Slumberland

EPILOGUE TO THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY

THEY SAY THE Schwa’s wall sounds different depending upon which side you’re standing on. Experienced from the west, the replay of the concert invokes the West Berlin of thirty years ago. It gives the city a sense of the old intimacy that once made it so special. Standing on that side of the wall the music makes you feel safe. It’s the sound of inspiration, encouragement, and hope. On the other hand, if you walk ten meters east, the same music stirs up a different set of emotions. You’re overcome by a power-ballad wistfulness that leaves one reflecting upon how far the city and its citizens have come. In contrast to those on the west who take from the wall, listeners on the eastern side are moved to give of themselves. They treat this wailing wall like a musical temple. Prayers hang on nearby trees. The ground around the wall is wreathed and strewn with offerings ranging from photos of missing relatives to antiquated East German appliances like the RG-28 Mixing Device.* That’s been the wall’s impact on the city. At least until the speakers get shorted out by the rain and snow, and Christo or some other installation artist decides to dye the Spree river orange and wrap the Reichstag in flypaper.

Apparently my perfect beat has had a far less reverberatory effect. Not that I expected much, though an instant Grammy airmailed to my bedside would’ve been a good start. Is a call from the U.N. secretary-general asking if it’d be okay to commission my track as the anthem for planet Earth too much to ask? A show of appreciation from the sick and crippled children who were healed by the curative powers of my creative cut mastery would’ve been nice. Shit, it was only the day before yesterday that I transformed modern music from this very bar, and no one’s even bought me a drink. I bought my first drink tonight. I’m not buying another.

Doris and Tyrus slip into my side of the booth, squeezing me against the wall, crashing my pity party without so much as putting a three-mark beer on the table. Tyrus can’t contain his excitement. He’s flapping a Guggenheim Fellowship check in my face and insisting that I’m the only one who can do justice to his new musical.

“What’s it called?”

“Real Recognizes Real. It’s a one-man performance piece about an African-American expat from Los Angeles who returns from Germany with the perfect specimen of white womanhood in tow, a blonde Saxon named the Venus Hot-to-Trot. He and Venus tour the chicken ‘n’ waffle circuit charging sexually frustrated black men to touch her corporeal peculiarity, a completely flat ass. A condition the scientists refer to as noshapeatallpygia.”

“I’ll think about it,” I lie. I’d never score anything titled with black street vernacular. But it’s the only compliment I’ve gotten, so I’ll placate for now. Surely if I string him along long enough there’s a beer or two to be had.

“Hey, we went by the wall today. Sat there for two hours and never heard your beat. What’s up with that?”

“I erased it from the loop. I didn’t want my beat to be just another brick in his wall.”

“So where is it?”

“It’s on top of my refrigerator.”

Doris says nothing. She knows the space atop my icebox is where I keep my most precious valuables. I’d put my dreams up there if I could. Silently she hands me two pieces of paper. One a telegram from DJ Blaze that just says, “NIGGER!”* The other a long list of musicians who’d called the bar asking to get in touch with me. The list smells strangely familiar. I hold it to my nose.

“Your…”

She winks.

Now Lars hurtles himself into the booth. “Black is back, baby!”

Groan.

“Don’t you want to be relevant?”

“No way. Who needs the fucking pressure?”

“That’s the beautiful thing about you people. You stay bitter. I bet when Martin Luther King Junior got on his first integrated bus, he said, ‘C’mon, can’t you make this motherfucker go any faster?’ ”

Thanks to my misguided efforts, blackness is back. The Schwa’s musical munificence hadn’t rendered blackness irrelevant, only darkened it in even further. They say fifty is the new thirty. Iraq is the new Vietnam. Gin is the new vodka. Now that black is the new black, Lars had plans. Big plans.

He’d already conspired with a major computer manufacturer to take the Schwa on a concert tour of cities with a history of being bisected by walls. Tentative dates had already been scheduled in Jerusalem, Baghdad, Belfast, and the Calexico-Mexicali border. The Schwa would play a series of cutting contests against the company’s latest showpiece, Deep Blues. A jazz-playing computer that rumor has it has already beaten Wynton Marsalis three jams to none.

In comparison, my itinerary is rather limited. Apparently I’m booked to appear on Wetten, dass. .?, a German game show whose title best translates as Attention-Starved People with No Discernible Talents Doing Seemingly Amazing Things. I love that show and it’s easy to imagine the prime time course of events.

I’ll be pitted against a man who claims he can distinguish between brands of mineral water from how the carbonation bubbles settle on a spoon placed inside the glass. He can’t. Next week I’ll best a crane operator who brags that while standing in a dark room he can identify any car made after 1978 simply by the brightness and layout of its headlights and the blinking pattern of its left turn signal. He can, but no one will care. Then, in a long-awaited semifinal showdown, I’ll embarrass a blind girl from Bremerhaven who insists she has the ability to identify any bird indigenous to continental Europe by touching a single tail feather. The sympathy vote will be hers until her delicate finger-tips betray her on the plumage of the Bulgarian blue-breasted swamphen.

Undefeated and unbowed, I’ll face Karl-Heinz Schmidt, a telemarketer from Cologne who can identify the color of a colored pencil by taste. Going first, I’ll dutifully impress the judges and studio audience to no end with my phonographic recall. “That’s a McDonald’s straw being inserted into a vanilla shake. . a video gamer vanquishing a turtle, capturing a star, and eating a large polka-dotted mushroom in world one, level three of Super Mario Brothers…one more time, please. . Norma Desmond sashaying down the stairs on the way to her close-up. . that’s the sound of the other shoe finally dropping, and yes, that’s my final answer.”

Blindfolded, Karl-Heinz will then take center stage to a live orchestral accompaniment of Boléro. The host will hold up a sharpened brown pencil for all to see, and as Boléro’s insidious melody shifts from the flutes to the piccolos, he’ll doodle on our savant’s lumpy, outstretched tongue. There’ll be lots of wet lip smacking as if our star were tasting a delicate fine wine, then a dramatic pause and a ventured guess: “Burnt Sienna?”

“Unglaublich!”

Germany will be flabbergasted. Ravel’s oboes shall sing out in celebration. He’ll cleanse his palate, and as the melody increases in intensity the host will switch pencils and scribble.

French horns.

“Dark Gray.”

Correct.

Bass clarinet.

“Moss Green.”

Correct.

Bassoon. “Turquoise Blue.”

Correct.

Violas.

“Light Malachite Green.”

Correct.

It’ll be an amazing display, no doubt, yet it’ll still be anybody’s game until the host simply places a pencil under Karl-Heinz’s nose. He’ll take two deep hound-dog sniffs and in perfect synchronization with Boléro’s crescendo, correctly proclaim the color to be Salmon Pink.

* * *

Still no one has offered to buy me a beer. I’d buy one myself, but it’d be like giving myself a surprise birthday party by turning out the bathroom lights, flicking them back on, and yelling, “Surprise!” in the mirror.

Look at Klaudia, her judo bag slung over her shoulder, kicking up sand and smiling that sheepish we-have-to-talk smile. I’m already imagining our post-breakup encounters. When most couples stop fucking they meet for tea and pretend to be happy with one another’s successes or content with the lack thereof. Our run-ins will be more spontaneous. They’ll be attempted robberies and sexual assaults that’ll take place in darkened stairwells and twenty-four-hour Laundromats. Frame-by-frame surprise attacks straight out of the self-defense textbooks. I’ll have to brace myself for a lifetime of pellet guns pressed to the small of my back and kitchen knives to the gullet.

True to form, Klaudia grabs my wrist in a gonorrhea-piss-painful hold and climbs atop the table, pulling me up behind her.

I hadn’t noticed how crowded the bar had gotten.

Even Thomas, the place’s absentee owner, whom I hadn’t seen since he handed me the keys to the place, was there. Catching his eye, I tip an invisible glass to my lips, the universal sign for “Can I get a free brew?” He gives me the finger.

Klaudia plants a hard, wet Leonid Brezhnev Bruderkuss on me, flattening my nose into my lips and my lips into my incisors.

“May I have your attentions, please?”

Standing there, unable to avoid the stares, I realize the past thirty minutes of my life have unfolded like an episode of This Is Your Life. I half expect Ms. Belfour, my third-grade teacher, to make an appearance. Young Ferguson was a good student, not a great student.

“Ferguson Sowell, we, the regulars of the Slumberland Bar, in honor of your outstanding service to the arts, culture, and economy of the Slumberland and to the country, are proud to present you with the Order of Karl Marx and this proclamation designating your status as a Verfolgter des Selbstgenuss und Selbstsabotage, or victim of self-indulgence and self-sabotage.” With that she pins the shiny gold medal to my chest and shakes my hand and gives me another Bruderkuss, but I bet Brezhnev never slipped Nixon the tongue.

I finger the likeness of Karl Marx embossed on a red Soviet star and whisper over the applause.

“This thing is solid gold? Where’d you get this?”

She points to the vestibule. There the Stasi chickenfucker stands under the Ausgang sign, sipping a mojito. I’d never noticed the resemblance between him and Klaudia before.

“Is that your. .”

She cuts me off and hands me a coin.

“One last thing. .”

Lars whips a bedsheet off a gleaming, brand-new, state-ofthe-art Wurlitzer 2100 and with a gracious bow bestows upon me the honor of playing the first song. Leaping off the table I pop the coin into the machine, eager to peruse what I’m sure will be a massively wonderful song list. There’s only one selection. 0001 — THE PERFECT BEAT/DJ DARKY.

The song caravans through the room. A young brother whom I’ve never seen before, his gray pullover bearing the imprimatur of Yale University, steps to me with an awkward soulshake.

“Hey, man, I just wanted to tell you your beat’s thrown the entire School of Music into a tizzy.”

“They don’t like it?”

“No, everybody’s blown away. They just can’t agree on what it is.”

We talk briefly about Germany. He’s getting his doctorate in African-American studies and has come to Berlin to do research for his dissertation. “Did you know that seventy percent of scholarship on African-Americans is in German?” I didn’t know that but I’m not surprised. There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it’s impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We’re two insightful peoples constantly looking for reasons to love ourselves; and let’s not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks.

This novitiate doesn’t want to hear this. He wants what all the Negro newbies want, some advice on how to pick up white girls. If he’d only offer to buy me a beer I’d drop pearls of wisdom on him like, “White women with nose rings love black men. A diamond-pierced nostril and you’re in, man.”

I excuse myself and step outside. There’s a line of people waiting to get in so that they can hear the beat. Not a long line, but a line nonetheless.

A stout woman with her auburn hair matted into spiky plaits offers me an unsolicited cigarette, which I accept. If I wanted to I could light it with her stove-flame-blue eyes.

“Have you heard the beat?”

I nod and take a tight-lipped French-resistance drag on the Gauloise.

“Today morning in ethnography class my professor played an African chant, a Negro spiritual, a Robert Johnson ballad, some Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Marvin Gaye, and Kool Moe Dee, and asked the class if we could hear the similarities.”

“Did you?”

“No, except for a few Arschlecker in the front row, no one heard it. But when I hear that beat the other night, I hear all that music and more. I hear my grandmother raking the leaves. I hear a Volkswagen idling. I hear my father cheering Borussia Dortmund. My sister brushing her hair in the morning. I hear Sade. I hear Motown.”

“Naw, no goddamn way. You didn’t hear any Motown. Stax maybe, but not no fucking Motown.”

“Maybe I don’t. But you know what I hear most? I hear America.”

“And the rest of the world trying to sound like America.”

My curiosity got the best of me.

“What of America did you hear in the beat?”

“I’ve been to America. I was fifteen. My family went for a month. I hear the La Brea Tar Pits bubbling and chirps of the New York City subway escalator at Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street. I hear the nothingness blowing through the Mojave Desert Yucca trees. I hear black men on a Cleveland sidewalk, fighting over ten dollars. I hear Mexican deli workers speaking Korean and teasingly calling each other ‘mojados.’ I hear the false optimism in the ring and buzz of an Indian-reservation slot machine. I hear the runoff from Mount Shasta streaming through a bed of pine needles. I hear boiling shabushabu at Fisherman’s Wharf. I hear waves crashing into the Santa Monica pier at midnight under a red crescent moon. I hear my father talking over the tour guide at Universal Studios. ‘Wel-come to [America]! Before we begin, I’d like to remind you of a few rules we’d like you to follow while [in America] today: First, there is no smoking. Please extinguish all smoking materials [and unpatriotic thoughts] immediately. Second, keep children under forty pounds on the inside seats of the tram; some animated attractions [like ethnics and homeless people] can be intense. Keep your arms and legs [and private parts] inside the tram [and your pants] at all times, and do not stand up [or take your wallet out] while the cars [or any black people] are in motion. If you should require assistance at any time during the tour, pull the cord located above the window on either side of the car. [Most likely nothing will happen, but you never know.]’”

“You heard all that?” I ask this kindred spirit of phonographic memory.

She doesn’t answer. Too busy gazing at me with that skin-deep stare I don’t get much anymore. In an old gangster movie it’d be the blank, expressionless look Edward G. Robinson shoots a nosy flatfoot while deciding whether to ice him or not. Here on the streets of Berlin, it’s deciding whether to insult the black guy or not.

I’m expecting an impromptu ethnographic lecture on Orientalism and black infantilism or the standard “Hitler must’ve forgotten about you” rebuke. Instead she stands next to me shoulder to shoulder and measures off the difference in our heights.

“Height… slightly above average.”

Now she takes my chin and yanks it toward the streetlight to get a better view of my complexion.

“Skin color. . luminescent obsidian with a touch of purple.”

Roughly, like a horny sightless woman on a blind date, she begins to knead her heavy friendship-ring-laden fingers into my face. “Leptorrhine nose. . kumquat-headed dolichocephaly. . thin, almost Scandinavian lips, the small conchoidal ears, the pronounced prognathism common to most of the Negroid race. . tufted, no, fleecelike hair. . I bet you’re either from Lagos or Los Angeles. Now, if you show me your penis, I can tell by the size, girth, and curvature what African tribe your male ancestors hail from. It’ll be purely for ethnographic purposes, I assure you.”

Man, these Germans, they either want to fuck you or kill you.

Sometimes both.

Just like everybody else.