6.19.00 | Winston Foshay, aka Tuffy, fumes to a friend that he has had enough of out-of-town white boys assuming he is a drug dealer because he is black. He has had enough of police officers treating him like a “cannibal shaking salt on some white kid’s leg.” He has had enough of the indignity of being stereotyped as a criminal because of his race, and enough of being alternately ignored or hassled by the system.

His penchant for railing against ghetto clich’s one moment and reinforcing them the next is just one of the bundle of dichotomies that makes up Winston, the 320-pound protagonist of Paul Beatty’s sophomore novel, Tuff. The 19-year-old Tuffy’s search for his identity is the canvas for Beatty’s ruminations on growing up black, and the author covers every inch with color - vivid characters, realer-than-real dialogue and worthy social insights.

Beatty’s witty prose, which makes even the quirkiest subjects flow with seamless grace, propels the book nicely. The question that lingers far too long, though, is: to where?

Tuff opens with Winston regaining consciousness after fainting during a shootout in a Brooklyn drug den. His job of two weeks - looking mean and scaring delinquent customers into paying - is gone as quickly as his bosses, the three “ghetto phenotypes’ who died in the shooting. Winston and Fariq, his dapper and handicapped amigo, head back to Harlem for the first of the novel’s many drinking, dreaming and talking sessions.

The next day, Winston spends the afternoon on Fariq’s 109th Street stoop, discussing the state of black business with his friends and neighbors. The secondary characters that flavor Tuff sometimes seem inserted as ad hoc verbal backboards for Winston, but they do the job well.

Charles “Whitey” O”Koren is ‘the last of a dying breed: the native, destitute, inner-city white ethnic.” The Bonilla triplets, police officers and Winston’s rivals since childhood, are distinguished as much by their views on Puerto Rican statehood as by their looks.

Seeking guidance and focus amid the torrent of white noise from his friends and his own inner conflicts, Winston calls the Big Brothers program. The program sends Rabbi Spencer Throckmorton - who is what Spencer’s own father would call a “lapsed Negro,” and who plans to capitalize on his Big Brother role by writing a newspaper article using ‘the tried-and-true derisive-article-about-minorities-written-by-a-minority approach.”

The rabbi is shocked to discover his charge is not a wayward youngster who will be overjoyed by tossing a Frisbee, but an imposing husband and father known for knocking people out. Spencer sees a story in the confused hoodlum, though, and signs on to help Tuffy decipher his life.

Spencer provides an amusing foil for Winston. In nearly every scene, he provides comic relief and an opposing viewpoint to the other inhabitants of Winston’s world. The rabbi is bottled microbrews to their malt liquor and folk music to their rap. He comes dangerously close, though, to being the type of clich’d “hood book and movie figure that Beatty so skillfully avoids with his other characters. In short, Spencer is “The Black Man Who Sold Out.”

In addition to providing vitriolic but funny exchanges with the anti-Semitic Fariq, Spencer also arranges the event that precipitates the closest thing that “Tuff” has to a clear plot - At the rabbi’s behest, the important people in Winston’s life, including his mother via speakerphone and his militant poet father, gather to discuss the young man’s life and devise a plan for him to become a success.

Determined not to lose Winston like she once lost Malcolm, Inez offers him $15,000 - from a government restitution check she deems blood money and has refused to cash - to run for City Council. Winston accepts, figuring that “crime and politics pay about the same.”

Winston’s campaign is certainly unique: his platform is anti-cop, anti-cats-in-the-supermercados, and avowed ambivalence on drugs, alcohol and guns in the community. He meets with political parties who want him to run on their ballots, debates the other candidates and wins votes by competing in an impromptu sumo match and winning handily. Through it all, though, Winston remains fairly unenthusiastic about the race.

As Tuffy drinks and wisecracks his way through the campaign, he generates plenty of humor and tell-it-like-it-is social commentary, but Beatty fails to develop enough tension to make the ending significant. By the time the ballots are counted, whether Winston wins or loses seems like an afterthought. While this lack of tautness would be enough to scuttle a lesser novel, it is not enough to overcome the quality of Beatty’s prose and his acute observations.

In Winston, Beatty has created a character of so many dimensions that he gets away with a plot that is tenuously underdeveloped. A large part of the hulking thug’s appeal is his myriad contradictions - Winston simultaneously needs to save and be saved.

After the opening shootout, he wonders who will feed the drug dealers’ goldfish and takes the fish with him when he escapes, only to later drop a piranha in its bowl. Fariq recalls Winston saving a childhood friend from drowning in a public swimming pool, then viciously breaking his jaw days later. As an adolescent, he helped steal bikes by stringing fishing wire across paths to clothesline unsuspecting cyclists, then cried after the heist. The opposing forces at work inside Winston are among his most humanizing traits.

So is his love of film. The cinema, in addition to allowing Winston to escape reality, also seems to help him interpret his world. It is fitting that Winston’s introduction to foreign film was Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which he mistook for a kung fu flick while playing hooky in Greenwich Village. Once inside, though, the black and white story of a little French boy who turns to petty crime to endure his painful existence resonated with Winston.

He also connects to films a little closer to home. When he first begins concocting a plan to pull his life together, he says he is ‘tired of being one of these bummy Raisin in the Sun niggers.”

Two film references also epitomize one of the book’s strongest themes: the surrealism of life in the ghetto. Near the end of the novel, a carload of Winston’s friends remind him of the gun-boat crew in Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam translation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that features a lieutenant who surfs even as shells whistle through the air. The film captured the irrationality of war, much as “Tuff” relates the fantasticalness of Winston’s life in Spanish Harlem. Faced with the ultimatum to surf or fight, Winston decides he wants to surf.

In another scene, Spencer and Winston discuss the balcony scene from Schindler’s List. The rabbi cites preeminent surrealist Andre Breton’s statement that the epitome of surrealism was shooting into a crowd, but Winston argues the opposite - that the most surreal thing is being in a crowd getting shot at.

The scene was intended to portray the unbelievable nature of the Nazi concentration camps, argues Winston, but the evil deeds and bizarre acts Winston has witnessed growing up in the ghetto make it believable. The exchange drives home Winston’s dilemma: How is he supposed to carve a clean path for himself in a world in which reality betrays logic?