Tuff by Paul Beatty Read Free Book Online Page B

fingerprinting: “Nut on my haircut, like I been butt-fucked!” The city went through a roll of film before finally settling on a mug shot of him sporting an Uncle Ben smile, tears running down his face.
    Things ceased to be funny when the cops refused to believe that a boy Winston’s size could be thirteen, and since budget cuts had made night court a liberal memory, he’d have the weekend on Rikers to prove his identity. It didn’t take long. Winston disembarked from the bus, suffered through the indignities of a strip search, and strolled into building C-64. There, playing toilet-paper checkers on a bunk underneath the clock, was a double-jumping birth certificate: his father. Father and son played checkers with rolled-up balls of toilet tissue, arguing about who would call the wife, the mother. “I haven’t spoken to you or her in three years, I didn’t go to your sister’s funeral, so phone her, boy.”
    “Fuck you. King me, bitch.”
    Unlike Winston’s father, Patrice Foshay kept her promises. The last one, delivered behind an ironing-board pulpit, was: “Winston, you keep getting into trouble, I’m not going to kick you out the house, I’m going to leave my damn self and you’re not coming with. You’ll be living on your own. Understand?” Monday morning Mrs. Foshay posted bail on the two delinquents. She dropped Clifford off at his girlfriend’s, raised a “Power to the People!” fist in the air, and moved to Atlanta, assuring Winston she’d send rent and food money until he turned eighteen.
    It took Winston two years to move his belongings into his mother’s bedroom. When the phone rang every two weeks at precisely ten o’clock, after the black sitcoms went off the air, his mother would ask why he couldn’t be more like “those nice boys on TV.”
    Winston was just finishing the tale of his dysfunctional upbringing with a blasphemous “Fuck a Cosby” when an immense marble-white yacht christened
Jubilee
in bold black letters sailed alongside the tour boat. With sleek helicopters perched bow and stern and a radar dish spinningabove the bridge, the boat looked more like a war vessel than a luxury craft. “So you’re all alone?” Yolanda asked. Winston shrugged, his gaze cast out toward the bay. Yolanda knew the right thing to do was to put her head on Winston’s pillowy shoulder and say, “No, you aren’t.” But she had long since learned to let the man make the first conciliatory move. Instead she filled the uncomfortable silence with cynicism: “Every nigger’s father say they was in the Panthers. And if they was, they didn’t do shit but hand out flyers.”
    “Crazy? Nigger was down.” Winston flipped open his wallet and showed her a photo of a goateed black man dressed beret-to-boots in black, crouched behind a Volkswagen Beetle, his leather-gloved hands positioned over the hood, aiming a shotgun at some unseen enemy of the Revolution. Yolanda grabbed the wallet and fawned over the Polaroid. “Yo, your pop groovier-than-a-motherfucker. Look at those pointy kicks and the tight-ass straight legs.” She flipped through the rest of the wallet, pausing at the food-stamp ID card to verify that Winston wasn’t lying about his age. She studied the more recent photos of Latino and black boys grouped around firearms, posing in front of London-gray school lockers. Interspersed with the group shots were portraits of the same solemn-faced teens at the steering wheel of the communal vehicle or the local arcade, looking directly into the camera, holding the pistols to their temples. Winston introduced the boys on the block by proxy: “Rude, Kooky, Shorty-Wop, Point Blank—right there’s my ace, Fariq.” Going through the contents of Winston’s wallet, Yolanda realized what made him attractive, other than his cute button nose. He was comfortable with who he was and wasn’t. You don’t meet too many casual black people. Winston was honest—maybe not with the rest of the world, but he