I’d only told him because I hadn’t wanted to go back to Cello with the latest. She’d said nothing when I told her that there was an assistant architect working with me on the Lessing Project who was beginning to mean a great deal to me. We cared about each other, I said. Cello gave me no opening. She looked straight ahead. Two of her children played in the back seat of the Mercedes. She did not want me to discuss boys around them, I decided.
When Manfred accused himself of being lazy, of not having the self-respect to resign, I would tell him that that wasn’t true. “There’s a difference between troubled and lazy.”
He didn’t let me talk to him about what his trouble might be, which was why I ended up laying out to Hayden the facts of an afternoon when the trees in Berlin’s squares and along its boulevards were still full.
I’d left Manfred in his corner pub, seething as usual about the German fascist past. The next day he picked me up for our excursion to the radio tower and racetrack constructed in the 1920s dressed in the jeans and shirt he’d had on the night before. An American beauty was smiling up from the passenger seat of his Deux Chevaux. I stood there, a homo with a picnic lunch from Kaufhaus des Westens, “KaDeWe,” the woolly mammoth of a department store not far from Europa Center.
* * *
Mom used to say, “You have to kid yourself. How else do you keep going? That’s always been my motto: keep kidding yourself.”
* * *
I kept the ChiChi to myself. It was not a threat to my adult life. It was my time off, my skip through the looking glass, the boys’ club where in my head I scored all night, gently moving the poet’s thigh, that second thigh, and that left leg.
The loveliness of autumn in Berlin could not penetrate the ChiChi’s door. Behind it the atmosphere was like that of a ship far from land. Travelers tired of one another’s company, the regulars remembered that they’d bought me drinks every summer when I ran out of money. To them, I had arrived via helicopter, bringing supplies, more troops, the USO, or something. I bought everyone in the bar a drink my first night back. I paid off Big Dash’s tab. I wanted to wash after he smothered me in a humid embrace.
The windows of the ChiChi were painted over and then completely obscured by the haphazard decoration: a mass of tiny Christmas lights, the wires stapled to the walls; plastic ferns and plastic ivy everywhere on nails, hung with dozens of mutilated garden elves, some just torsos with dusty knives still in them. There were some good things from Odell’s collection of music posters and walls of postcards from servicemen and refugees and former barmaids who hadn’t forgotten the help and home Zippi and Odell had given them in cold, indifferent Berlin. The place looked like the inside of a shoebox of secrets. It was so swathed and coated and coded, no one ever knew what time it was outside. Nights passed unseen.
The dark toilets were beyond the ebony dance floor. The red kitchen was behind the green bar; the racks of green and brown and clear bottles and glasses looked over the bar at the crazy windows. Small round red tables were placed under the windows and along the remaining wall space. You took a seat and maybe someone interesting would join you.
I was always going to be in Zippi’s good books, I felt, because I found postcards from the turn of the twentieth century, racist cartoons, images of grinning black clowns over words such as “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.” I had a whole wall to myself of these sociable postcards that laughed at black people. It was behind the bar, off to the side of Zippi’s cash register. She admitted that Odell had to explain them to her. She put the wine bottle back without comment when I held up my hands and ordered a cola.
I’d come back on a good night, but then I had to stay away until the next fat envelope of cash was pushed toward me across the magenta-headed girl’s metal table in the office hut. I had to lie low again after another insane night of throwing money around in the ChiChi. Big Dash and some of the other black guys lined up along the bar raised glasses and cheered me, The Party. I didn’t tell them I’d stopped drinking and they apparently hadn’t noticed the colas and water with gas, no ice.
Big Dash was oblivious, unaware that he smelled of the restaurant where he washed dishes, not caring that two foreigners, Italians, deep into whatever they were talking about, were not in the least charmed by his 2:00 a.m. Bessie Smith impersonation. When really high, he’d lean on the bar and sway and sing stupidly. “Does he hold your head down … till you can’t breathe … Does he grab your head and wish you had a ponytail…” He thought he had a black diva’s power. What voice he ever had he’d destroyed a long time ago.
Odell could be depended on to walk over and turn up the music on the deluxe cassette player on its own shelf below the glasses and bottles. Odell usually played funk until midnight and jazz until dawn. He controlled the selections and the volume. The mood in the ChiChi was sometimes determined by how Odell was feeling, what he wanted to hear. Everything came back to what was the latest in his stormy marriage to Zippi, and often, to prove a point, he’d throw himself into some aspect of the business, whether designing a new ad or ordering a new outside lamp, but always at a weird hour. A storeroom between the two toilets held a number of previously ordered and uninstalled improvements. The new piece of equipment wouldn’t be what he’d wanted or right for their look and he’d send it back, eventually.
He did everything for the business, for the ChiChi. He washed the bar every morning, mopping around the dozing and the drugged up. It was theirs, his and Zippi’s; it kept them us-against-the-world, however much they battled each other on a slow night. I felt that they stayed understaffed in order to keep themselves up to their necks. Odell had been in the army, stationed forever in Giessen. One year he didn’t re-up, but the cops back in Los Angeles were making life too hard for black men. He missed not having to worry about them, a feeling he’d never got tired of in Europe. He came back to Berlin to take pictures. He was drawn into his own pictures, like an anthropologist. He stayed.
I knew that much from his conversation about politics. He and the man I had right away taken to be his new dealer went on for some time in Black Power fashion. I thought it was risky for someone who was a dealer to go by the name of Bags. My height, but twice my girth, dark-skinned Bags had a shaved, shiny head. The tattoo on his left forearm was very evolved. Everything about him made me uncomfortable, as though I knew that one day I’d be questioned about him under oath. He, too, was ex-military. Bags would have the latest unemployment figures for black men his age in the States. When guys in their circle talked about going back, he would point to black unemployment. “They don’t want us.”
* * *
The authentic mattered to Odell, wherever he came across it, and he liked Big Dash, didn’t seem to notice anything off-putting about the man. They went back a ways, but I didn’t know anything more. I was not in their circle. My place was over by Zippi and her cash register. I was her regular, much as I longed to be one of Odell’s, a masterpiece of muscle bundles. But she claimed me, and she commented a great deal in between glances on what her man was probably getting up to with his buddies over there.
She’d appeal to Big Dash to tell her what was going on, but as queenie as he was in the muumuu-like roominess of his unpleasant shirts, he would not sell out a man to his woman. Though a gay guy, he was not a “girlfriend.”