When winter comes with snow and sleet,
And me with hunger and cold feet,
Who says, “Here’s two bits, go and eat?”
Nobody.
Besides not knowing what the Schwa looked like, it occurred to me that I had no idea if he was dead or alive. Considering the timelessness of his music, the chicken-fucking song could’ve been twenty years or twenty minutes old.
Maybe someone whom I’d wronged in my past was dangling the Schwa in my face. Luring me into some Hitchcockian trap.
The kind where I chase my proverbial tail looking for proof that I’d seen what I’d seen, heard what I’d heard.
Here I’d sold my car. Signed a lease to sublet an apartment for five years, and the Schwa could be here at the Slumberland bar or in the slumberland of eternal sleep. Cary Grant always lives in the Hitchcock movies. Neither I nor the Schwa was Cary Grant.
Americans die in this city. Fleeing political and parental oppression, they come to Berlin claiming to be maligned and marginalized by a racist America too insecure to “get” them. Most find something less than moderate success and end up dying pitiful, meaningless, alcoholic deaths in small two-room flats, to be found by friends laid out in their own excrement, their livers bloated, their artwork unsold and dusty.
I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody.
I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no
time.
And until I get somethin’ from somebody,
sometime,
I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no
time.
Slumberland. The room pulsed with sexual congeniality. My vow against lustful miscegenation was quickly forgotten. I longed for someone to squeeze my thigh, pinch my ass. Ain’t I a man? Seated underneath a fully grown banana tree, two women at a corner table stared in my direction so hard I had to double-check that I didn’t have a ticket in my hand and that there wasn’t an electric sign over their heads that said, NOW SERVING NUMBER 86.
Slumberland. I was past the point of no return, asleep, dreaming and dead all at the same time. My feet grew heavy; with each step into the room I seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into the floor. I looked down. The floor of the entire bar was covered, six inches deep, in pristine, white beach sand.
The redhead gawked unapologetically like a bewildered child looking at a disfigured passerby. The brunette’s gaze was one of an unrepentant sinner simultaneously demanding from her lord both satisfaction and salvation. I was about to choose the brunette — at least she wasn’t licking her lips — when Doris grabbed me by the elbow.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“For the past ten minutes you’ve been standing here in the middle of the room like a statue. Everyone’s looking at you like you’re crazy.”
Gently, like a psychiatric orderly leading a patient back to the dayroom, Doris returned me back to the bar and sat me down.
A jaunty Afro-pop song fluttered her deep-set eyes and pursed her whisper-thin lips with appreciation. Fela Kuti will do that to you. Now it was my turn to stare. Her eyes were the same soft macadamia nut brown as her hair. The laugh lines in her face accented the high cheekbones and the square, almost brutish jaw.
“What’s your favorite band?” she asked by way of readjusting me to my surroundings.
“When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water,” I said. “Well, they’re not my favorite band. They’re my favorite name for a band.”
“That is a good name, but did you ever notice that nine out ten times, bands with good names suck?”
I liked Doris from the moment her tongue touched the roof of her mouth. She was very pleasant sounding. Her slight lisp gave her sibilant fricatives a nice breathiness, so that her S’s and zeds sounded like the breeze wafting over the Venice Beach sand.
“What’s your favorite band name?” I asked.
“The Dead Kennedys,” she shot back, and for the next few minutes we volleyed excellent band names back and forth.
“The Soul Stirrers?”
“10,000 Maniacs.”
“Ultramagnetic MCs.”
“Dereliction of Duty.”
“The Stray Cats.”
“The Main Ingredient.”
“The Mean Uncles.”
“Little Anthony and the Imperials.”
“The Nattering Nabobs of Negativity.”
“The Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama.”
“The Butthole Surfers.”
“Peep Show Mop Men.”
“Sturm und Drang.”
“The Big Red Machine.”
“Ready for the World.”
“The Cure.”
“One of the great mysteries of the universe is why bands with really good names rarely make it.”
Doris took off her apron and took the seat next to me, abruptly ending her shift. I ordered something called a Neger off the drink menu. My German at this point was limited to a few insults and numbers under a thousand, but Neger looked suspiciously like nigger, and when the waitress delivered a murky concoction of wheat beer and Coca-Cola, two shades darker than me, I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.
I loved the blatancy of the German racial effrontery of the late eighties. Black German cabaret singers, with names like Roberto Blanco and Susanne Snow, sang on late-night variety shows accompanied by blackface pianists. The highway billboards featured dark-skinned women teasingly licking chocolate confections. The wall clocks in the popular blues joint Café Harlem read:
Berlin Sao Paulo Tokyo Harlem
My Neger was cold and surprisingly tasty, but I had to know.
“So what exactly does Neger mean in German?”
“It means ‘black person,’ ” said a woman eavesdropping in to our conversation.
“No, it doesn’t, it means ‘nigger,’ ” corrected Doris. “Don’t try to sugarcover it.”
The conversation turned to my reasons for coming to Germany. Doris listened patiently, and without a hint of shame explained to me that she either “knew bible-ly” or knew someone who “knew bible-ly” every black man who’d set foot in the Slumberland in the past two years, and that she had never heard of or met any Charles Stone.
A customer dropped a coin on the bar. That metallic oscillation between sudden loudness and nothing is a beautiful sound. I imagine that from far enough away, our galaxy sounds like a fifty-cent piece dropped onto an ice cream parlor tabletop. I wrote my phone number on a pasteboard coaster and flicked it and a fiftypfennig coin over to Doris. She put the coaster in her bag and asked what the money was for. I told her to use it to call the number I’d given her.
“But you’re not home.”
“No shit.”
She picked up the red house phone, dropped the coin in, and made the call. The white guys from the center table passed by me on their way out. One placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “You’re from a good family. A very good family, I can tell.”
He meant it as a compliment, but the implication was that most black families were not good. I was inclined to agree with him, because so far as I knew all families were fucked-up.
Doris returned from the phone call shooing the guy away like a fly.
“ ‘For the nigger it niggereth every day.’ What kind of answering machine message is that?” she asked.