by Paul Beatty
Forgetting all of his police training, Bendito rushed Winston like a berserk third-grader, arms windmilling, propelling him headlong into battle. Like a pawn making an en passant capture, Winston flanked Bendito’s frontal assault with a sidestep, and uncorked a right hand that caught the officer flush on the chin. The crack of the cop’s jaw dislocating was louder than the gunshot. Bendito lay on the sidewalk, eyes closed, the brass badge on his chest slowly rising and falling. Seeing their oldest and strongest brother supine, Enrique and Miguelito turned heel and ran, catcalls of “Mommy!” flogging them down the block. It was a neighborhood beef; no one worried about the beaten officers calling the cops.
One stickball player cautiously touched Der Kommissar’s gummy nose and exclaimed, “Hey, it’s cold. I thought when a dog’s nose is cold that meant they was healthy.” Another boy pressed his hand to Bendito’s nose and remarked, “This one’s warm. What that mean?”
Yolanda brushed aside the circle of stunned children staring at Der Kommissar’s carcass. She grabbed one of the dog’s cropped ears, lifted its head, then dropped it back into the gutter. “I knew it—no exit wound. These pits got thick-ass skulls. Learned that in my animal husbandry class.”
Nadine downplayed Yolanda’s observation. “You’re not taking into account the size of the gun—it was only a two-fifth.”
“But I am taking into account the size of your brain, bitch.”
“Heifer.”
“Ho, ad infinitum.”
“Speaking of animal husbandry, Yolanda, you better check your man,” Charles said, rolling another marijuana cigarette. Winston was in the middle of the stickball infield, standing on the manhole cover that was second base. He stared directly into the sun for few seconds, then looked down at the manhole cover as if he were comparing their dimensions. “He having a breakdown like an ’89 Ford.”
“Shut up, Whitey!” Yolanda called out to Winston: “Honey, what’s the matter?”
“I killed a dog.”
Unmoved by Tuffy’s behavior, Fariq questioned his friend’s sincerity. “You’ve put niggers in comas, and you feeling guilty about shooting a fucking dog?”
“It was just a dog, it didn’t know no better. I mean, it took a minute, but now I’m like damn, that dog could have been me back up in Demetrius’s spot two weeks ago. Niggers could’ve been looking at my dead body. Talking about, ‘It’s just some nigger, he didn’t know no better.’ ”
Fariq tossed Winston his cellular phone. “Well, call somebody who cares, you big bitch.”
“Don’t be like that, Smush,” Yolanda pleaded. “Say something to him. He just trying to turn his life around but he don’t know how.”
Fariq waved her off. “Tuff like a big ol’ battleship that sees some torpedos heading right for it. He want to turn on a dime and spin out the way, but he can’t. Too much momentum. Nigger too big. Moving too fast. Tuff gots to deal.”
“And y’all supposed to be boys. You not right, Fariq.”
Winston had Fariq’s slightly damaged cell phone pressed to his ear. “Hello, Big Brothers of America? … Yeah, I need a Big Brother.… No, I don’t want to be a Big Brother, I need a Big Brother.… How old am I? Twenty-two … Too old? To whom am I speaking? … Mr. Russo? Mr. Russo, you don’t send a nigger to 291 East 109th Street, you going to wish you had.… Foshay. Winston Foshay.” Laughing, Fariq flipped his business magazine in the general vicinity of the trash barrels. “Motherfuckers is hopeless.”
Feeling better, Winston walked back to the stoop. He handed Fariq his phone and took the bottle of rum from Inez. Unscrewing the pink top, he downed a capful of liquor. “Wooo! Yeah, this’ll do.” Slowly, he circled Der Kommissar, liberally splashing the pungent spirits around the carcass.
“Winston, what are you doing?” asked Inez.
“Standing on that manhole cover, looking down, I had a thought.” He took another sip, this time eschewing the cap. “Ms. Nomura, how many books have you given me to read over the years? About thirty?”
“I guess.”
“You know how many of those I read? Two: Go Tell It on the Mountain and Musashi. And out of those two books I remember nothing from Go Tell It on the Mountain, and one chapter from Musashi.” Winston asked Charles for some matches. He struck one and threw it onto the ring of rum. Suddenly the dog was encircled by an ankle-high wall of fire. “Miyamoto Musashi a samurai, right? Nigger trying to find the way of warrior and shit. Killed umpteen motherfuckers and still don’t know any more than when he hadn’t killed nobody. So one day he asks a monk for some advice. ‘Show me the way’ and shit. With a stick the monk draws a circle in the dirt around Musashi and walks away. Musashi like, ‘What the fuck?’ ”
Charles handed the blunt to Nadine. “Nigger, I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ”
Winston pressed on. “Musashi stood in that circle for hours trying to figure out what the monk meant. Finally he has a revelation; he and the universe are one. The circle is like time and space, never-ending.”
“Yo, Tuff, you do not need to be smoking no weed. You have lost your fucking mind. On the strength, just say no to drugs.”
Winston spread his arms out wide as he could. “Extend the circle, its edges go the ends of the universe.” He closed his arms and made a small circle with hands. “Shrink the circle, it becomes size of your soul.”
Inez and Winston shared a knowing smile: the Big Brother from the agency would be his monk. Winston poured the rest of the rum over Der Kommissar’s body, inadvertently spilling some on Bendito Bonilla, who, still unconscious, was perilously close to the fire. Winston nudged him out of harm’s way with the side of his foot, then tossed the bottle back to Inez. But before he could light another match, Charley O’ flicked the remainder of his joint onto the dog. A column of black smoke rose into the air, and underneath it the dog’s fur crinkled and its hide sizzled.
“You a hostile person, Tuffy. You got some issues,” Yolanda said from behind Winston, stepping over Bendito Bonilla and joining him outside the funeral pyre. She saddled Jordy on Winston’s shoulders. Fariq was bent over Bendito, probing the officer’s slow-breathing torso with his crutch.
Peering over his shoulder, Inez swallowed a mouthful of rum and asked how long Bendito would be unconscious.
Fariq stood up and said, “I don’t know, but he ain’t been out that long, about five minutes.”
“I thought knocking someone out with one punch was some ‘manipulative Hollywood bullshit.’ ”
“No, that shit is on the real. Cockstrong nigger, nice with the hands, like Tuffy, catch you right, forget about it. I seen niggers knocked unconscious for twenty, thirty minutes. Motherfuckers pissing on ’em and shit.” He unzipped his fly and straddled Bendito. “Come to think of it …”
7- A SPOONFUL OF BORSCHT
Rabbi Spencer Throckmorton cajoled his temperamental 1966 Ford Mustang onto East 112th Street. “There it is,” he said aloud, turning down the volume on his eight-track player and leaning across the passenger seat for a closer look at a brick building in the middle of the block. “It” was Congregation Tikvath Israel of Harlem, the last synagogue in Harlem. Six years had passed since Spencer had visited Spanish Harlem, and in the temple’s place was La Iglesia de Santo Augustine.
Spencer double-parked the car. He stood on the sidewalk and stared at the brownstone. The building’s remodeled facade was in excellent shape. A new gutter lined the roof and ran down the sides of the church. The cracks under the second-story windows were filled and smoothed with spackle. The cement Star of David carved in the pediment above the doorway was gone, replaced by a generic etching of the Son of God and two hovering angels in prayer. But to Spencer’s joy, buried under countless coats of paint, a small mezuzah remained nailed inside the doorjamb. In restoring the building, the Catholics, as usual, had done an excellent job of presenting the big picture without paying much attention to detail.
During his last year of rabbinical school Spencer served his internship under Rabbi Ab
e Zimmerman at Congregation Tikvath Israel of Harlem—or Constipation Tic Bath Unreal of Harlem, as the rabbis liked to refer to it while dusting the holy scrolls. The Jewish population of Harlem, once numbering over 100,000, had long since evaporated. When Spencer interned at Congregation Tikvath, the membership rolls listed twenty worshipers, twelve of whom were ambulatory, the rest attached to life-support systems at Mount Sinai Hospital. Two of the more regular worshipers weren’t even Jewish: Oscar and Rosa Alvarez, a Puerto Rican couple who loved to listen to the cantor, Samuel Levine, sing his solos (“Dios mío, he sounds like Caruso”). Sometimes in the midst of Levine’s chanting “Shema! Adonai elohenu, Adonai echad!” Oscar, moved to the depths of his soul, would wail “Changooo!”—his invocation of the Yoruba god—momentarily bringing the solemn services to a halt. “Lo siento! Lo siento! It won’t happen again.”
On the last Rosh Hashanah Spencer celebrated in the temple, he convinced Rabbi Zimmerman to let him bring in the New Year with a call from the shofar that would rattle the windows. He blew from the diaphragm, as Rabbi Zimmerman had advised, but all he produced was a garbled, flatulent tone. A quarter of the congregation died that year, and Spencer felt as if he were the most undesirable of God’s chosen people.
Spencer started the Mustang’s ignition, then leaned on the horn for a solid minute. Blindly plunging his hand into the mountain of cassettes on the dashboard, he shoved a pink Loggins and Messina tape into the eight-track player and double-checked the address taped to the sun visor: Winston Foshay, 291 East 109th Street, first floor.
Why the media paid so much attention to the crisis of the black family was a mystery to Spencer. His father, a successful mortician, was a constant presence in his life, and the parade of greedy wives had provided Spencer with an overabundance of mothering. Spencer grew up in Palmer Hills, a black upper-class enclave of Detroit. Well-rounded and comfortable as his childhood was, it prepared him for nothing but cocktail-party patter and entry into a prestigious university. When he wasn’t attending weekend classes in classical piano, jazz trombone, ice skating, Chinese calligraphy, or conversational Swahili, he was drag-racing through town in his sixteenth-birthday present, a mint-condition Mustang convertible.
The first family rift occurred over two decades ago, when Spencer spurned legacy status at the alma mater of his father and grandfathers before him, Morehouse College, and chose to attend Theodore College, a small, overpriced New England white liberal-arts school geared toward molding the minds of the wealthy A-minus student. During his freshman year Spencer became what his dad termed “a lapsed Negro” and fell in love with Belgian ales, easy-listening radio, and a ponytailed, athletic redhead named Hadar Nepove.
Hadar and Spencer met in front of the dorm during a late-night fire drill, two sleepy first-year students waiting for the all clear. Hadar’s frisky bosoms were poking out of her cotton nightgown like curious kitten heads. Spencer’s pants bulged like a wind sock in a hurricane. Hadar stuffed her breasts back into her frock and winked at a leering Spencer.
“When opportunity knockers …”
“What?”
“You know, that’s the first time anyone has ever winked at me. It’s very unsettling. I’d rather you grabbed my ass. Then I’ll know I’m not misinterpreting your signals.”
“You wanna get a beer?” Hadar asked, nodding toward the campus pub, the Rathskeller.
Spencer bowed. “After you, m’lady.”
They waited out the remainder of the fire drill dressed in their pajamas, drinking wheat beer and listening to German oompah-pah music. The conversation was brisk, since Spencer had prepared for such a moment by spending most of his free time at the local kiosk reading every magazine and was ready to fake a knowledgeable discussion on any topic from the situation in the Middle East to Victorian antique furniture.
Hadar was not as eager to please. Though Spencer’s Motor City swarthiness was of some primal appeal, she didn’t quite trust him. He seemed too comfortable. Here they were, Jew and black, in a loud faux-Bavarian beer hall, drinking from steins served by Rubenesque barmaids clad in dirndls, and Spencer was saying how relaxed and at home he felt: “It’s like I’m really Lutheran.” Spencer never questioned whether he fit in; if he was there, he belonged. A southern Jew surrounded by New England bluebloods, Hadar put up a brave front. She felt obliged to throw herself into the bastions of Gentile superiority—Theodore College, the Rathskeller, the crew and rugby teams—not sure whether she was being self-affirming or self-hating. Sometimes when Hadar phoned her family in Nashville, she’d say “regatta” and her grandmother would cry.
Spencer was agendaless, and his cultural neutrality made Hadar uncomfortable, yet envious of his unwillingness to be labeled. “Hadar, the only time I feel black is when I look at my hands,” Spencer said, spreading his fingers out in front of him.
“How do you feel when you aren’t looking at your hands?” Hadar asked.
“Normal.”
For three years Spencer loved Hadar from afar, happy to lend her his notes and cheer on her scull from the riverbank. Late one night, after a regatta victory party, a drunk Hadar asked Spencer to walk her home. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he flipped through her music collection. “Hadar, we’ve got identical taste in music. Every album you have, I have—well, not the album, but the eight-track.”
“No way! Nobody listens to my music—my friends won’t let me near a radio,” she said, packing the bowl of her bong with a soggy clump of black hash.
“Then your friends don’t have any taste. This is real music. Music that puts you in touch with your feelings. Man, you can’t hide from Barry Manilow, Dan Fogelberg, Art Garfunkel, Karla Bonoff, Jackson Browne. And this Leo Kottke album is—dare I say it?—nonpareil.”
“Hold this.” Hadar passed Spencer the bong and pulled a top-of-the-line Ovation acoustic guitar from under her bed. She placed the guitar on her lap and expertly plucked a few familiar chords. She began to sing, “All we are is dust in the wind.…” Spencer lifted his thumb from the bong’s air valve, carbing the thick column of smoke into his lungs. He exhaled just as Hadar was fading out of the last chorus as if a sound man were hidden away in the closet. When the d in “wind” melted away like a snowflake on her tongue, Spencer proposed.
Spencer and Hadar moved out of their respective dorms and scheduled the marriage for a year hence, the day after graduation. They took turns announcing the impending nuptials to their parents. Spencer went first. “Hello, Dad, I’ve got a new girlfriend, her name is—”
“That’s great news, son, but I’ve got something to tell you. You’ve got a new mother, Niecee Walters. Say hello to the boy, you fine, foxy thing, you.” Spencer squeezed Hadar’s hand, swearing lifelong allegiance, no matter the sacrifice.
The call to the Nepove household went somewhat smoother than the one to Spencer’s father. “Hello, Mom, Dad, Grandma—can you hear me? Everyone all there?” Hadar’s mother answered in an exaggerated southern accent: “We’s all assembled, darlin’, like kittens in a basket. What is it you is so giddy about? Vandy’s playing Georgia in two minutes—got a new running back this year, Clovis Buckminster. Boy big as the sultan’s house, so be quick about it.”
“Mom, I’d like to introduce my fiancé, Spencer Throckmorton.”
“Hello,” greeted Spencer from the extension phone, exuding confidence, “Mom, Dad, Nana.” From the other end came the sound of something tumbling to the ground.
Hadar gasped, “Mommy, what happened?”
“Uh, nothing, bubeleh. Everything’s fine.” Mr. Nepove responded, “That’s, er, good news,” then to the hired help, “Melba, prop Grandma’s head up with a book or something and get her some water.”
“What’s wrong with Nana?”
“Nothing—she had an attack. Hadar, this Throckmorton isn’t a member of the tribe, is he?”
“Nothing to fear, Mr. Nepove, I’m very sympathetic to the plight of Jewish people around the world. You’ve heard of Jews for Jes
us, well, consider me a—” Spencer racked his brain for an appropriate alternative alliteration. “Consider me a Zairian for Zionism.”
“Spencer, you’re black?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you know what they say: ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’ ”
“Mom?”
“That’s wonderful news, Hadar. And don’t worry about Nana, she’ll come around. Christ, our kick-return coverage is pitiful this year! Someone tackle that boy!”
Grandma did come around, on the condition that Spencer convert to Judaism. During that last semester before graduation, Spencer began his conversion by meeting with the Hillel House’s clergyman, Rabbi Eisenstadt, on alternate Thursdays. Together they studied the tenets of the Jewish faith, reciting passages and prayers applicable to the conversion. One Thursday, Rabbi Eisenstadt asked Spencer how he, as a Jew, would spend Christmas Day. Spencer said he’d go to the movies like everyone else, and Rabbi Eisenstadt pronounced him fit to be an American Jew. Mikveh, the ceremonial cleansing, was held in a stagnant pond on the college’s south campus. Spencer exited the waters, sopping wet, dripping with algae, silt, and soggy underbrush, physically dirtier than when he went in, but spiritually purified. “Congratulations, Spencer,” Rabbi Eisenstadt said proudly. “I’ve forgotten to ask you one thing, Spencer, but it shouldn’t be a problem. You’re circumcised, aren’t you?” Spencer blanched, slowly shook his head no, and was handed the business card of a Mr. Epstein, emergency mohel.
The bris had all the backroom horrors of a 1950 Mexican-border-town abortion: the mailed instructions, code words to be exchanged at the rendezvous point in front of a corner pharmacy. Spencer and Hadar climbed into a minivan already seating two other blindfolded goy/Jew couples. During the long, meandering ride to the clandestine medical offices, Spencer tried to memorize auditory landmarks, just in case.