Slumberland (23 page)

“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.

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.

IT TOOK THE EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT
more than three years to build the Berlin Wall. Once we got the approval, 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.

“Udo!”

Udo, an eager boy of about eighteen, appeared at his side, straightening his rayon tie and his unruly forelock at the same time.

“Yes, sir?”

“I want you to make a copy of this document and bring it back to me straight away.”

Udo reached for the paper, Herr Müller slapped his hand away.

“Gloves!”

When Udo returned with his identification papers they were encased in a plastic cover. A buzzer sounded and Herr Müller beckoned us to join him on the other side of the counter. Briskly, he escorted us into the bowels of the system, marching us down a cavernous hallway until we reached the frosted glass door to Frau Richter's office. We could see a short, insanely busy woman who, judging by his trepidatious knock and newfound stammer, was Herr Müller's superior.

Frau Richter was on the phone yelling something to the effect of, “Tell I. M. Pei that Potsdamer Platz makes the architect, not the other way around!” when Herr Müller passed the proposal and the mysterious paper under her pug nose.

“Das ist eine geniale Idee,” she said, hanging up the phone. She fingered her pearl necklace for a moment and made another phone call.

For the next two hours we were shuttled up the chain of command, marched from building to building until we finally found ourselves in a Reichstag sitting room, waiting to be seen along with an elderly and very dapper gentleman. The antechamber of the elected federal official, whom I am legally barred from naming, was ornate. Interspersed between historical tapestries were exquisitely framed portraits of high-ranking politicians whom I'm also not allowed to identify, but as a hint of the echelon of portraiture facing us, think “unsinkable” World War II battleship.

Now that we had time to rest, we asked Stone to see his identification. He removed it from the protective sheath and flung the plastic into the barrel chest of a bespectacled leader whose German surname in English means “cabbage.”

The ID paper was written in that interlocking old-German script that looks like a wrought iron fence. I barely managed to decipher the letterhead, “Verfolgte des Naziregimes,” a bold declarative that had been embossed with the screaming red insignia of the German Democratic Republic.

“No, it's not possible,” Klaudia said, absentmindedly slipping into the Saxony accent she always tried so hard to hide. “There's no way.”

The nameless politician stepped through the tall, walnut doors accompanied by a man with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. If the Chinese had attacked Germany at that very moment I could tell you the color of the proverbial “panic button” that unleashes unholy hell.