Magic frontcourt. . Magic yo-yoing up and down. . over to Jamaal. . four on the clock. . that’s good. Lakers by twelve and folks, this one’s in the refrigerator. The door’s closed, the light’s off, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s getting hard, and the Jell-O’s jiggling. We’ll be back for Lakers wrap-up after a word from our sponsor. . Here’s Cal Worthington and his dog, Spot! If your axle is a-saggin’, go see Cal. Maybe you need a station wagon, go see Cal. Ifyour wife has started naggin’ and your tailpipe is a-draggin’, go see Cal! Go see Cal! Go see Cal! Did you know I could put you in a used car or used truck for just twenty-five dollars down. . It’s Worthington Ford in Long Beach, open every day till midnight, we’ll see you here! Bring the kids!
In addition to missing the Westside, the Lakers’ fast break, and the incessant Cal Worthington commercials, I missed black people, which was strange for me. But somehow I longed for the sounds of urban working-class blackness. The heavily aspirated T’s and P’s. The Sunday-morning supermarket shushing of a woman too tired to do her hair, much less lift her heels, as she scuffles down the aisle as if she’s wearing cross-country skis and not a pair of furry baby-blue bedroom slippers. I missed the quiet of my room after Father had put me to sleep, perchance to dream. Sometimes on a sleepless night I could almost hear Brian Mooney proudly idling his ’64 El Camino lowrider in the driveway across the street. Other times I could hear my frustrated father in the other room rambling like a mindless maniac, trying to come up with the last ten of the two hundred “Spanish-sounding” street names he needed for a new city called Santa Clarita, names that had to reflect the area’s Mexican heritage and yet have enough of an “upscale ring” to convey to any Mexicans foolhardy enough to move to the Santa Clarita hinterlands that they weren’t wanted. Having come up with such gems as Via Palacio, Arroyo Park Drive, and Rancho Adobe Drive, Pops would reach his wits’ end.
“Son?”
“Yeah?”
“You up? I know you’re awake.”
“And?”
“You hang out with lots of Mexicans? Gimme some Spanish street names.”
“Toreador Lane.”
“Won’t do. Connotes animal cruelty. Give me another.”
“Calle Street.”
“Redundant. Come on, I’m serious.”
But unfortunately for him, I never was.
“How about We Need Faster Service at Tito’s Tacos Drive? Viva La Raza Boulevard. Badges? We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges Circle. Reconquista Califas Ahora Terrace. Margarita, You Thieving Pendeja, I Know You Stole the Ten-Dollar Bill I Left on the Kitchen Counter, You’re Fired, and to Think We Treated You Like Family Road.”
I was so lonely those early Berlin nights, I missed my own father calling me a dumb nigger. So lonely that I missed black people, which is to say I missed people who can’t take a joke, people to whom I was supposed to relate but couldn’t, if that makes any sense.
Those first few weeks in Berlin the closest I’d come to kinship with another life-form was with the newly imported emperor penguins at the zoo.
Emperor penguins, like the American Negro, are notoriously fickle creatures, and the city had gone to great lengths to ensure they would feel at home. But instead of re-creating the snow, rock, and water formations of the Antarctic tundra, they removed twenty-five square meters of actual polar cap, transported it intact to Berlin, set it down in the space once occupied by the dromedaries, and covered it with a climate-controlled biodome. All for about what it would have cost to enforce the environmental laws that were supposed to protect the endangered birds in the first place.
The penguin exhibit opened to great fanfare; however, the supposedly sprightly birds refused to perform. People came in droves to see their aquatic grace, but no amount of pleading toddlers or zoological trickery could coax them into the water. I visited my Antarctic familiars every day. Setting my tape recorder in the corner of the exhibit hall and taping the dismay of the visitors who’d paid good money to see the winsome waterfowl.
Like Miles Davis in concert, for the most part the penguins stood stock-still, their backs to the audience. Every few minutes a curious bird would cause a commotion by skating his webbed feet across the ice to the water’s edge. The zoo patrons would rush the railing, lifting the children onto their shoulders and their box cameras to their eyes, then with a squawk the penguin would invariably waddle fearfully back to the pack.
The crowd would turn ugly. They’d pound and spit on glass, cursing the reluctant birds: “Now I know why these things are nearly extinct — these snooty fuckers think they’re too good to get wet!”
At least the penguins had one another. I’d return home alone. Collapse on the couch and listen to my recordings of the day’s events. Reveling in penguin defiance in the face of the curious stares and the stereotyped expectations of the outside world. One day on an overcast autumn afternoon, while on my way to the zoo, I chased down a lone ray of sunshine through the tree-lined streets of Charlottenburg. When I caught up to the sun ray, it shone directly upon the Amerikahaus and nothing else. The Amerikahaus is an ivy-covered building that sits in the middle of a residential street like a cultural trading post and offers fellowships and cultural indoctrination instead of beaver pelts and fire water. Inside the glass-enclosed vestibule, next to the flagpole, stood a black security guard, wiping his hands on Old Glory as if it were a restroom towel dispenser.
In those days, seeing a black face in Berlin was almost as rare as a black field goal kicker in the NFL. And I stared. Stared unabashedly at my fellow human penguin. The tall African-American watchman belonged to the long legacy of freak show blackness including the Venus Hottentot; Ota Benga, the Congolese pygmy displayed as the missing link in the Bronx Zoo; Kevin Powell and Heather B, the first two African-Americans on MTV’s The Real World; and myself. When the guard spotted me peering at him through the glass, he cheerily waved me inside. I opened the door to his cage. His face was warm, thick, and brown as a wool sock in an L.L.Bean catalog. The creases in his gray uniform were sharp and fell down each pant leg to a pair of polished black combat boots. A set of official-looking keys jangled from a thick steel chain. He didn’t carry a weapon; he disarmed intruders with his smile. I eased in close enough to read the writing on the ID tag; it read, simply, security.
“Can I get an L.A. Times inside?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Usually it’s a few days late, though.”
“That’s cool.” It’d been weeks since my voice had deepened into the What’s happenin’? baritone I reserved for addressing black men whom I didn’t know.
“How long you been on this side, brother? How you like it?” he asked, though before I could answer and lodge my complaints about the coarseness of the toilet paper and bath towels and the puzzling absence of air conditioners and wall-to-wall carpeting, he looked around to see if anyone was listening, then whispered in my ear, “Germany is the black man’s heaven.”
“What?”
“These people know how to take care of you. They treat you like a king. Your wish is their command.”
I stepped away from him cautiously. He was dead serious. I excused myself, and as I backed out of the door he called out after me, “You just have to let them love you.”
A week later, to ease the societal transition of the emperor penguins, the Berlin Zoo brought in a gaggle of the more gregarious rockhopper penguin, and soon the once-uptight emperor penguins were splashing and barrel rolling through the frigid waters of this cold-ass city as if they had heard and heeded the security guard’s advice. You just have to let them love you.