Slumberland (18 page)

“Okay.”

“So when's the jukebox gonna be fixed?”

“In a few minutes.”

“Cool.”

“Later.”

“Late.”

I had my head buried in the machine's belly and was delicately soldering in a few replacement chips when I heard the squishing of someone walking across the sandy floor. That same someone kicked the sole of my foot.

“What? I'm busy.”

No response.

I never bothered to look to see who it was. At first I figured it was Doris wanting to play a quick game of backgammon, or an impatient and feverish regular in bad need of a Teena Marie fix. But the grainy sloshing was too deep, too leaden. I reran the squishy footfalls in my head. Matching them up against the hundreds of different Slumberland steps I'd had filed away in my head. It hit me. They belonged to the crazy-looking black guy who asked for donations to rebuild the Wall.

Ten seconds later I heard the voice on my answering machine coming from the bar: “For the nigger, it niggereth every day.”

The Schwa.

Finally.

As long as I'd been looking for him, there he was, around a corner, no more than twenty feet away from me, and I couldn't chase him down or shout him out. Not with the jukebox doors open wide, exposing its antiquated circuitry to the piles of sand
I'd kick up scrambling to greet him. Not with the white-hot tip of the soldering iron clenched between my teeth, precariously close to melting an irreplaceable quartz crystal.

I heard him lift his squeaky wheelbarrow and head out the door. After I finished my work I started up the jukebox and asked Doris what happened.

She didn't answer right away. She was holding me hostage. Waiting for me to pay the ransom. If I wanted her to set Charles Stone free I'd have to confess my undying love for her. Tell her that our breaking up was the dumbest separation since Frankie killed Johnny.

The jukebox buzzed and flickered to life. Van Morrison began to serenade the barflies. Two lovers standing beneath the overgrown banana tree kissed. I knew when the Irishman hit the chorus she'd cave. Crazy Love. Doris sang softly to herself and I pounced.

“What happened?”

“I give him some money. He bows and says, ‘For the nigger it niggereth every day.' And that's it. He didn't say anything else.”

“But it was Berlin Wall Guy?”

“Yes.”

“But there was a pause between him talking to you and him leaving.”

“He was listening to your music. Smiling.”

I got light-headed. Smoking-California-homegrown-and-drinking-Hennessy-at-the-beach-my-God-look-at-that-fucking-sunset-how-come-nobody-ever-talks-about-Zen-anymore light-headed.

Not wanting to alarm me, she ran her thumbnail down the length of my sideburns and softly said, “His wheelbarrow was filled with brand-new bricks. I think Mister Stone readies to build his wall.”

I cupped Doris's pretty face in my hands.

“Yes?” she asked expectantly.

“Can I borrow your bike?”

 

They say the Berlin Wall no longer exists on the street but in the mind. When it was extant, the Wall didn't meander through the city, it bogarted. Its inexorable ghost is just as belligerent. It cuts uninvited through vacant lots and pricey new condominiums, rattling its hammer and sickle, spooking the tourists and locals who travel along this invisible barrier.

With one eye out for the chickenfucker, who I knew was somewhere watching me, I cycled through the Berlin spring looking for the Schwa. I popped wheelies as I ran red lights, fish-tailed into clouds of mosquitoes breeding over pools of stagnant water, bunny hopped over long-haired subway buskers who didn't need the money, laid down senseless skid marks in historic plazas, rode no-hands down wide thoroughfares whose street names read like places on a Communist board game called Class Struggle: Paul-Robeson-strasse, Ho-Chi-Minh-strasse, Paris-Commune-Brücke.
You've been accused of Left Opportunism. Go back three spaces
.

In the middle of Leninplatz I cruised past a bearded black man stacking bits of broken brick and ill-fitting rocks into a makeshift barricade. I joined the other onlookers and watched him extend the wall into the street.

I have a tendency to remember the names but forget the faces, and I wished that I'd been born with a photographic memory and not a phonographic one. Because here was a man who, during the interminable time I'd been looking for him, I had heard but not seen. He'd been in the Slumberland, asked me for money on numerous occasions, and this was the first time I'd bothered to truly look at him.

Charles Stone looked nothing like I'd imagined, yet how could I have missed him? A garish, evergreen three-piece suit set
off his complexion nicely. The redbone, wrinkled skin, more photosphere than epidermis, still had a faint, rusty, Creole glow and reminded me of the setting sun I missed so much. His hair burst from his skull like an erupting solar flare. I don't know if he or the wind was responsible for combing it, but the gigantic afro swept from back to front, a graying red-tide tidal wave that crested over his forehead as if it were about to crash onto his freckled brow. Emaciated yet exceedingly energetic for his age, he moved in jangled fits and starts like a string puppet.

Though his face and physique were new to me, I already knew exactly what he sounded like. He breathed through a deviated septum in labored, wheezy, whistles. Sometimes when he closed his large, snarled hands, his knuckles popped loud and clear like oily kernels tossed into the frying pan. He gnashed his teeth. His wristwatch ticked softly, like a hushed cricket unsure of the temperature. He always carried large amounts of change that, with each step he took, jingled as if he had sleigh bells in his pocket. When he scratched the back of his dry, bristly head, it sounded like a little boy gathering kindling in the forest.

Heroes. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.

Blaze always said that one of my best qualities was that I'm never impressed by anyone. He was afraid that if I did locate the Schwa I wouldn't be fazed, and my lack of acolyte appeal would make him not want to play with me.

“Man, you have to flatter motherfuckers like Charles Stone.”

For a second I thought about tearing across the street and calling the Beard Scratchers one by one. Pretending that I was more excited than I was.

“Dude, you'll never guess who I'm looking at right now . . . the Schwa, man . . . I shit you not.”

But that would've been like Christopher Columbus returning to Queen Isabella with nothing to show for his voyage save a drippy case of syphilis. No, the Beard Scratchers would be notified when the mission for the Perfect Beat was complete.

 

The Schwa was serious about his work. After examining his pile of stones, he'd carefully select the rock he felt would best fit into the open crevice. If a block had to be shaved or cut down, he filed it by scraping it over the blacktop or dashing it against the curb. For mortar he used a boundless optimism that was constantly being tested by the rumbling vibrations of the passing trucks.

A motorcycle cop with thin cold eyes stepped off a brand-new BMW K100, and though he knew full well what the Schwa was up to, he asked the gathering what was going on.

“He's rebuilding the Berlin Wall,” someone announced.

“Looks more like the Berlin Partition,” the officer said, and though it wasn't very funny, the crowd, me included, laughed.

The cop snapped his fingers and Stone handed over a tattered but important-looking piece of paper, which the officer glanced at and quickly handed back. The cop waved a leather-gloved finger at a huge billboard that hung overhead. We all peered up at the advert for West brand cigarettes. Two crude-oil-black “homeboys,” dressed in black from sneaker to wool cap, stood against a white background, gangster posing and brandishing smokeless cigarettes over the caption
TEST IT
.

“Do you remember the watchtower that once stood there?” Heads nodded. The Schwa added a stone, oblivious to the socialist nostalgia. The officer stuffed his cap under his armpit and said something in Russian, which broke everybody up.

Then a haphazardly built section of the wall avalanched onto the street, blocking traffic. A man on the east side of the wall playfully leapt through the opening to freedom. A woman
closed one eye and squeezed off a couple of finger shots at his back. A few others grabbed the fallen bricks and set to repairing the breach.

Slowly walking over to his bike, the cop removed two small orange safety cones from the saddlebags and set them down in front of the wall. A sharp whistle blast and a stern look sent the halted traffic around the wall in an orderly fashion.

“Mr. Stone?”

The Schwa clucked his tongue and pouted like a kid who'd been found in a decadelong game of hide-and-seek. He tapped a brick into place with the butt end of his trowel, a trowel that had never seen an ounce of cement and gleamed in the sun. I didn't waver. Fuck the salutations. The ass kissing. I told him a joke.

“What do you call a jazz musician without a white girlfriend?”

I paused for effect, and he, pissed that I'd managed to pique the curiosity of a man who'd thought he'd heard and seen it all, idled for the briefest of moments, readjusting a brick that didn't need readjusting, and asked, “So what
do
you call a jazz musician without a white woman?”

“Homeless.”

I DIDN'T KNOW IT THEN
, but the afternoon Charles Stone spoke to Doris, he'd broken a vow of silence that was more than twenty years old. It was a sacred pact he'd taken with his larynx and his instrument the day trumpeter Lee Morgan died, shot to death by his fed-up woman, in some long-forgotten New York jazz café. When he entered the Slumberland and heard something in my music that invoked Lee Morgan's hard-bop verve, it gave him hope. Though after I'd gotten to know him it was a vow that I often wished he'd kept.

I wanted to subtly reintroduce the Schwa to the music industry and felt that a “listening session” for the latest album of the apple-bottomed pop star
La Crème
(italics music company's) would be the perfect time.

Lars and a few other journalists (referred to by the company as “music partners”), the sales staff, and a few marketing executives sat in the record company's grandest conference room. Doris was there to cater the drinks. I was there to DJ.
La Crème
's father entered the room to boisterous applause trying its best to sound spontaneous and genuine. A tall, black American, he looked like the best man at a motorcycle gang leader's wedding.

 

He wore a black leather suit that had Indian frills running down the sleeves and pant seams. His presentation was war room slick. There were charts and projections, battle plans and objectives. On command I played four songs from the album and during each one he'd say, “Crank it up, this is the jam.” Between “jams” he explained the concept of the album. There was the crossover club song, the R&B ballad—but
La Crème
hadn't forgotten “her core audience,” he insisted, and to prove it he played one last cut, “Soldier,” the album's title track. Supposedly, “Soldier” had what he referred to as a “street vibe.” When the song ended he pressed his fists into the shiny mahogany conference table and exhorted his minions. “We need, no, we
demand
a number-one album, and I expect all of us in this room to do our jobs: salespeople, media partners, everybody!” He cut his bloodshot eyes at us and asked, “Are you all soldiers for black music? Warriors for neo-soul?” After the meeting ended he grabbed Lars by the elbow.

“Do you know, my man, how many number-one singles
La Crème
has had to date?”

Lars nodded and said, “Sixteen.”

Impressed, Daddy La Crème smiled, ran his tongue over a twenty-four-karat-gold incisor, and squeezed Lars's elbow even harder.

“But do you know what they all have in common?”

Lars shook his head.

“The hook is repeated exactly forty times in every song.”

He released my pale friend gently, like a considerate fisherman throwing his catch back into the water. While everybody mingled over drinks and hors d'oeuvres, half listening to the rest of the album, I announced the Schwa's existence to the world by interrupting a tune called “Shaking My Light-Skinneded Ass Like a Dark-Skinneded Bitch” with the chicken-fucking song.

An angry Daddy La Crème rushed the turntables, demanding that I put his daughter's “shit” back on. He reached maddeningly
for the record and I flung it past his outstretched hands to Lars, who taunted him monkey-in-the-middle style before smashing it to pieces on the punch bowl. The husky European correspondent for
Rolling Stone
tackled the apoplectic stage father and sat on his chest. The others took seats at the boardroom table or stared out the window, quietly noshing on
flammeküche
and fighting back tears. Doris hugged me from behind, kissed my neck, and in French, a language she thought I didn't understand, asked me to marry her.

The tune did what it do, and when it ended two salespeople immediately handed in their resignations and left to pursue their dreams. One by one the music critics filed past the prostrated Daddy La Crème, and as he reached out to clutch at their ankles they freed themselves with swift kicks to his rib cage and spittle-punctuated admonishments.

“How dare you pimp your own daughter?”

“Neo-soul? Don't you mean sans-soul music?”

“For the past five years you people, and I mean ‘you people,' have ruined my life. Turned me into a musically unrequited necrophiliac who's been making love to a dead art form that won't love me back.”

When the man from
Rolling Stone
released Daddy La Crème there was an unexpected look of contriteness on the impresario's face. He shook out his crushed-velvet cowboy hat and looked at me with an “Et tu, brotherman?” expression. I opened the door for him. “Frankly, dude, I think even her ass is overrated.”