Slumberland

CHAPTER 1

IARRIVED IN BERLIN on a hazy mid-autumn afternoon, emerging from the coach-class bramble wrinkled, hungry, cold, and funky smelling, but happy as a runaway slave.

The cab ride to the hostel was in a Mercedes-Benz. Apart from a nervous three-block joyride in a Cadillac Seville, it was my first trip in a luxury car. I sank deep into that leather seat, thinking that if I hadn’t reached the promised land, Germany was at least a land of maybes and we’ll sees.

West Berlin was like a city populated entirely by Quaker abolitionists. Everyone was so nice — to a point. When I showed up to lease my first apartment, the landlord knocked seventy-five deutschmarks off the rent for reparations but wouldn’t shake my hand to close the deal. Over time the friendly small talk with the newspaper vendor devolved from “How do you like Germany? Do you plan on staying?” to subtle get-the-fuck-out-of-my-country-nigger musings like, “Wow, I can’t believe you’ve been here three months already? When are you going back to America?” When I went to local jazz clubs like the Quasimodo or the A Train, patrons at the bar would buy me drinks as an excuse to pick my brain about jazz and American racism. This was a typical conversation.

“Thanks for the beer.”

“Kein Problem. I bet you’re glad not having to drink that shit American beer. Blah, so bad.”

“Yeah, you motherfuckers are on to something with these pilsners. .”

Then Willi, Karl-Ludwig, and Bruno would defer to the American expat who’d take a stultifyingly mediocre saxophone solo that would inexplicably bring the house down. At the bar my newfound friend would put his arm around me and say, “You know, jazz improvisation comes from the slaves having to improvise in order to survive. Too bad every idiom of black music, be it jazz or rhythm and blues, or whatever, has declined in its Negroidery and purpose. It’s become whitified.”

Now I know why Harriet Tubman faked those blackout epileptic seizures: It was the only way she could get those damn abolitionists to stop patronizing her.

I quickly learned not to respond to jazzophile opinions that, judging from their use of words like Negroidery and whitified, had been stolen from the latest Wynton Marsalis magazine interview. I held then, and still do, that it’s ridiculous to think that slavery had anything to do with jazz improvisation. In order to survive, slaves didn’t improvise, they capitulated. The ones who stood their ground and fought back died. Making a holiday meal from pig innards isn’t improvisation; it’s common sense to throw whatever’s left into the fucking pot. If anybody was improvising, it was the free black population. And if anybody was “whitified,” it was the suit ’n’ tie — wearing Marsalis. Like Negroes hadn’t seen a white face until they saw the slave catcher. As if all the fucking race mixing in Spain, Egypt, ancient Rome, and Ethiopia never happened. But I knew no Berlin jazz aficionados wanted to hear me denigrate their romantic notions of white oppression being the progenitor of black musical genius. I didn’t even want to hear myself say these things. So I’d politely nod in agreement and say, “Have you ever heard of Charles Stone?”

My visa didn’t allow me to start work until November, so I spent the next two weeks contemplating the irony that though I’d be working at the Slumberland, I hadn’t slept since I got to Berlin. Slumberland. The name itself was foreboding enough to keep me out. It brought back all the childhood traumas, the sleepless nights staring at the lightning-bolt-blue night-light while pondering the relationship between reality, the dream state, and death. My father, the embittered literature Ph.D. who worked for the county naming the streets within walled communities that sprouted up on the Californian hillsides like concrete weeds, did nothing to ease my fear of the dark and dying. He’d look under the bed and in the closet, and speaking in the effete horror-movie accent of a Transylvanian ghoul, he’d name the monsters and demons lurking in the shadows. “Hello, Chimera. Good evening, Medusa. Glad to see you’re well, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, not the peace-loving miscreation who read Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch, but the vengeful brute from the second half of the book who killed innocent children without compunction.” With my eyes bulging from their sockets and my heart beating so hard I could hear it, he’d tuck me in with one of Shakespeare’s innumerable quotations about restless slumber. “To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,” Father would say, bussing me on the forehead and finishing the quote just before the click of the shutting door, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”

I was dizzily homesick. My attempts at re-creating my California lifestyle were amusing but ultimately ineffective. The citrus smell that wafted from the orange rinds I placed on the radiator made me sneeze constantly. The small colony of black ants Mother airmailed to me, so I could force march them across my windowsill, died when they were unable to digest the glutinous gummi bears I fed them. I rented a car and got five traffic tickets in one day for making right on red after right on red. I’d regurgi-tate Laker games I’d heard Chick Hearn call, play by play, commercial break by commercial break:

Magic frontcourt. . Magic yo-yoing up and down. . over to Jamaal. . four on the clock. . that’s good. Lakers by twelve and folks, this one’s in the refrigerator. The door’s closed, the light’s off, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s getting hard, and the Jell-O’s jiggling. We’ll be back for Lakers wrap-up after a word from our sponsor. . Here’s Cal Worthington and his dog, Spot! If your axle is a-saggin’, go see Cal. Maybe you need a station wagon, go see Cal. Ifyour wife has started naggin’ and your tailpipe is a-draggin’, go see Cal! Go see Cal! Go see Cal! Did you know I could put you in a used car or used truck for just twenty-five dollars down. . It’s Worthington Ford in Long Beach, open every day till midnight, we’ll see you here! Bring the kids!

In addition to missing the Westside, the Lakers’ fast break, and the incessant Cal Worthington commercials, I missed black people, which was strange for me. But somehow I longed for the sounds of urban working-class blackness. The heavily aspirated T’s and P’s. The Sunday-morning supermarket shushing of a woman too tired to do her hair, much less lift her heels, as she scuffles down the aisle as if she’s wearing cross-country skis and not a pair of furry baby-blue bedroom slippers. I missed the quiet of my room after Father had put me to sleep, perchance to dream. Sometimes on a sleepless night I could almost hear Brian Mooney proudly idling his ’64 El Camino lowrider in the driveway across the street. Other times I could hear my frustrated father in the other room rambling like a mindless maniac, trying to come up with the last ten of the two hundred “Spanish-sounding” street names he needed for a new city called Santa Clarita, names that had to reflect the area’s Mexican heritage and yet have enough of an “upscale ring” to convey to any Mexicans foolhardy enough to move to the Santa Clarita hinterlands that they weren’t wanted. Having come up with such gems as Via Palacio, Arroyo Park Drive, and Rancho Adobe Drive, Pops would reach his wits’ end.

“Son?”

“Yeah?”

“You up? I know you’re awake.”

“And?”

“You hang out with lots of Mexicans? Gimme some Spanish street names.”

“Toreador Lane.”

“Won’t do. Connotes animal cruelty. Give me another.”

“Calle Street.”

“Redundant. Come on, I’m serious.”

But unfortunately for him, I never was.

“How about We Need Faster Service at Tito’s Tacos Drive? Viva La Raza Boulevard. Badges? We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges Circle. Reconquista Califas Ahora Terrace. Margarita, You Thieving Pendeja, I Know You Stole the Ten-Dollar Bill I Left on the Kitchen Counter, You’re Fired, and to Think We Treated You Like Family Road.”

I was so lonely those early Berlin nights, I missed my own father calling me a dumb nigger. So lonely that I missed black people, which is to say I missed people who can’t take a joke, people to whom I was supposed to relate but couldn’t, if that makes any sense.

Those first few weeks in Berlin the closest I’d come to kinship with another life-form was with the newly imported emperor penguins at the zoo.

Emperor penguins, like the American Negro, are notoriously fickle creatures, and the city had gone to great lengths to ensure they would feel at home. But instead of re-creating the snow, rock, and water formations of the Antarctic tundra, they removed twenty-five square meters of actual polar cap, transported it intact to Berlin, set it down in the space once occupied by the dromedaries, and covered it with a climate-controlled biodome. All for about what it would have cost to enforce the environmental laws that were supposed to protect the endangered birds in the first place.

The penguin exhibit opened to great fanfare; however, the supposedly sprightly birds refused to perform. People came in droves to see their aquatic grace, but no amount of pleading toddlers or zoological trickery could coax them into the water. I visited my Antarctic familiars every day. Setting my tape recorder in the corner of the exhibit hall and taping the dismay of the visitors who’d paid good money to see the winsome waterfowl.

Like Miles Davis in concert, for the most part the penguins stood stock-still, their backs to the audience. Every few minutes a curious bird would cause a commotion by skating his webbed feet across the ice to the water’s edge. The zoo patrons would rush the railing, lifting the children onto their shoulders and their box cameras to their eyes, then with a squawk the penguin would invariably waddle fearfully back to the pack.

The crowd would turn ugly. They’d pound and spit on glass, cursing the reluctant birds: “Now I know why these things are nearly extinct — these snooty fuckers think they’re too good to get wet!”

At least the penguins had one another. I’d return home alone. Collapse on the couch and listen to my recordings of the day’s events. Reveling in penguin defiance in the face of the curious stares and the stereotyped expectations of the outside world. One day on an overcast autumn afternoon, while on my way to the zoo, I chased down a lone ray of sunshine through the tree-lined streets of Charlottenburg. When I caught up to the sun ray, it shone directly upon the Amerikahaus and nothing else. The Amerikahaus is an ivy-covered building that sits in the middle of a residential street like a cultural trading post and offers fellowships and cultural indoctrination instead of beaver pelts and fire water. Inside the glass-enclosed vestibule, next to the flagpole, stood a black security guard, wiping his hands on Old Glory as if it were a restroom towel dispenser.

In those days, seeing a black face in Berlin was almost as rare as a black field goal kicker in the NFL. And I stared. Stared unabashedly at my fellow human penguin. The tall African-American watchman belonged to the long legacy of freak show blackness including the Venus Hottentot; Ota Benga, the Congolese pygmy displayed as the missing link in the Bronx Zoo; Kevin Powell and Heather B, the first two African-Americans on MTV’s The Real World; and myself. When the guard spotted me peering at him through the glass, he cheerily waved me inside. I opened the door to his cage. His face was warm, thick, and brown as a wool sock in an L.L.Bean catalog. The creases in his gray uniform were sharp and fell down each pant leg to a pair of polished black combat boots. A set of official-looking keys jangled from a thick steel chain. He didn’t carry a weapon; he disarmed intruders with his smile. I eased in close enough to read the writing on the ID tag; it read, simply, security.

“Can I get an L.A. Times inside?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Usually it’s a few days late, though.”

“That’s cool.” It’d been weeks since my voice had deepened into the What’s happenin’? baritone I reserved for addressing black men whom I didn’t know.

“How long you been on this side, brother? How you like it?” he asked, though before I could answer and lodge my complaints about the coarseness of the toilet paper and bath towels and the puzzling absence of air conditioners and wall-to-wall carpeting, he looked around to see if anyone was listening, then whispered in my ear, “Germany is the black man’s heaven.”

“What?”

“These people know how to take care of you. They treat you like a king. Your wish is their command.”

I stepped away from him cautiously. He was dead serious. I excused myself, and as I backed out of the door he called out after me, “You just have to let them love you.”

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 alive. 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.

Doris, of course, blames our breakup on the frequency and length of my showers. In her eyes I’m a religious fanatic who every morning takes a hot-water baptismal to the gods Proctor and Gamble. My “obsession” with cleanliness symbolizes two hundred and fifty years of American sanctimony. If my finger-nails are clean, my soul is pure and lemony fresh. I’m 100 percent Puritan. A squeaky-clean American.

Doris: You crazy, uptight Americans. Do you know what we call “skinny-dipping” in Germany?

Me: No.

Doris: Swimming!

On our last night as a couple Doris sat on the floor of her spacious, impeccably furnished, penthouse igloo, bundled up in three layers of thrift-shop sweaters, settling an argument we had earlier in the day about Chico Marx’s piano virtuosity by making a list of piano players in descending order of greatness, while I washed the dishes and stared at the plastic frog with a thermometer for a spine suctioned to the kitchen window.

I could never explain Doris’s thermal frugality. I knew it’d been passed down from her parents, who, having been raised in the moldy-potato austerity of postwar Germany, made sure that she had a healthy respect for creature comforts like heat, clothes, salt, and toothpaste. She wasn’t cheap. She’d often splurge on pricey nonessentials that she then treated like foster children. She put regular gas in her BMW 7 Series sedan and her silk blouses in the washing machine. She drank expensive wine out of paper cups. Used African artifacts as doorstops and had a state-of-the-art central heating system installed, one capable of warming the bathroom floor and the towel racks but whose thermostat was as off-limits as a North Korean nuclear plant.

“Doris, it’s eight degrees in here. Do you know what that is in Fahrenheit?”

“About fifty degrees.”

“Fifty-one-point-eight degrees to be exact, which is the temperature at which black men lose their fucking minds. In 1967 when my Uncle Billy turned down a scholarship to UCLA and volunteered to go to Vietnam, it was eight degrees Celsius. On that clear, blue, carry-me-back-to-Ol’-Virginny morning when Nat ‘Crazy Like a Fox’ Turner looked directly into a solar eclipse and decided there and then to kill every white person in the world — it was eight degrees Celsius. In Rocky II, when Apollo Creed agrees to give Rocky Balboa a rematch in Phila-fuckingdelphia, Rocky’s hometown, it was eight degrees Celsius, fiftytwo fucking degrees.”

Doris and the cackles of the chicken-fucking song snuck up on me from behind. She burrowed her head between my shoulder blades and ran her hands under my shirt. She hadn’t bathed in three days, but she was warm.

“And you, black man,” she asked, tweezing my nipples with her nails, “how will you lose your mind on this fifty-two-degree night? Perhaps you go so crazy and finally give me oral sex, yes?”

“I would, but you smell.”

She unbuttoned her sweaters and yanked her shirt over her head. An earthy, almost steamy pungency closed my throat.

“Do I smell bad?” she asked.

I cupped my hand and passed it through the air like a chef wafting the vapors of the soup du jour toward his nostrils.

“You smell, but you don’t smell bad. Sort of like a basket of rotten fruit.”

We both paused to listen to a jaunty movement in the chicken-fucking song. Doris took the first page of her list, wiped her hairy underarms with it, and handed it to me. I held it gingerly because a single strand of black underarm hair, long enough to bisect pianist number nine, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, like an editor’s strikethrough, was epoxied to the page with a natural adhesive of perspiration and grit.

“Smell it,” she commanded.

I pressed the tip of my nose to Mozart and inhaled. The page smelled of nutmeg and paraffin with a hint of fresh bacon grease. I searched the rest of the page for Chico Marx. He wasn’t on it. I had him just behind Fats Waller and ahead of Chopin. Doris removed her bra and slid page two along the sweaty folds of her breasts. The dampness smudged Debussy, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Dave Brubeck. It was a damn good compendium. It smelled like a mothballed down jacket on the first cold day of winter. And still no Chico Marx. It went on like that for five minutes. She’d peel off a page, lick it, rub it over her scalp, run it between her toes, her pubes, the backs of her knees. Each page smelled different. Each body part and erogenous zone imparting its own aroma, every piano player and keyboardist emanating his or her own unique, musty funk. Mary Williams, Nat King Cole, and Doris’s right elbow smelled like hijiki salad, Grandma’s immutably stuck-to-the-wrapper butterscotch candies, and boiled Kutteln. Ray Manzarek, Thelonious Monk, and her inner thigh were redolent of burning rubber and a flat diet soda. Stevie Wonder, Glenn Gould, and the back of her neck reeked of day-old pizza, a blue urinal cake, and Laurel Canyon eucalyptus trees. Doris slid the last sheet of paper down the crack of her ass, and there, at the bottom of the page, sandwiched between her twelve-year-old nephew Andreas and Schroeder, the piano-playing Beethoven fanatic from the Charlie Brown cartoons, was Chico Marx, smelling like ass and “un-scented” two-ply toilet paper; nevertheless I had a raging hard-on.

The Schwa was in full swing and suddenly I understood why Doris, a woman who loved music unconditionally, kept her flat so cold. The cold heightened your senses. I not only heard it, I felt, saw, and tasted the music. My ears were suddenly bionic, and if I concentrated and made the didudidudidudid Bionic Woman sound effect, I could hear the stud’s distended nut sack slapping against the bird’s shiny belly plumage. I could hear the Schwa’s breathing. See iridescent polka dots of sound float from the speakers and pop suddenly in midair like music-filled soap bubbles. The cold electrified my skin like a charged prison fence; the glistening notes that landed on my skin sparked and fizzled.

I swirled the song in my mouth, isolating its sweet complexities as if it were a vintage Château d’Yquem stolen off the shelves of Trader Joe’s and downed between mouthfuls of chili-cheese fries. I couldn’t smell the song. Doris and her body odor were hanging onto my neck and biting my lip. There’s something beautifully Taoist about two people kissing when one partner is naked and the other clothed.

“Do I smell?” she asked.

I nodded. We kissed again.

“Good,” she said.

We fucked. Intermittently and passionately, in time we both stank. Our spooned bodies stuck to the linoleum floor and each other with cold sweat. With her back toward me, Doris propped herself up on her elbow. Pages two and five of her list were stuck to her shoulder blades like deformed angel wings.

“You know if someone got up after making love to me and showered like they do in your American movies, I’d fucking kill them.”

I pulled off her crumpled wings. She had Liberace, Neil Sedaka, Prince, and Brian Eno ranked ahead of Tom Waits and Art Tatum. The chicken-fucking song had ended. There was only the hum of the refrigerator and the swinging tick-tock of the Kit-Cat clock’s tail. We were doomed to start fighting. Liberace? It would be our last argument. The inevitable clash of puritanical Americanism and German pragmatics. I should have known from the start it could have never worked. We both were fond of hip-hop, but she was strictly Queensbridge, a proponent of MC Shan, Marley Marl, and Roxanne Shanté. I was down with BDP, Boogie Down Productions. KRS-One, Bronx-sworn Capulet to her Queensbridge Montague.

Doris grabbed my penis and pulled me in closer to her and, without turning around, asked, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why in American movies do they make so much noise when they kiss?”

I shrugged and slipped my frozen feet in between her fleshy calves.

“Is it the more smacking, the more saliva, the louder the kiss, the more in love? Is that what it is?”

Liberace. Prince. Schroeder. MC Shan. Fuck.

“Ferguson?”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

I took her question seriously, but I felt like Schroeder at his toy piano, exasperated by Lucy Van Pelt’s persistence and the dreamy glaze in her black pinprick eyes.

Do you love me?

I’d never been in love. I’d always thought love was like reading Leaves of Grass in a crowded Westside park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, having to suppress the urge with each giddy turn of the page to share your joy with the surrounding world. By “sharing” I don’t mean quoting Whitman’s rhythm-machine poetics to a group of strangers waiting for auditions to be posted at the Screen Actors Guild, but wanting to stand up and scream, “I’m reading Walt Whitman, you joyless, shallow, walking-the-dog-by-carrying-the-dog, casting-couch-wrinkles-imprinted-in-your-ass, associate-producer’s-pubic-hairs-on-your-tongue, designer-perambulator-pushing-the-baby-you-and-your-Bel-Air-trophy-wife-had-by-inserting-someone-else’s-sperm-bank-jizz-in-a-surrogate-mother’s-uterus-because-you-and-your-sugar-daddy-were-too-busy-with-your-nonexistent-careers-to-fuck, no-day-job-having California Aryan assholes! I’m reading Whitman! Fuck your purebred, pedigreed Russian wolfhound! Fuck your WASP infant with the Hebrew name and the West Indian nanny! Fuck your Norwegian au pair who’s not as hot-looking as you thought she’d be! I’m reading Whitman, expanding my mind and melding with the universe! What have you done today? It’s ten in the morning, do you know where your coke dealer is? Have you looked at the leaves of grass? No? I didn’t think so!” That’s what I thought love would be like. Reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority.

Doris turned to face me, her cheeks calcified with tearstains.

“Do you love me, Ferguson?”

“No.”

She released my penis and clambered over me, placing her forehead to my temple. A tear ran down her cheek and onto mine. I didn’t bother to wipe it off.

Why? She asked over and over. Why, if I didn’t love her, why was I with her? I told her the truth. Probably the first time I’d ever been completely truthful in my life. I was lonely. She raised her hand and I flinched, expecting to ward off a blow; instead she stroked my face as softly as she ever had. “That’s a reasonable answer,” she cooed. No voodoo curses were cast. No demanding the return of shit I’d thrown away without telling her. No vengeful postings of my nude photo, phone number, and salacious fisting fantasies on gay dating Web sites. Doris simply returned the chicken-fucking song, asked if I wanted to go to the movies on Thursday, and if she could help me find the Schwa.

The security guard at the Amerikahaus was right. Berlin is heaven.

CHAPTER 4

ON MY FIRST DAY OF WORK, Thomas Femmerling, the owner of the Slumberland, did two things: He gave me a set of keys to the bar, then he showed me how to properly pour a pilsner.

“It takes exactly seven minutes for ein gutes Pils,” he said, handing me an effervescent glass of beer with a head so thick it could support a silver piece. “And I figure if it takes that long to pour a good beer, it’ll take at least seven or eight months to program a good jukebox, so take your time, DJ man. Take your sweet time.” Then he plucked his coin from my beer and left me to my duties.

Bars in general are depressing places, but especially at eight thirty on a serene Monday morning. And there I was, alone and unbreakfasted, drinking a seven-minute beer, unable to block out the disconcerting chatter of children skipping merrily to school.

The Slumberland juke was a brand-new Wurlitzer SL-900. Unplugged, it sat dark and lifeless against the far wall. I immediately sympathized with the machine, for it reminded me of myself some years ago: a newborn black child come into the world obsolete and passé. The SL-900’s curse was that it played 45s and not the digital compact discs that were then just starting to take over the market share. Only two weeks old and the juke was already an antique. Still, it remained impressive and intimidating, and I approached the noble machine with the reverent caution that a game warden uses on the sedated grizzly bear.

“There, boy. Settle down, everything’s going to be all right.”

I opened the lid and counted fifty record slots. Room enough for one hundred songs, approximately thirteen hours of continuous music. That meant I had to come up with a playlist of fifty songs so compatible with one another that any one jam had to be able to seamlessly follow, precede, complement, supplement, and riff off any other jam. I also had to take into account fifty additional B-sides. Songs whose strains might be less familiar but, if mistakenly punched into the jukebox, wouldn’t bring the mack-daddy maneuvers of the Slumberland’s miscegenation menagerie to a screeching halt, and might even hip a funk-drunk listener to some classic James Brown besides “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” I needed songs that would make the bar’s black male clientele feel important, knowledgeable, and, yes, superior. Songs whose intricacies and subtext they could explain to the fräuleins without feeling like racial quislings to the Negress mothers and wives left back home to toil over the Serengeti and Amana ranges. I needed songs that spoke to the white woman’s inner nigger. The nigger who had so much in common with these defeated and delusional men, the bipolar white nigger woman in all of us who needs to be worshipped, whistled at, and sometimes beaten.

I’ve always maintained that one could make the case for the white woman being the most maligned personage on the planet. Like Pandora and Eve, white women have been built up as paragons of virtue and beauty only to be unjustly blamed for the world’s ills when they decide to come down off the pedestal to exercise their sense of entitlement and act human.

Yes, the Slumberland jukebox would be stuffed with perennial pop songs, bebop sui generis, and Memphis soul. It would be a fifty-pfennig musical library capable of dispensing stereophonic hope and salvation to the downtrodden from Harlem to Wies-baden. It would help a haughty German woman come down off her high horse and put a discouraged, diasporic black man on his.

This wouldn’t be like making a mix tape for a schoolyard crush filled with slow jams, conscious rap, James Taylor, saccharine jazz, and rainstorm interludes. I had to program that jukebox so it’d be me DJing on autopilot. Turn it into an electronic doppelgänger flashing its rainbow lights, blowing its plastic bubbles and my trademark shit. “Goddamn, get off your ass and jam” eclecticism. All I needed was that one record that would get the party started. Make the ladies say, “Ho,” the homosexuals say, “Hey,” and the skeptics say, “Fuck it.”

I sipped my beer, the second-best beer I’d ever had,* and asked the question I imagined all great artists ask themselves before engaging in the creative process: “Is there a God?” I weighed the arguments pro (Hawaiian surf, Welch’s grape juice, koala bears, worn-in Levi’s, the northern lights, the Volvo station wagon, women with braces, the Canadian Rockies, Godard, Nerf footballs, Shirley Chisholm’s smile, free checking, and Woody Allen) and con (flies, Alabama, religion, chihuahuas, chihuahua owners, my mother’s cooking, airplane turbulence, LL Cool J, Mondays, how boring heaven must fucking be, and Woody Allen), not so much to prove or disprove the existence of a powerless almighty, but to engage my increasingly tipsy thought process with so much conscious prattle that an idea might strike me when I wasn’t looking. After about twenty minutes of this I’d come as close as anyone with an associate’s degree in library sciences has come to disproving the existence of God,* but was no closer to programming the jukebox. Such is the way of the amateur atheologian and the professional jukebox sommelier.

Squweeek.

There was a cautious, almost shy squeak coming from outside the bar. Squweeek.

I lifted the bamboo window shade to investigate and, to our mutual surprise, revealed a startled schoolboy writing on the dew-covered windows with his fingertip. He blinked once, smiled, then resumed his condensation graffito. Though he wasn’t finished, it was obvious he was writing, “Ausländer raus!”—Foreigners Out! — on the pane. No one ever writes, “Ausländer, Bleibt! Wir brauchen, mögen und schätzen die kulturelle Vielfalt, die ihr uns durch eure Anwesenheit schenkt.” Foreigners Stay! We need, enjoy, and respect the cultural diversity your presence provides us. Ausländer raus is a phrase most commonly associated with racist skinheads after German reunification; it was in fact popular in West Germany long before Ronald Reagan wreathed Nazi graves at Bitburg and demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall. However, it wasn’t the boy’s xenophobia that intrigued me: It was the sonorous screeches his finger made as he wrote on the glass. It reminded me of a sound that I couldn’t quite place, and I went outside to get a better listen.

Just as the kid was putting the finishing touches on his public ignorance, he saw me coming and tried to run away. He was weighed down by his haversack, so I easily ran him down and marched him back to the window. He went obediently to erase his work, but I stopped him.

“Nein. Nein,” I said, waving my finger in his panic-stricken face. “Bitte ende.” Please finish. I held his hand to the glass and he timidly completed his opine, the squeaking letters loud and pitched in a distinct minor blues key I recognized as C minor but whose timbre and color I still couldn’t place. When the little xenophobe made the long downward stroke of the exclamation point, it hit me. The squeaks sounded exactly like Oliver Nelson’s tenor in “Stolen Moments.” I had my first tune for the jukebox.

“Stolen Moments” is Oliver Nelson’s signature tune, a song I find to be the ultimate mood setter; it’s a classic jazz aperitif. Oftentimes, when I play hardcore underground hip-hop or punk gigs, after three or four especially rambunctious tunes the mosh pits begin to resemble the skirmish lines of a Bronze Age battle-field, the warehouse windows start to shake, the record needle starts to skip, the women have that “I’m down with the pogrom” whatever-motherfucker look in their eyes, and I know the party is one more Wu Tang killa bee sting or Bad Brains power chord from turning into Attica, I play fifteen to twenty seconds of “Stolen Moments” to ease the tension, keep the peace. Its incongruous beauty brings about the wry existential lugubriousness of the Christmas Eve carol coming from the enemy encampment on the other side of the fog-covered river in a hackneyed war movie. “Stolen Moments” is that type of intrusion, a lull in the fighting, a time to finish that drink and forgive and forget. The people know I’m providing a respite from the real by granting them a temporary gubernatorial death-row reprieve before I hit them with the next piercing Mobb Deep fuck-you falsetto, Bounty Killer lick shot, or soul-splitting, pre-sellout, angst-ridden, Biohazard scream.

I knew immediately that “Stolen Moments” would be the Slumberland’s signature tune; a smooth midtempo song, it would provide a sticky, almost humid, languorous background to an already sexually charged atmosphere. If a female failed to become aroused by a Tanzanian peacock unfurling his tail feathers, it’d bring out the pavonine sheen of his olive-green polyester slacks, burgundy silk shirt, and tan patent leather shoes. When the middle-aged West Berlin lioness slinks about the place flicking her feather cut and stalking her prey, Dolphy’s flute would gently lift both her sagging breasts and spirits, Paul Chambers’s bass would enhance her rear end with some downtown Detroit rotundity, and Bill Evans’s piano would unaccent her English, put words in her mouth that she didn’t know she knew and make her immune to egotistical black-male bullshit. Maybe one day Doris, while stocking bar, would hear the song and forgive me for stealing her moments. I know the song has yet to be written that would allow me to forgive myself.

The schoolboy dotted the exclamation point, and I thanked him. “Ausländer raus!” never sounded so beautiful. I went back inside to finish my beer and watch the sun erase his slur.

CHAPTER 5

GERMAN BARS DON’T have happy hours. They have hubris hours. There is no designated time for hubris hour. It happens unexpectedly and without warning. The bartender doesn’t ring a bell at five P.M., announce that for the next two hours drinks are two for one, and that sage advice and unmitigated superciliousness are on the house. In fact, the only way I can tell when it’s hubris hour is by the look on Lars Papenfuss’s face.

Lars Papenfuss is Doris’s new boyfriend and my best friend. We met about two weeks after the unveiling of the jukebox. He’s a freelance journalist. A master spy who uses his cover as a pop-culture critic to prop up dictatorial movements like “trip-hop,” “jungle,” “Dogme 95,” and “graffiti art” instead of puppet third-world governments. He’s assassinated more visionaries than the CIA, but when we first met he was eager to come in out of the cold.

“Why are looking at me like that?” he asked.

“Because you look funny.”

“How do I look?”

“You look proud.”

“Then indeed I do look funny.”

I’d seen that self-satisfied smirk on a German face only once before. CitySports Bar was open until the wee hours of the morning so the Charlottenburg locals could watch Graciano Rocchigiani fight for the light-heavyweight title in Las Vegas. These storied German boxers never fight outside of Germany and are rarely even German, but “Rocky,” as his countrymen lovingly called him, wasn’t an adopted Pole or gargantuan Ukrainian, and that night the native Berliner beat a potbellied black man senseless in the Las Vegas heat. In the sixth round when the referee’s count reached ten and the American slumped into the arms of his cornermen, the fight fan next to me, Heiko Zollner from Wilmersdorf, swelled with a smug patriotism that his German guilt wouldn’t allow him to express. He wanted to say, “I’m proud to be German” but he couldn’t, it’s illegal. Even the slightly less salacious “I’m happy to be German” would’ve compelled him to turn himself in to the authorities, whereupon he would’ve been sentenced to six months probation and a hefty fine and required to recite the first fifteen lines of the kaddish in Hebrew or French kiss a leper.

After the fight Heiko and I drunkenly reenacted the bout over a frothy pitcher of beer. With the orange peels we’d stuffed into our mouths serving as mouthpieces, our hands cut through the stream rising from a stainless steel bin of freshly hard-boiled eggs. When we finally tired, Heiko, no longer able to contain his German pride over Rocky’s victory, raised a goldenrod mug of Bitburger beer brewed and poured to print-ad perfection. He pounded on the table. “Wie glücklich bin ich doch über dieses wunderschöne Bier heute morgen zum Frühstück,” he exclaimed. How fortunate I am to be able to partake in this beautiful glass of beer for my morning repast. That was all the displaced praise his champion and country would get.

Lars looked just like Heiko did that night. His face lit up with that same hubris-hour smirk. He ordered a round of drinks and stuck out a hairy hand. He was there to interview me. I’d seen him around. Sitting at a corner table by himself, drinking his wine and observing. Every now and then he’d walk over to the jukebox, put his hands on the glass, and peer into the machine like a mechanic listening to an engine.

He’d done a lot of record promotion disguised as objective music journalism for a record company headquartered in Berlin. Doris was tending bar at a meet-and-greet for an American boy band when he asked her to make him something different and if she’d heard any good music lately. She mixed him an Adios Motherfucker,* then offhandedly mentioned the Slumberland jukebox. Told him the bar’s patrons were so impressed by the jukebox selection that two or three times a night the place would go quiet for minutes at a time, that it wasn’t a rare occurrence for newcomers to get shushed for talking over Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” or for the crowd to applaud some particularly adroit Jackie McLean solo.

Intrigued, Lars had shown up once or twice the week prior to research his story by standing in the machine’s opalescent glow and pressing his nose against the glass.

I consented to the interview so long as he promised that he wouldn’t print my name or the name of the bar in the article, and, most important, that he wouldn’t tell any of his fellow hacks about the place. Nothing ruins a good thing like its discovery by aging rock ’n’ roll critics looking for a scene.

While Lars fumbled with his old-fashioned cassette recorder, I took out my minirecorder and placed it on the bar, answering the why-the-fuck-don’t-you-trust-me look on his face by explaining that I always tape random sounds and wanted to record the sound of the record button being pressed, telling him how I wasted the summer between fifth and sixth grades trying to press the record button fast enough to record the sound of its being pressed.

Lars laughed and said, “There’s some Einsteinian relativity to that somehow.”

I liked him immediately. I liked the word “Einsteinian.” I liked him enough to be jealous of how he managed to pull off wearing a turtleneck sweater. Whenever I wore one I moved about stiffly, craning my neck as if I’d been in a car accident and the turtleneck was less a masculine-magazine fashion statement than a way of hiding my neck brace. Doris sat down to join us.

I pressed record.

Lars pressed record.

I turned off my tape recorder and said, “Before we begin, I’d like to tell you that not everything I say to you will be the truth.”

He asked whether the jukebox had changed the bar’s notorious reputation as a meat market. I shrugged modestly, and Doris elbowed me in the side, forcing me to tell him the Carly Simon story.

The day after the new jukebox had been plugged in I stumbled upon a woman giving a guy head in the bathroom. Such Weimaresque displays of public affection, although common at raucous Berlin bars like the Kumpelnest and Café M, were unheard of at the race-mixing joints. For us Slumberlanders the sexual electricity was all about the pretense of taboo and stigma. If blacks and whites kissed in public it would take the fun out of the game. Sour the forbidden fruit gemütlichkeit, so to speak. Yet there they were, he leaning back against the sink, she squatting in front of him, her stringy blonde head plunging in and out of his nappy, ashen crotch, her hands grabbing onto the faucets for support, his hands wrapped around her neck for psychological and physical leverage. They were both crying and singing in tandem to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” the lachrymal ballad that dripped from the bathroom speaker. It was the most romantic and disgusting scene I’d ever witnessed. The scene played out like a page stricken from a long-lost Othello folio.

Act V, Scene I

OTHELLO

Lo, sweet Desdemona, many a knave and nobleman hath warned me, “Thou canst not maketh a ho into a housewife.” And yet, sainted wife, my dagger knows no other scabbard.

140

If they saw me, they continued to sing, and I continued to look and listen. He was in astonishingly good voice, a princely Ugandan alto with a hint of Jagger’s pseudo-cockney accent. She, on the other hand, was understandably garbled. I can still hear their orgiastic duet.

“Yeah,” I answered blithely, “the Slumberland’s the same, but different.”

We talked freely and openly for hours, the interview finally ending with Lars inquiring in that strange fractured syntax that most people adopt whenever discussing anything niggeresque, “How come they ain’t no hip-hop on the jukebox?”

“There isn’t?”

“No.”

“I guess it’s because rap doesn’t sound right in a bookstore, bar, coffee shop, or television commercial.”

“Less authentic?”

“It’s more about the acoustics. What makes hip-hop special is its spatial intimacy with the listener. Rap is a claustrophobic music that sounds best on headphones jammed deep into your ear canals, in a cinder block dorm room or a car packed dashboard to trunk with your friends, the music so loud that the rearview mirror pops to the beat, the weed bounces up and down on the Zig-Zag, the factory-installed bass speakers fight for their lives as the bass threatens to blow them and your eardrums out. You can’t play the music loud enough in here to give it any import. Maybe when hiphop dies, and it will die, then it’ll be fit for public consumption. Can you imagine listening to “Rebel Without a Pause” at low, unobtrusive Muzak volume, sipping a hot, cream-free double espresso and wondering, ‘Is this what Public Enemy meant by black power?’ ”

Lars turned off his tape recorder. As if on cue, the finger snaps to Peggy Lee’s “Fever” strutted into the bar, black-cat cool and followed by a finicky, purring vocal that slinked into your lap and demanded attention. On the other side of the bar a portly woman leaned over a dreadlocked American to put her drink order in to the bartender and her angora-covered breasts in his face. Her order placed, she tucked her hair behind her ear and started snapping her fingers to the beat. She wasn’t giving me fever, but the woman sitting next to the dread got hot and told her to step back.

Lars watched the scene curiously, drumming his pen on the bar, when he slowly turned his head in my direction and said, “Charles Stone”

I don’t how to punctuate that quote. There is no way to classify its purpose, for it was spoken without one. It came across more as an involuntary Tourette’s utterance than anything else. What could possess him to name-drop the Schwa, my paper-thin and increasingly futile raison d’être, for no apparent raison?

“Charles Stone”

This time the words hung in the air, swinging like a shop-keeper’s nominal shingle in an ominous Dickensian London breeze. Their only defining characteristic, other than the unaccented phonation, was the tone, a tone that had a tinge of the spy’s trench coat trepidation when broaching a potential contact with the opening fragment of a cryptic code phrase.

“Charles Stone”

I didn’t know the proper response. During D-Day, Allied soldiers crawled and cowered in the French hedgerows doing their best to avoid being victims of friendly fire by shouting, “Thunder!” at one another and anything else that moved. The only way friendlies such as the groundhogs, the clouds, and scared-shitless draftees wouldn’t be fired upon was to answer the “Thunder!” with a prompt “Flash!”—preferably spoken in a strong Texas dialect.

I was afraid to say anything. I looked to Doris for help, but she excused herself to fix a cola dispenser that had run out of CO₂. Maybe “Charles Stone” was the music critic’s “Halt! Who goes there?” We all have our dinner-party litmus tests. Standardized oral pop quizzes that we give to the moderately attractive person with the mouth stuffed with deviled eggs in order to find out if they’re worth spending the next half hour with, much less the rest of one’s life. My litmus test of compatibility is “Tom Cruise.” I hate people who hate Tom Cruise, cultural automatons who at the mention of his name reflexively bridle and say the diminutive thespian and Theta level Scientologist is “crazy” and “a terrible actor.” They hate him because he’s easy to hate. They think that despising Tom Cruise’s lack of personality and supposed lack of talent is somehow a blow against the bland American Anschluss of the rest of the planet. Tom Cruise may indeed be the Christopher Columbus of the twentieth century, sent off by the kings of Hollywood to prove the new world of International Box Office isn’t flat and to find a direct route into the Asian market, but the decline of everything isn’t his fault; he’s just a cinematic explorer and a damn fine actor. And hating him doesn’t make you seditious — it makes you complicit.

Maybe Lars Papenfuss was waiting for me to say the wrong thing so he could deem me unworthy of German recognition and the social-democratic largesse that came with it, then take me out back and shoot me.

“Charles Stone.”

That one had a period on it. A punctuation of suspicion put there because my eyebrows kept folding to crazy angles as I tried to hold a dumbfounded look on my face.

“Charles Stone.”

I ignored him. Focused my attention on the Dreadlock-American and the two women. He had them both entranced. Every caesura in his story followed by a sigh and an earnest, “See, I’m from the ghetto. .” He playfully slipped pretzels onto the ring fingers of both women and asked them for their hands in marriage. Answering with yesses that didn’t come off as face-tiously as originally intended, they laughed and kissed him on the cheek. I had something to do with that. A few years down the line when one, possibly both of these women are catching dread’s kids at the bottom of the slide and answering the “What was daddy like?” question, I’ll gaze nostalgically through the park fence at their happy, caramel-colored, schnitzel-eating kids and say to myself, “Me and Peggy Lee had something to do with that.”

Peggy Lee’s “Fever” subsided, and during the record change a tense silence filled the bar. The dread jump-started his conversation with the usually patented “See, I’m from the ghetto. .,” only this time he was silenced by both women. They leaned backward off their stools, ears cocked toward the main room. They wanted to hear what was coming on next. The panting hound dog leitmotif to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” bounced jauntily into the room, lifting me and at least half the other drunks out of our seats and onto the sand-covered floor. There we shape-shifted and transmogrified from one funkified pose to another. The funk and nothing but the funk running over us like a hot iron, flattening and steaming the Slumberland universe into a single wrinkle-free dimension. Pressed into the walls, our limbs raised and bent at odd, acute, and not-so-cute angles, we looked like dancing figures circumscribing an ancient Babylonian vase. An earthenware urn telling a story of modern antiquity, glazed and fire-hardened civil servants riding and shimmying what they thought was the downbeat, illegal aliens flying fancy free for the first time in their destitute lives, finally feeling like the African royalty they so often claim to be.

I’d always thought music writers, like gangsters, were too cool to dance; yet there was Lars doing a very credible strobe. Stopping and starting his body rock with such rapidity it looked as if he were moving underneath the flickering brightness of a strobe light. He pop locked over to me and touched me on the arm.

“Charles Stone.”

This time I knew what to say.

“Tom Cruise, motherfucker.”

During the next few weeks Lars and I bonded over Osamu Dazai, a thirty-year-old bottle of Poit Dhubh malt whiskey, the welter-weight fearlessness of Oscar De La Hoya, and the cleverness of contemporary American everything at the expense of passion. He claimed to be the only person alive who’d actually read Thomas Pynchon’s twenty-five-pound opus Gravity’s Rainbow without having yawned even once, and I believed and respected him for it. “A wonderful piece of children’s literature,” he said. “If only it were five hundred pages longer and a little less transparent.” For him reading the book to completion was like fighting a meaningless war and living to tell about it. Vietnam, Desert Storm — I’m against the wars but support the soldiers. He’d invite me over to his flat just so I could watch him finish his review of the latest American “me novels.” He’d toss the galley copy into the trash and say, “I’m against the author, but support the reader,” then tell me how he gave up fiction because whenever he submitted a gritty, realistic manuscript the publishers would say, “We like it, but we want more plot,” or if he submitted a tight, linear narrative, they’d say, “We like it, but we want more realism.” Jealous of everyone and anyone’s success, I gathered up the nerve to show Lars my novel, a work in perpetual progress composed entirely of opening sentences, the best of which he thought was, “ ‘We will be cruising at an altitude of zero feet, our estimated time of arrival is never, and the temperature in hell is bloody hot with searing winds out of the southwest. Sit back and relax and ignore the seat belt sign. Thank you for flying Kamikaze Airways,’ the pilot announced into the loudspeaker, his shoulders shaking with what the psychiatrists call ‘inappropriate laughter.’ ”

Defiant in my determination to complete my quest solo, I avoided any talk or discussion about Charles Stone until one autumn day when Lars, Doris, and I drove back from Jam, an outdoor party held on the banks of the Spree. Horace Silver’s “Señor Blues” crackled from the tinny dashboard speakers. It’s a wonderful driving song, and his sun-faded red Alfa Romeo convertible scuttled through Berlin leaking oil and bop pianissimo. At a stoplight Lars lowered the volume.

“What’s it like listening to jazz with no white people around?” he asked, apropos of nothing except that Horace Silver and me were both black and he wasn’t.

I recall my face in the side-view mirror. Forlorn. Fed up. Homesick. I wish I hadn’t been so offended by Lars’s curiosity. I wish that, like he and most other cultural critics, I believed in the mystique and exclusivity of Negro expression.

“You know what happens when you listen to jazz when there’s only black people around?”

Lars stiffened excitedly in his seat, his hands tightening around the steering wheel. I cleared my throat of sarcasm and hocked a spit wad of derision into the street.

“Well, if there’s just the right amount of barbecue sauce on the ribs and mentholated smoke in the air, we pass around the ‘jungle juice,’ a fruity, tribal, hallucinogenic Kool-Aid-based beverage, and wait for Coltrane, Clifford Brown, or some other goateed shaman to hit that perfect flatted fifth, sending us all into a collective trance state that awakens the dormant recombinant gris-gris gene in our mitochondrial DNA, thereby catapulting us into the fifth dimension where we surrey down to a stoned soul picnic, rejoicing in the cessation of the racist phenomenological world and attainment of Negro nirvana that for me, ironically, is absent any other Negroes.”

“Fuck you.”

“You asked. Next time I’ll tell you about how whenever two black quarterbacks face each other in a football game, black America gets a collective migraine because we don’t know which team to cheer for.”

At least Lars was curious about the appeal of jazz to black folk; for most observers, such ponderation is akin to contemplating why gorillas like bananas. The attractiveness of jazz to the nonblack is well documented in publicly funded documentaries where experts speak of jazz in the past tense. They look authoritatively into the camera and ingratiate themselves with the Man by saying things like, “White people were hearing something in jazz that says something deeply about their experience. I’m not sure that it would have been this way if we were not a country of immigrants. . so many people felt kind of displaced. . I think that was part of its amazing appeal, was how it spoke to feeling out of sort and out of joint and maladjusted.”*

What hogwash. Does my fondness for classical music make me well adjusted? Besides, people who are really fucked up don’t turn to jazz; they turn to heroin, opium, whiskey, and Vonnegut.

Lars turned up the radio. A bouncy yet vacuous tune that I couldn’t quite place replaced the Horace Silver. The music didn’t fill the air so much as pass through it. The song tried hard to be jazz, to be noble, to be American. The band wasn’t playing jazz so much as it was playing the history of jazz. I said something I rarely say about any piece of music.

“I have no idea who this is.”

Lars started to laugh, but a look of concern quickly reconfigured his face.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“You’re not fucking with me?”

“No,” I insisted, staring down the radio dial as if that would give me a clue.

The trumpet player’s recording levels were set a shade higher than the rest of the band, so I figured he was the leader. He lit into a bewailing tremolo. His technique was exquisite. The tone had the crisp dryness of a nice house sake, but there was a sterility to his phrasing that left me feeling empty and used.

Lars looked at his watch and, taking his hands off the wheel, pretended to write an obituary on the palm of his hand.

“Tonight, at five fifty-seven P.M. on a warm October evening, the American Negro was officially declared dead. His passing will be mourned by all who’ve enjoyed his musical precocity.”

“This time, fuck you.”

Lars drove with his knees better than I did with my hands. He’d eased the car into a fairly sharp turn, merging into traffic with a smile and peace sign for the Renault he’d almost side-swiped. The song and Lars forged intrepidly on.

“When I reviewed this record, the best description I could come up with was ‘nondescript.’ I was listening to it and completely forgot it was on. You know, when I review a good jazz album my neighbors’ kids come running into the flat, hands over their ears, screaming, ‘Was ist das Herr Lars? Was ist das?’ begging to know the name of the strange sounds coming from my living room. This time they stayed at home. Frau Junker, the elderly woman who lives across the hall, was the only one listening. In the middle of a solo she rang my bell, and when I opened the door, she says, ‘It’s a shame about the black man. I miss them,’ and returns to her business.”

Lars wouldn’t take the wheel. Pissed off that blackness was dead, he sat there with his arms folded and a Fritz Lang monocle squint on his face.

“Wynton Marsalis,” I said suddenly, pounding the dashboard in disgust. “That’s who this is.”

I should have known sooner; the tempo’s self-important braggadocio was a dead giveaway. Marsalis, New Orleans born and New York praised, is jazz’s most famous living musician. He’s been around for years, but until that night I’d never heard one note of his astringent horn in public. I’d never seen one of his CDs in a poolroom jukebox or seen a spry, elderly, know-it-all black man hanging out in front of the supermarket, snapping his fingers and whistling one of his melodies to pass the time. He’s a middle-aged child prodigy to whom everyone gives plaudits, but no one plays.

The tune, like most contrivances of the black telegentsia, seemed lost, a corny cacophonic search among the ruins of a romanticized African history for a self-affirming excuse to love being black. However, Wynton’s pretentious narcissistic nigrescence couldn’t fool me.* The pentatonic scaling and the repetition of the ninth through twelfth bars belied an underlying skittishness, and the song flitted aimlessly about like a flock of canaries that have flown into a room and can’t find their way out. If I had had a sack of breadcrumbs and sprinkled them on the car floor, his cawing notes would’ve fluttered from his trumpet one by one, landed at my feet, and begged for attention. The thunderclap of an Art Blakey rim shot would’ve scattered the song into nothingness, leaving nothing but muted airs and some unresolved psychosexual issues with Mother Africa.

I hate Wynton Marsalis in the same manner Rommel hated Hitler. Whenever I hear Marsalis’s trumpet playing I feel like the Desert Fox forced to come to grips with the consequences of totalitarianism after the war has been all but lost. At least Rommel had Wagner. All I’ve got is Wynton. His musical Valkyries arrive not on winged steeds but astride caged birds.

Wynton Marsalis reminds me that I was born wearing the wrong uniform. That I’m a Negro-Nazi who, being only a DJ and not a general, politician, or movie director, is at best a functionary or house-party gauleiter. At the tribunal I will not claim that during the culture wars I was deceived by my superiors and had no knowledge of the camps. I will plead guilty to the charge of crimes against humanity. Admit that I was a deceiver. A trickster whose greatest transgressions were kick-starting the strip-club putsch of 1989 by giving voice to the earliest in Afro-fascist rap (Young MC, JJ Fad, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince) and knowing of the existence of the death camps: the University of California at Berkeley, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Lyricist Lounge, Naropa, Def Jam and Bad Boy Records, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and that Auschwitz of free thought, Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The song labored on, Wynton’s band, like the critics, playing in the past tense. I began to feel a wave of black conformity wash over me and I felt the need to remind myself that oppression didn’t start with Kunta Kinte and that the trains probably ran on time before Hitler. A yawn that I didn’t bother to stifle left my lips.

Modern jazz, like the modern man, was devoid of funk, devoid of mystery. Maybe what Wynton’s band needed was a maladjusted white cat, a Bix, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, Adam Yauch, or an F. Scott Fitzgerald to give it some fervor. That way they could stop playing with a sense of entitlement and start playing with the daring birthed by vicariousness — but these days there’s never a Gene Krupa around when you need one.

The existentialists say the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the jungles of Mauritania can cause a hurricane in the plains of Kansas, but a high C from Wynton Marsalis’s trumpet doesn’t even change your mood, much less your mind. And I don’t know whether or not Marsalis’s music is an allegory for race, American democracy, or black fascism, but I do know the Schwa’s music is anarchy. It’s Somalia. It’s the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s Albert Einstein’s hair.

When we arrived back at my place I took out the chicken-fucking song and wiggled it in Doris’s face, indicating that I wanted to play it. Doris shook her head. That was our song. Our little free-jazz secret. I popped it into the VCR anyway. Lars was perusing the stacks of books that rose from the floor of my dingy apartment like paperback stalagmites. He opened a tattered Nabokov. Appropriate because the Schwa plays like Nabokov writes. I’m convinced that Nabokov wrote his novels around words like agglutinate, siliceous, gardyloo, ophidian, triskelions. That he took an ESL course at a local night school and the teacher wrote those words on the blackboard and said, “Today’s assignment is to take these words and use them in a first novel the New York Times will call ‘Riveting, truly a classic for the ages.’ ” Surely the Schwa’s process is similar, because every ten measures or so there’s a snippet, a riff within a riff that makes you realize that the previous nine measures were just an excuse to play a tricolor chord that bursts open in the middle of the song like a firework exploding in a clear night sky.

Lars sat on the arm of the couch grinning at Nabokov’s prosody. He was as relaxed as a boxer who thinks he’s far enough ahead on the card in the fight for cultural hegemony to let his hipster guard down and coast to an easy victory. He wasn’t paying that overhand left whistling in the distance any mind, and when the Schwa’s avant-garde jazz trochaics hit him, the smile on his face changed from mirthful to the be-mused toothy grin of a boxer who’s been seriously hurt by a punch but doesn’t want his opponent to know he can hear his own brains sloshing inside his skull. The genuflecting glaze in his eyes gave him away. Lars knew straightaway who it was. He considered himself Europe’s foremost authority on Charles Stone, and here his best friend was playing a heretofore unknown Stone gem, and he was hurt. Throw-in-the-towel hurt.

I wouldn’t turn off the music. The Nabokov fell face open into his lap. It might have been from muscle fatigue, though I suspect it was to hide an erection. The stud on the screen continued to pound the chicken doggy style, if that’s at all possible. The music continued on as if the Schwa were in the room using the book as sheet music. . shadography, Lacedaemonian sensation, ocelate. . Lars began to cry. Hearing that unknown recording of the Schwa affected him the same as if I’d told him Steve Biko, Bud Powell, Janis Joplin, Patrick Lumumba, and Bob Marley had survived the Rolling Stone rhetoric and were running glass-bottomed boat excursions off the Florida Keys. He buried his head into a sofa cushion, not in shame but to muffle his sobbing so that it didn’t interfere with the music. When the song ended he fired the Nabokov at my head.

“How can you live with yourself?” he yelled. “You verdammte DJs with your secrecy, your white labels and hush-hush-close-the-door-we’re-the-only-ones-with-cocaine-and-a-Japanese-import-on-vinyl-cooler-than-thou attitude. You know I worship this guy. How dare you sit on the greatest jazz piece recorded since 1969, unveiling it only to select guests like it’s a stolen fucking Picasso. You people think that because you own the recording you own the music.”

“You people?” I asked, slipping behind my turntables.

“Entschuldigen Sie. DJs aren’t people, they’re parasites.”

Lars picked up a Zora Neale Hurston and a Eugene O’Neill and fired a double-barreled scattershot blast at Doris.

“And fuck you too! Keeping this from me! You guys are probably fucking behind my back too!”

I switched on the sampler and calmly dropped the needle on the record. The first booming thump of my almost-perfect beat caved in Lars’s chest. When the hook kicked in it was as if Doctor Funkenstein had tapped his spinal cord with a rubber hammer. The autonomic reflexes took over. The crispy highs caused his neck to snap and jerk back and forth. The pounding lows dropped his ass halfway to the floor, rolled his shoulders, and turned his pelvis into a gyroscope of grinding sensuality. Meanwhile his pronated hands hovered mummylike in front of his chest and surfed the midrange. I finished my groove and Lars bit down hard on his bottom lip. I knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say, “Damn, nigger, so that’s what it feels like to be black.”

Instead he opened the windows, letting the very last of the cool daylight air blow into the room like a runaway child come home. “Now I know why you came to Germany,” he said. “You want to get Stone to lay down an original groove over your track.”

Lars ejected the tape and flipped it around, looking for clues as to where it came from. He was too much of an ethical journalist to ask me to divulge my sources. Not that I had any.

“It came in the mail.”

I handed him the envelope the chicken-fucking song had come in, making sure he noticed the return address and the East Berlin postmark. He held it gently, as if it were an old museum piece. “Wow, it feels good to know that Charles Stone might be out there.”

“There” meant the 350 square miles of divided Berlin expanse that existed in Lars’s head. From my window, “there” was the oak-tree-lined intersection of Schlüterstrasse and Mommenstrasse, an overpriced Italian restaurant, a furrier, and, almost directly underneath us, two stories down, Blixa Bargeld, the infamous leader of the industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, sitting on the fender of his sports car. Dressed head to toe in Berlin black, his legs crossed at the ankles, he’d take a long pull on his cigarette, hack into his fingerless leather glove, then crane his neck down the block. He too was waiting for somebody to come out of the growing darkness.

“That’s dusk you feel,” I said to Lars.

“No, it’s more than that,” he replied. “This city, this country has been dead for a long, long time, and if somebody like Charles Stone is out there somewhere, it means the cultural soil is no longer fallow. Picasso blossomed in Paris and the city flowered along with him. Gauguin in Tahiti. Kerouac in Mexico. Erich von Stroheim in Hollywood. DJ Darky and Charles Stone in Berlin.”

“The Schwa — back home we call him the Schwa.”

A flat-chested Chinese woman who played up her exotic communist appeal and downplayed her beauty with an X-Acto-knife-sharp bowl cut, kung fu slippers, square plastic Jiang Zemin glasses, a Red Army jacket with matching floppy Long March hat, and a bootleg Dead Boys concert T-shirt sidled up to Blixa and without asking coyly shared his cigarette.

“We haven’t had a great thinker since Heidegger, a great artist since Riefenstahl. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a great fucking DJ, but DJs aren’t artists or thinkers. They can’t be Picasso or Kerouac. But they can be one of those thankless unknowns that came before them. Influenced them. Threatened them. Fed them. Maybe you’re Dean Moriarty, Alice B. Toklas, Fab Five Freddy, or Allen Ginsberg’s ‘negro streets at dawn.’ ”

I watched Blixa and his girlfriend kiss, and with every vicarious grope I cared less and less about the Schwa and my perfect beat. I’d rather look for love, but blind, crippled, and crazy, I’d slept with damn near every woman in West Berlin, so I was running out of options.

On our way to the Slumberland we walked past the intertwined Blixa and his Red Guard. He stopped nuzzling his Sinosylph long enough to stare me down. He’d heard the beat. It had fallen from my window and landed on his head like a Newtonian apple. The curious rhythm bruising his auditory cortex and, I suppose, his ego. Still ringing fuzzily inside his head. Just as Sir Isaac knew the laws of gravity couldn’t be ignored when the apple struck him, Blixa instinctively knew that the George Clintonian Law of Universal Funk must also be paid obeisance. For every funky object in the universe attracts every other hip-hi-de-ho object with a soulsonic force directed along the bass line of centers for the two objects that is proportional to the product of the masses of their asses and inversely proportional to the bustin’ out of L7 square of the racial separation between the two objects.

where: F is the Funk, G is the Groove constant, m₁ is the mass of the first ass, m₂ is the mass of the second ass, and r is the great racial divide.

We left Blixa to his own calculations, and four hours later it was hubris hour at the Slumberland, Lars’s proud face beaming at the new multiculti Germany around him and still pontificating on the coming rebirth of both his city and the black man.

“Think about it, fifty years ago we tried to kill culture, and now without trying we’re going to resurrect it.”

In the middle of the bar a Watusi climbed on a table and danced the Watusi. I thanked the gods there were no tribes called the Mashed Potato, the Electric Slide, or the Funky Chicken. West Berlin, Lars drunkenly insisted, would prove to be the modern-day equivalent to the Olduvai Gorge. It would be the birthplace of the neo-protohuman, the new black man.

There was one sitting across the table from me. A premature protohuman baby with whom Lars and Doris had periodic threesomes named Tyrus Maverick. Tyrus was a self-described “performance artist slash poet slash playwright slash filmmaker slash activist” and, as I liked to add, “slash asshole” who still owes me three hundred dollars. He hailed from Southern California, claiming Compton though he’d spent the greater part of his boyhood in Hawthorne. He’d tried to pal up citing our common Sureño palm tree and In-N-Out burger vato loco heritage, and I was friendly at first until I went to a reading of his play Iceland Is Hot!*

Tyrus had the annoying habit of tapping me on the arm whenever he had something to say. “Hey, man”—tap, tap—“I think Doris still likes you. She’s always carrying on about how you the only black man she’d ever known who during a dinner date didn’t insist on sitting in the seat facing the door like a wanted criminal.”

Tyrus was good for one thing, though: He kept up with contemporary African-American male literature. That night he was reading a trade-paperback tome entitled Want Some, Get Some. Bad Enough, Take Some. Like everything else he read, it invariably bore a series of blurbs comparing the author’s biting satire to Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, a comparison that I never understood because Richard Wright isn’t funny.

“Can I borrow that when you’re finished? I’d like to read it.”

“No doubt. This cat’s a hell of a writer. Damn near as funny as Richard Wright.”

I loved reading these books. The black tweed-jacketed eruditeness mixed with street-corner irreverence, the honesty about racial turpitude coupled with the dishonesty about its manifestation. Like the authors, the protagonists are always brilliant, underappreciated men in search of white approval and, therefore, self-affirmation. I know these cats. These are the dudes from the neighborhood who got white-boy SAT scores, attended small Midwestern liberal arts colleges, and married frumpy white girls with hairy legs who douche with rainwater. Yet the female love interest who grounds their protagonists to their fragile blackness while they trek through the absurdist, mine-laden landscape that is America is always a demure, brown-skinned female with a refined intelligence, no personality, and no problems, the kind of woman guys like the ones who inhabit these novels would never be attracted to. I needed a real woman exactly like the fictional ones that always showed up in Part III of those novels. Where was my Melba? My Wanda? My African queen without the African features?

When I looked up from my musing, a full-chested, auburn-haired woman splattered with freckles from her cheekbones to her clavicle was seated at our table, jingling her car keys in my face. Lars slipped his pompous-looking mug over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow. Doris’s bumptious face suddenly appeared over the other shoulder. Together they looked like a smug, three-headed Aryan hydra.

“I know you’re thinking about giving up looking for the Schwa,” Doris said. “Don’t.”

The middle head smiled broadly, licked her lips, and this time jangled her keys so that the BMW logo on her rubber-tipped ignition key was prominently displayed.

Lars raised the other eyebrow. He was drunk, drunker than I’d ever seen him, which was saying a lot.

“Hey, man,” I said to him, “you never told me, why so proud tonight?”

He leaned in, speaking very softly. “Don’t tell anyone, but tonight, tonight I’m proud of the holocaust. Not the killing per se, but the efficiency. The drive. The single-minded devotion to a task. Is that so wrong?”

At that moment I needed a black woman in my life like never before. However, my venture into the mysteries of black carnality would have to wait, because the middle hydra head had taken my hand and placed it on her left breast. I kneaded the doughy appendage. It felt like strudel. And I love strudel.