Paul Beatty - Tuff

…

The foreign tongues, drawls, and dialects of the tourists buzzed in Winston’s ears like forest mosquitoes. Their gaiety almost fooled him into believing that he too was a foreigner to the urban chaos down below. A gale of hot wind rustled the city map he was holding. Winston struggled to hold it at a readable angle. A German tour guide and his group surrounded him. “Im Norden liegt Harlem,” the tour guide said, his hand raised for attention, “… die Heimat des schwarzen Amerikas.” The German language made his epiglottis itch, but Winston distinctly heard “Harlem” and wondered what the tour guide was saying. He knew the man wasn’t saying anything about his Harlem, Ost Harlem.

There was little East Harlem folklore. There had been no Spanish Harlem Renaissance, only Ben E. King’s catamitic reference to a rose in his soul song “Spanish Harlem,” three poets of some renown (Willie Perdomo, Piri Thomas, and Doug E. Fresh), and a playground basketball legend (Joe Hammond). It would be impossible for any tour guide to convey the absurdity of daily life in the neighborhood. How could one even translate Winston’s chaotic morning?

The East Harlem dawn bathed his casserole-dish aquarium in reddish-gold light. Beautiful , thought Winston. Shoot, my set up lookin’ kinda tropical . But when he checked up on his beloved piranha, he found the metaphor of his election campaign floating on its side, dead; the goldfish and turtle frolicking around its corpse.

East Harlem was where the real excitement was, but black Harlem seemed to have better marketing. Tour guides with a textbook knowledge of Harlem weren’t the only ones to profit by its mystique. Before the sanitized tour companies invaded Harlem with their double-decker buses and walking tours, Winston and Fariq provided services to European tourists. They plied their trade outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Near the cab stand they’d wait for a couple of tall, pale youths who displayed that distinctive European mien of being descendants of the great civilizations, along with cowlicks, black jeans, and a backpack, to stagger wearily out of the station. At the crinkle of a map unfolding, Fariq would break out his shortwave-radio-soccer German. “ Achtung , motherfuckers!” he’d say, wobbling over to the youths, gold teeth glinting in his “Welcome to New York” smile. “ Nicht scheißen! Nicht scheißen! Just kidding.”

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the tourist would ask skeptically. “A little,” Fariq would reply. “Check me out: Bayern München gegen Kaiserslautern; zwei zu eins. Borussia Dortmund gegen Herta BSC; eins zu null .” The tourists would back away, unsure of how to respond to the irony of a crippled American boy who loved Fussball . If there was a piece of trash about, with a swing of his crutch Fariq would “kick” it between two rubbish bins, then exclaim, “Klinsmann mit links — Tor!” —a pinprick in the travelers’ Social Democratic sensibilities. “Do you need any directions?” Fariq would volunteer. “Where you going? What are you planning to see? Have you thought about Alphabet City, or the Botanical Gardens?” “Botanical Gardens” was Winston’s cue. “Harlem. What about Harlem?” he would say robotically, his voice barely audible over the Ninth Avenue traffic. It was his only line. Whenever he complained to Fariq demanding a bigger role in the con game, Fariq would explain to him that he had to say the line. “You big, black, and ugly. You everything they’ve ever imagined Harlem to be.” “Yeah, great idea, Tuff. What about Harlem? Have you guys thought about Harlem?” At the mention of the magic word the European wayfarers would fidget like naughty children about to accept a dare. Soon the tourists would be purchasing fake tickets to a nonexistent Motown revue at the Apollo. If they were especially gullible, Fariq would bid Winston load their luggage into the cab, while he asked where they were staying, then relayed the information to the cabdriver. “Let’s see, the Upper West Side will be twenty-five dollars. You give us the money and the driver will take you where you want to go.” After a while the con stopped working. The new Eurotravelers were a wiser breed. They’d look at the counterfeit tickets and say, “James Brown never recorded for Motown.”

The German tour guide was pounding and kicking the telescope. He cuffed the telescope with the heel of his hand one last time. “Eine scheiß Optik.”

Tuffy’s gaze shifted back and forth from the distant rooftops of his neighborhood to the section of map Inez had marked off in red marker as his electoral district. While the German sightseers gawked at the lights of Times Square, his eyes traced the jagged borders of the unremarkable Eighth District. His mind filling in details invisible from eighty-six stories up and three miles away. According to Inez he needed nine hundred people to sign a petition that would place his name on the ballot. No one knew the district and its constituency like he did. The eastern boundary bisected the East River from 96th to 129th Streets, and Winston knew that somewhere along the concrete banks of the river, maybe by the 103rd Street overpass, crazy old Siddhartha Jenkins was minding rod and reel.

Today, like every day, Siddhartha was fishing for fluke, porgy, and the occasional albacore, wildly wrestling with his pole as if he’d hooked Hemingway’s giant marlin. “I wish the boy were here with me. Blessed Mary, pray for the death of this fish, wonderful though he is. I wish the boy were here.” If Siddhartha would sign the petition, Winston would be the boy.

The northernmost outpost of the ward was the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 129th Street. Winston envisioned constituent Jaimito Linares standing in front of Manny’s Superette, sipping on fifty-cent cans of malt liquor, hissing at any female who strayed too close to his lair. Psst, Mamí, com’ere. No, I really like you, you make me want to settle down . Next to him, in the shade of an orange beach umbrella, Wilma “La Albina” Mendez. Legs cocked open like a bronco-busting cowboy on break, Wilma would be running her pink-margarita eyes over Jaimito’s spillover. Her quasar-white skin set off with sparkling twenty-four-karat gold necklaces and dental caps, she would be searching for lesbian tendencies in the faces, walks, and haircuts of those who rebuffed Jaimito’s advances or talked to him but couldn’t keep their eyes off her. Wedding rings be damned. It’s fucking hot, right? You want some cold wine cooler. Come on, don’t be that way, tómelo. Come sit in the shade . Jaimito and Wilma would sign just to impress the ladies with their political savvy.

Down Lexington to 110th Street the streets would be lined with locals seeking relief from the heat. Some would have washrags dipped in ice water pressed to their foreheads, moving and speaking only when absolutely necessary. Others would be sitting on the porch listening to the block’s interlocutor provide the latest “ Oye , you heard about” gossip, basking in the air-conditioning of someone’s problems. Up and down Lexington, youngsters would keep from stalling in the heat by lubricating their idling engines with various coolants, both legal and illegal. On 121st Street, next to the record shop, Carl Fonseca would be tending his quarter-acre vegetable garden, bragging that the only thing that matched the size of his tomatoes was the size of his balls. Between 114th and 115th Streets a pair of towheaded Mormon boys would be knocking on doors, clicking open attaché cases like movie hitmen, threatening the local heathens with their pamphlet weaponry. Maybe, Winston thought, he could use the Mormon evangelism to his advantage. He’d let the Mormons open the doors, get the doomed descendants of Cain talking, then he’d swoop in and, catching the hosts in be-polite-in-front-of-the-white-man mode, have them sign his petition.