Paul Beatty - Slumberland

I’m used to his questions about the subtleties of the English language substituting for real conversation. “Which is more, some or a few ? When someone tells you they are happy to find you safe and sound, what does sound mean? To express the indirect object of an action do you use an objective pronoun directly after the verb, or a prepositional phrase?”

“I’d say it’s a throng.”

“Why not a mob?”

“In English you label groups of people by their moral intentions and collective needs. A mob tries to convince itself it’s right and needs to prove it. A crowd knows it’s right because if it weren’t right, they would all need to be someplace else. A throng doesn’t give a fuck about moral imperatives, it just wants and needs something to happen.”

Most of those folks were there thanks to Lars’s efforts. I imagine the scene wasn’t much different along the old Wall’s borders. In light of all the hoopla around the Berlin Wall of Sound, his interview with the Schwa had been reprinted in Der Spiegel , and suddenly the rediscovery of Charles Stone was akin to the unearthing of the Delta blues musicians in the mid-sixties or Dr. Leakey finding a heretofore theorized hominid species. To many, the Schwa, like Muddy Waters, Mance Lipscomb, and Ötzi the five-thousand-year-old iceman found in an Alpine glacier, was a well-preserved mummy, a music primitive seemingly unspoiled by commercialism and modernity. Lars was the musical paleontologist and I his pickax-wielding native assistant. I didn’t mind that he garnered the fame and the credit; all I wanted from the Schwa was a song. He wanted answers. He wanted to test his DNA and carbon-date his instrument so he could theorize about when and how exactly blackness became passé.

Lars removed a pack of Drum tobacco from his pocket. The crinkling pouch reminded me of the radio static in the days when radio KROQ was good. Me and DJ Blaze parked on the Malibu bluffs at dusk ruining our minds with Thai stick and Jane’s Addiction.

Exhaling a measured plume of cigarette smoke, Lars jotted down the word Throng in his notebook. The gathering was indeed a throng, and depending on how the night went, the shit could’ve ended in melee or orgy. In either case I figured I’d need some energy, so I decided to buy a sandwich from the peddler. He pushed me to buy a rose in addition to the sandwich, and he almost had me, but I couldn’t figure out, Who do you give a rose to at an orgy? Your first fuck or your last?

As we shouldered our way inside, Lars pointed out the cables worming through window transoms and under doorjambs. “That one’s for the international radio simulcast. .DAT recording. . check this out. .” He flicked some lever and a matchbox-sized switch box attached to an electrical cord quietly descended from the ceiling.

“When Stone presses that red button, the Berlin Wall of Sound will come to life.”

I wasn’t worried about the audiovisual technology. I’d long gotten used to the fact that in this country everything works. The vending machines never shortchange you, the pay phones unfailingly deliver that tinnitus-inducing European dial tone, and the suction of the vacuum cleaners is so powerful that vacuuming the living room throw rug gives one the same don’t-fuck-with-me rush as filling a human silhouette with bullet holes at the gun range. Charles Stone, on the other hand, was about as reliable as an American bank pen.

I scanned the crowd. Though the Schwa wasn’t among them, most of the faces were all too familiar, and I became overwhelmed with heart-searing guilt. Local musicians, tavern owners, regulars, bartenders, and groupies, I owed nearly every single person in the room something, various combinations of money, return phone calls, apologies, and my life. In today’s Germany the interpersonal bridges don’t burn as easily as those that spanned the Rhine in 1944; the more selfish my actions, the more irascible my behavior, the more those people were drawn to me.

Many of my past one-night stands were there, and Ute, Astrid, and Silke, women whom I’d forgotten even existed, all stared at me as if I’d just gotten out of prison. Bernadette, Karin, Petra, Ulrike — those women were heiresses, herbalists, radio engineers, bookbinders, milliners, but I’d treated them like gun molls. Day after day I swore at them and swore myself off them. Only to return to their arms, a pussy recidivist doomed to repeat my crimes.

I didn’t have time for the guilt.

I only had time to blow air kisses and whispered witticisms.

“Where’s Stone?”

Lars lifted his chin toward the back. There, perched above us, on the thickest branch of the banana tree, was the God of Improvisation. The sight and twisted symbolism of a black genius in a banana tree unnerved me, but I understood why he was up there — the mental Lebensraum . Sometimes you have to elevate yourself above the fray; bananas, monkey inferences, and misappropriated Nazi terminology be damned.

He was talking to a reporter, shyly fiddling with his cuff links and addressing his shoes. I couldn’t hear the conversation over the murmur and the Rahsaan Roland Kirk blaring from the jukebox.

“What do you think they’re talking about?”

Lars dubbed the dialogue in the affected pitchy drawl particular to the black thinking man. “Rothko. . harmonic translucency. . Gerhard Richter, right, right, chromatic color fields. . exactly. .”

Stone looked ashen, shell-shocked. There was even more of a paranoid bulge to his eyes than usual. Between questions he blinked at me with the deliberateness of a POW trying to convey some coded message to the boys back at the command center. Not sure if he was looking at me or past me, I wavered between soul-brother salutations — a light thump of my fist to my heart or the chin-up nod — finally settling on a discreet peace sign.

“. . Leibniz. . an alphabet of thought…”

I imagined that Stone, like any guest of honor, wanted to arrive fashionably late, avoid the hoopla, but the pro forma punctuality of the German transportation system wouldn’t let him. That’s one of the drawbacks of German reliability: There are no excuses, and that’s half the fun of being black, the excuses. The negative attention.

“Pollock…linear harmony. . visceral pointillism. .” Lars was on a roll. “I’ve interviewed a hundred jazz musicians, and every time I ask them, ‘What are your influences, Mr. Blackman?’ they come back with the same impress-the-white-boy-with-white-boys shit — Rothko, Bartók, Pollock, John Cage.”

Lars looked at me expecting an answer, but I couldn’t tell him the other half of the fun in being black is name-dropping Rothko and Liebniz in an interview. Crediting abstract impressionism and the stoics as the biggest influences on your avant-garde art, and not your two tours as a machine gunner in the army, Muhammad Ali, or the white ingenue (aren’t they all) who broke your heart by choosing economic stability over eight and three-quarter inches of dick.

“What’s he talking about now?”

“Heidegger.”

“Heidegger?”

“Heidegger, nigger!” Lars shouted, jokingly snapping out a fascist salute that guilt lowered almost immediately.

“Wow, that’s the first time I ever did that.”

“Yeah, the first time out of uniform.”

“We start after the song’s over, okay?” With that Lars withdrew to the bar, leaving me to my thoughts and the Roland Kirk.

At the moment, I needed Rahsaan Roland Kirk more than Ronald Reagan and Eazy-E had needed their ghostwriters. Kirk, as is his recalcitrant wont, was blindly misbehaving like a country cousin at the Thanksgiving dinner table, chewing with his mouth full. I shut my eyes and concentrated on his blowing. Stritch, tenor, and manzello, he played three saxophones at once, somehow braiding each instrument’s distinct timbre into one tensile melody. Rather than playing his notes, he played with his notes; chewing and gnawing on them until they were sweetened bubblegum chaws that he pulled pink and sticky from his horns, then reeled back in just to chomp on it and start the process all over again. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was telling me to relax. Letting me know that it’s okay to misbehave. Perfectly fine to once in a while play with your food, your blackness, and your craft. It was a message I needed to hear, especially since when the song ended I was going to have to introduce the Schwa, in all his musical rudeness, to the world.