Paul Beatty - Tuff

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.

On a low-visibility day, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the Manhattan skyline looked like a giant histogram, the lofty edifices stretching upward along the X axis of greed. Beyond the midtown skyscrapers lay the meaningless statistical outliers, the barren flatlands of East Harlem. Tuffy looked back at Inez and Spencer, who were busily noshing on a plate of hot Empire State nachos, letting Winston have his moment.

The view always evoked mixed emotions in Winston. This high off the ground at the base of the clouds, he experienced the dissonant symptoms of social vertigo. He didn’t know whether he was flying or falling. Today, the view was more apropos of Tuffy’s life than ever before. Since declaring his halfhearted candidacy for public office, he’d begun to look at his neighborhood from the outside in. When he visited friends, the overwhelming stench of buckets that served as toilets for the people who lived on the top-floor landings no longer caused him to gag and laugh in ridicule, but to daub his stinging eyes in shame. At night from his bedroom window, he counted the buildings on his block, stupefied that abandoned dwellings outnumbered occupied ones by two to one. He fell asleep watching the nocturnal drug addicts flit out of the concrete caves like bats, and the diurnal homeless return to burrow into the dilapidated warren.