Tuff

3- TUFFY AND YOLANDA

Winston didn’t realize how drunk he was until he arrived at his apartment and couldn’t insert his key into the lock. After a few misses he resorted to the method he picked up from watching his next-door neighbor return home after a payday binge. Bending down and closing one eye, Winston placed his left index finger on the keyhole. With his right hand he pressed the tip of the key into his left shoulder. Using his left arm as a guide, he slid the key into the lock with his right hand. Winston opened the door as quietly as possible, rehearsing his excuse to Yolanda for why he didn’t call. “I was at Keith’s crib and that nigger’s phone is off, so I sent Taurus to tell Jamilla to tell Yusef to tell Laura to call you. But I didn’t know Yusef got a restraining order against Jamilla after she set him on fire for fucking Wanda. Turn out that fool under house arrest anyway, and couldn’t tell Laura or nobody else nothing, nohow.” He was slowly making his way down the dark hallway when a block of light from the bedroom illuminated him like an escaped convict.

“Don’t worry about trying to creep, the baby woke.”

“All right.”

Walking past the bedroom, he hurriedly made his way to the bathroom.

“You not going to come see your son?”

“What, he got a mustache? I know what he look like.”

Winston took a no-handed piss. He held up the sandwich bag. The goldfish was swimming in water murkier than Winston’s alcohol-laden urine. Wedged in one corner, the fish opened his mouth every two seconds, as if he had something to say but couldn’t remember what it was. Flushing the toilet, Winston dangled the bag over the whirlpool, contemplating ridding himself of one more responsibility. “Seat,” Yolanda called out.

“Down,” he grumbled, a long, whispered “Fuck” lingering behind him as he headed for the kitchen. Taking a deep casserole dish from the cupboard, he filled it with tap water and spilled the goldfish into it. The fish swam an appreciative lap in its new home. Winston flicked the glassware, calling the fish to attention. “Is it safe?” Yolanda was giving him time to fix a quick meal before she went into her de rigueur Impertinent Black Mama act. Winston went to the refrigerator and removed a stick of margarine and two large flour tortillas. With a match he lit the gas burners and flipped the tortillas over the open flames. When the tortillas showed the first signs of charcoal burns, he whipped the hot disks onto the counter and ran the margarine stick over the doughy circles. Rolling the tortillas into dripping tubes of oleo, Winston chewed and tried to think of a name for the fish. Yolanda’s voice rushed into the kitchen, demanding obedience like God talking to Abraham. “Turn off the stove, wash your hands, then bring me some Kool-Aid.”

“Dustin,” he said to his pet. “Since you’re a survivor, like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man.” Winston dipped his finger in the water and began poking the fish in the head. After each jab he’d lean close to the water and ask his light-headed pet, “Is it safe?”

Yolanda was sitting on the edge of the rumpled bed breast-feeding their eleven-month-old son, Bryce Extraordinaire Foshay, Jordy for short. Upon hearing his father enter the room, Jordy released Yolanda’s nipple with a loud, wet smack. A bridge of drool sagged between the tip of the mother’s teat and the baby’s chin. As Jordy turned toward his father, the link of saliva snapped and the spit rope swung into the baby’s chest. Winston looked at the clock radio on the nightstand; it was two-thirty in the morning. A happy little gurgle bubbled from Jordy’s throat and the males greeted each other with puffy-cheeked smiles. “What up, little nigger?” Winston said, bussing his son on the forehead.

“I told you about that. Where you been … big nigger?” Winston sheepishly opened his mouth to speak, ready to unravel and inflate his prefab excuse like a passenger jet’s emergency slide. “Don’t even feel it, Tuff.”

Winston closed his mouth, offered Yolanda the Tupperware glass of Kool-Aid and a bite of his tortilla. She waved him off. He sat next to her. She had the gruff look of a cop standing two steps away from a car pulled over on the highway, one hand on her gun, asking to see a driver’s license and inquiring how many drinks were had this evening. Winston sobered up quickly and told his story, spraying tortilla crumbs over Yolanda and the baby. Whenever he reached a turning point in the tale, he illustrated the episode by removing the appropriate item from a pocket, then tossing it on the mattress: first the gun, then the empty bag of pork rinds, followed by the bubble-gum fortune, and lastly a thick rubber-banded roll of bills. Winston finished his tale, stuffing down the last of his tortilla. He licked his oily fingertips and waited for a reaction. Yolanda examined each piece of evidence carefully, looking for a flaw in the story. She read the bubble-gum fortune, snickering at the comic: “Bazooka Joe’s hilarious.” She placed the bag of pork-rind crumbs over her nose and mouth and inhaled, testing it for freshness. Whipping the bag behind her back, she snapped, “What’s the expiration date?”

“Yolanda, please.”

“I know your ass, you always check.”

“July nine.”

Yolanda examined the date and grunted. She inflated the bag with a quick breath of air and loudly popped it against his head. Handing Jordy to Winston, she picked up the gun, expertly ejected a bullet from the chamber, aimed at her reflection in the bureau mirror, then, with cowboy élan, spun the firearm around her finger. Anticipating a misfire, Winston tucked Jordy into his chest and ducked beside the bed.

“Baby, what the fuck you doing? That thing’s loaded!”

“Don’t worry, I put on the safety. You been running around with a loaded gun in your pocket with the safety off. Lucky thing hamburgers don’t have legs, ’cause you might have had to chase one down and shot your dick off.”

“Take a bigger gun than that — magnum maybe.”

“Yeah, sure.” Yolanda put the gun underneath the mattress, then yanked the rubber band off the roll of money. Licking her thumb, she quickly counted the money into neat little hundred-dollar stacks. Winston was whisking a giggly Jordy through the air and making airplane noises. “Stop it, you going to keep him up.”

Winston sat back down on the bed, bouncing the baby on his knee.

“You mean to tell me Smush just lent you seven hundred dollars.”

“He didn’t want to at first, talking about he would have to liquidate some stocks, but I liquored that nigger up and guilted him into it. Besides, it’s his fault I almost got killed.”

“How is it his fault?”

“Nigger know I didn’t want to work in Brooklyn.”

“Tuffy, why can’t you tell Smush no?”

Yolanda started to pout and busied herself restacking the money. Pretending obliviousness to her irritable mood, Winston nuzzled Jordy’s snot-encrusted nose. Yolanda placed the money in the top dresser drawer, removed the baby from Winston’s arms, and walked into the living room. As she belted her black satin nightgown with one hand, she issued Winston a caveat: “Better be a goldfish in here.” Winston kicked off his shoes, folded his arms behind his head, and lay back on the pillow, awaiting the tirade. “How this stupid nigger get to be my baby’s father?”

“You know damn well how — I wooed the fuck out of you.”

Yolanda had been working as a cashier at the Burger King on Fourteenth and Sixth Avenue, the filthy one around the corner from the YMCA. It was her first job since she’d started going to school part-time at York College, and even after six months she was still a gung-ho serf in the Burger King’s fast-food realm. She wore her paper crown with pride, pretending that every customer was possibly a mysterious Burger King plain-clothed inspector making a clandestine inquisition of her franchise. Super-sizing the Whopper Combo orders with a smile, and never forgetting the “Thank you, come again” salutation, Yolanda had a reputation to live up to — her photo Scotch-taped to the Employee of the Month plaque.

She didn’t notice Winston and his posse enter the store, each hooded druid bundled in overstuffed down jacket, ski mask, headphone earmuffs, shaking the December snow from their bodies like wet dogs and stomping their boots on the just-mopped floor. The group was bunched up at the counter jostling for position when Winston spotted Yolanda salting the french fries. He’d only gotten a glimpse of her, but already there was an expanding hollow in his chest. A machine in the kitchen emitted a long beep and Yolanda’s thick, tight body glided over to a silvery panel. She pressed a button, mindful of her long cherry-red fingernails, and removed a batch of breaded chicken pieces from a deep fryer. Winston saw several rings on each hand — a sign, he thought, that she might have a man. Yolanda placed the chicken in the warmer, and her squat profile revealed the arc of her right breast. The brown polyester pants gave her buttock a sexy sheen in the store’s fluorescent light. Her face Winston couldn’t see, since her head was turned. She was talking to the manager about some take-out trivialities. Winston stared at the nape of her neck, exposed by a granny-bun hairstyle. He shivered. Yolanda turned, topped off a soda, and faced Winston. Seeing him standing there transfixed, she started, then smiled. Their eyes met, and they were instantaneously on page 6 of a Harlequin romance novel on a spinning pharmacy book rack.

As she made her way back to her register, Winston retreated a few steps and let his hungry friends surge ahead of him in line. That wasn’t no “Welcome to Burger King” smile, Winston thought. Baby trying to say a little something. Yolanda avoided Winston’s stare. As she took the orders of his friends, she absentmindedly stroked the thin baby hairs meticulously greased to her temples, silently repeating the dating mantra passed down by generations of black women: Niggers ain’t shit. Niggers ain’t shit. Niggers ain’t shit.

“Next person in line, please,” Yolanda politely called out. Winston bellied up to the register and gazed at the menu. He took his time, carefully choosing his opening words to the woman he knew would be the love of his life: “One Whopper cheese, no pickles, no onion. Two king-size chicken sandwiches, light on the dressing.”

Yolanda repeated the order into the microphone, hiding the thrill she felt in the back of her throat. “Will there be anything else, sir?” Oops, she walked into it, the lounge lizard’s classic window of opportunity. Yolanda gripped the microphone tightly and steeled herself for the inevitable pickup line.

“Yes — large onion rings and two apple turnovers.”

Yolanda felt both relieved and disappointed. Maybe he didn’t like her. Maybe he wasn’t staring at her but at the conveyor belt of greasy burgers behind her. She looked into Winston’s cupcake-brown face and repeated his order. Remembering her customer protocol, Yolanda pushed the fries and beverages. “Would you like to try our new cheddar cheese curly fries and something to drink?”

“I’ll take an orange soda.”

“What size?”

“ ’Bout your size.”

Yolanda blushed but didn’t waver a second. “That be about a medium.”

Winston laughed, leaned over the countertop, and shouldered his way into her life. “You from Queens.”

Normally Yolanda would ask a customer to step aside so she could take the next order. Now she glanced from Winston’s face to his hands, marveling at the smoothness of his skin. “How can you tell?” she asked.

“The dolphin earrings, the cellophane-crimped bangs, more silver than gold on your wrists. Might even have a little Long Island in you.” Though Winston’s deductions were correct, Yolanda pretended to be unimpressed with a sassy “Sooo.”

“Where at? Hollis? Kew Gardens?”

“Queens Village, near the track. That okay with you?”

“Long as you ain’t from Brooklyn, I’m straight. You got a man?”

Yolanda held up her hands, showing off her collection of department-store promise rings.

“But can he be burnt?” Winston asked.

“Light a match.”

Holding trays of lukewarm burgers in wax paper and brimming with more jealousy than they’d care to admit, Winston’s boys chided him into hastening his mack.

“Let’s be out, Chubbsy Ubbsy.”

“Oh, Miss Crabtree, I have something heavy on my heart.”

“You going to have something heavy on your lip in a minute.”

“Baby girl going to have something heavy on her lap in minute.”

Winston struggled to resist the gravitational pull of his boys. He didn’t want to succumb to the forces of friendship physics, huddle up and get into a bitch-this-and-bitch-that round-table synopsis. Yolanda rescued the conversation by acknowledging the nappy-headed ballast hindering the weightlessness of puppy love. “Your team cock-blocking and shit.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your name?”

“Winston.”

“What they call you on the streets?”

“Tuffy.”

“Yolanda.”

Yolanda slid Winston a brown tray overflowing with food he didn’t order. Jammed into a forest of french fries, a two-inch figurine of the Burger King surveyed his cholesterol domain. Impaled on the king’s lance was the receipt with Yolanda’s phone number scribbled over the subtotal. Winston dropped a bundle of crumpled bills in her hand and assured her of a phone call that evening. A macho “All right then” and he was off to share his spoils with the homies, forgetting the change. As Yolanda watched him plod away, she wondered what her friends would say when she showed up at the club with a big-boned roughneck. She could hear Tasha now: “That huge nigger sure is ugly, hope he can sing.” With a smile at her musing, she called out, “Next,” and without looking back Winston answered, “Me, goddammit!”

Their first and only date was a Christmas Eve boat tour circumnavigating Manhattan. Yolanda and Winston met at the Battery Park marina, Winston punctual for the first time for an appointment that didn’t involve a court proceeding. Yolanda arrived an independent woman’s mandatory fifteen minutes late. Winston flashed the tickets he’d bought a week in advance and the giddy couple ran down the gangplank, elbowing past the out-of-towners and racing up the spiral stairs to the upper deck. Yolanda sat next to a porthole window and Winston squeezed in beside her.

“Got enough room?”

“Plenty.”

Winston lifted Yolanda’s curls and a cold sea breeze raised goose bumps on her neck. She braced for a kiss; instead, Winston slapped a Dramamine patch behind her ear. “What’s that?” Yolanda asked.

“In case you get seasick.”

“Thanks, but the boat don’t go but two miles an hour.”

“Knots.”

“I know.”

As the boat chugged around snowy Gotham, they talked over the droll tour guide, defining the landmarks for themselves. “See that building?” Yolanda asked, pointing at a limestone-and-steel skyscraper, “I used to work there two summers ago — thirty-second floor, in the cafeteria.”

“For real? You know that tan building right next to it? I used to slave there, Strudder, Farragut, and Peabody.”

“What’d you do?”

“Kept the fax machine from getting clogged.”

“That’s it?”

“My shit was high-tech, right? I lasted two whole days on that one.”

The roof speaker crackled, “Ladies and gentlemen, I know it’s a cloudy night, but those of you with binoculars can see the Rikers Island guard towers just past the Triborough Bridge. Commissioned in 1936, Rikers Island jail is the former residence of nefarious felons such as the Son of Sam, alias David Berkowitz, child-killer Joel Steinberg, the Cosa Nostra don John Gotti, and Harlem drug lord Nicky Barnes—”

Yolanda stood up and waved at the distant jailhouse. “Ahoy, Luscious and Tabitha! Jasmine, what up, girl?” Winston hissed and looked down at his feet. “You okay?” Yolanda asked, knuckling the brooding boy on the chin. “You know somebody in Rikers?”

“Please, I know much niggers on the rock.”

“ ‘Many niggers,’ or ‘a lot of niggers,’ ” Yolanda corrected.

Winston nodded, blinking to hold back his tears and a slew of sins past, present, and future. “You got bad memories?” Yolanda asked. Winston kept looking at his feet. Yolanda pulled on Winston’s earlobe, stroked his eyebrows, looking for the hidden lever that spins the bookcase, revealing the secret room. Winston raised his head and took a deep breath. He unlocked his chest plate and removed his armor piece by heavy piece. Fuck it. Winston started with his first arrest at age thirteen after a summer’s day spent shoplifting and chain snatching with every teenage boy from the block. At dusk, he and the posse were walking down Forty-fifth Street, nineteen deep — pissy drunk, brash and boisterous as soldiers on a three-day pass. Someone shouted “Pockets!” pointing at a man exiting the movie house. Before the sex fiend noticed the red-eyed wolf pack surrounding him, they were on him. Four kids grabbed a pocket and yanked. With a loud Mama-making-Sunday-morning-dustrags tear, the man’s pants fell apart at the seams. His billfold dropped to the ground and vanished before he had a chance to shout “Hey!” Coins and peep-show tokens clattered onto the sidewalk and raced around his shoes. The man scrambled after what remained of his belongings, trying to hold up his shredded pants, and fight off the boys, who descended upon the coins like pigeons upon breadcrumbs.

Somehow, one boy, Dark, a fresh-off-the-Greyhound-bus émigré from Duarte, California, left the robbery with pearls of errant masturbatory ejaculate in his hot combed hair. Eager to diffuse the taunts of the other boys and prove that his thick pigtails were “gangster” and not “sissified,” he backtracked four blocks and found the victim reporting the crime to two patrolmen. Ignoring the officers, Dark began pummeling the man, shouting, “You got sperm in my perm, now I’m full of germs.” Winston was rolling on the sidewalk in a fit of laughter when the police handcuffed him. He snickered all the way to the police station: “AIDS in my braids, now I’ll never get laid!” Giggled through the fingerprinting: “Nut on my haircut, like I been butt-fucked!” The city went through a roll of film before finally settling on a mug shot of him sporting an Uncle Ben smile, tears running down his face.

Things ceased to be funny when the cops refused to believe that a boy Winston’s size could be thirteen, and since budget cuts had made night court a liberal memory, he’d have the weekend on Rikers to prove his identity. It didn’t take long. Winston disembarked from the bus, suffered through the indignities of a strip search, and strolled into building C-64. There, playing toilet-paper checkers on a bunk underneath the clock, was a double-jumping birth certificate: his father. Father and son played checkers with rolled-up balls of toilet tissue, arguing about who would call the wife, the mother. “I haven’t spoken to you or her in three years, I didn’t go to your sister’s funeral, so phone her, boy.”

“Fuck you. King me, bitch.”

Unlike Winston’s father, Patrice Foshay kept her promises. The last one, delivered behind an ironing-board pulpit, was: “Winston, you keep getting into trouble, I’m not going to kick you out the house, I’m going to leave my damn self and you’re not coming with. You’ll be living on your own. Understand?” Monday morning Mrs. Foshay posted bail on the two delinquents. She dropped Clifford off at his girlfriend’s, raised a “Power to the People!” fist in the air, and moved to Atlanta, assuring Winston she’d send rent and food money until he turned eighteen.

It took Winston two years to move his belongings into his mother’s bedroom. When the phone rang every two weeks at precisely ten o’clock, after the black sitcoms went off the air, his mother would ask why he couldn’t be more like “those nice boys on TV.”

Winston was just finishing the tale of his dysfunctional upbringing with a blasphemous “Fuck a Cosby” when an immense marble-white yacht christened Jubilee in bold black letters sailed alongside the tour boat. With sleek helicopters perched bow and stern and a radar dish spinning above the bridge, the boat looked more like a war vessel than a luxury craft. “So you’re all alone?” Yolanda asked. Winston shrugged, his gaze cast out toward the bay. Yolanda knew the right thing to do was to put her head on Winston’s pillowy shoulder and say, “No, you aren’t.” But she had long since learned to let the man make the first conciliatory move. Instead she filled the uncomfortable silence with cynicism: “Every nigger’s father say they was in the Panthers. And if they was, they didn’t do shit but hand out flyers.”

“Crazy? Nigger was down.” Winston flipped open his wallet and showed her a photo of a goateed black man dressed beret-to-boots in black, crouched behind a Volkswagen Beetle, his leather-gloved hands positioned over the hood, aiming a shotgun at some unseen enemy of the Revolution. Yolanda grabbed the wallet and fawned over the Polaroid. “Yo, your pop groovier-than-a-motherfucker. Look at those pointy kicks and the tight-ass straight legs.” She flipped through the rest of the wallet, pausing at the food-stamp ID card to verify that Winston wasn’t lying about his age. She studied the more recent photos of Latino and black boys grouped around firearms, posing in front of London-gray school lockers. Interspersed with the group shots were portraits of the same solemn-faced teens at the steering wheel of the communal vehicle or the local arcade, looking directly into the camera, holding the pistols to their temples. Winston introduced the boys on the block by proxy: “Rude, Kooky, Shorty-Wop, Point Blank — right there’s my ace, Fariq.” Going through the contents of Winston’s wallet, Yolanda realized what made him attractive, other than his cute button nose. He was comfortable with who he was and wasn’t. You don’t meet too many casual black people. Winston was honest — maybe not with the rest of the world, but he was honest with her and himself. He didn’t embellish or rationalize his exploits, talking in pipe-dream slang about him and the crew “coming up,” “blowing up,” “bubbling,” and “living large.” No sob-story brooding about inner-city lassitude—“You can’t understand, it be mad crazy stress on a nigger”—as if Yolanda were on the outside looking in on a black man’s world. She understood self-pity and self-doubt; there was no need to talk over her dookie-braided head.

Yolanda tapped a purple-and-pink fingernail on the food-stamp ID and said, “You mind?”

“No, everybody at the store know me. Go ahead.” As she slipped the card from the plastic holder, Yolanda noticed there was another photo tucked underneath it. Oh, my competition, she thought; then she noticed it was a picture of a gray-haired woman who looked to be in her late fifties. She was standing in front of the Apollo Theater. Snuggled next to her, a young Winston, his nappy head resting atop her pageboy.

“Who’s this Oriental lady?”

“Asian.”

“Who is she?”

“Ms. Nomura. She’s my unofficial guardian. She looked out for a nigger after Moms jetted.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Yolanda handed the billfold back to Winston and turned her attention to the partygoers dancing on the Jubilee’s poop deck, one ear cocked for the explanation. “Yolanda, you ain’t got nothing to be salty about — Ms. Nomura like my auntie. She live right across the street, knew my father when he was in the Panthers. I told you, she’s like my second mother. If you jealous of a sixty-year-old, you got issues.”

Yolanda folded her arms and peered out the porthole window. “Fucking boat move too slow.” Winston pulled a bright orange life jacket from underneath the bench and carefully slipped it over Yolanda’s head, fastening the buckles across her chest and knotting the cotton straps behind her back. Yolanda’s shoulders visibly relaxed. Oh, this fat motherfucker smooth, she thought.

Winston flamboyantly doffed his jacket and cloaked it over Yolanda’s shoulders. He was entering player mode and about to unleash his rap, the rap being the black man’s equivalent of a lion tamer’s whip crack to straighten out a headstrong feline, or a Buddhist monk’s koan to further confuse a disciple. What’s the sound of one man rapping? “Yolanda, stop fronting. I can tell by your reaction you in a brother’s corner. That’s on point, but let’s not play no games. We all need to be rescued to some extent. You going to school, that’s rescuing yourself. Just seeing a strong black woman such as yourself going head-up with the bullshit makes me wonder what can I do to straighten my game out. So listen here, I ain’t now, and never will, trip off nothing in your life that makes your life better. That’s not a promise, that’s factoid, baby. Like the sky is blue, the summer’s hot, and you fine as hell. No question. Ms. Nomura is like this life jacket, kept me afloat when times was hard. But I was just bobbing up and down in the stormy sea of the streets. You’re my rescue ship plucking me out of the water — all ahoy-and-shiver-me-timbers like.”

Yolanda put the palm of her hand in Winston’s face. “Save it. You’re right, I like you — more than I should, but let’s not get into it tonight, we got the rest of our lives to kiss and make up. Let’s be carefree, like those white folks on that boat. Look, they kicking it.”

Winston reached into his backpack, pulled out a frosted black bottle of Freixenet champagne, two paper cups, a brown teddy bear with a hot-pink ribbon knotted around its neck, and a Christmas card. “Shit, we kicking it.”

Sipping her champagne, Yolanda opened her handmade card. On the cover was a surprisingly decent watercolor of a black couple sitting on a mountainside outcropping, hugging and kissing to the amusement of a brood of sad-eyed Disneyesque forest animals. On the inside, written in twiggish block lettering, was the following inscription:

The essence of beauty is —

[pocket mirror]

you.

Yolanda saw her reflection framed by the sentimental bromide and succumbed to the wanton manipulation that is romance. With a cheery “Clink,” she touched paper cups with Winston. “Let’s make a toast,” Yolanda said, trying to hide her wistfulness. “A toast to love. A toast to the man who got me open with no promises, no handsome-muscle-flexing tight-butt-wiggling, and no money.”

Winston rubbed his chin, trying to determine if he’d been insulted or not, then raised his cup. “Then a toast to the woman who loves me for me, though she don’t know me from the next man.”

“Fuck the next man.”

“A toast to a woman who knows what she wants.”

Yolanda and Winston unclenched from that first kiss, tongues numb with champagne, sex organs swollen with lust, and the axes of their young worlds permanently tilted. Or as Winston so delicately phrased it, wiping lipstick from his mouth, “Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.”

“How did I fall for that bullshit, Tuffy? ‘Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.’ It’s all jibbity-jibbity, because you always drunk, you wino.” Yolanda was still carrying on, and Winston found himself on the living-room sofa, obediently enduring his censure. Listening to Yolanda denigrate him was like going to church Easter morning. He didn’t want to do it, but he sat still out of obligation, hands folded in his lap, hoping his headache would prevent the sermon from seeping into his brain.

As Yolanda edged toward the bookshelf, Winston froze. “Come on, Landa, don’t.” Yolanda’s substantial archives consisted of well-kept stacks of Essence, Ebony, and Chocolate Singles magazines crammed with articles entitled “Hypnotize with Pumpkin Pie,” “Atlantis, Unicorns, Black Love — Fact or Fiction?” and “Ten Good Qualities About Black Men Other than Penis Size.” Next to the periodicals were the self-help books, all written by short-Afroed women from Philadelphia: Sisters Doing It for Themselves — How to Masturbate to an African Orgasm; The Black Women’s Guide to Finding a Real Man; and Yolanda’s bible, Nigger, Please Please Me.

What bothered Winston about Yolanda’s choice of reading material wasn’t all the doctoral-cum-beauty-shop research — anthropology seeking the missing link between prehistoric Stepin Fetchit man and the genetically engineered Denzel Washington that fossilized him, or the parascientific diaries that monsterized him. I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into this lifeless thing at my feet.… I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open—behold, I, Dr. Eula Frankenstein-Barnes, author of The Good Black Man: Some Assembly Required, have created life!

What irked Winston was that Yolanda started buying this trash after they’d married, when the relationship was problem-free, at least in his mind. When Yolanda sat up in bed after sex reading The Black Woman’s Guide to Finding a Real Man, he’d explode. “What, I’m not a real man? How come there’s never any doubt about you being a real woman?” … And I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! Yolanda would try to calm Winston with a lecture about the problems unique to black-on-black love. Winston argued that there were no differences between black, white, Puerto Rican, or kangaroo relationships. “Problems is problems,” he’d say. “The difference is, black couples have their bedroom behavior studied by every stuck-up bitch with a degree and a word processor.”

Yolanda blithely ran her hands along the paperback bindings of her library, drawing energy from the fiction section, like an Irish-woman kissing the Blarney Stone. Winston swore on the graves of every relative he could think of that he’d change his behavior. Pulling a slim volume entitled Pimp-Slapped to Oblivion off the shelf, Yolanda opened to page 1 and cleared her throat. Winston cringed, grabbing the arm of the sofa and awaiting the literary castor oil. The words “Clockwork Orange” involuntarily escaped from his mouth. Yolanda looked up from her text. “Tuffy, I’ll work your clock. After I read this, you’ll know what time it is.” Yolanda began reading in a voice so strong it pressed Winston into the upholstery. He was feeling a special kinship with the useless button in the middle of the pillow cushion. “ ‘Chapter One.’ ” Yolanda licked her lips. “ ‘Giorgio Johnson knew better than to disrespect the pussy.’ ” Winston stood up and objected with a stamp of his foot. “There ain’t no niggers named Giorgio!” Yolanda sat him back down with the cut-eyed look. Winston wondered why he hadn’t married a woman who solved word-search puzzles on the train instead of reading this trash. Yolanda continued: “ ‘The pussy is mighty-mighty, and Giorgio Johnson was letting it all hang out, his supplication total. His prickly tongue spelunked into the nether regions of my hot, drippy pubes.…’ ” As Yolanda read, Jordy crawled along the floor toward Winston and latched onto his ankle like a koala bear to a eucalyptus tree. “Shit is awful, isn’t it?” Winston said quietly to the boy, lifting him to his knee and dandling him about. “Ever notice that none of the female characters have names? They’re called Sister Child, Mama Doll, Cousin Girl, Queen Auntie Woman Purity Love. All this we-are-family, sisterhood bullshit. Fucking books should come with needlepoint and kinte-cloth headwraps. Don’t worry, boy, I’ll read you some Pippi Longstocking later.” Jordy responded with a toothless smile. “Ah, you like that, hunh? You remember my girl Pippi don’t wear no panties.” Covering his son’s ears, Winston gave thought to countering Yolanda’s redemption literature with the authors in his canon. He imagined tearing the book from his wife’s hands, pinning her to the carpet, and haranguing her womanist sensibilities with some macho, gonadal writing. A dose of Iceberg Slim’s or Donald Goines’s pimp/ho prose would restore some gender-role balance to the relationship.

“Winston!” Yolanda yelled.

“Hunh?”

“Look at the baby!”

Jordy had burrowed under Winston’s shirt, suckling and kneading his father’s fatty left breast. Yolanda was livid. “See, boy a year old and he don’t even know what parent is what.”

“He know I’m his father,” Winston said, wiping the spittle off his nipple.

“Then he don’t know what a father is for, because you be gallivanting the streets at all hours.” Exasperated, Yolanda massaged the bridge of her nose. “Winston, what are you going to do?”

Winston said nothing and eyed Jordy, who was straddling his thigh, for manly approbation. But the look on his son’s face seemed to say, “Yeah, nigger, what are you going to do?” The child’s forlorn expression triggered some handyman impulse in the father. Winston had an urge to fix a leaky faucet, sweep the sidewalk in front of his building, maybe check to see if the window guards were all securely fastened to their mounts. He’d been warned that having a kid would change him. Make him more responsible. Less impulsive. Winston had vowed that fatherhood wouldn’t change him, at least not permanently. He knew for most young fuck-up dads the post-partum conscientiousness lasted a year. After that they reverted to the old ways with even more zealotry than before: I gots mouths to feed, brother, mouths to fucking feed. So what if the individual changed — what did it matter if his circumstances remained the same? An angel in hell was still in hell. He removed the Wilfredo Cienfuegos handbill from his pocket. He read the tag line: Stop the Violence. Why?

Yolanda ran her hands through Winston’s greasy hair and kissed him on the cheek. “You staying up?” Winston nodded. “Leave me some money on the dresser for the movies, okay?”

“Just don’t read Jordy that Pippi Longstocking — turn the boy into a white-girl lover.” Yolanda scratched the back of her head. “I can trust you with him tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“No drinking, no reefer. Jordy is your son, not some nigger you know from your program.”

“It only happened once, go to sleep. One damn tattoo.”

As she turned to leave, Winston grabbed her by the sash, reeled her in like a yo-yo, and puckered up for a good-night kiss. Yolanda obliged. Winston’s lips mole-hopped from Yolanda’s mouth to her breasts with soggy pecks. Flicking a crusty nipple with the tip of his tongue, he covered the spigot with his mouth and took a long pull. A streamlet of milk coated his tongue. Yolanda moaned in soreness and pleasure. Winston sat back, a globule of milk pooled in the corner of his mouth. “You had arroz y abichuela con pulpo from Dalia’s for dinner, didn’t you?” Yolanda shook her head in disbelief and boxed his ear with a solid smack. Winston raised his arms, basking in self-adoration. “I know my breast milk. I should be on TV. I could suck women’s titties and say what they ate for breakfast. Now that would be a good-ass job. ‘Scrambled eggs with cheese and onions, blueberry pancakes, lightly buttered.’ ”

“Be careful with him tomorrow.”

“One tattoo.”

Yawning, Yolanda disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. “Good night, Tuffy.”

“Don’t be dreaming about Giorgio Johnson.”

Winston adjusted Jordy on his pelvis and pointed the remote control at the dark television set. The screen lit up with a satisfying instantaneous pop. A frail-looking white boy was playing catch with an offscreen partner. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Two features dominated the boy’s sullen face: a set of knobby cheekbones and a pair of fly-wing-thin varicose eyelids. His shriveled head was covered with a baseball cap five sizes too big. The camera zoomed out and someone lobbed the kid a baseball, which, using two hands, he clumsily caught in the palm of his brand-new mitt. After tossing the ball back, the boy turned to the camera to make his plea. “Hello, my name is Kenny Mendelsson. I’m ten years old, but I have the brittle hips of an eighty-seven-year-old woman and the hairline of a chemotherapy patient.”

“You got a sense of humor too,” Winston said, turning to Jordy. “That nigger got — what’s that disease called? Geezeritis or some shit.” Winston gingerly lifted each of Jordy’s limbs, checking behind the joints, in the concave pits, for skin blemishes or irritations that might be a sign of some such congenital malady. “I feel you, G,” Winston said to the television. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to get old before your time.” He ran his hand over his son’s back, reading the ridges and fatty folds in his soft skin like a familiar braille. Winston stopped at the right clavicle, where the lizard-green block letters embossed on Jordy’s Kahlua-brown skin read, DA’ BOMB. He sighed. Da’ Bomb. Man, nobody don’t even say ‘Da’ Bomb’ no more. Hopefully, it’ll fade as he gets older. And anyway, these light-skinned babies get darker when they get to be about five or so.

The next public-service announcement was for the Big Brothers program. A bald-headed black actor Winston was familiar with from some bit parts in a long-canceled television show walked down a tenement row in measured, authoritative strides. Speaking in a dinner-theater baritone, the actor strode up to a young black boy in a striped polo shirt. He clamped his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Providing guidance in an environment bereft of direction is the moral mandate, nay, the incumbent duty of African-American men. Isn’t that right, Clarence?” Clarence looked up at the man’s chin and smiled. “Yes, sir!”

“Show them what I taught you.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“Once upon a midnight dreary,” Young Clarence began reciting an extremely abridged version of Poe’s “The Raven,” doing a laudable job with just the slightest hesitation at the word “surcease,” and delivering the last lines with the appropriate morbid panache: “And my soul from out that shadow that lies / floating on the floor, / Shall be lifted — nevermore!” Clarence took a deep bow and the actor, his eyes welled with tears, looked into the camera and said, “Isn’t he the little Eliza Doolittle? Make a black boy’s dreams reality, call now.” Winston concentrated on memorizing the number sailing across the bottom of the screen.

Serenaded by the canonical poesy, Jordy had fallen asleep. Winston pressed his ear to his son’s heaving chest and listened to his heartbeat. “You know, little nigger, you was almost fatherless today? A hot second away from growing up to be one of those hard-to-handle motherfuckers. Having to listen to your mother whine, ‘Oh, ever since your daddy died you’ve been impossible.’ Yeah, I saved you from much grief. You’d be crying at night, cursing me because I left you. But I ain’t going nowhere, dog. I got a plan to get my shit together. Put all my caca in one big pile.”

Lifting his right pantleg, Winston scratched the surface of his tattoo: a cherry-red heart, ventricles and all, looking as if it could really pump blood, sitting atop a flaming Grecian torch, coiled concertina wire binding the disparate items together. The tattoo sat about an inch above his ankle and just below the tan line created by cotton crew socks — next to his palms and the bottoms of his feet, the lightest places on his body. Above the heart, in an elegantly smooth cursive, flowing like a solitary ribbon trailing a Red Square gymnast on May Day, was the epigram: BRENDA — I KNOW YOU DIDN’T LEAVE ME ON PURPOSE. I AIN’T MAD AT YOU. Winston told the tattoo artist that he wanted the words legible. “You know them notes in the old black-and-white movies? The star never opens the note and starts squinting, and moving the paper every-which-away, going, ‘What the fuck does this say?’ ”

Winston pressed gently on the borders of his handiwork, as if the skin were still reddened and tender. “What you think about an uncle, Jordy? Get a Big Brother who’ll teach me how to spell, so I can be a movie critic. No, wait. That’s out. You never see no black movie critics. Matter of fact, you never see niggers talk about anything that don’t involve other niggers — well, there’s that fag weatherman on Channel 7. ‘Scattered clouds and drizzles through early morning, oh joy.’ But that’s the move though. Get a designated nigger in my life. An educated motherfucker who’ll provide me with some focus and guidance and shit. Channel 7 will have a real nigger doing the weather. ‘Yo, it’s brick out there today. Cold as hell. You niggers with security jobs dress warm or sneak in the lady. Better yet, quit.’ And Jordy, whatever I learn from my Big Brother I’m going to pass down to your ass. Boy, your father going to be one of those pipe-smoking, Wall Street Journal — reading motherfuckers, because I’m tired of being one of these bummy Raisin in the Sun niggers.”