Paul Beatty - Slumberland

“Do you know, my man, how many number-one singles La Crème has had to date?”

Lars nodded and said, “Sixteen.”

Impressed, Daddy La Crème smiled, ran his tongue over a twenty-four-karat-gold incisor, and squeezed Lars’s elbow even harder.

“But do you know what they all have in common?”

Lars shook his head.

“The hook is repeated exactly forty times in every song.”

He released my pale friend gently, like a considerate fisherman throwing his catch back into the water. While everybody mingled over drinks and hors d’oeuvres, half listening to the rest of the album, I announced the Schwa’s existence to the world by interrupting a tune called “Shaking My Light-Skinneded Ass Like a Dark-Skinneded Bitch” with the chicken-fucking song.

An angry Daddy La Crème rushed the turntables, demanding that I put his daughter’s “shit” back on. He reached maddeningly for the record and I flung it past his outstretched hands to Lars, who taunted him monkey-in-the-middle style before smashing it to pieces on the punch bowl. The husky European correspondent for Rolling Stone tackled the apoplectic stage father and sat on his chest. The others took seats at the boardroom table or stared out the window, quietly noshing on flammeküche and fighting back tears. Doris hugged me from behind, kissed my neck, and in French, a language she thought I didn’t understand, asked me to marry her.

The tune did what it do, and when it ended two salespeople immediately handed in their resignations and left to pursue their dreams. One by one the music critics filed past the prostrated Daddy La Crème, and as he reached out to clutch at their ankles they freed themselves with swift kicks to his rib cage and spittle-punctuated admonishments.

“How dare you pimp your own daughter?”

“Neo-soul? Don’t you mean sans-soul music?”

“For the past five years you people, and I mean ‘you people,’ have ruined my life. Turned me into a musically unrequited necrophiliac who’s been making love to a dead art form that won’t love me back.”

When the man from Rolling Stone released Daddy La Crème there was an unexpected look of contriteness on the impresario’s face. He shook out his crushed-velvet cowboy hat and looked at me with an “Et tu, brotherman?” expression. I opened the door for him. “Frankly, dude, I think even her ass is overrated.”

Rolling Stone made me a hefty offer for the rights to an exclusive puff piece on this “new resurgent jazz” and I pointed toward Lars, who lit a cigarette and simply said, “I want Hunter S. Thompson money and the name of his drug connection.”

“Done.”

The Schwa proved to be a truculent subject. His musings were snotty, vainglorious, and in a new grammatical person called “first-person Jesus.” Every answer started with the phrase, “Jesus told me to tell you…,” and if Jesus was indeed using the Schwa as a medium, believe me, Jesus has some growing up to do.

The interview’s greatest contribution was its revelation of Charles Stone’s whereabouts those past twenty-some-odd years. Turns out that in the late fifties, the Schwa was a member of Buddy Rich’s big band. Buddy Rich billed himself as “the world’s greatest drummer,” and whether that appellation was true or not, there can be no doubt that he was the world’s greatest insulter. On those long transcontinental bus rides Stone, who at the time bore all the typical attributes of the fifties jazzman — talent, smarts, disillusionment, a lightweight drug habit, and a beard — bore the brunt of the drummer’s abuse.

Those tour-bus tantrums were more than manic outbursts. They were poems. Found American vitriol from a man who had nothing against talented, bright, heroin-using black musicians, but hated beards. Maybe you’ve got connections and you’ve heard Buddy Rich’s tirade. It circulates in major league dressing rooms and rock-band tour buses. If you’ve heard those tapes and wondered, Who’s Buddy Rich yelling at like that? — he’s yelling at the Schwa.

“Two fucking weeks to make up your mind, do you want a beard or do you want a job? This is not the goddamn House of David fucking baseball team. This is the Buddy Rich band, young people with faces. No more fucking beards, that’s OUT! If you decide to do it, you’re through, RIGHT NOW! This is the last time I’m going to make this announcement, no more fucking beards. I don’t want to see it. This is the way I want my band to look, if you don’t like it, get OUT! You got two weeks to make up your mind. This is no idle request, I’m telling you how my band is gonna look. You’re not telling me how you’re gonna look, I’m telling YOU. You got two weeks to make up your fucking mind, if you have a mind.”

Two weeks later a bearded Schwa, having been kicked off the tour, found himself standing on an Alpine mountainside outside Salzburg. Still dressed in his Buddy Rich Big Band tuxedo, a tailcoated burgundy-and-camel ensemble complete with top hat and white gloves. Against the glacial backdrop he looked like a lost minstrel who’d taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The monkey suit was a perfect metaphor for jazz: old-fashioned, worn-out, pressed and starched to within an inch of its life. Six days a week. Same tux. Same arrangements. Same ranting of an ebullient madman. He stripped off his clothes and walked back into town butt naked, playing “Lover Man” with both his dick and his music swinging in the wind.

After that he gigged his way through Europe, playing the new music for whoever’d listen. When he got to Eastern Europe, he was surprised to find an especially receptive audience. What he loved most was that the kids danced to a music even his staunchest admirers deemed eminently listenable but irrevocably undanceable. In Prague, Art Farmer and Ray Brown sat in and the kids shimmied around their white linen-covered dinner tables for three hours straight. And the more out he played, the louder the applause, the harder they got down.

In time his name began to ring out. In Krakow he was a proverbial Ornette Coleman. Antwerp welcomed him as Cecil Taylor incarnate despite the nearsighted pianist being very much alive and well. “The personification of cultural independence” was how he was introduced to Tito before playing at the dictator’s fourth presidential inauguration. In East Berlin, however, he was nobody’s free-jazz allegory or the embodiment of a musician too famous to play for socialist factory workers and peat farmers. He was just Charles Stone. Black genius. Billed around town as “ Der sensationelle amerikanische Original-Mulatte .” Yet that adoration wasn’t what kept him in Berlin; it was the conversation. How he enjoyed running into Klaus, the fungi-obsessed horticulturalist who, despite the lack of any demand, had devoted his life to cultivating the first shiitake mushrooms grown outside the Far East. The complicated growing process involved a series of sonorous and captivating gerunds. There was the plunging, the spawning, the pinning, the shading, the incubating, and, of course, what should’ve been the fruiting, but Klaus had trouble growing the prized mushrooms, too many spoiling nouns: the contamination, the moisture, the decay, the strain, the mycelium, the money, the time, the missus, the kids, and the fucking Japanese.

On Tuesdays he’d meet his small circle of friends at the Prater biergarten. Gabi the voice actor, Ernst the math teacher, and Felix the architect were eager to have an American musician join their English Stammtisch , or English-language discussion group. Theirs was an algorithmic roundtable that, with the addition of the Schwa’s urbane skepticism and superbad speech pattern, took the Kaffeeklatsch to such conversational heights they eventually found general discussion too easy and had to make a pact to limit their discussion to only subjects that started with the letter p . And still there was no shortage of insights and snide witticisms about panthers, plutonium, Palestine, phrenology, the piccolo, and the pimento. Folks, even those who couldn’t understand English, often stopped by the Prater just to listen to them talk, sometimes shouting out topics as if shouting out sketch ideas to an improvisational comedy troupe: “Paleontology! Plankton! Puppies! Pupae! Paraguay! Placentas!”