Slumberland

CHAPTER 1

YOU WOULD THINK they’d be used to me by now. I mean, don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so. It doesn’t matter whether anyone truly believes it; we are as mediocre and mundane as the rest of the species. The restless souls of our dead are now free to be who they really are underneath that modern primitive patina. Josephine Baker can take the bone out of her nose, her knock-kneed skeleton back to its original allotment of 206. The lovelorn ghost of Langston Hughes can set down his Montblanc fountain pen (a gift) and open his mouth wide. Not to recite his rhyming populist verse, but to lick and suck some Harlem rapscallion’s prodigious member and practice what is, after all, the real oral tradition. The revolutionaries among us can lay down the guns. The war is over. It doesn’t matter who won, take your roscoe, the Saturday night special, the nine, the guns you once waved fuck-a-white-man drunkenly in front of the kids, take those guns and encase them in glass so that they lie passively on the red felt next to the blunderbuss and Portuguese arquebus and Minuteman musket. The battle cry of even the bravest among us is no longer “I’ll see you in hell!” but “I’ll see you in court.” So if you’re still upset with history, get a lawyer on the phone and try to collect workmen’s comp for slavery. Blackness is passé and I for one couldn’t be happier, because now I’m free to go to the tanning salon if I want to, and I want to.

I hand the receptionist the coupon. On the front is a glossy aerial photo of a Caribbean coastline. She flips it over and her eyes drop suspiciously from my face to the back of the card, which reads, ELECTRIC BEACH TANNING SALON. BUY 10 LIGHT BATHS, GET 1 FREE. Underneath the promotion, in two rows of five, are ten pfennig-sized circles; and rubber-stamped in each circle is a blazing red-ink sun wearing a toothy smile and sunglasses. Today is the glorious day I redeem my free suntan. But somehow this woman, who has personally stamped at least seven of the ten smiling suns, is reluctant to assign me a tanning room. Usually she stamps my card and under her breath whispers, Malibu, Waikiki, or Ibiza, and I go about my business.

A look of bemused familiarity creeps across her face. A look that says, Maybe I’ve seen you somewhere before. Didn’t you rape me last Tuesday? Aren’t you my son’s tap dance teacher?

“Acapulco.”

Finally. She pencils my name into the appointment book. I point to the sunscreen in the display case behind her.

“Coppertone,” I say.

A tube of Tropical Blend skims over the countertop like a miniature torpedo. The sun protection factor is two. Not strong enough. If the receptionist’s white vanilla frosting lip gloss has an SPF of three, my natural complexion is at least a six. I return fire and send the lotion back. “Zu schwach. Ich brauche etwas Stärkeres,” I say, asking for something stronger.

Maybe mammals should be classified by their sun protection factors. Married SPF3 female, 35, seeks nonsmoking, spontaneous SPF4 or lighter for discreet affair. SPF7 Rhino Faces Extinction. I’m the Head SPF50 in Charge. It was the SPF2ness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myselfhere; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myselfI must, else all these chapters might be for naught.

The windowless Acapulco room has the macabre feel of a Tijuana cancer clinic. Like the liquor stores, ball courts, and storefront churches back in the old country, Berlin tanning salons are ubiquitous sanctuaries. Places of last resort for the terminally ill, the terminally poor and sinful, the terminally pale. Places where you go when the doctors tell you there’s nothing more they can do. When the world tells you you’re not doing enough.

A ceiling fan churns efficiently through the musty air. On one dingy aquamarine wall hang two framed, official-looking pieces of parchment, one an inspection certificate from the Berlin Department of Health and Safety, and the other, written in ornate script, a degree from the College of Eternal Harvest in something called Solarology. In the middle of the room sits the tanning bed, a glass-and-chrome-plated panacea from heaven or, more accurately, Taiwan. I undress and lotion up, leaving the door open just a crack.

After years of tanning, my skin has lost much of its elasticity. If I pinch myself on the forearm, the little flesh mound stays there for a few seconds before slowly falling back into place. My complexion has darkened somewhat; it’s still a nice, nonthreatening sitcom Negro brown, but now there’s a pomegranate-purple undertone that in certain light gives me a more villainous sheen. Half of my information on what’s new in African-American pop culture comes from Berliners stopping me on the street and saying, Du siehst aus wie. ., and then I go home and look up Urkel, Homey the Clown, and Dave Chappelle on the Internet. Lately the resemblances have been to the more sinister, swarthy characters from B-movie adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s pulp fiction.

I rent these movies—Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, Get Shorty—and watch them while running back and forth from the TV screen to the bathroom mirror. I think I look nothing like these men, these bad, one-note character actors whose only charisma seems to be the bass in their voices and the inflection in the way they say motherfucker. Sam Jackson, Don Cheadle, the chubby asshole from Be Cool, they’re always smart and dark, but never smart enough to outwit the white guy or dark enough to commit any really heinous crimes.

I often think it would’ve been easier to have grown up in my father’s generation. When he came up, there were only four niggers he could look like: Jackie Robinson, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Louis Armstrong, and Uncle Ben, the thick-lipped man in the chef’s hat on the box of instant rice. Today every black male looks like someone. Some athlete, singer, or celluloid simpleton. In Daddy’s day, if you described a black man to somebody who didn’t know him, you’d say he looks like the type of nigger who’d kick your natural ass; now you say he looks like Magic Johnson or Chris Rock, the type of nigger who’d kiss your natural ass.

Most liniments are cool and soothing, but this isn’t the case with sunblock. The stuff smells like brine and has the consistency of rancid butter. My dingy skin seems to repel it. No matter how hard I rub, I can’t get the cream to disappear, much less moisturize. The greasy swirls just sit there on my skin like unbuffed car wax. I silence the ceiling fan with a firm pull of the cord. If the fan has slowed down or sped up, I can’t tell. One more yank. Same difference. Clumsily, I climb onto the tanning bed and raise my hand until the fan’s blades skip across my fingers and gradually come to a stop. There’s an oily, linty residue on my hand, which I wipe off on the wall.

I put on the goggles. The tanning bed is cold but soon warms up. Like a childhood fever, tanning heats you from the inside out. My ash-white bones become calcium coals, briquettes of the soul. Soon I’m back in my bottom bunk, the ultraviolet radiation substituting for my overprotective mother piling blanket after quilt after blanket on her baby boy. The warmth from the lamps becomes indistinguishable from that of my mother’s dry, calloused hands. My own skin seems to vitrify, and while I have any range of motion in my arms I slip a CD into the built-in stereo and press play.

Music. My music. Not mine in the sense that backseat lovers have songs or fifties rock ’n’ roll belongs to the devil, but mine in the sense that I own the music. I wrote it. I own the publishing. All rights are reserved. The song is titled “Southbound Traffic Jam.” It opens with a rumbling melody, ten lanes of bumper-to-bumper morning rush-hour traffic over a sampled Kokomo Arnold guitar solo. In the background, two exits away and tail-gating the guitar riff, is the intermezzo, a Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler that merges into the tune with grinding gears and a double blast of its air horn. After sixteen bars of bottleneck guitar and bottlenecked cars (no one ever gets the joke), a Japanese sedan suddenly slams its brakes. The wheels lock. The skid is ominously long and even. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this track, and yet that high-pitched screech still makes me brace for impact. Steel myself for the sound of sheet metal folding in stereo. A windshield explodes and ten thousand cubes of safety glass fall to the fast-lane pavement with the digitally crisp tinkle of a Brazilian percussion instrument. Sun Ra’s satur-nine falsetto bespeaks the urgency.

So rise lightly from the earth.

And try your wings. Try them now.

While the darkness is invisible.

The guitar comes up, the traffic chugs on. Kokomo hums and moans. The knees of the receptionist pop. She’s at the door, peeking through the crack. Staring at the bulge in my Speedo, listening to my music, and wondering why. How does it come to this?

You’d think I’d be used to it by now — this lack of sunshine. But winter in Berlin isn’t so much a season as it is an epoch. Eight months of solid prison-blanket-gray skies that, combined with the smoky nightlife and the brogan solemnity of the Berlin footfall, give the city a black-and-white matinee intrigue. If it weren’t so cold I’d think I was doing a cameo in an old Hollywood melodrama. To shake the leaden September-to-April monochrome I find myself colorizing things. Ingrid Bergman’s eyes, the Polish prostitute’s language, the pastry sprinkles on the Schoko-Taler in the Bäckerei window, the patches of sky on a partly cloudy to mostly cloudy afternoon are all a false-memory shade of blue. A blue that doesn’t exist in nature, but resides only in my mind and the twang of Kokomo’s guitar.

On days when the skies are clear and that stark blue I’d long forgotten, I sprint out of the apartment and into the blinding afternoon looking for affection and serotonins. For an instant I forget where I am, then I notice the narrow wheelbases on the cars parked along the street with showroom precision. At the intersection of Schlüterstrasse and Mommenstrasse, dogs, dog owners, and unescorted schoolchildren, all equally well behaved, patiently wait for the walk signal. I look down at my funny-looking shoes and I remember where I am. Berlin, yup, Berlin.

The quirky functionality of the German shoe, like that of Volkswagens and Bauhaus, grows on you. If one is a creationist, the Adam and Eve of German cobblery are the bowling and nursing shoe, respectively. Shoe Darwinists such as myself believe the lungfish of the species is the three-hundred-year-old Birkenstock.

I own a highly evolved pair of Birkenstocks, all-season Hush Puppy — hiking boot hybrids that adapt to the ever-changing environment like suede chameleons. It is in these sturdy marvels of natural selection that I traipse around the city frantically searching for the sun in the same panic-stricken manner in which I look for my keys. The deductive clichés run through my head: When did you last see the sun? Are you sure you had it when you left the house? I work my way backward from the shadows of the Cinzano umbrellas that front the outdoor cafés and head for the Ku’damm shopping district. The crushed quartz in the sidewalk sparkles. Tourists wave from the tops of the double-decker buses. The sun is indeed “out,” but I can never find it in the sky.

None of the Germanic tribes had a sun god. Pagan as philosophy professors, the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Vandals knew better than to believe in something they couldn’t see. Ra, Helios, Huitzilopochtli — my name for the sun is Charlie. I weave in and out of pedestrians imagining that two thousand years ago some Hun idler shod not in Birkenstocks but straw sandals trod the same path looking for solar spoor in these now-concrete wilds. But I catch only glimpses of the yellow deity, the corona shimmering through the leaves of the tree blossoms in Tiergarten Park, the herbalescent shampoo sheen in a tall blonde’s hippie-straight locks, maybe a reflection in a skyscraper’s glacial façade. My sightings are never more than partial eclipses; castle parapet or church steeple, something is always in the way.

Knowing the Egyptians haven’t done anything of note in three thousand years, the Berlin civil engineers must have taken a cue from the ancient ones. Giza’s men of science built Cheops’s pyramids to align with the celestial pole, and so too did Berlin’s urban planners, establishing a zoning code that seemingly stipulates every structure, be it building, billboard, street lamp, or bird’s nest, be erected to such a height or in such manner as to prevent any person of normal stature standing at any point within the city limits from having a clear and unobstructed view of the sun.

I always conveniently abandon the search at Winterfeldtplatz, the bells of Saint Matthias ringing in the dusk and signaling an end to the hunt. The sky darkens. The acrid smell of charred pita bread and shawarma lingers in the air. An old man rides a creaky two-speed. A woman curses her uncooperative daughter. The lights inside the Slumberland bar flicker on. In all the time I’ve lived here I’ve seen one sunset. And if it hadn’t been for the reunification of Germany it wouldn’t be that many.

The buzzer goes off but before I start to climb out the receptionist resets the tanning-bed timer for fifteen more minutes, restarts my song, and beckons me to lie back down. Retaking her seat, she listens to the music, one corner of her mouth raised in a deeply impressed smile. Suddenly that corner lowers into a pensive frown. Her fingers stop dancing. Her feet stop tapping. She wants to know why. Why I tan. Why I came to Germany. I tell her it will take more than fifteen minutes to answer that question. It will take the two of us having one of those good horizontal relationships, the kind that the day-to-day verticality of dating, jogging, and window-shopping eventually destroys after two years. By the time I got to the point where I mailed her postcards with accidental haikus scribbled hastily on their backs. .

In bed we cool. Kiss.

Soon as my feet hit the floor—

The shit go haywire.

…her question would remain unanswered, then I’ll call her whining, “I sent you a postcard, please don’t read it.” She’d want to break up with me, but wouldn’t go through with it because she still hadn’t found out why.

She shifts her plump behind in the chair. The chair squeaks. My sphincter tightens. Other than that I don’t move. To move would mess up the comfort level, and I haven’t been this comfortable in years.

On our way out of the Electric Beach my freshly irradiated face quickly loses its battle against the brick-cold night. Always a clean city, on winter nights Berlin is especially antiseptic. Often, I swear, there’s a hint of ammonia in the air. This is not the hermetic sterility of a private Swiss hospital but the damp Mop & Glo slickness of a late-night supermarket aisle that leaves me wondering what historical spills have just been tidied up.

The ubiquitous commemorative plaques, placed with the utmost care as to be somehow noticeable yet unobtrusive, call out these disasters like weary graveyard shift cashiers. We have a holocaust in aisle two. Broken shop glass in aisle five. Milli Vanilli in frozen foods. These metallic Post-it notes aren’t religious quotes and self-help affirmations like those pasted onto bathroom mirrors and refrigerator doors, but they are reminders to never forget, moral demarcations welded onto pillars, embedded into sidewalks, etched into granite walls, and hopefully burnished onto our minds. WAY BACK WHEN, AND PROBABLY TOMORROW, IN THE EXACT PLACE WHERE YOU NOW STAND, SOMETHING HAPPENED. WHATEVER HAPPENED, AT LEAST ONE PERSON GAVE A FUCK, AND AT LEAST ONE PERSON DIDN’T. WHICH ONE WOULD YOU HAVE BEEN? WHICH ONE WILL YOU BE?

At the Nollendorfplatz U-bahn station we catch ourselves staring blankly at a marble plaque memorializing the homosexual victims of National Socialism. People whom the inscription described as having their bodies beaten to death (totgeschlagen) and their stories silenced to death (totgeschwiegen).

“What did you do last night?”

It’s an odd question. One that is usually only asked by a best friend after a drag on a borrowed cigarette or the pulling of a strange hair from a familiar shoulder. I’m thankful for it, though. She doesn’t want to dwell in the not-so-distant past, and neither do I. “Nothing. What about you?”

“Nothing.”

“What about the day before yesterday?” she asks, pulling in close enough to squeeze the air from my down jacket.

“The day before yesterday?” I say, reaching behind my back and breaking her grip. “I was really busy the day before yesterday.”

She’s hurt that I refuse to share, but the day before yesterday is too personal. The day before yesterday was the most important day of my life.

On the elevated tracks above us her train brakes to a halt. She’s trying to hold my gaze; however, my attention is focused on a place I can’t see but know is there. A place two blocks and a left turn behind her — the Slumberland bar. My patronizing good-bye kiss on the forehead is quickly countered with a kiss of her own. A lingering smack on the lips that gives me a glimpse into what could be our future, a long stretch of day after tomorrows that would be soft, impulsive, slightly salty, and an inch and a half taller than me. Bing-bong. The two-note electronic chime sounds, the pneumatic doors hiss to a close, and in a sense we’ve both missed our trains.

Not getting the anticipated response from me, the receptionist quickly folds her arms in disgust, her hands tucked tightly into her armpits. I want to ask her to do it again. Not kiss me, but fold her arms. The sandpapery sound of the linen sleeves of her lab coat rubbing together makes the tip of my penis itch. It’s time to say good-bye. I reach out to lift the name tag poorly fastened to the receptionist’s lapel. It reads, Empfangsdame, German for receptionist.

I begin to backpedal, expecting her figure to recede into the night. It doesn’t. Her lab coat is too bright. She stands there like a stubborn ghost of my satyric past, present and future refusing to disappear.

It’s a slow Monday night; the Slumberland is gloomy and quiet. Only the jukebox’s flickering lights and a Nigerian trying to impress a blonde with his Zippo lighter tricks punctuate the musty stillness. I order a wheat beer, then insert some money into the jukebox. I punch in 4701, “In a Sentimental Mood.” Duke Ellington’s languorous legato soft-shoes into the bar and, as advertised, puts me in a sentimental mood about the day before yesterday.

Most languages have a word for the day before yesterday. Anteayer in Spanish. Vorgestern in German. There is no word for it in English. It’s a language that tries to keep the past simple and perfect, free of the subjunctive blurring of memory and mood. I take out a pen, tapping the end impatiently on a bar napkin as I try to think of a English word for “the day before yesterday.”

I consider myself to be a political-linguistic refugee, come to Germany seeking asylum in a country where I don’t have to hear people say “nonplussed” when they mean “nonchalant” or have to listen to a military spokesperson euphemistically refer to a helicopter’s crashing into a mountainside as a “hard landing,” and I can’t begin to explain how liberating it is to live in a place where I can go through an autumn of Sundays without once having to hear someone say, “The only thing the prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.” Listening to America these days is like listening to the fallen King Lear using his royal gibberish to turn field mice and shadows into real enemies. America is always composing empty phrases like “keeping it real,” “intelligent design,” “hip-hop generation,” and “first responders” as a way to disguise the emptiness and the mundanity.

Ironically, though the sound of American rhetoric is one of the reasons I left, it’s the last remaining tie I have to the country of my birth. The only person back home I correspond with is Cutter Pinchbeck III, senior editor for the Kensington-Merriwether Dictionary of Standard American English. Our relationship is contentious, and like some exiled word revolutionary I try to improve the linguistic repression from afar. To date I’ve submitted four words for inclusion in the next edition: etymolophile, Corfunian, hiphopera, and phonographic memory. I like my words; they’re self-explanatory and, to my mind, much needed. Who’d believe that English is the only Indo-European language without an adjective to describe the inhabitants of the island of Corfu? Cutter Pinchbeck says we don’t need Corfunian. In his priggish rejection letters he states that the people of Corfu are called Greeks, and that an etymolophile wouldn’t be a lover of words, but a lover of the origin of words. He patronizingly says that hiphopera almost merited a lemma as an innovative, confluent melding of high and low culture; however, it didn’t possess the “straight gully, niggerish perspicuity of this year’s new entries, e.g., badonkadonk, bling, bootylicious, dead presidents, hoodrat, peeps, and swol,” just to name a few slang ephemerals. And despite my having enclosed signed affidavits from my mother and a video of me, age twelve, winning twenty-five thousand dollars on Name That Tune, Cutter Pinchbeck doesn’t believe that I, nor anyone of the hundred billion people who’ve trodden on earth in the past fifty thousand years, has ever had a phonographic memory — but I do. I remember everything I’ve ever heard. Every dropped nickel, raindrop drip-drop, sneaker squeak, and sheep bleat. Every jump rope chant, Miss Mary Mack Mack hand clap, and “eenie meanie chili beanie oop bop-bop bellini” method for choosing who’s it. I remember every sappy R&B radio lyric and distorted Hendrix riff. Every Itzhak Perlman pluck and squishy backseat contorted make-out session. I can still hear every Hey you, You the man, and John Philip Sousa euphonium toot and every tree rustle and streetcorner hustle. I remember every sound I’ve ever heard. It’s like my entire life is a song I can’t get out of my head.

“Ow.” The Nigerian has burned himself. He’s shaking his hand wildly and sucking air through his teeth. His date laughs, seizes his hand, and licks and nuzzles his seared fingers.

The jukebox ballad ends with a note that Ellington lays down with the gentleness of a child setting a wounded bird into a shoe-box lined with tissue paper. A series of English words for “the day before yesterday” dies in the back of my throat—penultidiem. . prepretoday. . yonyesterday. . — and like an unwitting Tourette’s Syndrome utterance, a word for “the day before yesterday” flies from my mouth. “Retrothence!” The blonde and the Nigerian give me a strange look. I’m going to send that to Cutter Pinchbeck III at Kensington-Merriwether. Retrothence will look awfully nice on page 1147 of the Fourth College Edition, nestled between retrospective and retroussé.

“You still have some songs left.”

The Nigerian is standing next to the jukebox.

“Put in 1007. You can play anything you want after that.”

Rock ’n’ roll saunters into the room. Overdubbed guitar riffs that don’t come off as gimmicky, drums driving the song with the tough staccato love of a caring drill sergeant, and the bass, the bass is above the fray, suspended above the strings, synthesizers and percussion, brimming with a cocksure confidence, always threatening to show off but never doing it.

“Who is this?”

“The Magnum Opus.”*

They’re Southern California, sprawling, hazy, fickle, as underground as a rock group that sold twenty thousand records could be. The critics hail groups like the Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam as the purveyors of the new rock ’n’ roll, choosing heroin vapidity over depth, haircuts over musicianship, head-to-toe white-boy pallor over a Mexican/black/American/guapo—politic band whose music has nothing to do with being Mexican, American, black, or handsome. High-pitched and just this side of screechy and that side of cogent, the vocals hydroplane over the melody.

“They’re good,” the Nigerian says.

“They are good,” I wanted to say, “but two nights ago, not so far from where you’re standing now, me and the greatest musician you’ve never heard of played two minutes and forty-seven seconds of musical perfection as timeless as the hydrogen atom and Saturday Night Live. A beat so perfect as to render musical labels null and void. A melody so transcendental that blackness has officially been declared passé. Finally, us colored folk will be looked upon with blithe indifference, not erotized pity or the disgust of Freudian projection. It’s what we’ve claimed we always wanted, isn’t it? To be judged ‘not by the color of our skins, but by the content of our character’? Dude, but what we threw down was the content not of character, but out of character. It just happened to be of indeterminate blackness and funkier than a motherfucker.”

CHAPTER 2

I MISS LOS ANGELES, the place where the sounds in my head started. I miss the midday smog; I liked the way my lungs pained after chasing my dog around the backyard fig and lemon trees, the dog, nearly as winded as I, licking the grit off my face, the sting from my eyes. I miss my day job at Trader Joe’s, a convenience store for rich folks on gluten-free diets who, while I hand-pressed oranges into fresh-squeezed orange juice, would come up to me carrying two bottles of wine and ask which one would I recommend with light Indonesian fare, the Chianti or the Beaujolais? That was one of the good things about the job: You got to say “Beaujolais,” “Gouda,” and “Reblochon.” I miss saying “Reblochon.” I miss the landslides and the brush fires. For those of us who lived below the poverty line, which in Los Angeles is below five hundred feet above sea level, Mother Nature was the poor flatlanders’ great equalizer. Lo, the guilt-free schadenfreude of watching a Coldwater Canyon dowager on the nightly news standing on the rooftop shingles of her ranch house armed with a garden hose, dodging embers and fighting back flames fanned by the high winds and my cynicism. I miss the Malibu mansions tumbling down rain-soaked mountainsides. Their owners tromping through the mud in Italian rain slickers, their beachfront dream homes now five-million-dollar piles of driftwood. In Los Angeles memorable nights are as countless as the Fatburger double-king-chili-cheese permutations. They’re warm and prevailing as the Santa Ana winds that announce them and they play out like student films, scratchy, nonlinear, experimental, self-indulgent, and overexposed. Nights lubricated with stolen Volnay, Bordeaux, and magnums of Louis Roederer. Nights that dismissed themselves when the psilocybin-induced cartoon characters stopped frolicking on the shag carpet and climbed back into the television to become men with generic American drawls asking, “Has God touched you today?”

I miss those nights, but what I don’t miss is the fear. In Los Angeles my fear was audible. What up, cuz? Was happenin’, blood? Pinche mayate, what are you doing in this neighborhood, ese? Hands behind your head, face on the ground! Are you sure you can afford to pay for this? What with all the posturing, the slam dunk scowls, the hip-hop bravura, the What, me worry? middle-class nonchalance, and the condomless B-boy fucking on the down low, you’d never guess that we black men are afraid of many things, among them the police, water, and the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test; however, what we fear above all else is that out there among the 450 million other black men who inhabit this planet is an unapprehended habitual offender, a man twice as bad as Stagolee and half as sympathetic, a freeze-motherfuckeror-I’ll-blow-your-head-off nigger on the lam who looks exactly like us.

Moving to Berlin reduced the fear of being mistaken for someone else to almost nothing. I stopped having the recurring nightmare of being at the post office and seeing a poster tacked to a bulletin board that read, WANTED FOR GRAND LARCENY, WHITE SLAVERY, AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. The profile and face-front mug shots didn’t resemble me, but were me. Albeit a me I didn’t know. A hard, slit-eyed, sneering me who went by an assortment of dead giveaway aliases, Pol Pot Johnson, Steve Mussolini, Mugabe von Quisling. Underneath the background information would be the rules of engagement and the amount of civic recompense. “This man is considered armed, ugly, and nuclear-meltdown dangerous. If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of this person, please notify the appropriate authorities immediately! Reward: $500,000 and the Eternal Gratitude of Your Government and Fellow Citizens.”

But that fear of myself was who I was. It was all I and a lot of other little Los Angelenos had. I waited to be picked out of the crowd, actualized by white America, and if not by her, then a kiss from Velma Reinhardt, the big-bosomed, blonde-neighborhood vixen would do. However, as luck would have it, America beat Velma to the punch.

When I was fifteen I got a letter from the Los Angeles Unified School District notifying me that I was to report to the University of California Los Angeles for “special testing.” I’d finally been identified, picked out of the crowd. This letter frightened my parents and me to no end, for there was a time not too long ago when colored men were purposely infected with syphilis, forced to ingest large doses of LSD, and timed in the forty-yard dash all under the guise of “special testing.” His voice cracking, Daddy called the school board. “Yes, sir. I fully understand, sir.” He muffled the receiver with his palm and whispered, “It’s a math test. There’ll be three other Negroes, two Chicanos, and an Eskimo boy there.” Mother removed her eyeglasses and mouthed, “White boys too?”

“Yes,” Father nodded. The dog scratched at the back door. My mother cried and turned her pages. I didn’t think anyone could read E. L. Doctorow that fast.

I was one of those kids who liked to be first, and I made sure, without looking too rascally, that I was the first one in that classroom, pretending that I was the first black non-athletic-scholarship student to reintegrate UCLA since the death of affirmative action. I took a seat near the open windows overlooking the quadrangle and stuck my head out of the ivory tower, a nappy-headed Rapunzel. White people’s air more refreshing, I thought to myself. The wind brisker, more invigorating. The shade shadier. The squirrels squirrelier. The proctor called my name—Hey! — then thumbed me to the back row, a row now occupied by two Sunday-suited black boys and a colored girl in what must have been her mother’s cut-down wedding dress. The Eskimo kid, his bottom lip swollen with a tobacco chaw, was the last to arrive.

“Uukkarnit Kennedy?” the proctor asked.

Without skipping a beat Uukkarnit said in a deep, hickory-smoked, filtered drawl, “It sure ain’t Ladies Love Cool James.” Everyone laughed, as we West Coasters hated the sappy LL Cool J, much preferring Too Short’s perverse rap limericks.

“Sit anywhere you like, Mr. Kennedy,” he was told, and though the white section had plenty of open seats, Uukkarnit sat with us. He nodded hello in the chin-up Negro fashion. After coolly depositing a glob of brown drivel into his spit cup, he set it on the corner of the desk. His sitting with us was an act of solidarity. A late-twentieth-century equivalent to a lunch counter sit-in; and up to that point in my life, his placing that Styrofoam spittoon on that desk in full view of those white kids was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.

The proctor walked up and down the aisles, placing a mechanical pencil and a sealed test booklet on each desk.

“If you find yourself in this classroom, it means that you’ve scored in the ninety-eighth percentile on the Tennessee Mathematical Proficiency Test for Non-Asian Eighth Graders. This booklet I’m placing in front of you is the Math Skills Assessment measure given to all incoming freshman math majors here at the University of California at Los Angeles. Do not open the booklet until you are told.”

A nervous cough. From below, on the quad, the sounds of a coed touch football game. I leaned forward and asked Uukkarnit what his name meant. Without looking back he answered, “If you shave the polar bear, you’ll find his skin is black.”

“Is that true?”

“The meaning of the name or the shit about the black skin?”

“Both.”

“The former is true; as for the latter, I’ve never been north of Santa Barbara, much less seen a shaved fucking polar bear.”

The scores were posted outside the classroom in descending order. It was the first computer printout I’d ever seen. There was something affirming about seeing my name and score — FERGUSON W. SOWELL: 100/100—at the top of the list in what was then a futuristic telex font. I felt official. I was real. One by one we were summoned to a small office. When my turn came, the man behind the desk launched into a rapid-fire spiel about the Cold War and “finding suitable candidates for training in the aeronautical and nuclear sciences.” When he said “suitable,” he slowed down, finally stopping altogether mid — sales pitch. My inherent unsuitability having dawned on him, he had nothing more to say to me other than, “You may keep the mechanical pencil.”

The white students were placed in an advanced mathematics class at the university; we Negro boys, and the lone girl, were given instruments and sent to the Wilmer Jessop Academy of Music. I never saw Uukkarnit again.

I won’t say I didn’t learn anything at Jessop Academy, but they never taught Why? Why was I playing? Why was music so powerful? What can I do with music? Can it heal? Can it kill? They never taught me who Wilmer Jessop was, either, now that I think about it. I learned more about music from watching Spencer Tracy on Turner Classic Movies than from any composition class. Pick a movie, any movie—Boys Town, Bad Day at Black Rock—when Spencer Tracy enters a room, he stares hard at the floor, looking for his acting mark. He ambles up to it, squints at it, jabs his toe at it, casually places his hands on his hips, lifts that broad beatific face of his, then acts his motherfucking ass off. I tried to teach myself to play like Spencer Tracy acts. Incorporating “looking for my mark” into my trumpet solos, playing with the knowledge that the search for identity and a sense of place is both process and result, and the trick is to fool the audience into thinking you know exactly where you’re going. That math test score was the first time I spotted my mark on the stage. I knew where to stand. I existed, and would go on to further differentiate myself from the rest of black maledom with an SAT math score that to this day I carry in my back pocket, so when anyone asks for my papers I can show them my test results and declare, “I don’t know what other nigger did what to whom, but it couldn’t be me. Look, 800 Math.”

Back then I harbored dreams of being the insouciant jazzman, figuring my given name, Ferguson W. Sowell, guaranteed that in a few years my pipe-smoking visage would be on the cover of a string of eponymous Blue Note albums. I had a desk drawer stuffed with scraps of paper bearing these unreleased titles: Sowell Brother, Sowell Survivor, O Sowell Mio, Sowell’d Out, Summer Sowellstice. I did have some talent; my phonographic memory allowed me to replicate any piece of music perfectly. But I never knew what I was playing. No matter how many times my music teacher reminded me that the tunes sounded like their titles, I couldn’t tell one Thelonious Monk composition from another.

“Bum baba bum. Bum baba bum,” he’d scat. “Bum ba bum ba bum bababa bum. What song is that, Mr. Sowell?”

“ ‘Epistrophy’?”

“ ‘Blue Monk,’ you tone-deaf ignoramus!”

I was “phased out” of the jazz program at Jessop Academy and became the only student enrolled in “Audiovisual Studies,” the music-school equivalent of special education. I spent most of my time preparing for a future career as a roadie by setting up drum sets, tuning instruments, and wheeling projectors and sound equipment from classroom to classroom. During my free time I locked myself in the storeroom and fucked around with the computers and the turntables. For graduation I was expected to hand in a thesis paper explaining how to properly mic up a drummer who sings background vocals, but instead handed in a version of Handel’s Messiah composed entirely of elements from the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill album. My baroque/brat-rap/mash-up oratorio became that year’s valedictorian speech. After graduation I decided to give up the trumpet, enroll in junior college, and become a DJ.

DJing was so much easier. Too easy, really. Play “Knee Deep” at the wedding reception and even the groom’s grandmother would ease out onto the dance floor to shake her brittle hips and swing her pendulous tits.

Look, I’ll be the first to admit it, I’m not the most technically gifted disc jockey ever to put needle to wax. Acute left-handedness, a fear of crowds, and what I consider to be my healthy hatred of self make for a catchy stage name, DJ Darky — That Right-Brained, Self-Absorbed Agoraphobic Boy, and not your prototypical beat-juggling, speed-mixing, whirling dervish yelling, “Art form! Art form!” after every body contortion and scratch. Much of what little scratching I do is accidental, so I compensate for a lack of skills and Negritude with a surfeit of good taste and a record collection that I like to think is to DJing what the Louvre is to painting.

I envy the Louvre’s curator. Whoever it is, they have it better than I do. No beating the bushes for the next impressionistic phenom. There’s this kid Monet you have to see. His brushwork is impeccable. No flipping through portfolios, listening to mix tapes, hoping your heavy sigh conveys intrigue, not exasperation. No one ever asks what you think about Jeff Koons. Twice a year the curator takes a slow, temperature-controlled elevator ride to the basement, greets the armed Algerian guard in the burgundy polyester blazer with a patronizing wave, and asks him to pick a letter, any letter, and blows the dust off the Degas and the Delacroix. We’ll show theez onez, no?

All the important decisions were made for him back in 1793 when the Louvre opened its gilded doors and said, Enculez le chic, fuck cool. At the end of the eighteenth century, neoclassicism was pop culture. Goya was a graffiti artist. Lithography was computer graphics. Mozart rocked the house sporting a Suzy-Q hair perm that’d make any time-traveling L.A. gangster rapper worth his curling iron and shower cap ask where he could cop one of them wigs, sans the powder? When Zerezo transformed the bolero, a Spanish folk dance, into French ballet, he might as well have been Crazy Legs or Rock Steady teaching break dancing to the urban doyennes, their hair in buns and their other buns in the air.

… and roller-skate, roller-skate. . and demi-plié, demi-plié.

I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa, and from what I hear it’s over-rated. But what isn’t? Da Vinci got lucky. Every genius does, especially the prolific ones. I feel the same way about Leonardo as I do about Tupac and Edgar Allan Poe. Two composers whose baggy-eyed, drug-induced prolificacy, in much the same way the millionth monkey on the millionth typewriter types Shakespeare, resulted in a few random pieces of brilliance among reams of rhyming, repetitious, woe-is-me claptrap. “The Raven,” “How Do U Want It?” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Dear Mama,” “California Love,”—each is a masterpiece, but when’s the last time a prep school taskmaster called upon a cardigan sweater for a recitation of “Tamerlane,” “To F — s S. O—–d” or “The Conqueror Worm”? And on that most sacred of holidays, Tupac’s birthday, every urban-contemporary radio station in the world knows not to play “Honk If U Luv Honkies,” “Thugs, Slugs and Butt Plugs,” and “Real Niggaz Get Manicures.” To me the Mona Lisa is little more than a Renaissance Playboy centerfold. Blemishes and Mediterranean hirsuteness airbrushed out, she has been retouched to the point of meaningless perfection. However, I understand the painting’s value: the allure of a piece of art that not everyone adores, but that no one hates. My record collection lacked a Mona Lisa, an apolitical, simple yet subtly complex piece of music that no one could dismiss. A beat that when you hear it at a party makes you think you’re special even though you’re dressed, speaking, drinking, dancing, and thinking exactly like everyone else. This beat that spoke directly to you and no one else. Telling you in no uncertain terms that you’re alive.

I didn’t know it then, but I was starting out on the quest for quintessential dopeness that would eventually lead me to Berlin.

Buddha had his first revelation under the bodhi tree. I had mine under the influence of Vicodin, Seconal, and what a cat named Twitchy told me were the last two quaaludes south of San Luis Obispo. Here in this DJ booth my body may shrivel up; my skin, my bones, my flesh may dissolve; but my body will not move from this booth until I have attained Enlightenment, so difficult to obtain over the course ofmany caipirinhas.

It was a fundraiser, a marathon rave where I played sixteen hours straight, spinning a depressant electronic-dance-music sutra comprising two hundred records so similar in melody and bpm they might as well have been issued on one manhole-sized platter. I was still unenlightened and I was down to my last record, a techno single that had somehow snuck into my crate the way a crop-devouring beetle slips into the country in a sack of coffee beans. Techno is the only musical genre I find completely incomprehensible. I won’t say it’s noise. Noise at least has a source. I played the record; the incessant drumbeat tomtommed throughout the club. My raga turned into a powwow. Hordes of shirtless strobe-lit frat boys bejeweled in glowing necklaces and bracelets zigzagged from medicine man to medicine man, war-whooping their cares away, while sweaty coeds danced in tiny Ojibwa circles.

Enlightened by the realization that playing records at weddings and raves wasn’t the way to enlightenment, I’d reached the end of my meditative period. When DJ Blaze, my best friend and fellow member of the Beard Scratcher record collective, arrived with the crate of records I needed, he was two hours late. His eyes were glazed and reddened from indica bud. My indica bud.

“You sure you wanted this crate?” I nodded and motioned for him to hand me a record, any record. “These white boys going to lynch your ass. Not for reckless eyeballing, but for reckless rap.” He handed me the next record in the crate, one that, despite our collective’s vow to share all resources, was one I didn’t want him to know I had. I placed it on the deck and cued it up. Back then playing New York hip-hop in an Inland Empire dance club jam-packed with white kids expecting industrial and synthpop was akin to Hernán Cortés landing on the beaches of Hispaniola. Each booming bass note was a starboard cannon blast fired over the heads of primitives and into the rain forest. “I hereby claim your heathen souls in the name of the South Bronx, the South South Bronx!” A shrapnel shower of tree bark, scratching, and slant rhyme rained down on the natives. No one danced. No one told me to stop, either.

Blaze craned his neck to look at the spinning record. The label had been peeled off but he thought maybe he could glean some information from the serial number scratched into the run-off or the width of the grooved portion. I can say what it was now, Stezo’s “It’s My Turn.”

Funk not only moves, it can remove…it’ll clear your chakras; I’ll give it that. But it isn’t enlightenment. None of it is. Jazz, classical, blues, dancehall, bhangra — it’s all scattered chapters of the sonic Bhagavad Gita.

Blaze and I drove home windows down, cool air and cool FM jazz blasting in our faces. Clifford Brown swung through “Cherokee” and I thought of all things Indian: Buddha’s pilgrimage, Jim Thorpe, Satyajit Ray, peyote, Tonto, lamb korma, extinction, overpopulation, cricket, Bob “Rapid Robert” Feller, and antique 350cc motorcycles.

Once back in my bedroom, I sought to dampen the techno echoes still reverberating in my head. To do this I consulted my Buddhas, both the oxidized green brass figurine that sat serenely inside my gohonzon and the moist, spinach-green buddha-bless sealed inside a sandwich baggie and buried at the bottom of my underwear drawer. That wasn’t the night I decided to come to Germany, but the longest journey starts with a single toke.

The weed was good. A kind blend of medicinal from the alternative clinic and the remnants of the hydroponic I mooched off Alice in Chains. I sparked the joint and made the mandatory pothead vow: “From now on, man, everything’s going to be different. Soon as I graduate from SMCC with an associate degree in library science, shit’s going to be on. The world will be my card index.”

The pot kicked in harder. Marijuana doesn’t erase my auditory flashbacks but mitigates them in much the same manner that Fats Waller’s left hand and infectious asides keep one from paying attention to the inane lyrics of those Tin Pan Alley ditties he was forced to sing.

That night, in addition to the techno, I was being tormented by my worst sonic memory. The sound of a brutal injury my endorphins prevented me from feeling but not from hearing. I’m eight. Playing Nerf hoop. Going one-on-one against the dog. I have a lane for the dunk but never get airborne. There’s only the crack of my tibia snapping in half like a giant pair of takeout chopsticks, followed by the Velcro rip of one side of the broken bone tearing away from the muscle and shooting up my leg, knocking off my kneecap with a sixty-decibel pop that sounded like a schoolboy stepping on a empty milk carton. The dog. The dog is whining, yelping, and frantically scrambling, trying to get out from under my broken body.

I used to be a loudness maniac. I’d try to drown out my sound memories by standing next to jackhammer operators, cupping my ear when the fire engines roared by, or sticking my sand-covered head into the deafening, numbing sting of the board-walk showers at Venice Beach. Apart from two weeks of blissful tinnitus brought on by an eighty-thousand-watt Blue Öyster Cult concert at the Fabulous Forum, these noisy escapisms always proved to be short-lived. The ringing in my ears eventually subsided, a piece of boulevard sidewalk would catch me in the face or a pushy elderly couple would bogart my shower, then proceed to flap water from my stream onto their distended, sea-salt-caked pubes. Still, I’m one of the few who relish the wailing baby on a crowded plane.

The higher I got that night, the softer and mellower my fugue. In time, the more fragile and subtle sounds from my past began to dominate my thoughts: the cuteness of every puppy sneeze I ever heard, the freedom in the whir of a Tour de France peloton coasting downhill, the unlimited artistic possibility in the click of a four-color pen, the anticipation in a firecracker fuse’s sizzle. I sifted through these sounds and tried to come up with the most comforting sound from my childhood, one that if I were on my deathbed would actually be the last thing I’d want to hear.

I remembered how I used to sit in the den with Moms just so I could listen to her read the New Yorker. In those days the literary and paper quality of that magazine was much better than it is now. Those pages had an intellectual and textual heft to them. They felt like parchment, a parchment that no family ever had the temerity to throw away. Ma would turn through the Bellow and the pages rustled as though the story had been printed on numbered autumn leaves. I decided that if I could collapse all my memories into one sound, it would be the sound of those pages turning. Crisp. Mordant. Pipe-smoke urbane. I went to my turntables and tried to replicate it. That was when I first started mining the favorite sounds in my memory bank in the hope that one day I’d compose a soundtrack that’d loop inside my head over and over again. I, like many a mixmaster who’s come before me — Count Basie, the biathlete’s heart, and the inimitable Afrika Bambaataa — was looking for the perfect beat, the confluence of melody and groove that transcends mood and time. A beat that can be whistled, pounded on lunch-room tabletops, or blasted from shitty undermodulated car-stereo speakers and not lose its toe-tapping gravitas. A beat that would make all the ladies in the house say Hey! without prompting from a concert rapper in dire need of some stage presence. A beat that couldn’t be commercialized and trivialized by Madison Avenue, reduced to thirty hard-sell/soft-sell seconds. A timeless beat, never to become an “oldie but a goodie” but always destined to be as fresh as French bread. The sonic Mona Lisa.

Above my decks hung an eight-by-ten color photo from a house party I had done a while back. In it I was positioned in some nondescript Mar Vista garage exactly as I was then, bent over a set of turntables, face barely visible, left shoulder awkwardly raised to my ear to hold the headphone in place. Fingertips freshly licked and resting lightly on the vinyl as if I were testing a hot iron’s readiness. My Piru-red XXXL T-shirt with the words TRADER JOE’S/PRONTO MARKET silk-screened just above the breast pocket, billowing away from my scrawny body. Blaze in the background, in profile, Locs sunglasses, black wool beanie pulled down past his ears, frozen in mid — pop lock, a contorted Toltec testimonial to post-Hispanic Mesoamericana. Behind him, leaning against the garage wall among the gardening tools and surfboards, a multidysfunctional lineup of West-side hoods, homies, and honeys of all races, intellects, and loyalties to Laker basketball. I looked at the photograph and knew then that all I knew was sound, and that sound would be all that I’d ever know.

“That was incredible, dude.”

It was Blaze. He was holding two cheap but intricate-looking pewter beer steins, two six-packs of beer, and singing the Löwenbräu commercial: “Here’s to good friends / Tonight is kind of special / The beer will pour, must say something more somehow/Tonight let it be Löwenbräu.”

“Is that Löwenbräu?”

“No, I’m just singing the song — my sister wouldn’t send me some shit we could steal from Trader Joe’s, this is the unpronounceable shit.”

Apparently Blaze’s older sister, Mariela, a tank mechanic stationed in Germany, had sent him a case of that strong leathery beer we loved so much. Beer that, no matter how much we drank, never left us with a hangover, only an urge to obey orders.

As the beer percolated in the steins, we clanked them together.

“To the Reinheitsgebot.”

“Reinheitsgebot!”

“What was that radical stuff you were playing?”

“I’m trying to find the perfect beat.”

“That was damn close, bro. Remember that offshore storm senior year when we went up to Zuma? Set after perfectly timed set of glassy eight footers, steep-ass take-offs, big barrels, remember that?”

“Yeah, even the sunset session was fucking excellent.”

“If there had been five miles per hour less wind, it would have been absolutely perfect conditions.”

“The wind made the shoulders just a tad too gnarly.”

“Well, that’s what your mix sounds like. It’s easily the best beat I’ve ever heard and probably the best beat I’ll ever hear, but it’s five miles per hour too windy.”

The beer and the weed complemented each other well. I was drunk and high at the same time. Close my left eye and I was high, shut my right and I was drunk.

High.

Drunk.

High.

Drunk.

I squinted through the mental fog and looked at the detail on the stein. The castles, elks, and mustachioed Kaisers came to life. A beer maiden, her hair in thick sausage curls, whispered my name.

Over the next few months I set about composing my perfect beat, whittling off a mile per hour of wind here and a couple of knots there. Eventually I succeeded in splicing together a two-minute-and-forty-seven-second amalgamation of samples, street recordings, and original phrases. It was with some trepidation that I played it for Blaze and the rest of the Beard Scratchers. The Beard Scratchers being the members of our record pool, and so named because of our capricious yet squandered intellectualism, the way we listened to jazz with our faces pinched in agony as if we were suffering from migraine headaches as much as from our scruffy and chronically itchy chins. Though the Beard Scratchers, like most DJs, were inveterate biters, incorrigible beat snatchers who would rip off any rhythm or melody not copyrighted in triplicate and claim it as their own, I wasn’t worried about anyone stealing it. The beat was impossible to replicate. Too many layers, obscure riffs from pop bands that never popped, folk music from countries without folksiness, sea chanteys from landlocked nations, all overlapped with my favorite idiosyncratic sounds and pressed into a musical ore as unidentifiable as a fragment of flying saucer metal in a 1950s sci-fi film. I was worried, though, that it was too long to be a beat or break. That what I had composed was an interlude or, even worse, a song.

When the music ended, all the Beard Scratchers scratched their beards save for Elaine Dupree, aka DJ Uhuru, the only member of the collective for whom a beard was an impossibility. But Elaine wasn’t even rubbing her chin: She was dialing a number on the phone.

“Who you calling?”

“Bitch Please.”

Bitch Please was an aging, once-platinum-selling rapper who occasionally purchased beats from us whenever her latest career reinvention called for some sonic esotericism. She once said about me that when I spun, no matter how frenzied or attentive the crowd was, I always looked unsure of myself. Looked as if I smelled gas but didn’t have anyone to ask if they smelled it too, much less the nerve to strike a match.

Elaine put the phone on speaker and held it up.

“Hello, this Bitch Please, the world’s only rhinestone rock-star doll, baby baba. Please leave a message.”

On the beep, Elaine motioned for me to hit the play button. The beat was only ten seconds in when Bitch Please answered the phone: “I don’t know who this is, but I’ll give you thirty thousand dollars cash for that track right now.”

Elaine hung up.

Thirty thousand dollars was an absurd amount of money to pay for a beat, and after the poor sales of her latest release, Bitch Please Raps the Cole Porter Songbook, I doubted that her bank account held half that amount. Still, it was a meaningful gesture.

“So it is a beat?” I asked.

“A damn near perfect one at that, presque parfait, as the French would say,” said DJ Umbra. “What’s in it? Anatomize, yo, anatomize!”

I began to break down some of the more obvious samples, getting only as far as the de rigueur Mantronix, when Elaine interrupted me by blurting out, “Popsicle!”—the name of the only Swedish pop group worth blurting out. And it was without trepidation that DJ Skillanator followed with, “Foreigner, ‘Feels Like the First Time,’ opening lick, second and third chords transposed with the handclap from the Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back,’ interpolating on the downstroke.”

DJ So So Deaf, a beat jockey who is in fact deaf, and who made a decent living playing bass-heavy music at dances and sock hops at schools and universities for the hearing impaired, began waving and gesticulating wildly in his slang B-boy sign language. His brother, DJ You Can Call Me Ray or You Can Call Me Jay but Ya Doesn’t Have to Call Me Johnson, whose bailiwick was comedy albums and television theme songs from the seventies, interpreted. “So So Deaf says, ‘Only Roger Daltrey’s epiglottal scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again” can raise the hairs on his arm like that.’ He loves how you flared it.”

I touched my hand to my lips and kissed out a sign language thank-you to So So Deaf in return for his compliment. As the music played on, our thoughts returned to the beat presque parfait.

There were no more guesses and the Beard Scratchers leaned in, eager for just a taste of the beat’s trace elements; and seeing the wide-eyed puppy-dog looks of inquisitiveness on their faces, I felt compelled to recite the only true truism I’d ever heard. “I should warn you before we begin,” I said loudly and urgently, as if I were delivering a line from the final act of a Tennessee Williams play, “that I’m not going to necessarily tell you the truth.”

The Beard Scratchers nodded.

DJ Close-n-Play asked, “Is that a quote from Catcher in the Rye?”

It was saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe’s opening statement from his Opprobrium magazine interview, but I didn’t want to get into “Who’s he?” and “What’s ‘opprobrium’ mean?” so I simply turned up the volume and said, “No, it’s my motto,” and went about naming my sources.

“That’s ‘Insider Tradin’ on My Mind’ by Penthouse Red,” I whispered, “from his Work Songs and Office Hollers of the Corporate Elite sampler.”

“Same cat who did ‘My Trophy Wife (Makes Me Feel Like a Loser)’?” asked DJ You Can Call Me Ray, et cetera.

“No, you’re thinking Greedy Steve McNeely.”

I went on.

“Audio Two’s ‘Top Billin’ ’ as rapped in the whistled language of the Nepalese Chepang.”

“I knew it!” Umbra said, pounding his forehead in musicolo-gist shame.

I continued my list: “Brando’s creaking leather jacket in The Wild One, a shopping cart tumbling down the concrete banks of the L.A. River, Mothers of Invention, a stone skimming across Diamond Lake, the flutter of Paul Newman’s eyelashes amplified ten thousand times, some smelly kid named Beck who was playing guitar in front of the Church of Scientology, early, early, early Ray Charles, Etta James, Sonic Youth, the Millennium Falcon going into hyperdrive, Foghorn Leghorn, Foghat, Melvin Tormé, aka ‘The Velvet Fog,’ Issa Bagayogo, the sizzle of an Al’s Sandwich Shop cheesesteak at the exact moment Ms. Tseng adds the onions. .”

Blaze raised his hand. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’re spoiling it. You’re explaining rainbows, motherfucker.”

He let the song play out, then continued. “You know what your beat reminds me of?”

“No,” I answered, rewinding the tape.

“It reminds me of the code of Hammurabi, the Declaration of DJ Independence, the Constitution, or some shit.”

Everyone else nodded in agreement, but I didn’t understand the comparison.

“Look, dude, you’ve sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the DJ up as the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I’ve heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.”

We the true music lovers ofthe world, in order to form a more perfect groove. .

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated Blaze’s praise, but I didn’t like my music being compared to a piece of paper and said so: “I think of it more as a timeless piece of art, you know, like the Mona Lisa of music. Your Constitution metaphor is too political. You’re making it seem like my music is propaganda.”

Pressing the play button, Blaze laughed, “Man, didn’t anybody ever tell you that all art is propaganda? It doesn’t matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn’t be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you’re sitting on a funky Magna Carta. An unbelievably dope beat that’s this close to being the supreme law of the land — but as it stands now is no more than a musicalized Equal Rights Amendment, a brilliant and necessary idea doomed to the dustbin of change.”

The music quieted the room with a thumping irrefutability that was indeed just short of perfection. I turned it down.

“So what’s it missing?” I asked.

Blaze leaned back in his chair and smoothed his goatee. “Like any important document, it needs to be ratified.”

“Take my track to the thirteen original colonies and get people to vote on whether they like it or not?”

Elaine scratched at her jawline. “No, he’s just saying you need that one special somebody to approve it,” she said. “Think Mick Jagger ratifying Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain.’ ”

Umbra contemplatively tugged on his soul patch and tossed out another example: “Charlie Christian ratifying Benny Good-man’s ‘A Smo-o-o-oth One.’ ”

So So Deaf stopped playing with his pointy imperial beard long enough to sign, “Like Kool G Rap on Marley Marl’s ‘The Symphony.’ “

“So who can ratify my beat?” I asked.

Blaze looked at me like I was stupid. “The Schwa,” he said, crossing his heart and blowing a kiss to the sky. “Who else?” The rest of us bowed our heads in reverence. Who else indeed.

Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, is a little-known avant-garde jazz musician we Westside DJs had nicknamed the Schwa because his sound, like the indeterminate vowel, is unstressed, upside-down, and backward. Indefinable, but you know it when you hear it. For us the Schwa is the ultimate break beat. The boom bip. The oo-ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang. The om. He’s the part in Pagliacci where the fucking clown starts crying.

He had one minor hit record, a hard-bop rendition of “L’Internationale” that ironically charted briefly in the early stages of the Vietnam War. “L’Internationale” is on his seminal Polemics album. Polemics, recorded in 1964, is an engaging, thought-provoking, and shabbily produced masterpiece. Listening to that record is like sitting in on an impromptu graduate seminar taught by a favorite, slightly tipsy professor at the campus pub. Measure by measure the Schwa deconstructs nursery rhymes, advertising jingles, and the more sonorous of the world’s anthems. Each tune, from “Ten Little Indians” to “The Battle Hymn of Andorra” to the Slinky song, is lovingly turned inside out and played in a style so free it makes entropy jealous. Sandwiched between the Nazi Party’s “Horst Wessel Song” and Johnny Rebel’s swampbilly classic “Some Niggers Never Die (They Just Smell That Way),” “Do-Re-Mi,” the whitest song ever written, becomes more than simply a song I hate: The Schwa exposes that Alpine ditty for what it is, hate music.

But “L’Internationale” stands out. I’m the type who prefers to listen to one song a hundred times rather than a hundred different songs one time. And I listened to that song a thousand times straight, its majestic strains as quotidian to my day as breakfast cereal. It was a song that made me wish I’d come of age during the Spanish Civil War, shared a foxhole with George Orwell. It was a song that would’ve shamed Stalin and lionized Paul Robeson. In fact, I’m quite certain that if the song had gotten more radio play, America would’ve never stopped buying union.

Background information on the Schwa was scarce. I’d scoured the underground jazz magazines and reference books, and all I could find was a scant entry in The Jazz Encyclopedia:

Stone, Charles—b. 4/17/33, Los Angeles, California. A well-respected musician proficient in the improvisational techniques of the free-jazz movement of whom little is known.

And a heavily redacted copy of a brief FBI file:

There were also scattered concert reviews from the early fifties that praised the “physicality of his performance.” It seemed the Schwa played with his body contorted in ghastly positions. Sometimes he stood onstage gyrating his pelvis or dislocating his shoulders for five minutes before producing any sounds. Most critics theorized that these corporeal contrivances were designed to illustrate that making music is more than a mental process, that a musician brings his body to a gig, not just his brain.

The Schwa’s discography was slight: three albums and a smattering of monaural EPs that had seeped into circulation. The most recent being Darker Side of the Moon, a foray into fusion that featured a cover photo of a black man’s backside and had the good fortune of being released at the same time as Pink Floyd’s multiplatinum Dark Side of the Moon. Due to clerical errors and acid-rock fans tweaked on microdots, the record did a steady if not brisk mail-order business. But since then the Schwa had completely disappeared from the scene, an act that served only to endear him to me all the more. There’s a special place in my heart for artists who inexplicably disappear at the top of their games. The list is a short one: Gigi Gryce, Louise Brooks, Rimbaud, D’Angelo, Francis Ford Coppola.* I admire these aesthetes for withdrawing into themselves knowing they have nothing further to say, and even less desire to hear what anyone has to say to them. That’s why I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye: I don’t want the novel to ruin a good reclusion.

Elaine broke my trance. “Man, it’d be almost worth finding the Schwa just to get him to play over your beat.”

“I’ll make the first pledge,” Blaze said, throwing sixty dollars on the floor. “Seriously, you need to find him. The chance for true perfection doesn’t come along every day.”

The phone rang. “It’s Bitch Please,” Elaine announced sotto voce, her hand over the receiver. “She says she’ll pay fifty thousand dollars for the beat.”

CHAPTER 3

BACK IN LOS ANGELES I used to score porn films. Still do when money’s tight. Not much difference between the American and German smut, except that German pornographers don’t see the three Ps, pubic hair, plot, and perky breasts, as anachronisms. In the beginning I took the job seriously. Most cats just handed in any old piece of music they weren’t able to sell. They could care less about the music matching the mood. I actually watch the schlock. Sometimes I’ll go so far as to compose different themes for each character. For a while I even tried working as a soundman, thinking that would give me some insight into the X-rated mise-en-scène. However, my latent prudishness was exposed when to my open-mouthed and wide-eyed surprise I discovered 1) females ejaculate, 2) they’re capable of expelling said ejaculate over long distances, 3) it’s salty, and 4) it stings like hell! Despite my rubber-gloved, hands-on approach to scoring porn films, the only thing I learned was why the great film composers like Michel Legrand and Lalo Schifrin stayed away from the set.

After dropping le beat presque parfait, I’d composed the soundtrack for a blue movie called Splendor in the Ass. A score that Rick Chess, a director with whom I’d worked before, deemed “too musical.” I explained to him how the overlap of the progression and the extended glissando matched the sex act’s natural music. The rhythmic clapping of the stud’s testicles against the star’s buttocks accentuated the trombone runs. Her “fuck-me-you-motherfucker-harder-goddammit” guttural scatting was contrapuntal to the lower-register xylophone. Rick started to ask what mise-en-scène meant, getting only as far as the mise before grabbing me by the elbow and ushering me into the bestiality department. He removed a videotape from a manila envelope and popped it into the editing machine. A bespectacled man, his pants dropped to his ankles, was fucking a chicken. Rick twisted a knob. The music came up. A sound so beautiful it should have been incongruous with the image on the monitor, but it was instead transformative. The man was making love to the chicken, and the chicken was enjoying it. I recognized the musician immediately. It could have only been the Schwa.

Rick Chess fiddled with the hydraulics of his computer chair, raising and lowering his seat in rhythm to the music.

“This is quality footage, but it’s unusable. The music is too good. Now the shit is an art film. Some sick fuck in a peep booth on Santa Monica Boulevard doesn’t want to jerk off to art — he wants filth.”

“Who is this?” I asked Rick.

He looked at me crazily. “How’m I supposed to know? Came in the mail as an audition tape.”

He tossed me the envelope. The return address read, “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, Slumberland Bar, Goltzstraße 24, 10781 Berlin, Germany.”

“Can I have this?” I asked.

Rick nodded. “Sure, keep it. I want you to use this as an example of what not to do, because you’re reverting to your old ways.” He stuck his hand into his receding, greasy hairline and kept it there. “I want the hack back. I want the DJ Darky who provided nondescript background music for Lawrence ofa Labia and 12 Angry Menses, conveyed the apolitical intrigue in All the President’s Semen. I don’t want the high-concept genius.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Nonplussed in the proper Kensington-Merriwether usage of the word, I was only half listening to Rick’s harangue. I couldn’t believe that distinctive legato that swirled inside my head was coming from the Schwa. I’m not the “it all happens for a reason, God has a plan, everything will work out like an HBO television show” type. Before Rick Chess played that video, the only serendipitous occurrence in my life was that I misspelled “serendipity” during a local spelling bee and thankfully wasn’t aboard the bus carrying the area’s best spellers to the city finals when it plunged off the Sepulveda Overpass.

This was no happy accident. I turned my attention back to the video. Serenaded by an exquisitely delicate diminuendo, the stud and the hen reached a cackling, groaning, mutual orgasm.

Chess elbowed me in the ribs. “Who came first, the chicken or the egghead?”

When I got home I took a good long look at the envelope. I didn’t have to be Easy Rawlins to figure out the Schwa didn’t send the tape. The use of esszet ligatur in “Goltzstraße.” The crosshatched 7s. The handwriting just looked too German.

I called up West German information and over a staticky connection asked for Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann’s phone number in West Berlin.

The operator couldn’t stop laughing.

“You making fun with me. This must be that American television show. .” I could hear her flipping through her dictionary. “. .Straightforward Kamera.”

She meant Candid Camera, but at $3.75 a minute I wasn’t in the mood to correct her.

“So there’s no Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann in the Berlin directory?”

“Nein. We have an Andreas Dunkelmann auf der Lausitzerstrasse. A Dieter Dunkelmann on Derfflingerstrasse. A Hugo on…”

“What about the Slumberland Bar?”

“Please, hold for that number.”

“Hallo, Slumberland,” the bartender, a woman with a sultry Mae West rasp, yelled into the phone, trying to make herself heard over music and the raucous din. I remember thinking the place sounded dangerous. I asked for Dunkelmann.

“There are many dunkel men here. Who do you want to speak with?” she asked, sounding a bit leery. I felt like I was making an international crank call.

“I’d like to speak to Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann.”

The bartender paused for a moment. “You want to speak with maybe a DJ Black Man or a DJ Dark Person?”

Suddenly the cryptogram became obvious. “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann” was an approximation of my nom de musique, DJ Darky. The bartender explained to me that in German, Dunkelmann means “obscurant” or, more literally, “dark man,” and that Schallplattenunterhalter was an East German term for “disk jockey.” East Germany being a place where the global predominance of English had yet to suck the fun out of the language’s tongue-twisting archaism.

The phone call sealed it: I had to go to Germany. Obviously someone there had heard my music and appreciated it enough to think I was worthy of finding the Schwa. What I couldn’t figure out was why all the subterfuge. Why not just tell me where he was?

Music history is rife with no-brainer collaborations that should’ve but never happened. Charlie Parker and Arnold Schoenberg. The Osmonds and the Jackson Five. The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats, and though I didn’t even have the name recognition of Valerie Smith, Josie’s tambourine-shaking sidekick, such a missed opportunity would not befall the Schwa and Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann. If I could figure out a way to raise the funds to get my ass and my record collection to Germany, history would have its perfect beat.

Of course, I wasn’t about to sell my beat to Bitch Please or any other track-starved rapper, so I started saving my cash and begging every German Institute and art organization I could find for grant money and a visa. But after discovering that DJs and porno composers don’t qualify as musicians or artists, I took another tack. I became a jukebox sommelier.

CHAPTER 4

THE JUKEBOX-SOMMELIER IDEA came to me not long after hearing the chicken-fucking song, during a night out at Sunny Glens, a dive bar on Robertson Boulevard populated by Hamilton High alums who’d graduated in the bottom third of the previous twenty graduating classes. Bridgette Lopez and I were on one of our rare public dates. Some days I thought I could marry Bridgette. She was a forty-five-year-old divorcée who, during my Sunday-night gigs at La Marina in Playa Del Rey, sat next to the DJ booth, her pudgy legs crossed at the knees and looking like two porpoises trapped in fishnet stockings. She’d ply me with cosmopolitans and five-dollar bills, scratch a long ex-chola burgundy fingernail down my forearm, and request a song or sex act. More often than not I granted both her requests, and by the end of the evening we’d be singing sweet doo-wop oohs and coos and making slow jam vows to love each other always and forever. Apart from having to listen to Heatwave ad infinitum the rest of my days, a life with Bridgette wouldn’t have been too bad.

She stuffed quarters into the pool table and I bought drinks. I had to shout to make myself heard over the loud, keening, post—Diver Down Van Halen guitar riffs coming out from the rainbow Wurlitzer. “What you drinking, pendeja?” I yelled. Bridgette loved it when I talked dirty to her.

“Dame una vaso de vino, mayate.” And I loved when she called me nigger in her woeful Spanish.

“Red or white, puta? ”

“Rojo, cabrón.”

“Red wine,” I screamed into the bartender’s ear. He shook his head and slammed down two bottles of bum wine, neither of them red or white. I told him to pour the green even though he was pushing the orange.

Whenever I think of Bridgette I think of the sound of her pool breaks. They were molecular and sounded like an introduction to an organic chemistry textbook. I loved to tape-record them. The cue ball flying toward the pyramid of painted ivory neutrinos as if it’d been shot out of a particle accelerator.

Bridgette sank two solids off a clean, wonderfully cold-blooded-sounding break, and as she lined up her next shot, she took her first sip of Chateau du Ghetto. “Who the fuck is the sommelier here — Big Daddy Kane?” she said with a thick tongue and cough-medicine face.

We both laughed, and spent the rest of the evening shooting pool, wondering if green wine was supposed to be served chilled or at alleyway temperature, and cracking corny rotgut jokes.

“When the bartender said, ‘Would you like the house wine,’ I didn’t know he meant crackhouse wine.”

At some point we tired of the classic rock ‘n’ roll thumping from the jukebox. There’s only so much Eric Clapton — bluesy Negro mimicry a person can take, and I made a halfhearted comment about reprogramming the jukebox. “I could be a jukebox sommelier.” I’d never said sommelier before and I liked how the word sounded coming from my mouth. I looked for an excuse to say it again, but Bridgette beat me to the punch.

“You could be a jukebox sommelier,” she suggested in all seriousness. “Nobody ever gives enough thought to what’s on the jukebox. It’s always the same selection, fifty greatest hits CDs, a mediocre Motown anthology, the essential Billy Joel, a mix tape of Top 40 singles from two years ago, two Los Lobos CDs and that fucking Bob Marley album.”

“Legend.”

“That’s it, Legend. My God, the bar scene has made me hate that fucking record. Drunk white boys singing ‘Get Up, Stand Up.’ “

I grabbed a chunk of Bridgette’s ass and eased her out the door.

“You want to go back to my place to hear some good music?” I asked her.

“Not if by good music you mean that classical crap you played for me last time.”

“Come on, you got used to it.”

“That’s the problem, you listen to that shit long enough, you start thinking you’re rich and white. And rich and white is no way to go through life if you happen to be neither.”

Later that night Bridgette Lopez became the first of a notso-select group of women to hear the chicken-fucking song. Back then the ultimate sexual maneuver was to sprinkle cocaine on one’s engorged penis just before penetration. I’ve never done it but the rumored pleasures are boundless, the shared orgasms supposedly more intense and lasting than championship chess. Listening to the chicken-fucking song with her that night was like sprinkling cocaine on my heart.

To this day I don’t abide artificial intrusions in my sex play. I prefer natural light and abhor toys, pills, and negligees. My only coital enhancement is the chicken-fucking song. I drape a towel over the TV, put the tape into the VCR, and play it for paramours and other sundry pieces of ass with the bad luck to end up in my arms. The music adds a Romeo-and-Juliet double-suicide poignancy to the otherwise loveless and in my life almost perfunctory one-night stand. Suddenly everything I say becomes something Khalil Gibran wishes he’d said. Every kiss and caress has the all-or-nothing, give-me-intimacy-or-give-me-death honesty of a Sylvia Plath poem. In my mind, my lumpy full-sized bed becomes the beach in From Here to Eternity and I’m Sergeant First Class Burt Lancaster fucking a voluptuous Rhode Island Red on a wet, sandy Hawaiian beach, the tattered sheets crashing over us in waves of cotton and rayon.

The morning after with Bridgette Lopez set the tone for all the rest that would follow. It was arduous and awkward, a runny-egged breakfast of stilted conversation and averted eyes. There is something about the song that embarrasses and shames you like catching yourself picking your nose in public.

The last thing Bridgette ever said to me was, “I’m serious, do the jukebox-sommelier thing.” So I did. I wrote a letter to the Slumberland Bar in Berlin requesting a position as a jukebox sommelier, enclosing a résumé and an unlabeled mix tape. Two weeks later I received a small packet in the mail containing the paperwork for a work visa, a one-way plane ticket, a beer coaster, and a brief letter that stated my salary and equated the finding of my tape to the excavation of King Tut’s tomb.