Paul Beatty: Slumberland

Elaine broke my trance. “Man, it’d be almost worth finding the Schwa just to get him to play over your beat.”

“I’ll make the first pledge,” Blaze said, throwing sixty dollars on the floor. “Seriously, you need to find him. The chance for true perfection doesn’t come along every day.”

The phone rang. “It’s Bitch Please,” Elaine announced sotto voce, her hand over the receiver. “She says she’ll pay fifty thousand dollars for the beat.”

BACK IN LOS ANGELES I used to score porn films. Still do when money’s tight. Not much difference between the American and German smut, except that German pornographers don’t see the three Ps, pubic hair, plot, and perky breasts, as anachronisms. In the beginning I took the job seriously. Most cats just handed in any old piece of music they weren’t able to sell. They could care less about the music matching the mood. I actually watch the schlock. Sometimes I’ll go so far as to compose different themes for each character. For a while I even tried working as a soundman, thinking that would give me some insight into the X-rated mise-en-scène. However, my latent prudishness was exposed when to my open-mouthed and wide-eyed surprise I discovered 1) females ejaculate, 2) they’re capable of expelling said ejaculate over long distances, 3) it’s salty, and 4) it stings like hell! Despite my rubber-gloved, hands-on approach to scoring porn films, the only thing I learned was why the great film composers like Michel Legrand and Lalo Schifrin stayed away from the set.

After dropping le beat presque parfait , I’d composed the soundtrack for a blue movie called Splendor in the Ass . A score that Rick Chess, a director with whom I’d worked before, deemed “too musical.” I explained to him how the overlap of the progression and the extended glissando matched the sex act’s natural music. The rhythmic clapping of the stud’s testicles against the star’s buttocks accentuated the trombone runs. Her “fuck-me-you-motherfucker-harder-goddammit” guttural scatting was contrapuntal to the lower-register xylophone. Rick started to ask what mise-en-scène meant, getting only as far as the mise before grabbing me by the elbow and ushering me into the bestiality department. He removed a videotape from a manila envelope and popped it into the editing machine. A bespectacled man, his pants dropped to his ankles, was fucking a chicken. Rick twisted a knob. The music came up. A sound so beautiful it should have been incongruous with the image on the monitor, but it was instead transformative. The man was making love to the chicken, and the chicken was enjoying it. I recognized the musician immediately. It could have only been the Schwa.

Rick Chess fiddled with the hydraulics of his computer chair, raising and lowering his seat in rhythm to the music.

“This is quality footage, but it’s unusable. The music is too good. Now the shit is an art film. Some sick fuck in a peep booth on Santa Monica Boulevard doesn’t want to jerk off to art — he wants filth.”

“Who is this?” I asked Rick.

He looked at me crazily. “How’m I supposed to know? Came in the mail as an audition tape.”

He tossed me the envelope. The return address read, “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, Slumberland Bar, Goltzstraße 24, 10781 Berlin, Germany.”

“Can I have this?” I asked.

Rick nodded. “Sure, keep it. I want you to use this as an example of what not to do, because you’re reverting to your old ways.” He stuck his hand into his receding, greasy hairline and kept it there. “I want the hack back. I want the DJ Darky who provided nondescript background music for Lawrence ofa Labia and 12 Angry Menses , conveyed the apolitical intrigue in All the President’s Semen . I don’t want the high-concept genius.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Nonplussed in the proper Kensington-Merriwether usage of the word, I was only half listening to Rick’s harangue. I couldn’t believe that distinctive legato that swirled inside my head was coming from the Schwa. I’m not the “it all happens for a reason, God has a plan, everything will work out like an HBO television show” type. Before Rick Chess played that video, the only serendipitous occurrence in my life was that I misspelled “serendipity” during a local spelling bee and thankfully wasn’t aboard the bus carrying the area’s best spellers to the city finals when it plunged off the Sepulveda Overpass.

This was no happy accident. I turned my attention back to the video. Serenaded by an exquisitely delicate diminuendo, the stud and the hen reached a cackling, groaning, mutual orgasm.

Chess elbowed me in the ribs. “Who came first, the chicken or the egghead?”

When I got home I took a good long look at the envelope. I didn’t have to be Easy Rawlins to figure out the Schwa didn’t send the tape. The use of esszet ligatur in “Goltzstraße.” The crosshatched 7s. The handwriting just looked too German.

I called up West German information and over a staticky connection asked for Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann’s phone number in West Berlin.

The operator couldn’t stop laughing.

“You making fun with me. This must be that American television show. .” I could hear her flipping through her dictionary. “. . Straightforward Kamera .”

She meant Candid Camera, but at $3.75 a minute I wasn’t in the mood to correct her.

“So there’s no Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann in the Berlin directory?”

“ Nein . We have an Andreas Dunkelmann auf der Lausitzerstrasse. A Dieter Dunkelmann on Derfflingerstrasse. A Hugo on…”

“What about the Slumberland Bar?”

“Please, hold for that number.”

“Hallo, Slumberland,” the bartender, a woman with a sultry Mae West rasp, yelled into the phone, trying to make herself heard over music and the raucous din. I remember thinking the place sounded dangerous. I asked for Dunkelmann.

“There are many dunkel men here. Who do you want to speak with?” she asked, sounding a bit leery. I felt like I was making an international crank call.

“I’d like to speak to Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann.”

The bartender paused for a moment. “You want to speak with maybe a DJ Black Man or a DJ Dark Person?”

Suddenly the cryptogram became obvious. “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann” was an approximation of my nom de musique, DJ Darky. The bartender explained to me that in German, Dunkelmann means “obscurant” or, more literally, “dark man,” and that Schallplattenunterhalter was an East German term for “disk jockey.” East Germany being a place where the global predominance of English had yet to suck the fun out of the language’s tongue-twisting archaism.

The phone call sealed it: I had to go to Germany. Obviously someone there had heard my music and appreciated it enough to think I was worthy of finding the Schwa. What I couldn’t figure out was why all the subterfuge. Why not just tell me where he was?

Music history is rife with no-brainer collaborations that should’ve but never happened. Charlie Parker and Arnold Schoenberg. The Osmonds and the Jackson Five. The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats, and though I didn’t even have the name recognition of Valerie Smith, Josie’s tambourine-shaking sidekick, such a missed opportunity would not befall the Schwa and Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann. If I could figure out a way to raise the funds to get my ass and my record collection to Germany, history would have its perfect beat.

Of course, I wasn’t about to sell my beat to Bitch Please or any other track-starved rapper, so I started saving my cash and begging every German Institute and art organization I could find for grant money and a visa. But after discovering that DJs and porno composers don’t qualify as musicians or artists, I took another tack. I became a jukebox sommelier.