Paul Beatty - Slumberland

“Excuse me, Herr DJ Darky.”

Klaudia von Robinson wore a strapless designer dress that shimmered and clung to her rolls of baby fat like wet sealskin. I acknowledged her with a papal you-may-approach-the-DJ-booth nod. She had big, brown, mackerel begging eyes and wore her hair pulled back in a scalp-tingling tight chignon. It’d been years since I’d talked to a black woman, even longer since I’d touched one. At least I assumed Frau von Robinson was black. I couldn’t tell, her buttery-soft skin was the color of ten-million-year-old amber and nearly as transparent. Hers was an epic epidermis that seemed to have fossilized around her reluctant smile, wary heart, and the dragonfly tattoo on her shoulder. She wasn’t black, she was gold. The aboriginal gold of a Solomon Islander’s sun-kissed shock of an afro. The gold of my Auntie Marie’s incisor. The gold of the Pythagorean golden ratio. How I longed to say to her, “Baby, in the words of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Kepler, you are as fine as 1.618033989.”

Behind Klaudia stood her younger sister, Fatima, a stunningly beautiful woman whose own African heritage oozed “dream on, motherfucker” from her sloe-eyed Ethiopian features and her full, permanently puckered lips. She had been, as the Germans say, hit harder by the “nigger stick” than her sister. I suspected that they had different fathers. Princess Fatima daintily proffered a peola-brown hand, face down as if she were introducing herself to a prostrating underling. I shook her hand weakly. It was cold and bony. There was something sad and restive about her. She wore her blackness like the heroine in that Chekhov play who, when asked why she always wears black, replies, “I’m in mourning for my life, I’m unhappy.” Fatima reminded me of myself. Omniphobic — scared of everything. Omniphobic . That’s a good one. I’ll have to submit it to Kensington-Merriwether and see what Cutter Pinchbeck has to say about it.

Klaudia, smug and even more stuck-up, never bothered to introduce herself. She just presumptuously pressed a finger to my chest as if my sternum were a doorbell.

“Do you have Sixto Rodriguez?”

“ ‘Sugar Man’?”

“ ‘Sugar Man.’ ”

I nodded. Great song. Probably do wonders for my cocaine headache. One often hears that Germans don’t have any taste. True, though it’s not that they are connoisseurs of schmaltz, it’s that they appreciate everything. When a German shows good taste, I’ve learned not to be surprised. Here subjectivity and objectivity have a way of canceling each other out like common cultural denominators, so out of necessity they’ve invented a new nonqualitative state of perception, an all-appreciative “neutertivity,” if you will. Everything’s good. Nothing is bad. And if it is bad, it doesn’t matter because somebody likes it.

I flipped through my crates and lifted out the Sixto Rodriguez album. Took me three years to find that record. This was before the Internet. When record collecting meant excursions to the suburban rec rooms of cracked-out, disbarred, no-longer-rich-as-hell affirmative-action uncles. Getting to the Ray Barrettos, Artur Rubenstein and the NBC Orchestra Plays Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2 s, and Booker T. and the MGs before they ended up at the bottom of an empty kidney-shaped pool covered with silt, rusted lawn chairs, and barbecue grills. I had to send all the way to Auckland for Sixto. Sixty dollars plus eight for shipping and handling.

Eyes hidden behind the darkest pair of shades I’d ever seen, Sixto peered out at me through the glare of the shrink-wrap. Quintessentially seventies, he sits on some wooden stairs in front of a small A-frame ghetto brick house. His polyester bell-bottoms, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, feather-cut movie-Indian silky black hair complete with David Cassidy flip — there’s no doubt in my mind he’s the absentee father of someone about my age.

Sixto’s plaintive wail pulsed in and out of the half-calypso and half-mariachi guitar lick and the cheesy, warbled sci-fi sound effects. Sugar Man won’t you hurry . . A simple 3?4 time bass line and a three-note muted horn announced the chorus. Su-gar-man. . Su-gar-man . . The Torpedo Käfer, not loud to begin with, went totally silent. Oblivious that he’s singing over what sounds like the climactic battle scene in Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds , Sixto continued on undaunted, calling out to his drug dealer like a sick dog howling at its last full moon. Su-garman . . Klaudia slow danced with herself, eyes closed, hands tucked into her underarms, softly singing the chorus. Like me under the tanning lamp, she left the door slightly ajar. Providing me a peek, me being the closest embodiment of dopehead stereophonic pathos. A patron raised an eyebrow and a bierflasche in my direction. Su-gar-man . .

Somehow Sixto slipped through the cracks of the album cover stairs he sits on and missed out on soul-man immortality. I’m not one of those DJs who thinks every underappreciated crooner should be deified in the same breath as Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone. But it’s a shame he wasn’t at least a one-hit wonder. No reason this song shouldn’t be on some compilation album, generating enough residuals to at least paint the A-frame, keep the child-support checks from bouncing. Su-gar-man… Su-gar-man… Su-gar-man … Powerful stuff. Not the Mona Lisa, but seminal.

The bartender set a bubbling pilsner on the table. I’d been playing about two hours straight and wanted to enjoy it uninterrupted, so I removed my headphones and put on the longest record I had with me, “Lizard” by King Crimson, twenty-three minutes and twenty-six seconds. Despite the shift from black to blacklike music, no one protested. The foam mustache made my upper lip tingle, and I didn’t wipe it off until I noticed Klaudia was still standing there, circling her index finger over the record as if she were making it spin through telekinesis.

“Why are your turntables. . oberseite unten? ” “

What?”

She turned to the bartender. “Wie sagt man ‘Oberseite unten’ auf English?”

“Upside-down.”

“ Genau . Why are your turntables upside-down?”

“I’m left-handed. This way it’s easier for me to move all the things I have to move — the tone arm, these switches, knobs — they’re less in the way.”

“And that’s the main important thing — to have things less in the way or so?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“As a DJ you try to tell a story? Achieve a certain linearity, no?”

“No, I just play what I feel like hearing.”

“No, you don’t. You play what you think we should hear.”

One day I’m going to call those folks at the Berlitz School of Language, tell them I want money back, that there is no such thing as conversational German, only argumentative German. She had a beautiful voice. The timbre of the German female voice is pitch-perfect. Every time I go to kiss one I’m afraid I’m going to catch something. They all sound like Marlene Dietrich with a head cold. The rasp denotes a woman who’s able to take care of herself and, if need be, me too (in a film noir, femme fatale sense). I’ve come to realize that the high-pitched American-female “Oh my God!” squeal is a ploy for attention. A soprano subterfuge for a weakness sometimes feigned, sometimes in-grained, but always annoying.

“But you tell a story with what you play.”

“What story is that?”

“A love story.”

“It’s soul music. It’s like new-wave French cinema, it’s always about love.”

“But tell me why are the turntables Obersiete unten ?”

It wasn’t that she wooed me; it was that she was the first person to ever ask me twice.