Paul Beatty - Tuff

The older girls resumed dreaming of success, imagining journalists writing rave reviews of their debut single and conducting fawning magazine interviews. “Yeah, I’m going be up in the magazine cruising through the neighborhood in my Range Rover. Waving and saying whud’dup to people on the street. Talking about, “These are the niggers I used to know.”

“I got a name! I got a name! We could be B-U-B-B-A — Blown Up Big By Afternoon.”

“How about N-I-P-P-L-E — Naked In Public Places Like Escalators?”

The quiet little girl tried to blow a bubble that would turn her world a chalkish pink. A bubble so big that when it popped, it would startle the gods and stick to her ears. As soon as the gum was moist enough for bubble blowing, she flattened the wad against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Then with a loud, wet tongue cluck she broke the suction and shifted the disk so its outer edges lined the insides of her incisors and the meat of the gum covered her inner lips. Slowly the girl parted her teeth and lips with the tip of her tongue, while taking a deep world-record-bubble-gum-blowing breath. Her breath control was excellent. The meditation-smooth exhale produced a nice clean softball-sized but rapidly thinning bubble. The girl panicked. She didn’t have enough gum. Her breath came in stops and starts. Just one more puff of air … but her next blow was too strong and the entire wad flew out of her mouth and landed in the street, a pink waste of still-juicy, sweet, and sticky bubble gum.

Winston entered the foyer and touched knuckles with the doorman, who parted a burgundy curtain and bade him enter. Dancing couples packed the front room. Hands thrust out in front of them and eyes closed, they wafted in the crashing breakers of bass-heavy funk rolling over them. Submerged in the music, the dancers swam in syncopation like a school of fish, suddenly twisting, changing direction at some hidden signal in the vibrations.

Normally in such a setting Winston would scan the dance floor watching the rumps shake, timing the pelvic thrust of a shapely rear end so he could slide behind a cutie-pie, align his zipper with the groove in her behind, and ride her ass until he needed a beer. But there would be no dancing tonight, because to Winston’s thinking, It’s crazy faggots up in this here motherfucker . Winston checked his hands for signs of contagion. The red light turned his brown skin a mossy green. The pungent tobacco smoke, incense, and the saccharine stench of women’s perfume on sweaty men combined to form a swamp gas that immediately saturated his clothes. Winston wanted a beer, but the wanton looks of the men embracing in the dark corners, the come-hither stares of the unattached wallflowers leadened his limbs. Aghast at the homosexual brazenness, Winston was hard pressed to move.

He asked around for Antoine, and a partygoer directed him to the VIP lounge in the basement. When he reached the foot of the stairs, the crew was waiting for him: Fariq, Charley O’, Nadine, Armello, and Moneybags, the niggers he still knew. They occupied the far corner of the bar, sipping cans of Budweiser and silently watching a video on the overhead television. At the near corner six women stirred their drinks with the repose of regulars.

Trying his best to look like an overworked hostess, Cousin Antoine tended bar. Bar rag tucked into his waist, he scurried from the blender to the beer cooler, flipping his long ponytail, blowing the bangs off his forehead, and sneaking peaks at the TV screen. Behind Antoine, amongst the neon and mirrored advertisements for import beers the bar didn’t stock, was a neon sign: the FTD logo — Mercury, ankles winged in mid-arabesque, delivering a bouquet. Antoine looked up from a Brandy Alexander. “Tuffy!” he yelled, scampering from behind the bar in a straight-legged wind-up-doll trot, his house slippers sloshing through the sawdust on the floor. “Damn, it’s good to see you! I thought by this time you’d be upstate doing twenty-five-to-life. You ain’t killed nobody yet?”

Winston pointed to the pair of hip-hugging dungarees that crushed his cousin’s genitals into near-oblivion, and delivered his retort. “You ain’t got a vagina yet?” The regulars at the bar laughed, and Winston noticed that two of the six women laughed like pirates, with guttural “hardy-har-har”s that belied their svelte bodies: the one in the turquoise blouse and Ms. Thing with the beehive hairdo and red halter top. He reminded himself no matter how drunk he got, to stay away from those two — they probably owned penises bigger than his.

The cold snapping spritz of a newly opened Budweiser called Winston to the end of the bar. There the television loomed over his head at an angle that reminded him of being in a jailhouse day room. A beer can on a collision course with his own slid toward him. Fariq hobbled over and intercepted it, crutches swinging from his arms like pendulums. “Much faggots up in this piece, yo. I was surprised you suggested this spot, this being Brooklyn and all. Faggots and all. You right, though — ain’t nobody going to look for us here.” Fariq blew a kiss to Nadine, then raised his voice. “It was kind of tight coming through the disco, though. I remember back in the day when a motherfucker you didn’t know looked you in the eye, you’d be like ‘Hey my man, Fifty Grand, what’s happening? Stay safe.’ Now a motherfucker look you in the eye it mean he want to shoot you or stick his dick in your ass. Times is changed.” The rest of the gang thumped their Budweiser cans on the bar to show their approval of Fariq’s commentary. From the far end of the bar in a testy voice Antoine said, “How come boys always think that anal sex is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them?”

“I can think of something worse than being booty-busted.”

“What, Fariq?”

“Having a dick in your ass and one in your mouth!”

Though he found Fariq’s quip funny, Winston didn’t laugh as hard as he normally would. The feeling of being an outsider again crept up on him. He was within an arm’s length of his best friends, and yet he felt as if he were back atop the Empire State Building looking down on them through the reverse end of the telescope. They were in focus but very far away.

His discomfort had only a little to do with his antipathy for Brooklyn and being surrounded by men in search of ovaries arguing about whether or not they were homosexuals. It stemmed more from the fact that by bringing Spencer into his life and accepting Inez’s money he’d made a half-ass commitment to his life. He knew his friends saw him as turning his back on them, but that wasn’t the case. In the war zone that was his neighborhood Winston wanted to be a neutral nigger. He wanted to call time out, steal a Popsicle from the corner store, and rejoin the game when he felt like it. But for Tuffy there was no middle ground. He was either real or fake. Down or invisible.

He’d felt this way before, during a Rikers shakedown that didn’t involve him. During a cell-block search someone had handed him some contraband. He didn’t know what to do with it: swallow it, tuck it under a roll of fat, or give it back? He ended up with two months added to his sentence.

Watching his friends guzzle beer and chat, Winston wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He had a notion to call Spencer and seek some Big-Brotherly guidance. But the phone was near the transsexuals, one of whom was flitting his tongue like a disturbed snake. Winston let out a cry of frustration. “What’s wrong with you, son?” asked Armello.

“You niggers seem different.”

“Fuck, you talkin’ ’bout?”

“I don’t know, Whitey, it’s like tonight I don’t know y’all.”

Fariq moved from behind Nadine. He was a little drunk, and held his beer unsteadily, his middle finger off the can and pointing at Winston. “Nigger, you the one changed. Got a Jew and Ms. Inez running your fucking life. Man, I wouldn’t run for no white man’s City Council for no amount of money. Not fifteen thousand or fifteen million thousand.”