Paul Beatty - Slumberland

In a delirious fit of tolerance and gratitude, the neo-Nazi reached out, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pinned me to the wall of the car.

“Kamerad, hast du diese Schallplatten?”

“Klar. Ich bin Schallplattenunterhalter. .”

A week later I DJed a skinhead rally in Marzhan, a high-rise ghetto twenty-five minutes east of downtown Berlin. The wind-up Victrola phonograph I’d brought lent the festivities an eerie beer-hall putsch authenticity. Scratchy parade marches and brownshirt encomiums bellowed from the machine’s mahogany horn. To my ears it was buffoonish kitsch, but the earnestness with which the crowd sang the songs matched the shouting-hallelujah devoutness of the best black American gospel.

I spent the night turning the phonograph crank and watching the bald and milkmaid-braided hellions hoist beers, sieg, and heil, celebrating as if the morning papers had announced the Anschluss, praising the reannexation of Austria, Mississippi, and Redondo Beach in one fell swoop. I felt like a Class D war criminal, but being a DJ is like being an ACLU lawyer arguing for the Klansmen’s right to march: If they pay, you play what the crowd wants to hear. Besides, it was going to be the first and last time I’d ever get the chance to play those records. So whenever a pockmarked, punky fraulein spat at me and asked to see my Schwanz, I patted the knot of deutschmarks in my pocket and reminded myself that I knew which “tail” she really wanted to see.

Thorsten, my employer, leaned on the table. I motioned for him to back off. “Don’t do that; you’ll scratch the record,” I cautioned.

He apologized, then with a wicked look on his face said, “Do you know why the Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?”

I shrugged. “Isn’t it because St. Patrick got rid of the snakes in Ireland?”

“There never were any snakes in postglacial Ireland. The snakes are a metaphor.”

“For what?”

“For…hey, that’s a catchy tune, what’s this record?”

“ ‘People to the Rifle.’ ”

“Powerful stuff, makes me want to. .”

I steered him back on course. “The snakes, the snakes are a metaphor for what?”

“For niggers. St. Patrick kicked the Moors out of Ireland, not the snakes.”

I clucked my tongue and pointed out that one or two of his neo-Nazi brethren seemed to be of mixed-race stock. This time it was Thorsten who frowned.

“Look, I hate the blacks, the Jews, and all the other others, but I’m not so stupid as to believe in racial purity. Come on, after two, three thousand years, and not one of my ancestors was a non-Aryan? How do you Americans say? ‘No way, dude.’ ”

“So the half-black guy over there in the SS jacket. .”

“It’s the hate that’s important. It doesn’t matter who does the hating, but who you hate. Gerhard hates niggers. We hate him. He hates himself. Alles in ordnung.”

“Does he think he’s inferior?”

“He is inferior and he knows it.”

I ended “People to the Rifle” prematurely with an abrupt record-scrapping lift of the stylus.

Over the complaining murmurs I said to Thorsten, “I want you to hear something,” and played the Schwa’s version of the Horst Wessel Song, the Nazi national anthem. Even before I’d placed the needle on the record Thorsten had sussed out my intentions.

“This is going to be a black man, isn’t it? I’ve heard your Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, Porgy and Bess , ‘My Funny Valentine,’ nice music, but its artistry was mostly due to the efforts of his white impresario, Gil Evans. The Negro doesn’t have the organizational necessities. .” The opening salvo of kick-drum beats shut Thorsten up. As the Schwa’s band turned his anthem inside out, he sat there holding his head as if he had a headache. I imagine Adolf Hitler had the same expression on his face when he witnessed Jesse Owens pull away from his vaunted supermen in a blazing mastery of muscle. Subhuman or what have you, there was no denying the apelike man was fast as hell and that Stone’s music was no shitty Orange County racist-punk-band cover. The Schwa was doing to National Socialism what Warhol had done to the Campbell’s soup can. A few partygoers blubbered nostalgically in their drinks, but most stood at a slouching attention, unsure if the bop rendition of the song was an honorific tribute or an insult. To be honest I didn’t know, and neither did Thorsten. When the tune ended it was evident from his downcast gaze that he’d been deeply moved, but he was too embarrassed to praise it and too dumb-founded to trash it. He pressed a fifty into my palm and asked me to play it again. After the fourth playback Thorsten finally spoke. “Did you know that before World War II, the percentage of Jews in Germany was zero point eight-seven-two? To blame such a small percentage of people for the world’s problems, it’s embarrassing. To be threatened by primitive races like yours that can’t think, or heathen races that can only deceive and nothing else, this shows our own inherent inferiority, and I hate the Jews for this, I hate you for this. I’ve never even met a Jew, and who knows, I might even be Jewish, but I hate them anyway. Who is this?”

“Charles Stone.”

“A nigger?”

“If you’re an Aryan, he’s a nigger.”

“There are no ‘Aryans,’ it’s a fake race, a marketing tool. It’s ethnic branding.”

“Exactly, so are ‘niggers.’ ”

“You know, monkey man, one day there will be no races, no ethnicities, only brands. People will be Nikes or Adidas. Microsoft or Macintosh. Coke or Pepsi.”

Thorsten Schick was the scariest person I’d ever met. An intelligent man who sees through the media thought control, the myths of race and class, and free market propaganda only to have become a guileless man who now hates without compunction and speaks perfect English. At evening’s end the skinhead egghead bestowed upon me the highest compliment he could give a non-Aryan when he said, “Just remember, DJ Darky, I don’t have a beef with you, just your people.”

The Right Fork

The Bundestreffen is the annual Afro-German get-together. A thousand native-born black volk from all over the country weekend at a spa in Ettlingen, a small resort town in the Black Forest. Klaudia and Fatima were reluctant to invite me, knowing that it’d be almost impossible for me to resist the innumerable puns I could make about a gathering of blacks in the Black Forest. But when I offered to DJ for free, even they laughed when I joked, “When we get to the Black Forest, we won’t be able to see the niggers for the trees.”

In many ways the Afro-German is W. E. B Du Bois’s Talented Tenth come to life. They’re almost a Stepford race. Unified as only an invisible people without a proximate community to turn one’s back on can be. Human muesli, they’re multilingual and multikulti, exceedingly well mannered and groomed, and, though most show the telltale sign of biraciality — the prominent shiny forehead — on the whole they’re a stunningly handsome and intelligent people.

While Klaudia played volleyball, Fatima played sideline reporter and gave me periodic updates on the game’s participants.

Making the side out calls was spunky Friederike Lutz, the nonagenarian referee. During World War II, Friederike avoided the concentration camps by working as a topless ooga-booga extra in German imperialism films such as Auntie Wanda from Uganda and Nine Little Nubian Nubiles .

On one side of the droopy volleyball net stood Maximilian, Bertolt, Uschi, Axel, Effi, and Detlef, all second- and third-generation descendents of the French colonial soldiers who occupied the Rhineland after World War I. Their ultratraditional names a noble effort to make them, if not more German looking, then German sounding. In the service court, younger and hipper, were the offspring of the black American Cold War occupiers. Their fathers mantelpiece Polaroids, their namesakes jazz legends and blaxploitation antiheroes. Miles, Billie, Dexter, Superfly, Shaft, and Buck and the Preacher stared into the net, knees bent, arms raised. Liberos, middle blockers, or outside hitters, there was something forced in the players’ broad smiles and hearty laughter. They seemed as out of place in the Fatherland as black women in shampoo commercials.