Looking at her surreptitiously from the rear gave him a perverted chill of satisfaction, a feeling similar to a breeder’s pride in watching his prized mare fly around the racetrack. When Yolanda first moved into his apartment, Winston, full of common-law jealousy, would follow her around the neighborhood, spying on her from behind double-parked cars, eavesdropping on her conversations to the best of his lip-reading ability. Once he saw Player Ham, the neighborhood ladies’ man, run out of Danny’s Cuts, still cloaked in the barber’s towel, smelling of coconut oil and hair sheen. “Damn, girl, you fine.” Cracking his knuckles, Winston hid behind a van, ready to pounce at the first peck on the neck or affectionate squeeze of the hand. “Thank you,” said Yolanda, going on about her business. “I just had to tell you, because you a looker.” Then softly to himself he said, “Boy, I’d tear that shit up.”
Winston emerged from behind the van, glowering at Player Ham. He waited a couple of beats and, when Yolanda was out of earshot, whispered, “Nigger, if I ever …” Shaking, Player Ham dug into his pocket, saying “Tuffy, come on now, I didn’t know,” and slapped forty dollars into Winston’s hand, paying back a debt he never owed. “We straight, right?” Jogging to catch Yolanda, Winston realized how lonely she was in the neighborhood without him. Her family and friends in Queens had written her off for moving in with an obese unemployed habitual offender, and the local women her age were just too fast for her. With Player Ham’s money he treated her to a bouquet of bird-of-paradise flowers and a dinner of bacalao and white rice.
Belted into his stroller, Jordy tried to alert his mother to his father’s presence, but she was too engrossed in the game to pay any attention. Tuffy nudged Yolanda aside and dropped fifty cents into the machine’s slot, interrupting her duel with a turbaned, scimitar-wielding Sikh caricature. As the coins plunked into the change box, the machine’s screen flashed A CHALLENGER COMES in bold red letters. Each player was presented with a cast of fighters from which to choose. Yolanda stuck with her warrior, Kashmira, a ponytailed ninja assassin. Winston selected a scaly green behemoth. He pressed a button and the video game roared “Rotundo” in a deep electronic voice. “That’s right, Rotundo in the house. Ro-fuckin’-tun-do about to get busy.” Yolanda said nothing, mentally rehearsing the intricate joystick-button combinations that would unleash a flurry of secret moves upon Winston’s fighter. Yolanda toggled her joystick with her left hand, the fingers of her right hand darting over the red, white, and blue set of buttons. Her dexterity resulted in a samurai sword assault that dropped Rotundo’s arms to the ground like pruned tree branches. Unfazed, Rotundo parried by raising his stumps and squirting a stream of his blue acidic blood in Kashmira’s face. Temporarily blinded, Kashmira endured a barrage of flying kicks that sapped her strength, turning her energy bar from green to yellow to red.
“Girl, you about to get laid the fuck out.”
Yolanda didn’t panic. Holding down the red button, she calmly jiggled the joystick left, right, up, then tapped the white button twice. Kashmira let out a threatening “Kiai!” unsheathed two swords, and, raising her arms to the side, began to spin. The swords, twirling like helicopter rotors, lifted her up and sent her flailing toward Rotundo. Winston tapped his joystick twice to the right, causing Rotundo to back off, but before he could assume a defensive crouch Kashmira decapitated him, slicing the character’s balloon-sized head in half before it hit the ground. “Kashmira wins,” the machine announced.
“No fucking shit.”
Yolanda walked away from the game and pushed Jordy’s stroller outside. “Where you going? It’s still two more rounds left. Landa, you better get back here and finish.” Winston had Rotundo throw a couple of punches at the defenseless Kashmira, then gave up and followed Yolanda outside.
“How in the hell you come at me with ‘You better finish’? Winston, you leave me like that again and I’m done.”
“I know, Boo. I’m sorry. I got caught up. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“You know how Jordy get when one of us isn’t around. You know he had an attack.”
“He did? When?”
“Last night. The asthma hit him and he stopped breathing. If I wasn’t up doing homework, I wouldn’t have noticed. He was fucking turning blue. Like an idiot I called your name three times before I remembered your ass was in jail. I had to walk to Metropolitan. Three hours until the doctor saw him.”
“They put the oxygen mask on him?”
“I mean it, never again. Next time a locked door ain’t all you going to come home to.”
Winston gingerly took the stroller from Yolanda. In doing so commandeering his son and his status as head of the household. Yolanda hooked a finger around his belt loop and the trio slowly hiked back to the house. Winston played father at the steering wheel, his avuncular blather shortening the trip back home. “Long as you don’t lock up the coochie, Boo, you can lock anything up you damn well please. Because you know, sooner or later I’m going to fuck up. It’s in a nigger’s nature. All I ask is you two accept my apologies. I ain’t saying forgive and forget, but remember I’m just a young nigger trying to break the cycle.”
“Winston, unless you start acting right, I’m going to break your cycle.”
15- YORI-KIRI
Although his stalwart expression didn’t show it, Oyakata Hitomi Kinboshi was enraged. Sumo wrestling, his cherished livelihood, was dying an ignoble death in Spanish Harlem’s White Park. Here in a small local playground, the fifteen-hundred-year-old traditions of his sport were being violated like fourteen-year-olds at sleepaway camp. Instead of the yobidashi sitting cross-legged high up in a tower and announcing the start of the tournament with the customary playing of the sumo drums, a spindly-limbed herald sat atop a basketball hoop beating on a white plastic janitor’s bucket. In fifteen centuries a woman had never set foot on the dohyo, but a Japanese-American woman stood in the center of the hastily constructed ring, yelling inanities into the microphone like a Communist screech owl. The Oyakata’s English wasn’t very good, but he understood something to the effect of “No justice, no peace.”
Sumo wrestling, once the sport of the gods, was now a Japanese minstrel show, the wrestlers no longer warriors, but entertainers. They were Japan’s goodwill ambassadors, sent out by the government to make amends for each administration’s invariable breach of ethnic etiquette. Last year it was Vancouver to make amends for the foreign minister’s calling Canadians “junior Americans.” This time the justice minister blamed the country’s growing crime rate on Japanese youths’ desire to emulate American culture, specifically the wastrel and violent attitudes of blacks and Hispanics, characteristics inherent in most nonwhite races, but not the Japanese. Three months later, in an attempt to appease the unquieted ghetto masses, the Sumo Kyokai sent the Oyakata and the wrestlers to East Harlem.
The strange Japanese-American woman gestured to the crowd and a large black man rose to polite applause. The Oyakata smiled. It was the same sullen-faced young man he’d seen in the poster on the bus ride from the hotel — the one he thought looked like the Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. Standing up in the crowd, a child on his shoulders, a stuffed tiger on the child’s shoulders, the black man looked like the bottom of a totem pole. “What did the Japanese girl say?” Kinboshi asked his translator. The interpreter bowed. “She introduced the young man as Winston Foshay, a politician who is running for public office. There’s a petition circulating through the crowd. He needs fifty more signatures and he’ll be on the ballot.” Kinboshi shook his head in disgust. The translator must have made a mistake. That boy a politician? Never. Any fool could plainly see the impudence festering underneath a warrior’s I-don’t-give-a-damn expression. This Winston Foshay never had a civic thought in his life. With the body and face of a bullfrog, he was born to be either a sumo wrestler or blues singer. “Did she say something about Chairman Mao?” The interpreter answered yes, fumbling for a way to translate “Mao more than ever” into Japanese.