Winston turned around to look in the faces of his friends, gauging their resoluteness. To his surprise they looked half-serious. If he were to say, “You niggers is full of shit,” they’d probably rob the bank tomorrow just to prove him wrong. “You niggers full of shit,” he said. His friends looked as if they’d been slapped in the face. Fariq poked Winston in the shin with his crutch. “For real, son. On TV I seen a documentary on these fucked-up Japanese war criminals. They was using the drug knowledge they got from experimenting on the prisoners of war to rob banks and shit. They put on lab coats and ran up in the place telling the employees they’d been exposed to some poisonous gas and had to take an antidote. The antidote of course knocked them out, and boom, it was on. A white lab coat and white skin will get you in anywhere.”
Winston spoke very slowly in the lilting voice of the deeply intoxicated. “You going to poison the whole fucking place?”
“No, we just going to knock them out,” Nadine said. “Ain’t you listening?”
Armello clapped his hands, “I still got these date-rape pills from my baseball days. Roofies. Been saving them for something important.”
“That ain’t nothing new. It’s basically the chloroform dog-snatching bit. You on some coward shit, as usual.”
“It’s not cowardly, it’s slick. There is a difference. Want-to-be-brave, flex-they-muscles — type motherfuckers get shot. Like your boy Kennedy fittin’ to get.”
Turning back toward the television, Winston brushed the dust from the screen with his hand. The electrostatic crackle underneath his palm stood the hair on his arms on end. Kennedy’s limo was rounding the corner. Jackie’s left hand was atop her pillbox hat, keeping it from blowing away in the wind. The president was smiling like her right was buried in his groin. “All y’all, shut the fuck up.”
The dowdy white man halted the film and tapped the movie screen with a wooden war-room pointer. “Keep your eye on the limo driver. From this point on I’ll advance the film in slow motion, the chauffeur will turn around slightly, extend his right arm behind his head and over his left shoulder, you’ll see the gun, hear the shot, see a puff of smoke, and Kennedy’s head will snap back grotesquely. It wasn’t Oswald, the Cubans, the mob, it was the limo driver.” The film advanced frame by grainy frame. The driver turned his head. The driver’s arm reached back as if he were scratching the back of his neck. “Oh shit.” The report of a gun, the smoke, the snap of head, all the events unfolded exactly the way the man said they would. “Oh shit.” Amazed, Winston leaned in closer to the television, examining the fuzzy black blip the white man said was the gun. Is that a gun? That ain’t no gun. Fuck, I’m too high to see the gun.
Charles walked in front of the television. “That’s what’s going to happen to you if you run, Tuffy.” He held up the Fuckman #144 videocassette. “You mind?”
Winston shrugged, replaying the image of Kennedy slumped in the backseat of the limousine in his head. The echo of the shots reverberated, recalling his brush with death the last time he was in Brooklyn. Man, this politicking dangerous. If I won I’d be dropping so much truth, niggers would have to shoot me.
Charles backed away from the TV set, revealing a ponytailed middle-aged white man fingering a brunette who looked as if she’d been eighteen years old for all of ten minutes. Properly moistened with saliva and pillow talk, the young woman readied to receive the gray-bearded man, legs spread, eyes open. The lech, a saggy-skinned convulsion of grunts and grimaces, mounted the woman.
“You know he rolling, old man fucking with his socks on.”
“And his glasses.”
“But he ain’t doing no damage to the pussy.”
“Come on, bitch, get your feet into the fuck. Dig your heels in, girl.”
For the next few minutes the group watched the video in rapt silence, each caught up in a private pornographic peccadillo, Winston’s being that he loved watching a woman’s breasts bounce during sex. Armello, wringing his hands and bursting with the need to share, blurted out, “Ah shit, now she licking the asshole! Ever have your asshole eaten?” he asked, looking around, not really expecting an answer. “I did. I was in Memphis in a Budgetel. Mamí had me in the buck. I was the bitch, my knees all in my ears, her tongue showing a nigger’s anus much love. I completely forgot I struck out four times in that night’s game, twice with the bases loaded.”
Pointing emphatically at the TV, Fariq called everyone’s attention back to the video. “Now Fuckman working the pussy, that’s how you do!”
Whitey slapped Fariq in the back of the head. “Smush, what your scoliosis-crippled ass know about working pussy? You probably can’t even control your thrusts, flopping on the cock like a fish out of water. Bet you catch an epileptic fit on the pussy, talking about ‘Honey, did you spasm?’ ”
“Nadine, what you laughing at? When we get home, watch.”
“Look at this white girl, yo, she fucking like a wet blanket.”
“Any of you niggers ever tag a white bitch?”
Winston, beginning to sober up, spun around in his chair, raising his hand like a schoolboy. “I did.”
“Nigger, what? You ain’t never said shit.”
“You know me, before Yolanda I was sticking dick in all four inputs.”
The males nodded in agreement, though none of them, as they ran down the list of bodily orifices, could figure out exactly what the fourth input was.
“All right.”
“Word life, kid.”
“My boy.”
A quizzical look on his face, Armello stopped in mid-hurrah and began counting on his fingers. “Anal, oral, vaginal. Hey, yo, what’s number four?”
Winston laughed haughtily and said, “I be mind-fucking hos, stupid.”
“Where you meet this girl?”
“Remember in junior year we used to go to that underground spot in the meat district near the piers?”
“Uh-huh.”
“White bitch and black bitch about ten years older than us sipping Scotch near the speaker?”
“The redheaded freak?”
“You know when you see a white girl and black girl together at the club, the white one looking for some black dick, and black one wants to hook up with a white boy, ain’t no two ways about it. So I hit Red off with the digits on the sly. Trick called back and the next day I was up in her crib sucking titties and didn’t spend nary a dime on drink, dinner, or daffodils. What was her name? Holly, Markie, some shit. I think it was Holly.”
Nadine’s faced puckered. “Eeww. What’s a white girl like?”
“It was weird, man. She was so comfy all the damn time. She was a computer consultant. Had an office in the crib. I ain’t never been in no black person’s house with an office. I ain’t even heard a nigger say ‘I’m going to the office.’ I just let her carry on. Suck my dick right, you can talk about gigabytes and zip drives all you want. Then one day we chillin’, then out of the blue she start talking this ‘You know, when I was growing up I had a black nanny. I loved her like she was family. She loved me too. At her funeral her children told me so.’ ”
“She went there on you, kid?”
“She went straight plantation Gone with the Wind on a brother. My father used to tell me that every fool he knew who ever been with a white girl who was from even a little bit a money has heard that shit. Shoot, I was trying to be ‘peace and love, we’re all human beings’ with the bitch. I thought that madness my father was talking was old-fashioned. I’m like, ‘She white? Big deal, it’s the twenty-first century. People are people. So what if she brush her teeth with fennel-flavored all-natural toothpaste from Maine? So what?’ ”