Paul Beatty - Tuff

Winston’s eyes traveled west on 110th past the park, past the church of St. John the Divine, and down Broadway to what he approximated to be 96th Street. He struggled for an image of the area. That’s not my people. I don’t know shit about the West Side. Don’t white people live over there? Fuck . The Eighth District included Central Park, the lines of demarcation excluding the residential sides of its eastern and western borders. Though Central Park wasn’t a key voting bloc, the green was his jurisdiction. Right now Armello was playing baseball on diamond 10, nonchalantly scooping up hard-hit ground balls in the field and, after two feeble at-bats, being pinch-hit for in the fifth inning. If I win the election I can pass a law saying Armello gets four strikes .

“Ms. Nomura, it’s so big.”

“What is?”

“The district. I’m mean, I got the park, the West Side, everything but the fancy buildings on Central Park West and Fifth Avenue.”

“Well, East Harlem’s interests and their interests are different.”

“Don’t everybody pretty much want the same things — jobs, good schools, and shit?”

“Yeah, but they don’t want you in their neighborhood, much less having any say-so over their lives.”

Winston plucked a gooey tortilla chip from Inez’s plate, making sure to hook a slice of jalapeño. “Man, for a second there I was excited about this shit. But from here you see how many people live in the neighborhood. I mean, look at all the windows. In every one there’s a life being lived.”

Spencer smiled. “Winston, you don’t know it, but you’d be a really good city councilman.”

“Man, I don’t know shit about politics. No, wait, hold up, I do know something.” Winston swallowed his food and began singing in a shower-perfected baritone that rarely graced the world excepting in drunken soft lullabies to his son.

I’m just a bill. Yes, I’m only a bill

And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill .

It’s a long, long journey

to the capital city

It’s a long, long wait

While I’m sitting in committee

But I know that I’ll be a law someday.…

There wasn’t an American born after 1960 who hadn’t heard “Schoolhouse Rock.” Not surprisingly, Spencer joined Winston in singing the last lines of the chorus.

At least I hope and pray that I will

But today I am still just a bill .

Winston grumbled. “I know that song. That’s it, thank God. If I really knew something, my stubborn ass might get some ideas and actually try and make a change.”

“But if you could make a change, what would you do?” Spencer asked, taking out his notebook. Tuffy glanced at his distant neighborhood, its dirt-brown facades barely visible, camouflaged in the smoggy haze. “First thing I would do is paint a yellow line on the ground that exactly matched the boundaries of the district. That way we’d know that the neighborhood is ours. ‘This is our shit, step lively’—you know what I’m saying?”

Winston went on to create a paradise ex nihilo, an idyllic shtetl of midnight swimming holes and hassle-free zones where denizens would be free to “drug, fuck, suck, and thug” to their heart’s delight. Where personal stereos wouldn’t shatter into plastic shards when you dropped them, but bounce back into your hands undamaged, like rubber balls. Where children would never have to know what it is to eat sugar sandwiches for breakfast, frozen broccoli for lunch, and sit down to dinners of Spam, canned corn, and moldy pieces of bread, listening to Mother say, “Don’t worry about the green stuff, that’s where penicillin comes from, it’s good for you.” East Harlem would be a Shangri-la of moist weed, cold beer, and zesty sofrito.

“Then I would put up a huge sign that read ‘Spanish Harlem’ in bright red neon lights that flashed one letter at a time and then all at once. Some shit that make this GE, Citibank, big-business bullshit look small. Something that would make these foreigners say, “Over there is the Brooklyn Bridge, and over there, there is Spanish Harlem!” Winston shook his head. “I’m tripping, right?”

“Winston, those are things people need to hear,” Inez said.

“Even that madness about fuckin’, suckin’, druggin’, and thuggin’?”

“Well, maybe not the thuggin’.”

Inez handed Winston a petition. “Here, this is the petition I have to turn in to the Board of Elections in three weeks.”

Winston looked it over. “Nine hundred names? That won’t be so hard.”

“But they have to be registered voters and it has be done in three weeks.”

“All we have to do is get a bunch of the registration forms and register motherfuckers as they signing the petition. Many times as I been caught up in the system, I know how it works, they’ll never know.”

“That’s a good idea,” Spencer said, wrapping his arm around Winston’s shoulders, “You’re feeling it today, huh?”

Winston shrugged off Spencer’s hand. “You know, ever since I decided to run I’m thinking different. I can feel my brain working. Y’all remember those cards with the dots on them? You’d hold them up about six inches from your nose and stare at it, then real slowly a 3-D image appears. That’s what’s happening to me. My mind is slowly seeing the pattern. I hope it’s not a fad like them cards were. What were those things called?”

“Magic Eye, I think.”

“Then I got the Magic Eye. Woooo!”

Winston read the petition aloud. “We, the undersigned, do hereby state that as duly enrolled voters of the Eighth Council District and entitled to vote in the next blah, blah, blah to be held on blah, blah, blah, appoint Winston L. Foshay for City Council Eighth District. In witness whereof, we have hereto set our hands. Signed, Inez Nomura, Fariq Cole, and Yolanda Delpino-Foshay.” Winston thrust the piece of paper back into Inez’s hands. “Yolanda using her maiden name now? What the fuck is up with that? And my father — what, he don’t want to sign?”

“He said, ‘Why waste good ink on a lost cause?’ ”

“He’s probably right.”

Inez grabbed Winston by the wrist, saying, “Come with me,” and dragged him to the southeast corner of the observation deck. Spencer followed at a distance. Tourists excitedly taking photographs of the Statue of Liberty filled the corner, jostling for vantage points. Elbowing and cursing her and Winston’s way to the precipice, Inez was worried. There was an uneasiness in Winston she had never seen before. Why had she pushed him? Had she overreacted because he’d finally hinted he wanted to channel his natural leadership in a positive direction? Maybe she should have suggested he coach a Little League team instead. “Here’s fifteen thousand, run for City Council.” What was I thinking?

Inez watched the ferries shuttle people to and from Liberty Island, remembering the days when she knew exactly what was right and what was wrong. In 1977 it was right for her and the Puerto Rican National Activists to seize Lady Liberty in the name of libertad and political prisoner Andrés Cordero. Shoving Japanese tourists and schoolchildren aside, they slammed the door in the statue’s sandal and draped a Puerto Rican flag from the crown. Press releases fell to the ground like confetti. It was wrong of the men in the group to feel up the latticework under Lady Liberty’s dress and harass the women by asking one another, “Have you ever been inside of a woman? No, I mean really inside of a woman.” It was right for Nolan Lacosta to climb the stairway near Liberty’s vulva and insert his penis into a rusted-out orifice and say, “Hey, look, you guys, I’m fucking America!” It was wrong for her husband, embarrassed by the publicity, to leave her the next day to raise the children in Philadelphia, satisfying their filial curiosity by telling them their mother died in an explosion while making a pipe bomb.