Tuff

8- THE GAS THEORY

There’s a certain quixotic calm to an empty school hallway. Even though he wasn’t enrolled in Ramón Emeterio Betances Community Center and Preparatory School, Winston felt privileged. Cruising the hallways while class was in session was as close as a city kid got to experiencing the serenity of Huck Finn guiding his craft down the Mississippi. Thank God I’m not in one of those classrooms. And summer school to boot? The baby stroller squeaking, Winston wheeled Jordy down the halls on his way to a meeting Spencer had organized on his behalf. On the phone, Spencer had compared the meeting to a football huddle. Winston and the important people in his life would get together, discuss the best strategy for scoring a touchdown, then execute the play. “Winston becomes a success, on five, ready, break!” Spencer had said. Winston doubted it would be that simple.

He stuck his head into a second-floor room. Inside, a teacher stood in front of a pull-down map of New York City, reviewing the day’s social-studies lessons. “How many boroughs in New York City?”

“Five! Staten Island, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan!”

“Which ones are islands?”

“Staten Island!”

“And?”

“Manhattan!”

“What’s the northernmost borough?”

“The Bronx!”

“Now, which way is north?” Every student in the class thrust a finger high in the air, pointing toward the heavens. The beleaguered teacher’s head dropped slowly into his hands. “No. No.”

“Damn, this year’s crop is dumber than we were,” Winston said, pulling his head from the door frame and walking abjectly toward the teachers’ lounge. Ms. Dunleavy looked up from her lunch and saw a round silhouette pause on the other side of the fire glass. She opened the door. “Good eve-ning,” Winston said in a slow Hitchcockian drawl.

“Winston, good to see you.” Seeing Jordy curled in his stroller, she asked, “Is that your son? He’s so cute, may I hold him?” Winston turned his back to her, wheeling the baby out of reach. “Can’t do that. No white person has ever touched him. If one does, I’ll have to kill him. Like a mama rabbit does when a human handles her kid.”

Ms. Dunleavy had been Winston’s teacher last fall when he attended the GED preparatory program at the community center. Her notions of English didn’t feel right in his mouth. For Winston language was an extension of his soul. And if his speech, filled with double negatives, improper conjugations of the verb “to be,” and pluralized plurals (e.g., womens), was wrong, then his thoughts were wrong. And oftentimes her corrections had the effect of reducing him to ethnic errata.

In an alternative school whose faculty were mostly ex — flower children still mad at Bob Dylan for going electric, Ms. Dunleavy was a tolerable teacher. She just taught. She never grilled Winston about his home life, digging for literary fodder to be used in a persona poem or a condescending novel so orchestrated for political correctness it read like Uncle Tom’s Cabin meets a televised broadcast of the President’s State of the Union Address.

She didn’t conduct her geography lessons from a summer Sandinista intern’s perspective and in a Public Radio accent: People, today I’m going to place a red flag in every Latin American country where the United States has conducted covert operations to assassinate its leader. Say the names of the countries with me as I insert the flag: Cuuu-baaa, Ar-hen-tee-na, Neek-kar-rah-ghgxgwhaw. During arithmetic Ms. Dunleavy didn’t adopt a faux street attitude to explain how to divide fractions in the local vernacular. So peep this, when you be like wanting to divide fractions, you take the reciprocal of the divisor, “reciprocal” means flip the script, find the highest common digit, squash the common denominators, then multiply across. That’s stupid dope, right? Unlike the male teachers, she didn’t compound her sins by being constantly late for class, and not-so-discreetly fucking the students on the weekends.

Despite his resistance to Ms. Dunleavy’s ministrations, Winston was on the verge of reaching the delinquent’s equivalent of the four-minute mile, a two hundred score on the GED, when he quit school. When Ms. Dunleavy asked him why, he replied that he was afraid of what he’d do if he failed the test. “I know I’ll hurt somebody.” He also said he was afraid of what he’d do if he passed the test. “I know I’ll hurt myself. Sabotage my life.”

Winston could hear the overlapping small talk coming from the conference room next door. “My father in there?” he asked Ms. Dunleavy.

“Yes, he is. Are you going to stay for the reading?”

“Hell no — my father’s poems is worser than shit you used to make us read. You all be falling for that Black Panther Up-with-People bullshit too.”

“Your father is an inspiration to thousands of people involved in the struggle.”

“All I know is when that nigger starts reading, I be struggling to stay awake. First thing he does, every time, is put his watch on the podium, all serious-like. As if what he has to say is so important. Like the Revolution might start at any moment, so there’s no time to waste. Then Pops proceeds to ignore the watch and read for three hours. Whitey could put us all back in slavery and the nigger would still be reading.”

“Winston, you need to come back to school — it’s never too late.”

“But it’s always too hard.”

Winston lifted Jordy from the stroller, then walked into the conference room, wedging himself in the nearest corner. His entrance went unnoticed by everyone except Fariq, who silently acknowledged his friend with a raised eyebrow and an almost imperceptible lifting of his chin. Winston’s “peoples” sat around an oak table like off-Broadway dramaturges planning the last act of his life. Inez sat at the end of the table nearest him. On her right were Yolanda, Fariq, and Spencer. To her left a hedgerow of fluffy salt-and-pepper Afros crowning the heads of Winston’s father and his Panther cronies, Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke, each with a steel Afro pick tucked over one ear. At the foot of the table, in front of an empty chair, sat a speakerphone.

Spencer was proud of himself. It had taken him a week to make the arrangements but by gathering all of Winston’s loved ones in a single room, he’d performed his first mitzvah, and he wasn’t going to let Clifford Foshay’s brutish tactics sour the miracle. He knew of Clifford’s Panther reputation for being an intimidator, and the square-shouldered leather jacket and Mennonite beard only enhanced it. It wasn’t hard to see where Winston had learned his bullish ways. “Where this fucking boy at?” asked Clifford without bothering to even look at the door. He reached for Spencer’s arm and, leather sleeve creaking menacingly, seized Spencer by the wrist. “Fuck time is it?” He hiked up Spencer’s sleeve and, not finding a watch, sank back into his chair. “Where’s your watch, brother? You know, Brother Malcolm said, ‘Don’t trust a man who doesn’t wear a watch.’ ”

Spencer didn’t flinch. “Where’s your watch, Mr. Foshay?”

“Nigger, my watch is in my bag with my poems. Where it’s supposed to be. And don’t puff your chest out at me, I know who you are. You that fucking Negro rabbi white folks drag out every time they need a reasonable black opinion.”

“That’s right, that’s right. Why should we trust you?” echoed Sugarshack. Clifford’s squires sat back in their seats, stroking their goatees and finishing one another’s sentences. “Do you understand what Mao meant when he said—”

“ ‘In the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops, the former may be likened to—’ ”

“ ‘—water, and the latter to the fish who inhabit it’?”

Clifford held up his hand for quiet. “You a Tom. One of those political, cultural, social theorists. And now you cozying up to my son?”

Spencer sat upright in his chair. “I do subscribe to one theory. A metatheory, if you will. That is, I think a good theory should be generalizable, accurate, and simple.”

“Fuck kind of theory is that?” Clifford groused, finally letting go of Spencer’s wrist.

“It’s the GAS Theory, a theory about theories. But no theory meets all three of the criteria: generalizable, accurate, and simple.”

“Einstein’s theory of relativity!” shouted Sugarshack, pleased with himself for citing the grandest of theories.

“Generalizable and accurate, but not simple,” Spencer answered.

“What about the theory that fags and Hindu people talk a lot?” volunteered Gusto, unsheathing his Afro pick from his head and forking out his natural. Clifford frowned and asked, “Whose theory is that?”

“It’s my theory, mofo,” Gusto answered, burying his metal-toothed rake in his now lopsided hairdo.

“Sounds more like a prejudice than a theory,” Spencer said. “But for the sake of our getting-to-know-you discussion, we’ll call it a theory — though a simple one, it is definitely not generalizable, or accurate.”

Tired of playing the wallflower at a party supposedly thrown in his honor, Winston uprooted himself, placed Jordy on the table in front of Inez, and sauntered to his seat. Jordy crawled down the length of the tabletop and nestled himself in his father’s lap. “Man, the only theory that satisfies all three bits of the GAS Theory is the GAS Theory itself.”

“Where in hell you been, smartass?” asked Clifford.

“Where in hell you been?”

“Boy, don’t get uppity with me. Back in my day we didn’t need an intervention to straighten no young black boys out. Things was together. The community raised the children. If Mrs. Johnson saw you wasn’t acting right, she called you, you came. She put the stick to your behind, and you took it. Sent you home, called your mother. When your mother said, ‘Is what Mrs. Johnson said true?’ you said yes, and took another beating from your parents.”

Tuffy casually waved off his father. “If shit was so righteous and together back in the day, how come you turned out so fucked-up?”

Clifford stood up, his hand raised high overhead. “Nigger, don’t disrespect me!” The speakerphone crackled to life and the scratchy voice of Winston’s mother called out, “Clifford, you leave Winston alone!”

“Tell that nigger something, Ma,” Winston said, pulling the speakerphone closer to him and adjusting its volume upward, “before I have to stuff them ‘We Shall Overcome’ civil rights sunglasses up his ass.”

“How you doing, son?”

“Good, Mama. I miss you.”

“I’m here for you, baby, but I only got another thirty minutes until my lunch break is over.”

Spencer scooted in closer to the table. “Speaking of theory, I think we’ve just seen a bit of Freud’s Oedipal theory at work.”

“Now that’s one theory that isn’t generalizable,” said Yolanda. “It surely doesn’t apply to black folk. True, a nigger might want to kill his father, but he sure as hell doesn’t want to fuck his mother. He might fuck a cousin, but Mom is out.”

Spencer picked up his pen and pad and began. “I’m pleased everyone could make it. We are here to help Winston Foshay get on what is called ‘the right track.’ We all know him to be a troubled youth with loads of untapped potential. And Winston, I know that you are cynical about this process and it probably feels like a funeral to you, but please keep in mind that whatever you hear said today, we, unlike Antony, Brutus, come not to bury you, but to praise you.”

Fariq twisted the bill of his baseball cap to a rakish angle. “Tuffy, I don’t know what this fool talking about, but I came to make sure you find a job so you can pay me my ends, nigger.”

“Fuck you, man. You get it when I got it.”

“Let’s get started. Winston, one of a Big Brother’s initial duties is to alert the members of his Little Brother’s support group, assess the strength of the social network, then formulate a plan of action.”

“One minute.”

“Yes, Mr. Foshay.”

“I cannot in good conscience agree to be party to this without knowing where your political sympathies lie, Mr. Throckmorton. How do we know that you’re not leading Winston down the road to black apathy?”

“For the record, okay, I don’t believe in labels.”

“You still a Jew asshole.”

“Thank you, Fariq. As I was saying, before I was so rudely labeled, is that political terms such as ‘left,’ ‘right,’ ‘Democrat,’ ‘Republican’ have no meaning to me. They convey nothing about one’s political personality or motivations. I judge one’s political savvy on whether or not they capitalize the b in ‘black’ and can pronounce ‘Ntozake Shange.’ ”

“Who?” asked Dawoud.

Gusto nudged his stolid partner. “You know, that sister who wrote that play—Rainbows for Colored Chicks Whose Arms Too Short to Slap Box with God.”

“Yeah, I remember. Some bitch talking about how brothers don’t respect them. That shit was pretty good — I saw it while I was coked up.”

“Can we return to discussing Winston’s welfare?”

Clifford drummed his fingers on the table. “I just don’t want my son’s integrity as a strong black man compromised. We must ensure the boy develops himself as a black man, a descendant of African aristocracy, the southern working class, and some hellified Brooklyn niggers who took no shorts.”

Waving a mindful finger, Spencer interrupted him. “I think we shouldn’t take this black-man’s-right-to-self-determination thing too far with Winston. It’s like calculating pi to the five-billionth place — so what?”

“Wait a goddamn minute!”

Like channelers at a séance, everyone looked around to see where the disembodied yell was coming from. “Hey, anybody out there?”

“Oh shit, it’s Moms on the speaker phone. Everybody shut up! Go ’head, Mama.”

“Listen up. It’s Winston’s life. Let Winston decide what he wants to do with it. I’ve got to go — bye, son. I’ll call back in a few minutes.”

“Love you, Mama.”

After Mrs. Foshay’s reproach the gathering sat upright in their chairs, waiting for Winston to take command of the meeting and his life. Winston, oblivious to the restlessness surrounding him, rummaged through his backpack and removed a box of food. He set a tin of pernil, habichuelas, and arroz amarillo topped with gandules aside. He unwrapped a thin, flimsy burrito and bit into it. After just one bite he spit out the mouthful of food. “Taco Bell will definitely fuck up your order. I told them no onions.” Winston took his time rewrapping the rest of the burrito. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, “First, these niggers gots to go.”

“Who, us?” asked Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke, flabbergasted, their index fingers pressed to their breastbones. “How you going to act?”

“You four draft-dodging dashiki-wearing brown-car-driving leather-trenchcoat-in-the-summer-sportin’ stuck-on-stupid-played-out-1970s reject motherfuckers need to raise. You all ain’t none of my social support network.”

Clifford defended his friends. “Winston, you’ve known these brothers all your life. Who looked out for you when I was gone? They did. Who turned you on to Miles and Monk? They did.”

“Them niggers didn’t turn me on to shit. They only came over to the house to crash, smoke weed, and flirt with Moms. And when the electricity was turned off, they’d steal my boom box since it ran on batteries and force me to listen to all that fucked-up plink-plink-bong music.”

Clifford covered Winston’s hand with his own and squeezed. “Winston, these are four brothers who’ve been around the block. Proud black men who’ve sacrificed their youth so young people like yourself wouldn’t have to go through what they did. Do you remember?”

Winston’s resolve began to weaken as he recalled how comforting it was having the four men requisition the tiny apartment like Allied liberators. Their cocky banter made him and his mother laugh. Their menthol cigarettes dangled from ashtrays he’d made in school like smoking cannon from castle ramparts. Winston felt protected. And though he was too young to know the war had been over for more than a decade, he longed to be old enough to fight on the Revolution’s frontlines. After dinner the men would sit on the couch and clean their weapons. Carefully, they’d place dabs of brown oil on the guns’ mechanisms, smearing the droplets with their fingertips.

“I remember when Gusto shot me, cleaning his fucking rifle. That’s what I fucking remember.”

“You know that was an accident.”

“Dead in my fucking thigh.”

“Shit was an accident.”

Clifford shook Winston’s shoulder, and Winston blinked away the memory of his leg pulsing blood. Brenda tying a bathrobe-belt terry-cloth tourniquet around his leg.

“Winston.”

“What?”

“We’re all black men here, and men, especially black men, make mistakes. We need to forgive each other and work together. You’re a smart enough young man, not so different from Malcolm, Huey, and Eldridge when they were your age. Many a great black man has been in the same position you’re in now. Jesus, Hannibal, Pushkin, Babe Ruth, and Beethoven all listened to their elders, and you must do the same.”

Winston looked at the man he had designated to be his elder. Spencer was wearing a stonewashed blue oxford shirt. He looked under the table: his new mentor’s sockless feet were shod in pewter Sperry Top-Siders. Sugarshack, noticing the look of chagrin on Winston’s face, reached across the table and fingered Spencer’s collar. “Nigger look like CIA, don’t he? This the type nigger you want on your team?”

Winston popped off the plastic lid to his Spanish food and placed his face in the rising steam. Wrestling the slabs of fatty meat with his plastic utensils, he spoke without looking up. “Look, maybe y’all was throwing grenades, toting shotguns, feeding kids and shit back in the good ol’ days, but now you ain’t doing a damn thing but playing off-beat bongos and a dented-up saxophone behind my father’s wack-ass poetry, so even if Spencer is a CIA agent, you ain’t got nothing to worry about, because the statute of limitations has long expired on whatever revolutionary shit you’ve done.”

Clifford shook his head. “Son, you’re missing the point. I know you think we’re old-fashioned, paranoid, and who knows what else—”

“No, I know what else. Yolanda, what’s that word you always using for people who can’t function without certain other motherfuckers in they lives?”

“ ‘Codependent,’ ” she shot back.

“Right.” Winston turned to face Clifford and his rat pack. “Y’all codependent.… Yolanda, what’s that word you always use to describe me, Smush, Whitey, and Armello?”

“ ‘Homoerotic’?” she said, a little unsure of her answer.

“Yup, that’s it. Daddy, you, Sugarshack, and them are all old-fashioned, paranoid, codependent homoerotics.” Winston started flicking green snow peas from atop the mound of yellow rice at his father’s friends. “Now bounce! Before you motherfuckers start talking about John Coltrane.”

“That’s wrong, Winston.”

“Pops, you go too if you want.”

Clifford remained seated while Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke got to up leave, pulling their collars up around their necks, tugging on the sleeves of their jackets, and patting down their Afros, trying to maintain their expired seventies insouciant chic. “No need to bring Coltrane into this,” said Gusto, licking his fingers, then matting down his eyebrows. Winston beat a rhythm on the tabletop, mocking their poetry as they skulked into the hallway.

Coltrane be superbad.

Coltrane be black love.

Coltrane be a love supreme. A love supreme.

Coltrane be a burrito supreme. A burrito supreme.

“You call that poetry? I admit, when y’all used to bogart my tape deck, I liked that nigger’s music. That fucking horn would calm you down like a back rub. But after listening to you clowns write about his shit, I can’t stand his music. Whenever I hear one of his tunes I think about your bullshit poetry. Y’all must be killing the nigger’s record sales.”

Extremely satisfied with himself, Winston returned to shoveling food into his mouth. “Man, that felt good, yo.” Everyone was staring at him with varying degrees of incredulity. “What y’all looking at?” he demanded, speaking with his mouth full.

Spencer waited for Winston to swallow, looked him in the eye, and asked the question that forever has hounded any miscreant who’s ever tried to set his or her life straight. “Winston, what do you want to do?”

A grim look of concern crossed Winston’s face. This question had been asked of him countless times, and for the first time in his life he didn’t respond with his stock answer: “I don’t have to do nothing but stay black and die.” He couldn’t verbalize it, but Winston was feeling the onset of the freedom his father and Inez were always saying his ancestors died for. “What do I want to do? I don’t know, but I want to do something.”

“You want to make money,” blurted out Fariq.

“True.”

“You want to set a good example for your son,” suggested Yolanda, refilling Jordy’s baby bottle with apple juice and sliding it down the table as if it were a mug of beer in a saloon. Winston sipped from the bottle, then handed it to the baby.

“Sure, you right.”

“You want to emulate them,” Inez said, pointing to a set of posters including Ho Chi Minh, Marx, Menelik II, and Emma Goldman, lined up on the wall like a radical Mount Rushmore.

“If you say so,” Winston teased, looking over at the posters. “Who’s that?”

“Which one?” asked Inez.

“The one at the end — the crazy-looking white man.”

“That’s Eugene V. Debs. He was a labor leader at the turn of the century. He ran for president a few times too.”

Winston stared at the black-and-white photo of the bald, craggy-faced agitator. Eugene Debs was standing on an unseen soapbox, leaning over a sea of people like a figurehead lashed to a frigate bow, his fist beating the air, his mouth open in mid-mandate. You could almost hear the rabble rouser begging the crowd to overturn everything from corporate oligarchy to the horizon. The blown-up photo of Debs’s exhortations reminded Winston of himself: the pushy nigger who threatened and bitched and moaned and fought until he got his way. “That old motherfucker look like he about to have a heart attack. Nigger better calm down.”

Inez nervously tugged on one earlobe. “Winston, you’ve mentioned money, family, social activism as possible goals and aspects of your life you want to work on. Where do you plan to start?”

“Right here with my seed,” he answered, lifting Jordy up by the scruff of the neck like a mother lion lifting her cub. “This little nigger here is my first responsibility.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean, Ms. Nomura? I ain’t got to take care of Yolanda — she grown, she can look out for her own self.”

“Winston, it’s like being on an airplane.”

“I never been on a plane.”

Winston knocked his fist on his forehead and let out a groan. “I fell into one of your moral traps, didn’t I? Go ahead, tell me what happens on a plane.”

Inez winked. “Well, when you board the airplane they wait until everyone is seated; then the flight crew shows the passengers a safety video: how to fasten your seat belt, where the closest exit is, the life jacket is under the seat. Then on the screen are a mother and child sitting side by side. The narrator says, ‘If the cabin pressure falls, yellow oxygen masks will drop from directly overhead. Place one over your head and breathe as you would normally.’ ”

Fariq objected. “How can you breathe normally? If the plane is fucking going down, you’d be hyperventilating and shit.” Inez offered Fariq a cigarette, hoping the smoke would occupy what little air he had in his asthmatic lungs. When Fariq started coughing, she continued.

“The narrator goes on to say, ‘If you are traveling with a small child, put on your mask first, then place the mask on the child.’ ”

“You trying to say I have to be responsible for myself first before I can do anything else?”

“Exactly.”

Yolanda folded her arms and sat back in her chair, bottom lip protruding. “Dag, Winston, I’ve been trying to tell you the same thing for the past year. Why when Ms. Nomura says it, instantly you understand?”

“It’s not her saying it; it’s when and where she said it. You say it right after we’ve had sex. I’m not really listenin’ to your ‘Honey, when are you going to learn’ shit. I’m rubbing my dick against your thighs trying to get another hard-on.”

“Tuffy!” Yolanda screamed, slapping the table in an effort to keep from laughing. Winston apologized with a kiss on the cheek. Although he hadn’t fully answered the question of what he wanted to do with his life, in deciding to take responsibility for himself he felt he’d made some progress.

However, the unavoidable, but rarely acknowledged, corollary to the what-to-do quandary loomed unspoken in everyone’s mind as they watched Winston wolf down the rest of his lunch. Winston knew what they were thinking. Now that I’ve said I’m going to do something, the real question is what can a high-school-dropout short-tempered nigger like me do? I ain’t starting over. No way. Using his thumbnail he picked at a piece of meat lodged in his teeth. “So I suppose I have to get a job?”

Winston spun about in his chair and looked at the cork job board on the wall behind him. Nestled among sheaves of multicolored flyers, the job board promoted everything from political rallies to a charity sumo demonstration in a local park to the candidates running in the upcoming election. Thumbtacked to the board were the job listings. Written with black felt-tipped pen on yellow three-by-five index cards, the listings were neatly arranged in columns under the headings Clerical, Child Care, Service, and Miscellaneous. Winston shuddered, thinking of the last time he’d found himself face-to-face with the dreaded job board.

Just after Jordy was born, Winston, feeling the pressures of an extra mouth to feed, joined up with a chain-snatching ring that operated in the tony Chelsea/West Village area. Although the baby was good subterfuge, he quickly tired of lugging Jordy to work with him, but was averse to leaving him at the day-care centers in his neighborhood. He couldn’t bring himself to entrust his child to places that sounded more like halfway houses or reclamation institutions than nurseries: Bridge the Gap Day Care, Family Restoration Through Faith, Empowerment House, Sheltering Arms Children’s Service. Even Ms. Nomura’s day care at the community center was called the Crack Is Wack Children’s Center. Winston wanted to drop Jordy off at one of the Chelsea spots he passed while running from the cops — child-care centers whose names seemed to emphasize preparing kids for the future: the Multimedia Preschool, the Piaget Discovery School. The implied mission of the other nurseries was simply allowing children to be children: the Acorn School, City and Country School, Kids Curious, and Buckle My Shoe. Winston had fixated on Buckle My Shoe. To him it sounded like a luxury rumpus room where the staff called the kids “toddlers” and “youngsters,” not “clients” and “crumb snatchers.” He’d seen the name somewhere before. The job board!

The index card termed the position as “custodial in nature,” one day a week, and ten cents over the minimum wage. Winston accepted the job, negotiating free child care two days a week for Jordy in return for an eighth of top-grade marijuana a week. On his first Tuesday, at precisely one-thirty, while Winston was cleaning the windows, Diedre Lewis, his supervisor, took a break to smoke her weed on the roof. “Watch my kids for me, Mr. Foshay.” The moment Diedre left the room, all fifteen brats started wailing like tripped-up security alarms, and no amount of cradling, lullabies, or “Aw, there now”s would silence them. Next Thursday, on his way to work, Winston grabbed a crusty brown bottle from the medicine cabinet — a bottle he hadn’t opened since his dognapping days. That afternoon when Diedre went on break, the kids cried like beaten seals. Winston twisted the cap off the bottle and poured the clear, dense liquid onto a cleaning rag. Shaking a box of Chiclets as if it were a hunting rattle, he lured Kyle Palmetti into striking distance. Quickly, Winston pounced on the boy, covering his mouth and nose with the towel. The child fell instantly into a deep sleep. Instead of fleeing after seeing one of their brethren incapacitated, the other kids clamored to be next. “How’d you do that?” “Do me next.” “No, me!” “Me!” When Diedre returned from her break, the entire brood were asleep in their cubbyholes. Winston sang the latest radio hit to himself and ran his squeegee over the windows. “How?” she asked.

“Chloroform.”

Convicted of child endangerment, the state sentenced him to six months’ probation.

“Any of those jobs interest you, Winston?”

“Ms. Nomura, can I get a job putting up jobs on the job board?”

“No.”

“This sumo sounds interesting. Is there a sumo school near here? Maybe I can be professional sumo wrestler.”

“Get serious!”

“Chill, Pops.”

Winston put a beefy hand to the side of his face, a makeshift horse-blinder blocking out the distractions on his determined run for the roses.

“If you’re going to get a job, get one you look forward to going to,” suggested Spencer. “Winston, what do you look forward to?”

“This documentary called Seven Up, where they follow these British people around. But it only comes out once every seven years.”

Winston got up from his chair and, hands on knees, studied the board. Reading each card carefully, he hoped something in the text would jump out at him, showing itself from among the overabundance of data-entry positions. NEW YORK CITY PLANETARIUM — ASTRONOMER’S ASST. “Hey, I like this one,” he said, tapping the card with his finger. “Look into the sky all night. Naming stars, look for spaceships — who knows, maybe I’ll discover a comet. Tuffy’s Comet. Sounds kind of ill. This might could work.”

“You should be a comet, ’cause niggers like you don’t come around too often.”

Winston frowned at his father’s insult. Inez asked him to read the bottom of the card, trying her best not to sound too discouraging.

His voice hesitant, Tuffy began reading. “ ‘Excellent math skills required. All applicants must have working knowledge of basic physics.’ Is my math that bad?”

Fariq, who during games of twenty-one always knew when Winston had over fifteen in his hand because he’d roll his eyes into his head, count his fingers, and take forever to say “Hit me,” spat out, “You ain’t never even had pre-algebra, kid. What x stand for?”

Winston shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Actually, that’s right—x stands for the unknown.”

“Told you. Ask me another one.”

“What’s an average?” Inez said impatiently.

“Average? Let’s see …” Winston answered cautiously, gauging the correctness of his response by the twists and frowns in Inez’s expression, “that’s like the most regular. If you put everything together and picked out the most typical. I’ll use it in a sentence. ‘The average black man can whip four or five white boys.’ ” A look of skepticism swept over Inez’s face. “I mean, because of the anger,” Winston said quickly.

Yolanda pointed at the job board. “Once more.”

“I’m just playing.” Winston giggled. “I know what average is. That’s when you add the numbers, divide, and come up with the number in the middle. Ha, I’m about to be an Astronomer’s Assistant. Later for all y’all.”

“I have one,” said Spencer. “In the equation E = mc², what does c represent?”

Clifford waved his hand in disgust. “Forget that. Ask him what’s physics.”

Winston said nothing and returned to the board. Embarrassed, he read one of the campaign flyers aloud, as if to prove a point. “Collette Cox — City Councilwoman for the 8th District. Vote Social Democrat for Justice. September 9th.” He looked back at the poster of Debs, then ripped the handbill from the wall and sat back down. “You all would back me in anything I do, long as it’s positive, right?”

“Of course,” said the collective.

He slid the campaign flyer across the table and announced, “I’m going to run for City Council.” The assuredness in his voice surprised him. Everyone but Inez scooted away from the table like tapped-out poker players. Winston had a satisfied smirk on his face. Politician. Don’t need to know physics to run for some bullshit office. Jordy scrambled up his father’s face, using Winston’s ears, lips, and eye sockets for toe- and handholds.

“You stupid?” asked Fariq. “This is a waste of time, this boy is hopeless.” Clifford added, “This shit isn’t funny.”

“I’m serious. Ever since I can remember, you, Moms, Yolanda, my counselors been going on about how I need to meet the challenges of life. That I need to stop taking the easy way out. Well, here go my challenge.”

“Tuffy, leave me out of this.”

“Didn’t nobody say nothing about you, Smush.”

“I just challenge you to pay me back my money. Anyway, I don’t know why you talking this nonsense about running for City Council when you don’t even vote.”

Having reached the top of Winston’s head, Jordy planted a flag of saliva on the bristly peak. “I vote,” Winston said, wiping the top of his head with a napkin.

“Who you voted for?”

“Voted for president.”

“The one we got now?”

“Fuck I look like? I walked in the booth, looked at the bullshit candidates, and said to the lady at the desk, ‘What if I don’t like none of these motherfuckers runnin’?’ She gave me a big ol’ ballot and said I could write in whoever I wanted.”

“And?”

“Nigger.”

“What?”

“I wrote your crippled ass in. ‘I, Winston Foshay, vote for my man, Fariq Cole, for president. If you don’t know, you better ask somebody. And in case you still don’t know, he lives at 154 East 109th Street, first floor. When he walks his knees bend backwards like a flamingo’s.’ ”

“Damn, yo — you voted for me for president?”

“Yeah, bro. Swear on my mother.”

Flattered, Fariq looked away, blinking his eyes. “Damn, yo. That’s lovely, kid.” Winston, already assuming victory at the polls, began doling out political patronage. “Don’t sweat that, dude. When I win, you going to be chief of the fire department, Armello going to be chief of police, Whitey chief of white people. Ms. Nomura, you my chief of education. No, scratch that — chief of fair play. Somebody should be in charge of fair play, don’t you think?”

Swinging a leg over Winston’s shoulder, Jordy used his father’s arm like a fireman’s pole and slid down to the floor, where he untied Winston’s shoelaces.

“You showing your ass, son.”

“That’s all right, I got a lot of ass to show.”

“Get real and get this thought of running for City Council out of your head, because you’re unqualified, boy.”

Yolanda bunny-hopped her chair closer to her man. “Now, Clifford, I’m not saying Winston should run, but think about it — who’s qualified? That black man they always talking running for president in the next election? Because he gives a good press conference he’s qualified? If he ever does decide to run, you know what the first thing he’s going to be—unqualified.”

Although he didn’t know what black man Yolanda was talking about, Winston nodded his head. Ms. Nomura, her hands clasped together like a nun administering to a bedridden child, said, “Winston, maybe you should get involved in politics at a more basic level.” Tuffy shook his head. “I already tried that. Every time you ask me to go to one of your demonstrations I go. I picket the army recruiting station when you tell me the U.S. fixing to bomb some defenseless country for no reason. What happens? The fuckers get bombed anyway. Remember, I went hunger-striking with you for them goddamn refugees?”

“What refugees?”

“Some dirty jungle motherfuckers in some country I never heard of was getting mistreated. We were in front of the UN Building.”

“I don’t remember.”

“The time I was the only one who got arrested, because that man was heckling me. ‘That’s not fair, hunger-striking with the fat kid. It’ll take him a whole year to die.’ I had to beat that man’s ass.”

Spencer, who’d been quiet since Winston had announced his candidacy, finally spoke. “I feel that we must admit to ourselves that we’ve laid out some stipulations and guidelines for Winston to follow: his vocation should pay a decent living wage, contribute to the social good, be an exemplar to his son, and be racially, I don’t know — righteous. I think Winston has chosen to pursue a course of action that while on the surface is infeasible and bullheaded does meet the agreed-upon exigencies. I have only one question. Winston, are you certain this is what you really want to do?”

“No, but it’s what I’m going to do. The only people who want to become politicians are the third-grade snitch-ass hall-monitor types. Why can’t I do it? You just put up some posters in the neighborhood and people vote for you. All I need to know is how much does the job pay.”

“I’d say about seventy-five thousand dollars a year,” Ms. Nomura said.

He stamped his feet and pumped his fist in the air. “Oh, that’s crazy money. After I win I’ll be making more than all y’all combined.”

“You won’t be making more than me, believe that shit, motherfucker.”

“But you can’t win. Winston, listen to me for one second.” Clifford stood up and pointed a finger in his son’s face. “Be practical. I know I’ve always told you pursue your dreams, but you got to understand the difference between fantasy and reality.”

Winston slapped away his father’s hand. The loud, stinging crack caused those at ringside to cringe. “Man, I’m tired of you getting up in my face.” Clifford backed off but continued preaching about the costs of running a campaign and the number of votes needed to win. Winston ignored him and stared at the poster of Debs. He tried to imagine what the old Socialist was saying. Used the buildings in the background to figure out where in New York City he was speaking. Lower East Side? He counted the number of blacks in the crowd. Two. I bet those niggers had it hard. Calling everybody “boss.” “Daddy, how many times have we met face-to-face?”

“I don’t know—”

“I’m going to tell you: thirty-three times in twenty-two years. Eight in the last eleven. That’s counting today, and the last time I seen you, you was sleeping on the A train at four in the morning, snoring your ass off, your head banging against the window, an empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose rolling between your feet.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I bet you in at least thirty-two out of those thirty-three times we’ve had the same conversation: ‘Why you fucking up in school? Why don’t you stay out of trouble?’ And I always said, ‘Because I can’t do the work,’ or ‘I can’t stop hanging out with my friends.’ You would tell me I can do anything I set out to do. And what I’m setting out to do is run for City Council. Why can’t you just say, ‘Son, I’m proud of you, I know you can do it.’ ”

“Because you can’t.”

“Ms. Nomura, how many votes it take to win?”

“Four thousand votes in the primary, you’d win for sure.”

“That’s it?”

“I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but the primary is in September, that’s right around the corner — and besides, not many people in this neighborhood vote.”

“That’s because I never ran. Look, I know more than four thousand people in this place. I know at least half of every project. Woodrow Wilson Houses, first floor: Gilbert Osorio raising six cousins by his dammy — Monica, Dolores, Pepón, Jessie, Suzette, and Pharaoh, jam-packed in a one-bedroom crib. Next to them, Cynda Alfaro and her moms, who works at the hospital — she’s real cool, always puts my triage form on top. Two doors from the Alfaros on the right, them crackhead brothers Erwin, Erving, and Ernest. Plus, those fucking dykes Jocelyn and Lourdes on the left-hand side, with, for some unknown fucking reason, a rainbow flag on their door and in every damn window. Down from the lesbos, Genise Norris and her twin sons, Unique and Unique. Don’t let me have to tell you who’s on the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth floors because we’ll be here all day. Shit, much drug running, breaking and entering, hiding out as I’ve done? I been on every block, in every apartment, Wilson Houses, Taft Projects, Jefferson Houses, George Washington. Wilson, Taft, Jefferson, Washington — ain’t that a bitch? I never realized all the projects were named after presidents — what kind of twisted message is that? Anyway, I see these little flyers various candidates got up now. Wilfredo Cienfuegos, that motherfucker be selling illegal cellular phones in the back of Estrella’s Restaurant. Any of y’all know that fool?”

“Naw.”

“Course not. I know him because I know everybody.”

Jordy opened Winston’s thighs and clawed his way through the mass of flesh and muscle to his father’s crotch. He lifted Tuffy’s sagging stomach and was about to land a punch to the bulge before him when Winston punched him in the chest, knocking him to the seat of his diapers. Jordy just giggled and charged in again.

“Who else running?” Fariq asked, his interest piqued.

“Margo Tellos. She live over on one-eighteen. Got a big, fat, juicy ass and a little boy who goes to private school on the West Side.” Winston held up Collette Cox’s campaign flyer. “I know Ms. Nomura knows her. This one used to teach here at the school. I remember one day she was subbing for Ms. Dunleavy, we fucking around not doing the assignment, throwing shit out the windows, woman could’ve died and no one would’ve noticed or cared. Out of nowhere she starts crying, mascara all down by her chin, talking about, ‘When I look at you people, I see failures. Wasted talent. The ghosts of students who could’ve become lawyers, doctors. It’s like you people are zombies.’ ”

Winston looked cockeyed at Yolanda and Fariq to see if they’d shared his umbrage. Smush asked Inez for another cigarette and Yolanda just sat there, studying Tuffy for signs of bipolar disorder. “You two might not give a fuck, but I ain’t no zombie. Damn if you see me walking in a straight line, arms stretched all out in front of me, hands choking the shit out of the air, going ‘uuurrggghhhh, uuurraaaagggghh,’ waiting for some teen hero to bash my head in and put me out of my misery. Fuck that. I’m sick of being …”

“Disenfranchised,” volunteered Spencer.

“I was going to say ‘left out.’ But your word sound better.”

“You flipping,” said Smush.

“You’re still my campaign manager.”

“And Landa, you don’t got no choice, because our thing is till death do us part.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Ms. Nomura, Daddy, I know you with me, since you two are so supportive of everything I do.”

“I raised a fool.”

“Nigger, you didn’t raise nobody.” Angrily Winston pushed the tin of food scraps away from him. His chin dipped into his chest. His eyes closed. He squeezed them tighter, then covered his face with his hands.

“You all right, son?” Fariq asked.

Winston didn’t move. Yolanda couldn’t tell if he was about to cry or snap the neck of the person closest to him, which unfortunately was her.

Just contemplating the absurdity of a nigger like him running for political office was making Winston’s head hurt. He knew there was no point in talking about his future. He shut his eyes and patted the gun in his pocket. Fuck am I doing? he thought. If it’d been winter and the flyer said, “Macy’s — Extra Christmas Help Needed,” I’d have said, “That’s it — I want to be a department-store Santa!” He slowly ripped Collette Cox’s campaign flyer into four squares. Almost instinctively he whispered a verse from an old rap song:

… Bullet with my name on it

Knife with my bloodstain on it

Coffee table with my brain on it

Pallbearer grab a coffin latch

Another nigger snatched

In the ghetto it’s Catch-

22 slug to the mug …

Inez winced. It wasn’t hard to envision a bullet-riddled Winston sprawled underneath the White Park monkey bars, gargling his blood, his head lolling in her lap, while his friends tried to coax his soul back into his body. She was determined not to be too late to save Tuffy, like she was too late to save Malcolm.

Winston slowly lifted his head and opened his eyes. “I ain’t serious with this election bullshit. I’m not running for a damn thing. Fuck it.”

Inez raised an index finger in the air like a committeeperson making a point of order. “Fifteen thousand dollars, Winston,” she said. “I’ll pay you fifteen thousand dollars if you run. Maybe a little more after I look into how much it costs for posters and things. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose. It’ll be like a summer job.” Winston immediately flashed to the restitution check hanging on Inez’s bedroom wall. “Come on, Ms. Nomura, don’t joke.”

“Inez, don’t encourage the boy,” pleaded Clifford. “He’s going to think you mean it.”

“The election is a little over three months away. Let’s see — that’s five thousand dollars a month.”

Inez’s eyes locked with his. She was serious. “It might be fun.” Winston stole a glance at Yolanda. She looked skeptical. She don’t like Ms. Nomura nohow. He shifted his gaze to Fariq. Smush would eventually come up with some nefarious plan to make money this summer. It depended upon the riskiness of the venture, but at best Winston’s end would be between four and five thousand a month. Ain’t that a bitch, crime and politics pay about the same. “Ms. Nomura, I want all the money up front.”

“Done.”

Inez sighed. No one else said anything as they waited for her to come to her senses and renege on the offer. The phone rang. Winston pressed the Speaker button and snapped, “Who this?”

“Winston, is that how you answer the phone?”

“No ma’am.”

“Okay, then. What did you decide to do?”

“I’m running for Congress.”

“City Council,” hissed Yolanda.

“That’s nice, son, you have my blessing. Take care.”

“Thanks, Mama, you always there for a nigger. I mean, you wasn’t really there for me, but yeah, thanks. I’ll call you soon. Bye. Love you.” Winston picked Jordy up off the floor and dangled him over the phone with one hand and tickled his stomach with the other. “Say goodbye to Grams, Jordy.” Jordy purred a slobbering gurgle into the phone.

Clifford backed away from the table. “Inez, is the auditorium ready?”

“Ms. Dunleavy is taking care of everything, but we should get going. I’ll be there in a minute.” While Clifford gathered his books and strode into the hall, Inez walked up to Winston and gave him a long hug. “You know what we haven’t done lately?”

“Naw.”

“Gone to the top of the Empire State Building. Let’s meet next Sunday. Spencer, you come too.”

“Sure.”

“Winston, you mind?”

“Naw.”

“Coming to listen to your father read?”

“Maybe.”

Winston rose from the table, began cleaning up his mess. He crumpled Collette Cox’s campaign flyer and tossed it with the food scraps into a wastebasket. “Ms. Nomura?”

“What?”

“You think my pops would’ve come to this meeting if he didn’t have this reading scheduled for today?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better vote for me.”

“You have to earn votes, Winston. You can’t strong-arm folks into voting for you,” Inez said, scooting out into the corridor.

As he buckled Jordy into his stroller, Yolanda eased up to him and rolled his T-shirt over his beach-ball paunch. “You look hot, baby. You bring an extra shirt?”

“I forgot.”

Yolanda hiked the shirt to Winston’s underarms, exposing his chest. “I don’t like how Ms. Nomura looks at you.”

“Now who paranoid? You notice my father didn’t even say goodbye?”

“I noticed.”

With two fingers Yolanda skied a path down Tuffy’s breastbone, jumping moguls of fat, slaloming in and out of his carbuncles and assorted battle scars, leaving wavy tracks on his sweaty skin. Winston’s stomach quivered as her fingers schussed around the rim of his navel. “What did you mean when you said I don’t have a choice — that I have to support you if you run for office?”

“You my girl — if I do something, you follow. And vicey-versey.”

“It’s much easier following a nigger who got fifteen grand, I know that much.”

“Ain’t that a bitch. But no te preocupes, I’m just going to take the money and run.”

“Thought you said you wasn’t going to run?”

“You know what I mean. Ms. Nomura wanna play social worker, I don’t care.”

Fariq grabbed Spencer by the elbow and guided him out of the room. “We be right out here, all right?”

“All right,” answered Winston.

Yolanda cleared the layer of perspiration off Tuffy’s chest with her hands, then blow-dried each nipple, watching his skin fill with goose bumps. “Yolanda, what are you doing?”

“You ever think we married too young?” she asked, driving an index finger into the abyss that was his navel. Her finger two knuckles deep into his belly button, she probed for the pressure points in her husband’s soul. She wanted to arouse the real nigger within, hear him scream, and beg her, and only her, for mercy. Winston clenched his abdominal muscles, causing the walls of his belly button to clamp down on her finger like a set of fleshy Chinese handcuffs. “Landa, you not going nowhere, so stop fronting.” Yolanda tugged violently, trying to extract her finger from Winston’s suction hold. “Tuffy, stop playing!” Winston exhaled and released her finger. It was moist. She smelled it before wiping it dry on Winston’s pants. Yolanda lifted her shirt and they hugged, their sweaty bellies stuck together like wet tissue paper.

Outside, Spencer turned to Fariq. “Are Winston and Inez serious?”

“Jewboy, I don’t know about Ms. Nomura, and I doubt Tuff will be out there campaigning and shit, but I know when he was talking about who he know in the neighborhood and all, he was coming from the heart. He only has two emotions: serious and serious as fuck, straight up. Only time I ever heard the nigger tell a joke was when we was working in Brooklyn, that shit was just a freak thing. Even when Tuffy jokin’, he bein’ dead real. He a sensitive nigger. You know how niggers be snappin’ on each other, ‘You so ugly,’ ‘so black,’ ‘so stupid’? Don’t no one get into it with Tuffy. Not since him and Carter got into it. One day we was comin’ from the beach and Carter was all over Tuffy, ‘Nigger, you so fat, you jumped into the sky and got stuck. Motherfucker, you so big, you wear pillow cases for socks. You so big, you shit cannonballs. You so fat the only things on earth the astronauts can see from space is the Great Wall of China and the crack of yo’ ass.’ This wasn’t no when-you-sit-around-the-house, you-sit-around-the-house, seafood-diet bullshit; this session was heated. Carter was rockin’ that nigger, and all Tuffy could do was take the blows. But Tuffy can’t play the dozens, ’cause he can’t lie. If he ever say to a nigger, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ that boy will have fewer friends than Israel. So Carter breaking on Tuffy so hard he has to stop and catch his breath. Tuffy, tired of Carter fucking him up, right out of the blue says, ‘Yeah, nigger, like I fucked yo’ mama.’ Now normally when a nigger go into the ‘I fucked your mother’ bag, the other niggers start groaning, saying, ‘That shit’s a dud.’ But in this case they start laughin’, fallin’ off the stairs, runnin’ into traffic, giving each other pounds — niggers is straight dyin’.”

“Why?”

“Because they knew that if Tuffy had said it, then he’d really fucked Carter’s mother.”

“Oh, shit.”

“ ‘Oh, shit’ is right. A nigger who honest as Tuffy just said he fucked your mother in front of your boys? You gots to fight. Tuffy should’ve just let Carter hit him, he don’t weigh but a hundred twenty pounds. But Tuff play for keeps. Nigger hit Carter so hard — you ever see a matador stab a bull? Bull staggers for a quick second like, ‘Goddamn, this punk motherfucker stabbed me,’ then just fall to his knees. That’s how hard Tuffy hit Carter. Nigger dropped to his knees olé like a motherfucker. His nasal passages is all permanently crushed. The poor guy got to keep his mouth open to breathe. You give that nigger a lollipop and he’ll die.”

Fariq’s gaze shifted and Spencer looked over his shoulder to see Winston and Yolanda standing arm in arm behind him. Spencer now understood why little boys ran to Tuff in the streets, tugging on his shirt, begging to be “put down” on some invisible ghetto roster of the terminally bad. He knew why his hubcaps were still on his car after that initial visit to Winston’s apartment. Winston Foshay — a living African-American folk hero whose mythos lay somewhere between that of the angelic John Henry and the criminally insane Stagger Lee. Spencer had his newspaper story.