Tuff

20- INFIERNO — DEBAJO DE NUEVA ADMINISTRACIÓN

The butt end of a flauta de pollo disappeared down Winston’s gullet. His napkin already saturated with grease stains, he licked his fingertips and wiped his mouth with the corner of the linen tablecloth. “I don’t know where all these Mexicans came from, but I’m glad they decided to move here. Fucking food is good.” Spencer paid the bill and they left Puebla Mexico, Winston savoring the last of his cold horchata.

Headed north, they walked in silence, digesting the meal and their surroundings. Like the moors of the English countryside or the bogs of the Louisiana bayou in a late-night creature feature, at night the streets of East Harlem undergo a metamorphosis. Only fools and monsters trod in the darkness. Spencer splashed up Lexington Avenue, jumping at every hoot-owl screech. Winston slipped upstream, an urban alligator skimming the swamp’s surface, eyes peeled for prey.

At 110th Street locals jammed the intersection. Oblivious to the automobile traffic, they dashed between cars, yelling and furiously signaling to one another like traders on the New York Stock Exchange floor, closing bell be damned. “It’s hot out here tonight!” Winston remarked with a relish that made it obvious he was referring more to the street frenzy than to the muggy evening. Spencer read the lettering above the gated windows of the post office on the far side of 110th Street, ‘HELL S GATE STA ION.’ At their feet were a couple sitting on milk crates and dressed in T-shirts, cut-off denims, and foam-rubber thongs, watching a black-and-white television powered by an extension cord alligator-clipped to the innards of a lamppost. The Yankee game was in extra innings, and the play-by-play in melodramatic Spanish. The woman, her newly hot-combed hair dipping like an aileron behind her head, looked away from a pop-up and greeted Winston with a broad smile. “Hey, Tuffy Tuff.”

“What up, girl? How you feel?”

When her man saw Winston, he grabbed and held his dog, a stocky black-and-brown rottweiler named Murder, by the collar. “¿Qué te pasa, bro?”

“Suave.”

Turning the bill of his baseball cap to an even quirkier angle, Winston stooped to pet Murder. When the dog went to lick his hand, he quickly put its head in an armlock. “What up, nigger?” he said to the animal, who answered him only with pleading brown eyes and a try to yank himself out of the grip. Winston tightened his hold until the dog whimpered. Satisfied, he released Murder and he and Spencer crossed the street.

“Now are you ready to study?” Spencer asked, handing Winston a sheet of paper. “I made up a list of questions I think might be asked at the debate.” Winston took the paper and, without looking at it, rolled it into a tube. “Let’s walk uptown,” he said. “It’ll be quieter.”

Ahead of them a row of red traffic lights receded far into the distance. Spencer felt as if he were about to descend into the concrete depths of perdition, Dante to Winston’s Virgil.

It had been a while since Spencer had walked the streets of East Harlem at night. The last time was when he and Rabbi Zimmerman sat shiva on 117th Street with Bea Wolfe, her husband laid out on the kitchen table, dead of lung cancer. For seven days he shuttled between the apartment and the market, sprinting through the chaotic streets for cat food and candles, reciting the kaddish to himself.

He glanced about, looking for Mr. Wolfe’s ghost or another remnant of a Jewish presence. A vagabond wearing a weather-beaten sweater and grimy polyester pants sat cross-legged in front of a panadería. The smell of fresh-baked bread mixed with the stench of dried urine. There was an eerie lacquered sheen to the man, as if he’d been bronzed by gritty air and polished by the warm night winds. Catching Spencer’s gaze, the vagrant put his thumb and forefinger to his lips. “You got a square?” Not knowing exactly what a square was, Spencer shook his head, sidestepping away from the man with a patronizing smile he hoped would placate them both. Winston handed the man a cigarette.

“Do you know if any Jews still live in the neighborhood?” Spencer asked. Tuffy shrugged, saying he occasionally saw old white people taking baby steps to and from the market, or store owners collecting the day’s receipts and hopping into their Cadillacs. Maybe they were Jewish, he didn’t know. A war whoop rolled down the street. Ahead of them a brood of rough-looking young men blocked the sidewalk. The boys jumped up and down like freshly oiled pistons, feverish with the boundless energy that comes from being on a New York street corner after eleven p.m. En masse the group moved toward Spencer and Winston. Spencer braced for an act of violence. He was thankful Fariq wasn’t with them. Fariq would sense his fear, hear his insides knotting like a ship’s lanyard, notice his eyes avoiding the boys as if they were lepers and he a gentleman too polite to stare.

Tuffy pointed to a second-floor bay window. Tucked in the corner of the window was a small sign, RAYMOND TENNENBAUM — ABOGADO Y SEGUROS.

“You asked if there are any Jewish people in the neighborhood — Tennenbaum sound Jewish, don’t it?”

Spencer agreed, his head sinking toward the ground. The boys were within mugging distance. He could almost hear Fariq saying something about the irony of Tennenbaum making money off both ends: insuring the public against the crimes of colored boys like these, then defending the same kids after they’d committed the crimes.

“Rabbi, take your hands out your pockets,” Tuffy whispered. “And lift your fucking head up.”

Spencer did as he was told. The boisterous youths were only two steps away from him — so close he could feel the chill emanating off their ice-cold scowls. Winston walked toward the group, reached out, and, without breaking stride, shook the hand of the lead gargoyle.

It was the same with nearly every band of young people they met: a firm yet quick slide-’n’-glide handshake exchange that, like comets hurtling around the sun, seemingly propelled each party up the sidewalk to the next rallying point. “What up, kid?”

“Coolin’.”

“Tranquilo.”

“Stay up, son.”

Some handshakes ended with a finger snap, others with a light touching of knuckled-up fists. “Peace, God.” One man, whom Winston apparently hadn’t seen in a while, received a handshake that collapsed into a strong, spinning bear hug that chicken-winged their elbows out to the side. “Nigger.”

“My man. Fuck’s happenin’?”

Spencer asked why he warranted an embrace from Winston rather than the standard soul shake. “Rabbi, that nigger got stories to tell, but the fucked-up thing is, he so deep in the life, he can’t tell them.”

Not having spent much time with Winston on his home turf made it difficult for Spencer to determine if he was campaigning or just taking his leisurely nighttime stroll up the avenue. He knew so many people. And those who were too busy to hail him watched him knowingly.

“Winston, it’s too late now but you should’ve taken the election seriously — you probably could’ve won.” Tuffy looked at Spencer like he was crazy. He spat and put the rolled-up debate questions to his mouth. Through the paper megaphone he yelled to two sisters sitting on a fire escape three stories above them. “Where your brother at?”

“Wagner!” one shouted back.

Tuffy shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with many locals, but few received the bear hug. As with prime numbers, the farther uptown they zigzagged, the greater the distance between the persons who got the grip and the loving embrace. Between 109th and 112th Streets, Winston squeezed homeboys and homegirls 2, 3, 7, 11, and 13 like lost children found in the amusement park; 23, 29, and 37, all standing in line to get into the La Bamba dance hall on 115th Street, were crushed like sympathetic friends at a funeral. In the lobby of the Chicken Shack on 117th, Winston, 41, and his sister, 43, were hugged like football players in the end zone celebrating a Super Bowl touchdown. Now, at 119th and Second Avenue, Winston was tapping 73 on the shoulder.

Raychelle Dinkins was his first love. His first kiss. His first slow dance. His second fuck. His first regular drug customer. Back in junior high when Winston and Raychelle were an item, she was a thick-framed teen who had what Winston liked to call “a luscious, dark black, hard-ass gospel body.” A heroin addiction had eaten away her muscle like jungle rot. Turned her into a wisp of a woman so thin her pregnant belly seemed to account for half her body weight. “Winston!” Raychelle shouted, raising her bony arms to hug him. Winston tucked her head into his chest, resting his chin on her flaky scalp. The familiar scent of the perfume she’d been wearing since seventh grade flared his nostrils and caused an involuntary growl to rumble from his throat, the sweet smell taking him back to ditch parties at Kevin Colón’s house, where he spent school days sipping wine coolers and listening to Hector Lavoe sing love ballads he couldn’t understand. “You speak Spanish, what he sayin’, Raychelle?” Taking a break from notching a hickey on his neck, she would cock an ear toward the stereo. After a few bars she’d stick her tongue and her translation in Winston’s ear. “He saying, ‘Fuck math, fuck English, fuck me right now.’ ”

“Raychelle!” her boyfriend, an integer, a regular nigger, called from across the street. He was clapping his hands, a drill-sergeant coach urging his recruit through the obstacle course. “Let’s go!” As she turned to leave, Winston hooked an arm around her waist, swept a lock of stringy hair from her ulcerated face, and planted an affectionate kiss on her cheek. “How many months?”

“Seven and a half.”

The boyfriend, seeing the kiss, took three strides into the street. “Bitch, come on!”

“Hold up, motherfucker!” Raychelle licked her thumb and brushed it across Winston’s eyebrows. “You know what I’m a name it, right?”

“Lonnie if it’s boy. Candice if it’s girl.”

“You remember.”

“Come on now, this Tuff.”

“How’s Jordy?”

“He all right. He don’t never talk, but he cool.”

“Raychelle, them niggers ain’t going to be at the spot forever, and unless you got some works, you best to come on!”

Raychelle bussed Winston on the eyelids, then, stomach-first, waddled into the street, tumbling after her already-departed boyfriend, who seemed to pull her along as if she were a mangled kite he was trying to get airborne. The couple moved briskly past a brick wall plastered with graffiti and campaign posters. Winston spat. The street lamp hanging overhead began to flicker. The strobelike flashes illuminated Winston and Spencer as if they were caught in a silent-movie lightning storm. “Damn, she used to be fine.”

“I bet she was. You can still see it. She still got some booty left.”

“Check you out, Rab, showing a little zest,” Winston said, still gazing up at the light. He handed Spencer his questions back, then clapped his hands. The beam steadied. “What they going to ask me at the debate, Rabbi? They going to ask about Raychelle?”

“They will. They’ll hand out index cards and ask the audience to write down their questions and pass them to the front.” Spencer unrolled the paper like a medieval herald. “ ‘Mr. Foshay, what do you plan to do about drugs in the community?’ ”

“You not hearing me, Rabbi. Are they going ask me about Raychelle? Are they going to say, ‘Tuffy, you know all the troublemakers, if you get elected what you going to do about Raychelle, or Petey Peligroso?’ ”

“Winston, the idea of a debate is to address the issues on a broader scope. I doubt they’ll mention anyone by name.”

“That’s because they know better. Because then I’d say, ‘What you going to do about your son, your niece, your nephew, yourself?’ I’d throw it back in they face, word.”

They continued north on Second Avenue, Spencer tossing out prospective debate questions in the affected stuffy yammer of a television moderator. “Children having children. A problem. A moral disgrace. How do we prevent it? Mr. Foshay?” Although he was listening, Winston looked straight ahead, keeping his answers to himself, vainly trying to remember which one of the upcoming bodegas carried the Captain Nemo chocolate cakes he was craving. You ain’t never going to stop kids from having sex. Those that want to fuck going to fuck. What you need to do is be real with them. Hip them to the Astroglide. Squeeze it out the tube, slap it on the rubber, and the pussy feel normal.

“Rap music … violent television programming … films that glorify crime. Are they influencing our youth and pushing them in the wrong direction? Isn’t the answer censorship, and not warning labels and ratings?” Has anyone ever thought that this type of entertainment is … what’s that word Yolanda be using after we have one of our angry fucks? Cathartic. Maybe if niggers wasn’t listening to rap music, and watching these bullshit films, they’d be even more violent. And for that matter, if the white man wasn’t making these movies, he’d be more violent too.

Soon they found themselves treading down a narrow footpath that cut through the innards of the massive Wagner projects. As they stood in the urban gorge there was a roar in the air. The sound of laughter and argument echoed off the sides of the tall brick buildings. Bands of residents could be seen navigating the housing development’s cataracts, wittingly rushing headlong to the unseen cascades like daredevils in a barrel. One way to keep people off the streets would be to provide them with air-conditioning, Spencer thought. “Do you want more questions, Winston?”

“Naw, I’m just going to have to look stupid. But that’s all right, I’m used to it.”

A herd of grade-schoolers detoured around Winston and stampeded past Spencer, almost knocking him down in the process. He looked at his watch. “It’s one-thirty in the morning — do you know where your parents are?”

An eleven-year-old boy, his hair already shorn in a gangster tonsure, moped up to Winston and clasped his hand with a vigorous shake. “When you going to put me down, big man?”

“You know I ain’t out there like that right now, Shorty,” Winston said, palming the boy’s head in his hands.

“I know, I seen the posters. These bummy-ass niggers and some Chinese lady be putting them up all the time.”

“She Japanese.”

“Right, right, whatever. Niggers say you laying in the cut. Niggers say if you walkin’ out of courtrooms free as a beetle, then the mafia backing you. Niggers say that you finally packin’ a toolie. That if you win, bodies going to drop.”

“I ain’t going to win.”

“You packin’ heat, though?”

“That ain’t none of your business.”

“Niggers say you on some syndicate-type shit.”

“Fuck out of here.”

“Niggers say you holding twenty, thirty G’s on the daily. I know you not pushin’ no product, so how you get that kind of scratch? I know, you can’t tell me — just when the time come, hook a young nigger up. I’d like a piece of that mafia lifestyle. Live that ‘wack a nigger here, clip a nigger there’ day to day.”

Winston cut the youngster off with a ten-dollar bill. “You know where to get a Captain Nemo’s chocolate cake around here?” The boy nodded, his hands posed to take the money. “Get me three loosies, a chocolate cake, Captain Nemo’s now, not none of them no-name ghetto snacks, and a tall can of Budweiser.” The boy snatched the money, but Winston held on tight to his end. He tossed his head toward a circle of teenagers standing under a lone elm tree. “I’ll be over there with Bucknaked and them, okay?” Winston released his grip on the money, sending the boy flying through the projects like a pellet from a slingshot. Winston looked at Spencer, then, cupping his hands over his mouth, shouted down his runner. “Change that Budweiser to two foreign beers! Heineken or some shit!” The boy acknowledged the change in orders with a raise of his hand.

Sitting on top of a pipe rail bordering the walkway, they sipped their canned lagers, Tuffy somehow also managing to smoke a cigarette and lick chocolate frosting off the Nemo’s wrapper. “Shit good, ain’t it, Rabbi?” asked Winston, holding up his green can like an actor in a television commercial. Spencer grinned. Though the first taste of the mundane Dutch import had made him gag, and long for a foamy glass of a Flemish wit bier with a slice of lemon, he had to concur that nothing went better with a humid New York City night than beer — even this vacuum-packed aluminum swill. Beneath the branches of the elm tree, about five yards from Winston and Spencer, the cluster of young men had tightened. A Spanish kid, the color of wet sand, was blowing into his hand as if it were a trumpet’s embouchure. His efforts produced a mélange of beats that varied between the sounds of flatulence, the pings of a drummer’s high hat, and the burps of a jalopy chugging uphill. As his other hand alternately slapped his chest and muted his “horn,” the percussives gained momentum. The other members of the clique, feet planted firmly against the cement like the roots of the nearby tree, began to dip at the knees. A few slowly bobbed and weaved their torsos like boxers practicing dodging punches in the mirror. The rest lifted their hands skyward and bounced in place like Sunday rollers in the first pew catching the Holy Ghost. Even the branches of the elm tree seemed to sway to the beat. And like the singing trees in The Wizard of Oz, the teens began spouting frenzied rhymes, trying to solve all the world’s problems in one breath. Spencer wondered if among these young men was the anonymous neologist who invented the ever-mutable New York slang.

Experts in urban eschatology, the rappers’ monodies and laments weaved a dense skein of verse from the spindles of despair and cautious optimism that unraveled from the looms in their hearts and minds. Spencer could only make out the guttural call-and-response what-whats, uh-huhs, okays, mm-hmms, and yes-yes-y’alls. Even Winston, though somewhat better versed in ghetto colloquialism, understood only about three-quarters of the machine-gun poetics.

A shirtless young man wearing a Jackie Coogan cap and a pair of Tom Sawyer denim overalls peeled away from the group. He weaved toward Winston waving a paper-bagged pint of liquor like a metronome, spewing his freestyle like a drunken Nubian skald.

… this here is Bucknaked

life expectancy of a fly,

ready to die

so no time for faking it.

Bucknaked in your sphere —

ass out, talking loud,

farting rain clouds.

Penis flapping,

nuts hanging,

lube the pubes

’cause bitches I’m banging.

Like my nigger Tuff

call your bluff.

My whole race got a poker face,

treys over queens,

and like they say I’m keeping it real.

Don’t what that means,

but I know how it feels …

After Bucknaked dropped his last “lyrical bomb,” the session ended, the rappers’ scorched-earth policy having temporarily defoliated the briar patch that was once the quadrangle of the Wagner projects and left the night as brittle as rice paper. Exhausted and speaking in wheezes, the boys gathered around Winston to catch their breath with small talk.

“With them posters up, nigger, everybody think you rapping.”

“I know.”

“When’s the election?”

“Next Tuesday. Y’all niggers going to vote for me?”

A slender snaggle-toothed boy waved his hand in front of his face. “Get real, dog. I’m from the projects, dog. That vote shit ain’t for niggers like me.”

Tuffy raised a hand, feigning a backhanded slap in the pessimist’s direction. “Who you think you talking to, a nigger from Mars? What your birth certificate say—‘Place of Birth: Projects’? You better save that ‘I’m from the projects’ bullshit for a somebody that give a fuck.”

The boy shuffled his feet and with sanguine eyes looked up at Winston.

“I ain’t saying waste your vote on me, because I ain’t the somebody that give a fuck, but you need to vote for somebody.”

“Check, Tuff out, son!” one of the group exclaimed. “You been around Smush and Five Percenter shit too long, because you talking in circles now.”

Bucknaked was staring intently at Winston, rubbing his chin. “On the real, yo, I would vote, but that shit just puts me in the system, B. Give them motherfuckers one more address to bust up. Feel me?”

“Man, the worst that can happen is they call you to jury duty.”

“You been called?”

“Had to serve last November. Paid me twenty-five dollars a day or some shit.”

“Federal?”

“I wish. Some joker was suing the electric company.”

“I’m sayin’,” said Bucknaked, feeling his apathy vindicated by Winston’s jury experience, “that right there is why I ain’t registered. What if I get on some boring-ass long-drawn-out case where you have to live in a Roach Motel for six month? I got no time for the city, not for no measly twenty-five a day. I could steal that out my mama’s purse.”

“You would, nigger,” commented the project baby.

“Damn straight. And I have, too,” snorted Bucknaked.

“It ain’t all that. If you don’t like the case it’s ways to get out of it.”

“Like how, nigger?”

“Motherfuckers tried to put me on that electric-company-blew-up-my-house madness. I wasn’t having it — Joe Whiteman vs. Amalgamated So-and-So, who give a fuck? So we broke for lunch, I came back eating a bean pie and holding a copy of The Final Call. Headline in big-ass letters: MINISTER CITES SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE — WHITE MAN IS THE DEVIL. They wasn’t going to pick me for shit after that. But I got to thinking, as much as I been in court, I ain’t never seen a nigger like me in the jury box.”

Bucknaked reconsidered his stance and in a fit of giddiness started jumping up and down like he’d won some local raffle. “Word life, son. If I was on the jury I be like, ‘Let my people go! Videotape, smideotape! DNA, NBA! The nigger didn’t do it!’ ”

Spencer unzipped his rucksack. The group was startled by the sound like a herd of bucks catching a whiff of the hunter. Their relief was palpable when his hand produced nothing more than a notebook and a pen. For a second Spencer thought he saw a gun in the hands of the buck-toothed kid. Now his hands were empty and Spencer couldn’t guess where he’d stashed his weapon. “Who this nigger, man?”

The pen and paper had increased the discomfort in regard to his presence, and the rappers backed away from him. Spencer waited for Winston to introduce him to his friends to ease the tension. He wondered what would be the term of endearment: Big Brother, Rabbi Spence, Ace? He’s a Jew, but he’s all right.

Winston snatched the pad out of Spencer’s hand. “Fuck you doing?”

“I’m just jotting down some thoughts for the next installment. I don’t want to forget anything.” Winston tossed the book back to Spencer and said, “Big Brother, Little Brother over. Rabbi, you need to be out. This ain’t no zoo.”

“Who is this nigger, G?”

“Nobody. Motherfucker just writing some article about me for the paper. Some King-of-the-Jungle-type shit. But the safari over now.”

Spencer wanted to defend his actions but knew that anything he’d say would sound hollow. Goose bumps rose on his skin. He felt as if he were shrinking before Winston, soluble in his own bullshit, his body bubbling and floating toward the sky in tiny pieces like an antacid tablet dissolving into the night. Before disappearing completely, he turned to leave. “See you tomorrow afternoon at the debate, okay? Two-thirty?”

Winston wrested the paper bag from Bucknaked, took a long pull from the bottle, then slung an arm around his friend’s shoulders. Together they and rest of the boys bopped down a labyrinthian walkway and into the depths of the Wagner Projects. This level of hell was off limits to Spencer, and he began the trek back to his car, feeling slighted he hadn’t been introduced, and guilty for taking out his notebook. He knew that he’d never have the access to Winston the others had, and it suddenly dawned on him why: he was more afraid of Winston than for him. Afraid of his reputation. Afraid of his latent intellect. Afraid of being judged — and being judged fairly.

As Spencer walked to the edge of the apartment complex, the boy who’d fetched Winston the beer and cake jumped in front of him. “Hey yo,” the imp said, stepping directly in his path. “My man say you gave him a Frisbee.” Spencer followed the boy’s outstretched arm across a small patch of grass and recognized the child he’d given the Frisbee to after his first visit to Winston’s. “Yes, I did.”

“Do you have any more, mister?”

It was an innocent request, and for the first time the kid’s tone of voice matched his age. Regretfully, Spencer shook his head and lightly reached out to touch the youngster’s forehead. He’d just started to mumble a benediction when the boy slapped his hand away and yelled, “Well, fuck you then!”