Paul Beatty - Tuff

“You know how Jordy get when one of us isn’t around. You know he had an attack.”

“He did? When?”

“Last night. The asthma hit him and he stopped breathing. If I wasn’t up doing homework, I wouldn’t have noticed. He was fucking turning blue. Like an idiot I called your name three times before I remembered your ass was in jail. I had to walk to Metropolitan. Three hours until the doctor saw him.”

“They put the oxygen mask on him?”

“I mean it, never again. Next time a locked door ain’t all you going to come home to.”

Winston gingerly took the stroller from Yolanda. In doing so commandeering his son and his status as head of the household. Yolanda hooked a finger around his belt loop and the trio slowly hiked back to the house. Winston played father at the steering wheel, his avuncular blather shortening the trip back home. “Long as you don’t lock up the coochie, Boo, you can lock anything up you damn well please. Because you know, sooner or later I’m going to fuck up. It’s in a nigger’s nature. All I ask is you two accept my apologies. I ain’t saying forgive and forget, but remember I’m just a young nigger trying to break the cycle.”

“Winston, unless you start acting right, I’m going to break your cycle.”

Although his stalwart expression didn’t show it, Oyakata Hitomi Kinboshi was enraged. Sumo wrestling, his cherished livelihood, was dying an ignoble death in Spanish Harlem’s White Park. Here in a small local playground, the fifteen-hundred-year-old traditions of his sport were being violated like fourteen-year-olds at sleepaway camp. Instead of the yobidashi sitting cross-legged high up in a tower and announcing the start of the tournament with the customary playing of the sumo drums, a spindly-limbed herald sat atop a basketball hoop beating on a white plastic janitor’s bucket. In fifteen centuries a woman had never set foot on the dohyo , but a Japanese-American woman stood in the center of the hastily constructed ring, yelling inanities into the microphone like a Communist screech owl. The Oyakata’s English wasn’t very good, but he understood something to the effect of “No justice, no peace.”

Sumo wrestling, once the sport of the gods, was now a Japanese minstrel show, the wrestlers no longer warriors, but entertainers. They were Japan’s goodwill ambassadors, sent out by the government to make amends for each administration’s invariable breach of ethnic etiquette. Last year it was Vancouver to make amends for the foreign minister’s calling Canadians “junior Americans.” This time the justice minister blamed the country’s growing crime rate on Japanese youths’ desire to emulate American culture, specifically the wastrel and violent attitudes of blacks and Hispanics, characteristics inherent in most nonwhite races, but not the Japanese. Three months later, in an attempt to appease the unquieted ghetto masses, the Sumo Kyokai sent the Oyakata and the wrestlers to East Harlem.

The strange Japanese-American woman gestured to the crowd and a large black man rose to polite applause. The Oyakata smiled. It was the same sullen-faced young man he’d seen in the poster on the bus ride from the hotel — the one he thought looked like the Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. Standing up in the crowd, a child on his shoulders, a stuffed tiger on the child’s shoulders, the black man looked like the bottom of a totem pole. “What did the Japanese girl say?” Kinboshi asked his translator. The interpreter bowed. “She introduced the young man as Winston Foshay, a politician who is running for public office. There’s a petition circulating through the crowd. He needs fifty more signatures and he’ll be on the ballot.” Kinboshi shook his head in disgust. The translator must have made a mistake. That boy a politician? Never. Any fool could plainly see the impudence festering underneath a warrior’s I-don’t-give-a-damn expression. This Winston Foshay never had a civic thought in his life. With the body and face of a bullfrog, he was born to be either a sumo wrestler or blues singer. “Did she say something about Chairman Mao?” The interpreter answered yes, fumbling for a way to translate “Mao more than ever” into Japanese.

One of the sumotori , a Yokozuna named Takanohana, was in the ring performing the traditional dohyo-iri . Rising from his squat, he clapped his hands; then, with a hand behind his knee, hoisted a massive leg high above his head. His foot stamped down on the clay surface with a resounding thump. Instead of responding to the demonstration of the Yokozuna’s uncanny balance with the customary shout of “Yoisho!” the audience answered each heavy stomp with a boisterous “Aiiight!” Under the searing New York City sun Oyakata Kinboshi reddened.

Ms. Nomura, how come they raising their arm to the side like that?”

“To show that they aren’t carrying any weapons.”

“Fair fight — I likes that.”

The ancient sport immediately appealed to Winston. Never had he been in the presence of so many men his size. And in the world of sumo, he was on the small end of the scale, as most of the rikishi outweighed him by fifty to eighty pounds.

“Look at them two motherfuckers, they huge!”

“That’s Akebono and Musashimaru,” Inez said, referring to the two largest rikishi , each of whom stood well over six feet tall and weighed over four hundred and fifty pounds.

“They black?” asked Winston, puzzled by the wrestlers’ swarthy skins and wavy hair tied into oily topknots.

“No, I think they’re both from Hawaii.”

“Hawaiians always looked kind of black to me. Big noses, grass skirts, and shit. They seem real African but more laid back.”

Two lower-ranked rikishi prepared to enter the ring. Each man stoically tossed a purifying fleck of salt onto the dohyo , before determinedly stepping into the circle of inlaid straw and assuming their starting positions. Crouched down in football-like four-point stance, the half-naked titans, without any visible signal from the formally dressed referee, fired into one another. The sound of a slab of meat landing on a butcher’s cutting board echoed throughout the park. The crowd, momentarily stunned by the ferocity, suddenly burst out in cheers, wildly applauding when one wrestler dumped the other unceremoniously out of the ring with a deftly executed leg trip. “Takanishiki, sotogake no kachi!” said the ring announcer.

Tuffy sat back in his seat, deeply impressed by what he’d just witnessed. “Man, I likes this. May the best and biggest motherfucker win. These niggers ain’t just fat. Look at the leg muscles. The goddamn pecs. These boys is yoked. It ain’t a whole lot blubber just jiggling around like I thought it’d be. Ms. Nomura, why you never told me you like this stuff?”

“It’s embarrassing. So old-fashioned. So feudal. You know how you get crazy whenever somebody mentions slavery? ‘Why you have to bring that up? That was in the past.’ Sumo makes me feel that way. Makes my insides itchy, but sometimes when nobody’s around I scratch the itch and watch it on NHK.”

Normally, Winston didn’t have much use for sports or the mob mentality of the sports fan. He found the events repetitive, pointless, and armchair analysis of the contests even more so. It didn’t take long for the residents of his block to learn not to approach him after one of his frequent street fights saying, “Tuffy, you kicked that fool’s ass, but when you had him in that headlock what you should’ve did was …,” because the speaker would find himself on the ground, holding a dislocated jaw in place, in too much pain to beg for mercy. Winston triumphantly straddled over his victim, taunting him like Diomedes sans spear and armor. “What you should’ve done is kept your fuckin’ mouth shut.” But sumo wrestling tugged at his corpulent pride. He soon found himself choosing a wrestler at the introduction for some indiscriminate reason — unusual sideburns, a gangster smirk, an especially serene countenance — then unabashedly urging him on until the bout’s all-too-quick conclusion. Sometimes his allegiances changed mid-bout, touched by a smaller man’s cunning and quickness overcoming the stronger, larger man’s plodding orthodoxy. By bringing his street-fighter mentality to the matches, it was simple for him to figure out the rules. First man out of the ring or to touch the ground with something other than the soles of his feet loses. If Winston saw an opening in a wrestler’s defense that wasn’t exploited using the vicious tactic he’d employ under similar circumstances, then he knew his way was illegal. “Man, all the shit I’d do is outlawed. Because if that motherfucker grabbed me like that I’d kick him in the nuts, punch him in the face, yank on his ponytail, choke him with one hand, and gouge out his eyeballs with the other.”