Tuff Read online

  Acclaim for Paul Beatty’s

  TUFF

  “Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, the writing here is seamless and teeming with momentum.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Wickedly satirical yet touching.”

  —Newsweek

  “Beatty has written a wonderfully comic and, at times, cleverly insightful book.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Tuff is splendid writing. It has a dog’s bite and the kiss of poetry.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Tuff, and the characters in it, are slapstick, irreverent, and funny. Satire is Beatty’s weapon for educating his readers and for prodding them to remember the ‘have nots’ while keeping his audience in the mood to read.”

  —The Boston Book Review

  “Beatty riffs continuously from the opening to the closing pages of the novel, driving home the point … that in a world of death and violence often all that is left is a well-told joke.”

  —The News & Observer (Raleigh)

  “Paul Beatty combines subversive wit and a remarkable eye for cultural detail to create a memorable, often hilarious book.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “[An] inventive second novel from a promising young New York writer.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Tuff is fascinating not just because it’s a sharp, funny piece of work but because in its 259-page stretch it reveals the paranoia and disenchantment black people feel in society.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  PAUL BEATTY

  TUFF

  Paul Beatty has published two volumes of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce and one novel, The White Boy Shuffle. He lives in New York City.

  ALSO BY PAUL BEATTY

  The White Boy Shuffle

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Paul Beatty

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  ABC Entertainment: Excerpt from “Schoolhouse Rock” theme song. Schoolhouse Rock® and its characters and other elements are trademarks and service marks of American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ABC Entertainment.

  Universal Music Publishing Group: Excerpt from “My Melody,” words and music by Eric Barrier and William Griffin, copyright © 1987 by Universal—Songs of Polygram Int., Inc., a division of Universal Studios, Inc. (BMI). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Universal Music Publishing Group.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Beatty, Paul.

  Tuff : a novel/by Paul Beatty. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82899-6

  1. Afro-Americans—New York (State)—New York Fiction. I. Title

  PS3552.E19T84 2000

  813’.54—dc21 99-40358

  Author photograph © Emily Mott

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  To paraphrase the immortal Biggie Smalls —

  This book is dedicated to all my niggers in the struggle, both literary and real: Nigger Jim, Queequeg, Dilsey, Candide, Uncle Tom, Teacake, Dan “Spook” Freeman, Stagolee; Al and Ronald, Jerry, Charlie and Billy, T. Morrow, DCP, D.W., Lawson, and Toi Russell.

  Thanks to Shelah, Pam, Jordan, Jürgen, Anna, Sharon, Ma, Grandma, and Ainka.

  A special thanks to Shawn Wilson and Yuri Kochiyama for their perseverance and inspiration.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1 - Tuffy and Smush

  2 - Paquetes de Seis de Bud

  3 - Tuffy and Yolanda

  4 - The Stoop

  5 - Inez

  6 - The Bicycle Thief

  7 - A Spoonful of Borscht

  8 - The GAS Theory

  9 - The Reading

  10 - Paradise Ex Nihilo

  11 - Where Brooklyn At? Where Brooklyn At?

  12 - The Little Bell

  13 - Tippecanoe, Tyler, and Tuffy Too

  14 - Muskrat Love

  15 - Yori-Kiri

  16 - Free Parking

  17 - Ine Hustle

  18 - Third Party Over Here

  19 - Feelin’ Groovy

  20 - Infierno — Debajo de Nueva Administración

  21 - “Voie Winsion Foshay—King!”

  22 - If Elected I Will Not Serve

  23 - There Was a Father

  1- TUFFY AND SMUSH

  When Winston Foshay found himself on the hardwood floor of a Brooklyn drug den regaining consciousness, his reflex wasn’t to open his eyes but to shut them tighter.

  Instead of blinking until he reached a state of alertness like a normal person, he stood up, and eyes still closed, hands splayed out in front of him, blindly searched for the full-length mirror he knew was somewhere between the leather couch and the halogen lamp. Feeling like a birthday boy playing pin the tail on the donkey, Winston found the mirror, gently touched the glass with his fingertips, and slowly opened his eyes, his suspicions of what the donkey looked like confirmed in full.

  The jackass staring back at him has the drum-weary, heat-darkened face and heart of a Joseph Conrad river native. A thin beard of nappy curlicues worms from his chin. Deep worry lines crease his forehead. His eyelids droop at half-mast. His thick tight lips hint at neither snarl nor smile. Winston’s is a face that could just as easily ask you for the time as for your money. So impenetrable, so full of East Harlem inscrutable cool is his expression that usually even he doesn’t know what he’s thinking, but this time it’s different. This time his thoughts are as plain to him as the cracked likeness in the mirror. He probed the bullet hole that had smashed his nose into a shock-white dimple of crushed glass and thought, Niggers will be niggers.

  Moments before he’d been as unconscious as a white heavyweight and, like the boxer, a debit to his race, so he didn’t quite trust the healthy appearance of his reflection. He frantically patted himself down as if he were looking for a cigarette lighter. Finding no bullet holes, Winston thumped a fist on his chest. “Damn, a nigger still breathing like a motherfucker.”

  Scattered about the small Brooklyn apartment were three other ghetto phenotypes, soulless young outlaws posed stock-still, mouths agape, eyes open, like figurines in a wax museum’s rogues’ gallery. The room was Zen silent, save for the sound of the tattered curtains flapping against the wall and the steady gurgle of an aquarium filter. The cocksure composure Winston had lost only minutes before, during the shooting, was returning fast. Cupping his testicles with his left hand, Winston strode over to the nearest body, a man he’d known only as Chilly Most from Flatbush. Chilly Most was slumped over the coffee table, his forehead resting midway between the baking powder and the metric scales. Five minutes ago Chilly Most was fiddling with the dram weights, waiting for the base cocaine to arrive, pontificating on the idiocy of the incumbent mayor guesting on a radio talk show, taking credit for the city’s falling crime rates. “The mayor think rhyming sound bites, community policing, and the death penalty going to stop fools from getti
ng paid. Don’t tell me, a criminal, eight credits shy of an associate’s degree in criminology, that stupid slogan ‘Stop the heist, love Christ,’ a cop on a moped, and the gas chamber will make you think twice. Please, once you decide to commit the crime you’ve already had two thoughts. Sneak attack or frontal assault? Should I say ‘Run your shit, nigger,’ or the more traditional ‘Stick ’em up’? You put the gun barrel up a nigger’s nostril, you think, Damn, I shouldn’t put skylight in this motherfucker’s dome, then you say, ‘Fuck it.’ That’s two more thoughts, right there. Man, the death penalty make you kill more. You spark one fool, you going to smell the vapors, might as well not leave no witnesses. Any fool with a modicum of reasoning ability would draw that conclusion. And if the city is so safe, why the mayor still traveling with nine bodyguards? All this empty election bullshit—if crime is down it’s only because niggers killing other niggers. Like when food gets scarce, alligators eat other alligators, trimming the population.”

  Chilly Most had indeed been trimmed. There was a golf-divot-sized cavity in the crown of his head and a thick layer of blood and junior-college brain tissue seeping over the charcoaled entry wound. Recoiling from the carnage, Winston sucked his teeth, popped a piece of gum in his mouth, and muttered, “Goddamn, I hate Brooklyn.”

  To celebrate Winston’s eighth birthday, his father had taken him and his rowdy Brooklyn cousins on a day trip to Coney Island. Winston’s present was the entry fee to the annual hot-dog-eating contest. He won first place only to be disqualified for washing down thirty-three foot-long frankfurters with his father’s tepid beer. Instead of a year’s supply of all-beef wieners, he received a fifty-dollar citation for underage drinking.

  The party moved to the sideshow tent, where Harry Hortensia, the Bearded Lady, let all the other children parade over her stomach as she lay on a bed of nails. When Hortensia spotted Winston out of the corner of her eye, trundling toward her like a baby hippopotamus, she shot up, rubbed his tummy for a cheap laugh, and gave the disgruntled boy his first kiss. While Salamander Sam, the Amphibian Boy, juggled flaming truncheons, Cousin Carl, imitating a talk-show host, ran up and down the bleachers, shoving an air microphone in the faces of strangers and asking, “Since the bearded lady kissed my cousin Winston … does that make him a faggot?” Then it was on to the Hellhole.

  The Hellhole was an upright metal cylinder that by spinning at high speeds used centrifugal force to pin the riders like refrigerator magnets against its metal walls. The operator took Winston’s ticket and glanced at the roly-poly black boy and then at the rusty guide wires dangling overhead. “How much you weigh, son?”

  “Not that much,” Winston answered, tears welling in his eyes. “Please, mister, it’s my birthday.” Against his better judgment the operator waved Winston through. “Make sure you stand away from the door. The rest of you little shits stand opposite Buddha Boy to balance things out.” Winston placed himself against the cold steel wall, trying to avoid the glare of his thrill-seeking cousins. “See, Winston, your fat ass going to slow the ride down.” There was a high-pitched whine and the Hellhole began to turn, gaining speed until the g-forces stuck even big Winston to the walls. All was forgiven, and his cousins shrieked and laughed, yelling for the operator to “drop the floor!” With a pained mechanical groan the floor began to recede, and for a moment Winston’s weight was not a hindrance: he was sticking to the wall like a swatted fly, just like the rest of the riders. Then, almost as soon as he allowed himself a smile, he began slowly sliding down the wall like a drop of paint. What, the ride was over? No, Cousin Julie was still horizontal, swimming her way around the cylinder. “Look at Winston,” she yelled, “he falling like a motherfucking dead bird!” The kids spun around and above, raining insults down on the helpless pudgy eight-year-old caught in the vortex of the metal eddy. Winston coughed up a ball of saliva and spat in the direction of his effeminate cousin Antoine, the loudest of his tormenters. The wad of mucus hung in the air for a tantalizing second, then snapped back, splattering on the bridge of his nose. Even his father laughed. Winston began to cry. The tears didn’t run down his chubby cheeks, but streamed backward, past his temples, canaling through the ridges of his ears. The sounds of ridicule from thirteen summers ago replaced the reverberations of gunplay in Winston’s ears. “Fuck Brooklyn, and fuck all you Brooklyn niggers!”

  Now on this, the last cool night of summer, Brooklyn was short three more niggers for Winston to hate. Although he addressed all black men as “God,” Chilly Most, apparently less than divine, was unable to resurrect himself. Zoltan Yarborough, who was always running off at the mouth about his proud Brooklyn roots, “Brownsville, never ran, never will,” had become the rigid embodiment of his slogan. He had one leg over the windowsill, and a bullet hole in him that, like everything his mother ever told him, went in one ear and out the other. Demetrius Broadnax from “Do-or-die Bed-Stuy” was shirtless on the floor with a column of bullet holes from sternum to belly button in his muddy brown torso. Winston gloated over Demetrius’s body, looking into his ex-boss’s glassy eyes, tempted to say “I quit” and ask for his severance pay. Instead he walked to the aquarium, pressed his nose against the glass, and wondered who was going to feed the goldfish.

  Like most of the jobs Winston had taken since graduating high school, this one also ended prematurely, after a job interview only two weeks ago where the look on his face was his résumé and two sentences from his best friend, Fariq Cole, were his references. “This fat nigger ain’t no joke. Yo—known uptown for straight KO’ing niggers.” There was no “So, Mr. Foshay, how do your personal career goals mesh with our corporate mission? Would you consider yourself to be a self-starter? What was the last book you read?” Demetrius simply handed Winston the inner-city union card, a small black .22 Raven automatic pistol, which Winston coolly, but immediately, handed back.

  “What, your ass don’t need a burner?”

  “Naw.”

  “Look, fool, maybe you can body-slam niggers out on the street, but in this business, people don’t walk in the door shaking their fists in your face.”

  Winston shrugged.

  Demetrius studied him up and down and asked, “You ain’t shook, are you? You don’t seem the scary type.”

  “Never back down. Once a nigger back down, he stay down, know what I’m saying? Just don’t like guns.”

  “Well, when some niggers do come in blasting, your big ass be in the way and shit, two, three motherfuckers can hide behind you. Be here tomorrow afternoon at four.”

  When Winston started work, he was “in the way and shit,” but not in the manner Demetrius had hoped. Winston’s job description was simple: four to ten, five days a week, answer the door, look mean and yell, “Pay this motherfucker, now!” at the balky customers. But the trip into Brooklyn made him edgy. His childhood traumas kicked in, undoing his cool. Instead of suavely sauntering around counting his money every five minutes, Winston fumbled about the drug den, stepping on people’s toes, toppling everything he touched, and talking nonstop. He tried to lighten the somber felonious atmosphere by telling embarrassingly bad jokes. (“You hear the one about why Scots wear kilts?”) After the flat punchlines (“Because sheep can hear a zipper open from one hundred feet away”) there would be a barely audible metallic click, the sound of Demetrius switching the gun’s safety to the off position.

  Winston had trouble keeping track of the Brooklyn drug mores. Which colored caps went with what size plastic vials? Were portable televisions an acceptable form of payment? He was unable to distinguish one crew’s secret whistle from another’s. How often had Demetrius yelled at him, “You moron, don’t flush the drugs! That’s the mating call of the ruby-crowned kinglet!” Then Chilly Most and the others would join in with their snide castigations: “As opposed to our secret signal—”

  “The flight song of the skylark.”

  “A gentle woo-dukkadukka-woo.”

  “Good ol’ Alauda arvenis, indigenous to Eurasia, but common in the
Northwest Territories of Canada, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You are not, you nigger ornithologist, you.”

  The last time Winston heard the cherished secret whistle, he answered the door and two niggers he’d never seen before, brandishing firearms, rushed past him and, before they could be properly announced, introduced themselves with a bullet in Chilly Most’s newly shorn bald head. Winston did what his coworkers always said he’d do if he ever found himself face-to-face with a gun: he fainted “like a bitch.”

  Three minutes had passed since Winston regained consciousness, and he couldn’t leave the apartment. It was as if he were spacewalking, tethered to some mother ship treading Brooklyn ether. He would clamber for the door and a muffled sound in the hallway or a distant siren would drive him back into the living room. He began to mumble: “This like that flick, the bugged-out Spanish one where the rich people couldn’t leave the house. Luis Bustelo or some shit. What is it … surrealism? Well, I got the surrealisms.”

  A creak in the floor behind him stopped Winston’s babbling. He quickly about-faced, balling his shaky hands into fists.

  “Who dat?”

  “Who dat?” came the response. Winston relaxed. He smiled, “Nigger,” unclenched his fists, and plopped down on the sofa.

  Fariq Cole hobbled into the living room, his crutches splayed out to the side, propelling him forward. Fariq’s friends called him Smush because his nose, lips, and forehead shared the same Euclidean plane, giving him a profile that had all the contours of a cardboard box. Each herky-jerky step undulated Fariq’s body toward Winston like a Slinky, alternately coiling and uncoiling. A solid-gold dollar-sign pendant and a diamond-inlaid ankh whipped about his neck in an elliptical orbit like a jewel-encrusted satellite. Fariq stopped next to the doorjamb, tilted his head to the side, and cut his friend a dubious look.