11- WHERE BROOKLYN AT? WHERE BROOKLYN AT?
Brooklyn was in the throes of a muggy yet festive Saturday night. The borough, at least the area surrounding the Fort Greene projects, was one big outdoor juke joint, and the party was in full swing. There’s a weekend adage Brooklynites utter on nights such as this: “It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.” But Winston, feeling the effects of his Brooklynphobia, had no idea where he was at. He was nauseous and disoriented. Somewhere, a few blocks back, the east end of Myrtle Avenue had flipped up and attached itself to the west end, encircling Winston in a concrete band. The street began to spin. Dance-hall music boomed out of slow-moving sedans, and triplets of red and green dice bounded off brick walls. The ghosts of Demetrius, Chilly Most, and Zoltan circled overhead, spooking him into dropping his bottle of malt liquor. Winston was back in Coney Island’s Hellhole.
He took corrective measures. He truncated his gait and slowed his pace to a chain-gang plod. The appropriate amount of bounce was applied to his diddy-bop, just enough spring in his step to rock his torso and head in an autistic half-beat. His shoulders rolled so that his arms paddled stiffly through the humid air like oars to a cruising Phoenician warship. His face arranged itself into a Noh scowclass="underline" eyebrows cinched tight like zipper teeth, eyes squinted, jaw jutted to a position not seen on a hominid since Homo erectus. No oncomers held his stare longer than it look to think, Who that ugly motherfucker? Nigger look crazy. The street stopped spinning. His demons fled.
If he couldn’t help looking like an outsider, it was best to look like a dangerous one. Stopping at each intersection, Tuffy suspiciously looked both ways, as if he were on the lookout for the police when in reality he was searching for a landmark that would jog his memory of where his cousin Antoine lived. Where that nigger rest at? There was a post office, a laundermat kitty-corner from that, and a basketball court down the block. Cool, there go the laundermat. Relieved, he turned left and walked to the middle of the brownstone-lined block, stopping under an oriel window with a debauched red glow. Three preteen girls sat on the hood of a car parked out front, dreaming aloud, daring the world to listen. But the only person paying attention was a delighted little girl, elbows on the fender, chin in hands, a small tinker bell attached to a red nylon choker wrapped tight around her neck.
“When we sign our record contract, we going to be so big. Oh my God! I’m a buy a car, set Moms out. Damn, I can’t fuckin’ wait!”
“You iggin’, girl, we need to write some songs first.”
“We don’t need no songs. We don’t even need know how to sing. All we need is an image, some dance steps, and a good name for the group. The music comes last, yo.”
“So what’s our group called?”
“I was thinking of B-R-A-T-S.”
“What’s that stand for?”
“Being Real And True Sisters.”
“Hell naw, that’s too soft. We gots to come hard, know what I’m saying? How about S-H-I-T — Some Hos In Trouble?”
“We can’t be a cuss word. How we going to get any radio play. ‘Here’s the latest single by SHIT.’ I ain’t never going to get a pearl-gray Jaguar like this.”
“What about C-R-A-P, Coming Real At People?”
“That’s wack, we should be called A-S-S. We get on Soul Train, and the host’ll say, ‘All the way from Brooklyn, put your hands together for ASSSSS!’ ” The girl leaped off the car, danced a quick heel-toe-jig butt-shaking routine, then, clutching a microphone as real as her singing abilities, conducted the postperformance interview. “ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Felicia.’ ‘Felicia, I hear you’re the choreographer for the group, is that true?’ ‘I put together a little something something. Get the people excited.’ ‘And where do you hail from?’ ‘Brooklyn. Hey, Brooklyn in the house, y’all.’ ‘ASS has the number-one single on the charts, but everywhere I go people ask me what does ASS stand for, what should I tell them?’ ‘Tell them it stands for Always Singing Sisters.’ ”
One girl lifted her chin in Winston’s direction, alerting her friends to the presence of an older boy. As the would-be divas eyed him, Winston’s posture straightened and his face softened. Stopping within speaking range of the young ladies, he patted his stomach and ran his tongue over his teeth. The choreographer, at thirteen years old the doyenne of the group, closed the gap with two bold, hands-on-hip steps toward him, her egg-sized breasts violating his personal space. Tilting her head at the obtuse angle one uses to make sense of an abstract museum piece, she said, “Mmm, you fine.” The backup harpies slid off the car fender with all the seductiveness bony twelve-year-olds can muster.
“Where Antoine at?” Winston asked, looking skyward to keep from flirting, the tag line to male adolescence ringing in his head: “Old enough to pee, old enough …”
“He upstairs,” the choreographer answered, brushing her bangs from her forehead, then pointing toward the red window. “You going to get your dick sucked? You don’t look like no fag.”
“That’s my cousin.”
“Your name Tuffy?”
“Uh-huh. How you know?”
“He said you was coming by tonight. Antoine be talking about you. Told me you was his bodyguard. He said you be running up on niggers, for real.”
“Naw, it ain’t like that.”
Felicia was referring to the nights when Tuffy used to escort Antoine to the cab stand after long nights of working the peep show and fuck booths. Winston would tromp up the lighted spiraling stairs of the XXX Sex Palace to find his cousin on the second floor sitting on a bar stool, wearing high heels, a tight miniskirt, and a lavender bustier, striking pinup poses. After a 360-degree spin on the stool, Antoine emerged looking ready to be posted up over a homesick GI’s bunk.
“Who’s this?” he’d ask his coworkers, nose pointed to the heavens, back arched, hairless legs crossed with one hand resting limply over one knee. He’d flick one bra strap seductively off his shoulder, part his thin red lips ever so slightly, and flutter his eyelids. “I said, who’s this?”
“Betty Grable!”
“Jane Russell!”
“Susan Hayward!”
“No. No. No. How stupid can you be — I’m Ida Lupino!”
“Who the fuck is that?”
“You bitches better learn your history.”
“Let’s go, Antoine!” Winston would snarl, snatching his cousin’s rabbit-fur coat off the wall hook and, with a matador snap of the jacket, coax him off the stool and into the night. “Vámanos, goddammit.”
“Winston, don’t call me Antoine. Here my name is Mons Venus, you know that.”
For thirty dollars in sticky one-dollar bills or fifty dollars in peep-show tokens, Winston’s job was to march Antoine past a sign reading
GIRLS!
GIRLS!
GIRLS!
(with penises) All sex acts non-refundable.
then guide him through a gauntlet of sexually frustrated and bewildered men. Men who after fifteen minutes of awkward light petting through a small window in a Plexiglas partition reached for the phone to negotiate the price of a vaginal display. Antoine would stall for time, prudishly suggesting that it was his time of month. Nervous, he’d scratch the razor stubble on his cheeks, his reluctance to “show some pussy” and the amplified rustle of his five o’clock shadow arousing the customer’s suspicion. The client would begin to panic. Eyes jumping from titties to Adam’s apple, back to titties, over to the hands and feet, and back to the titties. The man would jabber in clipped sentences, his anger and shock fusing the declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative into complete thoughts that accommodated any form of sentence punctuation. This bitch got a beard? This bitch got a beard! This bitch got a beard. “I demand to see the manager!”