Slumberland

CHAPTER 1

NO ONE BELIEVED she’d do it. Fatima. Her charred skeleton sitting in the lotus position in the middle of Bernauerstrasse, creaking in the wind.

When I got there I could literally see through her, but the bile that rose in my throat forced me to stop looking. Every now and then, from behind my back, I’d hear a sharp crack that sounded like a potato chip being snapped in two and I’d know that a piece of burnt flesh or a tuft of crinkled hair had peeled off her body and was tumbling in the street, being chased down by Klaudia.

I suppose ultimately that was what Fatima wanted, to be skinless and hairless. Featureless really.

Since reunification Fatima had lost a lot of weight, becoming, as Klaudia so accurately described it, “heavily anorexic.” Her kilo-shedding despondency grew deeper with each passing day. What had been the healthy fear of white people shared by most of the country’s colored inhabitants had recently morphed into full-blown leukophobia, or fear of all things white. It was debilitating at first. She stopped answering any mail that arrived in white envelopes. Refused to drink milk or eat mashed potatoes. Polar bears, snowstorms, and Danes had to be avoided at all costs because they were bad omens. And, in blessed irony, toilet paper scared her shitless.

Her only solace from this all-encompassing pallidity was Charles Stone, and she found it not so much in his music but in the man. Klaudia and I never spoke about how much her sister and the Schwa looked alike. And as far as I know, neither did they. All we knew was that the two became inseparable. Whenever he was in the streets rebuilding his wall, she was right there next to him, blasting his music on a boom box. And conversely, whenever she was hospitalized he was at her bedside singing lullabies and helping her tear down her mental walls. He encouraged her to confront her fears, and for a while she listened. Taking up nursing even though the uniform caused her to break out in hives. For a while she even dated a Kenyan albino she met at the Slumberland. But the grind of being black in Berlin wore on her.

I’d last seen her a few weeks before on Russian disco night at a popular nightspot in Prenzlauer Berg called An Einem Sonntag im August. Fatima, Stone, Klaudia, and I queued up for over an hour waiting to get in. If you’ve ever heard Russian disco you’d stand in line too. An amalgam of Gypsy hip-hop, Siberian soul, and Moldavian ska, it’s an underground music so unabashedly commercial and cheesy that it takes awfulness to heights unexplored since Lawrence Welk covered the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” The effect is truly lobotomizing, and Fatima looked forward to her and the Schwa dancing their troubles away to classics like “Vodka Revolution,” “Generation @,” and “Vassily’s Groove.”* When we finally reached the entrance, the doorman said he could let the women in, but not me and the Schwa.

“There’s a new club policy,” he said. “No black men.” I followed his finger to an exclusionary sign that, if you’d struck out the No, would’ve been the entrance policy at the Slumberland. The sign read:

No Admittance To Black Men

Who Meet Any Of The Following Criteria

• Under 25 years of age

• Wearing expensive and grotesque American sportswear, gold chains, and pricey watches

• Bloodshot eyes

• Bad teeth in conjunction with unusual body hygiene for an African (i.e., strong-smelling deodorant and aftershave)

• Not in the company of white females or locals

• Frequent the drug scene

• Exceptions will be made for tourists and black men with intelligent eyes

While we protested, the doorman shoved us into the street, explaining that the club was having problems with black men selling drugs and sexually harassing the female help.

“We aren’t racist,” he shouted, addressing the crowd more than us. “We respect our multikulti brethren in the neighborhood far too much for us to suspect all black people. Our policy is only directed toward drug dealers.”

Peeking over his shoulder I could see Doris and Lars inside, boogying on down totalitarian style to a polka-punk ditty called “Dancing on the Airplane.” I felt less insulted by the place’s discriminatory illogic than by the fact that he failed to notice the glint of intelligence in my eyes.

While Fatima had a breakdown sitting on the hood of an Opel station wagon, I walked up on the scruffy gatekeeper and batted my brilliant peepers smartly in his face.

“Come on, man. You mean to tell me you don’t see at least a hint of intelligence in these eyes?”

Fatima never recovered from the insult. Among the daily affronts — the squirt gun assaults, dirt-clod bombardments, subway gropes, and “compliments” about her excellent German and her good fortune in having grown up in Germany and not Africa — the incident at An einem Sonntag was the snub that stopped the cultural chameleon from changing colors. There is no camouflage for being black.

When the cops asked the crowd about the smoldering corpse, they were really addressing Thorsten, as he was the only white person present. Since my gig the cold-hearted neo-Nazi couldn’t get the Schwa’s sound out of his head no matter how many Turks he beat, Chinese he stoned, Jewish ghosts he exorcised, and niggers he flicked lit cigarette butts at. On days off from his piano-moving job, he’d call me.

“Where is he?”

I’d call Fatima to find out, relay the info to him. He’d bus in from Marzahn just to sit curbside and listen to the music, hoping to catch the Schwa before he was shooed away by the authorities. The verdammte Neger across the street, who since the Bundestreffen also followed the Schwa, sometimes gave him dirty looks, but Stone and Fatima never paid him any mind.

As Thorsten explained himself to a sympathetic cop, the paramedics floated a plastic sheet over Fatima’s body. It wasn’t hard from the evidence (a singed metal gas canister and a melted boom box) to figure out what had happened.

Thorsten told the cop that when he showed up and took his place on the bus stop bench, it was as if she had been waiting for him. She stared him down with those large, distant, camel-brown eyes, then silently toted her gas can to the nearby station. Splurged on two liters of high octane. Returned to the scene. Sat down. Drenched herself in gasoline. Jabbed her earphones into the radio. Turned up the volume. Adjusted the treble. Held up her lighter rock ’n’ roll — concert style and lit it. Hell of an encore.

The Schwa and Fatima had gotten a lot of work done that day, and I admired their handiwork. At nearly five feet high and fifteen feet long, the wall was higher, longer, smoother, and sturdier than I’d ever seen it. Stone remarked that Fatima had studied some architecture books and had taught him that before building he should sort the stones into piles and that the base of a freestanding wall should be about half its height with the bigger stones at the bottom.

By this time the police had barricaded the good-sized group of increasingly agitated blacks behind wooden horses. Seeing the Schwarzen had been contained, the coroner whipped the sheet off Fatima’s burnt corpse and began pounding the remains into ash with a shovel while two cops prepared to sweep her up into a body bag. The callous treatment of the deceased set the black Germans off, and from behind a phalanx of riot police they hurled rocks and curses. Thorsten, with his ball-peen skull and Nazi chic attire, drew his fair share of both the stony fusillade and abuse. The rocks were your standard fare: hard, meta-morphic, and amorphous. But the invective was uniquely German: wonderfully smart, deeply emasculating, and with a dash of U-boat sailor’s brio thrown in for good measure. Whether you call it snapping, capping, or bagging, the insult the beach-ball-afroed Nordica unleashed on Thorsten was one for the ages: “It’s your fault she died, you cowardly, warm-shower-taking, satin-testicled, spotty-dicked onanist who stinks like a lion’s cage, saves every fucking e-mail, answers every fucking e-mail, compares gas prices, drives an automatic car, uses his brakes when driving uphill, and is a fish-faced, poor excuse for an evolutionary mishap who waves back at the Teletubbies and only swims near the edges of the pool.”

A lesser man would have joined Fatima in suicide then and there, but Thorsten just stood there, hands on hips, ignoring the barrage of rocks and insults like some cocksure army officer oblivious to the war going on around him.

He took a small, neatly folded piece of paper and tossed it to Klaudia, who tucked it safely behind the wall.

“Your sister gave me this before she killed herself.”

“Is it a suicide note?”

“I don’t know; I can’t read. I didn’t give it to the bulls because I thought maybe it blames me for her death. Read it to me, but cover your ears so that you don’t hear it, okay?”

The cute, twisted logic of thinking that if she couldn’t hear herself reading the note she wouldn’t know what it said caused a tight, almost morbid smile to break out on her tearstained face. The Schwa and I scooted in next to her and peeked over her shoulder. Though the note was in German, Thorsten made us cover our ears too. Klaudia started to read: It was a stanza from a poem, “They’re People Like Us,” by May Ayim.

“We really believe

that all people are the same.

No one should be discriminated against,

just because he’s different.”

The stanza’s sarcasm hit Thorsten about the same time as a grenade-sized rock pegged him right above his eye. A thick rivulet of blood ran down his cheek and dripped from his chin.

The wind and the rioting kicked up Fatima’s ashes, scattering them in black swirls about the street. Klaudia, her fingers feverishly nimble, folded the suicide note into an origami paper cup complete with tuck-in flap and sprinted toward the last pile of ashes. Someone javelined a tree branch into the fracas; meant for the police, it boomeranged into my girl’s rib cage, knocking her down. A beer bottle landed at her feet. Unbowed, she scrambled through the broken glass. Thorsten turned to the Schwa and said, “This city really does need a new Berlin Wall, only this time it should be transparent,” then whipped his shirt off and stood in front of Stone’s wall.

“Heil Hitler!” he shouted, drawing the attention of all those who hadn’t already been transfixed by the life-sized tattoo of the führer inked across his muscular chest. It was an exact likeness, but if you looked closely you could see the mustache was a splotchy, fuzz-covered birthmark just above his belly button. Thorsten snapped a fascist salute, clicked his booted heels, and then stiffly goose-stepped to and fro in front of the wall like a storm trooper target in a Coney Island shooting gallery circa 1942.

Some bumptious carnival barker shouted out the rules.

“You have to stay on the curb. Legs and torso — ten points. Head shot — twenty-five points. Groin — fifty points. The swastika on his neck — one hundred points! Five rocks for one mark!”

The crowd loved it, and soon directed all of its energy to hitting the freak, pelting him with bottles, rocks, batteries, and whatever else they could find to throw. Whenever he was hit, Thorsten would shout a metallic “Bing!” and make an abrupt about-face.

The antics created the diversion that Klaudia needed to retrieve the ashes of her sister. And as we watched her scoop the flesh granules and bone chips into the paper urn, the Schwa turned to me. “You know, the bald-headed guy’s right.”

“About what?”

“About the wall. I can build a transparent wall — a wall of sound.”

The intensity of the stone throwing picked up. One of the blacks accused Thorsten of killing Fatima, and without a trace of bitterness in his voice, Thorsten kindly pointed out to them in so many words that in some moral court of law with broad psychosomatic jurisdiction, that accusation might be true, but the one thing they were all guilty of, black monkey and white superhuman alike, is that they all watched her die.

The stones stopped pinging against the wall.

Exhausted, Thorsten slumped to the ground, his Hitler tattoo covered in blood.

CHAPTER 2

FOR HIM IT isn’t about the way a musician sounds. He could care less whether or not he or she has the “goods.” How they dress. For him the assemblage of a band is about some bizarre teleological holism whose main precept seems to be “the whole is a grater on some of its parts.”

He conducted his rehearsals like a basketball coach who, in order to emphasize conditioning and defense, puts his players through two weeks of grueling practice before they ever touch a basketball. He auditioned and rehearsed his band without once hearing a musician play.

“How do you know if someone can play without even checking out his embouchure?” I asked him.

“When you see someone holding the steering wheel at ten and two, exactly how they teach you in driving school, what’s the first thing you think about that driver?”

“That motherfucker can’t drive.”

“Okay then, I don’t need to see nobody hold, bow, blow, pound, sound no instrument.”

Instead he plotted their horoscopes, gave them psychometric tests for group compatibility, and made them sit through team-building exercises. My favorite part of the auditions was when he presented the musicians with his universal sheet music.

“But isn’t sheet music already universal?” they’d invariably ask.

“It is for musicians who can read music. What about the cats who can’t read music?”

Even the most forward-thinking musician would turn to the first page of “universal music” and freeze.

“Hey, man, Ikea instructions? I’m sorry, but I don’t get this.”

“Ikea’s instructions for furniture assembly are the closest thing we earthlings have developed that approaches a universal language. Okay, people, on page two, when we attach the left panel to the top shelf, I want the horns to come in on a D-flat major chord, and trombone, as you’re putting in the dowels, tonic the chord at the top. From there we’ll count sixteen bars, segue back to the intro, and nail the back panels down. Saxes, I want you to give out with that old Phillips-head-screwdriver, good-timey feeling. Now let’s play this fucking hutch, hit it on four.”

Most guys ran out the door screaming, but the ones who stayed were special.

There were like-minded guys like Willy Wow, a violinist whose music I’d greatly admired. His talents were retrograde in a very modern sort of way — he could make a violin sound like a synthesizer. During his job interview, the Schwa didn’t ask him what was the last book he’d read or what he felt was his worst quality. He looked at Wow’s mangled hand and said, “Tell me about Nam.”

“Vietnam wasn’t so bad. It’s what freed up my mind. I used to sit on top of the PX and listen to the sounds of battle. It was like going to the Laos philharmonic. Like sitting at Minton’s bar during a late night cutting session. It was the freest of free jazz. The Viet Cong would open up with this light-arms staccato. And the U.S. would return fire with artillery legato, mortar fire. Pound the hillside with 150mm and 175mm rondo and drop the napalm coda and blow away the whole stage, you dig? You’d think after that display of firepower there’d be no more shit for Charlie to play, right? Hills burned to a crisp. Not even a bird in the sky, much less a tree for one to fly out of. Any other normal motherfucker would have walked off the bandstand never to play again, but Charlie Cong let off three little mortar bursts, pop pop pop! And the cutting contest was over. They’d won the day and I knew they’d win the war. Right then and there I decided to sound like Vietnam.”

Needless to say Willy Wow was the band’s violinist, insomuch as there was a band. You never knew exactly who was in the band. The Schwa never summarily dismissed anybody or castigated his (and sometimes her) manhood and musicianship. Cats would simply know if they were wanted or not and would decide for themselves if they could hang. Permit me to introduce some of the regulars: Soulemané Eshun, a black-American bass player with an excellent bow technique and an annoying between-song habit of uttering cryptic African proverbs that only he and the Schwa seemed to understand.

“Gbawlope nane a gipo ni ton ne a gipo ta-ton. Alligator says: We know a friendly from an enemy canoe.”

“Yeah, baby.”

“Lã asike legbe meflo dzo o. A long-tailed animal should not attempt to jump over a fire.”

“Right on.”

On piano and percussion, Uli Effenberg. An expert aero-phone player, his eclectic collections of wind instruments included a cage of bees, a propeller hat, and a human skull, which when he waved it in the air produced the eeriest glissando through the eye sockets and missing teeth. Uli didn’t play the piano so much as he fucked with the piano. Sometimes he’d just move the stool back and forth, augmenting whatever the band was doing with the squeaks of the roller wheels and the slamming of the lid. He’d strike the pedals with a hammer; play the keyboard with a beach ball. Once, to the Schwa’s great amusement, he threw a mouse onto the piano strings, then went to sleep while the little white rodent comped the band.

On drums, Sandra Irrawaddy. Despite holding the sticks as if she had the palsy, she could do things on a drum set Philly Joe Jones could only dream about. The Schwa, stealing a Duke Ellington line, called her an “exponent of drum-stickery,” but her footwork was no joke either. Once during a cigarette break Sandra played a more-than-reasonable facsimile of John Bonham’s infamous “Moby Dick” drum solo with no hands. Instead of using drumsticks she kicked out the jam on the bass drums and spit tangerine seeds at the cymbals.

And then there’s Yong Sook Rhee. Ever wonder whatever happened to that stuck-up-looking Korean kid with the slicked-down hair who was known as the world’s smartest boy? The one who at age five had an IQ of 210, could speak nine languages, program in five, recite pi to ten thousand places, and composed poetry?* I’ll tell you what happened to young Yong Sook, he plays trumpet in the Schwa’s band. Not much of a musician, he plays with a shameless naïveté reminiscent of Halle Berry trying to act. Just as the starlet’s insufferable overacting is about to drive you insane, she flashes a perfectly parabolic expanse of flesh and all is forgiven; and when you listen to Yong Sook play he’ll miss ten thousand notes, but the one he hits is crazy beautiful.

My role in the band was undefined. There were always turntables and a mixer in the studio, but I never touched them and no one ever asked me to sit in. In the days leading up to the concert someone asked if I was in the band.

“Yes,” the Schwa said.

“Well, what the hell does he do?”

“He’s our secret weapon. The grand finale that’ll bring down the house.”

Then he strolled over to Fatima’s melted radio, which he always kept nearby, turned it “on,” and began to dance a tango with an invisible partner.

As the Schwa caminata’d around the room, Soulemané tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Brow tron lo, eta ne a ne won oh gike. The world is too large, that’s why we do not hear everything.”

The concert couldn’t come fast enough. The African proverbs were starting to make sense.

CHAPTER 3

IT TOOK THE EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT more than three years to build the Berlin Wall. Once we got the approval, it took us only three days to rebuild it. The idea was to bisect the heart of the city from Treptow to Pankow with a wall of sound ten meters thick and five meters high, a sound that, if everything went according to plan, would be a continuous loop of the Schwa’s upcoming concert. The music would be so real that anyone within earshot would feel as if they could reach out and touch it. They’d have to figure out for themselves if the wall of sound was confinement, exclusion, or protection.

Given Germany’s reputation for being a bureaucratic quagmire where one needs a stamp of approval in order to get the stamp of approval, we walked into the Senate for Urban Redevelopment fully expecting to get the infamous civic runaround. To be, as the Germans say, sent from Pontius to Pilatus.

The Schwa handed the clerk his proposal, a tersely worded, one-sentence document written in English on a sheet of notebook paper wrinkled as an elephant’s ass. Herr Müller calmly spread it over the counter, ironed it out with his forearm, and read it aloud. “I want to rebuild the Berlin Wall with music instead of concrete, barbed wire, and machine guns ’n’ shit.”

Without so much as a snicker, Herr Müller put a bearded chin in his hand and said, “In some ways that’s not a bad idea.”

His muted enthusiasm shouldn’t have been a complete surprise. Berlin newspapers often poll their readerships as to whether or not they want the Wall back. At least 20 percent of the respondents answer yes. So we had Herr Müller’s tacit approval, but surely that wouldn’t be nearly enough. True to form, he slapped a small stack of various pastel-colored application forms on the counter, rattling off in very official German which ones had to be sent where and addressed to whom. It didn’t take long for Müller to see that his Byzantine bullshit wasn’t registering with Herr Stone, so he tried English.

“Excuse me, sir. If you aren’t a German citizen and lawful resident of Berlin, this is going to be a problem. I need to see your papers.”

At the mention of papers, both Klaudia and I panicked, thinking that at any second a squad of crew-cut Polizei would come barreling in and escort the Schwa to the border. The Schwa, sensing he was at some bureaucratic impasse, coolly took out the same frayed piece of paper he showed the motorcycle cop the day I first discovered him. Herr Müller scanned it, skeptically at first, then he lifted the pair of librarian glasses from his chest and placed them over his slowly unwrinkling nose. Suddenly he was handling the paper by the edges like it was the fucking Magna Carta.

“Udo!”

Udo, an eager boy of about eighteen, appeared at his side, straightening his rayon tie and his unruly forelock at the same time.

“Yes, sir?”

“I want you to make a copy of this document and bring it back to me straight away.”

Udo reached for the paper, Herr Müller slapped his hand away.

“Gloves!”

When Udo returned with his identification papers they were encased in a plastic cover. A buzzer sounded and Herr Müller beckoned us to join him on the other side of the counter. Briskly, he escorted us into the bowels of the system, marching us down a cavernous hallway until we reached the frosted glass door to Frau Richter’s office. We could see a short, insanely busy woman who, judging by his trepidatious knock and newfound stammer, was Herr Müller’s superior.

Frau Richter was on the phone yelling something to the effect of, “Tell I. M. Pei that Potsdamer Platz makes the architect, not the other way around!” when Herr Müller passed the proposal and the mysterious paper under her pug nose.

“Das ist eine geniale Idee,” she said, hanging up the phone. She fingered her pearl necklace for a moment and made another phone call.

For the next two hours we were shuttled up the chain of command, marched from building to building until we finally found ourselves in a Reichstag sitting room, waiting to be seen along with an elderly and very dapper gentleman. The antechamber of the elected federal official, whom I am legally barred from naming, was ornate. Interspersed between historical tapestries were exquisitely framed portraits of high-ranking politicians whom I’m also not allowed to identify, but as a hint of the echelon of portraiture facing us, think “unsinkable” World War II battleship.

Now that we had time to rest, we asked Stone to see his identification. He removed it from the protective sheath and flung the plastic into the barrel chest of a bespectacled leader whose German surname in English means “cabbage.”

The ID paper was written in that interlocking old-German script that looks like a wrought iron fence. I barely managed to decipher the letterhead, “Verfolgte des Naziregimes,” a bold declarative that had been embossed with the screaming red insignia of the German Democratic Republic.

“No, it’s not possible,” Klaudia said, absentmindedly slipping into the Saxony accent she always tried so hard to hide. “There’s no way.”

The nameless politician stepped through the tall, walnut doors accompanied by a man with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. If the Chinese had attacked Germany at that very moment I could tell you the color of the proverbial “panic button” that unleashes unholy hell.

But Germany doesn’t have nuclear arms.

Sure they don’t.

Anyway, since China didn’t attack, I can’t tell you what color the “button” is, but suffice it to say the suitcase is brown. Yeah, I would’ve thought black too.

“Herr Stone?”

The Schwa stood, hat in hand, except that he didn’t have a hat.

“Do you mind, Herr Gleibermann, if I see this gentleman first?” Our anonymous statesperson was smooth yet commanding. It was easy to see how he or possibly she carried North Rhine — Westphalia with 86 percent of the vote.

“Kein problem. .”

After the brass-handled doors clicked behind the Schwa, I asked a still-pale Klaudia what was the deal with his identity papers.

“What does Verfolgte des Naziregimes mean?”

Klaudia cupped her hands around my ear and whispered. Whenever she discussed matters referring to “the former East Germany,” she whispered. A survival instinct from the days when the walls had ears and best friends had microphones taped to their chests.

“Verfolgte des Naziregimes means ‘persecuted by the Nazi regime.’ It was an identity the DDR gave to Holocaust survivors as recompense. Of course, in the government’s eyes the war was West Germany’s fault.”

“How so?”

“We were good, innocent Communists, and don’t forget, the Nazis hated Communists. My history teacher used to say, ‘Re-member, class, they gassed Communists alongside the Jews, and if you were a Jewish Communist, forget about it, they gassed and burned you twice just to make sure.’

“Anyway,” Klaudia continued, “if you have this Verfolgte des Naziregimes, you got party favors. .”

I grinned, picturing a bunch of survivors in conical paper hats, tossing confetti and blowing paper whistles, celebrating life, but she meant special privileges. “They could start a little private business, sell food or umbrellas, open up a bicycle-repair shop, even though any kind of open capitalism was strictly forbidden. Maybe they got a little stipend. Maybe they only had to wait six years for a car, I don’t know. But anyone who carried this paper basically didn’t get fucked with.”

I never could figure out how the Schwa supported himself. Now I knew. I mean, so what if the guy basically defected to East Germany — what was the current German government going to do, leave an honorary Jewish black jazzman to die?

The Schwa exited the office with the politician’s arm around his shoulder, a substantial check, and written carte blanche to build his wall in any shape or form he saw fit so long as it didn’t obstruct traffic or violate any noise-pollution statutes.

Old Herr Gleibermann, clutching a paper certificate of victimization exactly like the Schwa’s, touched his hand and in a halting English asked, “What camp were you in, brother?”

“Camp?”

“Sachsenhausen? Buchenwald? Bergen-Belsen?”

“No. Never.”

“I thought maybe you were a survivor. Your eyes.”

“No, sorry.”

“No camp?”

“Stephen S. Wise Day Camp when I was a young’un, that’s about it.”

The old man took his joke in good humor and entered into the chancellor’s inner sanctum complaining that his neighbor’s dog was still barking at all hours of the night.

The East Side Gallery is a mural-covered remnant of the Berlin Wall that runs along the north bank of the river Spree between the Oberbaum Bridge and the Ostbahnhof train station. It’s a kilometer-long memorial that simultaneously tries to erase and preserve the Berlin Wall’s legacy. Knowing that in this case the art is the canvas, the best of the faded and peeling panels incorporate the Wall into their themes. Birgit Kinder’s three-dimensional Trabant sedan crashes the through the Wall to freedom. The artist Suku simply lists the Wall’s achievements on a concrete résumé.

Curriculum Vitae

1961 1962 1963 1964

1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971

1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979

1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

1988 1989 1990

The last two entries are painted in a screaming red and caution-ary yellow, respectively.

It was here, nailed into the butt end of the Gallery, that the cornerstone of the new Berlin Wall, Fatima’s melted boom box, was laid. In many ways our wall was an extension of the Gallery — but one immune to the neglect and the countless coats of graffiti defacement that in recent years had rendered the original artwork almost invisible.

With the Schwa who knows where, Lars, Doris, and Klaudia gave me the honor of turning on the old radio, which had been hollowed out and stuffed with Fatima’s ashes and new electronic gadgetry. It buzzed with an antiphonary static that carried about thirty meters into the middle of the wide sidewalk.

The sound cut right through Klaudia.

“Was ist los?”

“This is freaking me out. I just realized what we’re doing.”

She removed a small radio from her satchel and fiddled with the power button. The red light flashed off and on.

“The sound makes the Wall more real.”

“More real than the gallery?”

“In a way, yeah. For you guys the murals are a kitschy tourist attraction, but for me, sometimes I walk past them and remember things.”

“You’re saying we’re trivializing the repression?”

I looked up and down Mühlenstrasse. It was getting harder to tell the differences between East and West. Back in the day it was easy. Border streets such as Mühlenstrasse were like the river Styx. Concrete tributaries not to be crossed because on the other side was Hades, a backward underworld where the living dead lived in prefab housing. I dashed across the six-lane street and tried to imagine what West Berlin looked like from an Eastern vantage point. People died attempting to cross that street, so I supposed it looked like the Elysian Fields: still part of the underworld, only the markets carried bananas.

“You’re forgetting the chicken-fucking song,” I said, somewhat out of breath from the return sprint. “The guy takes an improbable bestial coupling, like man and fowl, and makes it seem like you’re watching the secret bedroom tapes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Whatever his reasons, it’s impossible for his music to trivialize anything. His music is an honorific to life — the good, bad, and the ambiguous.”

“There’s no denying the chicken-fucking song,” Doris said, her voice inflected with a sexual nostalgia I thought Klaudia might take offense to. She didn’t. Instead she erased any apprehensions we had with an ironic memory of totalitarian life.

She held out the radio.

“See this power button? In East Germany we didn’t have power buttons. The word ‘power’ was too aggressive.”

“That’s hilarious.”

“We had the ‘Netz’ button.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s like ‘network.’ So when you turned on the television or whatever, you were plugged into the people. Everybody was sharing the power.”

“That’s deep.”

Klaudia handed me the radio.

“Here.”

There was a little bit of resignation in her voice that I took for the residue of thought control.

“What now?”

“There’s no place to put it.”

She was right. We were standing on the only thirty-meter stretch of Berlin sidewalk without trees. The closest thing we had to a tree was a street-lamp stanchion. A truck zipped passed us, illuminating our dumbfounded faces in bright xenon light.

The plan was simple. For the most part the old Wall ran along existing streets. Berlin is easily one of the most tree-lined cities in the world, so we’d stick satellite radios in the trees, where they’d dangle from the branches like transistorized fruit. In the treeless places where the Wall’s footprint had been erased by progress in the form of condominiums or vacant lots that would soon be turned into condos, there was no shortage of local artists who were willing to fill in the blanks. For instance, Steffi Rödl strung a clothesline made of barbed wire across the trash-strewn vacant lot that sat behind a row of apartment houses on Stallschreiberstrasse. Using wooden clothespins, she hung a twelve-foot-high curtain of shiny charcoal-gray silk that billowed majestically in the wind, a brilliantine representation of the Berlin Wall aired out like so much dirty laundry. In Potsdamer Platz, where the Wall had been eradicated by commercialism and skyscrapers, in lieu of radios — which would never have been heard over the din of downtown traffic — Michael Harnisch projected a musical stave across the white limestone base of the Sony Center. A computer instantly annotated the music and projected the notes onto the wall, the concert’s score running through downtown Berlin like a ticker tape opera. Using the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop, Uwe Okulaja lined up a bank of high-powered green and red lights that, like a giant equalizer, shot a pulsing LED readout 250 meters into the night sky. There were other installations: a dancing fountain, an oscilloscope, and pushcarts where you could rent a set of those chintzy museum headphones and take a sonic tour of the new Berlin Wall; of course, none of these things would mean much if we couldn’t find somewhere to place the second speaker. It’d be like the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific coming up a few tracks short at the joining of the first transcontinental railroad. Some top-hatted CEO pocketing the golden spike with a “Fuck it, that’s close enough” shrug.

Overhead the telephone lines buzzed. A car cruised past at that odd not-too-fast, not-too-slow L.A. street-corner drive-by speed that made me instinctively duck behind the streetlight for cover. There, crouched behind the stanchion, I remembered the telephone lines buzzing on a warm night back in Westwood, California. We were playing hooky from Emerson Junior High. Lounging in Julie Koenig’s spacious backyard celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday before it was a holiday. Bong hits. Two cases of Hamm’s beer. Devin Morris listening to the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” and declaring that, just like Glenn Frey, he too had seven women on his mind. A spirited Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small versus Richard Pryor’s That Nigger’s Crazy debate. Sneaking off into the guesthouse to lose my virginity to Lori Weinstein (and Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do for Love”). Blaze and the rest of my boys finding out about it and jumping me into manhood, pinning me to the ground, snatching off my bleach-white Converse All-Stars and tossing them overhead onto the telephone wires that crisscrossed Com-stock Avenue. Those shoes were loyal to me. Twelve points in the Robinson Park rec league. Hopped the fence when Loretta White’s Doberman pinscher attacked me for no good reason. Sneaked me down glass-strewn Sherbourne alleyway past the Crip-ass Boyd family. So loyal were those shoes, I expected them to untangle themselves from the wire and slither down the pole and back onto my feet. But night fell with my size tens still hanging from those buzzing telephone lines like some surreal Duchamp castoff. Walking home barefoot, chewing on a plastic straw, a black Tom Sawyer whistling Rush’s classic “Tom Sawyer.” The world is, the world is. .

The patrol cop calling me over to his black-and-white squad car with a crooked finger and a sneer.

Love and life are deep. .

“What are you doing over here, boy?”

“I was visiting my girlfriend; she lives. .”

“I don’t give a fuck where she lives, I don’t ever want to see you in this neighborhood again. Now get the fuck out of here — and where in the hell are your shoes?”

His eyes are open wide.

Klaudia caught me daydreaming. “What are you thinking about?”

“I was just listening to the buzz of the telephone wires and thinking about ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” I said, kicking off my shoes.

“The book?”

“The song.”

They watched as I knotted the shoelaces around the radio handle, and then bola’d the three-piece menagerie over the telephone wire, gaucho-style.

The New Berlin Wall of Sound was nearly complete. All that remained was for the golden spike to be driven: the first note struck by the Schwa during the next day’s concert. Until then the Berlin Wall of Sound would remain silent.

We pressed on home. Mühlenstrasse felt warm beneath my tired feet. It felt just like Comstock Avenue or Robertson Boulevard. It felt like home.

CHAPTER 4

LARS COOLED IN front of the Slumberland, checking his watch and taking notes. Above him, strung between two trees, the concert banner sagged in the middle like a rainbow tweaked on angel dust. THE BLACK PASSé TOUR — BUILDING WALLS, TEARING DOWN BRIDGES. He looked proud. If everything went according to plan, in two hours he’d have saved blackness.

Doris sidled up to us to say hello. She was proud too. Proud of her man who, since his newfound purpose in life, had seemingly stopped drinking—seemingly being the key word. She leaned in for a peck on the lips, more a Breathalyzer test than a show of affection.

It was a good try. Unfortunately for her, Lars had a tampon stuffed up his ass. An ultra-absorbent, soft-scented tampon, designed by a woman gynecologist to provide eight hours of day or night protection and that little something extra. His tampon indeed had that little something extra the packaging promised, because it’d been soaking in absinthe for the past two days.

The alcohol suppository is a technique passed down to journalists and music-industry insiders the world over by Finnish rockabilly bands. “Besotted” is an ethnic group in Finland, and those Stratocaster hellions are the country’s most notorious drinkers. It’s their alcoholic ingenuity and the recent advances in the menstrual sciences that have allowed many music-industry peons to show up for work stone-bachelor-party drunk with no one the wiser, because their breath is odorless.

I’ve tried consuming alcohol through the rectum. It’s the dipsomaniac’s equivalent of a hype’s mainlining junk. The porousness of the rectal walls and their proximity to the digestive system make the onset of insobriety instantaneous and deeply spiritual. The flash flood of drunkenness must be what it’s like to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

“You drunk?”

“Yeah, man, I’m high sky.” Lars answered. “You want one? I have vodka, gin, and a really nice single malt back in the car.”

The offer was tempting, but I remembered that I had to play tonight — and besides, removing a tampon from a dehydrated anus involved rubber gloves, scented lubricants, tweezers, and a high pain threshold.

“That’s okay. Unlike you, I don’t drink to get drunk; I drink for the taste.”

Most of the concert reviews in the next day’s paper would describe the crowd milling about the Slumberland as “diverse” without saying what made them so. In polite democratic society it’s important to note stratification but impolite to label the layers. For the journalists in attendance, diverse meant that they had gone to a concert in a small venue on a narrow West Berlin side street and didn’t know everybody there. The astute reader looked at the concert photo of the nappy-headed Schwa and surmised that diverse implied the concertgoers were of various ages and class backgrounds, with a significant percentage of them being of black extraction. But not even an expert cryptologist would be able to infer from the word that the streets surrounding the Slumberland were jammed with a cross section of Berliners who’d come together to celebrate the city’s resegregation. A black African peddler vainly tried to sell roses and sandwiches to a platoon of Iron Cross skinheads who were without money, appetites, or lovers. Three Japanese hep cats, bearing gifts and unsigned memorabilia, traipsed over the grounds in open-toed sandals, dutifully upholding the legacy of the Eastern magi being on hand for the birth (in this case resurrection) of every musical messiah from Scott Joplin to DJ Scott La Rock. Yippies, yuppies, hip-hoppers, and pill poppers gathered on the stairs of Saint Matthias church and shared joints and stories. In the center of the plaza, next to the marble likeness of the patron saint of alcoholism, an unkempt beat junkie of about sixteen pressed a set of headphones tightly against his skull. Red eyed and wired, I knew the look — he was a DJ. A fledging turntablist subsumed by melody. Strung out on overdub. Trying with all his might to prevent even a single hertz of sound from escaping his purview.

Although he didn’t have a deadline to meet, Lars took notes out of habit. His notations were bare-boned, mostly one- or two-word phrases in German and misspelled English. A young Arab woman wearing a head scarf and a black Stooges T-shirt moonwalked past us. She glided over to her friends, locked eyes with a white dude in a Yankees cap, and started pop locking. After a medley of double-jointed moves, she laid hands on the boy’s head and, like a healing evangelist, passed the energy to him. The boy broke out into a spasmodic shock of electric boogie. Pressing down hard with his pen, Lars wrote “Dali-esk.”

“Is this a crowd, a mob, or a throng?” he asked.

I’m used to his questions about the subtleties of the English language substituting for real conversation. “Which is more, some or a few? When someone tells you they are happy to find you safe and sound, what does sound mean? To express the indirect object of an action do you use an objective pronoun directly after the verb, or a prepositional phrase?”

“I’d say it’s a throng.”

“Why not a mob?”

“In English you label groups of people by their moral intentions and collective needs. A mob tries to convince itself it’s right and needs to prove it. A crowd knows it’s right because if it weren’t right, they would all need to be someplace else. A throng doesn’t give a fuck about moral imperatives, it just wants and needs something to happen.”

Most of those folks were there thanks to Lars’s efforts. I imagine the scene wasn’t much different along the old Wall’s borders. In light of all the hoopla around the Berlin Wall of Sound, his interview with the Schwa had been reprinted in Der Spiegel, and suddenly the rediscovery of Charles Stone was akin to the unearthing of the Delta blues musicians in the mid-sixties or Dr. Leakey finding a heretofore theorized hominid species. To many, the Schwa, like Muddy Waters, Mance Lipscomb, and Ötzi the five-thousand-year-old iceman found in an Alpine glacier, was a well-preserved mummy, a music primitive seemingly unspoiled by commercialism and modernity. Lars was the musical paleontologist and I his pickax-wielding native assistant. I didn’t mind that he garnered the fame and the credit; all I wanted from the Schwa was a song. He wanted answers. He wanted to test his DNA and carbon-date his instrument so he could theorize about when and how exactly blackness became passé.

Lars removed a pack of Drum tobacco from his pocket. The crinkling pouch reminded me of the radio static in the days when radio KROQ was good. Me and DJ Blaze parked on the Malibu bluffs at dusk ruining our minds with Thai stick and Jane’s Addiction.

Exhaling a measured plume of cigarette smoke, Lars jotted down the word Throng in his notebook. The gathering was indeed a throng, and depending on how the night went, the shit could’ve ended in melee or orgy. In either case I figured I’d need some energy, so I decided to buy a sandwich from the peddler. He pushed me to buy a rose in addition to the sandwich, and he almost had me, but I couldn’t figure out, Who do you give a rose to at an orgy? Your first fuck or your last?

As we shouldered our way inside, Lars pointed out the cables worming through window transoms and under doorjambs. “That one’s for the international radio simulcast. .DAT recording. . check this out. .” He flicked some lever and a matchbox-sized switch box attached to an electrical cord quietly descended from the ceiling.

“When Stone presses that red button, the Berlin Wall of Sound will come to life.”

I wasn’t worried about the audiovisual technology. I’d long gotten used to the fact that in this country everything works. The vending machines never shortchange you, the pay phones unfailingly deliver that tinnitus-inducing European dial tone, and the suction of the vacuum cleaners is so powerful that vacuuming the living room throw rug gives one the same don’t-fuck-with-me rush as filling a human silhouette with bullet holes at the gun range. Charles Stone, on the other hand, was about as reliable as an American bank pen.

I scanned the crowd. Though the Schwa wasn’t among them, most of the faces were all too familiar, and I became overwhelmed with heart-searing guilt. Local musicians, tavern owners, regulars, bartenders, and groupies, I owed nearly every single person in the room something, various combinations of money, return phone calls, apologies, and my life. In today’s Germany the interpersonal bridges don’t burn as easily as those that spanned the Rhine in 1944; the more selfish my actions, the more irascible my behavior, the more those people were drawn to me.

Many of my past one-night stands were there, and Ute, Astrid, and Silke, women whom I’d forgotten even existed, all stared at me as if I’d just gotten out of prison. Bernadette, Karin, Petra, Ulrike — those women were heiresses, herbalists, radio engineers, bookbinders, milliners, but I’d treated them like gun molls. Day after day I swore at them and swore myself off them. Only to return to their arms, a pussy recidivist doomed to repeat my crimes.

I didn’t have time for the guilt.

I only had time to blow air kisses and whispered witticisms.

“Where’s Stone?”

Lars lifted his chin toward the back. There, perched above us, on the thickest branch of the banana tree, was the God of Improvisation. The sight and twisted symbolism of a black genius in a banana tree unnerved me, but I understood why he was up there — the mental Lebensraum. Sometimes you have to elevate yourself above the fray; bananas, monkey inferences, and misappropriated Nazi terminology be damned.

He was talking to a reporter, shyly fiddling with his cuff links and addressing his shoes. I couldn’t hear the conversation over the murmur and the Rahsaan Roland Kirk blaring from the jukebox.

“What do you think they’re talking about?”

Lars dubbed the dialogue in the affected pitchy drawl particular to the black thinking man. “Rothko. . harmonic translucency. . Gerhard Richter, right, right, chromatic color fields. . exactly. .”

Stone looked ashen, shell-shocked. There was even more of a paranoid bulge to his eyes than usual. Between questions he blinked at me with the deliberateness of a POW trying to convey some coded message to the boys back at the command center. Not sure if he was looking at me or past me, I wavered between soul-brother salutations — a light thump of my fist to my heart or the chin-up nod — finally settling on a discreet peace sign.

“. . Leibniz. . an alphabet of thought…”

I imagined that Stone, like any guest of honor, wanted to arrive fashionably late, avoid the hoopla, but the pro forma punctuality of the German transportation system wouldn’t let him. That’s one of the drawbacks of German reliability: There are no excuses, and that’s half the fun of being black, the excuses. The negative attention.

“Pollock…linear harmony. . visceral pointillism. .” Lars was on a roll. “I’ve interviewed a hundred jazz musicians, and every time I ask them, ‘What are your influences, Mr. Blackman?’ they come back with the same impress-the-white-boy-with-white-boys shit — Rothko, Bartók, Pollock, John Cage.”

Lars looked at me expecting an answer, but I couldn’t tell him the other half of the fun in being black is name-dropping Rothko and Liebniz in an interview. Crediting abstract impressionism and the stoics as the biggest influences on your avant-garde art, and not your two tours as a machine gunner in the army, Muhammad Ali, or the white ingenue (aren’t they all) who broke your heart by choosing economic stability over eight and three-quarter inches of dick.

“What’s he talking about now?”

“Heidegger.”

“Heidegger?”

“Heidegger, nigger!” Lars shouted, jokingly snapping out a fascist salute that guilt lowered almost immediately.

“Wow, that’s the first time I ever did that.”

“Yeah, the first time out of uniform.”

“We start after the song’s over, okay?” With that Lars withdrew to the bar, leaving me to my thoughts and the Roland Kirk.

At the moment, I needed Rahsaan Roland Kirk more than Ronald Reagan and Eazy-E had needed their ghostwriters. Kirk, as is his recalcitrant wont, was blindly misbehaving like a country cousin at the Thanksgiving dinner table, chewing with his mouth full. I shut my eyes and concentrated on his blowing. Stritch, tenor, and manzello, he played three saxophones at once, somehow braiding each instrument’s distinct timbre into one tensile melody. Rather than playing his notes, he played with his notes; chewing and gnawing on them until they were sweetened bubblegum chaws that he pulled pink and sticky from his horns, then reeled back in just to chomp on it and start the process all over again. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was telling me to relax. Letting me know that it’s okay to misbehave. Perfectly fine to once in a while play with your food, your blackness, and your craft. It was a message I needed to hear, especially since when the song ended I was going to have to introduce the Schwa, in all his musical rudeness, to the world.

Introductions are a serious matter, the import of which I think only the Mafia truly understands. In the criminal underworld there are consequences to expanding the sewing circle. You introduce somebody to the family and your goombah from the neighborhood turns out to be a fuck-up or an undercover cop, you’re held responsible, and the person who vouched for you is held responsible for your transgression, and so on down the line. I feel the same way about music: Problem is, there are no repercussions. Some irresponsible uncle drags you to a GBH concert at the Roxy before you’re ready and it’s like going on a bad acid trip. You’re never quite the same. Yet given all my misgivings about making an introduction, I insisted on being the one to introduce the Schwa to the world and I was willing to assume full responsibility for what ensued.

I had prepared by studying all the great emcees. Brave toast-masters like Symphony Sid, whose houndstooth-sport-jacketed “Oh, man, daddy-o” afternoon-radio equipoise ushered in the swing era. I sat up nights staring at album covers and lip-syncing Pee-Wee Marquette’s slurring, whiskey-breathed “Welcome to the Birdland” castrato. I thought that these masters of ceremonies would inspire me, but when I sat down to write my intro, nothing past the mundane came to mind; lots of words that start with in- and ended in — able: in-domit-able, in-defatig-able, indubit-able, and I swear I took my hand off the pen and, like a player piano mechanically reproducing a hokey Bourbon Street rag, it scribbled out, “Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction. .” If anybody ever needed an introduction, it was the Schwa.

I had half a notion to reverse protocol and introduce the audience to the band. Clear my throat and say, “Over-rehearsed and underpaid musicians, allow me to present your fawning fan base. Charles Stone and members of the band, I give you the last group of people on earth with an attention span — the free-jazz audience.”

I finally phoned the Schwa and asked him how he wanted to be introduced.

He simply said, “In German.”

His answer surprised me because I’d never heard him speak a lick of German. He was the stereotypical lazy expatriate for whom German is a dour, unnecessarily serious language. He feels life is morose enough without the mooing umlauts and throat-irritating diphthongs. Even though I knew better, I asked him politely if he spoke German.

“Thirty-some-odd years,” he said proudly, “thirty-some-odd years I’ve lived in this country, and all I can say in German is, ‘Kann ich reinspritzen?’ Can I come inside you? What can I say, man? The language just don’t taste right in my mouth.”

He had managed to offend what few sensibilities I have, and I was about to hang up the phone when his voice sputtered through the receiver. “Wait, I can say something else,” he said in an excited pant, “‘Kann ich in Ihnen kommen?’ May I come inside you, woman whom I don’t know well enough to address in the informal variant of you?”

“If you don’t speak German, why do you want me to introduce you in German?”

“So I don’t understand the fucking lies.”

“Lies?”

“Are you going to say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce Charles Stone, an old, persnickety, impotent everyday-except-Thursday, muscatel-in-a-plastic-cup-at-four-in-the-afternoon-drinking motherfucker. Let’s give him a warm welcome and hope this jazz dinosaur completes the set before he dies’? No, you’re not. So whatever you say, say it in German. Bullshit sounds good in German.”

He was right, bullshit does sound good in German. In any of the dialects high, low, middlebrow, or guest worker, I can never tell if a person is lying. Come to think of it, I never even suspect them of lying. I think it started with the cigarettes and Günter Grass, but more so the cigarettes. I never had much of a habit, a pack a week, pack and a half if I was waiting on the results of an HIV test, but as my German improved I began reading The Tin Drum, The Rat, and the cigarette warnings on my Marlboro boxes. The print was the size of a newspaper headline and just as starkly worded: SMOKERS DIE EARLIER, SMOKING DAMAGES THE SPERM AND DECREASES FERTILITY, SMOKING IS A SIGN OF LOW SELF-ESTEEM, FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY, AND IS SCIENTIFICALLY LINKED WITH GROUP THINK AND MOB VIOLENCE. There was none of the microscopic wishy-washy wording of the American warning labels. No “may causes” or “might lead tos.” Gradually I stopped smoking and began to believe everything I read and heard as long as it was in German or the New York Times (a paper printed in a font that looks suspiciously like German). However, agreeing to introduce him in German didn’t solve all my problems. I still didn’t know what to say.

It’s no accident that I’m a DJ: I’m a copycat at heart, and as a plagiarist of rhythm I need a source. Someone else’s idea that I can cut and paste into an “original” creation, but I couldn’t translate Alan Freed, Funkmaster Flex, or Symphony Sid — there’s no words for daddy-o or fresh new joint in German. I tried to think of a German impresario and could come up with only one name. Ruldolf Hess, the master of ceremonies for the master race. His signature line echoed in my head. “Hitler ist Deutschland! Deutschland ist Hitler!”

I winced, yet with a little alteration and less flying spittle it’d make a fine closing statement. I’d be paraphrasing the Third Reich’s publicity agent, who himself was only paraphrasing Keats.* I’m rationalizing, I know, but I take some comfort in the fact that humanity is united by its latent fascism, and that is as true now as it ever was and will ever be.

I stepped in close to the microphone, enjoying the sensuous tease of the cold crosshatched steel on my lips. Nothing sounds as believable as little white lies told in amplified German.

“Ich bin sehr stolz, jetzt den Star unserer Show zu präsentieren. Sein Klang ist der Klang des Jazz, der Klang der Freiheit — ein Klang, der nicht zu imitieren ist, die durch hundert berühmte Platten in aller Welt bekannt geworden ist. Er wird von Uli Effenberg am Piano, Yong Sook Rhee an der trompete, Sandra Irrawaddy, Soulemané Eshun, und Willy Wow begleitet. Meine Damen und Herren — Charles Stone ist jazz. Jazz ist Charles Stone.”

The applause was gracious, warm, and buoyant, and though it wasn’t mine to bask in, I stepped off the stage and waded into it,letting the clapping and huzzahs lap at my body in small, exuberant waves. The lies were nothing serious, exaggerations of opinion more than falsehoods. What I said was, “He’s the sound of jazz, the sound of freedom, a sound that cannot be imitated, that has become known worldwide through a hundred celebrated records. With Uli Effenberg on piano, Yong Sook Rhee on saxophone, Sandra Irrawaddy, Soulemané Eshun, and Willy Wow accompanying. Ladies and gentlemen — Charles Stone is jazz. Jazz is Charles Stone.” Okay, the “hundred celebrated records” was an outright lie. And, I confess, I cribbed the intro from Leonard Feather’s 1954 introduction of Billie Holiday to Cologne.

The Schwa took the stage before an audience as still as a herd of antelope who’d caught a predator’s scent. It was that rare absolute stillness that occurs only after accidentally breaking a neighbor’s window, shooting your best friend in the belly, or before the creation of the universe. And having busted many a window, witnessed a shooting or two, and created more than a few mix-tape universes in my day, I knew that that preternatural silence is usually momentary and often followed by earsplitting frenzy. So as a man haunted by a lifetime of sound, the silence was a condition to be cherished, held onto, and appreciated the way an overwrought mother appreciates a sleeping baby.

The band had been onstage for more than ten minutes and hadn’t played a solitary note. Thus far the concert consisted of the star attraction Marcel Marceau-ing across the stage in his socks. I didn’t care if the quiet was stupefied awe for his tipsy traffic-cop Butoh minuets or impatient politeness for his double-jointed Thai stripper contortions. This was as close to the tranquility of deafness as I would ever get. For the first time in my life I’d forgotten my sonic past. My head hushed as the eighteen minutes of erased Watergate tape played in deep space. It was the blissful quietude of being buried alive in cotton. An indelible nothingness I would remember for the rest of my life.

The Schwa’s body began its physical decrescendo. He weaved across the stage like a concussed Movietone stooge slowly regaining his slapstick equilibrium after a blow to the head. He stepped back into his oxfords as if they were bedroom slippers and shuffled to center stage. From the back of the room a cry went up. The skinheads, led by Thorsten, whooped and stomped their feet in appreciation because the silence had finally broken. I turned on my digital recorder. In the gradually dimming room the red recording light glimmered like a distant star in a pitch-black universe.

The Schwa pressed the red button and it was, World, meet Charles Stone. Charles Stone, World. How do you do? Nice to meet you. It’s a pleasure.

The Listening Experience

Defying all the laws of acoustics and containing only the barest characteristics of tonality and melody, the Schwa’s sound was music in the sense that prison gruel is food. The opening composition, a dirge deluge entitled “Fatima,” was a profane flash flood of auditory tyranny that hurtled downhill with such force it literally knocked me off my feet. I felt like I was listening to a family of hillbillies reading Philip Roth aloud in a backwoods mountain hollow; each movement an endless filibuster so dense and pedantic that any one speaker, one paragraph, one instrument became indistinguishable from another.

As I struggled to stay afloat, I wondered how the lay listeners on the outside were coping with the free-jazz tsunami. I imagined a scene quite similar to the one that opened 2001: A Space Odyssey—the Berlin primordials, in the ill-fitting monkey suits of the day, growling and bounding around the unwelcome-sound monolith. It’d be chaos until one brave soul reached out to touch the wall; then there’d be change. Fundamental no-turning-back change.

There’s an old Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” So I picked myself up off the floor — fought back against this torrential downpour of pig calls and tuba bellows by going back to basics. Desperately I tried to wrap my mind around the drumming, but Irrawaddy went into this flimflam paradiddle sextuple ratatap, and the tenuous grip I had on sanity and the tune were broken. Thirty more seconds of her impeccable drum work caused my ego to slide off an inverted ratamacue in the obstinato voice as if it were a wet, slippery, moss-covered river rock in an Appalachian class-five rapid. Barely able to keep my head above water, I gave myself up to the current. Surrendered to the sound, waiting, praying, for the next eddy of cacophony to pick me up, smash my head against the rocks, and put an end to my misery. However, floating among the flotsam of brassy detritus, rushing past my ears — a simple elongated note. A distant overhead trumpet screed that had more in common with the ominous drone of a B-52 flying at twenty-five thousand feet than it did with jazz.

I latched onto this heaven-sent piece of Acadian driftwood, but it wasn’t heavy enough to support me. Another wave of dia-tonic chords, and I was resubmerged in the horn section’s slip-stream. Too tired to surrender, I decided to just sit there on the floor until the storm subsided. Knowing that in the morning the authorities would find my bloated, improvisation-logged body on the Slumberland floor buried under alluvial layers of sedimentary jazzbo. From behind, just as I had given up all hope, a suntanned-lifeguard-brown arm wrapped itself across my chest and dragged me to the river’s edge. Backs against the wall, we slumped to the floor. The hand tapped a beat on my heart. Doomp-doomp tshk da-doomp-doomp tshk doomp-doomp tshk. . And there it was, a sardonic sonic pun buried beneath the pounding piano, the keening horns and the epileptic bass line: The violinist quietly quoting Eric B. and Rakim’s “My Melody” was the melody. Doomp-doomp tshk da-doomp-doomp tshk doompdoomp tshk. . Her hand still tapping my chest, Klaudia von Robinson and I headed back out into the rushing waters, determined to ford the unfordable.

CHAPTER 5

YOU KNOW HOW when a soprano hits that note and the wineglass breaks? The Schwa’s music does that, except instead of breaking glass, it shatters time. Stops time, really.

Whenever I hear about a method of time travel that involves wormholes, flux capacitors, or cosmic strings and no music I’m not impressed. If there is such a thing as a vehicle for time travel it’s music: Ask any brokenhearted Luther Vandross fan.

I used to be obsessed with stoppages in time. Whenever I saw the dog acting funny, I’d think he was forecasting an earthquake. So I’d run inside and set the kitchen clock precariously on the nail nubbin, so that when the big one hit, our fractured family clock would join the famous timepieces stopped by cataclysms, like the frozen wall clock from the Great Alaska Earthquake and the smashed Waiakea town square clock lying in the rubbled aftermath of the 1960 tsunami. In high school I was an above-average athlete who rarely saw the field of play because I’d call time-out for no reason other than to see the scoreboard clock come to a halt. Every spring and fall at the onset of daylight savings time I’d call the time, hoping to hear time stop and repeat itself. In L.A. the number was 264-1234; three hollow rings, and the time would answer. The time was a woman. A husky-voiced female who got straight to the point: “At the sound of the tone, the time will be eleven thirty-three p.m. and ten seconds.” Beep. No hello or nothing. “At the sound of the tone. .” Man, I miss her. With the Schwa’s band tearing a hole in the space-time-music continuum, I felt like calling the time right then and there. Press the receiver to my ear so I could hear her say, “At the sound of the tone the American Negro will be passé, and I for one couldn’t be happier.” Beep.

When the Schwa called me onstage for the encore, I somnambulantly approached the bandstand. The carnage was everywhere. It was as if some suicide sound bomber had detonated his explosive belt in the middle of the room. People, seats, and sensibilities were scattered about the room. Though the band had stopped playing, the music still rang in everyone’s ears. The audience still tumbled and swayed in the eerie disharmony of a North Korean gymnastics troupe celebrating May Day on acid and half rations. In the darkness I found myself stepping over prostrate bodies and bumping aside zombified audience members. The Schwa’s set had blown minds, and all that remained was the smithereens of a pre-Schwa, post-commercial consciousness.

I took my place behind the turntables, my hands shaking so uncontrollably I could barely put the record on the spindle.

“PTSD!” someone shouted.

A peal of laughter rippled the room. They were right, of course; we were all indeed suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. My case being especially acute because I had to follow in the Schwa’s brilliant wake. To ease my nerves I did what we all do in times of crisis: I turned to the cliché. Peering through the darkness into the packed house, I imagined the audience naked, but in this case the old adage was of no help because half the audience really was naked. In back of the room couples clung to each other in the infamous Yoko-and-John-Lennon Rolling Stone pose. A conga line of streakers, including Thorsten and Nordica, molted from their clothes and deliriously snaked their way through the audience. A man stood at the front of the bandstand wincing as he pulled the hair from his nipples. The sympathetic African sandwich peddler gave him a rose and a hug.

Cuff links sparkling in the spotlight, Stone raised his arms and hushed the crowd.

“On those days when I wake up realizing my life has been lived in vain, I come here to the Slumberland. Let me rephrase that: I never knew my life had been lived in vain until I came to the Slumberland and heard that jukebox.”

“Die größte Jukebox in der Welt!” someone, who sounded suspiciously like Klaudia, shouted.

From its corner the jukebox flashed and flickered its lights in appreciation.

“This is a man who’s turned the jukebox into a modern-day oracle. You put your money in the slot and Bill Withers answers a question you didn’t think you had, Aretha Franklin distills advice you didn’t think you needed, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers predict your future. He’s a man who’s synthesized every sound ever heard and every feeling ever felt. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…”

He never finished his sentence. He’d forgotten my name, hoping “the look” would suffice as an apology for his mental lapse and my anonymity.

“The look” sufficed. I’d waited all my life for someone to give me that look. The look Duke gave Johnny Hodges. Bob Marley gave Peter Tosh. George Clinton gave Bootsy. Benny Goodman gave Charlie Christian. Billie Holiday gave Lester Young. Chuck D gave Flavor Flav. Alvin gave the Chipmunks. The look that said, “Do your thing, motherfucker.”

I didn’t mince music. I slapped the crossfader and hit them straight with the beat. No grease. The room went reverential. Folks sat down and listened with the rapt attentiveness of campers hearing their first fireside ghost story. Those on the outside pressed their regretful faces against the windows and the skylight. I knew, somewhere, my boy Blaze was listening in on the international feed, clapping his hands and nodding his head. “Oh, hell yes. It’s about time, fool.”

I was scared. Scared that I would die before we finished. I wanted time to stop but not forever.

The Schwa was frightened too. Even though he’d been expecting a miracle, he wasn’t quite ready for the thoroughness of the boom. His hands shook. He was faltering, unsure of himself. It was then I shot him the look. Do your thing, motherfucker.

The Schwa leapt onto the track. Tackling and attempting to subdue his instrument as if it were a wild swamp gator roused from a deep, satisfying sleep. The first note he hit was pure paterfamilias. Its sound wave so concussive it flapped my clothes, shook the walls, and caused one audience member to exclaim, “Yes, Father?”

If you ever attend a poetry or jazz workshop to learn the mystical art of improvisation, invariably the instructor will say to you, “First thought, best thought.” It’s a faux-Buddhist axiom that has led to nothing more than some wildly uneven Beat literature and some shaky second-half play calling by the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl XIV, but it sounds good. Personally, I never believed in improvisation. Listen to any cat freestyle or solo — Dizzy, Biggie, Bessie, or Ashbery — they’re not playing the way they want to play, they’re trying to play the way they want to play. No one ever sounded exactly the way they wanted to sound. But that night the Schwa convinced me otherwise. Without trying, he played exactly the way he wanted to play, and when I say he wasn’t trying, I don’t mean he wasn’t putting forth any effort, I mean there was no pretense. He simply played his ass off, blessing my beat with brilliant new neo-bop and retro-cool interstices that filled voids both musical and spiritual.

In the advanced poetry and jazz-improvisation workshop the instructor will invariably say, “Don’t think. If you think, you’re dead.” Of course, it’s the obverse that’s really true. If you’re not thinking, you’re dead, and I didn’t need to look at the Schwa’s knitted brow and gritted countenance to know that Charles Stone was deep in thought. I just had to listen.

He was switching up the tempo. Segueing from a frenzied fortissimo to a languid legato by quoting from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro national anthem. It’s a beautiful yet trepidatious song, and especially so in his hands. Musical mason that he was, the Schwa erected a series of African-American landmarks upon the foundation I had laid down. The contrapuntal effect of our discordant architectural styles meshed together wonderfully. One moment the beat was a towering black obelisk, the next it was an ebony-walled Taj Mahal. The music was so uniquely majestic I felt like stepping outside of the song. A dis-embodied DJ floating out into the audience, putting a proud arm around his unborn child, and saying, “See that song? Hear that music? Daddy helped build that.”

Despite the tune’s genius, in my mental landscape where blackness is passé, his quoting the Negro national anthem was a blatant violation of the zoning laws. By constructing a new black Berlin Wall in both my head and the city, he was asking me to improvise. Prodding me to tap out an unpremeditated beat on the drum pads, compress the bass line, and add some shama lama ding-dong to the groove. He was daring me to be “black.”

But blackness is and forever will be passé and I held my compositional ground, hit my presets, and leaned on my turntables, furiously scratching the coda. The audience roared and shouted for more. Hands so sweaty that my slippery fingers had trouble staying on the vinyl, I continued to scratch, lacing the beat with a dense, undulating buzz that I cribbed from a nest of agitated hornets I found during a late-night stroll along the Spree.

I shall not be moved

Like a tree that’s planted by the water

I shall not be moved

Forced to relent to my racial and turntable obstinacy, the Schwa deconstructed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by laying out like a suicidal Acapulco cliff diver who could give a fuck about timing the tide. He paused, then took a deep breath and cannonballed into his own tune, unleashing a voluminous splashing salvo of triplets that shattered and scattered the song into a wave of quarter, half, whole notes that fluttered to the floor in wet, black, globular droplets.

My beat parfait complete, I leaned into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charles Stone. Thanks for coming out, drive home safely, and remember, ‘All art is propaganda.’ ”

Each of us exhausted and covered in sweat, the Schwa and I met at center stage. Over those past two and a half minutes we’d spilled more inner secrets than Anna Freud and Deep Throat combined, but having been in Germany too long and deeply influenced by a country where one has two or three friends and everyone else in your life is an acquaintance, we didn’t know whether to hug, shake hands, or kiss.

From outside I could hear police sirens blare and kids, amped up on caffeine drinks and our extraordinarily powerful encore, jumping on cars and setting fires. It wasn’t a case of the devil’s music spurring the youth to act a fool. It’s not rock ’n’ roll or hip-hop that’s to blame: After all, Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici set off the Belgian Revolution, and long before the Paris rap riots, a wolf pack of rich old ladies went absolutely buck wild on the Champ-Élysées following the debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It’s the touch of sound. Sound is touch and nothing touches you like good, really good, music. It’s like being masturbated by the hand of God. Having the siroccos cooing softly into your ear. It’s Mama’s lullaby gently stroking the neurons in your auditory cortex.

The cops were getting closer and Doris tried to hurry us outside before we would get arrested. The Schwa gripped me by the shoulders like a man trying to be fatherly and keep his distance at the same time. Our conversation was short and sweet.

“Thanks, man,” we mumbled to each other.

“No, really,” he said, “the wall, the concert, Fatima, I want you to know. . you know.”

“Yeah, man, likewise.”

“Beautiful.”

“Say, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, go ’head.”

“During that last solo, what were you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about the phrase on the banner, ‘Black Passé.’

How being passé is freedom. You can do what you want. No demands. No expectations. The only person I have to please is myself.”

“You’ll never be passé.”

“Shit, you keep spinning like that and neither will you.”

“I don’t know about that. To be passé you have to have been happening at some point in time, and I never was nor never will be happening.”

The Schwa laughed. Doris finally got us outside. Burning cars filled the streets. People crowded around the Schwa and begged for his autograph. Behind him I could see the towheaded boy who years ago had written “Ausländer Raus!” on the dewy Slum-berland window standing in a circle of Sudanese skateboarders. A flash of light and the circle parted, leaving the white kid standing there holding a Molotov cocktail. He tossed it into the church plaza, then stood there transfixed by the spreading flames.

“Lauf!” I shouted at him. Run!

Tyrus, the Slumberland librarian, came out of nowhere, shaking me by the elbow. I expected him to give me a book. And I wanted a book. I needed a gratuitous, multigenerational tale of colored-people woe that would assure the white reader and the aspiring-to-be white reader that everything would be okay despite the preponderance of evidence that nothing is ever okay.

“Dude, do you know what you’ve done?”

“Huh?”

“You’ve turned this motherfucker out. Permanently fucked shit up. Shit is no longer okay, but that’s a good thing.”

“Huh?”

Sensing my confusion, Lars handed me a tampon soaked in absinthe. In the middle of Goltzstrasse I dropped trou, and in the greatest act of love since Juliet tried to drink Romeo’s hemlock backwash, Klaudia took the cottony dagger and rammed it up my ass, thusly. Thank goodness for the gentle-glide design.

The wormwood buzz kicked in immediately, and for the rest of the night any conversation was subtitled in bright pink-and-green variety-show Japanese.

And that was most definitely okay by me.