Tuff

4- THE STOOP

The clicks and buzzes of the lottery machine conveyed an almost telluric importance as it hiccuped the pastel-colored tickets into the operator’s hand one by one. It was as if its grinding sounds somehow helped to keep the world spinning on its axis, or least the neighborhood from collapsing into total ruin. “Okay, 2-2-1 dollar box, 8-4-7 dollar straight, 3-7-3-1 both ways a dollar.” The operator dutifully punched in Winston’s numbers. “5-2-2-4 dollar straight, fifty-cent box.” Yolanda knocked the operator’s hand away from the panel. “One second, Denesh. Winston, where did you get these numbers from?”

“I told you, I’m changing my life. And I’m starting with changing my numbers.”

“But you’re changing my numbers.”

“Our numbers, baby.”

“How much did you put in the pot?”

“Two dollars.”

“Okay, then you get to change two dollars’ worth of numbers.”

Yolanda handed Winston a stubby green pencil and a computer punch card and shoved him away from the counter. “Winston, fill out this week’s Lotto, and stop messing with my numbers.” He pretended to reel from Yolanda’s push and stumbled toward the rack of vacuum-sealed pastries. “I hate these stubby fucking pencils, they don’t have any erasers. If I fill in ‘44’ instead of ‘45,’ I might fuck up the rest of my life because these stupid pencils for midgets don’t have erasers.”

Yolanda laughed. “You thought you were slick, ‘5-2-2-4 dollar straight, fifty-cent box.’ Like I wouldn’t care because it was only a fifty-cent play. Hoo boy, between you and this Big Brother crap and changing my numbers.”

“Almost had your ass, though.”

“You didn’t have shit.”

“Shit, for a second you was like, ‘Hmmm, I like when my man is assertive. Listen to my nigger, “Fifty-cent box.” Doing his thing.’ ” Winston stuffed a cupcake into his mouth and hurriedly filled in his application for a worry-free future. Fariq and the rest of the gang were waiting.

Fariq sat atop his concrete rostrum, the top stair of his 109th Street stoop, poring over a magazine. His eyebrows gull-winged in concentration, Fariq spat business jargon from his mouth like the morning remnants of last night’s tortilla chips. “Earnings per share, decent. Median operating margin, about average. Market value, twenty-four-point-six mil. Profits as of … nothing special. Stockholder’s equity, fifteen-point-seven percent, no shit?” Fariq’s girlfriend, a thin, swaybacked woman named Nadine Primo, slid in closer to him, deposited her chin on his shoulder, and, pointing to the page, said, “This one has a nice employee-to-sales ratio.”

The three men lounging on the stairs below were growing impatient. “What the fuck you talking about, Smush?” asked Armello Solcedo, a lanky half-Dominican, half — Puerto Rican. “I didn’t come out here to waste my Sunday watching you read a magazine, entiendes?” Jabbing a thumb at their skeptic friends, Nadine said to Fariq, “Show them.” Fariq removed the magazine from his lap and, with the infinite patience of a kindergarten teacher for his charges, panned it slowly past the blank faces of his boys. “My brothers, this is what we need to be about this summer — major dollars. Economic self-reliance.”

“What the fuck you tripping on?” Asked Winston, rolling down the sidewalk, hand in hand with Yolanda, cradling Jordy like a football. “Your crippled ass still reading them kung fu mags? I don’t know why you all excited, they been printing the same articles since I was five. ‘Bruce Lee’s One-Inch Punch and Other Powerful Jeet Kun Do Techniques Revealed Here — for the First Time Ever.’ With a picture of him doing a one-finger push-up.”

He stopped at the base of the stoop. Every important decision Winston had ever made had been made while sitting on this stoop, from saying yes to his first beer to deciding not to ask Yolanda to get an abortion. He looked over at the kids playing stickball in the street. A boy who had just finished legging out a triple used the last of his breath to gloat in front of the third baseman: “I’ll hit your pitcher all motherfucking day!” If all the world’s a stage, the stoop at 258 East 109th Street was his proscenium of Ghetto Tragedy. Yolanda guided her sheepish man by the elbow. “C’mon, Tuffy, let’s sit.” The couple, dressed alike from sneaker to fisherman’s hat in matching green-and-blue-striped cabana suits, worked their way up the stairs, gingerly stepping over and around the bramble of knobby knees and spindly legs until they settled in a space next to the wrought-iron rail reserved for them. Pleased to see them, the crew, excepting Fariq, greeted Winston and Yolanda with handshakes and cheek kisses. Fariq frowned, looking down and away from the tardy pair. Winston drew his friend’s attention with a smack atop his head. “Never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow.”

“Man, you an asshole.”

Winston continued, his voice taking on a clichéd Chinese lilt. “It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon: don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

“Enough with Enter the Dragon bullshit. You late. And this ain’t a copy of Karate Illustrated.” Fariq held the magazine in the crook of his arm like Moses on the mount holding the commandments. “This is the June issue of Black Enterprise.”

“No, not the June issue, my bad,” Winston said, sarcastically dipping his head in apology. “What so special about the June issue, son?”

“The June issue lists the one hundred largest black businesses. If we going to make some real money this summer, we need some inspiration, and here”—Fariq slapped the magazine with the back of his hand—“are one hundred moneymaking entities run by punctual niggers who’ve achieved something in this doggy-dog world.”

“ ‘Dog-eat-dog,’ ” Yolanda corrected.

“Don’t mock me, Yolanda,” Fariq said, continuing his harangue, “Money and Allah are the keys — the keys that open the chains wrapped around our hearts and minds. The Koran teaches one how to be a locksmith, and money allows one to buy the tools a locksmith needs. Then you can make the key to freedoms.”

Yolanda’s lip curled into a lioness’s snarl. “ ‘Freedoms,’ the plural?”

“Hell yeah, the motherfucking plural.” Fariq rubbed his chin, searching for an example. Finding it, his hands chopped the air, accenting each word. “When Lincoln gave the slaves their freedom, singular, could they vote? Own property? Fuck who they wanted to fuck? No. So it must be more than one freedom.”

“So now it’s ‘the right to truths, justices, and the pursuit of happinesses.’ ”

“College fucking you up, girl. What’s your major, anyway?”

“Undecided.”

“See, them crackers bending one of your free wills right there. Undecided. Black people ain’t got time to be undecided. And at the college you go to it’s only two majors anyway, undecided and tricknology.”

“Trick who?”

“Anyway, we, and niggers in general, need to keep everything in the community — lie black, die black, and buy black. Emulate the Jew.”

Growing incensed, more so at Fariq’s rhetorical illogic than at his religious insensitivity, Yolanda glowered at him and asked, “ ‘The Jew,’ singular?”

“Yes, singular. Jew.”

“You mean there’s one huge Superjew out there?”

“You know what I mean, Little Miss Grammar. The Jew is like that — Tuffy, what’s the name of that three-headed monster that be fighting Godzilla?”

“Ghidrah,” answered Winston.

“The Jew is like Ghidrah — three heads, one body working toward the same goal: kicking Godzilla’s ass.”

“And who’s Godzilla — the black man, I suppose?”

Fariq rolled his rheumatoid eyes at Winston. “I told you we shouldn’t have brought the women. Women don’t know shit about making money.”

“Fuck you, Smush,” Yolanda said, looking to Nadine for gender solidarity.

Nadine shrugged her shoulders. “He’s right.”

“You know I’m right. Moneybags will back me up. Ain’t that right, Moneybags?”

At the mention of his name, Moneybags, momentarily aroused from his stupor, sat upright. His soiled and skinny frame was crammed into the width of one mid-stoop stair, knees folded tightly into his chest, and the spongy souls of his flip-flops overlapping the stair like owl talons around a redwood bough. “Ain’t that right, Moneybags?” Fariq repeated. Mummified from a life of failed business ventures, crack, and old age, Moneybags stiffly raised his paper-bagged pint in agreement. “Ain’t but two bitches ever made money on they own — Oprah Winfrey and — I forget the other bitch’s name. Bitch invented the hot comb or some shit.”

It was through Moneybags’s curbside lessons in big business that Fariq had learned to decipher the stock pages, when to lowball a buyer, and if he were dumb enough to pay taxes, how to leap through the gaping loopholes. All Winston knew about the supposed oracle of commerce was that he didn’t dress as sharply as he had in the past. Moneybags made his early fortune selling milk-crate seating for a dollar a pop to overflow crowds during the legendary basketball tournaments held at Rucker and West Fourth Street parks each summer. Despite Fariq’s claims that Moneybags possessed infinite economic knowledge, Winston had never seen him offer any jewels of his wisdom other than the semiprecious baubles he’d snatched off the necks of groggy subway riders. Only once had he heard Moneybags engage in a coherent conversation. Two years ago, upon leaving a retrospective of Italian comedy at Lincoln Center, Winston spotted Moneybags’s showroom, a one-man open-air bazaar on the corner of Broadway and Sixty-sixth Street. Dealing in vacuum-wrapped electronics, Moneybags hopscotched over his smorgasbord of off-brand home phones, answering machines, and cassette decks to barter with the tourists. Winston was about to nod a covert hello when a potbellied black man pointed at a video camera box sealed in seamless cellophane. “How much?” the man asked, picking up the medium-sized carton, examining each side as if the sharpness of the corners conveyed something of the product therein. Moneybags smirked, answering the buyer sotto voce, “Crazy?”

“Naw, man, how much for the camcorder?”

“This merchandise ain’t for the brothers,” Moneybags said, grabbing the box from the man’s hands and placing it behind his back as if he were a suitor hiding a bouquet of roses, searching for an excuse to renege on an ugly blind date. The man backed off, a glint of understanding spreading across his face. “Your kindness is appreciated, brother.” Walking downtown, the portly man took one last look at Moneybags haggling with the bargain hunters. He guessed the tourists would be returning to Munich, Osaka, and Rome, arms laden with gifts: transistorless radios and red clay bricks wrapped in newsprint.

Government attempts to revitalize minority small business through free trade agreements and tax breaks had failed Moneybags. He was no longer a one-man electronics warehouse. The effects of trickle-down economics had reduced him to peddling ghetto bric-a-brac: stolen cheese, browning meats, and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. It wasn’t uncommon for East Harlem residents to see Moneybags zigzagging across Lexington Avenue hawking a small bottle of red cough suppressant: “I got that Robitussin, baby. Got that Robitussin. Cough syrup. Cough syrup.”

Today it was flimsy wooden picture frames. Moneybags placed a heavy mahogany frame around his neck. He was preparing to leave. As he squared his shoulders toward Fariq, the sun silhouetted Moneybags’s dark profile against the partly cloudy sky. For a moment, the sickly sheen on his face and the graying mustache made him look like an oil portrait in the boardroom of a multinational corporation come to life. Moneybags excused himself. “I need to be going. Apparently none of you boys has any crack rock. But if I hear anything happening where you all might make some loot, I’ll let you know.” The proud CEO of nothing walked away from the stoop, steering a metal pushcart, one wobbly rear wheel alternately turning and sticking.

“I admire that motherfucker,” said Fariq. He shouted at the slouched back of the wiry tradesman, “Moneybags, stay up, God.”

“Why do you admire him?” Armello asked.

“Nigger could be out here selling drugs, doing something negative like the rest of us, but he’s down with the downtrodden, bottle hustling, redeeming aluminum cans and souls at the same time. Allah be praised. All praise due.”

“Fariq deep today,” commented Nadine.

Fariq began thumping on the magazine again. “This list is going to give us some ideas. This summer we ain’t fucking around, it’s time to build the foundation. Let’s get this money, hear me?”

Armello, sitting to Winston’s right, said, “Word is bond, son. What the first company on the list, yo? Bet money it’s a record company.”

Winston turned, threatening to smack Armello. Armello flinched. “Stop it, Tuff.”

“Record company — you thinking small, yo,” said Winston. “Niggers own bigger shit than a record company.”

“I know. I know. You right.”

Armello was the only member of the crew ever to have any of what they considered “real” money. As a high-school senior Armello was a twenty-year-old all-city shortstop and fourth-round draft choice of the Toronto Blue Jays. To boost his worth, Armello’s agent had him shave three years off his age and pretend he was a seventeen-year-old hurricane refugee who spoke no English and grew up on the dirt roads of Barahona playing ball with a chocolate milk carton for a baseball mitt. The ruse worked. The Blue Jays, thinking they’d found the next barefoot phenom, offered Armello one hundred thousand dollars to play minor-league baseball in Knoxville, Tennessee. Five years, four hundred ninety-two errors, a career batting average of.074, two hushed-up charges of statutory rape, and one very public conviction for battery of a third-base umpire later, all Armello had to show for the bonus money was a worthless laminated baseball card of himself, the lime-green Kawasaki Ninja parked a few feet away, and an overabundance of I’m-not-going-to-blow-my-next-opportunity determination. “I’m with you, Smush, we can do this. All we need to do is focus. Shit, I remember playing Chattanooga in late August, we were down two — one, bottom of the sixth, man on second, two out, I steps to the plate—”

“Strike three!” Yolanda yelled, jabbing a fist past Armello’s chest and pointing at an imaginary dugout somewhere near the El Tropical social club. “Armello, you ain’t giving no Hall of Fame speech, so shut the fuck up.”

While Armello sulked, Yolanda impatiently extended an upturned palm to Fariq and said, “Well, nigger, you got the floor, the steps, whatever.” Fariq looked over at Winston. “Damn, nigger, you need to check your girl.”

Winston shrugged. “What you waiting for, Smush, a drumroll? Get on with it.”

“The number-one black company in America is”—Fariq paused, locking eager eyes with the rest of the crew—“TLC Beatrice International Holdings.” The gang’s chests sank in a collective exhalation. Everyone had expected to hear the name of a familiar conglomerate: Texaco, Colgate-Palmolive, Zenith, Schlitz beer, thinking niggers must own something they’d heard of. Seeing the crew’s racial pride crash and burn, Fariq tried to swell their deflated egos. “The company is worth two billion dollars.”

“So,” snorted Yolanda. “Who ever heard of TLC Beatrice? What in hell do they make?”

Fariq explained, “TLC makes orange juice. They distribute groceries all over Europe, especially in France. International foods, supermarkets, know what I mean?” Fariq immediately realized he’d set himself up for ridicule by mentioning such a staid venture as the supermarket. He steadied himself for the inevitable pillory.

“What, nigger, you expect us to go to France to deliver and sell groceries all summer? This is going to make us rich?”

“Remember eggs and bread go on top.”

“Manager to register seven, I have an overring. I need the key. La llave, por favor.”

“Shit, none of us even speaks French.”

“Speak for yourself, nigger.” Yolanda said. She stood up, whipped her braids behind her back, and started singing the chorus from an old soul classic into her hairbrush. “ ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir.’ ”

“We going to be broke this summer.”

“Dead and stinking.”

“ ‘Gitchi gitchi ya ya da da.’ ”

Shaking his head, Fariq bemoaned the shortsightedness of his friends. “That’s why niggers don’t have shit. You know, the average white man holds on to a dollar for one-point-six-five years. Guess how long stupid niggers like yourselves hold on to a dollar?”

“How long, motherfucker?”

“Thirty-eight minutes.” Fariq wearily leaned back against the sloping stairs. He lifted his head and said, “My people … my people,” hoping someone would see fit to put him out of his misery. From the bottom of the stoop, Charles O’Koren, who’d remained silent until this point, willingly delivered the death blow. “TLC Beatrice ain’t even a black-owned entity.” He waited for the gasps of disbelief to subside, then continued: “I seen a special last week — the brother who owned it been dead for years. Money was worth a couple hundred mil at least. Hear me, ‘Money was worth’—ha, ha. I got jokes, right?”

Charles “Whitey” O’Koren was an American anachronism, the last of a dying breed: the native, destitute, inner-city white ethnic. The O’Korens moved to East Harlem in the mid-twenties when it was still a haven for scab labor. The slack-shouldered Whitey lived on 111th and Third Avenue with his mother, Trish; stepfather, Felix Montoya; and Grandpa Mickey. During the postwar forties Mickey O’Koren had watched tidal waves of REO Speedwagon trucks crash upon the streets, then recede into night, leaving wiggly hordes of indistinguishable young Puerto Ricans skittering and writhing on the streets like exposed grunion. “Better than more wops,” he’d say optimistically, waving goodbye to the Giamattis, the Lambresis as they closed the doors to the Packard and headed for the lily-white sanctuary of the South Bronx. Soon the package stores were called bodegas and the food stocks on the local shelves were unpronounceable. Cables of cured brown longaniza puerpoiquena replaced the red links of kielbasa and bangers. In the clash of cultures pidgin arguments with Spanish tenderos in blood-splattered lab coats were commonplace. “Listen, jocko, I want yellow bananas, not these unripe, snot-green plátanos. Who do you think you’re calling ‘Mofungo’? And give me a pound of papas, Chico.”

The headstrong patriarch ignored pleas from friends and family to move. So long as there was a local barbershop that cut “non-burrhead” hair and Guinness came in the can, Mickey saw no need to relocate. When his grandson was born, Mickey wrapped him in a green, white, and orange blanket and lobbied for a Gaelic name — Eamonn, Colin, or Paddy. Trish, wanting something less Hibernian, plied Grandpa Mickey with creamy stout and stated her case for a soft euonym, español perhaps, a name that sang racial armistice, so the boy wouldn’t feel so different from the other kids — Miangel, Panchito, or Ramón, she suggested. After three weeks of debate they settled on the classically safe Charles Michael O’Koren. It was the neighbors who revived the old Anglo-American sobriquet and dubbed the boy Whitey.

Whenever a stranger asked Charles whether he found the ethnic blatancy of his nickname a hindrance, the hard-hearted, freckled boy of nineteen replied, “It makes me no nevermind.” In private he preferred to be called C–Ice or Charley O’. But there were paranoid tendencies lurking underneath his b-boy scowl. Often while walking the streets of Spanish Harlem minding his business, Charles flinched upon hearing a frustrated local curse the living gods with a “Fuck whitey!” forcing him to ask what he’d done wrong. Charles implored his friends not to call him Whitey, and they begrudgingly agreed. However, old-timers such as Winston, Fariq, and Armello sometimes slipped and called him that, out of equal parts habit and condescension.

“For real,” Winston asked Charles, “a black man don’t even own the business?”

“Word. A nigger used to own it, but like I said, the nigger dead, now his wife running the company.”

Winston could almost see the word “nigger” come out of Charles’s mouth. Normally Winston chastised him with a punch to the chest for using “nigger” in his presence, but he didn’t know this dead executive, and he let the trespass slide. “His wife ain’t black?”

“No, Tuff, the bitch is Filipino or some shit.”

“Filipina,” said Yolanda, angrily snatching the magazine from Fariq’s hands. She scrutinized the chart as if she were reading the bylaws of a clearinghouse sweepstakes to decide if she’d really won ten million dollars. “You mean the largest black company in America is owned by an Oriental bitch?”

“Asian.”

“Shut up, Winston. Where’s the sense in that? Just because a black man used to own the business, to act like the shit is still black! If that’s the logic, then the damn Indians still collecting rent on all this,” Yolanda spouted, sweeping the cement expanse of 109th Street with a real-estate-agent wave of her hand. “I swear to God, niggers is retarded.”

Armello didn’t like the defeatist tone Yolanda was setting and tried to put a positive spin on the proceedings. “Come on now, no need to be upset — so the largest black company is owned by a Chink, so what? We still got the number two company. What’s número dos?”

Yolanda scanned the full-page chart; sucking her teeth in disappointment, she tossed the magazine back in Fariq’s lap. “Norman Kearny’s Automotive Group. A goddamn car dealership in Detroit is the largest truly black-owned business. This is sad; I feel like crying. A fucking used-car salesman! The next business down is probably them African niggers selling fake Rolex watches at the Statue of Liberty.”

Fariq looked crestfallen. Nadine slung a sympathetic arm around Fariq and glared at Yolanda. “Well, bitch, at least my man trying. Ever since they almost got shot everybody been like ‘Life too short. I got to get paid, now.’ What ideas your man got?”

All heads swiveled toward Winston, who had tuned out soon after the “Asian” “Shut up, Winston” exchange and was now busy filling out a wrinkled pink form with the short green lottery pencil, using Charles’s back for a hard surface.

“Tuffy, what the fuck you doing?”

“Filling out my unemployment sheet. It’s obvious dealing with you estúpidos, I’m going to need the two months I got left. Anyway, I got my own program in the works. I don’t need y’all. I’m just out here for the camaraderie and the excitement. Let’s see, ‘Date of Search’—last Tuesday.”

Armello snorted, “Coño, why you got be so negative, Tuff? The city going catch you in a lie — last Tuesday you was sleep all day because we broke night Monday.”

Winston licked the point of his pencil and scribbled on. “ ‘Name and/or Title of Person Contacted’—Lester Muñoz’s — no, wait, Maldonado’s Auto Body, 5881 West 147th Street, Harlem, New York.”

Charles started to straighten up. “The numbers on Forty-seventh only go up to five hundred something.”

Winston cuffed Whitey sharply on the back of head. “Stop moving, nigger.” Charles placed his elbows back on his knees. “ ‘Contact Method’—C-lo game in back room. ‘Work Sought’—speedometer adjuster, stolen parts inventory taker.”

“You playing yourself, Winston.”

“Resultado—offered position, but unable to accept position because I’m too fat for the available jumpsuits, also allergic to carbon monoxide/dioxide, whatever.” Winston folded up the sheet and slipped it into his back pocket. Yolanda scooted away from the banister, putting a bit of distance between her and her lazy man. “Winston, why you acting like this?” she whined.

Reaching into Yolanda’s purse, Winston pulled out the Raven.22 automatic and flashed an evil sneer. He wondered if he was once again challenging his destiny on the stoop of 258 East 109th Street. “We need to get back to what we do best, the roughness. I’m feeling scandalous, like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, fixing to push the old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs. I about get my hustle on. I know my life was spared because I’m destined for a higher purpose.”

“You bugging. After it happened you couldn’t even imagine a higher purpose. Now listen to you.”

Winston held the pistol to his mouth, fogged the muzzle with a gust of hot breath, then began polishing with the underside of his shirt, rotating the gun in the sunlight. “Man, these things are instant imagination. It’s like having a good idea, but you don’t know exactly what it is yet.”