Slumberland (27 page)

From its corner the jukebox flashed and flickered its lights in appreciation.

“This is a man who's turned the jukebox into a modern-day oracle. You put your money in the slot and Bill Withers answers a question you didn't think you had, Aretha Franklin distills advice you didn't think you needed, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers predict your future. He's a man who's synthesized every sound ever heard and every feeling ever felt. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...”

He never finished his sentence. He'd forgotten my name, hoping “the look” would suffice as an apology for his mental lapse and my anonymity.

“The look” sufficed. I'd waited all my life for someone to give me that look. The look Duke gave Johnny Hodges. Bob Marley gave Peter Tosh. George Clinton gave Bootsy. Benny Goodman gave Charlie Christian. Billie Holiday gave Lester Young. Chuck D gave Flavor Flav. Alvin gave the Chipmunks. The look that said, “Do your thing, motherfucker.”

I didn't mince music. I slapped the crossfader and hit them straight with the beat. No grease. The room went reverential. Folks sat down and listened with the rapt attentiveness of campers hearing their first fireside ghost story. Those on the outside pressed their regretful faces against the windows and the skylight. I knew, somewhere, my boy Blaze was listening in on the international feed, clapping his hands and nodding his head. “Oh, hell yes. It's about time, fool.”

I was scared. Scared that I would die before we finished. I wanted time to stop but not forever.

The Schwa was frightened too. Even though he'd been expecting a miracle, he wasn't quite ready for the thoroughness of the boom. His hands shook. He was faltering, unsure of himself. It was then I shot
him
the look.
Do your thing, motherfucker
.

The Schwa leapt onto the track. Tackling and attempting to subdue his instrument as if it were a wild swamp gator roused from a deep, satisfying sleep. The first note he hit was pure paterfamilias. Its sound wave so concussive it flapped my clothes, shook the walls, and caused one audience member to exclaim, “Yes, Father?”

If you ever attend a poetry or jazz workshop to learn the mystical art of improvisation, invariably the instructor will say to you, “First thought, best thought.” It's a faux-Buddhist axiom that has led to nothing more than some wildly uneven Beat literature and some shaky second-half play calling by the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl XIV, but it sounds good. Personally, I never believed in improvisation. Listen to any cat freestyle or solo—Dizzy, Biggie, Bessie, or Ashbery—they're not playing the way they want to play, they're
trying
to play the way they want to play. No one ever sounded exactly the way they wanted to sound. But that night the Schwa convinced me otherwise. Without trying, he played exactly the way he wanted to play, and when I say he wasn't trying, I don't mean he wasn't putting forth
any effort, I mean there was no pretense. He simply played his ass off, blessing my beat with brilliant new neo-bop and retro-cool interstices that filled voids both musical and spiritual.

In the advanced poetry and jazz-improvisation workshop the instructor will invariably say, “Don't think. If you think, you're dead.” Of course, it's the obverse that's really true. If you're not thinking, you're dead, and I didn't need to look at the Schwa's knitted brow and gritted countenance to know that Charles Stone was deep in thought. I just had to listen.

He was switching up the tempo. Segueing from a frenzied fortissimo to a languid legato by quoting from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro national anthem. It's a beautiful yet trepidatious song, and especially so in his hands. Musical mason that he was, the Schwa erected a series of African-American landmarks upon the foundation I had laid down. The contrapuntal effect of our discordant architectural styles meshed together wonderfully. One moment the beat was a towering black obelisk, the next it was an ebony-walled Taj Mahal. The music was so uniquely majestic I felt like stepping outside of the song. A dis-embodied DJ floating out into the audience, putting a proud arm around his unborn child, and saying, “See that song? Hear that music? Daddy helped build that.”

Despite the tune's genius, in my mental landscape where blackness is passé, his quoting the Negro national anthem was a blatant violation of the zoning laws. By constructing a new black Berlin Wall in both my head and the city, he was asking me to improvise. Prodding me to tap out an unpremeditated beat on the drum pads, compress the bass line, and add some
shama lama ding-dong
to the groove. He was daring me to be “black.”

But blackness is and forever will be passé and I held my compositional ground, hit my presets, and leaned on my turntables, furiously scratching the coda. The audience roared and shouted for more. Hands so sweaty that my slippery fingers had trouble
staying on the vinyl, I continued to scratch, lacing the beat with a dense, undulating buzz that I cribbed from a nest of agitated hornets I found during a late-night stroll along the Spree.

 

I shall not be moved
Like a tree that's planted by the water
I shall not be moved

 

Forced to relent to my racial and turntable obstinacy, the Schwa deconstructed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by laying out like a suicidal Acapulco cliff diver who could give a fuck about timing the tide. He paused, then took a deep breath and cannonballed into his own tune, unleashing a voluminous splashing salvo of triplets that shattered and scattered the song into a wave of quarter, half, whole notes that fluttered to the floor in wet, black, globular droplets.

My beat parfait complete, I leaned into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charles Stone. Thanks for coming out, drive home safely, and remember, ‘All art is propaganda.' ”

Each of us exhausted and covered in sweat, the Schwa and I met at center stage. Over those past two and a half minutes we'd spilled more inner secrets than Anna Freud and Deep Throat combined, but having been in Germany too long and deeply influenced by a country where one has two or three friends and everyone else in your life is an acquaintance, we didn't know whether to hug, shake hands, or kiss.

From outside I could hear police sirens blare and kids, amped up on caffeine drinks and our extraordinarily powerful encore, jumping on cars and setting fires. It wasn't a case of the devil's music spurring the youth to act a fool. It's not rock 'n' roll or hip-hop that's to blame: After all, Daniel Auber's opera
La Muette de Portici
set off the Belgian Revolution, and long before the Paris rap riots, a wolf pack of rich old ladies went absolutely
buck wild on the Champ-Élysées following the debut of Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring
. It's the touch of sound. Sound is touch and nothing touches you like good, really good, music. It's like being masturbated by the hand of God. Having the siroccos cooing softly into your ear. It's Mama's lullaby gently stroking the neurons in your auditory cortex.

The cops were getting closer and Doris tried to hurry us outside before we would get arrested. The Schwa gripped me by the shoulders like a man trying to be fatherly and keep his distance at the same time. Our conversation was short and sweet.

“Thanks, man,” we mumbled to each other.

“No, really,” he said, “the wall, the concert, Fatima, I want you to know . . . you know.”

“Yeah, man, likewise.”

“Beautiful.”

“Say, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, go 'head.”

“During that last solo, what were you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about the phrase on the banner, ‘Black Passé.'

How being passé is freedom. You can do what you want. No demands. No expectations. The only person I have to please is myself.”

“You'll never be passé.”

“Shit, you keep spinning like that and neither will you.”

“I don't know about that. To be passé you have to have been happening at some point in time, and I never was nor never will be happening.”

The Schwa laughed. Doris finally got us outside. Burning cars filled the streets. People crowded around the Schwa and begged for his autograph. Behind him I could see the towheaded boy who years ago had written “Ausländer Raus!” on the dewy Slum-berland window standing in a circle of Sudanese skateboarders. A flash of light and the circle parted, leaving the white kid
standing there holding a Molotov cocktail. He tossed it into the church plaza, then stood there transfixed by the spreading flames.

“Lauf!” I shouted at him. Run!

Tyrus, the Slumberland librarian, came out of nowhere, shaking me by the elbow. I expected him to give me a book. And I wanted a book. I needed a gratuitous, multigenerational tale of colored-people woe that would assure the white reader and the aspiring-to-be white reader that everything would be okay despite the preponderance of evidence that nothing is ever okay.

“Dude, do you know what you've done?”

“Huh?”

“You've turned this motherfucker out. Permanently fucked shit up. Shit is no longer okay, but that's a good thing.”

“Huh?”

Sensing my confusion, Lars handed me a tampon soaked in absinthe. In the middle of Goltzstrasse I dropped trou, and in the greatest act of love since Juliet tried to drink Romeo's hemlock backwash, Klaudia took the cottony dagger and rammed it up my ass, thusly. Thank goodness for the gentle-glide design.

The wormwood buzz kicked in immediately, and for the rest of the night any conversation was subtitled in bright pink-and-green variety-show Japanese.

And that was most definitely okay by me.

THEY SAY THE
Schwa's wall sounds different depending upon which side you're standing on. Experienced from the west, the replay of the concert invokes the West Berlin of thirty years ago. It gives the city a sense of the old intimacy that once made it so special. Standing on that side of the wall the music makes you feel safe. It's the sound of inspiration, encouragement, and hope. On the other hand, if you walk ten meters east, the same music stirs up a different set of emotions. You're overcome by a power-ballad wistfulness that leaves one reflecting upon how far the city and its citizens have come. In contrast to those on the west who take from the wall, listeners on the eastern side are moved to give of themselves. They treat this wailing wall like a musical temple. Prayers hang on nearby trees. The ground around the wall is wreathed and strewn with offerings ranging from photos of missing relatives to antiquated East German appliances like the RG-28 Mixing Device.
*
That's been the wall's impact on the city. At least until the speakers get
shorted out by the rain and snow, and Christo or some other installation artist decides to dye the Spree river orange and wrap the Reichstag in flypaper.

Apparently my perfect beat has had a far less reverberatory effect. Not that I expected much, though an instant Grammy airmailed to my bedside would've been a good start. Is a call from the U.N. secretary-general asking if it'd be okay to commission my track as the anthem for planet Earth too much to ask? A show of appreciation from the sick and crippled children who were healed by the curative powers of my creative cut mastery would've been nice. Shit, it was only the day before yesterday that I transformed modern music from this very bar, and no one's even bought me a drink. I bought my first drink tonight. I'm not buying another.

Doris and Tyrus slip into my side of the booth, squeezing me against the wall, crashing my pity party without so much as putting a three-mark beer on the table. Tyrus can't contain his excitement. He's flapping a Guggenheim Fellowship check in my face and insisting that I'm the only one who can do justice to his new musical.

“What's it called?”

“
Real Recognizes Real
. It's a one-man performance piece about an African-American expat from Los Angeles who returns from Germany with the perfect specimen of white womanhood in tow, a blonde Saxon named the Venus Hot-to-Trot. He and Venus tour the chicken ‘n' waffle circuit charging sexually frustrated black men to touch her corporeal peculiarity, a completely flat ass. A condition the scientists refer to as noshapeatallpygia.”

“I'll think about it,” I lie. I'd never score anything titled with black street vernacular. But it's the only compliment I've gotten, so I'll placate for now. Surely if I string him along long enough there's a beer or two to be had.

“Hey, we went by the wall today. Sat there for two hours and never heard your beat. What's up with that?”

“I erased it from the loop. I didn't want my beat to be just another brick in his wall.”

“So where is it?”

“It's on top of my refrigerator.”

Doris says nothing. She knows the space atop my icebox is where I keep my most precious valuables. I'd put my dreams up there if I could. Silently she hands me two pieces of paper. One a telegram from DJ Blaze that just says, “NIGGER!”
*
The other a long list of musicians who'd called the bar asking to get in touch with me. The list smells strangely familiar. I hold it to my nose.