Paul Beatty - Slumberland

I thanked him, and we had our first real conversation. Meaningless Tarantino-like banter about how the compact disc was a waste of silicon because no musician has ever been nor ever will be inspired enough to record eighty minutes of worthwhile music.

“In the history of recording, name one good double album.”

“ The White Album ?”

“Disjointed, and Yoko Ono. Need I say more?”

“ London Calling ?”

“Great album cover. Overrated band.”

“ Blonde on Blonde ?”

“Okay, I’ll give you Blonde on Blonde , like I give God the narwhal whale — beautiful but fucking incomprehensible.”

We were bonding. I focused my chi and gathered my nerves. I wanted to broach a sensitive subject with the Schwa, and it was now or never.

“You want to come to my house and watch a video of a man fucking a chicken with me?”

“I’ve already seen it.”

“You have?”

“Short guy, glasses, humping a Rhode Island Red?”

“That’s the one.”

“I rented it a while back. I have a little fetish for what the German freaks call fowl play. I went to the video store checking for To Fill a Mockingbird , starring Gregory Pecker, it was out, and the clerk handed me that one. Surprised the shit out of me when I heard my music on there. Needless to say, that flick is long overdue.”

“Did you know the guy in the movie?”

“You know what? He did look familiar. Back in the day there used to be a crew of young, totally square, suit ‘n’ tie cats that for the longest showed up at my gigs on the regular. Sit in the front row, grooving they no-rhythm asses off. I remember them because when they were in house, all of a sudden my band couldn’t play for shit. Asked my drummer how come when these guys show up you motherfuckers start clamming all over the stage. He says, ‘They’re Stasi agents.’ I was like, ‘Then be about your business, and play better, so when shit goes down, they’ll want to keep you around.’ Anyway, I think he may have been one of those cats. Hard to say, you know, because secret agents don’t look like James Bond, they look like plain old ordinary motherfuckers who’d get lost in a crowd of two. They have faces you forget.”

Before I could ask about playing with him, “Outstanding,” the Gap Band’s show-stopping tune, took a cautious peek from around the corner and, like a furtive, funkified pimp, dipped garishly into the Slumberland. “ H-e-y-y-y, ” Fatima said, grabbing the Schwa and pulling him away from me and toward the dance floor.

In a way I welcomed the intrusion. I wasn’t ready to jam with the Schwa. We both knew it; that’s why he gave me the book.

I enjoyed watching them gyrate and twist in the sand. I’d almost forgotten how effortlessly some women ride a beat. That shake. The way their feet glide over a floor, even a sandy one, as if shod in newly sharpened ice skates. A rather large woman, Fatima was no figure skater. Her face etched in bomb-defusing concentration, she danced like a Zamboni machine circling the floor in wide sweeping circles. She was efficient, powerful, and boogied with a smooth grace that belied her size. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She reminded me of the way L.A. women got they Westside groove on.

In a twinge of homesickness, I wanted to smarmily creep in behind her, press up against her denim derrière, and grind away. Ask her in a not-so-hushed whisper what was happening back home. But I knew the answer. She’d say, “Nothing is happening back home. The word widget has lost its ineffability, the computer companies having given it groovy functionality. This generation’s young people are the first since the dawn of the jazz age whose music sucks and they know it. And most galling, after all these years, there still has never been an Asian-American male on MTV’s The Real World .”

Klaudia caught me looking wantonly at her sister. Using a wristlock, she twisted my arm into an ampersand and asked me what I was thinking.

“I was thinking about being back home.”

She released my arm and asked me what America was really like.

I told her I once heard a comedian say that if you put an apple on television every day for six months, and then placed that apple in a glass case and put that on display at the mall, people would go up to it and say, Oooh, look, there’s that apple that’s on television . America’s a lot like that apple.

IT TOOK ME FOUR TRIES to finish The Sound and the Fury . I nearly drowned in Faulkner’s stream of consciousness, but once I got past the fact that in Faulkner’s world literary existentialism never extends to blacks, the book’s technical construction did offer some guidance. Taking a cue from his style, I decided to remove all the punctuation from my life: commas, quotation marks, periods, one-night stands, midday naps, ellipses, and the evening news.

Like Quentin Compson I too stood at an important crossroad. My junction was tri-forked; three life-altering gigs lay ahead of me. Gigs that were to me what The Ed Sullivan Show was to the Beatles and the Newport Jazz Festival to Muddy Waters. They lifted my confidence and shaped my style and affirmed my phonographic voice. I traveled down these paths lain with vinyl only to find out that all roads lead to the Schwa.

The Left Fork

Bleary-eyed and fighting a severe case of cotton mouth, I was returning home from an all-night gig in East Berlin wondering if my favorite German boxer, Dariusz Michalczewski, had won his fight for the light-heavyweight championship the night before. My question was answered when a gang of skinheads, still drunk and charged up by the German’s victory, forced open the car doors of the fast-moving elevated S-bahn train. A frigid wind and laughter chilled the compartment. Not knowing what to expect, the passengers held tight to the overhead handrail like frightened paratroop trainees. As the treetops of Stralauer Allee whooshed by, the skins flicked their cigarette butts into the expanse, then looked at me. I looked down. Not at my feet but theirs, regretting that there was no Roy G. Biv mnemonic to help me remember the colored-shoelace spectrum of skinhead ideologies. White laces; white power. Is green gay or vegetarian? Red. . is red commie skin or neo-Nazi?

“Did you see Michalczewski beat the shit out of that nigger last night on television?”

Neo-Nazi .

The alpha asshole smashed his fist into his palm and whistled a militaristic tune. He interrupted himself to call me a gorilla, then returned to whistling. I ignored the lame insult, not out of prudence but because the song’s title was on the tip of my tongue.

“Torpedo Los!” I shouted, naming the once-popular U-boat tune (“Fire Torpedo!”) he was whistling. He blanched and quickly launched into another whistled march. After about three notes I buzzed in with game-show-contestant alacrity, “Hitler’s People!” The answer unballed his fist.

“Sit down, kamerad,” he ordered.

I should have replied, “I’m not your kamerad,” but I simply motioned that there weren’t any open seats.

“Do you like fascist music?” he asked.

“Not especially. I like the exclamatory titles: ‘Under the Double Eagle!’ ‘70 Million Strike!’ ‘Farewell to the Gladiators!’ ‘Germany Awake!’ ‘I Don’t Believe Hitler Can Fly, I Know He Can Fly!’”

“But you don’t like the music?”

“No, not really, it’s all kind of gay. I love this guy. He loves me. He died in my arms, our blood commingling.”

“But why do you know this music?”

“I collect records — those fascist 78s are worth money. A collector in Salzburg offered me two thousand dollars for ‘The Book Burning March’ and ‘If Mother Won’t Give You a Nickel, Ask Neville Chamberlain for Czechoslovakia.’ ”