Paul Beatty - Slumberland

Lars raised the other eyebrow. He was drunk, drunker than I’d ever seen him, which was saying a lot.

“Hey, man,” I said to him, “you never told me, why so proud tonight?”

He leaned in, speaking very softly. “Don’t tell anyone, but tonight, tonight I’m proud of the holocaust. Not the killing per se, but the efficiency. The drive. The single-minded devotion to a task. Is that so wrong?”

At that moment I needed a black woman in my life like never before. However, my venture into the mysteries of black carnality would have to wait, because the middle hydra head had taken my hand and placed it on her left breast. I kneaded the doughy appendage. It felt like strudel. And I love strudel.

MY FAVORITE BERLIN DAYS are those rare late afternoons when I go outside full of an unflappable faith in mankind that only a double espresso and a clean T-shirt can muster, only to find the streets deserted. It’s like entering the set of a postapocalyptic 1959 film. The traffic is nonexistent and all the shops are closed. I’ll wonder if I’ve slept through the air raid sirens. Missed the mandatory evacuation pending the invasion from outer space. On the way to the newspaper kiosk I’ll hear a plaintive yelp, then I’ll sprint around the corner expecting to see a fifty-foot-tall, one-eyed, iridescent green robot zapping a stray dog with a ray gun. Is that a dust cloud churning down Kantstrasse, or some comet-borne, incurable, and highly communicable virus that liquefies innards and turns eyeballs to smoke? In the tiny chain-link confines of Albertus Magnus Park the rusted swings will creak, their meager ridership consisting of only the breeze and me. Eventually a hump-bearing dowager will sit in the next swing over, kick her varicose-veined, knee-high-stocking legs back and forth, and complain about the cold and the verdammte türkisch-polnische Neger-Ausländer Kanaken . Then I’ll know my fears of the apocalypse were unfounded and that it’s only some national holiday no one bothered to inform me about before their visit to Oma und Opa. Maybe it’ll be May Day or Three Kings Day or International Women’s Day or My God What Were We Thinking When We Voted for Hitler? (Twice!) Please Forgive Us — It’s Been Fifty Years Already! Day.

For fun I’ll ask the muttering old woman how she feels about the Neger-Neger (Nigger-Niggers) like myself and she’ll say, “Love them. Slept with a couple after the war. Nice boys. Polite. Big Schwänze , small minds, and even tinier ears. Maybe that’s why they’re so stupid, they don’t hear everything.” Oh, I love those Berlin days, empty streets, yowling dogs, and swinging on the swings with kindly, racist, octogenarian sex addicts. So it stands to reason that I hate undeclared and impromptu holidays like the fateful one when I’d flung myself into the streets with my usual hangover Weltschmerz and dirty-underwear petulance, and found the sidewalks packed stoop to curb with giddy, overly inquisitive Germans drinking Coca-Cola and noshing bananas and all moving in the same direction. As they passed me by, each one took a long moment to stare at me like a child on a field trip to the Völkerschau —people zoo. One boy, ignoring his mother’s don’t-feed-the-animals admonition, offered me a Coke and a smile. Both of which I gladly accepted.

At first I wasn’t quite certain they were German. They spoke German. They looked German, albeit with even tighter pants and uglier shoes, but there was something different about them. I figured maybe the Austrian national soccer team was in town or there was a kartoffelpuffer famine in Luxembourg. What was really eye-catching about the horde was how incredibly un-eye-catching they were. Not to say they were unappealing. On the whole they weren’t any uglier than any other mass assemblage since Bon Jovi’s last concert date. Yet even the most stunning physical specimens among them carried themselves without the slightest hint of pretension. The people seemed to be a lot like their clothes. They were a sturdy wash-and-wear group who favored comfort and practicality over style and flash. For them it wasn’t the clothes that made the man. It was the person who made the clothes.

A towering blonde Calliope exited the perfumery pressing cardboard samples to her Linda Evangelista nose and blissfully inhaled for all she was worth. Somehow, against all odds, that breathtakingly beautiful woman with the statuesque figure and the tweaked oblique eyebrow countenance of a Vogue covergirl wasn’t vaingloriously strutting the catwalks of Paris, twirling a Givenchy bag and scanning the frigid fashionistas for her heroin dealer, but clomping the streets in the most ungainly pair of dog-shit-brown flats, digging wax out of her ears, and wiping the viscous find on the sleeves of her denim jacket. And she gawked at me like I was the monkey masturbating in the trees.

An impossibly ordinary-looking man interrupted the stare down.

“How much does such an automobile cost?” he asked me in English, running a hand admiringly over the fender of a parked Mercedes-Benz sedan.

“I don’t know. Fifty, sixty thousand?”

He looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. Returning to the Benz, he peered into the car with his hands cupped around his eyes, drooling at the leather interior and dashboard gadgetry.

“ Scheisse, that’s ten years’ pay plus bribes, plus five. .” he mumbled something that sounded like “assassination bonuses,” then with a giddy, almost criminal look on his face spat out a dare disguised as an innocent question: “Ever ride in one?”

“Once.”

“Smooth?”

“Like I was flying in a dream, maybe better.”

“I knew it.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“ Bitte .”

“Where did all these people come from? Was there a soccer game?”

The bland man stopped looking at the various pipe-cleanersized metal rods he’d removed from his jacket pocket.

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“The Wall fell.”

I boldly stepped into the second-most embarrassing moment of my life and asked, “What wall?”*

Thus confirming every stereotype of American ignorance about world affairs and geography. I, of course, knew of the Berlin Wall and its storied history, but as so often happens to black Americans abroad and domestically, I found myself trapped in a culturally biased break in the race-time continuum. Just as the bright but underprivileged inner-city child will correctly and for all the wrong reasons answer “b” to the following PSAT puzzler:

Mademoiselle Chiffon took a soothing sip of oolong tea and smiled mournfully at the strains of chamber music coming from the conservatory. Her genteel mind flashed to the carefree days she’d spent summering in the Tuscan hills before the war. Oh, Gaston , she thought to herself, am I forever doomed to hear your voice only in a string quartet’s violins? Silently, she cursed Bartók and returned the teapot to the __________while absentmindedly fingering her warm __________ __________.

a. sink, first-edition Molière

b. saucer, tea cozy, wet coochie

c. table, Chinese exercise balls

d. cupboard, baroque lute

I too nearly fell victim to the ignorance resultant from a lack of exposure. Like the tea cozy to the ghetto child, the Berlin Wall was not a part of my lexicon. I’d never seen it. When the indescribable man mentioned “the Wall,” any number of walls flashed through my mind. The Great Wall of China. The Wailing Wall. Pink Floyd’s classic album. The blue wall of silence the LAPD erected at the disciplinary hearing held for officers Bar-bella and Stevenson after they’d beat me and Blaze’s ass in the ninth grade for suspicion of stealing a car while we were at the bus stop waiting patiently for a bus.