Slumberland (22 page)

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?

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 white 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:

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.

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.”