Paul Beatty - Tuff

Winston downed his prized drink in two gulps, slowly pulled the container from his mouth, and let out a loud “aaaahhhh.” “Dag, Fariq, you right, my sperms is fizzing.”

“Fuck you.”

Winston crushed the empty plastic container in one hand and bowled it down the aisle. The bus continued down Broadway.

“I got an idea how to make some cash. You down, Tuff?”

“Don’t know.”

“This drug insanity is played out. Shit is a hassle. You have to develop a regular clientele, the inventory is all complicated, one connect is LIFO, the other is FIFO. Too many unorganized crazy motherfuckers to deal with. We need to be into some self-contained shit. Make a quick strike and be out. Hit and quit it.”

“LIFO and FIFO? What the fuck you talking about?”

“Last in, first out; first in, first out. Man, I’m talking about revolutionizing the drug business. Inventin’ a product that if you look at it for more than two seconds, you’re addicted. Something that stays in your system forever, like PCP, and maybe throw in some trace amounts of Prozac to make it attractive to the upper-class-white market — ta-da, a drug that keeps losers high for life.” Fariq touched Winston lightly on the forearm like some used-car salesman with the deal of a lifetime. “A one-time, mind-altering gold mine. I’d call it Eternal Bliss, the dope fiend’s Everlasting Gobstopper. I’d be Willie Wonka up it this motherfucker. I’m tellin’ you.”

Winston pushed Fariq away. “You tripping.”

Undaunted, Fariq continued, his voice rising a couple of octaves to an overzealous infomercial pitch. “Tuff, think of the long-term savings for the consumer.”

While Fariq rambled on about his marketing strategy, Winston ignored him and watched the Manhattan skyline creep closer, lapsing into a funk somewhere between semi-alertness and sleep. The images of the dead bodies he’d left behind flickered in his head like science-class slides. He closed his eyes and began counting the number of dead bodies he’d seen in his twenty-two years. Including Fariq’s grandmother in the funeral home: sixteen.

After a warm weekend night, at 109th and Fifth Avenue, the border of Spanish Harlem and black Harlem, bodies turned up on the streets like worms on sidewalks after an afternoon shower. Sometimes the coroner pulled junkies stiff as Styrofoam from the abandoned apartments on 116th Street, or a group of kids on their way to school found a homeless person frozen to death under the brick railroad trestle of Park Avenue. Two weeks ago, on his way to buy an Italian ice at the pizza shop at 103rd and Lexington, Winston heard the screech of truck brakes. He looked up to see little Ursula Huertas, seven years old, flying across Lexington Avenue as if she’d been shot out of a circus cannon. She lay there in the gutter, a crumpled, unmoving ball of black hair and bony brown limbs, her mother and the purple flowers on her bleached white Sunday-school dress doing the screaming for her. Winston planted a sandalwood punk in the cardboard shrine Ursula’s relatives erected on the spot where she died. Filled with burning candles, assorted kitsch pictures of the Virgin Mary and angelic saints Winston didn’t know, the shrine was one of many forever-flame memorials that pop up on Spanish Harlem’s street corners and last for about two weeks.

The encroaching skyscrapers of the city began to look to Winston like tombstones for giants and he grew strangely homesick. Niggers die everywhere, Winston knew, but he longed to be back home among the tragedy of the familiar. Drinking brews on a corner where he knew or had at least heard of the names mentioned in the spray-paint cenotaphs that dot the neighborhood. Watching the children flick skelly caps over the sidewalk epitaphs where so-and-so’s nigger got dropped. Mourners with money to spend hired local graffiti artists to paint huge murals on handball walls or tenement sides. A larger-than-life-sized portrait of the deceased accompanied by Day-Glo renditions of luxury cars and the stylized signatures of his friends. The neighborhood women were never memorialized on the walls. Winston wished he could draw. He would have painted a three-story mural dedicated to his older sister Brenda. Winston was twelve when Fariq called up to his window, “Nigger, you better come on, Brenda getting dogged up on Seventeenth.” Winston arrived on the scene just as the ambulance was leaving. He walked to a public phone, one from which, thanks to deregulation, he could call anywhere in the United States and speak for thirty seconds for a quarter. Winston dialed local, his mother’s work number. “May I speak to Mrs. Foshay?… Ma, go to Metropolitan. I’ll meet you in the emergency room.”

Winston took out an indelible marker and absentmindedly scribbled his grade-school tag on the bus’s frayed upholstery: TUFFY 109. “So you down, kid?” asked Fariq, elbowing Winston in the ribs. “We talking googobs of money. Scads o’ cash.”

“Shit ain’t going to work.”

“And why the fuck not?”

“Because addicts is looking for a reason to get up in the morning, and crack, heroin, whatever, is the reason. Lipping that pipe like falling in love every day — maybe a little better. Can you imagine what it’s like waking up in the morning and knowing that soon as you hustle up ten dollars, you going to be in always-and-forever love? To do that you can’t wake up already in love. You got to get up in a cold room, mad as fuck you been sleeping on a flat pillow, or without a pillow, convinced that life hates you, and you hate life. Then you can cherish the high. You want the high to last, but not forever, yo.”

Fariq punched his friend in the shoulder. “You sound like you know what you talking about.”

Winston thought about confessing to the time, the fifth anniversary of his sister’s death, he experimented with crack and spent four days in his bedroom closet tweaked out of his mind. Like an addicted jeweler, he held powdery rocks to his eye with a set of tweezers, examining each brownish-white marbled facet for imperfections. When he ran out of cocaine he pronounced the bread crumbs and balls of lint flawless and stuffed them into his pipe. On day four Winston realized he’d been masturbating with paper-towel rolls and petroleum jelly for entertainment, and quit his mini-addiction out of sexual shame. But whenever Winston heard the line “I wanna rock right now” from Rob Base’s hip-hop classic “It Takes Two,” his throat parched. Turning away from Fariq, Winston mopped his brow. “I don’t know nothing about it, but I’ve heard people talk.”

Fariq paused for a moment. “Maybe what Eternal Bliss needs is some type of time-release-cold-remedy-type mechanism.”

Winston groaned, and the bus jolted to a stop. “Broadway Station, last stop.”

From there it was the J train across the bridge to Canal Street, then a long walk through the dank algae-laden tunnels to catch the uptown local. Once on the train, Fariq leaned down and glared at a middle-aged man seated next to the door. “Can’t you read, motherfucker?” he shouted, pointing to a sticker that read, THESE SEATS RESERVED FOR THE HANDICAPPED AND ELDERLY. The embarrassed man rose and politely offered Fariq his seat. Winston laughed, and the tweed-jacketed man standing next to him nonchalantly checked his wallet. Winston took a deep breath and, to keep from slapping the man upside the head, grabbed him firmly by the wrist, digging his watchband into his skin. “I had a long criminal-activity-filled day. One more crime ain’t going to hurt me none. Crime down, but it ain’t stopped.” The man rushed out at the next stop. A woman two seats away tucked her brooch beneath her blouse and twisted her engagement ring so the stone’s brilliance was doused in the dark of her palm.