Paul Beatty - Slumberland

I liked Doris from the moment her tongue touched the roof of her mouth. She was very pleasant sounding. Her slight lisp gave her sibilant fricatives a nice breathiness, so that her S’s and zeds sounded like the breeze wafting over the Venice Beach sand.

“What’s your favorite band name?” I asked.

“The Dead Kennedys,” she shot back, and for the next few minutes we volleyed excellent band names back and forth.

“The Soul Stirrers?”

“10,000 Maniacs.”

“Ultramagnetic MCs.”

“Dereliction of Duty.”

“The Stray Cats.”

“The Main Ingredient.”

“The Mean Uncles.”

“Little Anthony and the Imperials.”

“The Nattering Nabobs of Negativity.”

“The Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama.”

“The Butthole Surfers.”

“Peep Show Mop Men.”

“Sturm und Drang.”

“The Big Red Machine.”

“Ready for the World.”

“The Cure.”

“One of the great mysteries of the universe is why bands with really good names rarely make it.”

Doris took off her apron and took the seat next to me, abruptly ending her shift. I ordered something called a Neger off the drink menu. My German at this point was limited to a few insults and numbers under a thousand, but Neger looked suspiciously like nigger , and when the waitress delivered a murky concoction of wheat beer and Coca-Cola, two shades darker than me, I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.

I loved the blatancy of the German racial effrontery of the late eighties. Black German cabaret singers, with names like Roberto Blanco and Susanne Snow, sang on late-night variety shows accompanied by blackface pianists. The highway billboards featured dark-skinned women teasingly licking chocolate confections. The wall clocks in the popular blues joint Café Harlem read:

Berlin Sao Paulo Tokyo Harlem

My Neger was cold and surprisingly tasty, but I had to know.

“So what exactly does Neger mean in German?”

“It means ‘black person,’ ” said a woman eavesdropping in to our conversation.

“No, it doesn’t, it means ‘nigger,’ ” corrected Doris. “Don’t try to sugarcover it.”

The conversation turned to my reasons for coming to Germany. Doris listened patiently, and without a hint of shame explained to me that she either “knew bible-ly” or knew someone who “knew bible-ly” every black man who’d set foot in the Slumberland in the past two years, and that she had never heard of or met any Charles Stone.

A customer dropped a coin on the bar. That metallic oscillation between sudden loudness and nothing is a beautiful sound. I imagine that from far enough away, our galaxy sounds like a fifty-cent piece dropped onto an ice cream parlor tabletop. I wrote my phone number on a pasteboard coaster and flicked it and a fiftypfennig coin over to Doris. She put the coaster in her bag and asked what the money was for. I told her to use it to call the number I’d given her.

“But you’re not home.”

“No shit.”

She picked up the red house phone, dropped the coin in, and made the call. The white guys from the center table passed by me on their way out. One placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “You’re from a good family. A very good family, I can tell.”

He meant it as a compliment, but the implication was that most black families were not good. I was inclined to agree with him, because so far as I knew all families were fucked-up.

Doris returned from the phone call shooing the guy away like a fly.

“ ‘For the nigger it niggereth every day.’ What kind of answering machine message is that?” she asked.

I told her it was the Schwa introducing one of his songs, that it was a play on a Shakespeare quote: “For the rain it raineth everyday.” “We’re drinking these Negers, I heard the coin drop on the table. I don’t know, I thought maybe you’d recognize the voice.”

“So that was this Schwa man’s voice?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’ve never heard it before, and at the end of this niggereth stuff, the music, if that’s the Schwa too, you really need to find this man.”

I don’t know how many Negers I drank that night, but I had as much fun ordering the beer as drinking it. “Gimme two niggers!” I’d yell out to the waitress. “How much for two niggers? I’ll have a gin and tonic, the lady will have a large nigger.”

Eight hours later I awoke to Doris in the front room watching television with her eyes closed. She was swathed in a terry-cloth bathrobe I never wore and rewinding the chicken-fucking video. I turned up the radiator and I sat next to her. The VCR whirred and jolted to a clunky stop. She pressed play.

“How long you been up?”

“I don’t know, an hour maybe? You listen to this song and you get lost in time.”

Doris curled into the fetal position and put her head in my lap. After every phrase the Schwa played, she’d mutter something about the harmonics, coloration, and Stravinsky. Five minutes went by before she’d stopped shaking her head in disbelief and making faces whenever my stomach rumbled.

“I did it,” Doris said, speaking into my belly button.

“Did what?”

“On television I once heard an American homewife tell her UFO encounter. She spoke the usual bullshit—‘bright object in the sky,’ ‘incredible speed,’—but then she said the spaceship flashed a color she’d never seen before, and speeded off. Ever since then I’ve tried to imagine a color I’ve never seen before. And now I just did it. It was the music.”

She opened her eyes. They were a color I’d seen before.

“But if we find him, no one will purchase the music.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too good. Too much.”

“Come on, people are starving for this music.”

“Exactly, but when you have hungered for a long time, if you eat too much, you die.”

Doris sank her teeth into my nipple. I turned up the volume to a deafening loudness that no doubt violated the Berlin laws against Sunday-morning noise. No one complained.

I PUT THE SEARCH for the Schwa on hold while Doris and I had a one-night stand that lasted the month and a half the owner of the Slumberland was on vacation. We never truly got to know each other. Past a weakness for screwball comedies, the only thing we really had in common was our appreciation of the Schwa.

At our most intimate we’d play lazy games of backgammon and listen to his records. As soon as the music ended we’d fight. My Calvinist tendencies and her gloomy German stoicism clashing like two kindergartners playing musical chairs and attempting to squeeze their behinds into the last remaining plastic seat. We’d argue bitterly over the frequency of my showers and her refusal to turn her thermostat above sixty degrees in the dead of winter.

Doris, of course, blames our breakup on the frequency and length of my showers. In her eyes I’m a religious fanatic who every morning takes a hot-water baptismal to the gods Proctor and Gamble. My “obsession” with cleanliness symbolizes two hundred and fifty years of American sanctimony. If my finger-nails are clean, my soul is pure and lemony fresh. I’m 100 percent Puritan. A squeaky-clean American.

Doris: You crazy, uptight Americans. Do you know what we call “skinny-dipping” in Germany?

Me: No.

Doris: Swimming!

On our last night as a couple Doris sat on the floor of her spacious, impeccably furnished, penthouse igloo, bundled up in three layers of thrift-shop sweaters, settling an argument we had earlier in the day about Chico Marx’s piano virtuosity by making a list of piano players in descending order of greatness, while I washed the dishes and stared at the plastic frog with a thermometer for a spine suctioned to the kitchen window.