Paul Beatty - Slumberland

Overhead the telephone lines buzzed. A car cruised past at that odd not-too-fast, not-too-slow L.A. street-corner drive-by speed that made me instinctively duck behind the streetlight for cover. There, crouched behind the stanchion, I remembered the telephone lines buzzing on a warm night back in Westwood, California. We were playing hooky from Emerson Junior High. Lounging in Julie Koenig’s spacious backyard celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday before it was a holiday. Bong hits. Two cases of Hamm’s beer. Devin Morris listening to the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” and declaring that, just like Glenn Frey, he too had seven women on his mind. A spirited Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small versus Richard Pryor’s That Nigger’s Crazy debate. Sneaking off into the guesthouse to lose my virginity to Lori Weinstein (and Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do for Love”). Blaze and the rest of my boys finding out about it and jumping me into manhood, pinning me to the ground, snatching off my bleach-white Converse All-Stars and tossing them overhead onto the telephone wires that crisscrossed Com-stock Avenue. Those shoes were loyal to me. Twelve points in the Robinson Park rec league. Hopped the fence when Loretta White’s Doberman pinscher attacked me for no good reason. Sneaked me down glass-strewn Sherbourne alleyway past the Crip-ass Boyd family. So loyal were those shoes, I expected them to untangle themselves from the wire and slither down the pole and back onto my feet. But night fell with my size tens still hanging from those buzzing telephone lines like some surreal Duchamp castoff. Walking home barefoot, chewing on a plastic straw, a black Tom Sawyer whistling Rush’s classic “Tom Sawyer.” The world is, the world is . .

The patrol cop calling me over to his black-and-white squad car with a crooked finger and a sneer.

Love and life are deep . .

“What are you doing over here, boy?”

“I was visiting my girlfriend; she lives. .”

“I don’t give a fuck where she lives, I don’t ever want to see you in this neighborhood again. Now get the fuck out of here — and where in the hell are your shoes?”

His eyes are open wide .

Klaudia caught me daydreaming. “What are you thinking about?”

“I was just listening to the buzz of the telephone wires and thinking about ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” I said, kicking off my shoes.

“The book?”

“The song.”

They watched as I knotted the shoelaces around the radio handle, and then bola’d the three-piece menagerie over the telephone wire, gaucho-style.

The New Berlin Wall of Sound was nearly complete. All that remained was for the golden spike to be driven: the first note struck by the Schwa during the next day’s concert. Until then the Berlin Wall of Sound would remain silent.

We pressed on home. Mühlenstrasse felt warm beneath my tired feet. It felt just like Comstock Avenue or Robertson Boulevard. It felt like home.

LARS COOLED IN front of the Slumberland, checking his watch and taking notes. Above him, strung between two trees, the concert banner sagged in the middle like a rainbow tweaked on angel dust. THE BLACK PASSé TOUR — BUILDING WALLS, TEARING DOWN BRIDGES. He looked proud. If everything went according to plan, in two hours he’d have saved blackness.

Doris sidled up to us to say hello. She was proud too. Proud of her man who, since his newfound purpose in life, had seemingly stopped drinking— seemingly being the key word. She leaned in for a peck on the lips, more a Breathalyzer test than a show of affection.

It was a good try. Unfortunately for her, Lars had a tampon stuffed up his ass. An ultra-absorbent, soft-scented tampon, designed by a woman gynecologist to provide eight hours of day or night protection and that little something extra. His tampon indeed had that little something extra the packaging promised, because it’d been soaking in absinthe for the past two days.

The alcohol suppository is a technique passed down to journalists and music-industry insiders the world over by Finnish rockabilly bands. “Besotted” is an ethnic group in Finland, and those Stratocaster hellions are the country’s most notorious drinkers. It’s their alcoholic ingenuity and the recent advances in the menstrual sciences that have allowed many music-industry peons to show up for work stone-bachelor-party drunk with no one the wiser, because their breath is odorless.

I’ve tried consuming alcohol through the rectum. It’s the dipsomaniac’s equivalent of a hype’s mainlining junk. The porousness of the rectal walls and their proximity to the digestive system make the onset of insobriety instantaneous and deeply spiritual. The flash flood of drunkenness must be what it’s like to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

“You drunk?”

“Yeah, man, I’m high sky.” Lars answered. “You want one? I have vodka, gin, and a really nice single malt back in the car.”

The offer was tempting, but I remembered that I had to play tonight — and besides, removing a tampon from a dehydrated anus involved rubber gloves, scented lubricants, tweezers, and a high pain threshold.

“That’s okay. Unlike you, I don’t drink to get drunk; I drink for the taste.”

Most of the concert reviews in the next day’s paper would describe the crowd milling about the Slumberland as “diverse” without saying what made them so. In polite democratic society it’s important to note stratification but impolite to label the layers. For the journalists in attendance, diverse meant that they had gone to a concert in a small venue on a narrow West Berlin side street and didn’t know everybody there. The astute reader looked at the concert photo of the nappy-headed Schwa and surmised that diverse implied the concertgoers were of various ages and class backgrounds, with a significant percentage of them being of black extraction. But not even an expert cryptologist would be able to infer from the word that the streets surrounding the Slumberland were jammed with a cross section of Berliners who’d come together to celebrate the city’s resegregation. A black African peddler vainly tried to sell roses and sandwiches to a platoon of Iron Cross skinheads who were without money, appetites, or lovers. Three Japanese hep cats, bearing gifts and unsigned memorabilia, traipsed over the grounds in open-toed sandals, dutifully upholding the legacy of the Eastern magi being on hand for the birth (in this case resurrection) of every musical messiah from Scott Joplin to DJ Scott La Rock. Yippies, yuppies, hip-hoppers, and pill poppers gathered on the stairs of Saint Matthias church and shared joints and stories. In the center of the plaza, next to the marble likeness of the patron saint of alcoholism, an unkempt beat junkie of about sixteen pressed a set of headphones tightly against his skull. Red eyed and wired, I knew the look — he was a DJ. A fledging turntablist subsumed by melody. Strung out on overdub. Trying with all his might to prevent even a single hertz of sound from escaping his purview.

Although he didn’t have a deadline to meet, Lars took notes out of habit. His notations were bare-boned, mostly one- or two-word phrases in German and misspelled English. A young Arab woman wearing a head scarf and a black Stooges T-shirt moonwalked past us. She glided over to her friends, locked eyes with a white dude in a Yankees cap, and started pop locking. After a medley of double-jointed moves, she laid hands on the boy’s head and, like a healing evangelist, passed the energy to him. The boy broke out into a spasmodic shock of electric boogie. Pressing down hard with his pen, Lars wrote “Dali-esk.”

“Is this a crowd, a mob, or a throng?” he asked.