Paul Beatty - Tuff

Winston chewed his bottom lip and watched his friend shake, then suddenly zipped past the guard and raced for the fire exit. He pushed on the latch, swinging open the heavy door into the dusk. A zephyr of spring air gusted in and, for a moment, cooled Winston’s sweaty face. The alarm sounded, its deafening ring filling the cinder-block hallways. Winston hurried back to Fariq and in one motion hoisted his friend onto a shoulder and ran toward the front door. Pausing in a cranny, he watched the gunmen head for the back of the apartment building. Carrying Fariq like a wounded war buddy, Winston tore out for Bushwick Avenue, hurdling bushes and slipping around the mottled Brooklyn trees like the tag player of yore. The clap of the gun pounding against his thigh, the jingle of loose pocket change, and the squeaks of the metal brackets holding Fariq’s body together at the joints sounded to Winston like the score to the climax of a Hitchcock thriller. He stole a glance behind him, half expecting to be buzzed by a crop duster.

At the intersection of Bushwick and Myrtle, a line of public buses were impatiently queued up behind a lone drunk ranting in the middle of the street. Like a column of Tiananmen Square tanks, the buses tried to maneuver past the man, but he halted each advance, stepping in front of the buses and boldly waving them off with a raggedy sports jacket. From his drug errands Winston knew the man usually confronted his pink elephants about this time of night, and he counted on him being there, challenging the powers that be with non sequiturs. “I am black, it is raining. Warren Commission, I presume. Incoming!” Winston and Fariq skirted past the man (“You men, return to your positions”), hopped on the third bus, and headed for the back. They sank low in the plastic seats, gasping for air and waiting for the bus to move. Fariq was wheezing. He frantically removed his inhaler from his jacket and took two long hits.

“Shit, nigger, you didn’t have to do all that! You should have told me you was going to make your move, I could have followed you on my own.”

“Hah,” Winston snorted.

Fariq moved to whack Winston with a crutch, but it was wedged underneath the seat in front of him. “Naw, money, I’m serious. Shit is humiliating. I can take care of self, know what I’m saying, Tuffy?”

“Spare me, bro. I’d had to rescue your ass like in Deer Hunter . Wasn’t for me you’d be in a bamboo hut playing Russian roulette with the Brooklyn Viet Cong. Didi, mau! Mau!” Winston sniffed the air, then checked the bottoms of his sneakers. “Hey, did you poot?” he asked Fariq. Fariq said nothing, rolling his tongue in his cheek. For most young men this gesture was the sign for oral sex; for Fariq it was code for “I had an accident.” Winston reached under the seat and freed Fariq’s crutch.

The bus rolled onto Broadway, honking its way out of Bedford-Stuyvesant and into the fringes of the more cosmopolitan Williamsburg. As the projects receded into the distance the two survivors straightened in their seats, looking out the grimy windows. On the crowded sidewalks the people looked tired and angry, fighting for space on their way home from work. Bohemian whites weaved in and out of traffic, heads down, pissed off they couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan. Pairs of Hasidic men, dapper in black pin-striped coat-and-tail suits, walked like dandies, holding attaché cases and rehashing last night’s Knicks game. The only people Winston could differentiate as individuals were the Puerto Ricans. To Winston the whites, Jewish and Gentile, had the same general physiognomy. With callous, tight-lipped expressions, they marched as one, lockstep, arms linked at the elbows. The Puerto Ricans reminded him of people he knew. They were more or less from around the way, more or less niggers, more or less poor. The Puerto Ricans had faces he could say hello to. And he said a big silent “What’s happening?” to the woman in the green rayon sweater. Yes, you, honey dip, with the shopping bag. Why you walking so fast? Hurrying to help the kids with their homework? I feel you. The capital of Kansas is Topeka, that’s all I remember .

Winston peered into the flitting eyes of the colored boys who had sprouted and grown up along market walls like vines. He could tell which ones were filial home-by-eleven mama’s boys, which ones were walking the tightrope between rebellion and sainthood. Some, like the young man about Winston’s age, diddy-bopping against the foot traffic, had surrendered to the streets. Winston knew that one well, a lost warrior looking for an arena to test his skills. Winston grinned and delivered a whispered challenge: “You lucky I ain’t out there. We could bump shoulders and squab. Wax that ass, nigger.” Then a bit louder: “Sucker.”

Winston pressed the expanse of his back against the engine-warmed seat. The motor’s churning caused the seat to vibrate and he relaxed for a moment, enjoying the free massage. Fariq looked at his friend. He knew that smirk, the satisfied look after Winston had beaten the crap out of someone. “Tuffy?”

“Mmm.”

“You really did faint back there, didn’t you?”

“Battle fatigue, I guess. Saved my life, though. Maybe it was God reaching down and touching me. Saving me for some higher purpose.” Winston laughed. “Quick, Smush, cheer me up.” Fariq drummed his fingers against his jawbone. “Remember the cat-ass punk you beat down last week in front of the Old Timers’ Lounge?”

“Yeah, waving that box cutter, ‘ En garde , motherfucker,’ like he going to do somethin’.”

“I heard to avoid the neighborhood embarrassment the punk tried to join the armed forces. Been to all the motherfuckers — Navy, Marines, Coast Guard — but he can’t pass the psychological. You bruised his brain or some shit. Every two minutes for no reason at all he yells out ‘La Mega!’ like he a DJ on that Spanish station. He be taking the repeat-after-me oath, ‘I solemnly swear to uphold La Mega !’ ‘Yes sir, I’m really interested in flight mechanics and La Mega Noventa y siete punto nueve !’ Nigger a permanent radio jingle.”

Winston smiled. “So let’s call that nigger La Mega from now on, okay?”

“Yeah.”

Tuffy pulled a crinkled brown paper bag from his jacket pocket and offered it to Fariq. “You hungry?”

“What you got?”

“Pork rinds and fish.”

“You might has well got shot. The way you eat, you killing yourself anyway. How much you weigh now?”

“I don’t know — three-ten, three-twenty. It’s been a while since I’ve been to the meat-packing plant on Edgecombe to sit on the scale. Anyway, these are fat-free pork rinds.”

Fariq threw up his hands. “You idiot! Pork rinds are pieces of pig fat deep-fried in pig grease. How can they be fat-free when they’re one hundred percent fat? See, dumb niggers like you keeps the white man in business.”

Winston shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a small clear plastic jug of a light blue syrupy punch. “And now you drinking a Thirstbuster? How many times I told you the Klan owns that shit. That junk will make you sterile. How you think the company can afford to charge only twenty-five cent for the stuff? CIA subsidizes that fucking poison. You ever see Thirstbusters in the white neighborhoods? Hell no. What, white folks don’t want a bargain?”

There was something to what Fariq was saying. Whenever Winston was in Midtown, doing the things he couldn’t do in Harlem, such as seeing a movie or shopping for logo-free clothes, and got a craving for a Thirstbuster, his favorite drink was impossible to find. Stocked with colas and nectars, the shelves in the clean East Side delicatessens had natural waters from every lake in Europe, but no Thirstbusters. Winston would ask the shopkeeper for a grape or pineapple Thirstbuster and get a blank stare in return, forced to exit the store examining his two-dollar bottle of melted glacier water for mastodon hairs.