Tuff (7 page)

Yolanda saw her reflection framed by the sentimental bromide and succumbed to the wanton manipulation that is romance. With a cheery “Clink,” she touched paper cups with Winston. “Let’s make a toast,” Yolanda said, trying to hide her wistfulness. “A toast to love. A toast to the man who got me open with no promises, no handsome-muscle-flexing tight-butt-wiggling, and no money.”

Winston rubbed his chin, trying to determine if he’d been insulted or not, then raised his cup. “Then a toast to the woman who loves me for me, though she don’t know me from the next man.”

“Fuck the next man.”

“A toast to a woman who knows what she wants.”

Yolanda and Winston unclenched from that first kiss, tongues numb with champagne, sex organs swollen with lust, and the axes of their young worlds permanently tilted. Or as Winston so delicately phrased it, wiping lipstick from his mouth, “Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.”

“H
ow did I fall for that bullshit, Tuffy? ‘Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.’ It’s all jibbity-jibbity, because you always drunk, you wino.” Yolanda was still carrying on, and Winston found himself on the living-room sofa, obediently enduring his censure. Listening to Yolanda
denigrate him was like going to church Easter morning. He didn’t want to do it, but he sat still out of obligation, hands folded in his lap, hoping his headache would prevent the sermon from seeping into his brain.

As Yolanda edged toward the bookshelf, Winston froze. “Come on, Landa, don’t.” Yolanda’s substantial archives consisted of well-kept stacks of
Essence, Ebony
, and
Chocolate Singles
magazines crammed with articles entitled “Hypnotize with Pumpkin Pie,” “Atlantis, Unicorns, Black Love—Fact or Fiction?” and “Ten Good Qualities About Black Men Other than Penis Size.” Next to the periodicals were the self-help books, all written by short-Afroed women from Philadelphia:
Sisters Doing It for Themselves—How to Masturbate to an African Orgasm; The Black Women’s Guide to Finding a Real Man;
and Yolanda’s bible,
Nigger, Please Please Me
.

What bothered Winston about Yolanda’s choice of reading material wasn’t all the doctoral-cum-beauty-shop research—anthropology seeking the missing link between prehistoric Stepin Fetchit man and the genetically engineered Denzel Washington that fossilized him, or the parascientific diaries that monsterized him.
I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into this lifeless thing at my feet.… I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open
—behold, I, Dr. Eula Frankenstein-Barnes, author of
The Good Black Man: Some Assembly Required
, have created life!

What irked Winston was that Yolanda started buying this trash after they’d married, when the relationship was problem-free, at least in his mind. When Yolanda sat up in bed after sex reading
The Black Woman’s Guide to Finding a Real Man
, he’d explode. “What, I’m not a real man? How come there’s never any doubt about you being a real woman?” … 
And I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!
Yolanda would try to calm Winston with a lecture about the problems unique to black-on-black love. Winston argued that there were no differences between black, white, Puerto Rican, or kangaroo relationships. “Problems is problems,” he’d say. “The difference is, black couples have their bedroom behavior studied by every stuck-up bitch with a degree and a word processor.”

Y
olanda blithely ran her hands along the paperback bindings of her library, drawing energy from the fiction section, like an Irish-woman kissing the Blarney Stone. Winston swore on the graves of every
relative he could think of that he’d change his behavior. Pulling a slim volume entitled
Pimp-Slapped to Oblivion
off the shelf, Yolanda opened to page 1 and cleared her throat. Winston cringed, grabbing the arm of the sofa and awaiting the literary castor oil. The words
“Clockwork Orange”
involuntarily escaped from his mouth. Yolanda looked up from her text. “Tuffy, I’ll work your clock. After I read this, you’ll know what time it is.” Yolanda began reading in a voice so strong it pressed Winston into the upholstery. He was feeling a special kinship with the useless button in the middle of the pillow cushion. “ ‘Chapter One.’ ” Yolanda licked her lips. “ ‘Giorgio Johnson knew better than to disrespect the pussy.’ ” Winston stood up and objected with a stamp of his foot. “There ain’t no niggers named Giorgio!” Yolanda sat him back down with the cut-eyed look. Winston wondered why he hadn’t married a woman who solved word-search puzzles on the train instead of reading this trash. Yolanda continued: “ ‘The pussy is mighty-mighty, and Giorgio Johnson was letting it all hang out, his supplication total. His prickly tongue spelunked into the nether regions of my hot, drippy pubes.…’ ” As Yolanda read, Jordy crawled along the floor toward Winston and latched onto his ankle like a koala bear to a eucalyptus tree. “Shit is awful, isn’t it?” Winston said quietly to the boy, lifting him to his knee and dandling him about. “Ever notice that none of the female characters have names? They’re called Sister Child, Mama Doll, Cousin Girl, Queen Auntie Woman Purity Love. All this we-are-family, sisterhood bullshit. Fucking books should come with needlepoint and kinte-cloth headwraps. Don’t worry, boy, I’ll read you some Pippi Longstocking later.” Jordy responded with a toothless smile. “Ah, you like that, hunh? You remember my girl Pippi don’t wear no panties.” Covering his son’s ears, Winston gave thought to countering Yolanda’s redemption literature with the authors in his canon. He imagined tearing the book from his wife’s hands, pinning her to the carpet, and haranguing her womanist sensibilities with some macho, gonadal writing. A dose of Iceberg Slim’s or Donald Goines’s pimp/ho prose would restore some gender-role balance to the relationship.

“Winston!” Yolanda yelled.

“Hunh?”

“Look at the baby!”

Jordy had burrowed under Winston’s shirt, suckling and kneading his father’s fatty left breast. Yolanda was livid. “See, boy a year old and he don’t even know what parent is what.”

“He know I’m his father,” Winston said, wiping the spittle off his nipple.

“Then he don’t know what a father is for, because you be gallivanting the streets at all hours.” Exasperated, Yolanda massaged the bridge of her nose. “Winston, what are you going to do?”

Winston said nothing and eyed Jordy, who was straddling his thigh, for manly approbation. But the look on his son’s face seemed to say, “Yeah, nigger, what
are
you going to do?” The child’s forlorn expression triggered some handyman impulse in the father. Winston had an urge to fix a leaky faucet, sweep the sidewalk in front of his building, maybe check to see if the window guards were all securely fastened to their mounts. He’d been warned that having a kid would change him. Make him more responsible. Less impulsive. Winston had vowed that fatherhood wouldn’t change him, at least not permanently. He knew for most young fuck-up dads the post-partum conscientiousness lasted a year. After that they reverted to the old ways with even more zealotry than before:
I gots mouths to feed, brother, mouths to fucking feed
. So what if the individual changed—what did it matter if his circumstances remained the same? An angel in hell was still in hell. He removed the Wilfredo Cienfuegos handbill from his pocket. He read the tag line: Stop the Violence.
Why?

Yolanda ran her hands through Winston’s greasy hair and kissed him on the cheek. “You staying up?” Winston nodded. “Leave me some money on the dresser for the movies, okay?”

“Just don’t read Jordy that Pippi Longstocking—turn the boy into a white-girl lover.” Yolanda scratched the back of her head. “I can trust you with him tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“No drinking, no reefer. Jordy is your son, not some nigger you know from your program.”

“It only happened once, go to sleep. One damn tattoo.”

As she turned to leave, Winston grabbed her by the sash, reeled her in like a yo-yo, and puckered up for a good-night kiss. Yolanda obliged. Winston’s lips mole-hopped from Yolanda’s mouth to her breasts with soggy pecks. Flicking a crusty nipple with the tip of his tongue, he covered the spigot with his mouth and took a long pull. A streamlet of milk coated his tongue. Yolanda moaned in soreness and pleasure. Winston sat back, a globule of milk pooled in the corner of his mouth. “You had arroz y abichuela con pulpo from Dalia’s for dinner, didn’t you?” Yolanda shook
her head in disbelief and boxed his ear with a solid smack. Winston raised his arms, basking in self-adoration. “I know my breast milk. I should be on TV. I could suck women’s titties and say what they ate for breakfast. Now that would be a good-ass job. ‘Scrambled eggs with cheese and onions, blueberry pancakes, lightly buttered.’ ”

“Be careful with him tomorrow.”

“One tattoo.”

Yawning, Yolanda disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. “Good night, Tuffy.”

“Don’t be dreaming about Giorgio Johnson.”

Winston adjusted Jordy on his pelvis and pointed the remote control at the dark television set. The screen lit up with a satisfying instantaneous pop. A frail-looking white boy was playing catch with an offscreen partner. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Two features dominated the boy’s sullen face: a set of knobby cheekbones and a pair of fly-wing-thin varicose eyelids. His shriveled head was covered with a baseball cap five sizes too big. The camera zoomed out and someone lobbed the kid a baseball, which, using two hands, he clumsily caught in the palm of his brand-new mitt. After tossing the ball back, the boy turned to the camera to make his plea. “Hello, my name is Kenny Mendelsson. I’m ten years old, but I have the brittle hips of an eighty-seven-year-old woman and the hairline of a chemotherapy patient.”

“You got a sense of humor too,” Winston said, turning to Jordy. “That nigger got—what’s that disease called? Geezeritis or some shit.” Winston gingerly lifted each of Jordy’s limbs, checking behind the joints, in the concave pits, for skin blemishes or irritations that might be a sign of some such congenital malady. “I feel you, G,” Winston said to the television. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to get old before your time.” He ran his hand over his son’s back, reading the ridges and fatty folds in his soft skin like a familiar braille. Winston stopped at the right clavicle, where the lizard-green block letters embossed on Jordy’s Kahlua-brown skin read,
DA’ BOMB
. He sighed.
Da’ Bomb. Man, nobody don’t even say ‘Da’ Bomb’ no more
. Hopefully, it’ll fade as he gets older. And anyway, these light-skinned babies get darker when they get to be about five or so.

The next public-service announcement was for the Big Brothers program. A bald-headed black actor Winston was familiar with from some bit parts in a long-canceled television show walked down a tenement row in measured, authoritative strides. Speaking in a dinner-theater baritone,
the actor strode up to a young black boy in a striped polo shirt. He clamped his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Providing guidance in an environment bereft of direction is the moral mandate, nay, the incumbent duty of African-American men. Isn’t that right, Clarence?” Clarence looked up at the man’s chin and smiled. “Yes, sir!”

“Show them what I taught you.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“Once upon a midnight dreary,” Young Clarence began reciting an extremely abridged version of Poe’s “The Raven,” doing a laudable job with just the slightest hesitation at the word “surcease,” and delivering the last lines with the appropriate morbid panache: “And my soul from out that shadow that lies / floating on the floor, / Shall be lifted—nevermore!” Clarence took a deep bow and the actor, his eyes welled with tears, looked into the camera and said, “Isn’t he the little Eliza Doolittle? Make a black boy’s dreams reality, call now.” Winston concentrated on memorizing the number sailing across the bottom of the screen.

Serenaded by the canonical poesy, Jordy had fallen asleep. Winston pressed his ear to his son’s heaving chest and listened to his heartbeat. “You know, little nigger, you was almost fatherless today? A hot second away from growing up to be one of those hard-to-handle motherfuckers. Having to listen to your mother whine, ‘Oh, ever since your daddy died you’ve been impossible.’ Yeah, I saved you from much grief. You’d be crying at night, cursing me because I left you. But I ain’t going nowhere, dog. I got a plan to get my shit together. Put all my caca in one big pile.”

Lifting his right pantleg, Winston scratched the surface of his tattoo: a cherry-red heart, ventricles and all, looking as if it could really pump blood, sitting atop a flaming Grecian torch, coiled concertina wire binding the disparate items together. The tattoo sat about an inch above his ankle and just below the tan line created by cotton crew socks—next to his palms and the bottoms of his feet, the lightest places on his body. Above the heart, in an elegantly smooth cursive, flowing like a solitary ribbon trailing a Red Square gymnast on May Day, was the epigram:
BRENDA—I KNOW YOU DIDN’T LEAVE ME ON PURPOSE. I AIN’T MAD AT YOU
. Winston told the tattoo artist that he wanted the words legible. “You know them notes in the old black-and-white movies? The star never opens the note and starts squinting, and moving the paper every-which-away, going, ‘What the fuck does this say?’ ”

Winston pressed gently on the borders of his handiwork, as if the skin were still reddened and tender. “What you think about an uncle, Jordy? Get a Big Brother who’ll teach me how to spell, so I can be a movie critic. No, wait. That’s out. You never see no black movie critics. Matter of fact, you never see niggers talk about anything that don’t involve other niggers—well, there’s that fag weatherman on Channel 7. ‘Scattered clouds and drizzles through early morning, oh joy.’ But that’s the move though. Get a designated nigger in my life. An educated motherfucker who’ll provide me with some focus and guidance and shit. Channel 7 will have a real nigger doing the weather. ‘Yo, it’s brick out there today. Cold as hell. You niggers with security jobs dress warm or sneak in the lady. Better yet, quit.’ And Jordy, whatever I learn from my Big Brother I’m going to pass down to your ass. Boy, your father going to be one of those pipe-smoking,
Wall Street Journal–reading
motherfuckers, because I’m tired of being one of these bummy
Raisin in the Sun
niggers.”