“No, I know what else. Yolanda, what’s that word you always using for people who can’t function without certain other motherfuckers in they lives?”
“ ‘Codependent,’ ” she shot back.
“Right.” Winston turned to face Clifford and his rat pack. “Y’all codependent.… Yolanda, what’s that word you always use to describe me, Smush, Whitey, and Armello?”
“ ‘Homoerotic’?” she said, a little unsure of her answer.
“Yup, that’s it. Daddy, you, Sugarshack, and them are all old-fashioned, paranoid, codependent homoerotics.” Winston started flicking green snow peas from atop the mound of yellow rice at his father’s friends. “Now bounce! Before you motherfuckers start talking about John Coltrane.”
“That’s wrong, Winston.”
“Pops, you go too if you want.”
Clifford remained seated while Gusto, Dawoud, Sugarshack, and Duke got to up leave, pulling their collars up around their necks, tugging on the sleeves of their jackets, and patting down their Afros, trying to maintain their expired seventies insouciant chic. “No need to bring Coltrane into this,” said Gusto, licking his fingers, then matting down his eyebrows. Winston beat a rhythm on the tabletop, mocking their poetry as they skulked into the hallway.
Coltrane be superbad.
Coltrane be black love.
Coltrane be a love supreme. A love supreme.
Coltrane be a burrito supreme. A burrito supreme.
“You call that poetry? I admit, when y’all used to bogart my tape deck, I liked that nigger’s music. That fucking horn would calm you down like a back rub. But after listening to you clowns write about his shit, I can’t stand his music. Whenever I hear one of his tunes I think about your bullshit poetry. Y’all must be killing the nigger’s record sales.”
Extremely satisfied with himself, Winston returned to shoveling food into his mouth. “Man, that felt good, yo.” Everyone was staring at him with varying degrees of incredulity. “What y’all looking at?” he demanded, speaking with his mouth full.
Spencer waited for Winston to swallow, looked him in the eye, and asked the question that forever has hounded any miscreant who’s ever tried to set his or her life straight. “Winston, what do you want to do?”
A grim look of concern crossed Winston’s face. This question had been asked of him countless times, and for the first time in his life he didn’t respond with his stock answer: “I don’t have to do nothing but stay black and die.” He couldn’t verbalize it, but Winston was feeling the onset of the freedom his father and Inez were always saying his ancestors died for. “What do I want to do? I don’t know, but I want to do something.”
“You want to make money,” blurted out Fariq.
“True.”
“You want to set a good example for your son,” suggested Yolanda, refilling Jordy’s baby bottle with apple juice and sliding it down the table as if it were a mug of beer in a saloon. Winston sipped from the bottle, then handed it to the baby.
“Sure, you right.”
“You want to emulate them,” Inez said, pointing to a set of posters including Ho Chi Minh, Marx, Menelik II, and Emma Goldman, lined up on the wall like a radical Mount Rushmore.
“If you say so,” Winston teased, looking over at the posters. “Who’s that?”
“Which one?” asked Inez.
“The one at the end — the crazy-looking white man.”
“That’s Eugene V. Debs. He was a labor leader at the turn of the century. He ran for president a few times too.”
Winston stared at the black-and-white photo of the bald, craggy-faced agitator. Eugene Debs was standing on an unseen soapbox, leaning over a sea of people like a figurehead lashed to a frigate bow, his fist beating the air, his mouth open in mid-mandate. You could almost hear the rabble rouser begging the crowd to overturn everything from corporate oligarchy to the horizon. The blown-up photo of Debs’s exhortations reminded Winston of himself: the pushy nigger who threatened and bitched and moaned and fought until he got his way. “That old motherfucker look like he about to have a heart attack. Nigger better calm down.”
Inez nervously tugged on one earlobe. “Winston, you’ve mentioned money, family, social activism as possible goals and aspects of your life you want to work on. Where do you plan to start?”
“Right here with my seed,” he answered, lifting Jordy up by the scruff of the neck like a mother lion lifting her cub. “This little nigger here is my first responsibility.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean, Ms. Nomura? I ain’t got to take care of Yolanda — she grown, she can look out for her own self.”
“Winston, it’s like being on an airplane.”
“I never been on a plane.”
Winston knocked his fist on his forehead and let out a groan. “I fell into one of your moral traps, didn’t I? Go ahead, tell me what happens on a plane.”
Inez winked. “Well, when you board the airplane they wait until everyone is seated; then the flight crew shows the passengers a safety video: how to fasten your seat belt, where the closest exit is, the life jacket is under the seat. Then on the screen are a mother and child sitting side by side. The narrator says, ‘If the cabin pressure falls, yellow oxygen masks will drop from directly overhead. Place one over your head and breathe as you would normally.’ ”
Fariq objected. “How can you breathe normally? If the plane is fucking going down, you’d be hyperventilating and shit.” Inez offered Fariq a cigarette, hoping the smoke would occupy what little air he had in his asthmatic lungs. When Fariq started coughing, she continued.
“The narrator goes on to say, ‘If you are traveling with a small child, put on your mask first, then place the mask on the child.’ ”
“You trying to say I have to be responsible for myself first before I can do anything else?”
“Exactly.”
Yolanda folded her arms and sat back in her chair, bottom lip protruding. “Dag, Winston, I’ve been trying to tell you the same thing for the past year. Why when Ms. Nomura says it, instantly you understand?”
“It’s not her saying it; it’s when and where she said it. You say it right after we’ve had sex. I’m not really listenin’ to your ‘Honey, when are you going to learn’ shit. I’m rubbing my dick against your thighs trying to get another hard-on.”
“Tuffy!” Yolanda screamed, slapping the table in an effort to keep from laughing. Winston apologized with a kiss on the cheek. Although he hadn’t fully answered the question of what he wanted to do with his life, in deciding to take responsibility for himself he felt he’d made some progress.
However, the unavoidable, but rarely acknowledged, corollary to the what-to-do quandary loomed unspoken in everyone’s mind as they watched Winston wolf down the rest of his lunch. Winston knew what they were thinking. Now that I’ve said I’m going to do something, the real question is what can a high-school-dropout short-tempered nigger like me do? I ain’t starting over. No way. Using his thumbnail he picked at a piece of meat lodged in his teeth. “So I suppose I have to get a job?”
Winston spun about in his chair and looked at the cork job board on the wall behind him. Nestled among sheaves of multicolored flyers, the job board promoted everything from political rallies to a charity sumo demonstration in a local park to the candidates running in the upcoming election. Thumbtacked to the board were the job listings. Written with black felt-tipped pen on yellow three-by-five index cards, the listings were neatly arranged in columns under the headings Clerical, Child Care, Service, and Miscellaneous. Winston shuddered, thinking of the last time he’d found himself face-to-face with the dreaded job board.