Paul Beatty - Tuff

“Hold up, motherfucker!” Raychelle licked her thumb and brushed it across Winston’s eyebrows. “You know what I’m a name it, right?”

“Lonnie if it’s boy. Candice if it’s girl.”

“You remember.”

“Come on now, this Tuff.”

“How’s Jordy?”

“He all right. He don’t never talk, but he cool.”

“Raychelle, them niggers ain’t going to be at the spot forever, and unless you got some works, you best to come on!”

Raychelle bussed Winston on the eyelids, then, stomach-first, waddled into the street, tumbling after her already-departed boyfriend, who seemed to pull her along as if she were a mangled kite he was trying to get airborne. The couple moved briskly past a brick wall plastered with graffiti and campaign posters. Winston spat. The street lamp hanging overhead began to flicker. The strobelike flashes illuminated Winston and Spencer as if they were caught in a silent-movie lightning storm. “Damn, she used to be fine.”

“I bet she was. You can still see it. She still got some booty left.”

“Check you out, Rab, showing a little zest,” Winston said, still gazing up at the light. He handed Spencer his questions back, then clapped his hands. The beam steadied. “What they going to ask me at the debate, Rabbi? They going to ask about Raychelle?”

“They will. They’ll hand out index cards and ask the audience to write down their questions and pass them to the front.” Spencer unrolled the paper like a medieval herald. “ ‘Mr. Foshay, what do you plan to do about drugs in the community?’ ”

“You not hearing me, Rabbi. Are they going ask me about Raychelle? Are they going to say, ‘Tuffy, you know all the troublemakers, if you get elected what you going to do about Raychelle, or Petey Peligroso?’ ”

“Winston, the idea of a debate is to address the issues on a broader scope. I doubt they’ll mention anyone by name.”

“That’s because they know better. Because then I’d say, ‘What you going to do about your son, your niece, your nephew, yourself?’ I’d throw it back in they face, word.”

They continued north on Second Avenue, Spencer tossing out prospective debate questions in the affected stuffy yammer of a television moderator. “Children having children. A problem. A moral disgrace. How do we prevent it? Mr. Foshay?” Although he was listening, Winston looked straight ahead, keeping his answers to himself, vainly trying to remember which one of the upcoming bodegas carried the Captain Nemo chocolate cakes he was craving. You ain’t never going to stop kids from having sex. Those that want to fuck going to fuck. What you need to do is be real with them. Hip them to the Astroglide. Squeeze it out the tube, slap it on the rubber, and the pussy feel normal .

“Rap music … violent television programming … films that glorify crime. Are they influencing our youth and pushing them in the wrong direction? Isn’t the answer censorship, and not warning labels and ratings?” Has anyone ever thought that this type of entertainment is … what’s that word Yolanda be using after we have one of our angry fucks? Cathartic. Maybe if niggers wasn’t listening to rap music, and watching these bullshit films, they’d be even more violent. And for that matter, if the white man wasn’t making these movies, he’d be more violent too .

Soon they found themselves treading down a narrow footpath that cut through the innards of the massive Wagner projects. As they stood in the urban gorge there was a roar in the air. The sound of laughter and argument echoed off the sides of the tall brick buildings. Bands of residents could be seen navigating the housing development’s cataracts, wittingly rushing headlong to the unseen cascades like daredevils in a barrel. One way to keep people off the streets would be to provide them with air-conditioning , Spencer thought. “Do you want more questions, Winston?”

“Naw, I’m just going to have to look stupid. But that’s all right, I’m used to it.”

A herd of grade-schoolers detoured around Winston and stampeded past Spencer, almost knocking him down in the process. He looked at his watch. “It’s one-thirty in the morning — do you know where your parents are?”

An eleven-year-old boy, his hair already shorn in a gangster tonsure, moped up to Winston and clasped his hand with a vigorous shake. “When you going to put me down, big man?”

“You know I ain’t out there like that right now, Shorty,” Winston said, palming the boy’s head in his hands.

“I know, I seen the posters. These bummy-ass niggers and some Chinese lady be putting them up all the time.”

“She Japanese.”

“Right, right, whatever. Niggers say you laying in the cut. Niggers say if you walkin’ out of courtrooms free as a beetle, then the mafia backing you. Niggers say that you finally packin’ a toolie. That if you win, bodies going to drop.”

“I ain’t going to win.”

“You packin’ heat, though?”

“That ain’t none of your business.”

“Niggers say you on some syndicate-type shit.”

“Fuck out of here.”

“Niggers say you holding twenty, thirty G’s on the daily. I know you not pushin’ no product, so how you get that kind of scratch? I know, you can’t tell me — just when the time come, hook a young nigger up. I’d like a piece of that mafia lifestyle. Live that ‘wack a nigger here, clip a nigger there’ day to day.”

Winston cut the youngster off with a ten-dollar bill. “You know where to get a Captain Nemo’s chocolate cake around here?” The boy nodded, his hands posed to take the money. “Get me three loosies, a chocolate cake, Captain Nemo’s now, not none of them no-name ghetto snacks, and a tall can of Budweiser.” The boy snatched the money, but Winston held on tight to his end. He tossed his head toward a circle of teenagers standing under a lone elm tree. “I’ll be over there with Bucknaked and them, okay?” Winston released his grip on the money, sending the boy flying through the projects like a pellet from a slingshot. Winston looked at Spencer, then, cupping his hands over his mouth, shouted down his runner. “Change that Budweiser to two foreign beers! Heineken or some shit!” The boy acknowledged the change in orders with a raise of his hand.

Sitting on top of a pipe rail bordering the walkway, they sipped their canned lagers, Tuffy somehow also managing to smoke a cigarette and lick chocolate frosting off the Nemo’s wrapper. “Shit good, ain’t it, Rabbi?” asked Winston, holding up his green can like an actor in a television commercial. Spencer grinned. Though the first taste of the mundane Dutch import had made him gag, and long for a foamy glass of a Flemish wit bier with a slice of lemon, he had to concur that nothing went better with a humid New York City night than beer — even this vacuum-packed aluminum swill. Beneath the branches of the elm tree, about five yards from Winston and Spencer, the cluster of young men had tightened. A Spanish kid, the color of wet sand, was blowing into his hand as if it were a trumpet’s embouchure. His efforts produced a mélange of beats that varied between the sounds of flatulence, the pings of a drummer’s high hat, and the burps of a jalopy chugging uphill. As his other hand alternately slapped his chest and muted his “horn,” the percussives gained momentum. The other members of the clique, feet planted firmly against the cement like the roots of the nearby tree, began to dip at the knees. A few slowly bobbed and weaved their torsos like boxers practicing dodging punches in the mirror. The rest lifted their hands skyward and bounced in place like Sunday rollers in the first pew catching the Holy Ghost. Even the branches of the elm tree seemed to sway to the beat. And like the singing trees in The Wizard of Oz , the teens began spouting frenzied rhymes, trying to solve all the world’s problems in one breath. Spencer wondered if among these young men was the anonymous neologist who invented the ever-mutable New York slang.