Paul Beatty - Tuff

Tuffy, the collective eyes of the Bloods hawking him, approached a stocky Latin King, Brody Onteveras, known as King Bro. “You got case quarters for a dollar?”

“Here.” King Bro slapped three quarters in his palm.

Winston straightened. “Give me my fucking quarter, motherfucker. How you going to show, charging me a quarter for a dollar change?”

“You lucky I don’t charge you four dollars a quarter.”

“You better stop playing. Did I charge you when you needed a place to stay after Marisol …? Motherfucker, don’t let me put your shit in the street.” Blushing, King Bro handed Winston the fourth quarter.

Winston cut the line of inmates waiting for the phone and placed a call home. No answer.

“What’s this I hear about you running for City Council?” King Bro asked, his question quickly followed by a chorus of “For reals?” from every corner of the room.

“For reals. I’m running.”

“Why you doing something foolish like that?” asked Whip Whop, rising from his seat and almost treading into the Latin King side of the bunker.

Winston grabbed a chair, spun it backward, and sat in it so that his chin rested on the top of the seat back. He positioned himself between the Latin and the black camps. “Because I was talking out the back of my neck and said some shit without really thinking. Then someone put some money in my pocket.” The prisoners gathered around Winston as close as warring factions could gather around anything. “Man, can you imagine if a nigger like you won?”

“No, I can’t.”

“That be some out shit, though.”

“But if I did win, you know what I’d do?”

“What?”

“I’d sit in the meetings, take my shoes off, and put my funky feet on the table, and say, ‘I don’t know what you stupid motherfuckers is making laws about, but don’t forget the poor smelly motherfuckers like me.’ At the very least I’ll tell y’all niggers when the next roundup is.”

“On the real, though,” Whip Whop and King Bro said simultaneously. With a nod Whip Whop yielded the floor. “We need a voice. One of us speaking, instead of some television nigger speaking for us. Tuffy, if you ran I’d vote for you just on some ol’ humbug-I-don’t-give-a-fuck-type-shit.”

Winston took out a couple of empty petition pages and some voter registration cards, items neither the police nor the guards who frisked him deemed dangerous weapons. “CO,” he called out, “pen, please. I’m writing a letter to my lawyer.” The guard tossed him a felt-tipped pen. “All y’all sign here then, put me on the ballot. You nonfelony motherfuckers, fill these out. I’m going to send you misdemeanor bench warrant niggers absentee ballots.”

While the men passed around the petition, Winston spoke until lights out, not politicking a bloc of potential voters, but just simply getting some thoughts off his chest. “Look at us — in jail, treated like animals. Take a last look at the white boys, because they fixing to get desk appearance tickets. Judge going to wave his finger in their faces, ‘Don’t do it again.’ For us it don’t matter if we do it once or two million times, we headed for Rikers to spend sleepless nights listening to jet airplanes take off and land, and niggers getting tossed. Look at y’all niggers, niggers I’ve known since back in the day when we was shorter than shorties. I played in the johnny-pump with Ramón, Peehole, Felipe, Point Blank, Carlos, Tony Bump-off, Yancey. Stolen petty shit with Foster, Pan-Pan, Hard Top, and Hennessey. Lent money, borrowed money from damn near everybody in this piece. But I realized soon as I walked in here, seen so many niggers I know to be down decent motherfuckers, I was like, ‘Damn, there’s some good niggers in jail.’ Most of us in here because we was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Been that way since our births, if you think about it.” As he spoke, the circle tightened around him, cinching like a drawstring to a felt bag of valuables. With Winston as the midpoint of the circle, the friction between the gangs eased. The arc of each gang circumscribed a disjointed circle around him. Winston imagined the ghost of Musashi Miyamoto, stick in hand, filling in its gaps. The young gangsters listened, sucking on razor blades lodged alongside their callused gums, rubbing the crescent-shaped scars on their faces with their fingertips.

Ten minutes before his arraignment hearing, Winston was in a small holding cell behind the upstairs courtroom. Across from him sat his legal aid lawyer, Ms. Rachel Fisher. Rachel had the sniffles. As she leafed through the stack of Winston’s files, hawking and wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand, errant droplets of snot fell on his docket. “Mr. Foshay?” Winston grunted, offended and pleased she didn’t offer to shake his hand. “You got some record here. Because of your propensity to skip bail and miss court appearances the Criminal Justice Agency has decided your bail should be set at three thousand dollars. Since there’s no way you can afford that amount, I’ll try to get it reduced.”

“I can afford it.”

Rachel looked up with a snort. “You can? We’ll make a plea, then they’ll send you home,” she said with a lawyerly finality.

“Yeah, but I ain’t paying it. I need that money for other things.”

“Well, then no matter how you plead, there’s a chance you’ll be remanded to Rikers if you don’t post bail. I think if we plead guilty now to the cruelty charge the district attorney will drop the other counts without much of a fight. Possession of firearm — there’s no evidence of a firearm. The rest of these are bullshit. I think you’ll get four months max, maybe a fine. Maybe nothing.”

“I ain’t pleading guilty to shit. I ain’t done shit but get arrested.”

“But Mr. Foshay, you’re charged with a weapons violation and cruelty to an animal. Specifically the shooting of a pit bull”—the lawyer lifted a sheet of paper—“named Der Kommissar in the head, so they arrested you for something.”

“Nobody arrested me. I made a citizen’s arrest on myself because I needed to go to jail to take care of some business, but I ain’t done nothing.”

“You were arrested, but no crime was committed, per se?”

“No, I didn’t commit no crime, per se.”

“Per se.” Winston allowed the phrase to dangle on the tip of his tongue, enjoying its foreign tang. “ ‘Per se’? What language is that?”

“It’s Latin.”

Fighting to breathe through her clogged sinuses, Rachel tilted her head back. For the next five minutes she counseled Winston on the efficacy of making a guilty plea with her nose pointed to the ceiling. “Any questions, Mr. Foshay?”

“What’s the judge’s name?”

“Judge Weinstein.”

“He Jewish?”

“Yes, I believe he is.”

“Then I might got a chance. Maybe I’ll represent myself.”

“You want to make a fool out of yourself, too cheap to hire a lawyer or post bail, you go pro se , be my guest.”

“I don’t know about no pro se , but I arrested myself, and I’m going to represent myself. Shouldn’t be a problem. If I start losing I’ll just go Al Pacino in And Justice for All on them. Start screaming, ‘No, you’re out of order. In fact the whole system is out of order!’ ” The lawyer cleared her nasal passages with a loud sniffle, pinched her red-rimmed nostrils closed, and gathered her papers. “Fine, whatever,” she said. “Have you ever seen To Kill a Mockingbird ?”

“Of course.”

“Then I suggest you do a Gregory Peck and charm the judge.”

Before she stood to leave, Winston grabbed her wrist. “Can you do like Gregory Peck and get an innocent nigger like me out the door?”