Slumberland (24 page)

But Germany doesn't have nuclear arms
.

Sure they don't.

Anyway, since China didn't attack, I can't tell you what color the “button” is, but suffice it to say the suitcase is brown. Yeah, I would've thought black too.

“Herr Stone?”

The Schwa stood, hat in hand, except that he didn't have a hat.

“Do you mind, Herr Gleibermann, if I see this gentleman first?” Our anonymous statesperson was smooth yet commanding. It was easy to see how he or possibly she carried North Rhine–Westphalia with 86 percent of the vote.

“Kein problem . . .”

After the brass-handled doors clicked behind the Schwa, I asked a still-pale Klaudia what was the deal with his identity papers.

“What does
Verfolgte des Naziregimes
mean?”

Klaudia cupped her hands around my ear and whispered. Whenever she discussed matters referring to “the former East Germany,” she whispered. A survival instinct from the days
when the walls had ears and best friends had microphones taped to their chests.

“
Verfolgte des Naziregimes
means ‘persecuted by the Nazi regime.' It was an identity the DDR gave to Holocaust survivors as recompense. Of course, in the government's eyes the war was West Germany's fault.”

“How so?”

“We were good, innocent Communists, and don't forget, the Nazis hated Communists. My history teacher used to say, ‘Re-member, class, they gassed Communists alongside the Jews, and if you were a Jewish Communist, forget about it, they gassed and burned you twice just to make sure.'

“Anyway,” Klaudia continued, “if you have this Verfolgte des Naziregimes, you got party favors . . .”

I grinned, picturing a bunch of survivors in conical paper hats, tossing confetti and blowing paper whistles, celebrating life, but she meant special privileges. “They could start a little private business, sell food or umbrellas, open up a bicycle-repair shop, even though any kind of open capitalism was strictly forbidden. Maybe they got a little stipend. Maybe they only had to wait six years for a car, I don't know. But anyone who carried this paper basically didn't get fucked with.”

I never could figure out how the Schwa supported himself. Now I knew. I mean, so what if the guy basically defected to East Germany—what was the current German government going to do, leave an honorary Jewish black jazzman to die?

The Schwa exited the office with the politician's arm around his shoulder, a substantial check, and written carte blanche to build his wall in any shape or form he saw fit so long as it didn't obstruct traffic or violate any noise-pollution statutes.

Old Herr Gleibermann, clutching a paper certificate of victimization exactly like the Schwa's, touched his hand and in a halting English asked, “What camp were you in, brother?”

“Camp?”

“Sachsenhausen? Buchenwald? Bergen-Belsen?”

“No. Never.”

“I thought maybe you were a survivor. Your eyes.”

“No, sorry.”

“No camp?”

“Stephen S. Wise Day Camp when I was a young'un, that's about it.”

The old man took his joke in good humor and entered into the chancellor's inner sanctum complaining that his neighbor's dog was still barking at all hours of the night.

 

The East Side Gallery is a mural-covered remnant of the Berlin Wall that runs along the north bank of the river Spree between the Oberbaum Bridge and the Ostbahnhof train station. It's a kilometer-long memorial that simultaneously tries to erase and preserve the Berlin Wall's legacy. Knowing that in this case the art is the canvas, the best of the faded and peeling panels incorporate the Wall into their themes. Birgit Kinder's three-dimensional Trabant sedan crashes the through the Wall to freedom. The artist Suku simply lists the Wall's achievements on a concrete résumé.

 

Curriculum Vitae
1961 1962 1963 1964
1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971
1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979
1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987
1988 1989 1990

 

The last two entries are painted in a screaming red and caution-ary yellow, respectively.

It was here, nailed into the butt end of the Gallery, that the
cornerstone of the new Berlin Wall, Fatima's melted boom box, was laid. In many ways our wall was an extension of the Gallery—but one immune to the neglect and the countless coats of graffiti defacement that in recent years had rendered the original artwork almost invisible.

With the Schwa who knows where, Lars, Doris, and Klaudia gave me the honor of turning on the old radio, which had been hollowed out and stuffed with Fatima's ashes and new electronic gadgetry. It buzzed with an antiphonary static that carried about thirty meters into the middle of the wide sidewalk.

The sound cut right through Klaudia.

“Was ist los?”

“This is freaking me out. I just realized what we're doing.”

She removed a small radio from her satchel and fiddled with the power button. The red light flashed off and on.

“The sound makes the Wall more real.”

“More real than the gallery?”

“In a way, yeah. For you guys the murals are a kitschy tourist attraction, but for me, sometimes I walk past them and remember things.”

“You're saying we're trivializing the repression?”

I looked up and down Mühlenstrasse. It was getting harder to tell the differences between East and West. Back in the day it was easy. Border streets such as Mühlenstrasse were like the river Styx. Concrete tributaries not to be crossed because on the other side was Hades, a backward underworld where the living dead lived in prefab housing. I dashed across the six-lane street and tried to imagine what West Berlin looked like from an Eastern vantage point. People died attempting to cross that street, so I supposed it looked like the Elysian Fields: still part of the underworld, only the markets carried bananas.

“You're forgetting the chicken-fucking song,” I said, somewhat out of breath from the return sprint. “The guy takes an
improbable bestial coupling, like man and fowl, and makes it seem like you're watching the secret bedroom tapes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Whatever his reasons, it's impossible for his music to trivialize anything. His music is an honorific to life—the good, bad, and the ambiguous.”

“There's no denying the chicken-fucking song,” Doris said, her voice inflected with a sexual nostalgia I thought Klaudia might take offense to. She didn't. Instead she erased any apprehensions we had with an ironic memory of totalitarian life.

She held out the radio.

“See this power button? In East Germany we didn't have power buttons. The word ‘power' was too aggressive.”

“That's hilarious.”

“We had the ‘Netz' button.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's like ‘network.' So when you turned on the television or whatever, you were plugged into the people. Everybody was sharing the power.”

“That's deep.”

Klaudia handed me the radio.

“Here.”

There was a little bit of resignation in her voice that I took for the residue of thought control.

“What now?”

“There's no place to put it.”

She was right. We were standing on the only thirty-meter stretch of Berlin sidewalk without trees. The closest thing we had to a tree was a street-lamp stanchion. A truck zipped passed us, illuminating our dumbfounded faces in bright xenon light.

The plan was simple. For the most part the old Wall ran along existing streets. Berlin is easily one of the most tree-lined cities in the world, so we'd stick satellite radios in the trees, where they'd dangle from the branches like transistorized fruit. In the treeless
places where the Wall's footprint had been erased by progress in the form of condominiums or vacant lots that would soon be turned into condos, there was no shortage of local artists who were willing to fill in the blanks. For instance, Steffi Rödl strung a clothesline made of barbed wire across the trash-strewn vacant lot that sat behind a row of apartment houses on Stallschreiberstrasse. Using wooden clothespins, she hung a twelve-foot-high curtain of shiny charcoal-gray silk that billowed majestically in the wind, a brilliantine representation of the Berlin Wall aired out like so much dirty laundry. In Potsdamer Platz, where the Wall had been eradicated by commercialism and skyscrapers, in lieu of radios—which would never have been heard over the din of downtown traffic—Michael Harnisch projected a musical stave across the white limestone base of the Sony Center. A computer instantly annotated the music and projected the notes onto the wall, the concert's score running through downtown Berlin like a ticker tape opera. Using the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop, Uwe Okulaja lined up a bank of high-powered green and red lights that, like a giant equalizer, shot a pulsing LED readout 250 meters into the night sky. There were other installations: a dancing fountain, an oscilloscope, and pushcarts where you could rent a set of those chintzy museum headphones and take a sonic tour of the new Berlin Wall; of course, none of these things would mean much if we couldn't find somewhere to place the second speaker. It'd be like the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific coming up a few tracks short at the joining of the first transcontinental railroad. Some top-hatted CEO pocketing the golden spike with a “Fuck it, that's close enough” shrug.

 

Overhead the telephone lines buzzed. A car cruised past at that odd not-too-fast, not-too-slow L.A. street-corner drive-by speed that made me instinctively duck behind the streetlight for cover. There, crouched behind the stanchion, I remembered the
telephone lines buzzing on a warm night back in Westwood, California. We were playing hooky from Emerson Junior High. Lounging in Julie Koenig's spacious backyard celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday before it was a holiday. Bong hits. Two cases of Hamm's beer. Devin Morris listening to the Eagles' “Take It Easy,” and declaring that, just like Glenn Frey, he too had seven women on his mind. A spirited Steve Martin's
Let's Get Small
versus Richard Pryor's
That Nigger's Crazy
debate. Sneaking off into the guesthouse to lose my virginity to Lori Weinstein (and Bobby Caldwell's “What You Won't Do for Love”). Blaze and the rest of my boys finding out about it and jumping me into manhood, pinning me to the ground, snatching off my bleach-white Converse All-Stars and tossing them overhead onto the telephone wires that crisscrossed Com-stock Avenue. Those shoes were loyal to me. Twelve points in the Robinson Park rec league. Hopped the fence when Loretta White's Doberman pinscher attacked me for no good reason. Sneaked me down glass-strewn Sherbourne alleyway past the Crip-ass Boyd family. So loyal were those shoes, I expected them to untangle themselves from the wire and slither down the pole and back onto my feet. But night fell with my size tens still hanging from those buzzing telephone lines like some surreal Duchamp castoff. Walking home barefoot, chewing on a plastic straw, a black Tom Sawyer whistling Rush's classic “Tom Sawyer.”
The world is, the world is
. . .

The patrol cop calling me over to his black-and-white squad car with a crooked finger and a sneer.

Love and life are deep
. . .

“What are you doing over here, boy?”

“I was visiting my girlfriend; she lives . . .”

“I don't give a fuck where she lives, I don't ever want to see you in this neighborhood again. Now get the fuck out of here—and where in the hell are your shoes?”

His eyes are open wide
.

Klaudia caught me daydreaming. “What are you thinking about?”

“I was just listening to the buzz of the telephone wires and thinking about ‘Tom Sawyer,' ” I said, kicking off my shoes.

“The book?”

“The song.”

They watched as I knotted the shoelaces around the radio handle, and then bola'd the three-piece menagerie over the telephone wire, gaucho-style.

 

The New Berlin Wall of Sound was nearly complete. All that remained was for the golden spike to be driven: the first note struck by the Schwa during the next day's concert. Until then the Berlin Wall of Sound would remain silent.

We pressed on home. Mühlenstrasse felt warm beneath my tired feet. It felt just like Comstock Avenue or Robertson Boulevard. It felt like home.

LARS COOLED IN front of the Slumberland, checking his watch and taking notes. Above him, strung between two trees, the concert banner sagged in the middle like a rainbow tweaked on angel dust.
THE BLACK PASSé TOUR—BUILDING WALLS, TEARING DOWN BRIDGES.
He looked proud. If everything went according to plan, in two hours he'd have saved blackness.

Doris sidled up to us to say hello. She was proud too. Proud of her man who, since his newfound purpose in life, had seemingly stopped drinking—
seemingly
being the key word. She leaned in for a peck on the lips, more a Breathalyzer test than a show of affection.

It was a good try. Unfortunately for her, Lars had a tampon stuffed up his ass. An ultra-absorbent, soft-scented tampon, designed by a woman gynecologist to provide eight hours of day or night protection
and
that little something extra. His tampon indeed had that little something extra the packaging promised, because it'd been soaking in absinthe for the past two days.

The alcohol suppository is a technique passed down to journalists and music-industry insiders the world over by Finnish rockabilly bands. “Besotted” is an ethnic group in Finland, and
those Stratocaster hellions are the country's most notorious drinkers. It's their alcoholic ingenuity and the recent advances in the menstrual sciences that have allowed many music-industry peons to show up for work stone-bachelor-party drunk with no one the wiser, because their breath is odorless.