Paul Beatty - Tuff

“What about C-R-A-P, Coming Real At People?”

“That’s wack, we should be called A-S-S. We get on Soul Train , and the host’ll say, ‘All the way from Brooklyn, put your hands together for ASSSSS!’ ” The girl leaped off the car, danced a quick heel-toe-jig butt-shaking routine, then, clutching a microphone as real as her singing abilities, conducted the postperformance interview. “ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Felicia.’ ‘Felicia, I hear you’re the choreographer for the group, is that true?’ ‘I put together a little something something. Get the people excited.’ ‘And where do you hail from?’ ‘Brooklyn. Hey, Brooklyn in the house, y’all.’ ‘ASS has the number-one single on the charts, but everywhere I go people ask me what does ASS stand for, what should I tell them?’ ‘Tell them it stands for Always Singing Sisters.’ ”

One girl lifted her chin in Winston’s direction, alerting her friends to the presence of an older boy. As the would-be divas eyed him, Winston’s posture straightened and his face softened. Stopping within speaking range of the young ladies, he patted his stomach and ran his tongue over his teeth. The choreographer, at thirteen years old the doyenne of the group, closed the gap with two bold, hands-on-hip steps toward him, her egg-sized breasts violating his personal space. Tilting her head at the obtuse angle one uses to make sense of an abstract museum piece, she said, “Mmm, you fine.” The backup harpies slid off the car fender with all the seductiveness bony twelve-year-olds can muster.

“Where Antoine at?” Winston asked, looking skyward to keep from flirting, the tag line to male adolescence ringing in his head: “Old enough to pee, old enough …”

“He upstairs,” the choreographer answered, brushing her bangs from her forehead, then pointing toward the red window. “You going to get your dick sucked? You don’t look like no fag.”

“That’s my cousin.”

“Your name Tuffy?”

“Uh-huh. How you know?”

“He said you was coming by tonight. Antoine be talking about you. Told me you was his bodyguard. He said you be running up on niggers, for real.”

“Naw, it ain’t like that.”

Felicia was referring to the nights when Tuffy used to escort Antoine to the cab stand after long nights of working the peep show and fuck booths. Winston would tromp up the lighted spiraling stairs of the XXX Sex Palace to find his cousin on the second floor sitting on a bar stool, wearing high heels, a tight miniskirt, and a lavender bustier, striking pinup poses. After a 360-degree spin on the stool, Antoine emerged looking ready to be posted up over a homesick GI’s bunk.

“Who’s this?” he’d ask his coworkers, nose pointed to the heavens, back arched, hairless legs crossed with one hand resting limply over one knee. He’d flick one bra strap seductively off his shoulder, part his thin red lips ever so slightly, and flutter his eyelids. “I said, who’s this?”

“Betty Grable!”

“Jane Russell!”

“Susan Hayward!”

“No. No. No. How stupid can you be — I’m Ida Lupino!”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“You bitches better learn your history.”

“Let’s go, Antoine!” Winston would snarl, snatching his cousin’s rabbit-fur coat off the wall hook and, with a matador snap of the jacket, coax him off the stool and into the night. “ Vámanos , goddammit.”

“Winston, don’t call me Antoine. Here my name is Mons Venus, you know that.”

For thirty dollars in sticky one-dollar bills or fifty dollars in peep-show tokens, Winston’s job was to march Antoine past a sign reading

GIRLS!

GIRLS!

GIRLS!

(with penises) All sex acts non-refundable .

then guide him through a gauntlet of sexually frustrated and bewildered men. Men who after fifteen minutes of awkward light petting through a small window in a Plexiglas partition reached for the phone to negotiate the price of a vaginal display. Antoine would stall for time, prudishly suggesting that it was his time of month. Nervous, he’d scratch the razor stubble on his cheeks, his reluctance to “show some pussy” and the amplified rustle of his five o’clock shadow arousing the customer’s suspicion. The client would begin to panic. Eyes jumping from titties to Adam’s apple, back to titties, over to the hands and feet, and back to the titties. The man would jabber in clipped sentences, his anger and shock fusing the declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative into complete thoughts that accommodated any form of sentence punctuation. This bitch got a beard? This bitch got a beard! This bitch got a beard . “I demand to see the manager!”

After being shown the sign and laughed off the premises, the traumatized men lined Eighth Avenue, questioning their sexual orientation. With Winston as his escort, Antoine paraded past them like a debutante as they demanded recompense, threatened vengeance, and sometimes proposed marriage.

Felicia snapped open her lipstick case, then buried her face in the passenger’s-side mirror of a nearby car. She slowly applied the frosted-white wax with the expertise of a thirty-year-old. “Exactly like Antoine,” Winston commented. “Little girl, you need a new role model.”

He was about to enter Antoine’s building when he heard the tinny ringing of a bell. He turned just in time to see the smallest girl slither between two parked cars, yell a war cry, then charge toward him. Lurching forward, Winston stamped a hiking-boot-shod foot into the ground. The loud thud stopped the emaciated bell cow in her tracks, and she teetered like a nodding dope fiend trying to keep her balance. He recognized her immediately: it was the moppet who lived down the hall from the Brooklyn drug spot. “What are you doing here, you little thief?” The child averted her gaze and pointed at the red light in the window. “If you want to go upstairs and start pickpocketing faggots and transvestites, you in trouble, because they either wearing dresses or tight pants.”

The girl folded her prehensile arms tightly across her chest. The doleful expression on her face made the gesture seem more a self-hug than the intended show of disdain. “Fuck you, you fat motherfucker.” Winston had already picked out a spot on her leg to kick when the girl began crying, the sobs convulsing her skinny frame and causing the tiny bell to jingle eurhythmically. Winston cursed and spat at the ground, “Damn.” He looked at the child hard. She was even dirtier and thinner than he remembered. “Y’all know her?” he asked the older girls, wondering what about him set off such a violent reaction in the youngster. Winston tucked in his shirt. “Naw, some lady dropped her off out here and then went inside.”

The symptoms of poverty are timeless, and Winston knew exactly who the weepy kid looked like: an extra from John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath . A Brooklyn Joad, sullied from head to toe with the grime of parental and societal neglect. She wore a pair of tattered running shoes, the frayed laces tied through every other eyelet. Bands of dirt ringed her droopy white socks. A pair of knobby knees extended from the legs of her denim cutoffs. The grease-stained pink T-shirt was too small, and her bare midriff was bracketed by the bony ribcage of a lion cub starving in an African drought. Tufts of unkept sun-reddened hair flamed atop her head like a brushfire. The little girl pounded a small fist on her thigh and bit down hard on her bottom lip to control her crying. Samaritan that he was, Winston fished in his pocket for a piece of bubble gum. The confection disappeared from his hand before it was even offered. She chewed quickly, as if she were afraid Winston might reach into her mouth and take his gum back. “What the fortune say?” he asked, and she held the wrapper out for him to read. “Whoever said ‘Words cannot hurt me’ never got hit in the head with a dictionary.” That ain’t no fortune , Winston thought, turning his back on the girl and lumbering up the stairs. That’s a saying or a phrase or some shit .