Paul Beatty: Slumberland

I didn’t know it then, but I was starting out on the quest for quintessential dopeness that would eventually lead me to Berlin.

Buddha had his first revelation under the bodhi tree. I had mine under the influence of Vicodin, Seconal, and what a cat named Twitchy told me were the last two quaaludes south of San Luis Obispo. Here in this DJ booth my body may shrivel up; my skin, my bones, my flesh may dissolve; but my body will not move from this booth until I have attained Enlightenment, so difficult to obtain over the course ofmany caipirinhas .

It was a fundraiser, a marathon rave where I played sixteen hours straight, spinning a depressant electronic-dance-music sutra comprising two hundred records so similar in melody and bpm they might as well have been issued on one manhole-sized platter. I was still unenlightened and I was down to my last record, a techno single that had somehow snuck into my crate the way a crop-devouring beetle slips into the country in a sack of coffee beans. Techno is the only musical genre I find completely incomprehensible. I won’t say it’s noise. Noise at least has a source. I played the record; the incessant drumbeat tomtommed throughout the club. My raga turned into a powwow. Hordes of shirtless strobe-lit frat boys bejeweled in glowing necklaces and bracelets zigzagged from medicine man to medicine man, war-whooping their cares away, while sweaty coeds danced in tiny Ojibwa circles.

Enlightened by the realization that playing records at weddings and raves wasn’t the way to enlightenment, I’d reached the end of my meditative period. When DJ Blaze, my best friend and fellow member of the Beard Scratcher record collective, arrived with the crate of records I needed, he was two hours late. His eyes were glazed and reddened from indica bud. My indica bud.

“You sure you wanted this crate?” I nodded and motioned for him to hand me a record, any record. “These white boys going to lynch your ass. Not for reckless eyeballing, but for reckless rap.” He handed me the next record in the crate, one that, despite our collective’s vow to share all resources, was one I didn’t want him to know I had. I placed it on the deck and cued it up. Back then playing New York hip-hop in an Inland Empire dance club jam-packed with white kids expecting industrial and synthpop was akin to Hernán Cortés landing on the beaches of Hispaniola. Each booming bass note was a starboard cannon blast fired over the heads of primitives and into the rain forest. “I hereby claim your heathen souls in the name of the South Bronx, the South South Bronx !” A shrapnel shower of tree bark, scratching, and slant rhyme rained down on the natives. No one danced. No one told me to stop, either.

Blaze craned his neck to look at the spinning record. The label had been peeled off but he thought maybe he could glean some information from the serial number scratched into the run-off or the width of the grooved portion. I can say what it was now, Stezo’s “It’s My Turn.”

Funk not only moves, it can remove…it’ll clear your chakras; I’ll give it that. But it isn’t enlightenment. None of it is. Jazz, classical, blues, dancehall, bhangra — it’s all scattered chapters of the sonic Bhagavad Gita.

Blaze and I drove home windows down, cool air and cool FM jazz blasting in our faces. Clifford Brown swung through “Cherokee” and I thought of all things Indian: Buddha’s pilgrimage, Jim Thorpe, Satyajit Ray, peyote, Tonto, lamb korma, extinction, overpopulation, cricket, Bob “Rapid Robert” Feller, and antique 350cc motorcycles.

Once back in my bedroom, I sought to dampen the techno echoes still reverberating in my head. To do this I consulted my Buddhas, both the oxidized green brass figurine that sat serenely inside my gohonzon and the moist, spinach-green buddha-bless sealed inside a sandwich baggie and buried at the bottom of my underwear drawer. That wasn’t the night I decided to come to Germany, but the longest journey starts with a single toke.

The weed was good. A kind blend of medicinal from the alternative clinic and the remnants of the hydroponic I mooched off Alice in Chains. I sparked the joint and made the mandatory pothead vow: “From now on, man, everything’s going to be different. Soon as I graduate from SMCC with an associate degree in library science, shit’s going to be on. The world will be my card index.”

The pot kicked in harder. Marijuana doesn’t erase my auditory flashbacks but mitigates them in much the same manner that Fats Waller’s left hand and infectious asides keep one from paying attention to the inane lyrics of those Tin Pan Alley ditties he was forced to sing.

That night, in addition to the techno, I was being tormented by my worst sonic memory. The sound of a brutal injury my endorphins prevented me from feeling but not from hearing. I’m eight. Playing Nerf hoop. Going one-on-one against the dog. I have a lane for the dunk but never get airborne. There’s only the crack of my tibia snapping in half like a giant pair of takeout chopsticks, followed by the Velcro rip of one side of the broken bone tearing away from the muscle and shooting up my leg, knocking off my kneecap with a sixty-decibel pop that sounded like a schoolboy stepping on a empty milk carton. The dog. The dog is whining, yelping, and frantically scrambling, trying to get out from under my broken body.

I used to be a loudness maniac. I’d try to drown out my sound memories by standing next to jackhammer operators, cupping my ear when the fire engines roared by, or sticking my sand-covered head into the deafening, numbing sting of the board-walk showers at Venice Beach. Apart from two weeks of blissful tinnitus brought on by an eighty-thousand-watt Blue Öyster Cult concert at the Fabulous Forum, these noisy escapisms always proved to be short-lived. The ringing in my ears eventually subsided, a piece of boulevard sidewalk would catch me in the face or a pushy elderly couple would bogart my shower, then proceed to flap water from my stream onto their distended, sea-salt-caked pubes. Still, I’m one of the few who relish the wailing baby on a crowded plane.

The higher I got that night, the softer and mellower my fugue. In time, the more fragile and subtle sounds from my past began to dominate my thoughts: the cuteness of every puppy sneeze I ever heard, the freedom in the whir of a Tour de France peloton coasting downhill, the unlimited artistic possibility in the click of a four-color pen, the anticipation in a firecracker fuse’s sizzle. I sifted through these sounds and tried to come up with the most comforting sound from my childhood, one that if I were on my deathbed would actually be the last thing I’d want to hear.

I remembered how I used to sit in the den with Moms just so I could listen to her read the New Yorker . In those days the literary and paper quality of that magazine was much better than it is now. Those pages had an intellectual and textual heft to them. They felt like parchment, a parchment that no family ever had the temerity to throw away. Ma would turn through the Bellow and the pages rustled as though the story had been printed on numbered autumn leaves. I decided that if I could collapse all my memories into one sound, it would be the sound of those pages turning. Crisp. Mordant. Pipe-smoke urbane. I went to my turntables and tried to replicate it. That was when I first started mining the favorite sounds in my memory bank in the hope that one day I’d compose a soundtrack that’d loop inside my head over and over again. I, like many a mixmaster who’s come before me — Count Basie, the biathlete’s heart, and the inimitable Afrika Bambaataa — was looking for the perfect beat, the confluence of melody and groove that transcends mood and time. A beat that can be whistled, pounded on lunch-room tabletops, or blasted from shitty undermodulated car-stereo speakers and not lose its toe-tapping gravitas. A beat that would make all the ladies in the house say Hey! without prompting from a concert rapper in dire need of some stage presence. A beat that couldn’t be commercialized and trivialized by Madison Avenue, reduced to thirty hard-sell/soft-sell seconds. A timeless beat, never to become an “oldie but a goodie” but always destined to be as fresh as French bread. The sonic Mona Lisa.