Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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Doris, of course, blames our breakup on the frequency and length of my showers. In her eyes I’m a religious fanatic who every morning takes a hot-water baptismal to the gods Proctor and Gamble. My “obsession” with cleanliness symbolizes two hundred and fifty years of American sanctimony. If my finger-nails are clean, my soul is pure and lemony fresh. I’m 100 percent Puritan. A squeaky-clean American.
Doris: You crazy, uptight Americans. Do you know what we call “skinny-dipping” in Germany?
Me: No.
Doris: Swimming!
On our last night as a couple Doris sat on the floor of her spacious, impeccably furnished, penthouse igloo, bundled up in three layers of thrift-shop sweaters, settling an argument we had earlier in the day about Chico Marx’s piano virtuosity by making a list of piano players in descending order of greatness, while I washed the dishes and stared at the plastic frog with a thermometer for a spine suctioned to the kitchen window.
I could never explain Doris’s thermal frugality. I knew it’d been passed down from her parents, who, having been raised in the moldy-potato austerity of postwar Germany, made sure that she had a healthy respect for creature comforts like heat, clothes, salt, and toothpaste. She wasn’t cheap. She’d often splurge on pricey nonessentials that she then treated like foster children. She put regular gas in her BMW 7 Series sedan and her silk blouses in the washing machine. She drank expensive wine out of paper cups. Used African artifacts as doorstops and had a state-of-the-art central heating system installed, one capable of warming the bathroom floor and the towel racks but whose thermostat was as off-limits as a North Korean nuclear plant.
“Doris, it’s eight degrees in here. Do you know what that is in Fahrenheit?”
“About fifty degrees.”
“Fifty-one-point-eight degrees to be exact, which is the temperature at which black men lose their fucking minds. In 1967 when my Uncle Billy turned down a scholarship to UCLA and volunteered to go to Vietnam, it was eight degrees Celsius. On that clear, blue, carry-me-back-to-Ol’-Virginny morning when Nat ‘Crazy Like a Fox’ Turner looked directly into a solar eclipse and decided there and then to kill every white person in the world—it was eight degrees Celsius. In Rocky II, when Apollo Creed agrees to give Rocky Balboa a rematch in Phila-fuckingdelphia, Rocky’s hometown, it was eight degrees Celsius, fiftytwo fucking degrees.”
Doris and the cackles of the chicken-fucking song snuck up on me from behind. She burrowed her head between my shoulder blades and ran her hands under my shirt. She hadn’t bathed in three days, but she was warm.
“And you, black man,” she asked, tweezing my nipples with her nails, “how will you lose your mind on this fifty-two-degree night? Perhaps you go so crazy and finally give me oral sex, yes?”
“I would, but you smell.”
She unbuttoned her sweaters and yanked her shirt over her head. An earthy, almost steamy pungency closed my throat.
“Do I smell bad?” she asked.
I cupped my hand and passed it through the air like a chef wafting the vapors of the soup du jour toward his nostrils.
“You smell, but you don’t smell bad. Sort of like a basket of rotten fruit.”
We both paused to listen to a jaunty movement in the chicken-fucking song. Doris took the first page of her list, wiped her hairy underarms with it, and handed it to me. I held it gingerly because a single strand of black underarm hair, long enough to bisect pianist number nine, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, like an editor’s strikethrough, was epoxied to the page with a natural adhesive of perspiration and grit.
“Smell it,” she commanded.
I pressed the tip of my nose to Mozart and inhaled. The page smelled of nutmeg and paraffin with a hint of fresh bacon grease. I searched the rest of the page for Chico Marx. He wasn’t on it. I had him just behind Fats Waller and ahead of Chopin. Doris removed her bra and slid page two along the sweaty folds of her breasts. The dampness smudged Debussy, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Dave Brubeck. It was a damn good compendium. It smelled like a mothballed down jacket on the first cold day of winter. And still no Chico Marx. It went on like that for five minutes. She’d peel off a page, lick it, rub it over her scalp, run it between her toes, her pubes, the backs of her knees. Each page smelled different. Each body part and erogenous zone imparting its own aroma, every piano player and keyboardist emanating his or her own unique, musty funk. Mary Williams, Nat King Cole, and Doris’s right elbow smelled like hijiki salad, Grandma’s immutably stuck-to-the-wrapper butterscotch candies, and boiled Kutteln. Ray Manzarek, Thelonious Monk, and her inner thigh were redolent of burning rubber and a flat diet soda. Stevie Wonder, Glenn Gould, and the back of her neck reeked of day-old pizza, a blue urinal cake, and Laurel Canyon eucalyptus trees. Doris slid the last sheet of paper down the crack of her ass, and there, at the bottom of the page, sandwiched between her twelve-year-old nephew Andreas and Schroeder, the piano-playing Beethoven fanatic from the Charlie Brown cartoons, was Chico Marx, smelling like ass and “un-scented” two-ply toilet paper; nevertheless I had a raging hard-on.
The Schwa was in full swing and suddenly I understood why Doris, a woman who loved music unconditionally, kept her flat so cold. The cold heightened your senses. I not only heard it, I felt, saw, and tasted the music. My ears were suddenly bionic, and if I concentrated and made the didudidudidudid Bionic Woman sound effect, I could hear the stud’s distended nut sack slapping against the bird’s shiny belly plumage. I could hear the Schwa’s breathing. See iridescent polka dots of sound float from the speakers and pop suddenly in midair like music-filled soap bubbles. The cold electrified my skin like a charged prison fence; the glistening notes that landed on my skin sparked and fizzled.
I swirled the song in my mouth, isolating its sweet complexities as if it were a vintage Château d’Yquem stolen off the shelves of Trader Joe’s and downed between mouthfuls of chili-cheese fries. I couldn’t smell the song. Doris and her body odor were hanging onto my neck and biting my lip. There’s something beautifully Taoist about two people kissing when one partner is naked and the other clothed.
“Do I smell?” she asked.
I nodded. We kissed again.
“Good,” she said.
We fucked. Intermittently and passionately, in time we both stank. Our spooned bodies stuck to the linoleum floor and each other with cold sweat. With her back toward me, Doris propped herself up on her elbow. Pages two and five of her list were stuck to her shoulder blades like deformed angel wings.
“You know if someone got up after making love to me and showered like they do in your American movies, I’d fucking kill them.”
I pulled off her crumpled wings. She had Liberace, Neil Sedaka, Prince, and Brian Eno ranked ahead of Tom Waits and Art Tatum. The chicken-fucking song had ended. There was only the hum of the refrigerator and the swinging tick-tock of the Kit-Cat clock’s tail. We were doomed to start fighting. Liberace? It would be our last argument. The inevitable clash of puritanical Americanism and German pragmatics. I should have known from the start it could have never worked. We both were fond of hip-hop, but she was strictly Queensbridge, a proponent of MC Shan, Marley Marl, and Roxanne Shanté. I was down with BDP, Boogie Down Productions. KRS-One, Bronx-sworn Capulet to her Queensbridge Montague.
Doris grabbed my penis and pulled me in closer to her and, without turning around, asked, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why in American movies do they make so much noise when they kiss?”
I shrugged and slipped my frozen feet in between her fleshy calves.
“Is it the more smacking, the more saliva, the louder the kiss, the more in love? Is that what it is?”
Liberace. Prince. Schroeder. MC Shan. Fuck.
“Ferguson?”
“What?”
“Do you love me?”
I took her question seriously, but I felt like Schroeder at his toy piano, exasperated by Lucy Van Pelt’s persistence and the dreamy glaze in her black pinprick eyes.
&nbs
p; Do you love me?
I’d never been in love. I’d always thought love was like reading Leaves of Grass in a crowded Westside park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, having to suppress the urge with each giddy turn of the page to share your joy with the surrounding world. By “sharing” I don’t mean quoting Whitman’s rhythm-machine poetics to a group of strangers waiting for auditions to be posted at the Screen Actors Guild, but wanting to stand up and scream, “I’m reading Walt Whitman, you joyless, shallow, walking-the-dog-by-carrying-the-dog, casting-couch-wrinkles-imprinted-in-your-ass, associate-producer’s-pubic-hairs-on-your-tongue, designer-perambulator-pushing-the-baby-you-and-your-Bel-Air-trophy-wife-had-by-inserting-someone-else’s-sperm-bank-jizz-in-a-surrogate-mother’s-uterus-because-you-and-your-sugar-daddy-were-too-busy-with-your-nonexistent-careers-to-fuck, no-day-job-having California Aryan assholes! I’m reading Whitman! Fuck your purebred, pedigreed Russian wolfhound! Fuck your WASP infant with the Hebrew name and the West Indian nanny! Fuck your Norwegian au pair who’s not as hot-looking as you thought she’d be! I’m reading Whitman, expanding my mind and melding with the universe! What have you done today? It’s ten in the morning, do you know where your coke dealer is? Have you looked at the leaves of grass? No? I didn’t think so!” That’s what I thought love would be like. Reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority.
Doris turned to face me, her cheeks calcified with tearstains.
“Do you love me, Ferguson?”
“No.”
She released my penis and clambered over me, placing her forehead to my temple. A tear ran down her cheek and onto mine. I didn’t bother to wipe it off.
Why? She asked over and over. Why, if I didn’t love her, why was I with her? I told her the truth. Probably the first time I’d ever been completely truthful in my life. I was lonely. She raised her hand and I flinched, expecting to ward off a blow; instead she stroked my face as softly as she ever had. “That’s a reasonable answer,” she cooed. No voodoo curses were cast. No demanding the return of shit I’d thrown away without telling her. No vengeful postings of my nude photo, phone number, and salacious fisting fantasies on gay dating Web sites. Doris simply returned the chicken-fucking song, asked if I wanted to go to the movies on Thursday, and if she could help me find the Schwa.
The security guard at the Amerikahaus was right. Berlin is heaven.
CHAPTER 4
ON MY FIRST DAY OF WORK, Thomas Femmerling, the owner of the Slumberland, did two things: He gave me a set of keys to the bar, then he showed me how to properly pour a pilsner.
“It takes exactly seven minutes for ein gutes Pils,” he said, handing me an effervescent glass of beer with a head so thick it could support a silver piece. “And I figure if it takes that long to pour a good beer, it’ll take at least seven or eight months to program a good jukebox, so take your time, DJ man. Take your sweet time.” Then he plucked his coin from my beer and left me to my duties.
Bars in general are depressing places, but especially at eight thirty on a serene Monday morning. And there I was, alone and unbreakfasted, drinking a seven-minute beer, unable to block out the disconcerting chatter of children skipping merrily to school.
The Slumberland juke was a brand-new Wurlitzer SL-900. Unplugged, it sat dark and lifeless against the far wall. I immediately sympathized with the machine, for it reminded me of myself some years ago: a newborn black child come into the world obsolete and passé. The SL-900’s curse was that it played 45s and not the digital compact discs that were then just starting to take over the market share. Only two weeks old and the juke was already an antique. Still, it remained impressive and intimidating, and I approached the noble machine with the reverent caution that a game warden uses on the sedated grizzly bear.
“There, boy. Settle down, everything’s going to be all right.”
I opened the lid and counted fifty record slots. Room enough for one hundred songs, approximately thirteen hours of continuous music. That meant I had to come up with a playlist of fifty songs so compatible with one another that any one jam had to be able to seamlessly follow, precede, complement, supplement, and riff off any other jam. I also had to take into account fifty additional B-sides. Songs whose strains might be less familiar but, if mistakenly punched into the jukebox, wouldn’t bring the mack-daddy maneuvers of the Slumberland’s miscegenation menagerie to a screeching halt, and might even hip a funk-drunk listener to some classic James Brown besides “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” I needed songs that would make the bar’s black male clientele feel important, knowledgeable, and, yes, superior. Songs whose intricacies and subtext they could explain to the fräuleins without feeling like racial quislings to the Negress mothers and wives left back home to toil over the Serengeti and Amana ranges. I needed songs that spoke to the white woman’s inner nigger. The nigger who had so much in common with these defeated and delusional men, the bipolar white nigger woman in all of us who needs to be worshipped, whistled at, and sometimes beaten.
I’ve always maintained that one could make the case for the white woman being the most maligned personage on the planet. Like Pandora and Eve, white women have been built up as paragons of virtue and beauty only to be unjustly blamed for the world’s ills when they decide to come down off the pedestal to exercise their sense of entitlement and act human.
Yes, the Slumberland jukebox would be stuffed with perennial pop songs, bebop sui generis, and Memphis soul. It would be a fifty-pfennig musical library capable of dispensing stereophonic hope and salvation to the downtrodden from Harlem to Wies-baden. It would help a haughty German woman come down off her high horse and put a discouraged, diasporic black man on his.
This wouldn’t be like making a mix tape for a schoolyard crush filled with slow jams, conscious rap, James Taylor, saccharine jazz, and rainstorm interludes. I had to program that jukebox so it’d be me DJing on autopilot. Turn it into an electronic doppelgänger flashing its rainbow lights, blowing its plastic bubbles and my trademark shit. “Goddamn, get off your ass and jam” eclecticism. All I needed was that one record that would get the party started. Make the ladies say, “Ho,” the homosexuals say, “Hey,” and the skeptics say, “Fuck it.”
I sipped my beer, the second-best beer I’d ever had,* and asked the question I imagined all great artists ask themselves before engaging in the creative process: “Is there a God?” I weighed the arguments pro (Hawaiian surf, Welch’s grape juice, koala bears, worn-in Levi’s, the northern lights, the Volvo station wagon, women with braces, the Canadian Rockies, Godard, Nerf footballs, Shirley Chisholm’s smile, free checking, and Woody Allen) and con (flies, Alabama, religion, chihuahuas, chihuahua owners, my mother’s cooking, airplane turbulence, LL Cool J, Mondays, how boring heaven must fucking be, and Woody Allen), not so much to prove or disprove the existence of a powerless almighty, but to engage my increasingly tipsy thought process with so much conscious prattle that an idea might strike me when I wasn’t looking. After about twenty minutes of this I’d come as close as anyone with an associate’s degree in library sciences has come to disproving the existence of God,* but was no closer to programming the jukebox. Such is the way of the amateur atheologian and the professional jukebox sommelier.
Squweeek.
There was a cautious, almost shy squeak coming from outside the bar. Squweeek.
I lifted the bamboo window shade to investigate and, to our mutual surprise, revealed a startled schoolboy writing on the dew-covered windows with his fingertip. He blinked once, smiled, then resumed his condensation graffito. Though he wasn’t finished, it was obvious he was writing, “Ausländer raus!”—Foreigners Out!—on the pane. No one ever writes, “Ausländer, Bleibt! Wir brauchen, mögen und schätzen die kulturelle Vielfalt, die ihr uns durch eure Anwesenheit schenkt.” Foreigners Stay! We need, enjoy, and respect the cultural diversity your presence provides us. Ausländer raus is a phrase most commonly associated with racist skinheads after German reunification; it was in fact popular
in West Germany long before Ronald Reagan wreathed Nazi graves at Bitburg and demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall. However, it wasn’t the boy’s xenophobia that intrigued me: It was the sonorous screeches his finger made as he wrote on the glass. It reminded me of a sound that I couldn’t quite place, and I went outside to get a better listen.
Just as the kid was putting the finishing touches on his public ignorance, he saw me coming and tried to run away. He was weighed down by his haversack, so I easily ran him down and marched him back to the window. He went obediently to erase his work, but I stopped him.
“Nein. Nein,” I said, waving my finger in his panic-stricken face. “Bitte ende.” Please finish. I held his hand to the glass and he timidly completed his opine, the squeaking letters loud and pitched in a distinct minor blues key I recognized as C minor but whose timbre and color I still couldn’t place. When the little xenophobe made the long downward stroke of the exclamation point, it hit me. The squeaks sounded exactly like Oliver Nelson’s tenor in “Stolen Moments.” I had my first tune for the jukebox.
“Stolen Moments” is Oliver Nelson’s signature tune, a song I find to be the ultimate mood setter; it’s a classic jazz aperitif. Oftentimes, when I play hardcore underground hip-hop or punk gigs, after three or four especially rambunctious tunes the mosh pits begin to resemble the skirmish lines of a Bronze Age battle-field, the warehouse windows start to shake, the record needle starts to skip, the women have that “I’m down with the pogrom” whatever-motherfucker look in their eyes, and I know the party is one more Wu Tang killa bee sting or Bad Brains power chord from turning into Attica, I play fifteen to twenty seconds of “Stolen Moments” to ease the tension, keep the peace. Its incongruous beauty brings about the wry existential lugubriousness of the Christmas Eve carol coming from the enemy encampment on the other side of the fog-covered river in a hackneyed war movie. “Stolen Moments” is that type of intrusion, a lull in the fighting, a time to finish that drink and forgive and forget. The people know I’m providing a respite from the real by granting them a temporary gubernatorial death-row reprieve before I hit them with the next piercing Mobb Deep fuck-you falsetto, Bounty Killer lick shot, or soul-splitting, pre-sellout, angst-ridden, Biohazard scream.