Tuff

5- INEZ

The gun altered the general mood of the gathering. Charles and Nadine reacted to the pistol in much the same way a childless couple reacts to another person’s baby. “My boy, where you’d get that? That shit is nice. Yo, son, let me borrow it.”

Yolanda and Fariq maintained wary yet indifferent cool, respectful of the gun’s power, but knowing that without any immediate provocation there was no real cause for alarm. “Tuffy, that’s Demetrius’s gun. You stupid? You know that piece got bodies on it.” Chambering a bullet, Winston pointed the gun at three uniformed men and a dog about thirty yards away, cavalierly approaching the stairs. Armello panicked and let out a bluesy moan. “Ooooohhhh. Fuck you doing, Tuffy? Drawing down on some cops! Why didn’t you tell me you was dirty? You know I’m on probation, man. I’ll get a bid ’cause your fat ass traveling dirty.”

Armello turned to Fariq, speaking quickly and with a note of urgency in his voice: “Smush, I ain’t trying to go back to jail. I didn’t know Winston was carrying that piece, you my witness, right?”

“Relax, Armello, it’s only Bendito and them.”

As the three men and a dog came closer, Winston lowered his arms, frowning as he hid the gun under his leg. “Thought you were afraid of guns?” whispered Charles.

“Yolanda been working with me. I’m confronting my fears. Doing things to get me used to the piece a little bit at a time. What’s it called, Boo?”

“Phobia densensitization,” said Yolanda, happy to show off one of her Introductory Psychology terms. “But I can tell guns still make you nervous. You’re perspiring and your eyelid is twitching. Wish I had my galvanic skin response equipment from the lab, then I could measure your progress with some objectivity.”

The Bonilla triplets, Bendito, Miguelito, Enrique, and their brown, pink-nosed pit bull, Der Kommissar, stopped at the foot of the stoop. The brothers grew up on 109th Street, two buildings down from Winston; their complexions and politics covered the Hispanic spectrum. Bendito was as handsome as novela’s leading man: gigolo white, his dirty-blond hair permanently tousled by a tropical breeze that seemed to follow him wherever he went. He was enough of a nationalist to spurn the annual Puerto Rican Day parade as an affront to la patria. Every July he’d say, “When we march up Fifth Avenue with guns, like young lords preaching Taino love, then I’ll sing ‘Oye Como Va.’ Tú sabes?”

Miguelito was a swarthy Cuban-boxer black, but a loyalist to his supposed Spanish Majorcan roots and to the United States. He felt Puerto Rico’s admission to the Union would dignify his beloved isle: “We’ll no longer be dirty. We’ll be exotic, como Hawaii,” he liked to say.

The middle triplet, Enrique Bonilla, suffered from vitiligo. His skin was a splotchy calico of every shade on the melanin palette, and his politics were as convoluted as his complexion. He waffled between all three Puerto Rican destinies: independence, statehood, and its status quo as a United States protectorate.

The triplets were, however, united in their hatred for Winston. The animosity between him and the Bonillas started in elementary school. One day Tuffy noticed Enrique’s face looked like a beginner’s jigsaw puzzle of a map of the United States. He shoved young Enrique into the custodian’s closet and with a felt-tip pen placed a black dot in each sector of Enrique’s face, scribbled a state name in each patch of skin, and labeled every dot with all the capitals he could remember: Sacramento, California, was near Enrique’s right ear; Topeka, Kansas, under his right eye; Indianapolis, Indiana, beneath the left; and Tallahassee, Florida, on the lower left jaw. Winston turned his human political map into the teacher as a makeup assignment for a missed quiz, explaining that the squiggly black line running down Enrique’s forehead, over the bridge of his nose, and ending at the cleft in his chin was the Mississippi River. The feud was set in motion, and thereafter Winston honed his pugilistic skills on the Bonilla triplets.

Despite the Bonilla boys having enrolled in every karate and boxing school in Manhattan, Winston beat the brothers viciously and regularly, pulverizing every zygotic permutation: individually, Bendito and Enrique, Bendito and Miguelito, Enrique and Miguelito, all three at once. Like many bullied city kids, the Bonilla brothers had become auxiliary police officers right after finishing high school. Their civil servitude stemmed not from any sense of social justice; rather, it was a state-sanctioned training course for a job that would serve as an outlet for their vengeance and pent-up rage. Armed only with handcuffs, a flashlight, and a ticket book, the Bonilla brothers had a well-deserved neighborhood reputation for being the last ones on a crime scene, sucker-punching the suspect in a chintzy display of cop solidarity.

The Bonillas and their dog stopped in front of the stoop. The two factions, police and policed, looked at each other in silence for a few moments. Bendito, the oldest brother by three minutes, placed one shiny patent-leather shoe on the bottom stair. The hellhound, Der Kommissar, followed with a stumpy paw. Winston spat, the globule landing inches away from the tip of Bendito’s shoe, and the dog’s paw snapped back to the sidewalk.

“Afternoon, morenos,” came the greeting from Enrique.

“Buenas tardes a los tres pendejos. Ahora, vete por carajo,” answered Winston. Der Kommissar, whose Spanish was better than the Bonillas’, growled.

“Yo, Tuffy, you better be glad this dog is on a leash, else you’d be in trouble, bro,” cautioned Bendito.

“That dog is leashed for its own protection, because I’m a dangerous nigger. He comes near me, it’s over for him.”

“Don’t you people see the No Loitering sign?” asked Enrique, using his flashlight to point out a rusty metal placard that since the turn of the century had been ignored by the poor and used by the police as an excuse for harassment. Both parties overlooked the broadsides sloppily wallpapered beneath the No Loitering sign. Still wavy and wet with paste, the block of posters read: ON ELECTION DAY EMPOWER YOURSELF AND YOUR COMMUNITY — VOTE FOR MARGO TELLOS DEMOCRAT COUNCIL-WOMAN DISTRICT 8—LIMPIANDO NUESTRAS CALLES.

Fariq made a halfhearted peace offering to the officers. “We’re not loitering. We’re having a board meeting. Planning how to make money this summer.”

“That wouldn’t include drug dealing, would it?” asked Miguelito, both hands tugging at Der Kommissar’s leash.

“I doubt it. We thinkin’ ’bout going legit this summer. Actually, Tuffy was just about to share with us his brainstorms.”

Winston lifted his leg and pulled out the handgun. The Bonillas hurriedly stepped back, falling over each other in a dither. As the triplets disentangled themselves from the dog’s leash, Winston pressed his advantage. He held the small pistol in the flat of his hand, showing it off like a downtown gunsmith. “Way I figure it is, we buy a shitload of guns, paint the noses and barrels that street-cone orange so they look like toy guns. That way when kids about to spark up an officer of the law, such as you all, the cop will freeze for that crucial second, thinking his assailant is holding a plastic toy. Surprise!” Winston stuffed the gun into his pants pocket.

“That’s not a bad idea,” commented Yolanda, throwing a “so there” glance in Nadine’s direction. The testy young gun molls cinched in closer to their respective men.

The Bonilla brothers straightened their ties and badges. Miguelito strummed his flashlight across the wrought-iron balusters, turning the railing into a cacophonous harp. “Any more bright ideas, fat boy?”

“Sí, claro, mamao. I was thinking we could pool our resources and make a movie,” Winston said, slipping the gun into his front pocket.

“Here we go.” Fariq perked up, temporarily suspending the discord with the Bonilla triplets. “Ever go to the movies with this motherfucker? My man be at the movies in places you didn’t even know had a theater. I went one time with this weirdo to see some Japanese flick at the YWCA, no less.”

“Stray Dogs,” added Winston fondly.

“They showing the film on a wall. I’m not excited about having to spend the afternoon reading in the dark, but to make matters worse you couldn’t even read the subtitles.”

“Too fast?”

“Naw, in a movie where everybody is pale as Swiss cheese, sittin’ in a white room, wearin’ a white linen suit, they got the subtitles written in white letters. I was lost from the giddy-up — trying to read that shit was like trying to find Whitey at a hockey game. The nigger with the big lips could act, though.”

“Takashi Shimura.”

“That was the last time I went to the movies with Tuffy. I don’t feel comfortable. Don’t be nobody in the audience but retired old white people. Not a nigger in the entire place. Maybe one or two toothy motherfuckers flossing some white bitch. ‘Oh yes, Cannes this year was incroyable.’ Faggots. No black couples in there, that’s for sure. How in the fuck you get interested in them foreign shits anyway, Tuff?”

“Playing hooky in the Village one day. Walked past a marquee on this little place that said 400 Blows. My ignorant ass thought 400 Blows was one of them kung fu joints, so I was like ‘One adult. Where the popcorn and soda at?’ Ready for some drunken-monkey style, know what I’m saying? Turns out the film—”

“Hear this nigger? ‘The film.’ ”

“Whatever. As I was saying, this French nigger and his crimey are …” Winston mumbled something under his breath.

Fariq cupped his ear. “What, son? I can’t hear you.”

Charles, who was sitting closer to Winston than Fariq, gladly explained, “I think Winston said, ‘looking for a poetry to explain their misunderstood lives.’ Then something that sounded like ‘Balzac.’ ”

Winston knew better than to give a heartfelt synopsis of a grainy black-and-white film that had inadvertently touched his heart and caused him to empathize with a loafer-shod French boy, Doinel, the young, unloved Parisian, running toward the sea in the last reel. Winston had wanted to chase behind him, clasp him on the shoulder. Wait up. Where you going? Can I come with you? What’s the story with this fat motherfucker Balzac?

Winston vibrated his lips in disgust. “I didn’t say nothing about no Balzac, I said, ‘Him and his boy be like balls out.’ ”

“But you did say something about poetry, though.”

Ready to resume his tête-à-tête with Bendito, Winston walked toward the cop. “Anyway, I got two ideas for movies, one underground, one commercial.” Bendito, growing testy but feeling the security of his badge and a partisan court system, held his ground. Winston and Bendito stood forehead to forehead, nose tips touching like Eskimo lovers. Tuffy spoke, his voice cold and steady. “My underground joint is going to be straight-up guerrilla filmmaking. A snuff film where masked niggers go round ambushing police officers, field-testing those bulletproof vests. The boys come out the Chino’s wiping they chins—kack! kack! Shit going to be called Officer Down. Sell them on the corner next to the bootleg Disney cartoons. All profits go to the families of those killed in police custody.” Winston took a deep breath and began reciting names drummed into his head by his father during the “police brutality” lectures he delivered during his infrequent custody weekends. “Ernest Sayon, Jason Nichols, Yong Xin Huang.” Droplets of Winston’s hot spit landed softly on Bendito Bonilla’s face and cooled in the light crosstown breeze. “Leonard Lawton, Frankie Arzuaga, Annette Perez.”

Bendito and his brothers slowly drew their flashlights from their holders. Winston backed up two steps, planted a loud kiss on each fist, and eyed the bludgeons dancing in front of his nose. Bendito lunged forward, eyes closed, hacking wildly at the space where Winston had stood a split second earlier. “I’m going add your name to that list.”

Fist cocked near his ear, Winston was poised to unload a punch when two thin arms grabbed him from behind and wheeled him back toward the stoop. Inez Nomura’s touch was as familiar to Winston as Yolanda’s. Emboldened by the sight of a small woman walking Winston away, the triplets raged on: “Let him go, you slant-eyed bitch!”

At one time Inez had admired the Bonillas’ spunk; at least the boys tried to stand up to Winston’s bullying. But the brothers had committed the unpardonable sin of joining the police force, becoming conspirators with the capitalist oppressors. Enrique stepped to Inez, his badge sparkling in the afternoon sun. “You goddamn zipperhead, don’t you watch the news? Communism is dead. The cold war is over. Cuba’s going to be the fifty-first state.”

“Fifty-second, man, después Puerto Rico!” corrected Miguelito.

“Fuck you — and shut up that dog!” snapped Winston. Inez and Yolanda calmed him with soothing words the Bonillas couldn’t hear.

“What y’all sayin’ to him?”

Yolanda turned and flipped a lavender acrylic talon at the trio. Inez raised a V for Victory into the air and teasingly shouted, “Workers of the world, unite!”

Bendito Bonilla replied, “None of these motherfuckers have jobs, so what you talking about, ‘workers’?”

The brothers turned to leave, scattering the crowd with shoves, snarls, and threats. “Maricón,” hissed Armello to Enrique, who, tugging Der Kommissar’s leash, turned and replied, “That’s Mister Maricón to you.”

When the triplets resumed patrol duty against a nearby brownstone wall, Inez asked Fariq what had happened. “It wasn’t nothing, Ms. Nomura. We was discussing moneymaking.”

“Why are you guys so preoccupied with money?”

“Because we don’t have none.”

“I don’t have any money either, Winston, but you don’t hear me complaining about it.”

“That’s because you too busy complaining about the system. And what you mean you don’t have no money?”

“You know how much I make running the school? Thirty thousand dollars a year. Not a whole lot of money.”

“Yeah, but you got a framed uncashed check for twenty thousand dollars on your bedroom wall next to the picture of you and your kids.”

“Doesn’t count. That’s blood money — a bribe from the United States government to be quiet, forget about the camps, and fall in line like a good American. A bribe that I never accepted. That restitution check is not my money, it’s a memento.”

Fariq shook his head. “You Chinese. If it was me I’d cash that check and put it right into the Hang Seng.”

“I’m Japanese.”

“The Nikkei then.”

“I get a restitution check too,” Nadine said meekly.

Fariq squinted at his girlfriend. “Fuck you talking about, Nadine? Niggers ain’t never got, ain’t never going to get, any restitution money.”

“My welfare sounds like the same thing Ms. Nomura talking about. And it’s more money in the long run.”

“Funny.”

Nadine, pleased with her joke, worked Jordy’s arms up and down like water pumps, producing a foamy saliva that bubbled from the baby’s mouth. “Tuffy, you sure this kid ain’t got rabies?”

The afternoon wore on, the shadows lengthened, and the tension died down. The neighborhood kids resumed playing stickball. The adults chattered like patrons in a theater lobby waiting for the bell to signal the next act. As veterans, they knew the edges on a rough East Harlem weekend were never smooth. “Tuff, what your commercial idea for a movie?”

“That’s right, Boo, you never said.”

A smile lit up Winston’s face like a camera flash. He pretended to close one eye around an Otto Preminger monocle. “Okay, picture this: Cap’n Crunch — the Movie.”

“What? The cereal, yo? You buggin’,” Nadine said, tapping her index finger on her temple.

“Hollywood’s remade all the cartoons—The Flintstones, Popeye, Batman—but nobody has done a cereal. The commercials are just as popular as the cartoons. Captain Crunch sailing on an ocean of milk, having adventures and shit. Shit would be slamming.”

The gang started to giggle, seeing the appeal of the idea and unable to fight off Winston’s infectious enthusiasm. “You got the Carlisle and the little white kid sailor motherfuckers for that matinee PG feel.” The group closed in around Tuffy, peppering him with questions. “Who gonna play Cap’n Crunch?”

“Danny DeVito.”

“What was the thing that steered the boat?”

“Sea Dog, fool. And I’m going to have Smedley the stupid elephant rampaging to get to the Peanut Butter Crunch. The fucking Crunchberry Beast, all yellow with strawberry polka dots and shit. You know who going to be the costar?”

“Who?”

“The invisible motherfucking Goo-Goo!”

The group convulsed with laughter, giddy with the reminiscence of how important breakfast cereal was to a kid’s sanity.

Inez folded her arms and looked at Winston and his friends high-stepping around her. Their glee was contagious, and she wanted to join them, but age and psychological distance immobilized her. She felt as if she were tied to the stake while the natives whooped and pranced. Tuffy wiped the tears from his eyes with his wrist. “Don’t give me that look out of the corner of your eye, Ms. Nomura. You about to start that ‘If you’d only channel your energy, harness your intelligence, you could be the next Malcolm X’ bullshit. Remember how you sent me the Koran when I was in jail? Well, I never told you this, but I traded it for some astronomy magazines stolen from the library. So you can forget about that by-any-means-necessary bullshit.”

Almost four decades ago Inez was in her early twenties, a University of Washington dropout, and procrastinating in New York before returning to the drudgery of her parents’ chicken farm just outside of Olympia. There was no better place to put off poultry raising than Manhattan in the early sixties.

Every morning she would go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building and place pennies into the power telescopes, bringing into focus the beatnik far-out, bebop outta-sight — and New Jersey. A week before the spring molt, she received a letter from her mother. It was in English — the language her mother often bragged was taught to her by her personal tutor, Lionel Barrymore, who held class in Seattle’s Rialto Theater. The letter’s curt B-movie telegram prose was all too clear. There was no salutation.

Return home. This is final plea to only daughter. Born March 19th, 1943, in Tule Lake, California. Named after half-Japanese, half-Peruvian midwife, and not after the months (April, May, June) or flowers (Rose, Daisy, Iris, Violet) like the rest of the Japanese girls your age. Too young to remember barbed-wire fences, redheaded sentry who manned the machine gun in guard tower making sounds like he is strafing Japanese. We know you are rebellious, it’s in your blood. Descendant of Choshu clan, whose children slept with smelly feet pointed toward the Tokugawa’s Tokyo for two hundred and fifty years. During war Father and I were repatriated from Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to Tule Lake with other “no-noes,” though he insists he was not a “no-no,” he was a “hell no, fuck no.” The War Relocation Authority give us questionnaire: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? “Hell no!” Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any foreign government, power, or organization? “Fuck no!” You are born rebel, but our daughter nonetheless, one does not “forswear” allegiance to family. The kindness of gods is only reason Father got the land back. We have just placed this season’s pullets in the pen. You are smart. You can help with courts and Mexicans, who are on strike with the Filipinos. They want one dollar forty cents an hour. Father, chicken-king of Olympia, Washington, orders you home. We thinking of adding turkeys.

Mother loves you.

Enclosed with the letter were two Rhode Island Red feathers.

Ma never talks about the camps.

From the top of the Empire State Building Inez gazed past the Central Park greenery and into the clay-brown Harlem horizon. She envisioned herself driving the family acreage in the sky-blue convertible Oldsmobile, ordering the migrants about in her clipped Spanish, hoping the silk scarf would keep the mosquitoes off her face and the guano dust out of her lungs.

I’ve been everywhere in New York but Harlem.

She walked up Central Park West looking for street signs directing her to Harlem. Crossing 110th Street, she stumbled over a fissure in the blacktop and fell into a pothole the size of an army soup kettle. A group of girls in gingham dresses stopped jump-roping to giggle at her, laughing shyly into their palms. Welcome to Harlem.

After dusting herself off, Inez inhaled deeply; the air was thick and heavy and smelled of gasoline. She traipsed the brownstone-lined streets, tarred, narrow tributaries that all flowed into the big river, 125th Street, black America’s Nile. At the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, a faded banner hung limply from two lampposts: BLACK UNITY RALLY. A gathering of about forty people was huddled around a wooden tribune. The speaker, a clean-shaven, bespectacled man, was dressed in a clean but well-worn gray suit and trench coat. He was the color of the Rhode Island Red feathers in her pocket and seemed to have butane for blood, gas fumes for breath, and a flint for a tongue. As he spoke his words burst into flaming invective, burning the ears of anyone brave enough to listen. The man paused, wiped his sweaty brow, then narrowed his eyes as if he’d spotted an approaching enemy hidden in the brush. A woman moved away from the throng, downcast and shaking her head. “That man crazy. He going to get us all killed.”

Inez filled the void. Malcolm X smiled, showing off an equine set of teeth. “I’m a field Negro,” he said. “The masses are the field Negroes.… Imagine a Negro saying, ‘Our government.’ I even heard one say, ‘Our astronauts.’ They won’t even let him near the plant. ‘Our astronauts.’ ” After two weekends Inez was in the front row of the weekly rally, mouthing “I’m a field Negro” to herself. She soon moved into the Theresa Hotel on 125th Street and began working part-time for Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-African Unity. Her duties were mostly editing press releases, inserting a semblance of Anglo cogency into the rambling colored rhetoric. Exasperated, Inez often confronted Malcolm, clutching heavily revised speeches and essays. “Malcolm, you can’t just jump from theme to theme, you need a transition.” Malcolm would chide her, saying, “Now, Inez, you’ve been here long enough to know niggers can’t never stay on the topic.”

Despite all the organizational infighting and bad grammar, nothing else made sense to her. What organizations other than OAAU were thinking globally, had a charter for racial brotherhood — and a cache of weapons? The yippies had explosives and California pot connections, but lived off trust funds. The Peace Corps was a Kennedy front fraught with peaceniks too naive to understand they were nothing more than hut-to-hut corporate salespeople, setting up company trading posts in virgin markets, installing just enough electricity to power the soda machines. The Communists? The first two years were fun: the thrill of being subversive; tossing around Party vernacular in the cell meetings; the vodka; pretending to have read all the Trotsky; outing Hollywood auteurs; posing for a Communist Party ID card photo. Then things took a turn for the worse. Cynicism and paranoia took precedence over revolutionary praxis. Everyone became a possible infiltrator; the vodka was no longer used to toast union victories, but to drown the sorrows of African corruption; the bull sessions became “Ralph Ellison is a traitor” laments; and the ID card became an orange “Go Directly to Jail” card in a deadly game of Monopoly.

There was a strange dissonance in the fact that though Inez was poor, fatigued, and immersed to her neck in the world’s misery, life in the OAAU was good. Hands in her sweater pocket, her chicken feathers rubbed to the quill, she ignored her mother’s daily ultimatums, busying herself with plotting the Revolution. Dissidents from around the world were her lovers: South American grenadiers, African middle-class Bolsheviks, and one long-term relationship with a Chinese spy whose cover was serving as Lyndon B. Johnson’s valet. The secret agent ended the relationship with a note stuck to the refrigerator with a carrot magnet.

Dearest Inez,

LBJ is growing suspicious. Always asking, “Isn’t Nomura a Japanese name? How can this woman in New York be your cousin if she’s a Jap and you’re a Chink? Where are my slippers?” We must part before El Jefe gets the bright idea to call Hoover. In addition, you sleep too late and your eggs are runny. No regrets my sweet, we remain united in our love for the workers’ struggle. Go outside and have fun.

Big Hug,

Agent #9906 M.I.D.

P.S.

By the time you read this, the Knicks will have beaten the Cincinnati Royals by five points, and Malcolm X will be dead.

The day Malcolm was shot, Inez drank herself numb at Showman’s Tavern, listening to the jukebox shuffle between Lunceford, Holiday, Eckstine, Parker, and twenty nickels of Etta James. The regulars commiserated over long-neck beers, thankful they still had Martin Luther King Jr.’s persistence and Father Divine’s ten-cent dinners. Told you they’d get that nigger. Shit, I give the playboy reverend four years tops. He talking about poor people and Indochina — that’s fucking with The Man’s money.

Returning home, Inez drunkenly stumbled through the Theresa’s lobby. The once-lavish hotel struggled to hold on to its glorified past. Its cracked and pitted marble pillars barely supported the sagging ceiling; a cave-in looked inevitable. If the structural decay didn’t bring the walls down, then the newly integrated downtown hotels would. Now that Malcolm had been shot, the secret was out: more than the spokesperson for black pride had been slain; Harlem itself was dead.

Inez followed a rutted trail that swathed through the faux-Turkish carpet to the lounge for one last gin-and-tonic to brace her against a temperamental radiator and a thin blanket. On the white Philco television Ed Sullivan was introducing a wonderful, wonderful entertainer, a Texan who’d be a really, really big star. Shyly Trini Lopez strode on stage wearing a rhinestone jacket and a warm smile, the oversized electric Gibson guitar held to his breast like a six-string shield. In a soft, chirping voice he began to sing. I like to be in A-mer-i-ca!.. Ev’rything free in A-meri-ca! Inez decided she too would like to be in America, start a community center in Harlem. Find the next Malcolm in Harlem.

The laughter had died down. Now Winston was sitting two steps below Yolanda, her crotch serving as his headrest. “Ms. Nomura?”

“Yes, Winston?”

“You like my Cap’n Crunch idea?”

“It’s ingenious, but impractical and scary. When are you going to call me Inez?”

“Inez? What kind of name is that for a nigger?”

As Yolanda toyed with Winston’s eyebrows, his shoulders began to sink from his earlobes. To Inez he looked a spoiled seraph — Lucifer a week before the fall from grace.

“I’m not a nigger,” she said.

“You used to be.”

Two years ago, before he met Yolanda, Winston and Inez were in some ways closer than he and Fariq. After a neighborhood scrap or a bad day at school, he’d often seek her out for solace. They’d walk into the bowels of Central Park, Winston cursing a storm and working off his anger with sets of chin-ups on a thick cottonwood branch belonging to his favorite tree. Finally he’d drop to the ground, more tired than angry, and tell stories about the tree. It was underneath these boughs a ten-year-old Winston watched a group of boys rape and beat a jogger, kicking her motionless body into the mulberry bushes and leaving her for dead. When he was a little older he nearly decapitated bicyclists by knotting the ends of a section of fishing wire to carpenter nails, stretching the filament across the footpath, and hammering the nails into the trees about shoulder high. At night the line was invisible. An unsuspecting cyclist would pedal past the trees and the fishing line would catch him under the chin, lifting the biker off the bicycle so cleanly, the riderless bike would coast straight down the hill and into the waiting hands of Winston and his friends. There they’d pile on the bicycle, one on the seat, one on the handlebars, one on the rear lug nuts, two on the frame, a troupe of Chinese acrobats forming a jittery pyramid and riding into the night. Then Winston would begin to cry. It was under this tree Winston had shanked Kevin Porter. Holding his hand, Inez would ask what it was like to stab someone. “It’s like putting your hand into shower steam. Weightlessness. Nothing on the other end of the knife but a nigger’s sticky body heat.” Winston would read the disappointment, envy, and fear in Inez’s face, and would feel the need to ease her conscience with the rationalization: “You know, it’s not the stab wound that kills them, it’s the bacteria. Most motherfuckers that get stuck die from septic poisoning and shit.”

From the bottom stair, Charles pulled out a cigar and looked up through the ghetto’s version of the glass ceiling. Winston, Fariq, and the rest of the colored executive board were still debating exactly what would be this summer’s business venture. Using his box cutter, Charles dissected the cigar lengthwise, spilling the tobacco onto the sidewalk. While he peeled away the inner leaf to thin the wrapper, the iridescence of the diamond stud in Fariq’s ear caught Charles’s eye. “Fariq, how you get that earring?”

“Scrambling, nigger, you know that.”

Charles nodded. “Okay, then can we cut dreaming about this Cap’n Crunch, Black Enterprise madness and talk about how we really going to make some ends meet this summer?”

Winston knew what Charles was hinting at: a return to drug dealing, this time him doing more than steering customers. “Stop right there, I ain’t selling no drugs this summer.”

“We don’t sell no heroin or coke. We’ll sell this shit.” He held the bag of marijuana in the air. “Won’t make as much money, but hey.”

Charles sprinkled marijuana onto what remained of the tobacco casing. Rolling the blunt tightly, he expertly licked an edge, applying just the right amount of saliva, and sealed it like an envelope. “Pharmaceutical’s good money, kid. Tuffy, Brooklyn got you shook, son? Shit, some niggers bum rush my spot and put a gun to my wig, I’d be jumpy too.”

Winston bristled at Charles’s suggestion that he was scared of drug dealing. “I told you, no. Just the drug thing is embarrassing. There’s no dignity standing on the corner saying ‘What’s up?’ ‘What you need?’ to every person who passes by, like I’m really a friendly motherfucker. ‘Smoke? Smoke? Red Top. Jumbo. Double Up. You straight, my man?’ People ignoring you, pretending you’re invisible, stepping over and around you like you a piece of dog shit on the sidewalk. But you be caught up, chasing that dollar. Raising your eyebrows at everything that move. Pushing product on kids, stray cats, and old women on they way to church. And every now and then one of them old holy-rolling bitches bites, be like, ‘Hit me off with a twenty.’ Man, that shit depressing as fuck. The worst is when these rides with out-of-state plates pull up packed with twelve white boys, like a damn Ringling Brothers clown car. ‘What’s up, you got that rock, bro?’ ”

“Hate it when a white boy call me bro,” concurred Armello, to the head-nodding agreement of Fariq and Charles.

“True indeed. They only call you bro when they want something,” Fariq empathized.

“I be wantin’ to stomp them fools. Why you got ask me for drugs — I look like a dealer because I’m black?”

Nadine frowned. “But you was dealing, Tuffy.”

“That makes it all the worse. I am the stereotype, angry about being stereotyped. Then when five-o blow up the spot, they treat the white boys like day campers. ‘You fellows go home, you don’t belong out here, it’s dangerous. These people will eat you alive.’ Turn to me like I’m a cannibal shaking salt on some white kid’s leg—‘If I see you out here again, chief, you gonna go down.’ My pathetic ass strugglin’ to get out an understandable ‘Yes, sir’ because I’m gargling crack rock wrapped in cellophane, tryin’ not to swallow unless absolutely necessary.”

Winston grabbed the joint from Charles, inhaled, and began to speak without breathing. The words seemed to come from his nostrils: “I ain’t selling no drugs.”

Inez was in disbelief: Tuffy refusing to deal drugs? Maybe her homilies suggesting how Winston should channel his street savvy into political action were finally sinking in. This was a different boy than the one who at the mention of Che, Zapata, and Gandhi would screw his face and say they didn’t sound like revolutionaries but like soccer stars.

“Come on, Ms. Nomura, why you keep looking at me like that? Wipe that smile off your face — it’s not like I’ve seen the error of my ways and shit. I’m still the same nigger. No shame in my game.”

“That’s right, no shame in his game,” echoed Yolanda, though she, too, was relieved that Winston had renounced dope peddling.

“I haven’t changed, y’all. You remember how in junior high you used go into the bathroom and there’d be one bold-ass, foul, don’t-give-a-fuck nigger taking a massive shit in a doorless stall and smoking a cigarette? Well, that nigger was me. No shame in my game. I’ll still mug a nigger, take a dump in a public toilet in a second.”

Charles rose to his feet. “Don’t play yourself, Tuff — how you think Derrick opened that Laundromat? Tito, that shitty tacquería? I say we ask Diego and them to put us down.”

Armello waved Charles off. “Whitey, I’m with Winston on this one. You ain’t got shit to say, because every time we get popped you don’t never no real time. You get reprimanded to your mama’s custody. Besides we ain’t got to do the drug thing nohow. Do we, Smush?” Armello hit the joint. The marijuana’s potency doubled him over with a hacking cough. A plume of smoke spewed from Armello’s mouth, immediately followed by a violent eruption of a clear, viscous slime that fell to the sidewalk in globs. Armello wiped his mouth, beamed, and handed Fariq the weed. “Hit this, G, my God.”

Without puffing on it, Fariq handed the joint to Yolanda. “I’m going to talk to Moneybags, y’all. Come up with a hustle somewhere between dope selling and banking.”

Nadine asked Yolanda for a puff, but Winston intercepted the pass, lipped the blunt, took a strong hit, then handed it to Nadine. “Damn, nigger, you got it all soggy.”

Bleak, he thought, my shit is looking bleak. Damn, that is some good-ass weed. Involuntarily his eyes closed. His brain seemed to solidify like drying cement, and his head grew heavy. A passing cloud blotted out the sun. Even with his eyes closed Winston noticed the sky darken. “You know what would be cool right now?” he said in a dreamy voice. “A fucking solar eclipse.”

“Whatever, nigger.”

Tuffy imagined being camouflaged in an umbra that matched the pitch blackness of his skin, the abysmal blackness of his mind, and the mysterious blackness of space. He took one more puff. I’d be lost in space then. I could disappear like a motherfucker. Harlem, we have liftoff.

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND LIGHT-YEARS: The Milky Way looks like a discarded hubcap by the side of the night road.

ONE MILLION LIGHT-YEARS: All quiet on the eastern edge of the universe, 109th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. The front line of the war on everything, and the end of creation. In space no one can hear you scream. In New York City everyone can hear you — but will anyone pay attention?