After invoking the requisite Yoruba spirits, Clifford was finally ready to read. There was a cannonade of shotgun fire, and Winston turned to leave. There was no purpose in his staying; he knew the program by heart. Poems about Clifford’s expatriation to Cuba: repetitive paeans layered with images of mangos, rusty automobiles, sugarcane, and raven-haired beauties who like to fuck until the roosters crow. To break the revolutionary reveille there would be some poems about basketball, drums, and of course John Coltrane. The freedom suite would be followed by intermittent tales of how Clifford, drunk on Cuban rum and missing his mama’s cooking, made a pontoon out of coconuts and fishnet, waded into the waters of Matanzas Bay, and extradited himself to Florida. For an encore Clifford would read an ode dedicated to Winston and his dead sister, Brenda. The poem would rumble incessantly onward, like the Iliad read aloud by a summer-school teacher on a gorgeous August afternoon. The first canto was the story of Clifford sending cross-country for Winston and Brenda when Huey P. Newton died tragically in the streets of Oakland, California. It would be read with dramatic caesuras inserted, not between musical phrases, but between poignant images, for maximum pathos. After a three-day bus ride, Winston and his sister arrived the day of the funeral. Winston, lacking a pair of clean underwear, was forced to attend the burial wearing a pair of his sister’s panties. How he cried — not because the snake head of black-American rebellion had been severed from its body, but because his undergarment was thin, pink, and had “Tuesday” handwritten just under the waistband.
Canto 2 retold in quatrains how Clifford discovered his daughter was dead when the amount of the court-ordered alimony payments that followed him through four address changes had been halved. The third canto was a recounting of young Winston’s African-American-warrior training. His thirteenth birthday present the very same twelve-gauge shotgun balanced on Clifford’s right hip. The hunting trips took place in the swampy reeds of Wards Island, where shotgun fire scattered homeless men like park pigeons. Winston was made to fetch the kill, mostly buckshot-shredded possums and cats.
Tears of regret would pour down Clifford’s face, and he would remove his reading glasses, take a sip of water, and read the poem’s envoi, hammering home the point of how in fighting the war humane he’d sacrificed his humanity. Then Winston’s father would bow his head; the audience, unsure if the poem was over, would remain silent. After the whispered “Thank you” into the microphone, everyone would stand and applaud this lyrical airing of dirty laundry. Clifford would scan the crowd looking for his bereaved son. Finding him, he’d ask Winston to stand. And the crowd would then turn toward Winston and smile, their clapping growing even more intense in recognition of the revolutionary’s son who wore pink panties to Huey P. Newton’s funeral. Finally, when his father had finished signing all the books, exchanging phone numbers with all the agents and groupies, the redeemed freedom fighter would make his way to his son and heartily embrace him, fooling Winston into thinking they might head into the night together, Ajax and Telamon after the siege of Troy. I love you. No, you can’t come with us, we’re going to get some drinks. Call you tomorrow. Love you.
Winston lay Jordy in his stroller and backed quietly out of the room, leaving Clifford on a Dadaist roll, turning wordplay riffs on Fidel Castro:
Fidel’s fidelity
Hi-fidelity
Sieg heil fidelity
Two tablespoons of Castro Oil
Castro-castrate the bull market
Winston decided he would celebrate his candidacy at the movies. He bought a pint of gin and a bottle of lemonade, then flagged a livery cab.
The burgundy Buick Electra sailed down Second Avenue like an obsolete dreadnought full steam ahead on its way to the dry dock. Father and son poked their heads though the sunroof. Shirtsleeves flapping in the downtown traffic sirocco, they ahoyed everything from the prostitutes to leashed Pomeranians. “Vote Winston Foshay — City Councilman!” Winston shouted, his arm stretched into the dusk in imitation of Debs’s pleading pose. “Vote Winston Foshay — City Councilman!” He didn’t have anything else to say. He didn’t have a political platform — no programs for reform, no admonitions for society. “Vote Winston Foshay — City Councilman!” As people turned to see who this crazy man yelling from an old Buick was, he could almost see his words drifting away in the slipstream of the muggy city air, like skywriting. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” He laughed, took a sip of his drink, then screamed, “All for a spoonful of borscht!”
“Here?” asked the driver, cruising the car past the multiplex. The marquee displayed six films, none of which Winston had any interest in. It was the usual dreck: a low-budget music video passing itself off as an African-American feature film; the summer blockbuster chock-full of special effects; three white independent “mosaics” of risqué subject matter, flat asses, dime-novel plot twists, and lots and lots of driving; and one big-budget masturbatory vehicle written, directed, and produced by an aging white Academy superstar playing a vile, bitter, successful old curmudgeon who finds humility and understanding for his fellow man in the arms of a young nubile. Fuck this garbage. He said aloud, “Take me to Chinatown.”
There is nothing darker than a Chinatown movie theater, and for a moment the gloom fooled Winston into thinking he was dead. After checking to make sure his heart was still beating, he groped his way down the aisle, his hand going from seat back to seat back, occasionally touching the sweaty neck of a sleeping old man. He found found two empty seats and rubbed the worn velvet cushions, checking for freshly chewed gum. Out of blankets and two small stuffed animals he made a pallet for Jordy, who quickly fell asleep, a parakeet in a covered cage.
Winston slouched in his seat and peered through the swirling cigarette smoke at the giant screen. Two Hong Kong brothers, obviously on different sides of the law, were arguing over who’d make the penultimate sacrifice. I’ll kill for you. No, I’ll die for you. Winston left the theater wondering if he would’ve thrown himself in front of the bullets that claimed his sister, dying in her arms with a noble look on his face. He headed north on Bowery singing the theme song to the second feature, Once Upon a Time in China, a picture he’d seen at least a dozen times. He was still singing when he walked into a pet store two blocks up from the theater. “Ao qi mian dui wan chong la-a-ang. Re xie xiang na hong ri gua-a-ang!” The proprietor greeted him with a smile and finished the chorus, “Dan si tie da-a-a. That’s a great movie.”
“The best.”
Winston asked to see the baby turtles, and the storekeeper placed a fishbowl full of dark-green inch-long turtles on the counter. Winston picked out a turtle and placed it in Jordy’s palm. “What do the words in that song mean?”