Tuff

9- THE READING

Winston paused at the auditorium’s entrance. The stragglers hurried by, and he saw very few neighborhood faces. Whatever their ethnicity, these were people who only came uptown for the meager portions of soul food at Sylvia’s Restaurant, or to hear a career Negro such as his father pontificate on the challenges faced by black Americans and those enlightened few genuinely sympathetic to the cause. Each loyalist mention of his father’s name from a patron’s lips was preceded by a slew of adjectives that convinced Winston that if he ever wanted to get to know his father, he’d have to read his books, because the dynamic, insightful, devoted Clifford Foshay was a man he didn’t know.

“Tuff, you coming, yo?” asked Fariq. “Popduke be dropping bombs.”

“No, y’all go ahead.”

Yolanda and Fariq eagerly sought out seats in the small but crowded auditorium. Spotting Spencer about to settle into a front-row seat, Fariq called out, “Hey, Jewboy! Wait the fuck up! Save me a seat, can’t you see I’m crippled?” Yolanda shoved Fariq ahead of her. “Do you have to say ‘Jewboy’?”

“You sensitive to the word ‘Jewboy’?”

“No, I’m just tired of hearing you say it.”

“What else is there?”

“I thought you were a follower of the Nation? What about ‘Hebe,’ ‘kike,’ ‘hymie,’ ‘Yid.’ Anything but ‘Jewboy’ all the damn time!”

“ ‘Yid,’ ” Fariq said thoughtfully, smacking his tongue as if he were tasting a fine wine. “I like that one.”

Winston stood just inside the exit. On stage, Clifford’s band was in the middle of their preperformance primping. Sugarshack tuned his saxophone with puffs of sound, peering down the bell and then shaking the horn every few notes, hoping to dislodge some invisible clog. Gusto sat behind a small drum kit practicing his licks and his distorted drum-solo faces. Duke adjusted and readjusted the congas propped between his legs. Winston recalled how he used to drive Duke crazy by asking him to explain the difference between congas and bongos. Dawoud rummaged through his duffel bag of percussion instruments, his choices for the evening’s entertainment seemingly based on nonmusical attributes such as blatant Africanness and the dexterity required to play them.

Pointing Jordy’s finger for him, Winston followed the nervous pacing of his father. “That’s your grandfather, Jordy. He’s an asshole.” Clifford Foshay had changed into his poetry garb. The black fakir was resplendent in a Bengal tiger — patterned djellaba, topped off with an intricately woven macramé kufi, accessorized with wooden beads and yellowed lion’s teeth. Unintroduced, Clifford strode across the rostrum, carefully set his watch on the lectern and produced a shotgun, which he fired into the air, silencing the crowd. “That’s for Huey.” Blam! “That’s for Fred Hampton.” He opened the barrel and inserted two more cartridges into the breech. Blam! “That’s for raping my great-grandma.” Blam! “And that’s one to grow on.” A sleet of particleboard and ceiling plaster began to fall. The audience leaned forward in their seats.

When Winston was younger and forced to attend his father’s readings, Clifford’s ostentatious militancy embarrassed him. He would return home obsessed with one question: what would happen if his dad turned white overnight? One day his father was a panelist on a Sunday-afternoon television news forum. The guests, no matter their political bent, argued, threatened, and insulted one another. Winston realized that every guest reminded him of his father and that if his dad had been born white he would be the same person, bellicose and belligerent, spewing his rhetoric from overstuffed recliners and television-studio swivel chairs instead of prison cots and bar stools. When his father called him later that day asking if he’d seen him on television, Winston said yes, then asked his father why, if he talked so much about the glories of Africa and the repressions of America, he didn’t drop his slave name for an African one. Clifford replied, “Because then you can’t cash the checks.”

After invoking the requisite Yoruba spirits, Clifford was finally ready to read. There was a cannonade of shotgun fire, and Winston turned to leave. There was no purpose in his staying; he knew the program by heart. Poems about Clifford’s expatriation to Cuba: repetitive paeans layered with images of mangos, rusty automobiles, sugarcane, and raven-haired beauties who like to fuck until the roosters crow. To break the revolutionary reveille there would be some poems about basketball, drums, and of course John Coltrane. The freedom suite would be followed by intermittent tales of how Clifford, drunk on Cuban rum and missing his mama’s cooking, made a pontoon out of coconuts and fishnet, waded into the waters of Matanzas Bay, and extradited himself to Florida. For an encore Clifford would read an ode dedicated to Winston and his dead sister, Brenda. The poem would rumble incessantly onward, like the Iliad read aloud by a summer-school teacher on a gorgeous August afternoon. The first canto was the story of Clifford sending cross-country for Winston and Brenda when Huey P. Newton died tragically in the streets of Oakland, California. It would be read with dramatic caesuras inserted, not between musical phrases, but between poignant images, for maximum pathos. After a three-day bus ride, Winston and his sister arrived the day of the funeral. Winston, lacking a pair of clean underwear, was forced to attend the burial wearing a pair of his sister’s panties. How he cried — not because the snake head of black-American rebellion had been severed from its body, but because his undergarment was thin, pink, and had “Tuesday” handwritten just under the waistband.

Canto 2 retold in quatrains how Clifford discovered his daughter was dead when the amount of the court-ordered alimony payments that followed him through four address changes had been halved. The third canto was a recounting of young Winston’s African-American-warrior training. His thirteenth birthday present the very same twelve-gauge shotgun balanced on Clifford’s right hip. The hunting trips took place in the swampy reeds of Wards Island, where shotgun fire scattered homeless men like park pigeons. Winston was made to fetch the kill, mostly buckshot-shredded possums and cats.

Tears of regret would pour down Clifford’s face, and he would remove his reading glasses, take a sip of water, and read the poem’s envoi, hammering home the point of how in fighting the war humane he’d sacrificed his humanity. Then Winston’s father would bow his head; the audience, unsure if the poem was over, would remain silent. After the whispered “Thank you” into the microphone, everyone would stand and applaud this lyrical airing of dirty laundry. Clifford would scan the crowd looking for his bereaved son. Finding him, he’d ask Winston to stand. And the crowd would then turn toward Winston and smile, their clapping growing even more intense in recognition of the revolutionary’s son who wore pink panties to Huey P. Newton’s funeral. Finally, when his father had finished signing all the books, exchanging phone numbers with all the agents and groupies, the redeemed freedom fighter would make his way to his son and heartily embrace him, fooling Winston into thinking they might head into the night together, Ajax and Telamon after the siege of Troy. I love you. No, you can’t come with us, we’re going to get some drinks. Call you tomorrow. Love you.

Winston lay Jordy in his stroller and backed quietly out of the room, leaving Clifford on a Dadaist roll, turning wordplay riffs on Fidel Castro:

Fidel’s fidelity

Hi-fidelity

Sieg heil fidelity

Two tablespoons of Castro Oil

Castro-castrate the bull market

Winston decided he would celebrate his candidacy at the movies. He bought a pint of gin and a bottle of lemonade, then flagged a livery cab.

The burgundy Buick Electra sailed down Second Avenue like an obsolete dreadnought full steam ahead on its way to the dry dock. Father and son poked their heads though the sunroof. Shirtsleeves flapping in the downtown traffic sirocco, they ahoyed everything from the prostitutes to leashed Pomeranians. “Vote Winston Foshay — City Councilman!” Winston shouted, his arm stretched into the dusk in imitation of Debs’s pleading pose. “Vote Winston Foshay — City Councilman!” He didn’t have anything else to say. He didn’t have a political platform — no programs for reform, no admonitions for society. “Vote Winston Foshay — City Councilman!” As people turned to see who this crazy man yelling from an old Buick was, he could almost see his words drifting away in the slipstream of the muggy city air, like skywriting. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” He laughed, took a sip of his drink, then screamed, “All for a spoonful of borscht!”

“Here?” asked the driver, cruising the car past the multiplex. The marquee displayed six films, none of which Winston had any interest in. It was the usual dreck: a low-budget music video passing itself off as an African-American feature film; the summer blockbuster chock-full of special effects; three white independent “mosaics” of risqué subject matter, flat asses, dime-novel plot twists, and lots and lots of driving; and one big-budget masturbatory vehicle written, directed, and produced by an aging white Academy superstar playing a vile, bitter, successful old curmudgeon who finds humility and understanding for his fellow man in the arms of a young nubile. Fuck this garbage. He said aloud, “Take me to Chinatown.”

There is nothing darker than a Chinatown movie theater, and for a moment the gloom fooled Winston into thinking he was dead. After checking to make sure his heart was still beating, he groped his way down the aisle, his hand going from seat back to seat back, occasionally touching the sweaty neck of a sleeping old man. He found found two empty seats and rubbed the worn velvet cushions, checking for freshly chewed gum. Out of blankets and two small stuffed animals he made a pallet for Jordy, who quickly fell asleep, a parakeet in a covered cage.

Winston slouched in his seat and peered through the swirling cigarette smoke at the giant screen. Two Hong Kong brothers, obviously on different sides of the law, were arguing over who’d make the penultimate sacrifice. I’ll kill for you. No, I’ll die for you. Winston left the theater wondering if he would’ve thrown himself in front of the bullets that claimed his sister, dying in her arms with a noble look on his face. He headed north on Bowery singing the theme song to the second feature, Once Upon a Time in China, a picture he’d seen at least a dozen times. He was still singing when he walked into a pet store two blocks up from the theater. “Ao qi mian dui wan chong la-a-ang. Re xie xiang na hong ri gua-a-ang!” The proprietor greeted him with a smile and finished the chorus, “Dan si tie da-a-a. That’s a great movie.”

“The best.”

Winston asked to see the baby turtles, and the storekeeper placed a fishbowl full of dark-green inch-long turtles on the counter. Winston picked out a turtle and placed it in Jordy’s palm. “What do the words in that song mean?”

“ ‘Stand proud when you face wars. Hot-blooded like the red sun. Courage like iron.’ ”

“That’s good advice. How much them turtles?”

“One for a dollar, ten for eight.”

Hunching over the counter, Winston whispered into the owner’s ear, “You got them piranhas?”

The man looked around suspiciously, called for his attendant to watch the cash register, then headed to a back room, returning with a menacing-looking fish in a sandwich bag.

“That’s what I’m talking about! Let me get some of those little rocks, too — blue ones.”

When Winston got home, he placed the rocks into a corner of the casserole bowl that held his goldfish, sticking a plastic palm tree in the cobalt-blue mound, forming a makeshift tropical isle. He pried open Jordy’s hand and resuscitated the dried-out turtle with a globule of saliva, then dropped it into the water with the goldfish and a dead fly that was floating on the surface. Waving the sandwich bag over the casserole dish, Winston teased his pet, “Fishy, come out to play! Dustin, I want you to meet Sir Laurence Olivier.” The piranha swam out of the Baggie and into its new environs. “Is it safe? Hell naw, it isn’t safe.” The turtle scrambled for the rocks. The goldfish backed into the corner, cautiously eyeing his new neighbor. The piranha ate the dead fly. Winston took Jordy to bed, chuckling in his Ming the Merciless laugh.