Slumberland Page 6

  A week later, to ease the societal transition of the emperor penguins, the Berlin Zoo brought in a gaggle of the more gregarious rockhopper penguin, and soon the once-uptight emperor penguins were splashing and barrel rolling through the frigid waters of this cold-ass city as if they had heard and heeded the security guard’s advice. You just have to let them love you.

  And God, I needed to be loved.

  CHAPTER 2

  SLUMBERLAND. NO MATTER how tightly I cupped my hands around my eyes, I couldn’t see inside the bar. A hazy red light filtered through the always-drawn bamboo blinds. The window vibrated with the murmur of loud conversation and reggae music. Judging from the rhythm of the shaking window, I guessed that the song was one of my favorite ballads, Aswad’s “On and On,” a deeply respectful cover of Stephen Bishop’s easy-listening hit.

  Down in Jamaica . . .

  I walked into the bar. And indeed, “On and On” was on; I was more than pleased with myself. I felt like a superhero who’d just discovered his powers. The ability to identify a song from the way its backbeat vibrated a windowpane wasn’t going to save the world from alien invasion or a runaway meteor, but I could envision winning some bar bets.

  For Berlin, the pub was crowded. There were only two open seats, a stool at the bar and an empty chair at an otherwise occupied table. The Slumberland was a repressed white supremacist’s fantasy. At almost every table sat one or two black men sandwiched by fawning white women. At a strategically located center table, four grinning white men sat voyeuristically watching the bloodlines of their race putrefy. I’d never been in a place more devoid of platonic love. The air was thick with the smell of musk oil, patchouli, and sweat. I had to breathe by taking big fish gulps of air.

  The desert-yellow walls were decorated with colorful paintings advertising various African businesses, barbershops that shaved petroglyphs into Cameroonian heads, Namibian eateries, and Senegalese fix-it shops. A white woman coming from the bathroom slithered past and winked at me. I froze like an Eisenhower-era virgin on his first trip to a Tijuana cathouse. No one had ever winked at me before. I didn’t think it was something real people did, and this was a blatant Betty Boop c’mere-big-boy wink come to life. I pretended to be preoccupied with the artwork and turned to the painting nearest me. It was a hand-painted graphic for a Ghanaian herbal center that sold various cure-alls. An asthmatic boy clutched his chest. A bald man, suffering from a painful condition called “kokoo,” squatted on the ground with his back to the viewer, hot brownish-red diarrhea spewing from his watercolor butt like lava. In another section of the painting the word power was underlined by a veiny, rock-hard penis attached to a well-muscled torso whose owner, apparently, no longer suffered from erectile dysfunction.

  I sat at the bar and introduced myself to the bartender as the new jukebox sommelier. Doris shook my hand, poured me a scotch the size of which you’d find only in a John Ford western, and told me that the owner, Thomas Femmerling, wasn’t sure when to expect me, but would be happy to see me when he got back from the Canary Islands.

  “If he has to listen to ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ one more time . . .”

  There was no mistaking that wonderfully alluring husky voice. Doris was the same woman who answered the phone when I first placed that long-distance call to the Slumberland.

  I took out the envelope the chicken-fucking song came in and asked if she knew anything about it; maybe the writing was familiar.

  Doris examined it and beckoned me to look at the postmark.

  “This was mailed from East Berlin.”

  “So?”

  “An East German can’t just mail a package to America. That’s high treason. Whoever mailed it probably works for the government or the Stasi. What was in the envelope?”

  “A videotape of a man having sex with a chicken.”

  “That’s very German,” she said.

  I’d soon come to learn that to a German, anything involving sexual perversion, punctuality, obsessive-compulsiveness, and oblique references to the deep-rooted national malaise was “very German.” Of course, for me it wasn’t these concepts or behaviors that were very German, but rather it was the reflex to characterize such things as “very German” that was very German.

  I asked Doris if she knew Charles Stone. She shrugged and asked me to describe him. I got out, “Black . . . musician . . . older gentleman,” before I realized I was describing half the bar’s clientele, and that I didn’t even know what the Schwa looked like.

  Stone wasn’t a self-promoter; he never appeared on his album covers, gave interviews, or posed for publicity head shots.

  Doris licked a fingertip and lifted a tiny grain of coal-black detritus from my glass.

  “Hey, don’t worry,” she said, rolling the almost-microscopic piece of dreck between her fingers. “If he’s a black man, he’ll come through here sooner or later. They all do. Look at you.”

  For a second I panicked. What if he isn’t black, I thought. Not that it mattered; in fact, my respect for Wolfman Jack, Johnny Otis, and 3rd Bass’s Pete Nice and MC Serch increased when I found out they were white. A part of me hoped the Schwa was white; maybe then he’d be more congenial, less embittered than those Slumberland Negroes.

  I spun around on my stool and looked down my broad black nose at those men. There but for the grace of my record collection go I, I thought to myself.

  This was Berlin before the Wall came down. State-supported hedonism. Every one-night stand a propaganda poster for democratic freedom and third-world empowerment. In my mind I made a vow that I’d never be like those sex warriors who subsisted only on their exoticness. These men of the diaspora who smiled meekly while libertine frauleins debated as to who was the “true black”: the haughty African with his tribal scars, gender chauvinism, and piercing eyes, or the cocksure black American, he of the emotional scars, political chauvinism, and physical grace. This was a time when if a white women saw a black man she wanted, she’d step to him and dangle her car keys in his face. The customary response on the part of the buck was to take those keys in hand and drive her home.

  Next to me a middle-aged Grossmutter jabbed her tongue down the throat of a handsome African half her age and twice her height. I made my “I smell gas” face and braved my way into the main room, mumbling the minstrel wisdom of Bert Williams under my breath.

  When life seems full ofclouds and rain,

  And I am filled with naught but pain,

  Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain?

  Nobody.

  Though I’m purportedly black—and, in these days of racial egalitarianism, a somebody—I’d never felt more white, more like a nobody. DJ Appropriate but Never Compensate. I was amanuensis Joel Chandler Harris ambling through the streets of Nigger Town looking for folklore to steal. I was righteous Mezz Mezzrow mining the mother lode of soul, selling gage on 125th Street, tapping my feet to Satchmo’s blackest beats. I was Alan Lomax slogging tape recorder and plantation dreams through the swamp-grass miasma looking to colorize the blues on the cheap. I was 3rd Bass’s MC Serch making my own version of the gas face. A rhyme-tight, tornado-white, Hebrew Israelite, stepping down from the soapbox and into the boom box to spit his shibboleth.

  I missed cats like Serch and Mezz. I found their lyrical introspection and unabashed nigger love comforting. Unlike Republicans of color and the Slumberland’s barroom lovers, they were race traitors with everything to lose. Their verses and riffs had both John Brown’s passion and his Harpers Ferry praxis. They feinted and weaved with the dazzling whiteness of Pete Maravich’s ball handling, the exactitude of Jerry West’s jump shooting. I hoped against hope that the Schwa was a white man who hung out with white people.

  When winter comes with snow and sleet,

  And me with hunger and cold feet,

  Who says, “Here’s two bits, go and eat?”

  Nobody.

  Besides not knowing what the Schwa looked like, it occurred to me that I had no idea if he was dead or ali
ve. Considering the timelessness of his music, the chicken-fucking song could’ve been twenty years or twenty minutes old.

  Maybe someone whom I’d wronged in my past was dangling the Schwa in my face. Luring me into some Hitchcockian trap.

  The kind where I chase my proverbial tail looking for proof that I’d seen what I’d seen, heard what I’d heard.

  Here I’d sold my car. Signed a lease to sublet an apartment for five years, and the Schwa could be here at the Slumberland bar or in the slumberland of eternal sleep. Cary Grant always lives in the Hitchcock movies. Neither I nor the Schwa was Cary Grant.

  Americans die in this city. Fleeing political and parental oppression, they come to Berlin claiming to be maligned and marginalized by a racist America too insecure to “get” them. Most find something less than moderate success and end up dying pitiful, meaningless, alcoholic deaths in small two-room flats, to be found by friends laid out in their own excrement, their livers bloated, their artwork unsold and dusty.

  I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody.

  I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no

  time.

  And until I get somethin’ from somebody,

  sometime,

  I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no

  time.

  Slumberland. The room pulsed with sexual congeniality. My vow against lustful miscegenation was quickly forgotten. I longed for someone to squeeze my thigh, pinch my ass. Ain’t I a man? Seated underneath a fully grown banana tree, two women at a corner table stared in my direction so hard I had to double-check that I didn’t have a ticket in my hand and that there wasn’t an electric sign over their heads that said, NOW SERVING NUMBER 86.

  Slumberland. I was past the point of no return, asleep, dreaming and dead all at the same time. My feet grew heavy; with each step into the room I seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into the floor. I looked down. The floor of the entire bar was covered, six inches deep, in pristine, white beach sand.

  The redhead gawked unapologetically like a bewildered child looking at a disfigured passerby. The brunette’s gaze was one of an unrepentant sinner simultaneously demanding from her lord both satisfaction and salvation. I was about to choose the brunette—at least she wasn’t licking her lips—when Doris grabbed me by the elbow.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “For the past ten minutes you’ve been standing here in the middle of the room like a statue. Everyone’s looking at you like you’re crazy.”

  Gently, like a psychiatric orderly leading a patient back to the dayroom, Doris returned me back to the bar and sat me down.

  A jaunty Afro-pop song fluttered her deep-set eyes and pursed her whisper-thin lips with appreciation. Fela Kuti will do that to you. Now it was my turn to stare. Her eyes were the same soft macadamia nut brown as her hair. The laugh lines in her face accented the high cheekbones and the square, almost brutish jaw.

  “What’s your favorite band?” she asked by way of readjusting me to my surroundings.

  “When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water,” I said. “Well, they’re not my favorite band. They’re my favorite name for a band.”

  “That is a good name, but did you ever notice that nine out ten times, bands with good names suck?”

  I liked Doris from the moment her tongue touched the roof of her mouth. She was very pleasant sounding. Her slight lisp gave her sibilant fricatives a nice breathiness, so that her S’s and zeds sounded like the breeze wafting over the Venice Beach sand.

  “What’s your favorite band name?” I asked.

  “The Dead Kennedys,” she shot back, and for the next few minutes we volleyed excellent band names back and forth.

  “The Soul Stirrers?”

  “10,000 Maniacs.”

  “Ultramagnetic MCs.”

  “Dereliction of Duty.”

  “The Stray Cats.”

  “The Main Ingredient.”

  “The Mean Uncles.”

  “Little Anthony and the Imperials.”

  “The Nattering Nabobs of Negativity.”

  “The Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama.”

  “The Butthole Surfers.”

  “Peep Show Mop Men.”

  “Sturm und Drang.”

  “The Big Red Machine.”

  “Ready for the World.”

  “The Cure.”

  “One of the great mysteries of the universe is why bands with really good names rarely make it.”

  Doris took off her apron and took the seat next to me, abruptly ending her shift. I ordered something called a Neger off the drink menu. My German at this point was limited to a few insults and numbers under a thousand, but Neger looked suspiciously like nigger, and when the waitress delivered a murky concoction of wheat beer and Coca-Cola, two shades darker than me, I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.

  I loved the blatancy of the German racial effrontery of the late eighties. Black German cabaret singers, with names like Roberto Blanco and Susanne Snow, sang on late-night variety shows accompanied by blackface pianists. The highway billboards featured dark-skinned women teasingly licking chocolate confections. The wall clocks in the popular blues joint Café Harlem read:

  Berlin Sao Paulo Tokyo Harlem

  My Neger was cold and surprisingly tasty, but I had to know.

  “So what exactly does Neger mean in German?”

  “It means ‘black person,’ ” said a woman eavesdropping in to our conversation.

  “No, it doesn’t, it means ‘nigger,’ ” corrected Doris. “Don’t try to sugarcover it.”

  The conversation turned to my reasons for coming to Germany. Doris listened patiently, and without a hint of shame explained to me that she either “knew bible-ly” or knew someone who “knew bible-ly” every black man who’d set foot in the Slumberland in the past two years, and that she had never heard of or met any Charles Stone.

  A customer dropped a coin on the bar. That metallic oscillation between sudden loudness and nothing is a beautiful sound. I imagine that from far enough away, our galaxy sounds like a fifty-cent piece dropped onto an ice cream parlor tabletop. I wrote my phone number on a pasteboard coaster and flicked it and a fiftypfennig coin over to Doris. She put the coaster in her bag and asked what the money was for. I told her to use it to call the number I’d given her.

  “But you’re not home.”

  “No shit.”

  She picked up the red house phone, dropped the coin in, and made the call. The white guys from the center table passed by me on their way out. One placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “You’re from a good family. A very good family, I can tell.”

  He meant it as a compliment, but the implication was that most black families were not good. I was inclined to agree with him, because so far as I knew all families were fucked-up.

  Doris returned from the phone call shooing the guy away like a fly.

  “ ‘For the nigger it niggereth every day.’ What kind of answering machine message is that?” she asked.

  I told her it was the Schwa introducing one of his songs, that it was a play on a Shakespeare quote: “For the rain it raineth everyday.” “We’re drinking these Negers, I heard the coin drop on the table. I don’t know, I thought maybe you’d recognize the voice.”

  “So that was this Schwa man’s voice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard it before, and at the end of this niggereth stuff, the music, if that’s the Schwa too, you really need to find this man.”

  I don’t know how many Negers I drank that night, but I had as much fun ordering the beer as drinking it. “Gimme two niggers!” I’d yell out to the waitress. “How much for two niggers? I’ll have a gin and tonic, the lady will have a large nigger.”

  Eight hours later I awoke to Doris in the front room watching television with her eyes closed. She was swathed in a terry-cloth bathrobe I never wore and rewinding the chicken-fucking video. I turned up the
radiator and I sat next to her. The VCR whirred and jolted to a clunky stop. She pressed play.

  “How long you been up?”

  “I don’t know, an hour maybe? You listen to this song and you get lost in time.”

  Doris curled into the fetal position and put her head in my lap. After every phrase the Schwa played, she’d mutter something about the harmonics, coloration, and Stravinsky. Five minutes went by before she’d stopped shaking her head in disbelief and making faces whenever my stomach rumbled.

  “I did it,” Doris said, speaking into my belly button.

  “Did what?”

  “On television I once heard an American homewife tell her UFO encounter. She spoke the usual bullshit—‘bright object in the sky,’ ‘incredible speed,’—but then she said the spaceship flashed a color she’d never seen before, and speeded off. Ever since then I’ve tried to imagine a color I’ve never seen before. And now I just did it. It was the music.”

  She opened her eyes. They were a color I’d seen before.

  “But if we find him, no one will purchase the music.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too good. Too much.”

  “Come on, people are starving for this music.”

  “Exactly, but when you have hungered for a long time, if you eat too much, you die.”

  Doris sank her teeth into my nipple. I turned up the volume to a deafening loudness that no doubt violated the Berlin laws against Sunday-morning noise. No one complained.

  CHAPTER 3

  I PUT THE SEARCH for the Schwa on hold while Doris and I had a one-night stand that lasted the month and a half the owner of the Slumberland was on vacation. We never truly got to know each other. Past a weakness for screwball comedies, the only thing we really had in common was our appreciation of the Schwa.

  At our most intimate we’d play lazy games of backgammon and listen to his records. As soon as the music ended we’d fight. My Calvinist tendencies and her gloomy German stoicism clashing like two kindergartners playing musical chairs and attempting to squeeze their behinds into the last remaining plastic seat. We’d argue bitterly over the frequency of my showers and her refusal to turn her thermostat above sixty degrees in the dead of winter.