Paul Beatty - Tuff

“That’s because they’d get lit up. And Whitey, don’t interrupt me.”

“Winston, do you and your friends go around bashing gay people?” asked Antoine.

“Man, what you saying? If I recall correctly, when I was little you and your little crew of faggots used to tease me and then beat me up. I was one who was bashed. You always hear of violence against fags, but you don’t never hear of fag violence against straight motherfuckers.”

“Fuck you, Tuffy.”

“Then don’t start. I ain’t about to take your side just because we cousins.”

Fariq began screaming, “Will you all, please, stop interrupting me and let me finish my story?”

The others quieted down. “Go ’head, nigger, damn.”

“Right. What the fuck was I talking about?”

“Lesbians.”

“Right. To each they own, know what I’m saying? But what I want to know is why lesbians dress so fuckin’ bad? I mean, they dress like they going to a cookout to roast frankfurters and eat discount potato chips. What they carry in their purses? Paper plates and plastic forks? Tan shorts, hiking boots, purple socks, and a fucked-up haircut. Look like they ready to pitch a tent and have a potato-sack race at a moment’s notice. How come these bitches ain’t got no style? I mean, I know all these bitches ain’t working construction?”

Antoine sucked his teeth. “Smush, you need to be more sensitive to the homosexual community. Especially since you, you know, is crippled and all.”

“Now what, I got to suck dick to be politically correct?”

“Ask Tuffy, he a politician,” suggested Nadine.

“Am I?” Winston asked, forcing another burning swallow down his gullet, and not so subtly sliding the vodka back on the shelf. By the gnarl in his voice it was evident to Fariq and the others that this drunk was going to be an introspective one for Winston. They almost preferred his mean psychosexual binges, when he would rampage through a club robbing men pressed up against the urinals, stand in the middle of the dance floor conducting the DJ by waving his penis like a flaccid baton. “Y’all better get off the politician thing. I ain’t never said I was a politician — even if I did say I was, it wouldn’t make me one. Whatever you seen me doing, that’s what I am.”

Armello raised his can in Winston’s direction. “So right now you a drunk motherfucker?”

“Yup, and ain’t ashamed of it neither. I ain’t like them cabdrivers. You get in the cab the driver try to start up a conversation, not because he a friendly guy, but to see if he fucked up and let the wrong nigger in his cab. ‘Hello, my friend. Back in my country, I am scientist. I am doctor.’ Motherfucker, shut the fuck up, you cabdriver!”

“But I bet if you was back there bleeding to death, you’d be hoping he’d be saying ‘I am doctor,’ Fariq said, waylaying Winston’s Sophoclean complaint. “Come on, y’all, let’s do what we came to do before Tuffy end up doing something stupid.”

Everyone agreed, reaching for their beer cans to take to the back room, mulling over which of the identical cans belonged to whom, their hands circling over the cluster of containers, wary of picking up someone else’s backwash. His lips pursed and making childlike airplane noises, Winston’s thick, flattened hand buzzed over the other hands; then, to the screeching whistle of a dive bomber making a pass, pitched and yawed its way through the other hands, swooping up a can from the middle of the pack. Satisfied, he scooted toward the back room, happily chugging his beer. “Nigger, how in fuck you know that’s your brew?” Armello shouted at Winston’s back. Winston flipped the now empty container over his shoulder. “Man, I twist the thingamajig on the lid.” Nadine reached out to catch the can. The pull tab was cleverly twisted to three o’clock. “Oh snap, that’s pretty smart.”

“I thought you motherfuckers was supposed to be ghetto,” Winston said, disappearing into the darkness of the back room.

Moneybags blocked his actors around the card table, which was nothing more than a cardboard box propped up on a milk crate. Though he was speaking in a barely comprehensible drunken brogue, Moneybags was more lucid than Winston had ever seen him. With the efficiency of a Broadway taskmaster, he rehearsed everyone for their roles in a three-card-monte production set to open in one week’s time. Armello, the leading man, stood behind the box, his magician-quick hands making the cards flip and leapfrog at will. Nadine was to play the ingenue. It would be her job to lure the marks to the game with a subtle squeeze of her breast, a slow lick of her upper lip, a foolhardy hundred-dollar bet. “Nadine, you have to sell that line: ‘Fuck, I’m losing my daughter’s birthday money.’ Make a man want to come and stand next to you. A whale with deep pockets, who thinks he can show the lady how it’s done — win some money and take you home.” Charles and Smush would be the supporting players, shills whose duties were to purposely obscure the mark’s view of the table, arousing his curiosity. Having enticed the mark into the game, the duo would advise him on its finer points, explaining that if they united in their efforts, they could turn the odds against the dealer. Charles was especially good at this. Winston remembered the time they’d stolen boxes of perfume from a broken-down van on FDR Drive, unloading it for five dollars a bottle in midtown, Whitey pitching the shag in an impeccable British accent: “Straight from France and Italy, the finest scents for your mum, your luv, and for you git wanker puftahs, your mates. Sixty dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue, five dollars at just Fifth Avenue.” Upon hearing the princely argot of the United Kingdom, West Indians on their lunch breaks fought each other to purchase bottles of perfume from the benevolent Brit.

Typecast as the heavy, Winston played the same part in the sham as always: he was to be the stick man — a bit player who stayed away from the action, vigilant for the police and the suckered, who having lost face in front of their girlfriends invariably returned demanding a refund. After he lobbied for a speaking role, Moneybags gave Tuffy a tryout as the lead shill, directly across from Armello. But Winston was in Armello’s light, and as Moneybags said while shunting him once more to the side: “Tuffy, you too big. Can’t nobody see the cards!” Winston kicked the milk crates, scattering the cards to the floor. Only Fariq deigned to speak up. “Look, Tuff, every nigger got to do what he do best, and motherfucker, can’t nobody regulate like you!”

Winston brusquely stepped past Fariq toward Whitey. Reaching into Charley O’s trouser pocket, he pulled out a sack of weed and dangled it in front of his nose. The curl in the corner of Whitey’s mouth gave Winston tacit “But don’t smoke it all” approval, and he sauntered out of the room.

“What’s wrong with you?” Antoine asked.

“Nothing,” Winston replied, gazing up at the television set. Antoine laughed through his nose. Though he hadn’t seen his cousin in nearly two years, he hadn’t changed very much. “Tuff?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you sit?”

Winston backed onto a bar stool. When he was younger, he thought the television screen was a mirror: a telepathic reflecting glass that sucked the thoughts from his mind, then played them back, so that he would know what he was thinking.

“Antoine?”

“What?”

“Movie is this?”

“You don’t know? Get out, I thought you’d seen everything ever made! It’s one of Carl’s movies, The Green Berets . John Wayne joint with this big-eared motherfucker as a nosy reporter. Sulu from Star Trek plays an Uncle Tom Vietnamese.”