Slumberland (14 page)

The robust revving of the eight-cylinder engine drowned out the rest of his prognostication and my question about what in hell was a mobile phone.

“Come,” he said, patting the passenger seat. “Come see the breach in the Wall through which the four horsemen of the American apocalypse will ride.”

“Are you some kind of spy or just a well-informed car thief?” I asked, closing the door behind me.

“I'm a spy, though by tomorrow I might be a war criminal.”

“Me too.”

Traveling in four-door, heated-leather-seat luxury, we drove slowly through the masses. The man with the run-of-the-mill face told me he was stealing the Benz to replace his Trabant, a piece-of-shit socialist sedan that could be completely assembled and disassembled with a crescent wrench.

“How do you double the value of your Trabant?” he riddled me rhetorically. “Fill it with gas!”

When we reached the Wall, I turned down his offer of a tour of the bowels of the evil empire. I'm one of those folks who poses for photos standing next to the sign that says,
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING SUCH AND SUCH STATE
, then sleeps through the windy drive through the majestic Grand Tetons.

Otis Redding's distinct rhythm 'n' blues profundo bellowed from the car speakers. I couldn't figure out if the refrain to “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay” was prophetic or not because it seemed as if everything was changing and yet remained the same.

Two East German border guards, hats askew and tunics unbut-toned, sat at their post taking alternating slugs and pulls from a Jack Daniel's bottle and an American cigarette. The first day-trip
sojourners into Western imperialism were just starting to return to their homes. Exhausted families of four and only four walked past the guards, the parents dragging their sluggish, candy-smeared, toy-laden, lumpen proletarian progeny behind them. I half expected to hear an announcement saying, “Disneyland, excuse me, West Germany is now closed. Mickey, Pluto, Helmut, NATO, Japan, the United States of America, and the rest of the G7 thank you for your patronage and servitude. Get home safely.”

The invisible man pressed a button and unlocked my door. “The one thing I regret is that we created the Beatles,” he said apologetically, “then killed Otis Redding.”

“We?”

“Yes, ‘we.' The dirty Reds killed Otis Redding. Mystery solved, okay. Look, the Beatles had been on top four years in a row, doing the job we gave them, which was to lull the West into a sitar secular stupor, and here comes this majestic black man with a haunting voice knocking them off the charts. We couldn't have a Negro on top of the pop charts in 1968 blurring the racial hegemony. Bad for propaganda. Everybody—Moscow, Washington, Capitol Records—everybody agreed on that. Otis Redding and Martin Luther King both had to go. Made a two-for-one deal with the FBI.”

“C'mon, he died in a plane crash.”

“Ever notice the talentless, the harmless ones, never die young? Vanilla Ice, Lawrence Welk, the Disco Duck. You know how the monks scour the countryside and choose a small child to be the Dalai Lama? In Memphis there's a bratty little boy named Justin Timberlake who's been chosen to be the next King of Pop. He'll live to be a hundred. It's all part of the plan to keep you people docile.”

Unable to bear any more achingly plausible conspiracy theories, I moved to leave the car before I was exposed to the pointy, bloodletting half of the Stasi's shield-and-sword motto. I was
too late. The man of a thousand and one faces, each one more bland and forgettable than the one before it, had a Walther PPK pointed at his temple. He held back tears. His face convulsed, yet his hand remained steady. He whistled along with the classic outro of “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay,” backed up by the sounds of the crashing surf and the giddy laughter of East Berliners returning home from their first day of freedom.

When the song faded out he said, “Before I shoot myself, Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, isn't there something you want to know?”

“ ‘Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann?' It was you who sent the chicken-fucking tape?”

“It was.”

“How did you know I was looking for Charles Stone? And if you knew I was looking for him, why didn't you just call and tell me where he was? Why fuck with me like that?”

“I fucked with you like that because I'm an East German secret agent and I'm trained to fuck with people like that. I don't say, ‘Good morning, how are you feeling?,' which is the American way of fucking with you, as if you people really care how someone is feeling. I fuck your mind.”

“So why me?”

“Well, Herr Darky, I first heard your music at a very exclusive stag party I attended. We were watching a film you might be familiar with, a pornographic western called
High Poon
.”

“Some of my best work.”

“Indeed, personages no less than Heiner Müller, Valeri Borzov, Nicolae Ceauscescu, and Deng Xiaoping commented on how wonderful your score was. It was your work during that final scene that brought home the film's point that the gang bang is the truest form of existentialism.”

“Thank you.”

“After that I became your biggest fan, which meant that I
showed my appreciation not only by smuggling in your films and mix tapes, but I bugged your phone and intercepted your communiqués.”

“Communiqués? I didn't know black people had communiqués.”

“When I found out you were corresponding with DJs around the world as to Charles Stone's whereabouts, I decided to help you find him.”

“And you sent the video.”

“I couldn't just contact you. No way to justify that to the higher-ups. See, we knew this day was coming, and a few of us lower-echelon guys at the agency who are huge Charles Stone fans were afraid that his unreleased masters would be burned along with the rest of the nefarious evidence. We couldn't take the chance that this great man and his music would be lost to time and capitalism. So we arranged with the pornographers to use his music in their films as a way to preserve it.”

“There's more music?”

“I'll send you a coprophagia short entitled
Eat Shit and Live
! His playing on that one is so unworldly that when someone puts a spoonful of shit in their mouth, you'd swear they were eating caviar.”

“So the Schwa's alive?”

“Very much so. I don't know where he is, but you'll find him. That's why I put the Slumberland's address on the envelope. He'll come through there—all you soul brothers do.”

“So why shoot yourself?”

“That was my dick in the chicken.”

“Fire at will, motherfucker.”

The chickenfucker laughed and lowered his gun. I scrambled out.

“One more thing,” he said, starting the engine. “In time you will meet a woman named Klaudia von Robinson.”

“Von Robinson?”

“It's not part of the master plan, but marry her anyway.”

Blaring its horn, the Benz parted the crowd and drove through the gate. The Spy Who Loved Chickens flashed his ID and the guards scrambled to their wobbly feet and bowed and scraped and saluted and raised the tailgate all at the same time. I wondered what the Schwa had to do with East German scat porn and the collapse of Communism.

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.

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.