Author: Paul Beatty
Category: Fiction
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The Schwa’s body began its physical decrescendo. He weaved across the stage like a concussed Movietone stooge slowly regaining his slapstick equilibrium after a blow to the head. He stepped back into his oxfords as if they were bedroom slippers and shuffled to center stage. From the back of the room a cry went up. The skinheads, led by Thorsten, whooped and stomped their feet in appreciation because the silence had finally broken. I turned on my digital recorder. In the gradually dimming room the red recording light glimmered like a distant star in a pitch-black universe.
The Schwa pressed the red button and it was, World, meet Charles Stone. Charles Stone, World. How do you do? Nice to meet you. It’s a pleasure.
The Listening Experience
Defying all the laws of acoustics and containing only the barest characteristics of tonality and melody, the Schwa’s sound was music in the sense that prison gruel is food. The opening composition, a dirge deluge entitled “Fatima,” was a profane flash flood of auditory tyranny that hurtled downhill with such force it literally knocked me off my feet. I felt like I was listening to a family of hillbillies reading Philip Roth aloud in a backwoods mountain hollow; each movement an endless filibuster so dense and pedantic that any one speaker, one paragraph, one instrument became indistinguishable from another.
As I struggled to stay afloat, I wondered how the lay listeners on the outside were coping with the free-jazz tsunami. I imagined a scene quite similar to the one that opened 2001: A Space Odyssey—the Berlin primordials, in the ill-fitting monkey suits of the day, growling and bounding around the unwelcome-sound monolith. It’d be chaos until one brave soul reached out to touch the wall; then there’d be change. Fundamental no-turning-back change.
There’s an old Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” So I picked myself up off the floor—fought back against this torrential downpour of pig calls and tuba bellows by going back to basics. Desperately I tried to wrap my mind around the drumming, but Irrawaddy went into this flimflam paradiddle sextuple ratatap, and the tenuous grip I had on sanity and the tune were broken. Thirty more seconds of her impeccable drum work caused my ego to slide off an inverted ratamacue in the obstinato voice as if it were a wet, slippery, moss-covered river rock in an Appalachian class-five rapid. Barely able to keep my head above water, I gave myself up to the current. Surrendered to the sound, waiting, praying, for the next eddy of cacophony to pick me up, smash my head against the rocks, and put an end to my misery. However, floating among the flotsam of brassy detritus, rushing past my ears—a simple elongated note. A distant overhead trumpet screed that had more in common with the ominous drone of a B-52 flying at twenty-five thousand feet than it did with jazz.
I latched onto this heaven-sent piece of Acadian driftwood, but it wasn’t heavy enough to support me. Another wave of dia-tonic chords, and I was resubmerged in the horn section’s slip-stream. Too tired to surrender, I decided to just sit there on the floor until the storm subsided. Knowing that in the morning the authorities would find my bloated, improvisation-logged body on the Slumberland floor buried under alluvial layers of sedimentary jazzbo. From behind, just as I had given up all hope, a suntanned-lifeguard-brown arm wrapped itself across my chest and dragged me to the river’s edge. Backs against the wall, we slumped to the floor. The hand tapped a beat on my heart. Doomp-doomp tshk da-doomp-doomp tshk doomp-doomp tshk . . . And there it was, a sardonic sonic pun buried beneath the pounding piano, the keening horns and the epileptic bass line: The violinist quietly quoting Eric B. and Rakim’s “My Melody” was the melody. Doomp-doomp tshk da-doomp-doomp tshk doompdoomp tshk . . . Her hand still tapping my chest, Klaudia von Robinson and I headed back out into the rushing waters, determined to ford the unfordable.
CHAPTER 5
YOU KNOW HOW when a soprano hits that note and the wineglass breaks? The Schwa’s music does that, except instead of breaking glass, it shatters time. Stops time, really.
Whenever I hear about a method of time travel that involves wormholes, flux capacitors, or cosmic strings and no music I’m not impressed. If there is such a thing as a vehicle for time travel it’s music: Ask any brokenhearted Luther Vandross fan.
I used to be obsessed with stoppages in time. Whenever I saw the dog acting funny, I’d think he was forecasting an earthquake. So I’d run inside and set the kitchen clock precariously on the nail nubbin, so that when the big one hit, our fractured family clock would join the famous timepieces stopped by cataclysms, like the frozen wall clock from the Great Alaska Earthquake and the smashed Waiakea town square clock lying in the rubbled aftermath of the 1960 tsunami. In high school I was an above-average athlete who rarely saw the field of play because I’d call time-out for no reason other than to see the scoreboard clock come to a halt. Every spring and fall at the onset of daylight savings time I’d call the time, hoping to hear time stop and repeat itself. In L.A. the number was 264-1234; three hollow rings, and the time would answer. The time was a woman. A husky-voiced female who got straight to the point: “At the sound of the tone, the time will be eleven thirty-three p.m. and ten seconds.” Beep. No hello or nothing. “At the sound of the tone . . .” Man, I miss her. With the Schwa’s band tearing a hole in the space-time-music continuum, I felt like calling the time right then and there. Press the receiver to my ear so I could hear her say, “At the sound of the tone the American Negro will be passé, and I for one couldn’t be happier.” Beep.
When the Schwa called me onstage for the encore, I somnambulantly approached the bandstand. The carnage was everywhere. It was as if some suicide sound bomber had detonated his explosive belt in the middle of the room. People, seats, and sensibilities were scattered about the room. Though the band had stopped playing, the music still rang in everyone’s ears. The audience still tumbled and swayed in the eerie disharmony of a North Korean gymnastics troupe celebrating May Day on acid and half rations. In the darkness I found myself stepping over prostrate bodies and bumping aside zombified audience members. The Schwa’s set had blown minds, and all that remained was the smithereens of a pre-Schwa, post-commercial consciousness.
I took my place behind the turntables, my hands shaking so uncontrollably I could barely put the record on the spindle.
“PTSD!” someone shouted.
A peal of laughter rippled the room. They were right, of course; we were all indeed suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. My case being especially acute because I had to follow in the Schwa’s brilliant wake. To ease my nerves I did what we all do in times of crisis: I turned to the cliché. Peering through the darkness into the packed house, I imagined the audience naked, but in this case the old adage was of no help because half the audience really was naked. In back of the room couples clung to each other in the infamous Yoko-and-John-Lennon Rolling Stone pose. A conga line of streakers, including Thorsten and Nordica, molted from their clothes and deliriously snaked their way through the audience. A man stood at the front of the bandstand wincing as he pulled the hair from his nipples. The sympathetic African sandwich peddler gave him a rose and a hug.
Cuff links sparkling in the spotlight, Stone raised his arms and hushed the crowd.
“On those days when I wake up realizing my life has been lived in vain, I come here to the Slumberland. Let me rephrase that: I never knew my life had been lived in vain until I came to the Slumberland and heard that jukebox.”
“Die größte Jukebox in der Welt!” someone, who sounded suspiciously like Klaudia, shouted.
From its corner the jukebox flashed and flickered its lights in appreciation.
“This is a man who’s turned the jukebox into a modern-day oracle. You put your money in the slot and Bill Withers answers a question you didn’t think you had, Aretha Franklin distills advice you didn’t think you needed, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers predict your future. He’s a man who’s synthesized every sound ever heard and every feeling ever felt. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...”
“The look” sufficed. I’d waited all my life for someone to give me that look. The look Duke gave Johnny Hodges. Bob Marley gave Peter Tosh. George Clinton gave Bootsy. Benny Goodman gave Charlie Christian. Billie Holiday gave Lester Young. Chuck D gave Flavor Flav. Alvin gave the Chipmunks. The look that said, “Do your thing, motherfucker.”
I didn’t mince music. I slapped the crossfader and hit them straight with the beat. No grease. The room went reverential. Folks sat down and listened with the rapt attentiveness of campers hearing their first fireside ghost story. Those on the outside pressed their regretful faces against the windows and the skylight. I knew, somewhere, my boy Blaze was listening in on the international feed, clapping his hands and nodding his head. “Oh, hell yes. It’s about time, fool.”
I was scared. Scared that I would die before we finished. I wanted time to stop but not forever.
The Schwa was frightened too. Even though he’d been expecting a miracle, he wasn’t quite ready for the thoroughness of the boom. His hands shook. He was faltering, unsure of himself. It was then I shot him the look. Do your thing, motherfucker.
The Schwa leapt onto the track. Tackling and attempting to subdue his instrument as if it were a wild swamp gator roused from a deep, satisfying sleep. The first note he hit was pure paterfamilias. Its sound wave so concussive it flapped my clothes, shook the walls, and caused one audience member to exclaim, “Yes, Father?”
If you ever attend a poetry or jazz workshop to learn the mystical art of improvisation, invariably the instructor will say to you, “First thought, best thought.” It’s a faux-Buddhist axiom that has led to nothing more than some wildly uneven Beat literature and some shaky second-half play calling by the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl XIV, but it sounds good. Personally, I never believed in improvisation. Listen to any cat freestyle or solo—Dizzy, Biggie, Bessie, or Ashbery—they’re not playing the way they want to play, they’re trying to play the way they want to play. No one ever sounded exactly the way they wanted to sound. But that night the Schwa convinced me otherwise. Without trying, he played exactly the way he wanted to play, and when I say he wasn’t trying, I don’t mean he wasn’t putting forth any effort, I mean there was no pretense. He simply played his ass off, blessing my beat with brilliant new neo-bop and retro-cool interstices that filled voids both musical and spiritual.
In the advanced poetry and jazz-improvisation workshop the instructor will invariably say, “Don’t think. If you think, you’re dead.” Of course, it’s the obverse that’s really true. If you’re not thinking, you’re dead, and I didn’t need to look at the Schwa’s knitted brow and gritted countenance to know that Charles Stone was deep in thought. I just had to listen.
He was switching up the tempo. Segueing from a frenzied fortissimo to a languid legato by quoting from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro national anthem. It’s a beautiful yet trepidatious song, and especially so in his hands. Musical mason that he was, the Schwa erected a series of African-American landmarks upon the foundation I had laid down. The contrapuntal effect of our discordant architectural styles meshed together wonderfully. One moment the beat was a towering black obelisk, the next it was an ebony-walled Taj Mahal. The music was so uniquely majestic I felt like stepping outside of the song. A dis-embodied DJ floating out into the audience, putting a proud arm around his unborn child, and saying, “See that song? Hear that music? Daddy helped build that.”
Despite the tune’s genius, in my mental landscape where blackness is passé, his quoting the Negro national anthem was a blatant violation of the zoning laws. By constructing a new black Berlin Wall in both my head and the city, he was asking me to improvise. Prodding me to tap out an unpremeditated beat on the drum pads, compress the bass line, and add some shama lama ding-dong to the groove. He was daring me to be “black.”
But blackness is and forever will be passé and I held my compositional ground, hit my presets, and leaned on my turntables, furiously scratching the coda. The audience roared and shouted for more. Hands so sweaty that my slippery fingers had trouble staying on the vinyl, I continued to scratch, lacing the beat with a dense, undulating buzz that I cribbed from a nest of agitated hornets I found during a late-night stroll along the Spree.
I shall not be moved
Like a tree that’s planted by the water
I shall not be moved
Forced to relent to my racial and turntable obstinacy, the Schwa deconstructed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by laying out like a suicidal Acapulco cliff diver who could give a fuck about timing the tide. He paused, then took a deep breath and cannonballed into his own tune, unleashing a voluminous splashing salvo of triplets that shattered and scattered the song into a wave of quarter, half, whole notes that fluttered to the floor in wet, black, globular droplets.
My beat parfait complete, I leaned into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charles Stone. Thanks for coming out, drive home safely, and remember, ‘All art is propaganda.’ ”
Each of us exhausted and covered in sweat, the Schwa and I met at center stage. Over those past two and a half minutes we’d spilled more inner secrets than Anna Freud and Deep Throat combined, but having been in Germany too long and deeply influenced by a country where one has two or three friends and everyone else in your life is an acquaintance, we didn’t know whether to hug, shake hands, or kiss.
From outside I could hear police sirens blare and kids, amped up on caffeine drinks and our extraordinarily powerful encore, jumping on cars and setting fires. It wasn’t a case of the devil’s music spurring the youth to act a fool. It’s not rock ’n’ roll or hip-hop that’s to blame: After all, Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici set off the Belgian Revolution, and long before the Paris rap riots, a wolf pack of rich old ladies went absolutely buck wild on the Champ-Élysées following the debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It’s the touch of sound. Sound is touch and nothing touches you like good, really good, music. It’s like being masturbated by the hand of God. Having the siroccos cooing softly into your ear. It’s Mama’s lullaby gently stroking the neurons in your auditory cortex.
The cops were getting closer and Doris tried to hurry us outside before we would get arrested. The Schwa gripped me by the shoulders like a man trying to be fatherly and keep his distance at the same time. Our conversation was short and sweet.
“Thanks, man,” we mumbled to each other.
“No, really,” he said, “the wall, the concert, Fatima, I want you to know . . . you know.”
“Yeah, man, likewise.”
“Beautiful.”
“Say, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, go ’head.”
“During that last solo, what were you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about the phrase on the banner, ‘Black Passé.’
How being passé is freedom. You can do what you want. No demands. No expectations. The only person I have to please is myself.”
“You’ll never be passé.”
“Shit, you keep spinning like that and neither will you.”
“I don’t know about that. To be passé you have to have been happening at some point in time, and I never was nor never will be happening.”
The Schwa laughed. Doris finally got us outside. Burning cars filled the streets. People crowded around the Schwa and begged for his autograph. Behind him I could see the towheaded boy who years ago had written “Ausländer Raus!” on the dewy Slum-berland window standing in a circle of Sudanese skateboarders. A flash of light and the circle parted, leaving the white kid standing there holding a Molotov cocktail. He tossed it into the church plaza, then stood there transfixed by the spreading flames.
“Lauf!” I shouted at him. Run!
Tyrus, the Slumberland librarian, came out of nowhere, shaking me by the elbow. I expected him to give me a book. And
I wanted a book. I needed a gratuitous, multigenerational tale of colored-people woe that would assure the white reader and the aspiring-to-be white reader that everything would be okay despite the preponderance of evidence that nothing is ever okay.
“Dude, do you know what you’ve done?”
“Huh?”
“You’ve turned this motherfucker out. Permanently fucked shit up. Shit is no longer okay, but that’s a good thing.”
“Huh?”
Sensing my confusion, Lars handed me a tampon soaked in absinthe. In the middle of Goltzstrasse I dropped trou, and in the greatest act of love since Juliet tried to drink Romeo’s hemlock backwash, Klaudia took the cottony dagger and rammed it up my ass, thusly. Thank goodness for the gentle-glide design.
The wormwood buzz kicked in immediately, and for the rest of the night any conversation was subtitled in bright pink-and-green variety-show Japanese.
And that was most definitely okay by me.
EPILOGUE TO THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY
THEY SAY THE Schwa’s wall sounds different depending upon which side you’re standing on. Experienced from the west, the replay of the concert invokes the West Berlin of thirty years ago. It gives the city a sense of the old intimacy that once made it so special. Standing on that side of the wall the music makes you feel safe. It’s the sound of inspiration, encouragement, and hope. On the other hand, if you walk ten meters east, the same music stirs up a different set of emotions. You’re overcome by a power-ballad wistfulness that leaves one reflecting upon how far the city and its citizens have come. In contrast to those on the west who take from the wall, listeners on the eastern side are moved to give of themselves. They treat this wailing wall like a musical temple. Prayers hang on nearby trees. The ground around the wall is wreathed and strewn with offerings ranging from photos of missing relatives to antiquated East German appliances like the RG-28 Mixing Device.* That’s been the wall’s impact on the city. At least until the speakers get shorted out by the rain and snow, and Christo or some other installation artist decides to dye the Spree river orange and wrap the Reichstag in flypaper.