Tuff

Acclaim for Paul Beatty’s

TUFF

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.

The White Boy Shuffle

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
.

W
hen 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 getting 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?”