Paul Beatty - Tuff

“Shit, I was hoping God was about to say something to me.”

“God ain’t never spoke to you?”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“You’re a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?”

“It’s what’s so great about being Jewish. You don’t have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish.”

Winston had a strange, slanted smile on his face. He threw his arm around Spencer’s shoulders and escorted him to the door like a kind bouncer saying good night to the village drunk. “Rabbi, let’s start next week. I’ll put you on six months’ probation, but I ain’t making no promises.” Here would be the monk Winston needed. He had dreadlocks, but so what? He’d have a person in his life to whom he wasn’t emotionally attached. Who knows, Spencer could be an impartial voice-over that would cut through the white noise of Yolanda’s bickering, Fariq’s proselytizing, and Ms. Nomura’s good intentions. “Can I ask one thing before you go?”

“Sure.”

“What’s borscht?”

“Borscht is beet soup.”

After shutting the door behind Spencer, Winston sat down on the couch, took out his marker, and drew a circle on his palm. Inside the circle he wrote his name. Yolanda stopped scouring Jordy’s anus and was about to place a fresh diaper, then the baby, on Winston’s lap, when he shot up and ran to the door. Spencer was ten paces past the threshold, trying to figure out how a young man with a child to support, living in an apartment with bedsheets for drapery and mayonnaise jars for glassware, could afford to see so many films. Maybe he walks in backwards , he thought, like Cacus stealing the cattle from Hercules .

“Yo, Rabbi!” Winston’s head was sticking out of the door. “Since you thought you were going to be a Big Brother to an eight-year-old, what were you planning to do with me this afternoon? Take me to the zoo?”

Spencer reached into his haversack and whipped out a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, which he expertly flung at Winston at warp speed. Winston laughed, and swiftly slammed the door. The disk bounced off the metal door frame with a thud and skidded to a wobbly stop at the feet of a young boy. The boy picked it up and offered it back to Spencer. “Keep it.”

Spencer Jefferson walked to his car feeling as if he’d just interviewed for, and landed, a job as an urban mahout. He’d walk alongside the elephantine Winston Foshay, beating on his rib cage with a bamboo cane, steering him past life’s pitfalls, prodding him into performing the tricks required by respectable society.

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.”