Paul Beatty: Slumberland

YOU WOULD THINK they’d be used to me by now. I mean, don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so. It doesn’t matter whether anyone truly believes it; we are as mediocre and mundane as the rest of the species. The restless souls of our dead are now free to be who they really are underneath that modern primitive patina. Josephine Baker can take the bone out of her nose, her knock-kneed skeleton back to its original allotment of 206. The lovelorn ghost of Langston Hughes can set down his Montblanc fountain pen (a gift) and open his mouth wide. Not to recite his rhyming populist verse, but to lick and suck some Harlem rapscallion’s prodigious member and practice what is, after all, the real oral tradition. The revolutionaries among us can lay down the guns. The war is over. It doesn’t matter who won, take your roscoe, the Saturday night special, the nine, the guns you once waved fuck-a-white-man drunkenly in front of the kids, take those guns and encase them in glass so that they lie passively on the red felt next to the blunderbuss and Portuguese arquebus and Minuteman musket. The battle cry of even the bravest among us is no longer “I’ll see you in hell!” but “I’ll see you in court.” So if you’re still upset with history, get a lawyer on the phone and try to collect workmen’s comp for slavery. Blackness is passé and I for one couldn’t be happier, because now I’m free to go to the tanning salon if I want to, and I want to.

I hand the receptionist the coupon. On the front is a glossy aerial photo of a Caribbean coastline. She flips it over and her eyes drop suspiciously from my face to the back of the card, which reads, ELECTRIC BEACH TANNING SALON. BUY 10 LIGHT BATHS, GET 1 FREE. Underneath the promotion, in two rows of five, are ten pfennig-sized circles; and rubber-stamped in each circle is a blazing red-ink sun wearing a toothy smile and sunglasses. Today is the glorious day I redeem my free suntan. But somehow this woman, who has personally stamped at least seven of the ten smiling suns, is reluctant to assign me a tanning room. Usually she stamps my card and under her breath whispers, Malibu, Waikiki , or Ibiza , and I go about my business.

A look of bemused familiarity creeps across her face. A look that says, Maybe I’ve seen you somewhere before. Didn’t you rape me last Tuesday? Aren’t you my son’s tap dance teacher?

“Acapulco.”

Finally. She pencils my name into the appointment book. I point to the sunscreen in the display case behind her.

“Coppertone,” I say.

A tube of Tropical Blend skims over the countertop like a miniature torpedo. The sun protection factor is two. Not strong enough. If the receptionist’s white vanilla frosting lip gloss has an SPF of three, my natural complexion is at least a six. I return fire and send the lotion back. “Zu schwach. Ich brauche etwas Stärkeres,” I say, asking for something stronger.

Maybe mammals should be classified by their sun protection factors. Married SPF3 female, 35, seeks nonsmoking, spontaneous SPF4 or lighter for discreet affair. SPF7 Rhino Faces Extinction. I’m the Head SPF50 in Charge. It was the SPF2ness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myselfhere; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myselfI must, else all these chapters might be for naught .

The windowless Acapulco room has the macabre feel of a Tijuana cancer clinic. Like the liquor stores, ball courts, and storefront churches back in the old country, Berlin tanning salons are ubiquitous sanctuaries. Places of last resort for the terminally ill, the terminally poor and sinful, the terminally pale. Places where you go when the doctors tell you there’s nothing more they can do. When the world tells you you’re not doing enough.

A ceiling fan churns efficiently through the musty air. On one dingy aquamarine wall hang two framed, official-looking pieces of parchment, one an inspection certificate from the Berlin Department of Health and Safety, and the other, written in ornate script, a degree from the College of Eternal Harvest in something called Solarology. In the middle of the room sits the tanning bed, a glass-and-chrome-plated panacea from heaven or, more accurately, Taiwan. I undress and lotion up, leaving the door open just a crack.

After years of tanning, my skin has lost much of its elasticity. If I pinch myself on the forearm, the little flesh mound stays there for a few seconds before slowly falling back into place. My complexion has darkened somewhat; it’s still a nice, nonthreatening sitcom Negro brown, but now there’s a pomegranate-purple undertone that in certain light gives me a more villainous sheen. Half of my information on what’s new in African-American pop culture comes from Berliners stopping me on the street and saying, Du siehst aus wie . ., and then I go home and look up Urkel, Homey the Clown, and Dave Chappelle on the Internet. Lately the resemblances have been to the more sinister, swarthy characters from B-movie adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s pulp fiction.

I rent these movies— Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, Get Shorty —and watch them while running back and forth from the TV screen to the bathroom mirror. I think I look nothing like these men, these bad, one-note character actors whose only charisma seems to be the bass in their voices and the inflection in the way they say motherfucker . Sam Jackson, Don Cheadle, the chubby asshole from Be Cool , they’re always smart and dark, but never smart enough to outwit the white guy or dark enough to commit any really heinous crimes.

I often think it would’ve been easier to have grown up in my father’s generation. When he came up, there were only four niggers he could look like: Jackie Robinson, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Louis Armstrong, and Uncle Ben, the thick-lipped man in the chef’s hat on the box of instant rice. Today every black male looks like someone. Some athlete, singer, or celluloid simpleton. In Daddy’s day, if you described a black man to somebody who didn’t know him, you’d say he looks like the type of nigger who’d kick your natural ass; now you say he looks like Magic Johnson or Chris Rock, the type of nigger who’d kiss your natural ass.

Most liniments are cool and soothing, but this isn’t the case with sunblock. The stuff smells like brine and has the consistency of rancid butter. My dingy skin seems to repel it. No matter how hard I rub, I can’t get the cream to disappear, much less moisturize. The greasy swirls just sit there on my skin like unbuffed car wax. I silence the ceiling fan with a firm pull of the cord. If the fan has slowed down or sped up, I can’t tell. One more yank. Same difference. Clumsily, I climb onto the tanning bed and raise my hand until the fan’s blades skip across my fingers and gradually come to a stop. There’s an oily, linty residue on my hand, which I wipe off on the wall.

I put on the goggles. The tanning bed is cold but soon warms up. Like a childhood fever, tanning heats you from the inside out. My ash-white bones become calcium coals, briquettes of the soul. Soon I’m back in my bottom bunk, the ultraviolet radiation substituting for my overprotective mother piling blanket after quilt after blanket on her baby boy. The warmth from the lamps becomes indistinguishable from that of my mother’s dry, calloused hands. My own skin seems to vitrify, and while I have any range of motion in my arms I slip a CD into the built-in stereo and press play.