Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/paul-beatty/page,17,68351-slumberland.html
No Admittance To Black Men
Who Meet Any Of The Following Criteria
• Under 25 years of age
• Wearing expensive and grotesque American sportswear, gold chains, and pricey watches
• Bloodshot eyes
• Bad teeth in conjunction with unusual body hygiene for an African (i.e., strong-smelling deodorant and aftershave)
• Not in the company of white females or locals
• Frequent the drug scene
• Exceptions will be made for tourists and black men with intelligent eyes
While we protested, the doorman shoved us into the street, explaining that the club was having problems with black men selling drugs and sexually harassing the female help.
“We aren’t racist,” he shouted, addressing the crowd more than us. “We respect our multikulti brethren in the neighborhood far too much for us to suspect all black people. Our policy is only directed toward drug dealers.”
Peeking over his shoulder I could see Doris and Lars inside, boogying on down totalitarian style to a polka-punk ditty called “Dancing on the Airplane.” I felt less insulted by the place’s discriminatory illogic than by the fact that he failed to notice the glint of intelligence in my eyes.
While Fatima had a breakdown sitting on the hood of an Opel station wagon, I walked up on the scruffy gatekeeper and batted my brilliant peepers smartly in his face.
“Come on, man. You mean to tell me you don’t see at least a hint of intelligence in these eyes?”
Fatima never recovered from the insult. Among the daily affronts—the squirt gun assaults, dirt-clod bombardments, subway gropes, and “compliments” about her excellent German and her good fortune in having grown up in Germany and not Africa—the incident at An einem Sonntag was the snub that stopped the cultural chameleon from changing colors. There is no camouflage for being black.
When the cops asked the crowd about the smoldering corpse, they were really addressing Thorsten, as he was the only white person present. Since my gig the cold-hearted neo-Nazi couldn’t get the Schwa’s sound out of his head no matter how many Turks he beat, Chinese he stoned, Jewish ghosts he exorcised, and niggers he flicked lit cigarette butts at. On days off from his piano-moving job, he’d call me.
“Where is he?”
I’d call Fatima to find out, relay the info to him. He’d bus in from Marzahn just to sit curbside and listen to the music, hoping to catch the Schwa before he was shooed away by the authorities. The verdammte Neger across the street, who since the Bundestreffen also followed the Schwa, sometimes gave him dirty looks, but Stone and Fatima never paid him any mind.
As Thorsten explained himself to a sympathetic cop, the paramedics floated a plastic sheet over Fatima’s body. It wasn’t hard from the evidence (a singed metal gas canister and a melted boom box) to figure out what had happened.
Thorsten told the cop that when he showed up and took his place on the bus stop bench, it was as if she had been waiting for him. She stared him down with those large, distant, camel-brown eyes, then silently toted her gas can to the nearby station. Splurged on two liters of high octane. Returned to the scene. Sat down. Drenched herself in gasoline. Jabbed her earphones into the radio. Turned up the volume. Adjusted the treble. Held up her lighter rock ’n’ roll–concert style and lit it. Hell of an encore.
The Schwa and Fatima had gotten a lot of work done that day, and I admired their handiwork. At nearly five feet high and fifteen feet long, the wall was higher, longer, smoother, and sturdier than I’d ever seen it. Stone remarked that Fatima had studied some architecture books and had taught him that before building he should sort the stones into piles and that the base of a freestanding wall should be about half its height with the bigger stones at the bottom.
By this time the police had barricaded the good-sized group of increasingly agitated blacks behind wooden horses. Seeing the Schwarzen had been contained, the coroner whipped the sheet off Fatima’s burnt corpse and began pounding the remains into ash with a shovel while two cops prepared to sweep her up into a body bag. The callous treatment of the deceased set the black Germans off, and from behind a phalanx of riot police they hurled rocks and curses. Thorsten, with his ball-peen skull and Nazi chic attire, drew his fair share of both the stony fusillade and abuse. The rocks were your standard fare: hard, meta-morphic, and amorphous. But the invective was uniquely German: wonderfully smart, deeply emasculating, and with a dash of U-boat sailor’s brio thrown in for good measure. Whether you call it snapping, capping, or bagging, the insult the beach-ball-afroed Nordica unleashed on Thorsten was one for the ages: “It’s your fault she died, you cowardly, warm-shower-taking, satin-testicled, spotty-dicked onanist who stinks like a lion’s cage, saves every fucking e-mail, answers every fucking e-mail, compares gas prices, drives an automatic car, uses his brakes when driving uphill, and is a fish-faced, poor excuse for an evolutionary mishap who waves back at the Teletubbies and only swims near the edges of the pool.”
A lesser man would have joined Fatima in suicide then and there, but Thorsten just stood there, hands on hips, ignoring the barrage of rocks and insults like some cocksure army officer oblivious to the war going on around him.
He took a small, neatly folded piece of paper and tossed it to Klaudia, who tucked it safely behind the wall.
“Your sister gave me this before she killed herself.”
“Is it a suicide note?”
“I don’t know; I can’t read. I didn’t give it to the bulls because I thought maybe it blames me for her death. Read it to me, but cover your ears so that you don’t hear it, okay?”
The cute, twisted logic of thinking that if she couldn’t hear herself reading the note she wouldn’t know what it said caused a tight, almost morbid smile to break out on her tearstained face. The Schwa and I scooted in next to her and peeked over her shoulder. Though the note was in German, Thorsten made us cover our ears too. Klaudia started to read: It was a stanza from a poem, “They’re People Like Us,” by May Ayim.
“We really believe
that all people are the same.
No one should be discriminated against,
just because he’s different.”
The stanza’s sarcasm hit Thorsten about the same time as a grenade-sized rock pegged him right above his eye. A thick rivulet of blood ran down his cheek and dripped from his chin.
The wind and the rioting kicked up Fatima’s ashes, scattering them in black swirls about the street. Klaudia, her fingers feverishly nimble, folded the suicide note into an origami paper cup complete with tuck-in flap and sprinted toward the last pile of ashes. Someone javelined a tree branch into the fracas; meant for the police, it boomeranged into my girl’s rib cage, knocking her down. A beer bottle landed at her feet. Unbowed, she scrambled through the broken glass. Thorsten turned to the Schwa and said, “This city really does need a new Berlin Wall, only this time it should be transparent,” then whipped his shirt off and stood in front of Stone’s wall.
“Heil Hitler!” he shouted, drawing the attention of all those who hadn’t already been transfixed by the life-sized tattoo of the führer inked across his muscular chest. It was an exact likeness, but if you looked closely you could see the mustache was a splotchy, fuzz-covered birthmark just above his belly button. Thorsten snapped a fascist salute, clicked his booted heels, and then stiffly goose-stepped to and fro in front of the wall like a storm trooper target in a Coney Island shooting gallery circa 1942.
Some bumptious carnival barker shouted out the rules.
“You have to stay on the curb. Legs and torso—ten points. Head shot—twenty-five points. Groin—fifty points. The swastika on his neck—one hundred points! Five rocks for one mark!”
The crowd loved it, and soon directed all of its energy to hitting the freak, pelting him with bottles, rocks, batteries, and whatever else they could find to throw. Whenever he was hit, Thorsten would shout a metallic “Bing!” and make an abrupt about-face.
&
nbsp; The antics created the diversion that Klaudia needed to retrieve the ashes of her sister. And as we watched her scoop the flesh granules and bone chips into the paper urn, the Schwa turned to me. “You know, the bald-headed guy’s right.”
“About what?”
“About the wall. I can build a transparent wall—a wall of sound.”
The intensity of the stone throwing picked up. One of the blacks accused Thorsten of killing Fatima, and without a trace of bitterness in his voice, Thorsten kindly pointed out to them in so many words that in some moral court of law with broad psychosomatic jurisdiction, that accusation might be true, but the one thing they were all guilty of, black monkey and white superhuman alike, is that they all watched her die.
The stones stopped pinging against the wall.
Exhausted, Thorsten slumped to the ground, his Hitler tattoo covered in blood.
CHAPTER 2
FOR HIM IT isn’t about the way a musician sounds. He could care less whether or not he or she has the “goods.” How they dress. For him the assemblage of a band is about some bizarre teleological holism whose main precept seems to be “the whole is a grater on some of its parts.”
He conducted his rehearsals like a basketball coach who, in order to emphasize conditioning and defense, puts his players through two weeks of grueling practice before they ever touch a basketball. He auditioned and rehearsed his band without once hearing a musician play.
“How do you know if someone can play without even checking out his embouchure?” I asked him.
“When you see someone holding the steering wheel at ten and two, exactly how they teach you in driving school, what’s the first thing you think about that driver?”
“That motherfucker can’t drive.”
“Okay then, I don’t need to see nobody hold, bow, blow, pound, sound no instrument.”
Instead he plotted their horoscopes, gave them psychometric tests for group compatibility, and made them sit through team-building exercises. My favorite part of the auditions was when he presented the musicians with his universal sheet music.
“But isn’t sheet music already universal?” they’d invariably ask.
“It is for musicians who can read music. What about the cats who can’t read music?”
Even the most forward-thinking musician would turn to the first page of “universal music” and freeze.
“Hey, man, Ikea instructions? I’m sorry, but I don’t get this.”
“Ikea’s instructions for furniture assembly are the closest thing we earthlings have developed that approaches a universal language. Okay, people, on page two, when we attach the left panel to the top shelf, I want the horns to come in on a D-flat major chord, and trombone, as you’re putting in the dowels, tonic the chord at the top. From there we’ll count sixteen bars, segue back to the intro, and nail the back panels down. Saxes, I want you to give out with that old Phillips-head-screwdriver, good-timey feeling. Now let’s play this fucking hutch, hit it on four.”
Most guys ran out the door screaming, but the ones who stayed were special.
There were like-minded guys like Willy Wow, a violinist whose music I’d greatly admired. His talents were retrograde in a very modern sort of way—he could make a violin sound like a synthesizer. During his job interview, the Schwa didn’t ask him what was the last book he’d read or what he felt was his worst quality. He looked at Wow’s mangled hand and said, “Tell me about Nam.”
“Vietnam wasn’t so bad. It’s what freed up my mind. I used to sit on top of the PX and listen to the sounds of battle. It was like going to the Laos philharmonic. Like sitting at Minton’s bar during a late night cutting session. It was the freest of free jazz. The Viet Cong would open up with this light-arms staccato. And the U.S. would return fire with artillery legato, mortar fire. Pound the hillside with 150mm and 175mm rondo and drop the napalm coda and blow away the whole stage, you dig? You’d think after that display of firepower there’d be no more shit for Charlie to play, right? Hills burned to a crisp. Not even a bird in the sky, much less a tree for one to fly out of. Any other normal motherfucker would have walked off the bandstand never to play again, but Charlie Cong let off three little mortar bursts, pop pop pop! And the cutting contest was over. They’d won the day and I knew they’d win the war. Right then and there I decided to sound like Vietnam.”
Needless to say Willy Wow was the band’s violinist, insomuch as there was a band. You never knew exactly who was in the band. The Schwa never summarily dismissed anybody or castigated his (and sometimes her) manhood and musicianship. Cats would simply know if they were wanted or not and would decide for themselves if they could hang. Permit me to introduce some of the regulars: Soulemané Eshun, a black-American bass player with an excellent bow technique and an annoying between-song habit of uttering cryptic African proverbs that only he and the Schwa seemed to understand.
“Gbawlope nane a gipo ni ton ne a gipo ta-ton. Alligator says: We know a friendly from an enemy canoe.”
“Yeah, baby.”
“Lã asike legbe meflo dzo o. A long-tailed animal should not attempt to jump over a fire.”
“Right on.”
On piano and percussion, Uli Effenberg. An expert aero-phone player, his eclectic collections of wind instruments included a cage of bees, a propeller hat, and a human skull, which when he waved it in the air produced the eeriest glissando through the eye sockets and missing teeth. Uli didn’t play the piano so much as he fucked with the piano. Sometimes he’d just move the stool back and forth, augmenting whatever the band was doing with the squeaks of the roller wheels and the slamming of the lid. He’d strike the pedals with a hammer; play the keyboard with a beach ball. Once, to the Schwa’s great amusement, he threw a mouse onto the piano strings, then went to sleep while the little white rodent comped the band.
On drums, Sandra Irrawaddy. Despite holding the sticks as if she had the palsy, she could do things on a drum set Philly Joe Jones could only dream about. The Schwa, stealing a Duke Ellington line, called her an “exponent of drum-stickery,” but her footwork was no joke either. Once during a cigarette break Sandra played a more-than-reasonable facsimile of John Bonham’s infamous “Moby Dick” drum solo with no hands. Instead of using drumsticks she kicked out the jam on the bass drums and spit tangerine seeds at the cymbals.
And then there’s Yong Sook Rhee. Ever wonder whatever happened to that stuck-up-looking Korean kid with the slicked-down hair who was known as the world’s smartest boy? The one who at age five had an IQ of 210, could speak nine languages, program in five, recite pi to ten thousand places, and composed poetry?* I’ll tell you what happened to young Yong Sook, he plays trumpet in the Schwa’s band. Not much of a musician, he plays with a shameless naïveté reminiscent of Halle Berry trying to act. Just as the starlet’s insufferable overacting is about to drive you insane, she flashes a perfectly parabolic expanse of flesh and all is forgiven; and when you listen to Yong Sook play he’ll miss ten thousand notes, but the one he hits is crazy beautiful.
My role in the band was undefined. There were always turntables and a mixer in the studio, but I never touched them and no one ever asked me to sit in. In the days leading up to the concert someone asked if I was in the band.
“Yes,” the Schwa said.
“Well, what the hell does he do?”
“He’s our secret weapon. The grand finale that’ll bring down the house.”
Then he strolled over to Fatima’s melted radio, which he always kept nearby, turned it “on,” and began to dance a tango with an invisible partner.
As the Schwa caminata’d around the room, Soulemané tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Brow tron lo, eta ne a ne won oh gike. The world is too large, that’s why we do not hear everything.”
The concert couldn’t come fast enough. The African proverbs were starting to make sense.
CHAPTER 3
IT TOOK THE EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT more than three years to build the Berlin Wall. Once we got the app
roval, it took us only three days to rebuild it. The idea was to bisect the heart of the city from Treptow to Pankow with a wall of sound ten meters thick and five meters high, a sound that, if everything went according to plan, would be a continuous loop of the Schwa’s upcoming concert. The music would be so real that anyone within earshot would feel as if they could reach out and touch it. They’d have to figure out for themselves if the wall of sound was confinement, exclusion, or protection.
Given Germany’s reputation for being a bureaucratic quagmire where one needs a stamp of approval in order to get the stamp of approval, we walked into the Senate for Urban Redevelopment fully expecting to get the infamous civic runaround. To be, as the Germans say, sent from Pontius to Pilatus.
The Schwa handed the clerk his proposal, a tersely worded, one-sentence document written in English on a sheet of notebook paper wrinkled as an elephant’s ass. Herr Müller calmly spread it over the counter, ironed it out with his forearm, and read it aloud. “I want to rebuild the Berlin Wall with music instead of concrete, barbed wire, and machine guns ’n’ shit.”
Without so much as a snicker, Herr Müller put a bearded chin in his hand and said, “In some ways that’s not a bad idea.”
His muted enthusiasm shouldn’t have been a complete surprise. Berlin newspapers often poll their readerships as to whether or not they want the Wall back. At least 20 percent of the respondents answer yes. So we had Herr Müller’s tacit approval, but surely that wouldn’t be nearly enough. True to form, he slapped a small stack of various pastel-colored application forms on the counter, rattling off in very official German which ones had to be sent where and addressed to whom. It didn’t take long for Müller to see that his Byzantine bullshit wasn’t registering with Herr Stone, so he tried English.
“Excuse me, sir. If you aren’t a German citizen and lawful resident of Berlin, this is going to be a problem. I need to see your papers.”
At the mention of papers, both Klaudia and I panicked, thinking that at any second a squad of crew-cut Polizei would come barreling in and escort the Schwa to the border. The Schwa, sensing he was at some bureaucratic impasse, coolly took out the same frayed piece of paper he showed the motorcycle cop the day I first discovered him. Herr Müller scanned it, skeptically at first, then he lifted the pair of librarian glasses from his chest and placed them over his slowly unwrinkling nose. Suddenly he was handling the paper by the edges like it was the fucking Magna Carta.