Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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She stuffed quarters into the pool table and I bought drinks. I had to shout to make myself heard over the loud, keening, post–Diver Down Van Halen guitar riffs coming out from the rainbow Wurlitzer. “What you drinking, pendeja?” I yelled. Bridgette loved it when I talked dirty to her.
“Dame una vaso de vino, mayate.” And I loved when she called me nigger in her woeful Spanish.
“Red or white, puta? ”
“Rojo, cabrón.”
“Red wine,” I screamed into the bartender’s ear. He shook his head and slammed down two bottles of bum wine, neither of them red or white. I told him to pour the green even though he was pushing the orange.
Whenever I think of Bridgette I think of the sound of her pool breaks. They were molecular and sounded like an introduction to an organic chemistry textbook. I loved to tape-record them. The cue ball flying toward the pyramid of painted ivory neutrinos as if it’d been shot out of a particle accelerator.
Bridgette sank two solids off a clean, wonderfully cold-blooded-sounding break, and as she lined up her next shot, she took her first sip of Chateau du Ghetto. “Who the fuck is the sommelier here—Big Daddy Kane?” she said with a thick tongue and cough-medicine face.
We both laughed, and spent the rest of the evening shooting pool, wondering if green wine was supposed to be served chilled or at alleyway temperature, and cracking corny rotgut jokes.
“When the bartender said, ‘Would you like the house wine,’ I didn’t know he meant crackhouse wine.”
At some point we tired of the classic rock ‘n’ roll thumping from the jukebox. There’s only so much Eric Clapton–bluesy Negro mimicry a person can take, and I made a halfhearted comment about reprogramming the jukebox. “I could be a jukebox sommelier.” I’d never said sommelier before and I liked how the word sounded coming from my mouth. I looked for an excuse to say it again, but Bridgette beat me to the punch.
“You could be a jukebox sommelier,” she suggested in all seriousness. “Nobody ever gives enough thought to what’s on the jukebox. It’s always the same selection, fifty greatest hits CDs, a mediocre Motown anthology, the essential Billy Joel, a mix tape of Top 40 singles from two years ago, two Los Lobos CDs and that fucking Bob Marley album.”
“Legend.”
“That’s it, Legend. My God, the bar scene has made me hate that fucking record. Drunk white boys singing ‘Get Up, Stand Up.’ “
I grabbed a chunk of Bridgette’s ass and eased her out the door.
“You want to go back to my place to hear some good music?” I asked her.
“Not if by good music you mean that classical crap you played for me last time.”
“Come on, you got used to it.”
“That’s the problem, you listen to that shit long enough, you start thinking you’re rich and white. And rich and white is no way to go through life if you happen to be neither.”
Later that night Bridgette Lopez became the first of a notso-select group of women to hear the chicken-fucking song. Back then the ultimate sexual maneuver was to sprinkle cocaine on one’s engorged penis just before penetration. I’ve never done it but the rumored pleasures are boundless, the shared orgasms supposedly more intense and lasting than championship chess. Listening to the chicken-fucking song with her that night was like sprinkling cocaine on my heart.
To this day I don’t abide artificial intrusions in my sex play. I prefer natural light and abhor toys, pills, and negligees. My only coital enhancement is the chicken-fucking song. I drape a towel over the TV, put the tape into the VCR, and play it for paramours and other sundry pieces of ass with the bad luck to end up in my arms. The music adds a Romeo-and-Juliet double-suicide poignancy to the otherwise loveless and in my life almost perfunctory one-night stand. Suddenly everything I say becomes something Khalil Gibran wishes he’d said. Every kiss and caress has the all-or-nothing, give-me-intimacy-or-give-me-death honesty of a Sylvia Plath poem. In my mind, my lumpy full-sized bed becomes the beach in From Here to Eternity and I’m Sergeant First Class Burt Lancaster fucking a voluptuous Rhode Island Red on a wet, sandy Hawaiian beach, the tattered sheets crashing over us in waves of cotton and rayon.
The morning after with Bridgette Lopez set the tone for all the rest that would follow. It was arduous and awkward, a runny-egged breakfast of stilted conversation and averted eyes. There is something about the song that embarrasses and shames you like catching yourself picking your nose in public.
The last thing Bridgette ever said to me was, “I’m serious, do the jukebox-sommelier thing.” So I did. I wrote a letter to the Slumberland Bar in Berlin requesting a position as a jukebox sommelier, enclosing a résumé and an unlabeled mix tape. Two weeks later I received a small packet in the mail containing the paperwork for a work visa, a one-way plane ticket, a beer coaster, and a brief letter that stated my salary and equated the finding of my tape to the excavation of King Tut’s tomb.
PART 2
DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES
CHAPTER 1
IARRIVED IN BERLIN on a hazy mid-autumn afternoon, emerging from the coach-class bramble wrinkled, hungry, cold, and funky smelling, but happy as a runaway slave.
The cab ride to the hostel was in a Mercedes-Benz. Apart from a nervous three-block joyride in a Cadillac Seville, it was my first trip in a luxury car. I sank deep into that leather seat, thinking that if I hadn’t reached the promised land, Germany was at least a land of maybes and we’ll sees.
West Berlin was like a city populated entirely by Quaker abolitionists. Everyone was so nice—to a point. When I showed up to lease my first apartment, the landlord knocked seventy-five deutschmarks off the rent for reparations but wouldn’t shake my hand to close the deal. Over time the friendly small talk with the newspaper vendor devolved from “How do you like Germany? Do you plan on staying?” to subtle get-the-fuck-out-of-my-country-nigger musings like, “Wow, I can’t believe you’ve been here three months already? When are you going back to America?” When I went to local jazz clubs like the Quasimodo or the A Train, patrons at the bar would buy me drinks as an excuse to pick my brain about jazz and American racism. This was a typical conversation.
“Thanks for the beer.”
“Kein Problem. I bet you’re glad not having to drink that shit American beer. Blah, so bad.”
“Yeah, you motherfuckers are on to something with these pilsners . . .”
Then Willi, Karl-Ludwig, and Bruno would defer to the American expat who’d take a stultifyingly mediocre saxophone solo that would inexplicably bring the house down. At the bar my newfound friend would put his arm around me and say, “You know, jazz improvisation comes from the slaves having to improvise in order to survive. Too bad every idiom of black music, be it jazz or rhythm and blues, or whatever, has declined in its Negroidery and purpose. It’s become whitified.”
Now I know why Harriet Tubman faked those blackout epileptic seizures: It was the only way she could get those damn abolitionists to stop patronizing her.
I quickly learned not to respond to jazzophile opinions that, judging from their use of words like Negroidery and whitified, had been stolen from the latest Wynton Marsalis magazine interview. I held then, and still do, that it’s ridiculous to think that slavery had anything to do with jazz improvisation. In order to survive, slaves didn’t improvise, they capitulated. The ones who stood their ground and fought back died. Making a holiday meal from pig innards isn’t improvisation; it’s common sense to throw whatever’s left into the fucking pot. If anybody was improvising, it was the free black population. And if anybody was “whitified,” it was the suit ’n’ tie–wearing Marsalis. Like Negroes hadn’t seen a white face until they saw the slave catcher. As if all the fucking race mixing in Spain, Egypt, ancient Rome, and Ethiopia never happened. But I knew no Berlin jazz aficionados wanted to hear me denigrate their romantic notions of white oppression being the progenitor of black musical genius. I didn’t even want to hear myself say these things. So I’d politely nod in agreement a
nd say, “Have you ever heard of Charles Stone?”
My visa didn’t allow me to start work until November, so I spent the next two weeks contemplating the irony that though I’d be working at the Slumberland, I hadn’t slept since I got to Berlin. Slumberland. The name itself was foreboding enough to keep me out. It brought back all the childhood traumas, the sleepless nights staring at the lightning-bolt-blue night-light while pondering the relationship between reality, the dream state, and death. My father, the embittered literature Ph.D. who worked for the county naming the streets within walled communities that sprouted up on the Californian hillsides like concrete weeds, did nothing to ease my fear of the dark and dying. He’d look under the bed and in the closet, and speaking in the effete horror-movie accent of a Transylvanian ghoul, he’d name the monsters and demons lurking in the shadows. “Hello, Chimera. Good evening, Medusa. Glad to see you’re well, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, not the peace-loving miscreation who read Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch, but the vengeful brute from the second half of the book who killed innocent children without compunction.” With my eyes bulging from their sockets and my heart beating so hard I could hear it, he’d tuck me in with one of Shakespeare’s innumerable quotations about restless slumber. “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,” Father would say, bussing me on the forehead and finishing the quote just before the click of the shutting door, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”
I was dizzily homesick. My attempts at re-creating my California lifestyle were amusing but ultimately ineffective. The citrus smell that wafted from the orange rinds I placed on the radiator made me sneeze constantly. The small colony of black ants Mother airmailed to me, so I could force march them across my windowsill, died when they were unable to digest the glutinous gummi bears I fed them. I rented a car and got five traffic tickets in one day for making right on red after right on red. I’d regurgi-tate Laker games I’d heard Chick Hearn call, play by play, commercial break by commercial break:
Magic frontcourt . . . Magic yo-yoing up and down . . . over to Jamaal . . . four on the clock . . . that’s good. Lakers by twelve and folks, this one’s in the refrigerator. The door’s closed, the light’s off, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s getting hard, and the Jell-O’s jiggling. We’ll be back for Lakers wrap-up after a word from our sponsor . . . Here’s Cal Worthington and his dog, Spot! If your axle is a-saggin’, go see Cal. Maybe you need a station wagon, go see Cal. Ifyour wife has started naggin’ and your tailpipe is a-draggin’, go see Cal! Go see Cal! Go see Cal! Did you know I could put you in a used car or used truck for just twenty-five dollars down . . . It’s Worthington Ford in Long Beach, open every day till midnight, we’ll see you here! Bring the kids!
In addition to missing the Westside, the Lakers’ fast break, and the incessant Cal Worthington commercials, I missed black people, which was strange for me. But somehow I longed for the sounds of urban working-class blackness. The heavily aspirated T’s and P’s. The Sunday-morning supermarket shushing of a woman too tired to do her hair, much less lift her heels, as she scuffles down the aisle as if she’s wearing cross-country skis and not a pair of furry baby-blue bedroom slippers. I missed the quiet of my room after Father had put me to sleep, perchance to dream. Sometimes on a sleepless night I could almost hear Brian Mooney proudly idling his ’64 El Camino lowrider in the driveway across the street. Other times I could hear my frustrated father in the other room rambling like a mindless maniac, trying to come up with the last ten of the two hundred “Spanish-sounding” street names he needed for a new city called Santa Clarita, names that had to reflect the area’s Mexican heritage and yet have enough of an “upscale ring” to convey to any Mexicans foolhardy enough to move to the Santa Clarita hinterlands that they weren’t wanted. Having come up with such gems as Via Palacio, Arroyo Park Drive, and Rancho Adobe Drive, Pops would reach his wits’ end.
“Son?”
“Yeah?”
“You up? I know you’re awake.”
“And?”
“You hang out with lots of Mexicans? Gimme some Spanish street names.”
“Toreador Lane.”
“Won’t do. Connotes animal cruelty. Give me another.”
“Calle Street.”
“Redundant. Come on, I’m serious.”
But unfortunately for him, I never was.
“How about We Need Faster Service at Tito’s Tacos Drive? Viva La Raza Boulevard. Badges? We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges Circle. Reconquista Califas Ahora Terrace. Margarita, You Thieving Pendeja, I Know You Stole the Ten-Dollar Bill I Left on the Kitchen Counter, You’re Fired, and to Think We Treated You Like Family Road.”
I was so lonely those early Berlin nights, I missed my own father calling me a dumb nigger. So lonely that I missed black people, which is to say I missed people who can’t take a joke, people to whom I was supposed to relate but couldn’t, if that makes any sense.
Those first few weeks in Berlin the closest I’d come to kinship with another life-form was with the newly imported emperor penguins at the zoo.
Emperor penguins, like the American Negro, are notoriously fickle creatures, and the city had gone to great lengths to ensure they would feel at home. But instead of re-creating the snow, rock, and water formations of the Antarctic tundra, they removed twenty-five square meters of actual polar cap, transported it intact to Berlin, set it down in the space once occupied by the dromedaries, and covered it with a climate-controlled biodome. All for about what it would have cost to enforce the environmental laws that were supposed to protect the endangered birds in the first place.
The penguin exhibit opened to great fanfare; however, the supposedly sprightly birds refused to perform. People came in droves to see their aquatic grace, but no amount of pleading toddlers or zoological trickery could coax them into the water. I visited my Antarctic familiars every day. Setting my tape recorder in the corner of the exhibit hall and taping the dismay of the visitors who’d paid good money to see the winsome waterfowl.
Like Miles Davis in concert, for the most part the penguins stood stock-still, their backs to the audience. Every few minutes a curious bird would cause a commotion by skating his webbed feet across the ice to the water’s edge. The zoo patrons would rush the railing, lifting the children onto their shoulders and their box cameras to their eyes, then with a squawk the penguin would invariably waddle fearfully back to the pack.
The crowd would turn ugly. They’d pound and spit on glass, cursing the reluctant birds: “Now I know why these things are nearly extinct—these snooty fuckers think they’re too good to get wet!”
At least the penguins had one another. I’d return home alone. Collapse on the couch and listen to my recordings of the day’s events. Reveling in penguin defiance in the face of the curious stares and the stereotyped expectations of the outside world. One day on an overcast autumn afternoon, while on my way to the zoo, I chased down a lone ray of sunshine through the tree-lined streets of Charlottenburg. When I caught up to the sun ray, it shone directly upon the Amerikahaus and nothing else. The Amerikahaus is an ivy-covered building that sits in the middle of a residential street like a cultural trading post and offers fellowships and cultural indoctrination instead of beaver pelts and fire water. Inside the glass-enclosed vestibule, next to the flagpole, stood a black security guard, wiping his hands on Old Glory as if it were a restroom towel dispenser.
In those days, seeing a black face in Berlin was almost as rare as a black field goal kicker in the NFL. And I stared. Stared unabashedly at my fellow human penguin. The tall African-American watchman belonged to the long legacy of freak show blackness including the Venus Hottentot; Ota Benga, the Congolese pygmy displayed as the missing link in the Bronx Zoo; Kevin Powell and Heather B, the first two African-Americans on MTV’s The Real World ; and myself. When the guard spotted me peering at him through the glass, he cheerily waved me inside. I opened the door to his cage. Hi
s face was warm, thick, and brown as a wool sock in an L.L.Bean catalog. The creases in his gray uniform were sharp and fell down each pant leg to a pair of polished black combat boots. A set of official-looking keys jangled from a thick steel chain. He didn’t carry a weapon; he disarmed intruders with his smile. I eased in close enough to read the writing on the ID tag; it read, simply, security.
“Can I get an L.A. Times inside?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Usually it’s a few days late, though.”
“That’s cool.” It’d been weeks since my voice had deepened into the What’s happenin’? baritone I reserved for addressing black men whom I didn’t know.
“How long you been on this side, brother? How you like it?” he asked, though before I could answer and lodge my complaints about the coarseness of the toilet paper and bath towels and the puzzling absence of air conditioners and wall-to-wall carpeting, he looked around to see if anyone was listening, then whispered in my ear, “Germany is the black man’s heaven.”
“What?”
“These people know how to take care of you. They treat you like a king. Your wish is their command.”
I stepped away from him cautiously. He was dead serious. I excused myself, and as I backed out of the door he called out after me, “You just have to let them love you.”