“Wait a minute,” Armello interrupted. “What’s fennel?”
“Some nasty-tasting flavor.” Winston sighed, then continued, “ ‘Black nanny.’ Pissed me the fuck off. I’m like, ‘Why this bitch feel the need to tell me this? “Black nanny?” What, she think I want to know that shit?’ ”
“Why you think, God?” Fariq said, all too eager to answer Winston’s question. “What she was really saying was, your mother ain’t shit, and that you ain’t shit, because she’s the white princess who everybody loves and worships. She think she special because she was raised by a black woman.”
“Shoot, a black woman raised me too, but that don’t make me special. But I was in the cut behind that comment. Stuck in the back of my mind. We be having a good time, then I look at her and think, This stupid bitch, said that stupid shit.”
“You should’ve said, ‘Fuck her. Later for that bitch.’ ”
“If I could’ve would’ve should’ve, but you know how a white girl do. Ol’ girl was kicking out gear, jewelry, sucking balls. Set a nigger out with a pass to the entire New York Film Festival. One time that crazy ho grabbed my arm, cut me with some scissors, and started sucking my blood.”
“Come on.”
“I’m serious. Wiped her mouth, talking about ‘Now we are both Negroes.’ I was like, ‘Negro? You ain’t Negro, bitch, you delusional.’ ”
“That’s what you get for messing with a white girl,” Charles said, nodding his head knowingly. “I’m telling you, white women is evil. Why any motherfucker would fuck with a white girl is beyond me.”
“Charley, how can you say that? Your mother and your sister is white.”
“Then don’t you think I should know what I’m talking about?”
Fariq slapped palms with Charles. “Charley O’ right. Any nigger who marry a white girl is marrying her because she white and no other reason. Unless a nigger meets a white bitch because they the sole survivors of an airplane crash and stranded on a desert island, he marrying her because she white. I don’t give a fuck what he say about true love, pretty eyes, and a nice disposition.”
“Who said anything about marriage? Me and a white babe, picture that. Smush, what you looking like that for?”
“I’m picturing.”
“Don’t even feel it. None of y’all would even know what to do with a dark-skinned babe. Yolanda is … man, please.”
“You and Landa still fucking?” Fariq asked, somehow phrasing the question in an innocuous manner.
“Of course.”
“You know what I mean when I say ‘still fucking’? Is she invisible yet? I’m not talking about when you be fucking and thinking, ‘Why am I fucking this bitch?’ but when you be fucking and thinking, ‘Why am I fucking?’ That’s when your woman becomes invisible.”
“Come on now, we been going out for two years, married for one. The attraction piece there, but hey, it ain’t easy. Before we get down to business I be sitting on the edge of the bed sipping a brew or smoking some cheeb, sometimes both. Gettin’ primed, know what I’m sayin’? Yolanda looking at me all sad, holding her breasts like food, like she’d give them to me if she could, if it would make me happy. She say, ‘Why you have to drink and smoke that shit before we make love? Shouldn’t I be enough?’ and I’m hitting the joint for all I’m worth, talking about, ‘Yeah, bitch, you should.’ ” To show his precoital exasperation, Winston took two hard pulls on the imaginary marijuana cigarette in his hand, then said, “I be like, ‘Man, this shit ain’t hitting right.’ ”
When the laughter died down, Nadine tried to bring the conversation back to the lovemaking distinctions between the Caucasian and the Negro. “You never said, was there a difference in how a white girl fucks and how we do it?”
“It ain’t like I been with a whole bunch of white girls. All I know is Latin babes like to pull on your ears, but I’d say, no difference in the coochie — pussy’s pussy.”
“I fucked a woman who didn’t have a pussy,” volunteered Armello, reluctantly tearing his eyes away from the sex video. “Una vieja—bitch was about fifty. Met her in Zebulon, North Carolina. She didn’t have a pussy, had a hysterectomy when I got with her. Stuck my entire hand up in there,” Armello slowly opened and closed his fist. “So much room in that mug, I could feel the wind blowing. Coño, if I’d’ve had a flashlight, I could have made shadow puppets on the insides of her stomach.”
Using the light from the television, Armello illustrated his sexual escapade by producing shape-shifting silhouettes, substituting the bedroom wall for some aging southern belle’s cervix. Barking canines metamorphosed into jellyfish. Pachyderms transformed into craning swans. Finding Armello’s story a repulsive anaphrodisiac, Winston excused himself from the room. “Me voy. Smush, dame chavo.”
“How much?”
“A pound.”
Winston took the five-dollar bill from Fariq, and said his goodbyes. “Tell Antoine I’m gone.”
Making his way downstairs, Winston could see the party was winding down. The living room smelled of musty men and spilled beer; plastic cups were strewn across the sticky floor. The bay windows, fogged from the night’s activities, were beginning to clear. The few remaining couples held hands and made out in the corners of the living room. A tall man slow-danced by himself, spinning, dipping, and softly crooning lyrics to a saccharine love ballad.
Once out the door Winston saw the little Joad girl sitting alone on a car bumper, fingering her bell, the preteen divas having gone home for the night. “Your moms still ain’t come out?” Winston asked.
The girl shook her head no and asked, “Did you see her in there?”
“What she look like?”
“Like me, but a little older.”
Suddenly, Winston was in a hurry to get home. He held the door open and waved the girl inside. Crossing the threshold, the girl stopped and punched him in the stomach. Before she could scamper inside, Winston lifted her by the collar, ripping the bell from her neck before setting her down. “You don’t need to let her know you coming, you just let her know you there.”
On his way to the subway he hoped that Yolanda would still be awake when he got home. He pictured her wearing a sheer silk teddy, two sticks of Black Love incense burning, a bottle of baby oil resting on the nightstand.
To avoid the stifling heat of the subway station, he waited at the top of the stairs, ears cocked for the roar of the next Manhattan-bound train, eyes on a group of cornrowed turnstile jumpers hurrying past him into the bowels of the transit system. He thought about what Fariq had said earlier: how women become invisible. Sex becomes routine. A salvo of gunfire rang out on the street above him. Winston was looking forward to the routine.
Girl, you my shorty, my wisdom, my Earth.
13- TIPPECANOE, TYLER, AND TUFFY TOO
Look at Ben Franklin. Tuffy, holding a starched one-hundred-dollar bill up to his face, was scrutinizing the old statesman’s portrait. Nigger look upset. Like somebody just told him, “You discovered electricity? So what, the radio ain’t been invented yet.” Crisp notes of the same denomination as the one in his hands swelled his pockets. So much so, he barely had room enough for his keys and bubble gum, much less his pistol, which he now toted in his sock. And Ben look like he about to say, “Motherfucker, if I was twenty years younger I put my pilgrim shoes so far in your ass …” Winston smelled the bill, aahed, then stuffed it back into his pocket.