I couldn’t forget Rock Hudson’s face. Saintly and shriveled, he talked cheerfully, but the lost-eyelashes look would not suit him. A big man had climbed from this sick man’s side and loped off to an all-night diner, never to return. He’d been dead three years, but the ravaged face flashed behind that of every cute boy I cut a desperate look at, even in faraway Berlin.
* * *
“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go,” Big Dash said. “But I’m waiting for that lost-looking dude down there to hit the can and I’ll join him.”
Zippi opened the big rectangle of aluminum foil and swept her bangs at the sight of the soft, moist black hash. It was coming into Europe again, I explained in German. Afghani chieftains and Russian officers had worked things out, I said, though I’d no idea where I got that news.
A football game was on TV. Odell let out a cowboy yelp. I didn’t have to lie either. I’d not seen Bags, I said in English. Regulars along the bar made what they thought were coyote sounds. Zippi said in German that I could tell Afer this didn’t make up for things. I let her look away first. The hash was a gift from me, but I didn’t volunteer that I purchased it from Afer’s girlfriend and I didn’t follow Zippi into the kitchen either.
I was a big boy now. I got a white wine from Odell and took it to a thin older woman I used to put them away with. She’d had a few glasses already. We laughed at how my German had advanced. Was I reading in German the German literature I liked so much, she wanted to know. I was flattered that she remembered that I liked Heinrich Mann. Two hours later my joker was wrapped and I was balling her. To stay interested I had to pretend I was commanding her with that fat one of Manfred’s I’d never seen.
* * *
My thing for this German dude was still very much alive. I slowed and looked up when I cycled past the building where his betrayed oncologist worked. I took to parking across from the Nissen huts. Even at a distance I could tell that the enclave looked and felt nothing like the militantly organized and clean encampment Rosen-Montag had insisted that it be every day. It wasn’t clear what the site was being used for now. On the other side of the Tiergarten, I wasn’t yet ready to go as far as Lessingsdorf. I turned back at the Academy of Arts.
I had a theory. The feelings for Manfred that I carried around Berlin changed in emphasis depending on my mode of transportation. On foot, my thoughts about him were sorrowful; by subway and train the images of our times together were fractured and comic; in a taxi or on a bus I was passive, the weak one, someone not in charge; but by bicycle I experienced gratitude in having enjoyed his company, acceptance that as an ideal he belonged to German history and as a man to himself, not to me, and maybe not even to his countess, taking the Rilke view of patrons in castles.
I cycled as far as the Schlachtensee. Every family on the banks of the lake was a nudist colony. Buck-naked fathers climbed trees and dived and grandmothers wiped the mouths of cherubs, the loose flesh of their grandmotherly arms sagging beside breasts content to have done their job, retired, and gone to sleep above their cascades of flesh.
The sun was going to be out for a good while yet. I was in a rowboat. Experimentally, I removed my sneakers and socks. My shirt came off next. I rowed farther into the lake. My skin was slippery from the effort and the sun. My trousers and underwear I got rid of in a single motion. I lay down in the rowboat, knees above me. It was too much on my eyes, even with clip-on shades. I sat up. I did that German thing. I looked at my navel. I noted mostly the absence of definition around it. I did the boy thing next, deliciously.
“Jed, Mann,” Manfred might have said, pulling on my arms. He got excited when I took to something characteristic of Berlin: bouletten, George Grosz, controlling the line I was standing in at the cinema, his reckless parking, too much cake on Sunday, hatred of authority, exhibitionism. “How cool is that then,” he’d say.
I was willing to masquerade as him on the sheets again, but my former partner in white wine didn’t want me. Everything she said to me under her breath in the ChiChi was humiliating. I was, like every black man in the free city, a hustler when it came to white women. She nodded in Odell’s direction. If I couldn’t get what I wanted from her I’d discard her. True, I admitted. If she wanted that, she would hire from the bar one of the talented, skillful musicians, she said. She pushed away the glass of wine I’d brought her and called for one she’d pay for herself. I should have given her my black man’s Who-are-you-kidding look, but I doubted at that moment that I had one.
After that, the time I would have given to the ChiChi went instead to piles of dishes and miles of bike lanes. I didn’t want to lie to Zippi even if I wasn’t coming around. I didn’t like my gentleman’s debt to Afer’s girlfriend. When I asked Afer if he’d seen Bags, he said he’d gone to see his family in America. But he was coming back. He rushed over it, like a salesman covering up something defective about the product. Afer wasn’t good at intrigue. He had a way of letting on that he was involved in something, keeping big secrets. But he tricked me. I hadn’t expected him to understand when I quit smoking dope.
Lotte was at her table in the window one morning and we saw five guys from the architects’ collective rush around from the front of the building to their cars. They had blueprints rolled up under their arms and waved big notebooks. They ran like the Keystone Kops, like they were having a good time. Lotte said it was a circulated fact that since the Cold War, German architects on both sides of the Iron Curtain were expected to spy for their governments.
I put off having a coffee that day and fell asleep without having had any. I didn’t take a break while on café duty the next day and fell into bed without having had a cigarette. It was going to be easier to ride the bicycle, I told myself. I couldn’t stop sweating. I ignored the content and Technicolor of my recurring dreams.
In my intense and bewildering nakedness in the head, I phoned my mother from the café. Nothing was wrong, I said. But I’d wanted to say I was sorry. I would never forget that I’d made my rehab experience as shameful for Mom and Dad as I could. Inmates have more power than their visiting families. I could range freely over that prairie of memory where childhood incidents lay unburied, and in their guilt as creators of an addict they were obliged to render unto me hides of truth. I’d always known that her politics put Mom on the defensive as a mother. That I had denounced in the rehab her social activism as a species of child neglect explained why she had stayed in the public rooms of her feelings with me ever since. I could say I was sorry and she could say that I mustn’t dwell on such things, but she dodged me, and my covert pleas. I felt it all the more now that Cello was back in with her.
She was excited about Dad’s surprise: he himself had got them tickets for practically every performance of the Ravinia Festival. She was going to have Mozart and Frederica von Stade and Brahms and the Chicago Symphony all summer long. She said that our conversation reminded her that there was something she wanted to tell Cello and she hung up. It was no consolation that Solomon was now perhaps also wondering how long it would be before Mom was her real self with him again.
* * *
“You can start a riot by having a black ass on the wrong beach,” Ralston Jr. said when the paramedics took Uncle Ralston away. “By having your black ass on the wrong one. Ask Carl. Ask Loraine. Your brown black ass.”
* * *
In Berlin, when one door closed, another opened. I’d heard of her, but hadn’t met her. Everyone at the house meeting was excited to have Alma back, except for the house leader’s partner. The house leader and his woman were the only Co-op members with children. He used to be with Alma. They met when she got hurt at the first squatters’ riots in Berlin eight years before. He still liked her. His woman fumed and baked in the main Co-op kitchen. I let myself imagine Zippi wet for Odell all day long.