Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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I knew immediately that “Stolen Moments” would be the Slumberland’s signature tune; a smooth midtempo song, it would provide a sticky, almost humid, languorous background to an already sexually charged atmosphere. If a female failed to become aroused by a Tanzanian peacock unfurling his tail feathers, it’d bring out the pavonine sheen of his olive-green polyester slacks, burgundy silk shirt, and tan patent leather shoes. When the middle-aged West Berlin lioness slinks about the place flicking her feather cut and stalking her prey, Dolphy’s flute would gently lift both her sagging breasts and spirits, Paul Chambers’s bass would enhance her rear end with some downtown Detroit rotundity, and Bill Evans’s piano would unaccent her English, put words in her mouth that she didn’t know she knew and make her immune to egotistical black-male bullshit. Maybe one day Doris, while stocking bar, would hear the song and forgive me for stealing her moments. I know the song has yet to be written that would allow me to forgive myself.
The schoolboy dotted the exclamation point, and I thanked him. “Ausländer raus!” never sounded so beautiful. I went back inside to finish my beer and watch the sun erase his slur.
CHAPTER 5
GERMAN BARS DON’T have happy hours. They have hubris hours. There is no designated time for hubris hour. It happens unexpectedly and without warning. The bartender doesn’t ring a bell at five P.M., announce that for the next two hours drinks are two for one, and that sage advice and unmitigated superciliousness are on the house. In fact, the only way I can tell when it’s hubris hour is by the look on Lars Papenfuss’s face.
Lars Papenfuss is Doris’s new boyfriend and my best friend. We met about two weeks after the unveiling of the jukebox. He’s a freelance journalist. A master spy who uses his cover as a pop-culture critic to prop up dictatorial movements like “trip-hop,” “jungle,” “Dogme 95,” and “graffiti art” instead of puppet third-world governments. He’s assassinated more visionaries than the CIA, but when we first met he was eager to come in out of the cold.
“Why are looking at me like that?” he asked.
“Because you look funny.”
“How do I look?”
“You look proud.”
“Then indeed I do look funny.”
I’d seen that self-satisfied smirk on a German face only once before. CitySports Bar was open until the wee hours of the morning so the Charlottenburg locals could watch Graciano Rocchigiani fight for the light-heavyweight title in Las Vegas. These storied German boxers never fight outside of Germany and are rarely even German, but “Rocky,” as his countrymen lovingly called him, wasn’t an adopted Pole or gargantuan Ukrainian, and that night the native Berliner beat a potbellied black man senseless in the Las Vegas heat. In the sixth round when the referee’s count reached ten and the American slumped into the arms of his cornermen, the fight fan next to me, Heiko Zollner from Wilmersdorf, swelled with a smug patriotism that his German guilt wouldn’t allow him to express. He wanted to say, “I’m proud to be German” but he couldn’t, it’s illegal. Even the slightly less salacious “I’m happy to be German” would’ve compelled him to turn himself in to the authorities, whereupon he would’ve been sentenced to six months probation and a hefty fine and required to recite the first fifteen lines of the kaddish in Hebrew or French kiss a leper.
After the fight Heiko and I drunkenly reenacted the bout over a frothy pitcher of beer. With the orange peels we’d stuffed into our mouths serving as mouthpieces, our hands cut through the stream rising from a stainless steel bin of freshly hard-boiled eggs. When we finally tired, Heiko, no longer able to contain his German pride over Rocky’s victory, raised a goldenrod mug of Bitburger beer brewed and poured to print-ad perfection. He pounded on the table. “Wie glücklich bin ich doch über dieses wunderschöne Bier heute morgen zum Frühstück,” he exclaimed. How fortunate I am to be able to partake in this beautiful glass of beer for my morning repast. That was all the displaced praise his champion and country would get.
Lars looked just like Heiko did that night. His face lit up with that same hubris-hour smirk. He ordered a round of drinks and stuck out a hairy hand. He was there to interview me. I’d seen him around. Sitting at a corner table by himself, drinking his wine and observing. Every now and then he’d walk over to the jukebox, put his hands on the glass, and peer into the machine like a mechanic listening to an engine.
He’d done a lot of record promotion disguised as objective music journalism for a record company headquartered in Berlin. Doris was tending bar at a meet-and-greet for an American boy band when he asked her to make him something different and if she’d heard any good music lately. She mixed him an Adios Motherfucker,* then offhandedly mentioned the Slumberland jukebox. Told him the bar’s patrons were so impressed by the jukebox selection that two or three times a night the place would go quiet for minutes at a time, that it wasn’t a rare occurrence for newcomers to get shushed for talking over Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” or for the crowd to applaud some particularly adroit Jackie McLean solo.
Intrigued, Lars had shown up once or twice the week prior to research his story by standing in the machine’s opalescent glow and pressing his nose against the glass.
I consented to the interview so long as he promised that he wouldn’t print my name or the name of the bar in the article, and, most important, that he wouldn’t tell any of his fellow hacks about the place. Nothing ruins a good thing like its discovery by aging rock ’n’ roll critics looking for a scene.
While Lars fumbled with his old-fashioned cassette recorder, I took out my minirecorder and placed it on the bar, answering the why-the-fuck-don’t-you-trust-me look on his face by explaining that I always tape random sounds and wanted to record the sound of the record button being pressed, telling him how I wasted the summer between fifth and sixth grades trying to press the record button fast enough to record the sound of its being pressed.
Lars laughed and said, “There’s some Einsteinian relativity to that somehow.”
I liked him immediately. I liked the word “Einsteinian.” I liked him enough to be jealous of how he managed to pull off wearing a turtleneck sweater. Whenever I wore one I moved about stiffly, craning my neck as if I’d been in a car accident and the turtleneck was less a masculine-magazine fashion statement than a way of hiding my neck brace. Doris sat down to join us.
I pressed record.
Lars pressed record.
I turned off my tape recorder and said, “Before we begin, I’d like to tell you that not everything I say to you will be the truth.”
He asked whether the jukebox had changed the bar’s notorious reputation as a meat market. I shrugged modestly, and Doris elbowed me in the side, forcing me to tell him the Carly Simon story.
The day after the new jukebox had been plugged in I stumbled upon a woman giving a guy head in the bathroom. Such Weimaresque displays of public affection, although common at raucous Berlin bars like the Kumpelnest and Café M, were unheard of at the race-mixing joints. For us Slumberlanders the sexual electricity was all about the pretense of taboo and stigma. If blacks and whites kissed in public it would take the fun out of the game. Sour the forbidden fruit gemütlichkeit, so to speak. Yet there they were, he leaning back against the sink, she squatting in front of him, her stringy blonde head plunging in and out of his nappy, ashen crotch, her hands grabbing onto the faucets for support, his hands wrapped around her neck for psychological and physical leverage. They were both crying and singing in tandem to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” the lachrymal ballad that dripped from the bathroom speaker. It was the most romantic and disgusting scene I’d ever witnessed. The scene played out like a page stricken from a long-lost Othello folio.
Act V, Scene I
OTHELLO
Lo, sweet Desdemona, many a knave and nobleman hath warned me, “Thou canst not maketh a ho into a housewife.” And yet, sainted wife, my dagger knows no other scabbard.
140
If they saw me, they continued to sing, and I cont
inued to look and listen. He was in astonishingly good voice, a princely Ugandan alto with a hint of Jagger’s pseudo-cockney accent. She, on the other hand, was understandably garbled. I can still hear their orgiastic duet.
“Yeah,” I answered blithely, “the Slumberland’s the same, but different.”
We talked freely and openly for hours, the interview finally ending with Lars inquiring in that strange fractured syntax that most people adopt whenever discussing anything niggeresque, “How come they ain’t no hip-hop on the jukebox?”
“There isn’t?”
“No.”
“I guess it’s because rap doesn’t sound right in a bookstore, bar, coffee shop, or television commercial.”
“Less authentic?”
“It’s more about the acoustics. What makes hip-hop special is its spatial intimacy with the listener. Rap is a claustrophobic music that sounds best on headphones jammed deep into your ear canals, in a cinder block dorm room or a car packed dashboard to trunk with your friends, the music so loud that the rearview mirror pops to the beat, the weed bounces up and down on the Zig-Zag, the factory-installed bass speakers fight for their lives as the bass threatens to blow them and your eardrums out. You can’t play the music loud enough in here to give it any import. Maybe when hiphop dies, and it will die, then it’ll be fit for public consumption. Can you imagine listening to “Rebel Without a Pause” at low, unobtrusive Muzak volume, sipping a hot, cream-free double espresso and wondering, ‘Is this what Public Enemy meant by black power?’ ”
Lars turned off his tape recorder. As if on cue, the finger snaps to Peggy Lee’s “Fever” strutted into the bar, black-cat cool and followed by a finicky, purring vocal that slinked into your lap and demanded attention. On the other side of the bar a portly woman leaned over a dreadlocked American to put her drink order in to the bartender and her angora-covered breasts in his face. Her order placed, she tucked her hair behind her ear and started snapping her fingers to the beat. She wasn’t giving me fever, but the woman sitting next to the dread got hot and told her to step back.
Lars watched the scene curiously, drumming his pen on the bar, when he slowly turned his head in my direction and said, “Charles Stone”
I don’t how to punctuate that quote. There is no way to classify its purpose, for it was spoken without one. It came across more as an involuntary Tourette’s utterance than anything else. What could possess him to name-drop the Schwa, my paper-thin and increasingly futile raison d’être, for no apparent raison?
“Charles Stone”
This time the words hung in the air, swinging like a shop-keeper’s nominal shingle in an ominous Dickensian London breeze. Their only defining characteristic, other than the unaccented phonation, was the tone, a tone that had a tinge of the spy’s trench coat trepidation when broaching a potential contact with the opening fragment of a cryptic code phrase.
“Charles Stone”
I didn’t know the proper response. During D-Day, Allied soldiers crawled and cowered in the French hedgerows doing their best to avoid being victims of friendly fire by shouting, “Thunder!” at one another and anything else that moved. The only way friendlies such as the groundhogs, the clouds, and scared-shitless draftees wouldn’t be fired upon was to answer the “Thunder!” with a prompt “Flash!”—preferably spoken in a strong Texas dialect.
I was afraid to say anything. I looked to Doris for help, but she excused herself to fix a cola dispenser that had run out of CO2. Maybe “Charles Stone” was the music critic’s “Halt! Who goes there?” We all have our dinner-party litmus tests. Standardized oral pop quizzes that we give to the moderately attractive person with the mouth stuffed with deviled eggs in order to find out if they’re worth spending the next half hour with, much less the rest of one’s life. My litmus test of compatibility is “Tom Cruise.” I hate people who hate Tom Cruise, cultural automatons who at the mention of his name reflexively bridle and say the diminutive thespian and Theta level Scientologist is “crazy” and “a terrible actor.” They hate him because he’s easy to hate. They think that despising Tom Cruise’s lack of personality and supposed lack of talent is somehow a blow against the bland American Anschluss of the rest of the planet. Tom Cruise may indeed be the Christopher Columbus of the twentieth century, sent off by the kings of Hollywood to prove the new world of International Box Office isn’t flat and to find a direct route into the Asian market, but the decline of everything isn’t his fault; he’s just a cinematic explorer and a damn fine actor. And hating him doesn’t make you seditious—it makes you complicit.
Maybe Lars Papenfuss was waiting for me to say the wrong thing so he could deem me unworthy of German recognition and the social-democratic largesse that came with it, then take me out back and shoot me.
“Charles Stone.”
That one had a period on it. A punctuation of suspicion put there because my eyebrows kept folding to crazy angles as I tried to hold a dumbfounded look on my face.
“Charles Stone.”
I ignored him. Focused my attention on the Dreadlock-American and the two women. He had them both entranced. Every caesura in his story followed by a sigh and an earnest, “See, I’m from the ghetto . . .” He playfully slipped pretzels onto the ring fingers of both women and asked them for their hands in marriage. Answering with yesses that didn’t come off as face-tiously as originally intended, they laughed and kissed him on the cheek. I had something to do with that. A few years down the line when one, possibly both of these women are catching dread’s kids at the bottom of the slide and answering the “What was daddy like?” question, I’ll gaze nostalgically through the park fence at their happy, caramel-colored, schnitzel-eating kids and say to myself, “Me and Peggy Lee had something to do with that.”
Peggy Lee’s “Fever” subsided, and during the record change a tense silence filled the bar. The dread jump-started his conversation with the usually patented “See, I’m from the ghetto . . .,” only this time he was silenced by both women. They leaned backward off their stools, ears cocked toward the main room. They wanted to hear what was coming on next. The panting hound dog leitmotif to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” bounced jauntily into the room, lifting me and at least half the other drunks out of our seats and onto the sand-covered floor. There we shape-shifted and transmogrified from one funkified pose to another. The funk and nothing but the funk running over us like a hot iron, flattening and steaming the Slumberland universe into a single wrinkle-free dimension. Pressed into the walls, our limbs raised and bent at odd, acute, and not-so-cute angles, we looked like dancing figures circumscribing an ancient Babylonian vase. An earthenware urn telling a story of modern antiquity, glazed and fire-hardened civil servants riding and shimmying what they thought was the downbeat, illegal aliens flying fancy free for the first time in their destitute lives, finally feeling like the African royalty they so often claim to be.
I’d always thought music writers, like gangsters, were too cool to dance; yet there was Lars doing a very credible strobe. Stopping and starting his body rock with such rapidity it looked as if he were moving underneath the flickering brightness of a strobe light. He pop locked over to me and touched me on the arm.
“Charles Stone.”
This time I knew what to say.
“Tom Cruise, motherfucker.”
During the next few weeks Lars and I bonded over Osamu Dazai, a thirty-year-old bottle of Poit Dhubh malt whiskey, the welter-weight fearlessness of Oscar De La Hoya, and the cleverness of contemporary American everything at the expense of passion. He claimed to be the only person alive who’d actually read Thomas Pynchon’s twenty-five-pound opus Gravity’s Rainbow without having yawned even once, and I believed and respected him for it. “A wonderful piece of children’s literature,” he said. “If only it were five hundred pages longer and a little less transparent.” For him reading the book to completion was like fighting a meaningless war and living to tell about it. Vietnam, Desert Storm—I’m against the wars b
ut support the soldiers. He’d invite me over to his flat just so I could watch him finish his review of the latest American “me novels.” He’d toss the galley copy into the trash and say, “I’m against the author, but support the reader,” then tell me how he gave up fiction because whenever he submitted a gritty, realistic manuscript the publishers would say, “We like it, but we want more plot,” or if he submitted a tight, linear narrative, they’d say, “We like it, but we want more realism.” Jealous of everyone and anyone’s success, I gathered up the nerve to show Lars my novel, a work in perpetual progress composed entirely of opening sentences, the best of which he thought was, “ ‘We will be cruising at an altitude of zero feet, our estimated time of arrival is never, and the temperature in hell is bloody hot with searing winds out of the southwest. Sit back and relax and ignore the seat belt sign. Thank you for flying Kamikaze Airways,’ the pilot announced into the loudspeaker, his shoulders shaking with what the psychiatrists call ‘inappropriate laughter.’ ”
Defiant in my determination to complete my quest solo, I avoided any talk or discussion about Charles Stone until one autumn day when Lars, Doris, and I drove back from Jam, an outdoor party held on the banks of the Spree. Horace Silver’s “Señor Blues” crackled from the tinny dashboard speakers. It’s a wonderful driving song, and his sun-faded red Alfa Romeo convertible scuttled through Berlin leaking oil and bop pianissimo. At a stoplight Lars lowered the volume.