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.
CHAPTER 4
THE JUKEBOX-SOMMELIER IDEA came to me not long after hearing the chicken-fucking song, during a night out at Sunny Glens, a dive bar on Robertson Boulevard populated by Hamilton High alums who’d graduated in the bottom third of the previous twenty graduating classes. Bridgette Lopez and I were on one of our rare public dates. Some days I thought I could marry Bridgette. She was a forty-five-year-old divorcée who, during my Sunday-night gigs at La Marina in Playa Del Rey, sat next to the DJ booth, her pudgy legs crossed at the knees and looking like two porpoises trapped in fishnet stockings. She’d ply me with cosmopolitans and five-dollar bills, scratch a long ex-chola burgundy fingernail down my forearm, and request a song or sex act. More often than not I granted both her requests, and by the end of the evening we’d be singing sweet doo-wop oohs and coos and making slow jam vows to love each other always and forever. Apart from having to listen to Heatwave ad infinitum the rest of my days, a life with Bridgette wouldn’t have been too bad.
She stuffed quarters into the pool table and I bought drinks. I had to shout to make myself heard over the loud, keening, post—Diver Down Van Halen guitar riffs coming out from the rainbow Wurlitzer. “What you drinking, pendeja?” I yelled. Bridgette loved it when I talked dirty to her.
“Dame una vaso de vino, mayate.” And I loved when she called me nigger in her woeful Spanish.
“Red or white, puta? ”
“Rojo, cabrón.”
“Red wine,” I screamed into the bartender’s ear. He shook his head and slammed down two bottles of bum wine, neither of them red or white. I told him to pour the green even though he was pushing the orange.
Whenever I think of Bridgette I think of the sound of her pool breaks. They were molecular and sounded like an introduction to an organic chemistry textbook. I loved to tape-record them. The cue ball flying toward the pyramid of painted ivory neutrinos as if it’d been shot out of a particle accelerator.
Bridgette sank two solids off a clean, wonderfully cold-blooded-sounding break, and as she lined up her next shot, she took her first sip of Chateau du Ghetto. “Who the fuck is the sommelier here — Big Daddy Kane?” she said with a thick tongue and cough-medicine face.
We both laughed, and spent the rest of the evening shooting pool, wondering if green wine was supposed to be served chilled or at alleyway temperature, and cracking corny rotgut jokes.
“When the bartender said, ‘Would you like the house wine,’ I didn’t know he meant crackhouse wine.”
At some point we tired of the classic rock ‘n’ roll thumping from the jukebox. There’s only so much Eric Clapton — bluesy Negro mimicry a person can take, and I made a halfhearted comment about reprogramming the jukebox. “I could be a jukebox sommelier.” I’d never said sommelier before and I liked how the word sounded coming from my mouth. I looked for an excuse to say it again, but Bridgette beat me to the punch.
“You could be a jukebox sommelier,” she suggested in all seriousness. “Nobody ever gives enough thought to what’s on the jukebox. It’s always the same selection, fifty greatest hits CDs, a mediocre Motown anthology, the essential Billy Joel, a mix tape of Top 40 singles from two years ago, two Los Lobos CDs and that fucking Bob Marley album.”
“Legend.”
“That’s it, Legend. My God, the bar scene has made me hate that fucking record. Drunk white boys singing ‘Get Up, Stand Up.’ “
I grabbed a chunk of Bridgette’s ass and eased her out the door.
“You want to go back to my place to hear some good music?” I asked her.