Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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“But you don’t like the music?”
“No, not really, it’s all kind of gay. I love this guy. He loves me. He died in my arms, our blood commingling.”
“But why do you know this music?”
“I collect records—those fascist 78s are worth money. A collector in Salzburg offered me two thousand dollars for ‘The Book Burning March’ and ‘If Mother Won’t Give You a Nickel, Ask Neville Chamberlain for Czechoslovakia.’ ”
In a delirious fit of tolerance and gratitude, the neo-Nazi reached out, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pinned me to the wall of the car.
“Kamerad, hast du diese Schallplatten?”
“Klar. Ich bin Schallplattenunterhalter . . .”
A week later I DJed a skinhead rally in Marzhan, a high-rise ghetto twenty-five minutes east of downtown Berlin. The wind-up Victrola phonograph I’d brought lent the festivities an eerie beer-hall putsch authenticity. Scratchy parade marches and brownshirt encomiums bellowed from the machine’s mahogany horn. To my ears it was buffoonish kitsch, but the earnestness with which the crowd sang the songs matched the shouting-hallelujah devoutness of the best black American gospel.
I spent the night turning the phonograph crank and watching the bald and milkmaid-braided hellions hoist beers, sieg, and heil, celebrating as if the morning papers had announced the Anschluss, praising the reannexation of Austria, Mississippi, and Redondo Beach in one fell swoop. I felt like a Class D war criminal, but being a DJ is like being an ACLU lawyer arguing for the Klansmen’s right to march: If they pay, you play what the crowd wants to hear. Besides, it was going to be the first and last time I’d ever get the chance to play those records. So whenever a pockmarked, punky fraulein spat at me and asked to see my Schwanz, I patted the knot of deutschmarks in my pocket and reminded myself that I knew which “tail” she really wanted to see.
Thorsten, my employer, leaned on the table. I motioned for him to back off. “Don’t do that; you’ll scratch the record,” I cautioned.
He apologized, then with a wicked look on his face said, “Do you know why the Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?”
I shrugged. “Isn’t it because St. Patrick got rid of the snakes in Ireland?”
“There never were any snakes in postglacial Ireland. The snakes are a metaphor.”
“For what?”
“For...hey, that’s a catchy tune, what’s this record?”
“ ‘People to the Rifle.’ ”
“Powerful stuff, makes me want to . . .”
I steered him back on course. “The snakes, the snakes are a metaphor for what?”
“For niggers. St. Patrick kicked the Moors out of Ireland, not the snakes.”
I clucked my tongue and pointed out that one or two of his neo-Nazi brethren seemed to be of mixed-race stock. This time it was Thorsten who frowned.
“Look, I hate the blacks, the Jews, and all the other others, but I’m not so stupid as to believe in racial purity. Come on, after two, three thousand years, and not one of my ancestors was a non-Aryan? How do you Americans say? ‘No way, dude.’ ”
“So the half-black guy over there in the SS jacket . . .”
“It’s the hate that’s important. It doesn’t matter who does the hating, but who you hate. Gerhard hates niggers. We hate him. He hates himself. Alles in ordnung.”
“Does he think he’s inferior?”
“He is inferior and he knows it.”
I ended “People to the Rifle” prematurely with an abrupt record-scrapping lift of the stylus.
Over the complaining murmurs I said to Thorsten, “I want you to hear something,” and played the Schwa’s version of the Horst Wessel Song, the Nazi national anthem. Even before I’d placed the needle on the record Thorsten had sussed out my intentions.
“This is going to be a black man, isn’t it? I’ve heard your Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, Porgy and Bess, ‘My Funny Valentine,’ nice music, but its artistry was mostly due to the efforts of his white impresario, Gil Evans. The Negro doesn’t have the organizational necessities . . .” The opening salvo of kick-drum beats shut Thorsten up. As the Schwa’s band turned his anthem inside out, he sat there holding his head as if he had a headache. I imagine Adolf Hitler had the same expression on his face when he witnessed Jesse Owens pull away from his vaunted supermen in a blazing mastery of muscle. Subhuman or what have you, there was no denying the apelike man was fast as hell and that Stone’s music was no shitty Orange County racist-punk-band cover. The Schwa was doing to National Socialism what Warhol had done to the Campbell’s soup can. A few partygoers blubbered nostalgically in their drinks, but most stood at a slouching attention, unsure if the bop rendition of the song was an honorific tribute or an insult. To be honest I didn’t know, and neither did Thorsten. When the tune ended it was evident from his downcast gaze that he’d been deeply moved, but he was too embarrassed to praise it and too dumb-founded to trash it. He pressed a fifty into my palm and asked me to play it again. After the fourth playback Thorsten finally spoke. “Did you know that before World War II, the percentage of Jews in Germany was zero point eight-seven-two? To blame such a small percentage of people for the world’s problems, it’s embarrassing. To be threatened by primitive races like yours that can’t think, or heathen races that can only deceive and nothing else, this shows our own inherent inferiority, and I hate the Jews for this, I hate you for this. I’ve never even met a Jew, and who knows, I might even be Jewish, but I hate them anyway. Who is this?”
“Charles Stone.”
“A nigger?”
“If you’re an Aryan, he’s a nigger.”
“There are no ‘Aryans,’ it’s a fake race, a marketing tool. It’s ethnic branding.”
“Exactly, so are ‘niggers.’ ”
“You know, monkey man, one day there will be no races, no ethnicities, only brands. People will be Nikes or Adidas. Microsoft or Macintosh. Coke or Pepsi.”
Thorsten Schick was the scariest person I’d ever met. An intelligent man who sees through the media thought control, the myths of race and class, and free market propaganda only to have become a guileless man who now hates without compunction and speaks perfect English. At evening’s end the skinhead egghead bestowed upon me the highest compliment he could give a non-Aryan when he said, “Just remember, DJ Darky, I don’t have a beef with you, just your people.”
The Right Fork
The Bundestreffen is the annual Afro-German get-together. A thousand native-born black volk from all over the country weekend at a spa in Ettlingen, a small resort town in the Black Forest. Klaudia and Fatima were reluctant to invite me, knowing that it’d be almost impossible for me to resist the innumerable puns I could make about a gathering of blacks in the Black Forest. But when I offered to DJ for free, even they laughed when I joked, “When we get to the Black Forest, we won’t be able to see the niggers for the trees.”
In many ways the Afro-German is W. E. B Du Bois’s Talented Tenth come to life. They’re almost a Stepford race. Unified as only an invisible people without a proximate community to turn one’s back on can be. Human muesli, they’re multilingual and multikulti, exceedingly well mannered and groomed, and, though most show the telltale sign of biraciality—the prominent shiny forehead—on the whole they’re a stunningly handsome and intelligent people.
While Klaudia played volleyball, Fatima played sideline reporter and gave me periodic updates on the game’s participants.
Making the side out calls was spunky Friederike Lutz, the nonagenarian referee. During World War II, Friederike avoided the concentration camps by working as a topless ooga-booga extra in German imperialism films such as Auntie Wanda from Uganda and Nine Little Nubian Nubiles.
On one side of the droopy volleyball net stood Maximilian, Bertolt, Uschi, Axel, Effi, and Detlef, all second- and third-generation descendents of the French colonial soldiers who occupied the Rhineland after World War I. Their ultratraditional names a noble effort to make them, if not more German looki
ng, then German sounding. In the service court, younger and hipper, were the offspring of the black American Cold War occupiers. Their fathers mantelpiece Polaroids, their namesakes jazz legends and blaxploitation antiheroes. Miles, Billie, Dexter, Superfly, Shaft, and Buck and the Preacher stared into the net, knees bent, arms raised. Liberos, middle blockers, or outside hitters, there was something forced in the players’ broad smiles and hearty laughter. They seemed as out of place in the Fatherland as black women in shampoo commercials.
Klaudia preferred the outdoor activities and spent her days playing ping-pong and tetherball. Fatima, on the other hand, reveled in the bleakness of the Afro-German experience. She dragged me to countless workshops, lectures, and films where I’d watch and listen to a people construct an identity from historical scratch.
Strangely, the whole affair reminded me of being on a porn set, and I couldn’t shake the idea that porn stars and black Germans are a lot alike. Two neglected and attention-starved communities of people who, despite their public nakedness, remain “invisible” to a society that pretends not to see them.
In a class on the history of Germany’s blacks during World War II, the lecturer flashed a slide of a sandy-haired black boy in pleated shorts and mohair vest complete with swastika button standing next to his mother and saluting Hitler’s passing motor-cade with a prim nationalist pride. Another Afro-Junge, some-one’s precocious black child, stood in front of the projection mimicking the salute to crying laughter. I came to the sober realization that the disquietude of forced sterility is the common underlying subtext to porn and Afro-Germanness. In porn menstruation is nonexistent and semen isn’t lifeblood, it’s slander. A gooey expression of political and interpersonal barrenness, and in comparison the history of the Afro-German is literally one of forced sterilization. A systematic sterilization not only of people but of memory. No wonder Fatima was so sad. No wonder they were people in desperate need of a good party.
I’m proud to take credit for introducing the concept of the after party to Afro-Germany. After party—I love that expression. The party after the party. It’s one of those ignoble black-American idioms that, along with frontin’ and turned out,* I wouldn’t sell to Cutter Pinchbeck and the boys at Kensington-Merriwether for a million dollars. The words wouldn’t do standard English any good anyways. They’re nonstandard words for nonstandard people.* And no one’s more nonstandard than a tall, abyss-black German named Nordica still workshopping her existence at one o’clock in the morning.
“Can you turn down the music?” she said. “I need to ask you something.”
I eased down the volume of Charles Stone’s “Berlin Skyline #45” to a level that allowed the party people to continue tapping their feet and ruminate in the flickering fireplace light about German blackness.
“What is happening?” Nordica asked, sounding just like a Hollywood runaway on her first Ecstasy trip.
I didn’t answer her. I was too caught up in her afro. A billowy natural so huge it had its own atmosphere, gravitational pull, and a 37.89 percent chance of supporting intelligent life.
“I need to know what is happening to me. Why do I feel so unsecure? Afraid, and yet not frightened.”
The room rumbled with agreement. Overcome with German inquisitiveness and black paranoia, these sons and daughters of Hegel and Queen Nefertiti wanted an answer. I wanted to tell them that the Schwa’s music leans heavily on semitone, that tiny musical interval that’s a half step between harmony and noise, for a reason. He wants to show us that the best parts of life are temporal semitone, those nanoseconds between ecstasy and panic that if we could we’d string together in sensate harmony. If only we could be Wile E. Coyote walking on air for those precious few moments before the bittersweet realization he’s walking on air. Before falling to earth with a pitiful wave of the hand and a puff of smoke.
I didn’t say any of that because I didn’t know the German word for semitone or if my audience knew who Bugs Bunny was. I simply said, “What is happening is that you’ve been turnt out, baby.”
The Schwa turns us all out sooner or later.
Straight Ahead
My next gig of note took place at the Free University. It was there that I finally answered the cult artist’s eternal bugaboo, Who’s your audience? I can’t count how many times a reporter, a fan, or me myself has asked that very question. Who’s your audience? Who listens to that wild, screaming, arrhythmic, keening, vinyl-scratching capriccio anyways?
I set up my turntables in a Department of Ancient American Studies classroom. Behind me, on the chalkboard, was Professor Fukusaku’s breakdown of what he termed “The Global Battle Royale,” a chicken-scratch list of countries and sovereign states that America had invaded in the past two hundred years. Korea, Turkey, Haiti, Honduras, Egypt, the list almost exhaustive but, as recent news reports had shown, was missing one key territory. I grabbed a piece of chalk and in the tiny space between Samoa and El Salvador I squeezed in “Los Angeles.” Now with the list complete, can’t we all get along?
Clapping the chalk dust off my hands, I turned to face my audience. A pretty, vaguely Mediterranean-looking woman sat patiently in the front row, her hands folded neatly in her lap. It was well past the start time and obvious that no one else but her was going to show up. I scratched my head, wondering whether or not to go on.
“Fuck it,” I told myself, “I’ll play.”
I don’t know how long I played for, but I was inspired. I dedicated every note to that woman in the front row.
I can’t count how many times a lazy writer for a northwestern music zine, a nosy fan boy, or a stodgy music teacher has asked me, “So DJ Darky, who is your audience?”
Well, I finally had an answer to that ol’ bugaboo. Who’s my audience? The chick in the blue dress, her hands folded neatly in her lap, that’s my audience!
My melodies stomped through the room overturning every unoccupied chair, ripping in half every unsold ticket. Throughout the torrential sheets of sound I rained down upon her, she never moved. Never lifted her head, smiled, or tapped her feet. But she didn’t leave either. I couldn’t have spun any better. Exhausted, my eyes burning with sweat, my ears ringing, my mind turned inside out, I flung the last Super Ball–dense, illbientbluegrass-deep-house mash-up of the evening against the back wall. Spiraling in and out of madness, the beat bounced off the walls, it screamed and writhed, a naked patient in the state hospital for the insane fighting against the bed restraints. Eventually it died in a corner with its mouth open, bequeathing nothing to the world save a ghostly silence that, in the absence of improvisational clamor, was hauntingly piercing. The woman in the powder-blue dress never applauded. She stood up, looked at me meekly, and asked, “Are you finished?” I nodded yes, and she exited into the hall only to return moments later bearing a mop and bucket of sudsy water. What if you had a concert and nobody came?
PART 4
THE LISTENING EXPERIENCE
CHAPTER 1
NO ONE BELIEVED she’d do it. Fatima. Her charred skeleton sitting in the lotus position in the middle of Bernauerstrasse, creaking in the wind.
When I got there I could literally see through her, but the bile that rose in my throat forced me to stop looking. Every now and then, from behind my back, I’d hear a sharp crack that sounded like a potato chip being snapped in two and I’d know that a piece of burnt flesh or a tuft of crinkled hair had peeled off her body and was tumbling in the street, being chased down by Klaudia.
I suppose ultimately that was what Fatima wanted, to be skinless and hairless. Featureless really.
Since reunification Fatima had lost a lot of weight, becoming, as Klaudia so accurately described it, “heavily anorexic.” Her kilo-shedding despondency grew deeper with each passing day. What had been the healthy fear of white people shared by most of the country’s colored inhabitants had recently morphed into full-blown leukophobia, or fear of all things white. It was debilitating at first. She stopped answering any mail that arrived in wh
ite envelopes. Refused to drink milk or eat mashed potatoes. Polar bears, snowstorms, and Danes had to be avoided at all costs because they were bad omens. And, in blessed irony, toilet paper scared her shitless.
Her only solace from this all-encompassing pallidity was Charles Stone, and she found it not so much in his music but in the man. Klaudia and I never spoke about how much her sister and the Schwa looked alike. And as far as I know, neither did they. All we knew was that the two became inseparable. Whenever he was in the streets rebuilding his wall, she was right there next to him, blasting his music on a boom box. And conversely, whenever she was hospitalized he was at her bedside singing lullabies and helping her tear down her mental walls. He encouraged her to confront her fears, and for a while she listened. Taking up nursing even though the uniform caused her to break out in hives. For a while she even dated a Kenyan albino she met at the Slumberland. But the grind of being black in Berlin wore on her.
I’d last seen her a few weeks before on Russian disco night at a popular nightspot in Prenzlauer Berg called An Einem Sonntag im August. Fatima, Stone, Klaudia, and I queued up for over an hour waiting to get in. If you’ve ever heard Russian disco you’d stand in line too. An amalgam of Gypsy hip-hop, Siberian soul, and Moldavian ska, it’s an underground music so unabashedly commercial and cheesy that it takes awfulness to heights unexplored since Lawrence Welk covered the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” The effect is truly lobotomizing, and Fatima looked forward to her and the Schwa dancing their troubles away to classics like “Vodka Revolution,” “Generation @,” and “Vassily’s Groove.”* When we finally reached the entrance, the doorman said he could let the women in, but not me and the Schwa.
“There’s a new club policy,” he said. “No black men.” I followed his finger to an exclusionary sign that, if you’d struck out the No, would’ve been the entrance policy at the Slumberland. The sign read: