Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/paul-beatty/page,11,68351-slumberland.html
The parade of returnees was thicker now. So was the crowd watching them return to the other side of the Iron Curtain. A large middle-aged man wearing a tweed blazer with suede patches peeling from the elbows, faded from liquor, three fingers of perestroika, and a jigger of glasnost, spotted my black face in the overwhelmingly white crowd. He stumbled up to me and ensnarled me in a big bear hug. When he released me, he threw up his arms and shouted, “Ich bin frei!” I am free! Then, cribbing from Kennedy’s famous speech, he whispered in my ear, “Ich bin ein Negro. Ich bin frei jetzt.”
The claim was heartfelt. For him, being black and free was a boast, not a conundrum or an oxymoron. I, however, believed him more black than free. I thought of something my father would say whenever he’d come across a hard-luck colored person in a witness box, cardboard box, or coffin box before his time. He’d say, “Lincoln freed the slaves like Henry Ford freed the horses.”
I suppose being East German was a lot like being black—the constant sloganeering, the protest songs, no electricity or long-distance telephone service—so I gave the East German Negro a hearty soul shake and a black power salute and wished him luck with the minimum-security emancipation he’d no doubt serve in the new German republic.
Full of the wonders of brotherhood, I approached the only other black face on the street. It was the security guard from the Amerikahaus, still in uniform and standing stolidly among the revelers. Eager to discuss the geopolitical ramifications of the breakup of the Soviet Bloc with a fellow member of the reified oppressed, I asked him what he thought about the goings-on.
“What do I think?” he sneered. “More white pussy. That’s what I think.”
The black man’s burden had never been heavier than it was at that moment. And I was more convinced than ever that the only thing that mattered was good music. Everything else was dead weight.
I took out my minirecorder and taped the sounds of freedom. Cars horns blared. A woman slammed a pickax into the Wall, grew tired, and then began to spit at the bricks. Chanting. Clapping. People said, “Wunderbar!” whenever a reporter shoved a microphone in their faces. Cameras clicked. Singing. Flashbulbs popped. A beer-hammered young man, too inebriated to lift his head, vomited his first Big Mac onto his first pair of Air Jordans. His boys teased him about wasting a month’s pay on sneakers that didn’t even last him a day. All in all, freedom sounded a lot like a Kiss concert.
CHAPTER 2
AFTER THE BERLIN WALL fell I never told anyone about my encounter with the chickenfucker and his internecine plans for my future. Despite his prognostications concerning the Schwa and a Klaudia von Robinson, nothing really much changed for me, except that I spent an inordinate amount of time watching syndicated broadcasts of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club. Every afternoon at one o’clock I’d flip on the TV and grouse to the unlucky woman who’d accompanied me home the previous evening that the little blond cutie-pie cabal of Justin, Christina, and Britney was evil incarnate. When the trio would be introduced for their next number I’d whine, “They might as well say, ‘P. W. Botha, Imelda Marcos, and Eva Braun will now sing “Love Me Tender.” ’ ”
When I wasn’t decrying the future of pop music, I was at the Slumberland. Liter of beer in hand, I’d wander from table to table drunkenly prophesizing about a reunited Fatherland’s return to world supremacy. If not militarily, then cinematically, and if not that, a resumption of dominance on the soccer pitch at the very least. Unlike the chickenfucker’s predictions, none of my divinations have come to pass, of course, but it’s still early yet.
Klaudia von Robinson was the first of his presages to come true. I met her at a party I DJed at the Torpedo Käfer, a quaint six-table bar, two burly speed-metal musicians short of being trendy, in an East Berlin neighborhood two Thai restaurants short of being gentrified.
My pay was forty deutschmarks and a fold of shitty discotheque blow left over from the seventies. I did the lines in the bathroom, half expecting to see Ziggy Stardust come stumbling out of a toilet stall, rubbing his gums for a freeze, complaining to anyone who’d listen that the coke was more stepped-on than Sacco and Vanzetti’s civil rights.
I don’t remember how long the Wall had been down, but I remember bringing more records to that gig than usual. Other than the time I took a photo at Checkpoint Charlie wearing a fur Russian Red Army hat, earflaps down, to send to my mother, I don’t think I’d yet visited East Berlin with any sense of purpose. I had no idea what to play, and the cab driver waited patiently as I filled his backseat and trunk with milk crate after milk crate of records.
In order to fulfill my part in the resurrection of the black man, Lars determined to keep me alive by using his many connections to get me DJ and jukebox-sommelier gigs. I’d worked most of the clubs in West Berlin and had long since stopped measuring time in days of the week. Tomorrow was the day after South African pop night at Abraxas. Yesterday was Jazz Brunch at the Paris Café, pre-1935 Dixieland played by all-white bands with an allowance for any colored nostalgia about the Confederacy or lazy Negroes and rivers. The day before that it was Celia Cruz and more Celia Cruz at the Boogaloo. What music do the economically and politically subsumed listen to? Do they want punk rebellion or blue-jean conformity? Do they want to forget or remember? Do they want to dance or fight? I got in the taxi thinking compromise: the Pogues, Sham 69, the Buzzcocks, and some Wasted Youth and Neighborhood Watch demos, two Southern California bands I followed from backyard to backyard in the early eighties.
The cabbie didn’t know the eastern half of the city very well, but as he slowed in front of a frosted plate glass window on a dark cobblestone street, he pointed to an electric chalkboard hanging on the front door. The question of what to play was answered in Day-Glo orange.
To-nite
BLACK MUSIC!
That narrowed it down.
“No worries,” I said to myself, “I’m prepared. I’ll spin the black classicists—Marion Anderson, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, André Watts, Kathleen Battle, some Malinké fourteenth-century circumcision chants, maybe a bit of that Negro klezmer all those bored jazz musicians are playing.” I did the cocaine in the water closet and knew immediately something was off. The bar was too crowded. The tables full. Every stool occupied. I checked my watch. I wasn’t late. People weren’t even due to trickle in for at least another hour or so. As I set up my console under the sneak peeks and unblinking stares, it dawned on me that I and not my music was the entertainment, the atmosphere. That night I spun mostly the unsung American and German funkateers: Shuggie Otis, Chocolate Milk, Xhol, Manfred Krug, and Veronika Fischer, throwing in a dash of sing-along grooves here and there for the uninitiated—the Bar-Kays, AWB, Slave, Gil Scott-Heron.
“Excuse me, Herr DJ Darky.”
Klaudia von Robinson wore a strapless designer dress that shimmered and clung to her rolls of baby fat like wet sealskin. I acknowledged her with a papal you-may-approach-the-DJ-booth nod. She had big, brown, mackerel begging eyes and wore her hair pulled back in a scalp-tingling tight chignon. It’d been years since I’d talked to a black woman, even longer since I’d touched one. At least I assumed Frau von Robinson was black. I couldn’t tell, her buttery-soft skin was the color of ten-million-year-old amber and nearly as transparent. Hers was an epic epidermis that seemed to have fossilized around her reluctant smile, wary heart, and the dragonfly tattoo on her shoulder. She wasn’t black, she was gold. The aboriginal gold of a Solomon Islander’s sun-kissed shock of an afro. The gold of my Auntie Marie’s incisor. The gold of the Pythagorean golden ratio. How I longed to say to her, “Baby, in the words of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Kepler, you are as fine as 1.618033989.”
Behind Klaudia stood her younger sister, Fatima, a stunningly beautiful woman whose own African heritage oozed “dream on, motherfucker” from her sloe-eyed Ethiopian features and her full, permanently puckered lips. She had been, as the Germans say, hit harder by the “nigger stick” than her sister. I suspected that they had different fathers. Princess Fatima
daintily proffered a peola-brown hand, face down as if she were introducing herself to a prostrating underling. I shook her hand weakly. It was cold and bony. There was something sad and restive about her. She wore her blackness like the heroine in that Chekhov play who, when asked why she always wears black, replies, “I’m in mourning for my life, I’m unhappy.” Fatima reminded me of myself. Omniphobic—scared of everything. Omniphobic. That’s a good one. I’ll have to submit it to Kensington-Merriwether and see what Cutter Pinchbeck has to say about it.
Klaudia, smug and even more stuck-up, never bothered to introduce herself. She just presumptuously pressed a finger to my chest as if my sternum were a doorbell.
“Do you have Sixto Rodriguez?”
“ ‘Sugar Man’?”
“ ‘Sugar Man.’ ”
I nodded. Great song. Probably do wonders for my cocaine headache. One often hears that Germans don’t have any taste. True, though it’s not that they are connoisseurs of schmaltz, it’s that they appreciate everything. When a German shows good taste, I’ve learned not to be surprised. Here subjectivity and objectivity have a way of canceling each other out like common cultural denominators, so out of necessity they’ve invented a new nonqualitative state of perception, an all-appreciative “neutertivity,” if you will. Everything’s good. Nothing is bad. And if it is bad, it doesn’t matter because somebody likes it.
I flipped through my crates and lifted out the Sixto Rodriguez album. Took me three years to find that record. This was before the Internet. When record collecting meant excursions to the suburban rec rooms of cracked-out, disbarred, no-longer-rich-as-hell affirmative-action uncles. Getting to the Ray Barrettos, Artur Rubenstein and the NBC Orchestra Plays Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2s, and Booker T. and the MGs before they ended up at the bottom of an empty kidney-shaped pool covered with silt, rusted lawn chairs, and barbecue grills. I had to send all the way to Auckland for Sixto. Sixty dollars plus eight for shipping and handling.
Eyes hidden behind the darkest pair of shades I’d ever seen, Sixto peered out at me through the glare of the shrink-wrap. Quintessentially seventies, he sits on some wooden stairs in front of a small A-frame ghetto brick house. His polyester bell-bottoms, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, feather-cut movie-Indian silky black hair complete with David Cassidy flip—there’s no doubt in my mind he’s the absentee father of someone about my age.
Sixto’s plaintive wail pulsed in and out of the half-calypso and half-mariachi guitar lick and the cheesy, warbled sci-fi sound effects. Sugar Man won’t you hurry . . . A simple 3?4 time bass line and a three-note muted horn announced the chorus. Su-gar-man . . . Su-gar-man . . . The Torpedo Käfer, not loud to begin with, went totally silent. Oblivious that he’s singing over what sounds like the climactic battle scene in Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, Sixto continued on undaunted, calling out to his drug dealer like a sick dog howling at its last full moon. Su-garman. . . Klaudia slow danced with herself, eyes closed, hands tucked into her underarms, softly singing the chorus. Like me under the tanning lamp, she left the door slightly ajar. Providing me a peek, me being the closest embodiment of dopehead stereophonic pathos. A patron raised an eyebrow and a bierflaschein my direction. Su-gar-man. . .
Somehow Sixto slipped through the cracks of the album cover stairs he sits on and missed out on soul-man immortality. I’m not one of those DJs who thinks every underappreciated crooner should be deified in the same breath as Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone. But it’s a shame he wasn’t at least a one-hit wonder. No reason this song shouldn’t be on some compilation album, generating enough residuals to at least paint the A-frame, keep the child-support checks from bouncing. Su-gar-man... Su-gar-man... Su-gar-man... Powerful stuff. Not the Mona Lisa, but seminal.
The bartender set a bubbling pilsner on the table. I’d been playing about two hours straight and wanted to enjoy it uninterrupted, so I removed my headphones and put on the longest record I had with me, “Lizard” by King Crimson, twenty-three minutes and twenty-six seconds. Despite the shift from black to blacklike music, no one protested. The foam mustache made my upper lip tingle, and I didn’t wipe it off until I noticed Klaudia was still standing there, circling her index finger over the record as if she were making it spin through telekinesis.
“Why are your turntables . . . oberseite unten? ” “
What?”
She turned to the bartender. “Wie sagt man ‘Oberseite unten’ auf English?”
“Upside-down.”
“Genau. Why are your turntables upside-down?”
“I’m left-handed. This way it’s easier for me to move all the things I have to move—the tone arm, these switches, knobs—they’re less in the way.”
“And that’s the main important thing—to have things less in the way or so?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“As a DJ you try to tell a story? Achieve a certain linearity, no?”
“No, I just play what I feel like hearing.”
“No, you don’t. You play what you think we should hear.”
One day I’m going to call those folks at the Berlitz School of Language, tell them I want money back, that there is no such thing as conversational German, only argumentative German. She had a beautiful voice. The timbre of the German female voice is pitch-perfect. Every time I go to kiss one I’m afraid I’m going to catch something. They all sound like Marlene Dietrich with a head cold. The rasp denotes a woman who’s able to take care of herself and, if need be, me too (in a film noir, femme fatale sense). I’ve come to realize that the high-pitched American-female “Oh my God!” squeal is a ploy for attention. A soprano subterfuge for a weakness sometimes feigned, sometimes in-grained, but always annoying.
“But you tell a story with what you play.”
“What story is that?”
“A love story.”
“It’s soul music. It’s like new-wave French cinema, it’s always about love.”
“But tell me why are the turntables Obersiete unten?”
It wasn’t that she wooed me; it was that she was the first person to ever ask me twice.
The left-handed explanation is partially true. To compensate for a right hand so useless that it could barely place a record on the spindle, I’ve experimented with every configuration of gadgetry and form. Both decks on one side, no cross fader, hamster style, reverse hamster, S-shaped and straight tone arms—but even after my right hand became dexterous enough to perform the perfunctory party skills such as stabs, cuts, and scratches, I still felt unsettled behind the tables. Standing behind my decks was like sleeping in somebody else’s bed.
The closest my work gets to ritual is the cleaning of the records. Hands gloved in thin white cotton, I treat the rare acetate 78s and the reissue-vinyl LPs with equal amounts of welcome-tothe-Waldorf-Astoria doorman respect. I follow the instructions on the cleaning fluid as prescribed. Removing static, crackle, and pop-producing dust particles and/or oily contaminants by handling the discs by the edges and labeled surfaces only.
I was cleaning an especially dirty record, something I never played, Earl Klugh, maybe, when it dawned on me why I was so uncomfortable behind the turntables: The records spin in the wrong direction. They turn clockwise when every other naturally occurring vortex, from spiral galaxies to hurricanes to flushing toilets to red-white-and-blue Harlem Globetrotter basketballs, spins counterclockwise. Looking at the Earl Klugh album, the dust particles clinging to the shiny black vinyl like stars to the desert sky, I realized that in my hand I held a dusty twelve-inch microcosm of the Milky Way. The LP is a grooved mini-whirlpool down which the needle spirals to produce sound. In the case of Earl Klugh, saccharine crap, but sound nonetheless. So I turned my turntables upside down. Now my records spin counterclockwise in concert with the spinning universe itself.
My explanation impressed Klaudia. She placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. It seemed to be pressing down on me, forcing me into place as if I were a misshapen puzzle piece. In the new jigsaw Germany
, where does this strange one go? Her fingers, nails unpainted, cuticles chewed raw, dug into my shoulders.
King Crimson still had another three quarters of an inch of playing time left. I started to give some thought to the next song. When I play in front of a crowd, I don’t sample. I play the entire recording. Live sampling is like taking a quote out of context.
I wavered between Brick’s “Dazz,” “Children of the Sun” by Mandrill, and readdressing my narcosis subtext with “Riding High” by Faze-O. Klaudia’s hand slid off my shoulder. But she didn’t go away. I settled for “Children of the Sun.” For a plump woman she had a long neck, and I wanted to run the palm of my hand against the grain of blonde fuzz on its nape. I suppose she wanted me to ask her name. But I didn’t want to know it. I wanted to know why the dogs in this city didn’t bark, and that was about it.
I drained my beer, mixed in the chimes from “Children of the Sun” a shade behind the pounding downbeat of King Crimson’s Mellotron, and realized there was something I did want to know.
“Do you know where I can see the sunset?”
“The sun is hard to find here. Does that go on your nerves?”
“Well, if you think of a place . . .”
Klaudia stuck out her hand and finally introduced herself. I gave her my card, making a point of handing one to her boyfriend, Horst, a bald-headed, rugger-nosed translator who looked like an IRA terrorist who moonlighted as a mountain crag between car bombings and kneecappings. He introduced himself by slipping a beer in my hand and an arm around Klaudia’s waist. Maybe her sidelong glances were just that, sidelong.
Two days later, she called.
“Hallo? Please, may I speak to DJ Darky?”