Slumberland

CHAPTER 1

MY FAVORITE BERLIN DAYS are those rare late afternoons when I go outside full of an unflappable faith in mankind that only a double espresso and a clean T-shirt can muster, only to find the streets deserted. It’s like entering the set of a postapocalyptic 1959 film. The traffic is nonexistent and all the shops are closed. I’ll wonder if I’ve slept through the air raid sirens. Missed the mandatory evacuation pending the invasion from outer space. On the way to the newspaper kiosk I’ll hear a plaintive yelp, then I’ll sprint around the corner expecting to see a fifty-foot-tall, one-eyed, iridescent green robot zapping a stray dog with a ray gun. Is that a dust cloud churning down Kantstrasse, or some comet-borne, incurable, and highly communicable virus that liquefies innards and turns eyeballs to smoke? In the tiny chain-link confines of Albertus Magnus Park the rusted swings will creak, their meager ridership consisting of only the breeze and me. Eventually a hump-bearing dowager will sit in the next swing over, kick her varicose-veined, knee-high-stocking legs back and forth, and complain about the cold and the verdammte türkisch-polnische Neger-Ausländer Kanaken. Then I’ll know my fears of the apocalypse were unfounded and that it’s only some national holiday no one bothered to inform me about before their visit to Oma und Opa. Maybe it’ll be May Day or Three Kings Day or International Women’s Day or My God What Were We Thinking When We Voted for Hitler? (Twice!) Please Forgive Us — It’s Been Fifty Years Already! Day.

For fun I’ll ask the muttering old woman how she feels about the Neger-Neger (Nigger-Niggers) like myself and she’ll say, “Love them. Slept with a couple after the war. Nice boys. Polite. Big Schwänze, small minds, and even tinier ears. Maybe that’s why they’re so stupid, they don’t hear everything.” Oh, I love those Berlin days, empty streets, yowling dogs, and swinging on the swings with kindly, racist, octogenarian sex addicts. So it stands to reason that I hate undeclared and impromptu holidays like the fateful one when I’d flung myself into the streets with my usual hangover Weltschmerz and dirty-underwear petulance, and found the sidewalks packed stoop to curb with giddy, overly inquisitive Germans drinking Coca-Cola and noshing bananas and all moving in the same direction. As they passed me by, each one took a long moment to stare at me like a child on a field trip to the Völkerschau—people zoo. One boy, ignoring his mother’s don’t-feed-the-animals admonition, offered me a Coke and a smile. Both of which I gladly accepted.

At first I wasn’t quite certain they were German. They spoke German. They looked German, albeit with even tighter pants and uglier shoes, but there was something different about them. I figured maybe the Austrian national soccer team was in town or there was a kartoffelpuffer famine in Luxembourg. What was really eye-catching about the horde was how incredibly un-eye-catching they were. Not to say they were unappealing. On the whole they weren’t any uglier than any other mass assemblage since Bon Jovi’s last concert date. Yet even the most stunning physical specimens among them carried themselves without the slightest hint of pretension. The people seemed to be a lot like their clothes. They were a sturdy wash-and-wear group who favored comfort and practicality over style and flash. For them it wasn’t the clothes that made the man. It was the person who made the clothes.

A towering blonde Calliope exited the perfumery pressing cardboard samples to her Linda Evangelista nose and blissfully inhaled for all she was worth. Somehow, against all odds, that breathtakingly beautiful woman with the statuesque figure and the tweaked oblique eyebrow countenance of a Vogue covergirl wasn’t vaingloriously strutting the catwalks of Paris, twirling a Givenchy bag and scanning the frigid fashionistas for her heroin dealer, but clomping the streets in the most ungainly pair of dog-shit-brown flats, digging wax out of her ears, and wiping the viscous find on the sleeves of her denim jacket. And she gawked at me like I was the monkey masturbating in the trees.

An impossibly ordinary-looking man interrupted the stare down.

“How much does such an automobile cost?” he asked me in English, running a hand admiringly over the fender of a parked Mercedes-Benz sedan.

“I don’t know. Fifty, sixty thousand?”

He looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. Returning to the Benz, he peered into the car with his hands cupped around his eyes, drooling at the leather interior and dashboard gadgetry.

“Scheisse, that’s ten years’ pay plus bribes, plus five. .” he mumbled something that sounded like “assassination bonuses,” then with a giddy, almost criminal look on his face spat out a dare disguised as an innocent question: “Ever ride in one?”

“Once.”

“Smooth?”

“Like I was flying in a dream, maybe better.”

“I knew it.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Bitte.”

“Where did all these people come from? Was there a soccer game?”

The bland man stopped looking at the various pipe-cleanersized metal rods he’d removed from his jacket pocket.

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“The Wall fell.”

I boldly stepped into the second-most embarrassing moment of my life and asked, “What wall?”*

Thus confirming every stereotype of American ignorance about world affairs and geography. I, of course, knew of the Berlin Wall and its storied history, but as so often happens to black Americans abroad and domestically, I found myself trapped in a culturally biased break in the race-time continuum. Just as the bright but underprivileged inner-city child will correctly and for all the wrong reasons answer “b” to the following PSAT puzzler:

Mademoiselle Chiffon took a soothing sip of oolong tea and smiled mournfully at the strains of chamber music coming from the conservatory. Her genteel mind flashed to the carefree days she’d spent summering in the Tuscan hills before the war. Oh, Gaston, she thought to herself, am I forever doomed to hear your voice only in a string quartet’s violins? Silently, she cursed Bartók and returned the teapot to the __________while absentmindedly fingering her warm __________ __________.

a. sink, first-edition Molière

b. saucer, tea cozy, wet coochie

c. table, Chinese exercise balls

d. cupboard, baroque lute

I too nearly fell victim to the ignorance resultant from a lack of exposure. Like the tea cozy to the ghetto child, the Berlin Wall was not a part of my lexicon. I’d never seen it. When the indescribable man mentioned “the Wall,” any number of walls flashed through my mind. The Great Wall of China. The Wailing Wall. Pink Floyd’s classic album. The blue wall of silence the LAPD erected at the disciplinary hearing held for officers Bar-bella and Stevenson after they’d beat me and Blaze’s ass in the ninth grade for suspicion of stealing a car while we were at the bus stop waiting patiently for a bus.

The Mercedes’s door popped open with a satisfying click.

“Typical,” the faceless man said before sticking his mundane mug underneath the steering column and fiddling with the wires.

“You Americans own the world but never bother to venture into your own backyard. That’s the attitude that allowed us to steal the basketball final in the ’76 Olympics from under your noses, use Leo Strauss to infiltrate the Republican Party with his madcap philosophy of cruelty parading as humanism, convince you that VHS was superior to Betamax, and lure you into the Vietnam, Korean, and cola wars. New Coke? That was Vita Cola, the swill we East Germans have been drinking for forty years. No doubt your president will take credit for the fall of the Wall as signaling the end of Communism, but it’s all part of the master plan. It’s a misdirection maneuver somewhat analogous to your trick plays in American football, a geopolitical Statue of Liberty or fumblerooski, if you will. Soon, my dense Afro-American friend, you’ll be casting invisible digital votes in the name of democracy. Enslaving the vast majority of your work-force with a negligible minimum wage in the name of liberty. Charging mobile-phone users to make and receive calls in the name of free enterprise. Training the very same religious zealots of the desert who’ll. .”

The robust revving of the eight-cylinder engine drowned out the rest of his prognostication and my question about what in hell was a mobile phone.

“Come,” he said, patting the passenger seat. “Come see the breach in the Wall through which the four horsemen of the American apocalypse will ride.”

“Are you some kind of spy or just a well-informed car thief?” I asked, closing the door behind me.

“I’m a spy, though by tomorrow I might be a war criminal.”

“Me too.”

Traveling in four-door, heated-leather-seat luxury, we drove slowly through the masses. The man with the run-of-the-mill face told me he was stealing the Benz to replace his Trabant, a piece-of-shit socialist sedan that could be completely assembled and disassembled with a crescent wrench.

“How do you double the value of your Trabant?” he riddled me rhetorically. “Fill it with gas!”

When we reached the Wall, I turned down his offer of a tour of the bowels of the evil empire. I’m one of those folks who poses for photos standing next to the sign that says, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING SUCH AND SUCH STATE, then sleeps through the windy drive through the majestic Grand Tetons.

Otis Redding’s distinct rhythm ’n’ blues profundo bellowed from the car speakers. I couldn’t figure out if the refrain to “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” was prophetic or not because it seemed as if everything was changing and yet remained the same.

Two East German border guards, hats askew and tunics unbut-toned, sat at their post taking alternating slugs and pulls from a Jack Daniel’s bottle and an American cigarette. The first day-trip sojourners into Western imperialism were just starting to return to their homes. Exhausted families of four and only four walked past the guards, the parents dragging their sluggish, candy-smeared, toy-laden, lumpen proletarian progeny behind them. I half expected to hear an announcement saying, “Disneyland, excuse me, West Germany is now closed. Mickey, Pluto, Helmut, NATO, Japan, the United States of America, and the rest of the G7 thank you for your patronage and servitude. Get home safely.”

The invisible man pressed a button and unlocked my door. “The one thing I regret is that we created the Beatles,” he said apologetically, “then killed Otis Redding.”

“We?”

“Yes, ‘we.’ The dirty Reds killed Otis Redding. Mystery solved, okay. Look, the Beatles had been on top four years in a row, doing the job we gave them, which was to lull the West into a sitar secular stupor, and here comes this majestic black man with a haunting voice knocking them off the charts. We couldn’t have a Negro on top of the pop charts in 1968 blurring the racial hegemony. Bad for propaganda. Everybody — Moscow, Washington, Capitol Records — everybody agreed on that. Otis Redding and Martin Luther King both had to go. Made a two-for-one deal with the FBI.”

“C’mon, he died in a plane crash.”

“Ever notice the talentless, the harmless ones, never die young? Vanilla Ice, Lawrence Welk, the Disco Duck. You know how the monks scour the countryside and choose a small child to be the Dalai Lama? In Memphis there’s a bratty little boy named Justin Timberlake who’s been chosen to be the next King of Pop. He’ll live to be a hundred. It’s all part of the plan to keep you people docile.”

Unable to bear any more achingly plausible conspiracy theories, I moved to leave the car before I was exposed to the pointy, bloodletting half of the Stasi’s shield-and-sword motto. I was too late. The man of a thousand and one faces, each one more bland and forgettable than the one before it, had a Walther PPK pointed at his temple. He held back tears. His face convulsed, yet his hand remained steady. He whistled along with the classic outro of “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” backed up by the sounds of the crashing surf and the giddy laughter of East Berliners returning home from their first day of freedom.

When the song faded out he said, “Before I shoot myself, Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, isn’t there something you want to know?”

“ ‘Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann?’ It was you who sent the chicken-fucking tape?”

“It was.”

“How did you know I was looking for Charles Stone? And if you knew I was looking for him, why didn’t you just call and tell me where he was? Why fuck with me like that?”

“I fucked with you like that because I’m an East German secret agent and I’m trained to fuck with people like that. I don’t say, ‘Good morning, how are you feeling?’ which is the American way of fucking with you, as if you people really care how someone is feeling. I fuck your mind.”

“So why me?”

“Well, Herr Darky, I first heard your music at a very exclusive stag party I attended. We were watching a film you might be familiar with, a pornographic western called High Poon.”

“Some of my best work.”

“Indeed, personages no less than Heiner Müller, Valeri Borzov, Nicolae Ceauscescu, and Deng Xiaoping commented on how wonderful your score was. It was your work during that final scene that brought home the film’s point that the gang bang is the truest form of existentialism.”

“Thank you.”

“After that I became your biggest fan, which meant that I showed my appreciation not only by smuggling in your films and mix tapes, but I bugged your phone and intercepted your communiqués.”

“Communiqués? I didn’t know black people had communiqués.”

“When I found out you were corresponding with DJs around the world as to Charles Stone’s whereabouts, I decided to help you find him.”

“And you sent the video.”

“I couldn’t just contact you. No way to justify that to the higher-ups. See, we knew this day was coming, and a few of us lower-echelon guys at the agency who are huge Charles Stone fans were afraid that his unreleased masters would be burned along with the rest of the nefarious evidence. We couldn’t take the chance that this great man and his music would be lost to time and capitalism. So we arranged with the pornographers to use his music in their films as a way to preserve it.”

“There’s more music?”

“I’ll send you a coprophagia short entitled Eat Shit and Live! His playing on that one is so unworldly that when someone puts a spoonful of shit in their mouth, you’d swear they were eating caviar.”

“So the Schwa’s alive?”

“Very much so. I don’t know where he is, but you’ll find him. That’s why I put the Slumberland’s address on the envelope. He’ll come through there — all you soul brothers do.”

“So why shoot yourself?”

“That was my dick in the chicken.”

“Fire at will, motherfucker.”

The chickenfucker laughed and lowered his gun. I scrambled out.

“One more thing,” he said, starting the engine. “In time you will meet a woman named Klaudia von Robinson.”

“Von Robinson?”

“It’s not part of the master plan, but marry her anyway.”

Blaring its horn, the Benz parted the crowd and drove through the gate. The Spy Who Loved Chickens flashed his ID and the guards scrambled to their wobbly feet and bowed and scraped and saluted and raised the tailgate all at the same time. I wondered what the Schwa had to do with East German scat porn and the collapse of Communism.

The parade of returnees was thicker now. So was the crowd watching them return to the other side of the Iron Curtain. A large middle-aged man wearing a tweed blazer with suede patches peeling from the elbows, faded from liquor, three fingers of perestroika, and a jigger of glasnost, spotted my black face in the overwhelmingly white crowd. He stumbled up to me and ensnarled me in a big bear hug. When he released me, he threw up his arms and shouted, “Ich bin frei!” I am free! Then, cribbing from Kennedy’s famous speech, he whispered in my ear, “Ich bin ein Negro. Ich bin frei jetzt.”

The claim was heartfelt. For him, being black and free was a boast, not a conundrum or an oxymoron. I, however, believed him more black than free. I thought of something my father would say whenever he’d come across a hard-luck colored person in a witness box, cardboard box, or coffin box before his time. He’d say, “Lincoln freed the slaves like Henry Ford freed the horses.”

I suppose being East German was a lot like being black — the constant sloganeering, the protest songs, no electricity or long-distance telephone service — so I gave the East German Negro a hearty soul shake and a black power salute and wished him luck with the minimum-security emancipation he’d no doubt serve in the new German republic.

Full of the wonders of brotherhood, I approached the only other black face on the street. It was the security guard from the Amerikahaus, still in uniform and standing stolidly among the revelers. Eager to discuss the geopolitical ramifications of the breakup of the Soviet Bloc with a fellow member of the reified oppressed, I asked him what he thought about the goings-on.

“What do I think?” he sneered. “More white pussy. That’s what I think.”

The black man’s burden had never been heavier than it was at that moment. And I was more convinced than ever that the only thing that mattered was good music. Everything else was dead weight.

I took out my minirecorder and taped the sounds of freedom. Cars horns blared. A woman slammed a pickax into the Wall, grew tired, and then began to spit at the bricks. Chanting. Clapping. People said, “Wunderbar!” whenever a reporter shoved a microphone in their faces. Cameras clicked. Singing. Flashbulbs popped. A beer-hammered young man, too inebriated to lift his head, vomited his first Big Mac onto his first pair of Air Jordans. His boys teased him about wasting a month’s pay on sneakers that didn’t even last him a day. All in all, freedom sounded a lot like a Kiss concert.

CHAPTER 2

AFTER THE BERLIN WALL fell I never told anyone about my encounter with the chickenfucker and his internecine plans for my future. Despite his prognostications concerning the Schwa and a Klaudia von Robinson, nothing really much changed for me, except that I spent an inordinate amount of time watching syndicated broadcasts of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club. Every afternoon at one o’clock I’d flip on the TV and grouse to the unlucky woman who’d accompanied me home the previous evening that the little blond cutie-pie cabal of Justin, Christina, and Britney was evil incarnate. When the trio would be introduced for their next number I’d whine, “They might as well say, ‘P. W. Botha, Imelda Marcos, and Eva Braun will now sing “Love Me Tender.” ’ ”

When I wasn’t decrying the future of pop music, I was at the Slumberland. Liter of beer in hand, I’d wander from table to table drunkenly prophesizing about a reunited Fatherland’s return to world supremacy. If not militarily, then cinematically, and if not that, a resumption of dominance on the soccer pitch at the very least. Unlike the chickenfucker’s predictions, none of my divinations have come to pass, of course, but it’s still early yet.

Klaudia von Robinson was the first of his presages to come true. I met her at a party I DJed at the Torpedo Käfer, a quaint six-table bar, two burly speed-metal musicians short of being trendy, in an East Berlin neighborhood two Thai restaurants short of being gentrified.

My pay was forty deutschmarks and a fold of shitty discotheque blow left over from the seventies. I did the lines in the bathroom, half expecting to see Ziggy Stardust come stumbling out of a toilet stall, rubbing his gums for a freeze, complaining to anyone who’d listen that the coke was more stepped-on than Sacco and Vanzetti’s civil rights.

I don’t remember how long the Wall had been down, but I remember bringing more records to that gig than usual. Other than the time I took a photo at Checkpoint Charlie wearing a fur Russian Red Army hat, earflaps down, to send to my mother, I don’t think I’d yet visited East Berlin with any sense of purpose. I had no idea what to play, and the cab driver waited patiently as I filled his backseat and trunk with milk crate after milk crate of records.

In order to fulfill my part in the resurrection of the black man, Lars determined to keep me alive by using his many connections to get me DJ and jukebox-sommelier gigs. I’d worked most of the clubs in West Berlin and had long since stopped measuring time in days of the week. Tomorrow was the day after South African pop night at Abraxas. Yesterday was Jazz Brunch at the Paris Café, pre-1935 Dixieland played by all-white bands with an allowance for any colored nostalgia about the Confederacy or lazy Negroes and rivers. The day before that it was Celia Cruz and more Celia Cruz at the Boogaloo. What music do the economically and politically subsumed listen to? Do they want punk rebellion or blue-jean conformity? Do they want to forget or remember? Do they want to dance or fight? I got in the taxi thinking compromise: the Pogues, Sham 69, the Buzzcocks, and some Wasted Youth and Neighborhood Watch demos, two Southern California bands I followed from backyard to backyard in the early eighties.

The cabbie didn’t know the eastern half of the city very well, but as he slowed in front of a frosted plate glass window on a dark cobblestone street, he pointed to an electric chalkboard hanging on the front door. The question of what to play was answered in Day-Glo orange.

To-nite

BLACK MUSIC!

That narrowed it down.

“No worries,” I said to myself, “I’m prepared. I’ll spin the black classicists — Marion Anderson, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, André Watts, Kathleen Battle, some Malinké fourteenth-century circumcision chants, maybe a bit of that Negro klezmer all those bored jazz musicians are playing.” I did the cocaine in the water closet and knew immediately something was off. The bar was too crowded. The tables full. Every stool occupied. I checked my watch. I wasn’t late. People weren’t even due to trickle in for at least another hour or so. As I set up my console under the sneak peeks and unblinking stares, it dawned on me that I and not my music was the entertainment, the atmosphere. That night I spun mostly the unsung American and German funkateers: Shuggie Otis, Chocolate Milk, Xhol, Manfred Krug, and Veronika Fischer, throwing in a dash of sing-along grooves here and there for the uninitiated — the Bar-Kays, AWB, Slave, Gil Scott-Heron.

“Excuse me, Herr DJ Darky.”

Klaudia von Robinson wore a strapless designer dress that shimmered and clung to her rolls of baby fat like wet sealskin. I acknowledged her with a papal you-may-approach-the-DJ-booth nod. She had big, brown, mackerel begging eyes and wore her hair pulled back in a scalp-tingling tight chignon. It’d been years since I’d talked to a black woman, even longer since I’d touched one. At least I assumed Frau von Robinson was black. I couldn’t tell, her buttery-soft skin was the color of ten-million-year-old amber and nearly as transparent. Hers was an epic epidermis that seemed to have fossilized around her reluctant smile, wary heart, and the dragonfly tattoo on her shoulder. She wasn’t black, she was gold. The aboriginal gold of a Solomon Islander’s sun-kissed shock of an afro. The gold of my Auntie Marie’s incisor. The gold of the Pythagorean golden ratio. How I longed to say to her, “Baby, in the words of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Kepler, you are as fine as 1.618033989.”

Behind Klaudia stood her younger sister, Fatima, a stunningly beautiful woman whose own African heritage oozed “dream on, motherfucker” from her sloe-eyed Ethiopian features and her full, permanently puckered lips. She had been, as the Germans say, hit harder by the “nigger stick” than her sister. I suspected that they had different fathers. Princess Fatima daintily proffered a peola-brown hand, face down as if she were introducing herself to a prostrating underling. I shook her hand weakly. It was cold and bony. There was something sad and restive about her. She wore her blackness like the heroine in that Chekhov play who, when asked why she always wears black, replies, “I’m in mourning for my life, I’m unhappy.” Fatima reminded me of myself. Omniphobic — scared of everything. Omniphobic. That’s a good one. I’ll have to submit it to Kensington-Merriwether and see what Cutter Pinchbeck has to say about it.

Klaudia, smug and even more stuck-up, never bothered to introduce herself. She just presumptuously pressed a finger to my chest as if my sternum were a doorbell.

“Do you have Sixto Rodriguez?”

“ ‘Sugar Man’?”

“ ‘Sugar Man.’ ”

I nodded. Great song. Probably do wonders for my cocaine headache. One often hears that Germans don’t have any taste. True, though it’s not that they are connoisseurs of schmaltz, it’s that they appreciate everything. When a German shows good taste, I’ve learned not to be surprised. Here subjectivity and objectivity have a way of canceling each other out like common cultural denominators, so out of necessity they’ve invented a new nonqualitative state of perception, an all-appreciative “neutertivity,” if you will. Everything’s good. Nothing is bad. And if it is bad, it doesn’t matter because somebody likes it.

I flipped through my crates and lifted out the Sixto Rodriguez album. Took me three years to find that record. This was before the Internet. When record collecting meant excursions to the suburban rec rooms of cracked-out, disbarred, no-longer-rich-as-hell affirmative-action uncles. Getting to the Ray Barrettos, Artur Rubenstein and the NBC Orchestra Plays Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2s, and Booker T. and the MGs before they ended up at the bottom of an empty kidney-shaped pool covered with silt, rusted lawn chairs, and barbecue grills. I had to send all the way to Auckland for Sixto. Sixty dollars plus eight for shipping and handling.

Eyes hidden behind the darkest pair of shades I’d ever seen, Sixto peered out at me through the glare of the shrink-wrap. Quintessentially seventies, he sits on some wooden stairs in front of a small A-frame ghetto brick house. His polyester bell-bottoms, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, feather-cut movie-Indian silky black hair complete with David Cassidy flip — there’s no doubt in my mind he’s the absentee father of someone about my age.

Sixto’s plaintive wail pulsed in and out of the half-calypso and half-mariachi guitar lick and the cheesy, warbled sci-fi sound effects. Sugar Man won’t you hurry. . A simple 3?4 time bass line and a three-note muted horn announced the chorus. Su-gar-man. . Su-gar-man. . The Torpedo Käfer, not loud to begin with, went totally silent. Oblivious that he’s singing over what sounds like the climactic battle scene in Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, Sixto continued on undaunted, calling out to his drug dealer like a sick dog howling at its last full moon. Su-garman. . Klaudia slow danced with herself, eyes closed, hands tucked into her underarms, softly singing the chorus. Like me under the tanning lamp, she left the door slightly ajar. Providing me a peek, me being the closest embodiment of dopehead stereophonic pathos. A patron raised an eyebrow and a bierflaschein my direction. Su-gar-man. .

Somehow Sixto slipped through the cracks of the album cover stairs he sits on and missed out on soul-man immortality. I’m not one of those DJs who thinks every underappreciated crooner should be deified in the same breath as Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone. But it’s a shame he wasn’t at least a one-hit wonder. No reason this song shouldn’t be on some compilation album, generating enough residuals to at least paint the A-frame, keep the child-support checks from bouncing. Su-gar-man… Su-gar-man… Su-gar-man… Powerful stuff. Not the Mona Lisa, but seminal.

The bartender set a bubbling pilsner on the table. I’d been playing about two hours straight and wanted to enjoy it uninterrupted, so I removed my headphones and put on the longest record I had with me, “Lizard” by King Crimson, twenty-three minutes and twenty-six seconds. Despite the shift from black to blacklike music, no one protested. The foam mustache made my upper lip tingle, and I didn’t wipe it off until I noticed Klaudia was still standing there, circling her index finger over the record as if she were making it spin through telekinesis.

“Why are your turntables. . oberseite unten? ” “

What?”

She turned to the bartender. “Wie sagt man ‘Oberseite unten’ auf English?”

“Upside-down.”

“Genau. Why are your turntables upside-down?”

“I’m left-handed. This way it’s easier for me to move all the things I have to move — the tone arm, these switches, knobs — they’re less in the way.”

“And that’s the main important thing — to have things less in the way or so?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“As a DJ you try to tell a story? Achieve a certain linearity, no?”

“No, I just play what I feel like hearing.”

“No, you don’t. You play what you think we should hear.”

One day I’m going to call those folks at the Berlitz School of Language, tell them I want money back, that there is no such thing as conversational German, only argumentative German. She had a beautiful voice. The timbre of the German female voice is pitch-perfect. Every time I go to kiss one I’m afraid I’m going to catch something. They all sound like Marlene Dietrich with a head cold. The rasp denotes a woman who’s able to take care of herself and, if need be, me too (in a film noir, femme fatale sense). I’ve come to realize that the high-pitched American-female “Oh my God!” squeal is a ploy for attention. A soprano subterfuge for a weakness sometimes feigned, sometimes in-grained, but always annoying.

“But you tell a story with what you play.”

“What story is that?”

“A love story.”

“It’s soul music. It’s like new-wave French cinema, it’s always about love.”

“But tell me why are the turntables Obersiete unten?”

It wasn’t that she wooed me; it was that she was the first person to ever ask me twice.

The left-handed explanation is partially true. To compensate for a right hand so useless that it could barely place a record on the spindle, I’ve experimented with every configuration of gadgetry and form. Both decks on one side, no cross fader, hamster style, reverse hamster, S-shaped and straight tone arms — but even after my right hand became dexterous enough to perform the perfunctory party skills such as stabs, cuts, and scratches, I still felt unsettled behind the tables. Standing behind my decks was like sleeping in somebody else’s bed.

The closest my work gets to ritual is the cleaning of the records. Hands gloved in thin white cotton, I treat the rare acetate 78s and the reissue-vinyl LPs with equal amounts of welcome-tothe-Waldorf-Astoria doorman respect. I follow the instructions on the cleaning fluid as prescribed. Removing static, crackle, and pop-producing dust particles and/or oily contaminants by handling the discs by the edges and labeled surfaces only.

I was cleaning an especially dirty record, something I never played, Earl Klugh, maybe, when it dawned on me why I was so uncomfortable behind the turntables: The records spin in the wrong direction. They turn clockwise when every other naturally occurring vortex, from spiral galaxies to hurricanes to flushing toilets to red-white-and-blue Harlem Globetrotter basketballs, spins counterclockwise. Looking at the Earl Klugh album, the dust particles clinging to the shiny black vinyl like stars to the desert sky, I realized that in my hand I held a dusty twelve-inch microcosm of the Milky Way. The LP is a grooved mini-whirlpool down which the needle spirals to produce sound. In the case of Earl Klugh, saccharine crap, but sound nonetheless. So I turned my turntables upside down. Now my records spin counterclockwise in concert with the spinning universe itself.

My explanation impressed Klaudia. She placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. It seemed to be pressing down on me, forcing me into place as if I were a misshapen puzzle piece. In the new jigsaw Germany, where does this strange one go? Her fingers, nails unpainted, cuticles chewed raw, dug into my shoulders.

King Crimson still had another three quarters of an inch of playing time left. I started to give some thought to the next song. When I play in front of a crowd, I don’t sample. I play the entire recording. Live sampling is like taking a quote out of context.

I wavered between Brick’s “Dazz,” “Children of the Sun” by Mandrill, and readdressing my narcosis subtext with “Riding High” by Faze-O. Klaudia’s hand slid off my shoulder. But she didn’t go away. I settled for “Children of the Sun.” For a plump woman she had a long neck, and I wanted to run the palm of my hand against the grain of blonde fuzz on its nape. I suppose she wanted me to ask her name. But I didn’t want to know it. I wanted to know why the dogs in this city didn’t bark, and that was about it.

I drained my beer, mixed in the chimes from “Children of the Sun” a shade behind the pounding downbeat of King Crimson’s Mellotron, and realized there was something I did want to know.

“Do you know where I can see the sunset?”

“The sun is hard to find here. Does that go on your nerves?”

“Well, if you think of a place. .”

Klaudia stuck out her hand and finally introduced herself. I gave her my card, making a point of handing one to her boyfriend, Horst, a bald-headed, rugger-nosed translator who looked like an IRA terrorist who moonlighted as a mountain crag between car bombings and kneecappings. He introduced himself by slipping a beer in my hand and an arm around Klaudia’s waist. Maybe her sidelong glances were just that, sidelong.

Two days later, she called.

“Hallo? Please, may I speak to DJ Darky?”

She wasn’t frumpy enough for me, too ladylike and, even at a Rubenesque 165 pounds, too skinny. I’ve always been slightly disappointed that German women ran thin. I expected buxom prison guards with flabby arms, fullback thighs, and mean streaks as wide as their broad, flat, Aryan asses.

“I was in a record shop when I found a song I thought you might like, an old GDR propaganda tune from the early sixties, ‘Affenschande (Amerika stopft Affen in die Satelliten).’ Would you like to know the English?”

I speak German but sometimes it’s best never to let them know I spreche the Sprache. It’s safer that way.

“In English the title is something like, ‘Crying Shame (America Stuffs Apes in the Satellites)’ or so.”

“That’s funny.”

“Yes, it is. I also thought of a place where we can see the sunset as well. Shall I give you the record then?”

On the evening of my first Berlin sunset, only the thriftiest East Berliners hadn’t spent the complimentary one-hundred-deutschmark note they received as Bundestag howdy-dos to the Free World. When we met that night at the base of the Fern-sehturm, Klaudia von Robinson still had hers. Fernsehturm is the first German word any Berlin émigré learns. Built to commemorate the launching of the Sputnik satellite, the Fernsehturm is a forty-story television antenna that resembles a Soviet-era ICBM. Since the late fifties every guest worker, asylum seeker, and honorably discharged black American male with a predilection for white women has pointed at the city’s tallest structure and asked, What the fuck is that?

Standing at the base of the TV tower, Klaudia turned the bill over in her hands, contemplating the strange-looking money the way Jack must have contemplated his magic beans. The elevator doors opened. The bean stalk sprouted. We entered wondering what magical adventures lay ahead. Inside the elevator a placard written in German, Russian, and English said the elevator would ascend two hundred meters in thirty seconds.

The Fernsehturm has always frightened me. It looks operational. I’m convinced the tower is the Communist Trojan Horse wheeled up to the Brandenburg Gate as a gift and that, somewhere deep in the backwoods of Saxony, in an underground bunker hundreds of feet beneath the Hungarian oak, firethorn bushes, and black bears, a top-secret cadre of East German scientists still fights the Cold War, memorizing the day’s launch codes over breakfast. Swie-Zulu-Foxtrot-sieben-sieben-Whiskey-fünf. Mach mit, Kamerad. Mach mit.

Klaudia, sensing my nervousness, pointed to the face on her banknote.

“Who’s Clara Schumann?”

“She was a pianist, composer.”

“Where was she born?”

“Leipzig, I think. She was running with Brahms and them, so I’m guessing she was born in 1820 something. Maybe a little earlier.”

“Ha, an Ossie, on the West’s money.”

“In 1820 it wasn’t East Germany, it was eastern Germany. Wait, it wasn’t even Germany, it was Prussia or some shit.”

“Ja, das stimmt.”

“Who was on the one-hundred deutschmark in the GDR?”

“Karl Marx.”

At two hundred meters we stepped into the Telecafé, the revolving restaurant about two-thirds up the tower. Revolving restaurants are the world’s slow-spinning sociocultural centrifuges. The g-force they exert is slight, but enough to separate modernity from kitsch, communism from capitalism, love from lust. The hostess seated us at a cozy linen-covered table across from the wait station. The busboy jammed his hand into the forks, then the knives, then the spoons. The sound of the parting silverware was beautiful. I tried to fight the urge to tape it, thinking that recording random sounds would be rude on a first date. But the sound won. It always does.

Klaudia too respected sound. Quietly, she waited for the waiter to finish rummaging through the cutlery, then I switched the machine off.

“Kannst du wechseln?” she asked, waving her cherished bill in my face.

I handed her change for the hundred. She fanned open the bills, then jammed the mélange of greenish-yellow fives, purply-blue tens, and one blue-green twenty and olive-brown fifty into an empty water glass and slid the ersatz flower arrangement between the dinner candles.

The restaurant kept spinning. A sharply dressed trio of West German carpetbaggers circled the observation deck and stopped within spitting distance of me to point out their next land grab. Not knowing whom of us was nonradioactive chaff and who was pure uranium-235, I waited for the café’s centrifugal force to put some distance between us. I hate people with more money than me, which means I hate mostly everybody. The shortest speculator leaned rudely over our table. He said the green expanse out in the distance was the Pankow district. Speaking of amortization rates and marble staircases, his language was a patois of German banking terms and Beverly Hills real estate jargon. As he appraised the distant luxury villas occupied, according to him, by members of a soon-to-be-defunct politburo, his oversized tie fluttered off his potbelly and swung in front of my face like a Hermès pendulum. Without thinking, I reached out to touch it. I’d never felt anything so soft. It was a softness that made me question if I had made the right choices in life. I pressed the end of the tie against my cheek. The silk danced down the side of my face; its threads teasingly tangoed with my chin stubble, then freed themselves with mocking pops and haughty static crackles. Feeling the sexual tension, fat boy snatched his tie away and tucked it behind his belt buckle. He raised his hand to his forehead and made a motion as if he were turning the dial to a combination safe, the German sign for crazy. Ashamed of myself, I scooted away from the aisle and leaned against the window. The restaurant kept spinning. The carpetbaggers were hurled on their way, muttering about occupancy rates and the inevitability of the European Union. Outside the window Berlin, a panorama of stratified steel and concrete urbanity, drifted past. It was one of those Bash-o, frog-jumping-into-the-pond, timeless-haiku, apple-on-the-head-theory-of-gravity Newtonian moments. But my mind, corporate-tax-return blank, could only spell epiphany. E-p-i-p-h-a-n-y.

The restaurant kept spinning. Klaudia flipped open her pocket-sized German-English dictionary. Her plucked eyebrows were cinched so tightly they formed the McDonald’s arches above the bridge of her nose. I doubted she was looking up epiphany. I don’t think I’d said it aloud. Apparently she had something to say to me and was searching for exactly the right words. I couldn’t imagine what those words were. And I wasn’t about to try.

The restaurant kept spinning. Klaudia slammed shut her little green Wörterbuch. She’d found the words she’d been looking for. Her thin lips opened. Revealing a sexy gap in her teeth the size of a Little League strike zone. The restaurant kept spinning. What could she possibly have to say to me?

“Ferguson, I think I fall a little bit in love with you.”

I looked past her and, touching Klaudia’s cheek through the glass partition like a pathetic prison lifer, was the sinking Berlin sun. Her fingertip traced the edges of my lips. These Germans, they either want to fuck you or kill you. Sometimes both.

The twilight was uniquely uninspiring. The sun looked wobbly and slumped toward the horizon like a carsick child sinking deeper and deeper into the backseat. Its last act of consciousness, this solar hurl of refracted light, the colors of which were so putrid they scattered the birds and the clouds, and left the moon to clean up the mess.

CHAPTER 3

GERMANY CHANGED. After the Wall fell it reminded me of the Reconstruction period of American history, complete with scalawags, carpetbaggers, lynch mobs, and the woefully lynched. The country had every manifestation of the post-1865 Union save Negro senators and decent peanut butter. Turn on the television and there’d be minstrel shows — tuxedoed Schauspieler in blackface acting out Showboat and literally whistling Dixie. There were the requisite whining editorials warning the public that assimilation was a dream, that the inherently lazy and shiftless East Germans would never be productive citizens. There were East Germans passing for West Germans. Hiding their accents and fashion sense behind a faux-Bavarian stoicism and glacier hat, and making sure that whenever someone said the words Helmut Kohl they responded with “that fat bastard.” It wasn’t even unusual to see Confederate flags stickered to car bumpers and flying proudly from car antennas. The stars and bars were a racist’s surrogate for the illegal swastika, though if you confronted somebody about it they’d claim it represented an appreciation of rockabilly music, especially that of Carl Perkins.

My adoptive fatherland was still an introspective country, but it was a new era; instead of gazing at its navel, the country stared at its big, historical, hairy balls. There was a real sense of joy and accomplishment. This time we were going to do things right. I say “we” because for a moment there I was starting to feel German. Though you never hear of a black person “going native” (that shameful fall from grace is reserved for whites), I had gone, if not native, then at least temporarily Teutonic for one special day. If you can find any footage of the inaugural love parade, that’s me in the ten-inch platform sneakers drinking peach schnapps, sporting a blown-out pink afro and only a pair of black leather chaps, showing my glossy black ass and leading my band of wild white aboriginals down the Ku’damm like a sunburned Kurtz in a parallel universe.

Like Conrad’s Belgian Congo, Germany in the early days of reunification was a land where light was dark and dark was darker. In tribute to this confusing state of flux I’d gotten into the habit of opening up my gigs with the Undertones hit “Teenage Kicks.” The band had broken up seemingly at the height of its success, and in the trades I had once read a quote from Feargal Sharkey, the lead singer: “The last couple of years in the Undertones, for all of us, was very difficult. The conversations generally tried to revolve around, Can you turn that up a bit, or Can you turn that down a bit?” That statement summed up exactly how I felt about the world at that time. And my world was the new Germany — same as it ever was. The vast uninhabited no-man’s-land was reforested into a rich-man’s-land concrete tract of apartment complexes, shopping centers, and office buildings. Actors who when the Wall fell had begged and pleaded to play beleaguered Jews in small-scale indie films now longed to play misunderstood Nazis in big-budget features. If you stopped in a Munich train station and asked the mean-looking woman at the information desk how to get to the Dachau Concentration Camp, she’d snarl, “It’s not a camp, it’s a memorial!” The government legislated spelling-reform laws in a covert attempt to institute a uniform thought process. The country that spells together stays together, and it’s no coincidence that as the ß disappeared, social welfare and a few unlucky people of color also vanished.

Initially, Doris and Lars were elated about the fall of the Wall. Their daytime excursions into East Berlin were like traveling to see an extended family of stepsisters and — brothers who had been sired by the same philandering father. They marveled at the bullet-ridden buildings, the ghastly mullet haircuts. Cherished their first sips of the famed Radeberger beer they had heard so much about. But just as the relationship with “Daddy’s other kids” begins to tire over yet another you-look-just-like-Uncle-Steve conversation, Doris and Lars’s affinity for their poor relations to the east began to sour. They began to view the East Germans, or Ossies, as fundamentally different from themselves. Lazy, unmotivated, and ungrateful. Every day they had a new joke about their backward countrymen:

Q: Why do East German policemen travel in threes?

A: One to read, one to write, and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.

The haughtiness they showed toward their Ossie brethren somehow led them to be less shy about expressing their frustrations with the burden of being German.

Once, on a drizzly May morning, Doris, Lars, and I were at an outdoor café sharing an English-language newspaper, when Doris made an outburst that almost caused me to choke on my bratwurst.

“I hate this old Jew!” she shouted, backhanding the World section.

The “old Jew” was David Levin, the paper’s Berlin correspondent. I rather liked and identified with his conflicted personal accounts of the new Germany. Doris felt them too biased and bitter, and apparently too Jewish and too old.

Hearing the word Jew uttered in public used to be a rare occurrence. If a German used it around you it was a sign of affection. It meant that they were comfortable with you — and you too comfortable with them. Sometimes Klaudia would say it when she felt embittered about the second-class treatment Afro-Germans received. If she was feeling particularly aggrieved she’d take a good look around, ensuring that no Jews or Jewish ghosts were within earshot, and hiss, “maybe if I was Jewish. .,” never finishing the thought.

Both Doris and Klaudia felt a certain entitlement to the word. Klaudia’s sense of dispensation came from a “Hey, doesn’t anybody care, they sterilized us and sent us to the camps too?” outlook. Doris’s prerogative stemmed simply from the word being in the dictionary. If it was in the dictionary she was allowed to say it, wasn’t she?

“Old Jew?” I said, peering over my sports section while Lars wisely played deaf.

“The fucking guy never says anything positive about our country.”

Sometimes I’ll be on the train, standing in an out-of-the-way corner looking at the commuters, skin-pierced punks, and college kids all sitting ramrod straight in their seats, eyes front, hands folded in their laps, elbows tucked into their sides, and my prejudice and genocidal fears get the best of me. I think that one day a buzzer will ring and these people will all stand in unison, snap to attention with a heel click and a bellicose “Jawohl!” and order me to take the next train. I know that this buzzer can sound in any country, at any time. And that some will stand in good faith and others will stand in fear, and that a select few will stand taller than the rest by fighting back, harboring, leafleting, dying, and trying. But still.

“It’s the sins of the fathers, not the sins of the grandfathers — why should we Germans suffer forever?” Doris said, though as a devout pantheist she should know better than to think there’s a statute of limitations on genocidal guilt, much less suffering.

What’s funny is that if that buzzer ever does go off, I know I’d run to her. I’d skulk my way to Kruezberg, sprinting from shadow to shadow, until I ended up in her arms. And she’d sell her barely used possessions and find a way to spirit me out of the country. Any other persecutees would be shit out of luck because I wouldn’t share a single can of soured herring with their asses.

Ladling spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee, she summarized the article aloud, thinking that once I heard the unnecessarily mean-spirited screed, I’d see her anger as justified.

“Mr. Levin says that in the short time he’s lived in Germany he’s noticed that Germans rarely speak in the first-person singular. He claims it’s a symptom of groupthink. That talking to one German is like talking to eighty million German Siamese twins all conjoined at the mind. Ask someone what his opinion is, and the first word out of our mouths is we.”

“You do that all the time.”

“No we don’t!”

The way she bandied about Jew made me miss the Wall. Before reunification no one called me Neger to my face or said Jew as a pejorative. Now young boys jump out of parked cars and, in a pitiful imitation of the syndicated American cop shows they watch on television, point finger guns at my head and demand that I “freeze.” On the train a doughy white boy in the car ahead will catch my eye through the window and slide his finger across his throat. I’ll visit a sick friend in the hospital and the man in the bed next to her will call me “Smokey.”

I’m not the only one who misses the Wall; some Germans miss it too. The Wessies miss how special living on an island in the middle of a landmass made them feel. With no mandatory military service, West Berlin was a state-supported counterculture, a Jamestown without the Indians, Woodstock without the rain. East Berlin, on the other hand, was Wounded Knee without the news coverage, Wattstax without the soul music, and yet there are Ossies who miss the Wall. They miss the slow pace, the leisurely work hours, the obsession with free expression and not money, the lack of choice and the commensurate beauty of being able to go into a restaurant for dinner and not have to make nine imperialist decisions about your first course.

“Soup or salad?”

“Salad.”

“Green, spinach, Caesar, or arugula?”

“Spinach.”

“Italian, thousand island, French, blue cheese, or vinaigrette?”

“Blue cheese.”

“Regular or low-fat?”

Needless to say, the black expat population longed for the Wall’s return. Yes, the reunification had, as the black security guard and others like him had hoped, doubled the number of, pardon the misogynist redundancy, “fuckable white women”; however, it also had the unforeseen impact of quadrupling the number of white male assholes. Not that the asshole-per-capita ratio was any greater among East Germans. Reunification and the rise of neo-Nazi activity had given the West German asshole the freedom to show his true colors.

The personification of black American frustration in post-Wall Berlin was an eccentric black man who’d periodically come into the Slumberland pushing a wheelbarrow filled with assorted pieces of brick, stone, coins, and paper money. He never spoke, preferring to let the cardboard sign dangling from his neck do his talking for him. A placard said, HOW CAN WE READ THE WRITING ON THE WALL, IF THERE IS NO WALL. If you didn’t pitch some money or a good-sized rock into the wheelbarrow he’d stick a grimy finger in your drink.

Unlike the brickless brick mason, I had the Schwa to keep me sane in race-unconscious Berlin. Klaudia von Robinson’s brick-house blackness helped too. She and Fatima would show up unannounced at my door. I guess that’s how they did it in the former GDR. No phones. If I wasn’t home, they’d leave a message scrawled on a flier for Korean BBQ and jam it into the keyhole. If I had female company, they’d sit outside in the hallway, wait for the woman to leave, and then in a fit of pretend jealousy bust in demanding to know if I had licked her toes.

“If you kissed her smelly white feet I’m leaving,” Klaudia would declaim, examining my lips and tongue for who knows what. Nail-polish chips and toe-jam residue, I guess.

Despite delusions of a potential ménage a noir, the chicken-fucking song didn’t work on Klaudia and Fatima. The first time I played the tape, the only articles of clothing that came off were their shoes.

“Hey, that’s the man who suggested I go to the Torpedo Käfer that night we met,” Klaudia said, flinging her espadrilles at the man on the TV screen.

“Stasi,” growled Fatima, pointing at him.

“So offensichtlich!” Klaudia said, which is German for “Duh!”

While not devotees to the Schwa in the historical sense that Lars was, the von Robinson sisters, at first familiar with his music, soon became deeply fervent fans.

His music seemed to call out to them, especially Fatima, who more than once showed up at my place with a medical bracelet tied around a bloodstained wrist bandage. Sometimes in the middle of a tune Little Sis would hyperventilate. Gasping for air, her eyes would roll into the back of her pretty head and her chest would heave in time with the song. Once she OD’d on his music, passing out and falling to the floor unconscious with the cultic smile of a Beatlemania-stricken coed plastered on her face. It took a loud, cold, bracing splash of Joy Division to bring her back, and the first thing she said upon regaining consciousness was, “When I die I want to be listening to Charles Stone.” I didn’t see the von Robinsons for a while after that. Then one Sunday night Klaudia showed up at my door alone.

Most women think they’re strong. They like to wrestle men down to the floor and put them in what they think is some inescapable choke hold. Instead of tossing these delusional wannabe grapplers effortlessly out the window, we males humor them. Feign submission. Praise their yoga-toned physiques. “Whoa, look at those muscles! No, really, I couldn’t breathe.”

When I opened the door that fateful Sunday night Klaudia stormed inside, a kiai blur of martial arts expertise unseen since the likes of Lady Kung Fu. Little Miss Fists of Fury kicked off her shoes and judo flipped me over her shoulder, slamming me hard onto the living room floor. Before I could ask what I had done wrong, I was knee dropped in the groin, elbow struck in the larynx, and nearly strangled to death with my own shirt collar, all in rapid succession.

With a belch redolent of fine tequila, she clambered off my contorted heap of flesh and bone and announced she’d broken up with her boyfriend and that Fatima was in the hospital. Without asking permission, she stuck the chicken-fucking song into the VCR and poured herself a drink that she obviously didn’t need.

I parted the curtain of stringy clumps of dirty blonde hair that covered her flushed red face.

“Was ist los?”

She told me Fatima was in the hospital. She’d swallowed a bunch of pills and chased them down with a bottle of tequila.

I pressed the play button and the chicken-fucking song lifted her out of my arms. She began to dance. Arms cocked at oblique angles, she moved as if the song had been written for her. Her lithe body the spindle, the record playing around her.

Slowly, almost contritely, she corkscrewed herself into and out of the ground. There wasn’t much room, but she managed to express herself. The black soles of her bare feet slapped and pawed softly on the hardwood floor. As she danced, she told me the story of the von Robinson sisters.

Growing up black in all-white East Germany — a totalitarian state where there was free education, no unemployment, and no discrimination — the concept of race didn’t officially exist. Being proletarian and, as Klaudia put it, “inofficially black” was hard. At least she had her judo and her studies. She was good on both the mat and in the classroom. She had heroes like East German judo champion Astrid Timmermann and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. She’d contemplated a run at the Olympic games until her late mother made a big show of taking away her vitamin supplements and mentioning that Astrid Timmermann had a clitoris the size of an earthworm. She considered majoring in physics and applying for the Soviet space program until her quantum mechanics teacher told her that the Russians had already sent a monkey into space.

Fatima didn’t have hobbies or interests. All she had were pronounced bouts of depression and her sister’s broad shoulders to lean on.

It was hard being black in red East Germany. But the von Robinson sisters were determined to find out if they were indeed black. And if so, how black were they, and did it matter? They set upon developing a self-taught black curriculum. Theirs was an extremely independent course of study that consisted of lots of Pushkin and the Voice of America radio show.

“I’ve come to understand love wasn’t made for me. .” was a favorite quote from the black Russian poet, one that carried them through many a lonely and dateless weekend night. And when their tired eyes could no longer focus on the books, Willis Conover’s Voice of America radio program tucked them into bed. Conover’s voice was indeed America. “This is the music of freedom,” he’d say, enouncing each letter with propaganda perfection. At first, all the then non-English-speaking sisters understood was “Duke Ellington.” They could, however, hear the respect Conover had for the music and the musicians. The way he said, “This week the immortal Zoot Sims is in Seoul, South Korea, at the Matchstick Club. Oscar Peterson, Caracas, at the Mephisto.” They loved the music, but his interviews with the musicians were best. Unhurried. Measured. They could hear colors in the language, the relaxed whiteness in Conover’s shirt, his teeth and skin, the black cautiousness in his subjects’ voices and minds. Other than the Muhammad Ali rants on the news, and Pushkin’s poetic voice in the poems of which they’d grown so fond, these interviews were the only times they’d ever heard a black man speak. They reminded them of the father neither of them had ever seen. They sounded so close. Maybe Conover was a Soviet-bloc jazz fiend disguising himself as an American disc jockey, thinking it would never occur to the authorities to look for him in a rooftop studio in Prague or Belgrade. One night, Conover introduced a record with such anticipation in his voice that Klaudia looked up from Eugene Onegin. “Here’s a song you have not heard before,” Conover said, his voice cracking. His voice never cracked. “Charles Stone with ‘Darn That Dharma.’ ” When the song came on Fatima literally shook with happiness. She had found her blackness. After that it no longer mattered that her mother never told them who or what their father was beyond being “asshole-colored.” White, black, Arab, Mexican, asshole, it didn’t matter. They’d been reborn black. Pushkin black. Black belt black. First-woman-in-space black. German black. That was their story.

It was my mother’s feet that drove me to white women. Every other Sunday she’d drop those crusty appendages in my lap. Her toes hammered and gnarled at the knuckles with corns harder and darker than tree knots. Her nails were ridged like party-dip potato chips, and the ones that weren’t black were spectrograph bands of fungus brown. On Sundays I was forbidden to leave the house until I’d clipped her nails, filed down every bunion, barnacle, and callus, scraped the lint and gummy grit from her cuticles and crevices, chiseled the dead skin from her cracked and dried-out heels. Afterward my hands would smell like wet leather and my shirt would be caked with filings, rolls of toe jam, nickel-sized flakes of dead skin, and baby powder.

Klaudia’s dancing feet could pass for white. Her toes plump and unhammered and corn-free, they smelled like fresh-cut grass. When she was in the mood she’d hoist her pants above the knee, place a cool sole on my face, and with my cheekbone framed in the arch, massage my temples with her big toe.

“I can tell you’re in tension,” she’d say.

I’d deny being “in tension” and pop that toe into my mouth. Marshmallow soft and tasty as children’s vitamins, I’d suck on it, tracing every loop and whorl. Dip the tip of my tongue in ink and I could sketch her feet from memory.

As a result of her judo training, Klaudia experienced the world with her feet. When they weren’t touching the ground she was an uprooted tree, listless and silent as the romantic poet’s fallen bough.

Ifa woman has an orgasm and there isn’t

anyone to hear it, does it make a sound?

Klaudia believes that all vibrant energy, from the human heartbeat to music, emanates from the earth’s core. Though she’s never been in an earthquake, she theorizes my deep sense of foreboding comes from always waiting for the big one to hit. There’s some sense to that. Anyone who’s grown up in the ring of fire never crosses a high suspension bridge or reaches the apex on the Ferris wheel without thinking, “What if an earthquake hits right now?” Supposedly I’ve got it all wrong. An earthquake isn’t a catastrophe, but is simply stress leaving the planet. A 5.5 on the Richter scale that spills the dishes from the cupboards and topples thatch huts in Micronesia is just the earth cracking its knuckles after a long day. The 7.7 tremor that derails Japanese bullet trains and levels the business district of a major city? That’s the earth arching its back and popping its vertebrae.

Making love to Klaudia was like having sex with a snooker player: No matter how contorted the position, she had to have at least one foot on the ground. Her orgasms were loud, rumbling moans, quivering pelvic seismic temblors often in the same growling key as Coleman Hawkins’s tenor. Sometimes I’d ask where a certain passionate grunt came from and she’d say, “That was an earthquake epicentered in the seas off the coast of Sumatra,” then she’d close her eyes and announce, “Now I take a short sleep.”

I enjoyed watching her sleep, her face resting on her powerful arms, her feet smooth, almost white, and as sculpted as a Parthenon Athena’s hanging off the futon and resting gently on the floor. But I liked listening to her sleep even more. She snored loud and sharp as if some miniature salsero were stuck inside her throat, scraping her larynx like a guiro. If I pressed my ear to her heaving chest I could hear the beat of her arrhythmic heart. A rapid baboompbaboomp baboompba that sounded exactly like the conga riff that starts “Manteca.” While the snoring and the heartbeat were most-satisfying aural pleasures, listening to her nighttime farts was damn near orchestral. Hers were a cool-jazz modal flatulence that featured all the measured vibrato and impeccable intonation of a Ray Draper tuba solo. Sometimes after a hearty meal of cabbage stew and an especially passionate session of lovemaking, Klaudia’s irritable bowels would rumble and the nocturnal flatus welled up inside her intestines would be jettisoned with a force loud enough to wake her up. And when that happened, she’d sit up, inhale deeply like a proud farmer at daybreak, and exclaim, “Ah, a fresh wind is blowing.”

CHAPTER 4

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about Europe is that you can cruise the streets pedaling a turquoise women’s three-speed with a purple plastic basket attached to the handlebars and not feel effeminate. Secure in my sexuality and prospects of finding Charles Stone, I biked along the route of the old Wall.

About a month before my little bike trek, I was at the Slum-berland doing routine maintenance on the jukebox. To fill the void I pumped some of my own music through the in-house speakers. As I replaced the amplifier capacitors and installed a new stylus, a regular or two would stop by to compliment my taste. They liked the music, but their inability to categorize it made them nervous. They needed music that told them in no uncertain terms how to feel, how to behave. My music never ordered the listener to “Dance! Think! Wash the Dishes!” It simply said, “Be! or Don’t Be, I Couldn’t Care Less!” and the Slumberland couldn’t handle that kind of freedom.

“Hey, Dark.”

“Yeah.”

“Doris says this is your music.”

“It is.”

“It’s really fucking good, man. I mean that.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s too good, really. Like a plum so sweet you can’t eat it because it makes your heart beat too quick and you end up throwing it away.”

“Okay.”

“So when’s the jukebox gonna be fixed?”

“In a few minutes.”

“Cool.”

“Later.”

“Late.”

I had my head buried in the machine’s belly and was delicately soldering in a few replacement chips when I heard the squishing of someone walking across the sandy floor. That same someone kicked the sole of my foot.

“What? I’m busy.”

No response.

I never bothered to look to see who it was. At first I figured it was Doris wanting to play a quick game of backgammon, or an impatient and feverish regular in bad need of a Teena Marie fix. But the grainy sloshing was too deep, too leaden. I reran the squishy footfalls in my head. Matching them up against the hundreds of different Slumberland steps I’d had filed away in my head. It hit me. They belonged to the crazy-looking black guy who asked for donations to rebuild the Wall.

Ten seconds later I heard the voice on my answering machine coming from the bar: “For the nigger, it niggereth every day.”

The Schwa.

Finally.

As long as I’d been looking for him, there he was, around a corner, no more than twenty feet away from me, and I couldn’t chase him down or shout him out. Not with the jukebox doors open wide, exposing its antiquated circuitry to the piles of sand I’d kick up scrambling to greet him. Not with the white-hot tip of the soldering iron clenched between my teeth, precariously close to melting an irreplaceable quartz crystal.

I heard him lift his squeaky wheelbarrow and head out the door. After I finished my work I started up the jukebox and asked Doris what happened.

She didn’t answer right away. She was holding me hostage. Waiting for me to pay the ransom. If I wanted her to set Charles Stone free I’d have to confess my undying love for her. Tell her that our breaking up was the dumbest separation since Frankie killed Johnny.

The jukebox buzzed and flickered to life. Van Morrison began to serenade the barflies. Two lovers standing beneath the overgrown banana tree kissed. I knew when the Irishman hit the chorus she’d cave. Crazy Love. Doris sang softly to herself and I pounced.

“What happened?”

“I give him some money. He bows and says, ‘For the nigger it niggereth every day.’ And that’s it. He didn’t say anything else.”

“But it was Berlin Wall Guy?”

“Yes.”

“But there was a pause between him talking to you and him leaving.”

“He was listening to your music. Smiling.”

I got light-headed. Smoking-California-homegrown-and-drinking-Hennessy-at-the-beach-my-God-look-at-that-fucking-sunset-how-come-nobody-ever-talks-about-Zen-anymore light-headed.

Not wanting to alarm me, she ran her thumbnail down the length of my sideburns and softly said, “His wheelbarrow was filled with brand-new bricks. I think Mister Stone readies to build his wall.”

I cupped Doris’s pretty face in my hands.

“Yes?” she asked expectantly.

“Can I borrow your bike?”

They say the Berlin Wall no longer exists on the street but in the mind. When it was extant, the Wall didn’t meander through the city, it bogarted. Its inexorable ghost is just as belligerent. It cuts uninvited through vacant lots and pricey new condominiums, rattling its hammer and sickle, spooking the tourists and locals who travel along this invisible barrier.

With one eye out for the chickenfucker, who I knew was somewhere watching me, I cycled through the Berlin spring looking for the Schwa. I popped wheelies as I ran red lights, fish-tailed into clouds of mosquitoes breeding over pools of stagnant water, bunny hopped over long-haired subway buskers who didn’t need the money, laid down senseless skid marks in historic plazas, rode no-hands down wide thoroughfares whose street names read like places on a Communist board game called Class Struggle: Paul-Robeson-strasse, Ho-Chi-Minh-strasse, Paris-Commune-Brücke. You’ve been accused of Left Opportunism. Go back three spaces.

In the middle of Leninplatz I cruised past a bearded black man stacking bits of broken brick and ill-fitting rocks into a makeshift barricade. I joined the other onlookers and watched him extend the wall into the street.

I have a tendency to remember the names but forget the faces, and I wished that I’d been born with a photographic memory and not a phonographic one. Because here was a man who, during the interminable time I’d been looking for him, I had heard but not seen. He’d been in the Slumberland, asked me for money on numerous occasions, and this was the first time I’d bothered to truly look at him.

Charles Stone looked nothing like I’d imagined, yet how could I have missed him? A garish, evergreen three-piece suit set off his complexion nicely. The redbone, wrinkled skin, more photosphere than epidermis, still had a faint, rusty, Creole glow and reminded me of the setting sun I missed so much. His hair burst from his skull like an erupting solar flare. I don’t know if he or the wind was responsible for combing it, but the gigantic afro swept from back to front, a graying red-tide tidal wave that crested over his forehead as if it were about to crash onto his freckled brow. Emaciated yet exceedingly energetic for his age, he moved in jangled fits and starts like a string puppet.

Though his face and physique were new to me, I already knew exactly what he sounded like. He breathed through a deviated septum in labored, wheezy, whistles. Sometimes when he closed his large, snarled hands, his knuckles popped loud and clear like oily kernels tossed into the frying pan. He gnashed his teeth. His wristwatch ticked softly, like a hushed cricket unsure of the temperature. He always carried large amounts of change that, with each step he took, jingled as if he had sleigh bells in his pocket. When he scratched the back of his dry, bristly head, it sounded like a little boy gathering kindling in the forest.

Heroes. Idols. They’re never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there’s something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.

Blaze always said that one of my best qualities was that I’m never impressed by anyone. He was afraid that if I did locate the Schwa I wouldn’t be fazed, and my lack of acolyte appeal would make him not want to play with me.

“Man, you have to flatter motherfuckers like Charles Stone.”

For a second I thought about tearing across the street and calling the Beard Scratchers one by one. Pretending that I was more excited than I was.

“Dude, you’ll never guess who I’m looking at right now. . the Schwa, man. . I shit you not.”

But that would’ve been like Christopher Columbus returning to Queen Isabella with nothing to show for his voyage save a drippy case of syphilis. No, the Beard Scratchers would be notified when the mission for the Perfect Beat was complete.

The Schwa was serious about his work. After examining his pile of stones, he’d carefully select the rock he felt would best fit into the open crevice. If a block had to be shaved or cut down, he filed it by scraping it over the blacktop or dashing it against the curb. For mortar he used a boundless optimism that was constantly being tested by the rumbling vibrations of the passing trucks.

A motorcycle cop with thin cold eyes stepped off a brand-new BMW K100, and though he knew full well what the Schwa was up to, he asked the gathering what was going on.

“He’s rebuilding the Berlin Wall,” someone announced.

“Looks more like the Berlin Partition,” the officer said, and though it wasn’t very funny, the crowd, me included, laughed.

The cop snapped his fingers and Stone handed over a tattered but important-looking piece of paper, which the officer glanced at and quickly handed back. The cop waved a leather-gloved finger at a huge billboard that hung overhead. We all peered up at the advert for West brand cigarettes. Two crude-oil-black “homeboys,” dressed in black from sneaker to wool cap, stood against a white background, gangster posing and brandishing smokeless cigarettes over the caption TEST IT.

“Do you remember the watchtower that once stood there?” Heads nodded. The Schwa added a stone, oblivious to the socialist nostalgia. The officer stuffed his cap under his armpit and said something in Russian, which broke everybody up.

Then a haphazardly built section of the wall avalanched onto the street, blocking traffic. A man on the east side of the wall playfully leapt through the opening to freedom. A woman closed one eye and squeezed off a couple of finger shots at his back. A few others grabbed the fallen bricks and set to repairing the breach.

Slowly walking over to his bike, the cop removed two small orange safety cones from the saddlebags and set them down in front of the wall. A sharp whistle blast and a stern look sent the halted traffic around the wall in an orderly fashion.

“Mr. Stone?”

The Schwa clucked his tongue and pouted like a kid who’d been found in a decadelong game of hide-and-seek. He tapped a brick into place with the butt end of his trowel, a trowel that had never seen an ounce of cement and gleamed in the sun. I didn’t waver. Fuck the salutations. The ass kissing. I told him a joke.

“What do you call a jazz musician without a white girlfriend?”

I paused for effect, and he, pissed that I’d managed to pique the curiosity of a man who’d thought he’d heard and seen it all, idled for the briefest of moments, readjusting a brick that didn’t need readjusting, and asked, “So what do you call a jazz musician without a white woman?”

“Homeless.”

CHAPTER 5

I DIDN’T KNOW IT THEN, but the afternoon Charles Stone spoke to Doris, he’d broken a vow of silence that was more than twenty years old. It was a sacred pact he’d taken with his larynx and his instrument the day trumpeter Lee Morgan died, shot to death by his fed-up woman, in some long-forgotten New York jazz café. When he entered the Slumberland and heard something in my music that invoked Lee Morgan’s hard-bop verve, it gave him hope. Though after I’d gotten to know him it was a vow that I often wished he’d kept.

I wanted to subtly reintroduce the Schwa to the music industry and felt that a “listening session” for the latest album of the apple-bottomed pop star La Crème (italics music company’s) would be the perfect time.

Lars and a few other journalists (referred to by the company as “music partners”), the sales staff, and a few marketing executives sat in the record company’s grandest conference room. Doris was there to cater the drinks. I was there to DJ. La Crème’s father entered the room to boisterous applause trying its best to sound spontaneous and genuine. A tall, black American, he looked like the best man at a motorcycle gang leader’s wedding.

He wore a black leather suit that had Indian frills running down the sleeves and pant seams. His presentation was war room slick. There were charts and projections, battle plans and objectives. On command I played four songs from the album and during each one he’d say, “Crank it up, this is the jam.” Between “jams” he explained the concept of the album. There was the crossover club song, the R&B ballad — but La Crème hadn’t forgotten “her core audience,” he insisted, and to prove it he played one last cut, “Soldier,” the album’s title track. Supposedly, “Soldier” had what he referred to as a “street vibe.” When the song ended he pressed his fists into the shiny mahogany conference table and exhorted his minions. “We need, no, we demand a number-one album, and I expect all of us in this room to do our jobs: salespeople, media partners, everybody!” He cut his bloodshot eyes at us and asked, “Are you all soldiers for black music? Warriors for neo-soul?” After the meeting ended he grabbed Lars by the elbow.

“Do you know, my man, how many number-one singles La Crème has had to date?”

Lars nodded and said, “Sixteen.”

Impressed, Daddy La Crème smiled, ran his tongue over a twenty-four-karat-gold incisor, and squeezed Lars’s elbow even harder.

“But do you know what they all have in common?”

Lars shook his head.

“The hook is repeated exactly forty times in every song.”

He released my pale friend gently, like a considerate fisherman throwing his catch back into the water. While everybody mingled over drinks and hors d’oeuvres, half listening to the rest of the album, I announced the Schwa’s existence to the world by interrupting a tune called “Shaking My Light-Skinneded Ass Like a Dark-Skinneded Bitch” with the chicken-fucking song.

An angry Daddy La Crème rushed the turntables, demanding that I put his daughter’s “shit” back on. He reached maddeningly for the record and I flung it past his outstretched hands to Lars, who taunted him monkey-in-the-middle style before smashing it to pieces on the punch bowl. The husky European correspondent for Rolling Stone tackled the apoplectic stage father and sat on his chest. The others took seats at the boardroom table or stared out the window, quietly noshing on flammeküche and fighting back tears. Doris hugged me from behind, kissed my neck, and in French, a language she thought I didn’t understand, asked me to marry her.

The tune did what it do, and when it ended two salespeople immediately handed in their resignations and left to pursue their dreams. One by one the music critics filed past the prostrated Daddy La Crème, and as he reached out to clutch at their ankles they freed themselves with swift kicks to his rib cage and spittle-punctuated admonishments.

“How dare you pimp your own daughter?”

“Neo-soul? Don’t you mean sans-soul music?”

“For the past five years you people, and I mean ‘you people,’ have ruined my life. Turned me into a musically unrequited necrophiliac who’s been making love to a dead art form that won’t love me back.”

When the man from Rolling Stone released Daddy La Crème there was an unexpected look of contriteness on the impresario’s face. He shook out his crushed-velvet cowboy hat and looked at me with an “Et tu, brotherman?” expression. I opened the door for him. “Frankly, dude, I think even her ass is overrated.”

Rolling Stone made me a hefty offer for the rights to an exclusive puff piece on this “new resurgent jazz” and I pointed toward Lars, who lit a cigarette and simply said, “I want Hunter S. Thompson money and the name of his drug connection.”

“Done.”

The Schwa proved to be a truculent subject. His musings were snotty, vainglorious, and in a new grammatical person called “first-person Jesus.” Every answer started with the phrase, “Jesus told me to tell you…,” and if Jesus was indeed using the Schwa as a medium, believe me, Jesus has some growing up to do.

The interview’s greatest contribution was its revelation of Charles Stone’s whereabouts those past twenty-some-odd years. Turns out that in the late fifties, the Schwa was a member of Buddy Rich’s big band. Buddy Rich billed himself as “the world’s greatest drummer,” and whether that appellation was true or not, there can be no doubt that he was the world’s greatest insulter. On those long transcontinental bus rides Stone, who at the time bore all the typical attributes of the fifties jazzman — talent, smarts, disillusionment, a lightweight drug habit, and a beard — bore the brunt of the drummer’s abuse.

Those tour-bus tantrums were more than manic outbursts. They were poems. Found American vitriol from a man who had nothing against talented, bright, heroin-using black musicians, but hated beards. Maybe you’ve got connections and you’ve heard Buddy Rich’s tirade. It circulates in major league dressing rooms and rock-band tour buses. If you’ve heard those tapes and wondered, Who’s Buddy Rich yelling at like that? — he’s yelling at the Schwa.

“Two fucking weeks to make up your mind, do you want a beard or do you want a job? This is not the goddamn House of David fucking baseball team. This is the Buddy Rich band, young people with faces. No more fucking beards, that’s OUT! If you decide to do it, you’re through, RIGHT NOW! This is the last time I’m going to make this announcement, no more fucking beards. I don’t want to see it. This is the way I want my band to look, if you don’t like it, get OUT! You got two weeks to make up your mind. This is no idle request, I’m telling you how my band is gonna look. You’re not telling me how you’re gonna look, I’m telling YOU. You got two weeks to make up your fucking mind, if you have a mind.”

Two weeks later a bearded Schwa, having been kicked off the tour, found himself standing on an Alpine mountainside outside Salzburg. Still dressed in his Buddy Rich Big Band tuxedo, a tailcoated burgundy-and-camel ensemble complete with top hat and white gloves. Against the glacial backdrop he looked like a lost minstrel who’d taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The monkey suit was a perfect metaphor for jazz: old-fashioned, worn-out, pressed and starched to within an inch of its life. Six days a week. Same tux. Same arrangements. Same ranting of an ebullient madman. He stripped off his clothes and walked back into town butt naked, playing “Lover Man” with both his dick and his music swinging in the wind.

After that he gigged his way through Europe, playing the new music for whoever’d listen. When he got to Eastern Europe, he was surprised to find an especially receptive audience. What he loved most was that the kids danced to a music even his staunchest admirers deemed eminently listenable but irrevocably undanceable. In Prague, Art Farmer and Ray Brown sat in and the kids shimmied around their white linen-covered dinner tables for three hours straight. And the more out he played, the louder the applause, the harder they got down.

In time his name began to ring out. In Krakow he was a proverbial Ornette Coleman. Antwerp welcomed him as Cecil Taylor incarnate despite the nearsighted pianist being very much alive and well. “The personification of cultural independence” was how he was introduced to Tito before playing at the dictator’s fourth presidential inauguration. In East Berlin, however, he was nobody’s free-jazz allegory or the embodiment of a musician too famous to play for socialist factory workers and peat farmers. He was just Charles Stone. Black genius. Billed around town as “Der sensationelle amerikanische Original-Mulatte.” Yet that adoration wasn’t what kept him in Berlin; it was the conversation. How he enjoyed running into Klaus, the fungi-obsessed horticulturalist who, despite the lack of any demand, had devoted his life to cultivating the first shiitake mushrooms grown outside the Far East. The complicated growing process involved a series of sonorous and captivating gerunds. There was the plunging, the spawning, the pinning, the shading, the incubating, and, of course, what should’ve been the fruiting, but Klaus had trouble growing the prized mushrooms, too many spoiling nouns: the contamination, the moisture, the decay, the strain, the mycelium, the money, the time, the missus, the kids, and the fucking Japanese.

On Tuesdays he’d meet his small circle of friends at the Prater biergarten. Gabi the voice actor, Ernst the math teacher, and Felix the architect were eager to have an American musician join their English Stammtisch, or English-language discussion group. Theirs was an algorithmic roundtable that, with the addition of the Schwa’s urbane skepticism and superbad speech pattern, took the Kaffeeklatsch to such conversational heights they eventually found general discussion too easy and had to make a pact to limit their discussion to only subjects that started with the letter p. And still there was no shortage of insights and snide witticisms about panthers, plutonium, Palestine, phrenology, the piccolo, and the pimento. Folks, even those who couldn’t understand English, often stopped by the Prater just to listen to them talk, sometimes shouting out topics as if shouting out sketch ideas to an improvisational comedy troupe: “Paleontology! Plankton! Puppies! Pupae! Paraguay! Placentas!”

On a bright August day in 1962, Klaus shyly offered his musician friend an oily wedge of steamed shiitake sautéed in garlic butter. Other than the gizzards his grandmother used to make on Easter Sunday, the mushrooms were the only delicacy the Schwa had ever tasted. The Schwa looked into his friend’s eyes, expecting to see satisfaction, and found rheumy, hazel-colored apprehension blinking uncontrollably back at him.

“The end is near, my friend.”

“What?”

“The end is nigh.”

He could see that Klaus was serious, so he grabbed one more piece of the tasty mushroom cap before asking, “How near is nigh?”

“Tomorrow,” he said.

A confused Schwa chalked up his friend’s apocalyptic mind-set to the rigors of an overwrought empirical methodology, and watched him walk west, disappearing into the afternoon glare. The next morning when he decided to go to the city’s American zone to pick up some of the bananas that, along with nylon stockings and political satire, were becoming increasingly harder and harder to find in the east, he found that he couldn’t leave. The Berlin Wall had been erected. The border guards who once begged him to tell stories about Bud Powell and Chick Webb now pointed guns at his chest.

Tuesday. In a panic he ran to the Prater thinking about the p’s he’d never see again: Pittsburgh, Patti Page, Satchel Paige’s palm ball, Bob Petit’s pump fake, PayDay candy bars, pizza, the Pacific, Pontiac cars. Gabi sat alone at the table. She had garlic-buttered shiitake on her breath.

Perpetuity, she said, sliding a pen and exclusive lifetime recording contract with the German Democratic Republic toward him. The Schwa quickly signed and left it on the table. Gabi thanked him and went to her grave never mentioning that other p-word, pregnancy. Stone liked to think that he had sacrificed his freedom for hers, but in truth he signed because the Wall inspired him like the Skinner box inspires the rat. He spent the next thirty years as an operant-conditioned jazz musician circumnavigating the boundaries of his box, pressing psychic levers and retrieving his retrieving rewards.

Sometimes he explored the sections of the walled border that divided East and West Germany, a barrier fifteen feet high and nearly nine hundred miles long that ran from the northwest tip of Czechoslovakia to the Baltic Sea. The Wessies euphemistically referred to it as the Innerdeutsche Grenze, or Inner German border. The paranoid Ossies didn’t have time for such Cold War genteelism. The Antifaschistischer Schutzwall was what it was, the Anti-Fascist Protective Wall, a rampart against bullshit. It felt good to be trapped.

Legend has it that Sonny Rollins honed his chops on the Brooklyn Bridge; well, Charles Stone found his voice while seated at the base of a moss-covered tree stump, moved by the absurdity of a metal wall bisecting scenic Lake Schaal.

It never dawned on me that Charles Stone was the only artist on Kill the Czar Records, a small self-distributing label supposedly based out of that bastion of ultraleftism, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Maybe the East Germans saw the Schwa as a jazz earwig who’d crawl down the American ear canal and lay eggs of indoctrination in our brains, turning us into mindless Manchurian Candidates. I’m told Charles Manson, Squeaky Fromme, Big Bird, Huey Newton, and Henry Kissinger were all big fans.

Maybe the East Germans viewed him as a sort of socialist van Gogh, an undiscovered iconoclast whose transformative genius, though destined to be unappreciated in his lifetime, would one day come to define their great society. As Rome had been to the Renaissance, Paris to the Age of Enlightenment, Greenwich Village to postmodernism, so would East Berlin be to the glorious Age of Unpopular Antipop Populism.

To everyone’s (except the Schwa’s) disappointment, Lars’s interview didn’t result in the expected tsunami of adulation. There was some talk of selling the movie rights to his life to Oprah Winfrey.* But in the end, the only places where the article caused a serious stir were among the jazz cognoscenti and in the avant-garde and arrière-garde^† communities.

In order to meet the needs of his faithful, we installed the Schwa in a corner booth at the Slumberland. And for two months every free-jazz musician, alternative rapper, filmmaker who’d never made a film, and disgruntled downtown poet whose epigraphs were better than his poems and whose poems were better than nothing made the hajj to the Slumberland to pay tribute. The list of pilgrims was like a who’s who of unknowns who among the counterculture homeless are household names: Steve Lacy, Billy Bang, Bern Nix, Milford Graves, Anthony Braxton, William Parker, Cecil Taylor, David S. Ware, Peter Brötzmann, Jameel Moondoc, Butch Morris, Henry Threadgill, and many others.

Those men of my father’s generation, especially the black men, were a different breed. Fiercely independent, brilliant, and slightly touched, they were the type who’d represent themselves in court — and win. Children of the civil rights movement, they were the first generation of African-Americans with the freedom to fail without having to suffer serious consequences. They’re the Negronauts the black race sent off into the unexplored vastness of manumission.

Race, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the mother ship Free Enterprise. Its five-hundred-year mission: to explore strange, new, previously segregated worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no niggers had gone before.

And like the first men to walk on the moon, to have gone where no man has gone before, these men, if they come back at all, come back changed. They come back humbled. Discouraged that they’d seen all there was to see and that it didn’t amount to much. Yet finding out the Schwa was still alive had restored their optimism, and many of them, after they’d left the bar, would go on to do some of their best work. The Schwa had touched all these men just as he’d touched me and Philip Glass.

Lars tells a story. In 1971, Philip Glass goes to see the Schwa in Antwerp, and during the hour-and-forty-five-minute set the band plays a total of four notes, one chord change, an accidental cough, and a chorus of room-tone nothingness interrupted only by the drummer accidentally dropping his sticks and the bassist tapping his toe twice out of habit. Afterward Glass, then in his mid-thirties, still in search of his minimalist musical voice, and thinking of giving up the keyboards for sheep farming, approaches the Schwa backstage to offer his heartfelt congratulations. To his surprise, Stone is sulking in the corner, quietly cursing himself and his instrument. Glass asks the Schwa why he’s so disappointed after such a wonderful, groundbreaking performance. A little too rock ‘n’ roll, the Schwa says, a little too rock ‘n’ roll. Glass nods and complains how his synthetic nothingness felt forced, scripted. That his music was neither improvised nor natural but was what was on his mind and not what was in his mind. Glass and Stone go out to the piano, the bouncer is trying to empty the club of stragglers, but Belgians are as stout as their beers and they aren’t leaving. Glass sits down to play, and thirty-two bars of that pounding serialism crap does the bouncer’s job for him. The place empties. Glass looks sickly. Van-Gogh-self-portrait-with-the-bandaged-ear sickly. Billie Holiday sickly.

Kurt Cobain “It’s better to burn out than fade away” sickly. The Schwa takes out pen and paper and writes out a prescription. “Beckett.” That’s all the paper says. “Beckett.” First thing the next morning, Glass runs out to Standaard Boekhandel on Huidevettersstraat off the Meir. When he enters, the ring of the bell above the door is nothing; he barely hears it. When he exits, Godot, The Collected Poems in English, Rough for Theater, Krapp’s Last Tape in hand, the ring of the bell above the door is nothing happening twice, and Philip Glass understands minimalism.

Without fail at the end of the night the visiting musicians would take out their instruments and tell the Schwa they’d be honored if he would play with them. I always hoped he’d say yes. If he said yes to Charles Gayle or Peter Kowald, then maybe, if I begged him long enough and promised him the world, he’d say yes to me and agree to bless my beat. But he’d always turn them down.

He turned everyone down except Fatima. Fatima and Charles had some special connection. They seemed to lighten one another’s moods, and the Schwa doted on her as much as a broke nonplaying musician could.

Klaudia and Fatima were the Rosa Parkses of Slumberland integration. To my knowledge, before them no black female had ever set foot in the place. Whenever they came through, the regulars treated them like black-hatted gunfighters blown into town by an ill wind. Petrified, the locals would duly deputize a couple of brave white women to find out what the dark strangers wanted. At the first sign of trouble I always backed off, imagining the conversations from the safety of the far side of the room.

“In this here saloon we don’t cotton to strangers looking for trouble.”

“We ain’t looking for trouble, but we ain’t runnin’ from it neither.”

Then the stare down until the Schwa brokered an uneasy truce by buying a round of drinks with my money. After one narrowly averted bar brawl, Fatima said to the Schwa, “How about a song?”

Unable to refuse her, he achingly kicked his way across the sandy floor to the center of the bar and scanned the room with those baggy auburn eyes. It took me a second to realize that he was looking for an instrument to play. Gauging the chair backs, swizzle sticks, and beer bottles for their kinetic musicality. Seeing nothing that met his needs, he removed a paperback book from his jacket pocket and cleared his throat.

“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Lars.

“He’s going to accompany himself with a book.”

I hurriedly took out my minirecorder and pressed the record button. Visions of bootleg riches danced through my head.

Lars giggled.

“What?”

“They say you can’t record him without his permission. It’s like taking a photograph of Dracula, you’re not going to get anything.”

The Schwa ruffled the pages of the book over his pant seam, and the resulting sound rivaled that of the best Max Roach brushwork. I nearly fainted. He lifted the book to his mouth and played chapter seven like a diatonic harmonica; blowing and drawing on the pages like leaves of grass in the hands of Pan. Who knew a Signet paperback was in the key of D? For the more percussive sounds he rapped the spine on his elbow, thumb drummed page corners, pizzicatoed the preface, flutter tongued the denouement, and bariolaged the blurbs.

Brothers, will you meet me.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;

His soul’s marching on!

His voice. His voice was a magical confluence of Louis Armstrong, the thrush nightingale, and Niagara Falls at midnight.

After he finished there was no applause. Applause wasn’t a deep enough show of appreciation. People called their lawyers and had him written into their wills. A South African diplomat approached him about running against Nelson Mandela in the next election. A widow from Wilmersdorf gave him her mother’s secret recipe for Choucroute Alsacienne.

I immediately went to play back the concert, but to my dismay couldn’t find my minirecorder. Panic stricken, I asked Lars if he’d seen it and he stopped composing the ode he was dedicating to the Schwa long enough to point his pen at the floor. There, coated in sticky wine-soaked sand, was my minirecorder. Too cowardly to hear the results, I held the recorder to Lars’s ear and pressed play. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Nichts.”

Fuck.

I put the speaker tight to my own ear. Lars was right. Nothing, not even tape hiss, which is impossible — there’s always tape hiss. The myth was true: The Schwa could be recorded only when he felt like being recorded. I was having trouble breathing, too much magic realism, idolatry, and Color Purple mysticism for one night.

Stone dropped some coins into the jukebox. A breezy Bob Dylan tune filled my lungs with air. After perusing the song list for a moment, he ambled over to me, a devious thin-lipped sneer slicing across his freckled face.

“Whikrxx-whikrxx-whurr,” he said. He was mocking me, imitating Grandmixer D.ST’s legendary scratch from Herbie Hancock’s 1983 “Rockit.” “Whikrxx-whikrxx-whurr. Taurus the Bull. Taurus the Bull.” Very funny.

We never talked much. He never said anything, but he was pissed at me for dragging him into the public light, however dim it was. I think he felt belittled that a DJ, the bane of his existence, had been the only person willing to seek him out and dust him off. To him DJing was single-handedly responsible for the complete ruination of music. His frustration with the concepts of the turntable as instrument and the DJ as musician was understandable.

Niels Bohr once said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word,” and in the summer of ‘83 any listener who wasn’t shocked by the turntable work on “Rockit” was deaf. That grating chatto rhythm is to modern music what quantum mechanics is to physics, except that D.ST wasn’t concerned with the subatomic but the sub-sonic. He wanted to know not what atoms looked like but what they sounded like. His ministrations on that hit single proved what earlier theoreticians — Kool Herc, Albert Ayler, and every headbanging teenager who played their heavy metal records backward looking for satanic messages — had only postulated: that by manipulating rhythm and pitch, one could use melody to bend the space-time-summer-love continuum that is recorded sound. D.ST had transformed the turntable into both instrument and time machine. For me that whikrxx-whikrxx-whurrwas a call to arms for an old jazz confederate like the Schwa, the “Rockit” video was an air raid siren signaling a firestorm, and the turntable was Grant burning Atlanta. He heard something in the music, saw something in Herbie Hancock’s eyes, the splay of his fingers across the keyboard, that I wouldn’t feel until years later. He heard jazz sublimating itself to the turntable; and for the first time in his life he heard a jazzman play something he didn’t feel. He heard a jazzman running scared.

Something in the Dylan tune distracted him. Could’ve been the lyric. Might’ve been the violin. Or the way Dylan sings “reflection” as if it were a monosyllabic sigh. There was a hint of regret in his face. The now-or-never disillusionment of a lonely man who’d woken up in Germany on his fifty-fifth birthday and wondered what the fuck had he done with his life.

Any day now. .

Any day now. .

“That’s an excellent jukebox, man.”

“Thanks.”

“Lars tells me you have a beat,” he said.

“I do.”

He nodded approvingly. “Here,” he said, placing the book he’d just finished playing on the table.

I think he expected more of a reaction from me, as if he were Gabriel handing me the horn he just used to blow down the wall of Jericho, but it was just a book. The Sound and the Fury.

“Faulkner is the greatest DJ who ever lived,” he said, pressing his index finger to the cover, and again mocking me by jiggling it back and forth.

“Whikrxx-whikrxx-whuurr.”

I flipped the book over and skimmed the back cover. Each character was described in two words—beautiful, rebellious Caddy. . the idiot man-child Benjy. . haunted, neurotic Quentin. . and Dilsey, their black servant. Apparently Dilsey didn’t have a personality, unless black servant is a psychiatric disorder. At first I misinterpreted his gift as a passive-aggressive gesture. The musical contemporary’s equivalent of offering peppermint candy to a friend who has bad breath and doesn’t know it. Then I remembered Philip Glass and Beckett.

I thanked him, and we had our first real conversation. Meaningless Tarantino-like banter about how the compact disc was a waste of silicon because no musician has ever been nor ever will be inspired enough to record eighty minutes of worthwhile music.

“In the history of recording, name one good double album.”

“The White Album?”

“Disjointed, and Yoko Ono. Need I say more?”

“London Calling?”

“Great album cover. Overrated band.”

“Blonde on Blonde?”

“Okay, I’ll give you Blonde on Blonde, like I give God the narwhal whale — beautiful but fucking incomprehensible.”

We were bonding. I focused my chi and gathered my nerves. I wanted to broach a sensitive subject with the Schwa, and it was now or never.

“You want to come to my house and watch a video of a man fucking a chicken with me?”

“I’ve already seen it.”

“You have?”

“Short guy, glasses, humping a Rhode Island Red?”

“That’s the one.”

“I rented it a while back. I have a little fetish for what the German freaks call fowl play. I went to the video store checking for To Fill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Pecker, it was out, and the clerk handed me that one. Surprised the shit out of me when I heard my music on there. Needless to say, that flick is long overdue.”

“Did you know the guy in the movie?”

“You know what? He did look familiar. Back in the day there used to be a crew of young, totally square, suit ‘n’ tie cats that for the longest showed up at my gigs on the regular. Sit in the front row, grooving they no-rhythm asses off. I remember them because when they were in house, all of a sudden my band couldn’t play for shit. Asked my drummer how come when these guys show up you motherfuckers start clamming all over the stage. He says, ‘They’re Stasi agents.’ I was like, ‘Then be about your business, and play better, so when shit goes down, they’ll want to keep you around.’ Anyway, I think he may have been one of those cats. Hard to say, you know, because secret agents don’t look like James Bond, they look like plain old ordinary motherfuckers who’d get lost in a crowd of two. They have faces you forget.”

Before I could ask about playing with him, “Outstanding,” the Gap Band’s show-stopping tune, took a cautious peek from around the corner and, like a furtive, funkified pimp, dipped garishly into the Slumberland. “H-e-y-y-y,” Fatima said, grabbing the Schwa and pulling him away from me and toward the dance floor.

In a way I welcomed the intrusion. I wasn’t ready to jam with the Schwa. We both knew it; that’s why he gave me the book.

I enjoyed watching them gyrate and twist in the sand. I’d almost forgotten how effortlessly some women ride a beat. That shake. The way their feet glide over a floor, even a sandy one, as if shod in newly sharpened ice skates. A rather large woman, Fatima was no figure skater. Her face etched in bomb-defusing concentration, she danced like a Zamboni machine circling the floor in wide sweeping circles. She was efficient, powerful, and boogied with a smooth grace that belied her size. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She reminded me of the way L.A. women got they Westside groove on.

In a twinge of homesickness, I wanted to smarmily creep in behind her, press up against her denim derrière, and grind away. Ask her in a not-so-hushed whisper what was happening back home. But I knew the answer. She’d say, “Nothing is happening back home. The word widget has lost its ineffability, the computer companies having given it groovy functionality. This generation’s young people are the first since the dawn of the jazz age whose music sucks and they know it. And most galling, after all these years, there still has never been an Asian-American male on MTV’s The Real World.”

Klaudia caught me looking wantonly at her sister. Using a wristlock, she twisted my arm into an ampersand and asked me what I was thinking.

“I was thinking about being back home.”

She released my arm and asked me what America was really like.

I told her I once heard a comedian say that if you put an apple on television every day for six months, and then placed that apple in a glass case and put that on display at the mall, people would go up to it and say, Oooh, look, there’s that apple that’s on television. America’s a lot like that apple.

CHAPTER 6

IT TOOK ME FOUR TRIES to finish The Sound and the Fury. I nearly drowned in Faulkner’s stream of consciousness, but once I got past the fact that in Faulkner’s world literary existentialism never extends to blacks, the book’s technical construction did offer some guidance. Taking a cue from his style, I decided to remove all the punctuation from my life: commas, quotation marks, periods, one-night stands, midday naps, ellipses, and the evening news.

Like Quentin Compson I too stood at an important crossroad. My junction was tri-forked; three life-altering gigs lay ahead of me. Gigs that were to me what The Ed Sullivan Showwas to the Beatles and the Newport Jazz Festival to Muddy Waters. They lifted my confidence and shaped my style and affirmed my phonographic voice. I traveled down these paths lain with vinyl only to find out that all roads lead to the Schwa.

The Left Fork

Bleary-eyed and fighting a severe case of cotton mouth, I was returning home from an all-night gig in East Berlin wondering if my favorite German boxer, Dariusz Michalczewski, had won his fight for the light-heavyweight championship the night before. My question was answered when a gang of skinheads, still drunk and charged up by the German’s victory, forced open the car doors of the fast-moving elevated S-bahn train. A frigid wind and laughter chilled the compartment. Not knowing what to expect, the passengers held tight to the overhead handrail like frightened paratroop trainees. As the treetops of Stralauer Allee whooshed by, the skins flicked their cigarette butts into the expanse, then looked at me. I looked down. Not at my feet but theirs, regretting that there was no Roy G. Biv mnemonic to help me remember the colored-shoelace spectrum of skinhead ideologies. White laces; white power. Is green gay or vegetarian? Red. . is red commie skin or neo-Nazi?

“Did you see Michalczewski beat the shit out of that nigger last night on television?”

Neo-Nazi.

The alpha asshole smashed his fist into his palm and whistled a militaristic tune. He interrupted himself to call me a gorilla, then returned to whistling. I ignored the lame insult, not out of prudence but because the song’s title was on the tip of my tongue.

“Torpedo Los!” I shouted, naming the once-popular U-boat tune (“Fire Torpedo!”) he was whistling. He blanched and quickly launched into another whistled march. After about three notes I buzzed in with game-show-contestant alacrity, “Hitler’s People!” The answer unballed his fist.

“Sit down, kamerad,” he ordered.

I should have replied, “I’m not your kamerad,” but I simply motioned that there weren’t any open seats.

“Do you like fascist music?” he asked.

“Not especially. I like the exclamatory titles: ‘Under the Double Eagle!’ ‘70 Million Strike!’ ‘Farewell to the Gladiators!’ ‘Germany Awake!’ ‘I Don’t Believe Hitler Can Fly, I Know He Can Fly!’”

“But you don’t like the music?”

“No, not really, it’s all kind of gay. I love this guy. He loves me. He died in my arms, our blood commingling.”

“But why do you know this music?”

“I collect records — those fascist 78s are worth money. A collector in Salzburg offered me two thousand dollars for ‘The Book Burning March’ and ‘If Mother Won’t Give You a Nickel, Ask Neville Chamberlain for Czechoslovakia.’ ”

In a delirious fit of tolerance and gratitude, the neo-Nazi reached out, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pinned me to the wall of the car.

“Kamerad, hast du diese Schallplatten?”

“Klar. Ich bin Schallplattenunterhalter. .”

A week later I DJed a skinhead rally in Marzhan, a high-rise ghetto twenty-five minutes east of downtown Berlin. The wind-up Victrola phonograph I’d brought lent the festivities an eerie beer-hall putsch authenticity. Scratchy parade marches and brownshirt encomiums bellowed from the machine’s mahogany horn. To my ears it was buffoonish kitsch, but the earnestness with which the crowd sang the songs matched the shouting-hallelujah devoutness of the best black American gospel.

I spent the night turning the phonograph crank and watching the bald and milkmaid-braided hellions hoist beers, sieg, and heil, celebrating as if the morning papers had announced the Anschluss, praising the reannexation of Austria, Mississippi, and Redondo Beach in one fell swoop. I felt like a Class D war criminal, but being a DJ is like being an ACLU lawyer arguing for the Klansmen’s right to march: If they pay, you play what the crowd wants to hear. Besides, it was going to be the first and last time I’d ever get the chance to play those records. So whenever a pockmarked, punky fraulein spat at me and asked to see my Schwanz, I patted the knot of deutschmarks in my pocket and reminded myself that I knew which “tail” she really wanted to see.

Thorsten, my employer, leaned on the table. I motioned for him to back off. “Don’t do that; you’ll scratch the record,” I cautioned.

He apologized, then with a wicked look on his face said, “Do you know why the Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?”

I shrugged. “Isn’t it because St. Patrick got rid of the snakes in Ireland?”

“There never were any snakes in postglacial Ireland. The snakes are a metaphor.”

“For what?”

“For…hey, that’s a catchy tune, what’s this record?”

“ ‘People to the Rifle.’ ”

“Powerful stuff, makes me want to. .”

I steered him back on course. “The snakes, the snakes are a metaphor for what?”

“For niggers. St. Patrick kicked the Moors out of Ireland, not the snakes.”

I clucked my tongue and pointed out that one or two of his neo-Nazi brethren seemed to be of mixed-race stock. This time it was Thorsten who frowned.

“Look, I hate the blacks, the Jews, and all the other others, but I’m not so stupid as to believe in racial purity. Come on, after two, three thousand years, and not one of my ancestors was a non-Aryan? How do you Americans say? ‘No way, dude.’ ”

“So the half-black guy over there in the SS jacket. .”

“It’s the hate that’s important. It doesn’t matter who does the hating, but who you hate. Gerhard hates niggers. We hate him. He hates himself. Alles in ordnung.”

“Does he think he’s inferior?”

“He is inferior and he knows it.”

I ended “People to the Rifle” prematurely with an abrupt record-scrapping lift of the stylus.

Over the complaining murmurs I said to Thorsten, “I want you to hear something,” and played the Schwa’s version of the Horst Wessel Song, the Nazi national anthem. Even before I’d placed the needle on the record Thorsten had sussed out my intentions.

“This is going to be a black man, isn’t it? I’ve heard your Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, Porgy and Bess, ‘My Funny Valentine,’ nice music, but its artistry was mostly due to the efforts of his white impresario, Gil Evans. The Negro doesn’t have the organizational necessities. .” The opening salvo of kick-drum beats shut Thorsten up. As the Schwa’s band turned his anthem inside out, he sat there holding his head as if he had a headache. I imagine Adolf Hitler had the same expression on his face when he witnessed Jesse Owens pull away from his vaunted supermen in a blazing mastery of muscle. Subhuman or what have you, there was no denying the apelike man was fast as hell and that Stone’s music was no shitty Orange County racist-punk-band cover. The Schwa was doing to National Socialism what Warhol had done to the Campbell’s soup can. A few partygoers blubbered nostalgically in their drinks, but most stood at a slouching attention, unsure if the bop rendition of the song was an honorific tribute or an insult. To be honest I didn’t know, and neither did Thorsten. When the tune ended it was evident from his downcast gaze that he’d been deeply moved, but he was too embarrassed to praise it and too dumb-founded to trash it. He pressed a fifty into my palm and asked me to play it again. After the fourth playback Thorsten finally spoke. “Did you know that before World War II, the percentage of Jews in Germany was zero point eight-seven-two? To blame such a small percentage of people for the world’s problems, it’s embarrassing. To be threatened by primitive races like yours that can’t think, or heathen races that can only deceive and nothing else, this shows our own inherent inferiority, and I hate the Jews for this, I hate you for this. I’ve never even met a Jew, and who knows, I might even be Jewish, but I hate them anyway. Who is this?”

“Charles Stone.”

“A nigger?”

“If you’re an Aryan, he’s a nigger.”

“There are no ‘Aryans,’ it’s a fake race, a marketing tool. It’s ethnic branding.”

“Exactly, so are ‘niggers.’ ”

“You know, monkey man, one day there will be no races, no ethnicities, only brands. People will be Nikes or Adidas. Microsoft or Macintosh. Coke or Pepsi.”

Thorsten Schick was the scariest person I’d ever met. An intelligent man who sees through the media thought control, the myths of race and class, and free market propaganda only to have become a guileless man who now hates without compunction and speaks perfect English. At evening’s end the skinhead egghead bestowed upon me the highest compliment he could give a non-Aryan when he said, “Just remember, DJ Darky, I don’t have a beef with you, just your people.”

The Right Fork

The Bundestreffen is the annual Afro-German get-together. A thousand native-born black volk from all over the country weekend at a spa in Ettlingen, a small resort town in the Black Forest. Klaudia and Fatima were reluctant to invite me, knowing that it’d be almost impossible for me to resist the innumerable puns I could make about a gathering of blacks in the Black Forest. But when I offered to DJ for free, even they laughed when I joked, “When we get to the Black Forest, we won’t be able to see the niggers for the trees.”

In many ways the Afro-German is W. E. B Du Bois’s Talented Tenth come to life. They’re almost a Stepford race. Unified as only an invisible people without a proximate community to turn one’s back on can be. Human muesli, they’re multilingual and multikulti, exceedingly well mannered and groomed, and, though most show the telltale sign of biraciality — the prominent shiny forehead — on the whole they’re a stunningly handsome and intelligent people.

While Klaudia played volleyball, Fatima played sideline reporter and gave me periodic updates on the game’s participants.

Making the side out calls was spunky Friederike Lutz, the nonagenarian referee. During World War II, Friederike avoided the concentration camps by working as a topless ooga-booga extra in German imperialism films such as Auntie Wanda from Uganda and Nine Little Nubian Nubiles.

On one side of the droopy volleyball net stood Maximilian, Bertolt, Uschi, Axel, Effi, and Detlef, all second- and third-generation descendents of the French colonial soldiers who occupied the Rhineland after World War I. Their ultratraditional names a noble effort to make them, if not more German looking, then German sounding. In the service court, younger and hipper, were the offspring of the black American Cold War occupiers. Their fathers mantelpiece Polaroids, their namesakes jazz legends and blaxploitation antiheroes. Miles, Billie, Dexter, Superfly, Shaft, and Buck and the Preacher stared into the net, knees bent, arms raised. Liberos, middle blockers, or outside hitters, there was something forced in the players’ broad smiles and hearty laughter. They seemed as out of place in the Fatherland as black women in shampoo commercials.

Klaudia preferred the outdoor activities and spent her days playing ping-pong and tetherball. Fatima, on the other hand, reveled in the bleakness of the Afro-German experience. She dragged me to countless workshops, lectures, and films where I’d watch and listen to a people construct an identity from historical scratch.

Strangely, the whole affair reminded me of being on a porn set, and I couldn’t shake the idea that porn stars and black Germans are a lot alike. Two neglected and attention-starved communities of people who, despite their public nakedness, remain “invisible” to a society that pretends not to see them.

In a class on the history of Germany’s blacks during World War II, the lecturer flashed a slide of a sandy-haired black boy in pleated shorts and mohair vest complete with swastika button standing next to his mother and saluting Hitler’s passing motor-cade with a prim nationalist pride. Another Afro-Junge, some-one’s precocious black child, stood in front of the projection mimicking the salute to crying laughter. I came to the sober realization that the disquietude of forced sterility is the common underlying subtext to porn and Afro-Germanness. In porn menstruation is nonexistent and semen isn’t lifeblood, it’s slander. A gooey expression of political and interpersonal barrenness, and in comparison the history of the Afro-German is literally one of forced sterilization. A systematic sterilization not only of people but of memory. No wonder Fatima was so sad. No wonder they were people in desperate need of a good party.

I’m proud to take credit for introducing the concept of the after party to Afro-Germany. After party—I love that expression. The party after the party. It’s one of those ignoble black-American idioms that, along with frontin’ and turned out,* I wouldn’t sell to Cutter Pinchbeck and the boys at Kensington-Merriwether for a million dollars. The words wouldn’t do standard English any good anyways. They’re nonstandard words for nonstandard people.* And no one’s more nonstandard than a tall, abyss-black German named Nordica still workshopping her existence at one o’clock in the morning.

“Can you turn down the music?” she said. “I need to ask you something.”

I eased down the volume of Charles Stone’s “Berlin Skyline #45” to a level that allowed the party people to continue tapping their feet and ruminate in the flickering fireplace light about German blackness.

“What is happening?” Nordica asked, sounding just like a Hollywood runaway on her first Ecstasy trip.

I didn’t answer her. I was too caught up in her afro. A billowy natural so huge it had its own atmosphere, gravitational pull, and a 37.89 percent chance of supporting intelligent life.

“I need to know what is happening to me. Why do I feel so unsecure? Afraid, and yet not frightened.”

The room rumbled with agreement. Overcome with German inquisitiveness and black paranoia, these sons and daughters of Hegel and Queen Nefertiti wanted an answer. I wanted to tell them that the Schwa’s music leans heavily on semitone, that tiny musical interval that’s a half step between harmony and noise, for a reason. He wants to show us that the best parts of life are temporal semitone, those nanoseconds between ecstasy and panic that if we could we’d string together in sensate harmony. If only we could be Wile E. Coyote walking on air for those precious few moments before the bittersweet realization he’s walking on air. Before falling to earth with a pitiful wave of the hand and a puff of smoke.

I didn’t say any of that because I didn’t know the German word for semitone or if my audience knew who Bugs Bunny was. I simply said, “What is happening is that you’ve been turnt out, baby.”

The Schwa turns us all out sooner or later.

Straight Ahead

My next gig of note took place at the Free University. It was there that I finally answered the cult artist’s eternal bugaboo, Who’s your audience? I can’t count how many times a reporter, a fan, or me myself has asked that very question. Who’s your audience? Who listens to that wild, screaming, arrhythmic, keening, vinyl-scratching capriccio anyways?

I set up my turntables in a Department of Ancient American Studies classroom. Behind me, on the chalkboard, was Professor Fukusaku’s breakdown of what he termed “The Global Battle Royale,” a chicken-scratch list of countries and sovereign states that America had invaded in the past two hundred years. Korea, Turkey, Haiti, Honduras, Egypt, the list almost exhaustive but, as recent news reports had shown, was missing one key territory. I grabbed a piece of chalk and in the tiny space between Samoa and El Salvador I squeezed in “Los Angeles.” Now with the list complete, can’t we all get along?

Clapping the chalk dust off my hands, I turned to face my audience. A pretty, vaguely Mediterranean-looking woman sat patiently in the front row, her hands folded neatly in her lap. It was well past the start time and obvious that no one else but her was going to show up. I scratched my head, wondering whether or not to go on.

“Fuck it,” I told myself, “I’ll play.”

I don’t know how long I played for, but I was inspired. I dedicated every note to that woman in the front row.

I can’t count how many times a lazy writer for a northwestern music zine, a nosy fan boy, or a stodgy music teacher has asked me, “So DJ Darky, who is your audience?”

Well, I finally had an answer to that ol’ bugaboo. Who’s my audience? The chick in the blue dress, her hands folded neatly in her lap, that’s my audience!

My melodies stomped through the room overturning every unoccupied chair, ripping in half every unsold ticket. Throughout the torrential sheets of sound I rained down upon her, she never moved. Never lifted her head, smiled, or tapped her feet. But she didn’t leave either. I couldn’t have spun any better. Exhausted, my eyes burning with sweat, my ears ringing, my mind turned inside out, I flung the last Super Ball — dense, illbientbluegrass-deep-house mash-up of the evening against the back wall. Spiraling in and out of madness, the beat bounced off the walls, it screamed and writhed, a naked patient in the state hospital for the insane fighting against the bed restraints. Eventually it died in a corner with its mouth open, bequeathing nothing to the world save a ghostly silence that, in the absence of improvisational clamor, was hauntingly piercing. The woman in the powder-blue dress never applauded. She stood up, looked at me meekly, and asked, “Are you finished?” I nodded yes, and she exited into the hall only to return moments later bearing a mop and bucket of sudsy water. What if you had a concert and nobody came?