“ ‘Stand proud when you face wars. Hot-blooded like the red sun. Courage like iron.’ ”
“That’s good advice. How much them turtles?”
“One for a dollar, ten for eight.”
Hunching over the counter, Winston whispered into the owner’s ear, “You got them piranhas?”
The man looked around suspiciously, called for his attendant to watch the cash register, then headed to a back room, returning with a menacing-looking fish in a sandwich bag.
“That’s what I’m talking about! Let me get some of those little rocks, too — blue ones.”
When Winston got home, he placed the rocks into a corner of the casserole bowl that held his goldfish, sticking a plastic palm tree in the cobalt-blue mound, forming a makeshift tropical isle. He pried open Jordy’s hand and resuscitated the dried-out turtle with a globule of saliva, then dropped it into the water with the goldfish and a dead fly that was floating on the surface. Waving the sandwich bag over the casserole dish, Winston teased his pet, “Fishy, come out to play! Dustin, I want you to meet Sir Laurence Olivier.” The piranha swam out of the Baggie and into its new environs. “Is it safe? Hell naw, it isn’t safe.” The turtle scrambled for the rocks. The goldfish backed into the corner, cautiously eyeing his new neighbor. The piranha ate the dead fly. Winston took Jordy to bed, chuckling in his Ming the Merciless laugh.
10- PARADISE EX NIHILO
On a low-visibility day, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the Manhattan skyline looked like a giant histogram, the lofty edifices stretching upward along the X axis of greed. Beyond the midtown skyscrapers lay the meaningless statistical outliers, the barren flatlands of East Harlem. Tuffy looked back at Inez and Spencer, who were busily noshing on a plate of hot Empire State nachos, letting Winston have his moment.
The view always evoked mixed emotions in Winston. This high off the ground at the base of the clouds, he experienced the dissonant symptoms of social vertigo. He didn’t know whether he was flying or falling. Today, the view was more apropos of Tuffy’s life than ever before. Since declaring his halfhearted candidacy for public office, he’d begun to look at his neighborhood from the outside in. When he visited friends, the overwhelming stench of buckets that served as toilets for the people who lived on the top-floor landings no longer caused him to gag and laugh in ridicule, but to daub his stinging eyes in shame. At night from his bedroom window, he counted the buildings on his block, stupefied that abandoned dwellings outnumbered occupied ones by two to one. He fell asleep watching the nocturnal drug addicts flit out of the concrete caves like bats, and the diurnal homeless return to burrow into the dilapidated warren.
…
The foreign tongues, drawls, and dialects of the tourists buzzed in Winston’s ears like forest mosquitoes. Their gaiety almost fooled him into believing that he too was a foreigner to the urban chaos down below. A gale of hot wind rustled the city map he was holding. Winston struggled to hold it at a readable angle. A German tour guide and his group surrounded him. “Im Norden liegt Harlem,” the tour guide said, his hand raised for attention, “… die Heimat des schwarzen Amerikas.” The German language made his epiglottis itch, but Winston distinctly heard “Harlem” and wondered what the tour guide was saying. He knew the man wasn’t saying anything about his Harlem, Ost Harlem.
There was little East Harlem folklore. There had been no Spanish Harlem Renaissance, only Ben E. King’s catamitic reference to a rose in his soul song “Spanish Harlem,” three poets of some renown (Willie Perdomo, Piri Thomas, and Doug E. Fresh), and a playground basketball legend (Joe Hammond). It would be impossible for any tour guide to convey the absurdity of daily life in the neighborhood. How could one even translate Winston’s chaotic morning?
The East Harlem dawn bathed his casserole-dish aquarium in reddish-gold light. Beautiful, thought Winston. Shoot, my set up lookin’ kinda tropical. But when he checked up on his beloved piranha, he found the metaphor of his election campaign floating on its side, dead; the goldfish and turtle frolicking around its corpse.
East Harlem was where the real excitement was, but black Harlem seemed to have better marketing. Tour guides with a textbook knowledge of Harlem weren’t the only ones to profit by its mystique. Before the sanitized tour companies invaded Harlem with their double-decker buses and walking tours, Winston and Fariq provided services to European tourists. They plied their trade outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Near the cab stand they’d wait for a couple of tall, pale youths who displayed that distinctive European mien of being descendants of the great civilizations, along with cowlicks, black jeans, and a backpack, to stagger wearily out of the station. At the crinkle of a map unfolding, Fariq would break out his shortwave-radio-soccer German. “Achtung, motherfuckers!” he’d say, wobbling over to the youths, gold teeth glinting in his “Welcome to New York” smile. “Nicht scheißen! Nicht scheißen! Just kidding.”
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the tourist would ask skeptically. “A little,” Fariq would reply. “Check me out: Bayern München gegen Kaiserslautern; zwei zu eins. Borussia Dortmund gegen Herta BSC; eins zu null.” The tourists would back away, unsure of how to respond to the irony of a crippled American boy who loved Fussball. If there was a piece of trash about, with a swing of his crutch Fariq would “kick” it between two rubbish bins, then exclaim, “Klinsmann mit links — Tor!”—a pinprick in the travelers’ Social Democratic sensibilities. “Do you need any directions?” Fariq would volunteer. “Where you going? What are you planning to see? Have you thought about Alphabet City, or the Botanical Gardens?” “Botanical Gardens” was Winston’s cue. “Harlem. What about Harlem?” he would say robotically, his voice barely audible over the Ninth Avenue traffic. It was his only line. Whenever he complained to Fariq demanding a bigger role in the con game, Fariq would explain to him that he had to say the line. “You big, black, and ugly. You everything they’ve ever imagined Harlem to be.” “Yeah, great idea, Tuff. What about Harlem? Have you guys thought about Harlem?” At the mention of the magic word the European wayfarers would fidget like naughty children about to accept a dare. Soon the tourists would be purchasing fake tickets to a nonexistent Motown revue at the Apollo. If they were especially gullible, Fariq would bid Winston load their luggage into the cab, while he asked where they were staying, then relayed the information to the cabdriver. “Let’s see, the Upper West Side will be twenty-five dollars. You give us the money and the driver will take you where you want to go.” After a while the con stopped working. The new Eurotravelers were a wiser breed. They’d look at the counterfeit tickets and say, “James Brown never recorded for Motown.”
The German tour guide was pounding and kicking the telescope. He cuffed the telescope with the heel of his hand one last time. “Eine scheiß Optik.”
Tuffy’s gaze shifted back and forth from the distant rooftops of his neighborhood to the section of map Inez had marked off in red marker as his electoral district. While the German sightseers gawked at the lights of Times Square, his eyes traced the jagged borders of the unremarkable Eighth District. His mind filling in details invisible from eighty-six stories up and three miles away. According to Inez he needed nine hundred people to sign a petition that would place his name on the ballot. No one knew the district and its constituency like he did. The eastern boundary bisected the East River from 96th to 129th Streets, and Winston knew that somewhere along the concrete banks of the river, maybe by the 103rd Street overpass, crazy old Siddhartha Jenkins was minding rod and reel.