Paul Beatty: Slumberland

Above my decks hung an eight-by-ten color photo from a house party I had done a while back. In it I was positioned in some nondescript Mar Vista garage exactly as I was then, bent over a set of turntables, face barely visible, left shoulder awkwardly raised to my ear to hold the headphone in place. Fingertips freshly licked and resting lightly on the vinyl as if I were testing a hot iron’s readiness. My Piru-red XXXL T-shirt with the words TRADER JOE’S/PRONTO MARKET silk-screened just above the breast pocket, billowing away from my scrawny body. Blaze in the background, in profile, Locs sunglasses, black wool beanie pulled down past his ears, frozen in mid — pop lock, a contorted Toltec testimonial to post-Hispanic Mesoamericana. Behind him, leaning against the garage wall among the gardening tools and surfboards, a multidysfunctional lineup of West-side hoods, homies, and honeys of all races, intellects, and loyalties to Laker basketball. I looked at the photograph and knew then that all I knew was sound, and that sound would be all that I’d ever know.

“That was incredible, dude.”

It was Blaze. He was holding two cheap but intricate-looking pewter beer steins, two six-packs of beer, and singing the Löwenbräu commercial: “Here’s to good friends / Tonight is kind of special / The beer will pour, must say something more somehow/Tonight let it be Löwenbräu.”

“Is that Löwenbräu?”

“No, I’m just singing the song — my sister wouldn’t send me some shit we could steal from Trader Joe’s, this is the unpronounceable shit.”

Apparently Blaze’s older sister, Mariela, a tank mechanic stationed in Germany, had sent him a case of that strong leathery beer we loved so much. Beer that, no matter how much we drank, never left us with a hangover, only an urge to obey orders.

As the beer percolated in the steins, we clanked them together.

“To the Reinheitsgebot.”

“Reinheitsgebot!”

“What was that radical stuff you were playing?”

“I’m trying to find the perfect beat.”

“That was damn close, bro. Remember that offshore storm senior year when we went up to Zuma? Set after perfectly timed set of glassy eight footers, steep-ass take-offs, big barrels, remember that?”

“Yeah, even the sunset session was fucking excellent.”

“If there had been five miles per hour less wind, it would have been absolutely perfect conditions.”

“The wind made the shoulders just a tad too gnarly.”

“Well, that’s what your mix sounds like. It’s easily the best beat I’ve ever heard and probably the best beat I’ll ever hear, but it’s five miles per hour too windy.”

The beer and the weed complemented each other well. I was drunk and high at the same time. Close my left eye and I was high, shut my right and I was drunk.

High.

Drunk.

High.

Drunk.

I squinted through the mental fog and looked at the detail on the stein. The castles, elks, and mustachioed Kaisers came to life. A beer maiden, her hair in thick sausage curls, whispered my name.

Over the next few months I set about composing my perfect beat, whittling off a mile per hour of wind here and a couple of knots there. Eventually I succeeded in splicing together a two-minute-and-forty-seven-second amalgamation of samples, street recordings, and original phrases. It was with some trepidation that I played it for Blaze and the rest of the Beard Scratchers. The Beard Scratchers being the members of our record pool, and so named because of our capricious yet squandered intellectualism, the way we listened to jazz with our faces pinched in agony as if we were suffering from migraine headaches as much as from our scruffy and chronically itchy chins. Though the Beard Scratchers, like most DJs, were inveterate biters, incorrigible beat snatchers who would rip off any rhythm or melody not copyrighted in triplicate and claim it as their own, I wasn’t worried about anyone stealing it. The beat was impossible to replicate. Too many layers, obscure riffs from pop bands that never popped, folk music from countries without folksiness, sea chanteys from landlocked nations, all overlapped with my favorite idiosyncratic sounds and pressed into a musical ore as unidentifiable as a fragment of flying saucer metal in a 1950s sci-fi film. I was worried, though, that it was too long to be a beat or break. That what I had composed was an interlude or, even worse, a song.

When the music ended, all the Beard Scratchers scratched their beards save for Elaine Dupree, aka DJ Uhuru, the only member of the collective for whom a beard was an impossibility. But Elaine wasn’t even rubbing her chin: She was dialing a number on the phone.

“Who you calling?”

“Bitch Please.”

Bitch Please was an aging, once-platinum-selling rapper who occasionally purchased beats from us whenever her latest career reinvention called for some sonic esotericism. She once said about me that when I spun, no matter how frenzied or attentive the crowd was, I always looked unsure of myself. Looked as if I smelled gas but didn’t have anyone to ask if they smelled it too, much less the nerve to strike a match.

Elaine put the phone on speaker and held it up.

“Hello, this Bitch Please, the world’s only rhinestone rock-star doll, baby baba. Please leave a message.”

On the beep, Elaine motioned for me to hit the play button. The beat was only ten seconds in when Bitch Please answered the phone: “I don’t know who this is, but I’ll give you thirty thousand dollars cash for that track right now.”

Elaine hung up.

Thirty thousand dollars was an absurd amount of money to pay for a beat, and after the poor sales of her latest release, Bitch Please Raps the Cole Porter Songbook , I doubted that her bank account held half that amount. Still, it was a meaningful gesture.

“So it is a beat?” I asked.

“A damn near perfect one at that, presque parfait , as the French would say,” said DJ Umbra. “What’s in it? Anatomize, yo, anatomize!”

I began to break down some of the more obvious samples, getting only as far as the de rigueur Mantronix, when Elaine interrupted me by blurting out, “Popsicle!”—the name of the only Swedish pop group worth blurting out. And it was without trepidation that DJ Skillanator followed with, “Foreigner, ‘Feels Like the First Time,’ opening lick, second and third chords transposed with the handclap from the Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back,’ interpolating on the downstroke.”

DJ So So Deaf, a beat jockey who is in fact deaf, and who made a decent living playing bass-heavy music at dances and sock hops at schools and universities for the hearing impaired, began waving and gesticulating wildly in his slang B-boy sign language. His brother, DJ You Can Call Me Ray or You Can Call Me Jay but Ya Doesn’t Have to Call Me Johnson, whose bailiwick was comedy albums and television theme songs from the seventies, interpreted. “So So Deaf says, ‘Only Roger Daltrey’s epiglottal scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again” can raise the hairs on his arm like that.’ He loves how you flared it.”

I touched my hand to my lips and kissed out a sign language thank-you to So So Deaf in return for his compliment. As the music played on, our thoughts returned to the beat presque parfait .

There were no more guesses and the Beard Scratchers leaned in, eager for just a taste of the beat’s trace elements; and seeing the wide-eyed puppy-dog looks of inquisitiveness on their faces, I felt compelled to recite the only true truism I’d ever heard. “I should warn you before we begin,” I said loudly and urgently, as if I were delivering a line from the final act of a Tennessee Williams play, “that I’m not going to necessarily tell you the truth.”