Paul Beatty - Slumberland

Doris turned to face me, her cheeks calcified with tearstains.

“Do you love me, Ferguson?”

“No.”

She released my penis and clambered over me, placing her forehead to my temple. A tear ran down her cheek and onto mine. I didn’t bother to wipe it off.

Why? She asked over and over. Why, if I didn’t love her, why was I with her? I told her the truth. Probably the first time I’d ever been completely truthful in my life. I was lonely . She raised her hand and I flinched, expecting to ward off a blow; instead she stroked my face as softly as she ever had. “That’s a reasonable answer,” she cooed. No voodoo curses were cast. No demanding the return of shit I’d thrown away without telling her. No vengeful postings of my nude photo, phone number, and salacious fisting fantasies on gay dating Web sites. Doris simply returned the chicken-fucking song, asked if I wanted to go to the movies on Thursday, and if she could help me find the Schwa.

The security guard at the Amerikahaus was right. Berlin is heaven.

ON MY FIRST DAY OF WORK, Thomas Femmerling, the owner of the Slumberland, did two things: He gave me a set of keys to the bar, then he showed me how to properly pour a pilsner.

“It takes exactly seven minutes for ein gutes Pils, ” he said, handing me an effervescent glass of beer with a head so thick it could support a silver piece. “And I figure if it takes that long to pour a good beer, it’ll take at least seven or eight months to program a good jukebox, so take your time, DJ man. Take your sweet time.” Then he plucked his coin from my beer and left me to my duties.

Bars in general are depressing places, but especially at eight thirty on a serene Monday morning. And there I was, alone and unbreakfasted, drinking a seven-minute beer, unable to block out the disconcerting chatter of children skipping merrily to school.

The Slumberland juke was a brand-new Wurlitzer SL-900. Unplugged, it sat dark and lifeless against the far wall. I immediately sympathized with the machine, for it reminded me of myself some years ago: a newborn black child come into the world obsolete and passé. The SL-900’s curse was that it played 45s and not the digital compact discs that were then just starting to take over the market share. Only two weeks old and the juke was already an antique. Still, it remained impressive and intimidating, and I approached the noble machine with the reverent caution that a game warden uses on the sedated grizzly bear.

“There, boy. Settle down, everything’s going to be all right.”

I opened the lid and counted fifty record slots. Room enough for one hundred songs, approximately thirteen hours of continuous music. That meant I had to come up with a playlist of fifty songs so compatible with one another that any one jam had to be able to seamlessly follow, precede, complement, supplement, and riff off any other jam. I also had to take into account fifty additional B-sides. Songs whose strains might be less familiar but, if mistakenly punched into the jukebox, wouldn’t bring the mack-daddy maneuvers of the Slumberland’s miscegenation menagerie to a screeching halt, and might even hip a funk-drunk listener to some classic James Brown besides “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” I needed songs that would make the bar’s black male clientele feel important, knowledgeable, and, yes, superior. Songs whose intricacies and subtext they could explain to the fräuleins without feeling like racial quislings to the Negress mothers and wives left back home to toil over the Serengeti and Amana ranges. I needed songs that spoke to the white woman’s inner nigger. The nigger who had so much in common with these defeated and delusional men, the bipolar white nigger woman in all of us who needs to be worshipped, whistled at, and sometimes beaten.

I’ve always maintained that one could make the case for the white woman being the most maligned personage on the planet. Like Pandora and Eve, white women have been built up as paragons of virtue and beauty only to be unjustly blamed for the world’s ills when they decide to come down off the pedestal to exercise their sense of entitlement and act human.

Yes, the Slumberland jukebox would be stuffed with perennial pop songs, bebop sui generis, and Memphis soul. It would be a fifty-pfennig musical library capable of dispensing stereophonic hope and salvation to the downtrodden from Harlem to Wies-baden. It would help a haughty German woman come down off her high horse and put a discouraged, diasporic black man on his.

This wouldn’t be like making a mix tape for a schoolyard crush filled with slow jams, conscious rap, James Taylor, saccharine jazz, and rainstorm interludes. I had to program that jukebox so it’d be me DJing on autopilot. Turn it into an electronic doppelgänger flashing its rainbow lights, blowing its plastic bubbles and my trademark shit. “Goddamn, get off your ass and jam” eclecticism. All I needed was that one record that would get the party started. Make the ladies say, “Ho,” the homosexuals say, “Hey,” and the skeptics say, “Fuck it.”

I sipped my beer, the second-best beer I’d ever had,* and asked the question I imagined all great artists ask themselves before engaging in the creative process: “Is there a God?” I weighed the arguments pro (Hawaiian surf, Welch’s grape juice, koala bears, worn-in Levi’s, the northern lights, the Volvo station wagon, women with braces, the Canadian Rockies, Godard, Nerf footballs, Shirley Chisholm’s smile, free checking, and Woody Allen) and con (flies, Alabama, religion, chihuahuas, chihuahua owners, my mother’s cooking, airplane turbulence, LL Cool J, Mondays, how boring heaven must fucking be, and Woody Allen), not so much to prove or disprove the existence of a powerless almighty, but to engage my increasingly tipsy thought process with so much conscious prattle that an idea might strike me when I wasn’t looking. After about twenty minutes of this I’d come as close as anyone with an associate’s degree in library sciences has come to disproving the existence of God,* but was no closer to programming the jukebox. Such is the way of the amateur atheologian and the professional jukebox sommelier.

Squweeek .

There was a cautious, almost shy squeak coming from outside the bar. Squweeek .

I lifted the bamboo window shade to investigate and, to our mutual surprise, revealed a startled schoolboy writing on the dew-covered windows with his fingertip. He blinked once, smiled, then resumed his condensation graffito. Though he wasn’t finished, it was obvious he was writing, “Ausländer raus!”— Foreigners Out! — on the pane. No one ever writes, “Ausländer, Bleibt! Wir brauchen, mögen und schätzen die kulturelle Vielfalt, die ihr uns durch eure Anwesenheit schenkt.” Foreigners Stay! We need, enjoy, and respect the cultural diversity your presence provides us. Ausländer raus is a phrase most commonly associated with racist skinheads after German reunification; it was in fact popular in West Germany long before Ronald Reagan wreathed Nazi graves at Bitburg and demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall. However, it wasn’t the boy’s xenophobia that intrigued me: It was the sonorous screeches his finger made as he wrote on the glass. It reminded me of a sound that I couldn’t quite place, and I went outside to get a better listen.

Just as the kid was putting the finishing touches on his public ignorance, he saw me coming and tried to run away. He was weighed down by his haversack, so I easily ran him down and marched him back to the window. He went obediently to erase his work, but I stopped him.

“Nein. Nein,” I said, waving my finger in his panic-stricken face. “Bitte ende.” Please finish . I held his hand to the glass and he timidly completed his opine, the squeaking letters loud and pitched in a distinct minor blues key I recognized as C minor but whose timbre and color I still couldn’t place. When the little xenophobe made the long downward stroke of the exclamation point, it hit me. The squeaks sounded exactly like Oliver Nelson’s tenor in “Stolen Moments.” I had my first tune for the jukebox.