“Not if by good music you mean that classical crap you played for me last time.”
“Come on, you got used to it.”
“That’s the problem, you listen to that shit long enough, you start thinking you’re rich and white. And rich and white is no way to go through life if you happen to be neither.”
Later that night Bridgette Lopez became the first of a notso-select group of women to hear the chicken-fucking song. Back then the ultimate sexual maneuver was to sprinkle cocaine on one’s engorged penis just before penetration. I’ve never done it but the rumored pleasures are boundless, the shared orgasms supposedly more intense and lasting than championship chess. Listening to the chicken-fucking song with her that night was like sprinkling cocaine on my heart.
To this day I don’t abide artificial intrusions in my sex play. I prefer natural light and abhor toys, pills, and negligees. My only coital enhancement is the chicken-fucking song. I drape a towel over the TV, put the tape into the VCR, and play it for paramours and other sundry pieces of ass with the bad luck to end up in my arms. The music adds a Romeo-and-Juliet double-suicide poignancy to the otherwise loveless and in my life almost perfunctory one-night stand. Suddenly everything I say becomes something Khalil Gibran wishes he’d said. Every kiss and caress has the all-or-nothing, give-me-intimacy-or-give-me-death honesty of a Sylvia Plath poem. In my mind, my lumpy full-sized bed becomes the beach in From Here to Eternity and I’m Sergeant First Class Burt Lancaster fucking a voluptuous Rhode Island Red on a wet, sandy Hawaiian beach, the tattered sheets crashing over us in waves of cotton and rayon.
The morning after with Bridgette Lopez set the tone for all the rest that would follow. It was arduous and awkward, a runny-egged breakfast of stilted conversation and averted eyes. There is something about the song that embarrasses and shames you like catching yourself picking your nose in public.
The last thing Bridgette ever said to me was, “I’m serious, do the jukebox-sommelier thing.” So I did. I wrote a letter to the Slumberland Bar in Berlin requesting a position as a jukebox sommelier, enclosing a résumé and an unlabeled mix tape. Two weeks later I received a small packet in the mail containing the paperwork for a work visa, a one-way plane ticket, a beer coaster, and a brief letter that stated my salary and equated the finding of my tape to the excavation of King Tut’s tomb.
PART 2. DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES
CHAPTER 1
IARRIVED IN BERLIN on a hazy mid-autumn afternoon, emerging from the coach-class bramble wrinkled, hungry, cold, and funky smelling, but happy as a runaway slave.
The cab ride to the hostel was in a Mercedes-Benz. Apart from a nervous three-block joyride in a Cadillac Seville, it was my first trip in a luxury car. I sank deep into that leather seat, thinking that if I hadn’t reached the promised land, Germany was at least a land of maybes and we’ll sees.
West Berlin was like a city populated entirely by Quaker abolitionists. Everyone was so nice — to a point. When I showed up to lease my first apartment, the landlord knocked seventy-five deutschmarks off the rent for reparations but wouldn’t shake my hand to close the deal. Over time the friendly small talk with the newspaper vendor devolved from “How do you like Germany? Do you plan on staying?” to subtle get-the-fuck-out-of-my-country-nigger musings like, “Wow, I can’t believe you’ve been here three months already? When are you going back to America?” When I went to local jazz clubs like the Quasimodo or the A Train, patrons at the bar would buy me drinks as an excuse to pick my brain about jazz and American racism. This was a typical conversation.
“Thanks for the beer.”
“Kein Problem. I bet you’re glad not having to drink that shit American beer. Blah, so bad.”
“Yeah, you motherfuckers are on to something with these pilsners. .”
Then Willi, Karl-Ludwig, and Bruno would defer to the American expat who’d take a stultifyingly mediocre saxophone solo that would inexplicably bring the house down. At the bar my newfound friend would put his arm around me and say, “You know, jazz improvisation comes from the slaves having to improvise in order to survive. Too bad every idiom of black music, be it jazz or rhythm and blues, or whatever, has declined in its Negroidery and purpose. It’s become whitified.”
Now I know why Harriet Tubman faked those blackout epileptic seizures: It was the only way she could get those damn abolitionists to stop patronizing her.
I quickly learned not to respond to jazzophile opinions that, judging from their use of words like Negroidery and whitified, had been stolen from the latest Wynton Marsalis magazine interview. I held then, and still do, that it’s ridiculous to think that slavery had anything to do with jazz improvisation. In order to survive, slaves didn’t improvise, they capitulated. The ones who stood their ground and fought back died. Making a holiday meal from pig innards isn’t improvisation; it’s common sense to throw whatever’s left into the fucking pot. If anybody was improvising, it was the free black population. And if anybody was “whitified,” it was the suit ’n’ tie — wearing Marsalis. Like Negroes hadn’t seen a white face until they saw the slave catcher. As if all the fucking race mixing in Spain, Egypt, ancient Rome, and Ethiopia never happened. But I knew no Berlin jazz aficionados wanted to hear me denigrate their romantic notions of white oppression being the progenitor of black musical genius. I didn’t even want to hear myself say these things. So I’d politely nod in agreement and say, “Have you ever heard of Charles Stone?”
My visa didn’t allow me to start work until November, so I spent the next two weeks contemplating the irony that though I’d be working at the Slumberland, I hadn’t slept since I got to Berlin. Slumberland. The name itself was foreboding enough to keep me out. It brought back all the childhood traumas, the sleepless nights staring at the lightning-bolt-blue night-light while pondering the relationship between reality, the dream state, and death. My father, the embittered literature Ph.D. who worked for the county naming the streets within walled communities that sprouted up on the Californian hillsides like concrete weeds, did nothing to ease my fear of the dark and dying. He’d look under the bed and in the closet, and speaking in the effete horror-movie accent of a Transylvanian ghoul, he’d name the monsters and demons lurking in the shadows. “Hello, Chimera. Good evening, Medusa. Glad to see you’re well, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, not the peace-loving miscreation who read Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch, but the vengeful brute from the second half of the book who killed innocent children without compunction.” With my eyes bulging from their sockets and my heart beating so hard I could hear it, he’d tuck me in with one of Shakespeare’s innumerable quotations about restless slumber. “To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,” Father would say, bussing me on the forehead and finishing the quote just before the click of the shutting door, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”
I was dizzily homesick. My attempts at re-creating my California lifestyle were amusing but ultimately ineffective. The citrus smell that wafted from the orange rinds I placed on the radiator made me sneeze constantly. The small colony of black ants Mother airmailed to me, so I could force march them across my windowsill, died when they were unable to digest the glutinous gummi bears I fed them. I rented a car and got five traffic tickets in one day for making right on red after right on red. I’d regurgi-tate Laker games I’d heard Chick Hearn call, play by play, commercial break by commercial break: