Tuff (27 page)

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:

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.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he said to the woman.

“I thought so.” The hesitancy disappeared from her voice; her posture slumped with a friendly casualness. Her hand dropped away from the flap of her purse. “Why you look so mean in that picture? You a rapper or something?”

Winston frowned. The woman’s misconception was a common one. There was a slew of overweight rap artists, and rarely a week passed in which someone didn’t mistake him for Chub Boogie, Fat Max, or Tonnage, and request that Winston “kick a verse” or “bust a rhyme.”

“Why a fat nigger always got to be a faggot-ass rapper?”

“I’m sorry. I just thought since you out here handing out flyers and got a poster up, you was promoting your album. You never see a poster of a nigger your age on the wall unless he selling records.”

“True, but I’m running for City Council.”

“Oh snap, you really running? I thought City Council was the name of your posse or something. You serious?”

“I guess so.”

Winston gave her a flyer and showed her his clipboard.

“You registered?” he asked. The woman shook her head.

“Well, fill out this card, sign right here, and you can vote for me come September.”

As she scribbled in the pertinent information, Winston looked over her shoulder. “Mmm, you smell good. Let me ask you something—what’s that you wearing?”

“Let me ask you something—how you funding your campaign?” Snapping to attention, Winston stalled for time. He wasn’t about to admit that this morning Inez gave him fifteen thousand dollars, two thousand flyers, the campaign’s single poster, and a pep talk. With tears in her eyes, she explained half in Japanese and half in English, how at seven-fifteen this morning, she stormed into the local congressman’s office, an ex-socialist ally turned capitalist pawn, and threatening his lone staffer that
she knew her reparation check was old, but if the United States government didn’t cash it immediately, she’d rally every concentration camp survivor, bus them down to Washington, D.C., bind their wrists with barbed wire, and sit them down on the steps of the Capitol building until they bled to death trickle by trickle or her check was cashed. Then she handed the staffer a photo of the congressman as a young radical intern proudly showing off his birthday gifts, a framed photo of Stalin, a plastic Sputnik model, a signed copy of
Das Kapital
, and a lid of grass—Maui Wowee to be specific. A call was made to D.C., and an hour ago Inez gravely pushed fifteen thousand dollars across her coffee table.

Winston had seen ten times that amount in various neighborhood drug spots, but he knew how much suffering the money represented, and like the millionaire Hollywood megastar who acts flabbergasted at having found one hundred thousand dollars in a duffel bag, he perfunctorily bulged his eyes and dropped his jaw. As he jammed the money into his pockets, his mood changed. He began to feel a sense of indebtedness to Inez. “Ms. Nomura, I’ll help collect the nine hundred signatures, but I ain’t doing shit else but the sumo thing and the debate. No shaking hands and kissing babies.”

“I know,” she had said, and handed him an extra five hundred dollars.

“I got a little scratch saved up,” Winston told the woman. “You know, gots to be prudent with your funds.”

The woman brushed aside a loose braid and tucked it behind her ear.

“Where I know you from?” he asked her.

“Didn’t you run with Eric and Tango over on Mount Pleasant?”

“Yeah, how you know?”

“I’m Isabel’s sister.”

“You shitting me. So you must’ve been there when Alex and Kayson got into their little thing.”

“Who you think mopped up the blood? I knew I knew you. Now I know how you got your money—that place was a goldmine. You the only one I know who held on to any of it. You must’ve broke out before Lester got popped.”

“Right after. Fifty came in and blew up the spot, next day my shit was ghost.”

“You know T.J. got a thirty-year bid behind that.”

“I heard.”

“Well, anyway, I got to go to work,” the woman said, handing back the clipboard. “I’m going to vote for you—I like a man who supports the community. You better not get in office and start fucking up.”

“What could I possibly do to make things worse?”

W
hen the morning rush hour ended, Fariq and Charley surrendered to the tedium. Turning their clipboards in to Inez, they abandoned the struggle, going home to catch up on the sleep they’d lost the night before. Winston spent the rest of the day fending off the advances of aggressive women who were just glad to see a young nigger doing something positive, listening to people’s problems, and shrugging his shoulders when they asked what would he do for them if elected. “At least you honest,” they’d say, signing the petition while prattling on about an inept mayor, a do-nothing school board, disrespectful kids.

It was now late afternoon. The old-timers were out in force, trolling the streets for opportunity; yet their protégés, those wild-eyed, disrespectful kids, were missing in action. Now that Winston had noticed it, their absence was off-putting, and he was angry with himself for not being aware of it earlier.

Winston counted the number of signatures on his petition.
Eighty-six. That ain’t so bad. With what everybody else got I’m probably damn near halfway there
.

A voice came to Winston from above. “You got my vote, you fat motherfucker! Anything to keep your crazy ass off the streets,
moreno
.” Tuffy looked skyward, not bothering to shield his eyes from the sun. “Amante, what up, bro? Where the party at?” Perched on a rooftop, Edgar Amante, the local party promoter, was running wires from a small transformer into a washtub-sized satellite dish, working his day job. “
Qué te pasa, papi?
I heard you was running for City Council, I ain’t believe the shit till I seen the poster.”

“But I’m saying, where the set at tonight? I need to get loose.”

“No party tonight. Everybody’s gone to the Rock or to the Tombs.”