Paul Beatty - Tuff

When the laughter died down, Nadine tried to bring the conversation back to the lovemaking distinctions between the Caucasian and the Negro. “You never said, was there a difference in how a white girl fucks and how we do it?”

“It ain’t like I been with a whole bunch of white girls. All I know is Latin babes like to pull on your ears, but I’d say, no difference in the coochie — pussy’s pussy.”

“I fucked a woman who didn’t have a pussy,” volunteered Armello, reluctantly tearing his eyes away from the sex video. “ Una vieja —bitch was about fifty. Met her in Zebulon, North Carolina. She didn’t have a pussy, had a hysterectomy when I got with her. Stuck my entire hand up in there,” Armello slowly opened and closed his fist. “So much room in that mug, I could feel the wind blowing. Coño , if I’d’ve had a flashlight, I could have made shadow puppets on the insides of her stomach.”

Using the light from the television, Armello illustrated his sexual escapade by producing shape-shifting silhouettes, substituting the bedroom wall for some aging southern belle’s cervix. Barking canines metamorphosed into jellyfish. Pachyderms transformed into craning swans. Finding Armello’s story a repulsive anaphrodisiac, Winston excused himself from the room. “Me voy. Smush, dame chavo.”

“How much?”

“A pound.”

Winston took the five-dollar bill from Fariq, and said his goodbyes. “Tell Antoine I’m gone.”

Making his way downstairs, Winston could see the party was winding down. The living room smelled of musty men and spilled beer; plastic cups were strewn across the sticky floor. The bay windows, fogged from the night’s activities, were beginning to clear. The few remaining couples held hands and made out in the corners of the living room. A tall man slow-danced by himself, spinning, dipping, and softly crooning lyrics to a saccharine love ballad.

Once out the door Winston saw the little Joad girl sitting alone on a car bumper, fingering her bell, the preteen divas having gone home for the night. “Your moms still ain’t come out?” Winston asked.

The girl shook her head no and asked, “Did you see her in there?”

“What she look like?”

“Like me, but a little older.”

Suddenly, Winston was in a hurry to get home. He held the door open and waved the girl inside. Crossing the threshold, the girl stopped and punched him in the stomach. Before she could scamper inside, Winston lifted her by the collar, ripping the bell from her neck before setting her down. “You don’t need to let her know you coming, you just let her know you there.”

On his way to the subway he hoped that Yolanda would still be awake when he got home. He pictured her wearing a sheer silk teddy, two sticks of Black Love incense burning, a bottle of baby oil resting on the nightstand.

To avoid the stifling heat of the subway station, he waited at the top of the stairs, ears cocked for the roar of the next Manhattan-bound train, eyes on a group of cornrowed turnstile jumpers hurrying past him into the bowels of the transit system. He thought about what Fariq had said earlier: how women become invisible. Sex becomes routine. A salvo of gunfire rang out on the street above him. Winston was looking forward to the routine.

Girl, you my shorty, my wisdom, my Earth .

L ook at Ben Franklin . Tuffy, holding a starched one-hundred-dollar bill up to his face, was scrutinizing the old statesman’s portrait. Nigger look upset. Like somebody just told him, “You discovered electricity? So what, the radio ain’t been invented yet.” Crisp notes of the same denomination as the one in his hands swelled his pockets. So much so, he barely had room enough for his keys and bubble gum, much less his pistol, which he now toted in his sock. And Ben look like he about to say, “Motherfucker, if I was twenty years younger I put my pilgrim shoes so far in your ass …” Winston smelled the bill, aahed, then stuffed it back into his pocket.

On every corner of the intersection of Lexington and 106th Street his newly hired support staff, consisting of Inez, Fariq, Charley, and Yolanda and Jordy, canvassed the Monday-morning commuters. Fariq handed a woman a flyer, then shoved a clipboard in the drowsy worker’s face. “That’s him, right there,” he said, pointing across Lexington Avenue in Winston’s direction. “Hell yeah, he’s a good man — the best.” Fariq called out to his candidate, “Tuffy! Come over here, yo!” Winston kept his head down, his eyes fixed on his new shoes, looking for scuff marks on the burnished leather. “Get over here, son, and shake this lady’s hand. She wants to meet you!” Pretending he couldn’t hear Fariq’s request over the traffic noise, Winston cupped his ear, mouthed “Thank you” and greeted the woman with a grand-marshal parade wave. The woman waved back and signed the petition. Shouting over the woman’s head, Fariq cursed his friend’s lethargy. “Tuffy, you want these people to vote for you, you supposed to come running. You they servant. You doing for them. Don’t let that little chump change in your pocket fill your head, nigger!” Winston juggled his testicles and shouted, “Suck my dick, motherfucker!” The potential voter slunk into the subway, looking at the composed figure on the flyer, then crazily at the real candidate holding his crotch and yelling obscenities.

Winston thrust his hands into his pockets and squeezed the knot of bills. A jolt surged through his body. It was as if the bills were electrified. His joints jumped. His skin tingled with privilege — proving Ben Franklin’s research on conductivity is still incomplete.

A slim-hipped woman in a receptionist-tight black skirt walked past Winston and did a double-take. “That you on that poster?” she asked. He peered over his shoulder at the campaign poster in the restaurant window behind him. He and Inez had designed it two nights ago over gin and lemonade. It read:

THE REVOLUTION MAY BE DEAD,

BUT THERE IS A GHOST IN THE MACHINE

EAST HARLEM — VOTE FOR WINSTON FOSHAY

CITY COUNCIL 8TH DISTRICT

A SCARY MOTHERFUCKER

AMBIVALENT ON DRUGS, GUNS, AND ALCOHOL IN THE COMMUNITY

AGAINST CATS IN THE SUPERMERCADOS

ANTI–COP

ANTI–COP

ANTI–COP

TOPPLE THE SYSTEM: VOTE SEPTEMBER 9TH — A PARTY

Underneath “A Scary Motherfucker” was an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch photo of a sullen-faced sixteen-year-old Winston staring directly into the camera. His features were ashen. His eyelids drooped to an angle two degrees from slumber. An unlit cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth. Inez had taken the snapshot moments after a judge cleared him on drug-trafficking charges because the arresting officer was two hours late to the proceedings. She had implored him to smile. “You’re free,” she said. Winston looked relieved, not free. He made the obligatory vow to go straight, but never smiled. Soon after taking the suit and bow tie back to the Nation of Islam member Fariq had borrowed it from, he returned to his old ways.