and reattached itself to his hip like a house cat afraid of the backyard wilderness. Winston folded the flyer and stuffed it into his back pocket.

“Tuff, it was dead bodies, the whole nine.”

“Yup.”

“We still alive.”

“Yup.”

“Culture cipher, my brother. The fundamental black man manifest as the elemental hierarchy of the earth-sun dichotomy—”

“Don’t start.”

“Yacub—”

“I’m serious, don’t start.”

Fariq gave up trying to enlighten Winston to the ways of the knowledgeably holy five percent, and ran through possible acronyms for I-N-R-I to occupy his hyperactive mind. If Needed, Resurrect Immediately. Idolatrous Necrophilia, Religious Intercourse. Inspected — Natural Redwood Immobilizer. Is Nothing Really Important?

“Tuff, I bet you that I-N-R-I is Latin for some shit.”

Tuffy’s head was buried in the market’s night box, trying to talk to the proprietor through three inches of Plexiglas; if he heard Fariq he didn’t answer.

I Negro — Remedy Intoxication.