The Schwa was in full swing and suddenly I understood why Doris, a woman who loved music unconditionally, kept her flat so cold. The cold heightened your senses. I not only heard it, I felt, saw, and tasted the music. My ears were suddenly bionic, and if I concentrated and made the didudidudidudid Bionic Woman sound effect, I could hear the stud’s distended nut sack slapping against the bird’s shiny belly plumage. I could hear the Schwa’s breathing. See iridescent polka dots of sound float from the speakers and pop suddenly in midair like music-filled soap bubbles. The cold electrified my skin like a charged prison fence; the glistening notes that landed on my skin sparked and fizzled.
I swirled the song in my mouth, isolating its sweet complexities as if it were a vintage Château d’Yquem stolen off the shelves of Trader Joe’s and downed between mouthfuls of chili-cheese fries. I couldn’t smell the song. Doris and her body odor were hanging onto my neck and biting my lip. There’s something beautifully Taoist about two people kissing when one partner is naked and the other clothed.
“Do I smell?” she asked.
I nodded. We kissed again.
“Good,” she said.
We fucked. Intermittently and passionately, in time we both stank. Our spooned bodies stuck to the linoleum floor and each other with cold sweat. With her back toward me, Doris propped herself up on her elbow. Pages two and five of her list were stuck to her shoulder blades like deformed angel wings.
“You know if someone got up after making love to me and showered like they do in your American movies, I’d fucking kill them.”
I pulled off her crumpled wings. She had Liberace, Neil Sedaka, Prince, and Brian Eno ranked ahead of Tom Waits and Art Tatum. The chicken-fucking song had ended. There was only the hum of the refrigerator and the swinging tick-tock of the Kit-Cat clock’s tail. We were doomed to start fighting. Liberace? It would be our last argument. The inevitable clash of puritanical Americanism and German pragmatics. I should have known from the start it could have never worked. We both were fond of hip-hop, but she was strictly Queensbridge, a proponent of MC Shan, Marley Marl, and Roxanne Shanté. I was down with BDP, Boogie Down Productions. KRS-One, Bronx-sworn Capulet to her Queensbridge Montague.
Doris grabbed my penis and pulled me in closer to her and, without turning around, asked, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why in American movies do they make so much noise when they kiss?”
I shrugged and slipped my frozen feet in between her fleshy calves.
“Is it the more smacking, the more saliva, the louder the kiss, the more in love? Is that what it is?”
Liberace. Prince. Schroeder. MC Shan. Fuck.
“Ferguson?”
“What?”
“Do you love me?”
I took her question seriously, but I felt like Schroeder at his toy piano, exasperated by Lucy Van Pelt’s persistence and the dreamy glaze in her black pinprick eyes.
Do you love me?
I’d never been in love. I’d always thought love was like reading Leaves of Grass in a crowded Westside park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, having to suppress the urge with each giddy turn of the page to share your joy with the surrounding world. By “sharing” I don’t mean quoting Whitman’s rhythm-machine poetics to a group of strangers waiting for auditions to be posted at the Screen Actors Guild, but wanting to stand up and scream, “I’m reading Walt Whitman, you joyless, shallow, walking-the-dog-by-carrying-the-dog, casting-couch-wrinkles-imprinted-in-your-ass, associate-producer’s-pubic-hairs-on-your-tongue, designer-perambulator-pushing-the-baby-you-and-your-Bel-Air-trophy-wife-had-by-inserting-someone-else’s-sperm-bank-jizz-in-a-surrogate-mother’s-uterus-because-you-and-your-sugar-daddy-were-too-busy-with-your-nonexistent-careers-to-fuck, no-day-job-having California Aryan assholes! I’m reading Whitman! Fuck your purebred, pedigreed Russian wolfhound! Fuck your WASP infant with the Hebrew name and the West Indian nanny! Fuck your Norwegian au pair who’s not as hot-looking as you thought she’d be! I’m reading Whitman, expanding my mind and melding with the universe! What have you done today? It’s ten in the morning, do you know where your coke dealer is? Have you looked at the leaves of grass? No? I didn’t think so!” That’s what I thought love would be like. Reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority.
Doris turned to face me, her cheeks calcified with tearstains.
“Do you love me, Ferguson?”
“No.”
She released my penis and clambered over me, placing her forehead to my temple. A tear ran down her cheek and onto mine. I didn’t bother to wipe it off.
Why? She asked over and over. Why, if I didn’t love her, why was I with her? I told her the truth. Probably the first time I’d ever been completely truthful in my life. I was lonely. She raised her hand and I flinched, expecting to ward off a blow; instead she stroked my face as softly as she ever had. “That’s a reasonable answer,” she cooed. No voodoo curses were cast. No demanding the return of shit I’d thrown away without telling her. No vengeful postings of my nude photo, phone number, and salacious fisting fantasies on gay dating Web sites. Doris simply returned the chicken-fucking song, asked if I wanted to go to the movies on Thursday, and if she could help me find the Schwa.
The security guard at the Amerikahaus was right. Berlin is heaven.
CHAPTER 4
ON MY FIRST DAY OF WORK, Thomas Femmerling, the owner of the Slumberland, did two things: He gave me a set of keys to the bar, then he showed me how to properly pour a pilsner.
“It takes exactly seven minutes for ein gutes Pils,” he said, handing me an effervescent glass of beer with a head so thick it could support a silver piece. “And I figure if it takes that long to pour a good beer, it’ll take at least seven or eight months to program a good jukebox, so take your time, DJ man. Take your sweet time.” Then he plucked his coin from my beer and left me to my duties.
Bars in general are depressing places, but especially at eight thirty on a serene Monday morning. And there I was, alone and unbreakfasted, drinking a seven-minute beer, unable to block out the disconcerting chatter of children skipping merrily to school.
The Slumberland juke was a brand-new Wurlitzer SL-900. Unplugged, it sat dark and lifeless against the far wall. I immediately sympathized with the machine, for it reminded me of myself some years ago: a newborn black child come into the world obsolete and passé. The SL-900’s curse was that it played 45s and not the digital compact discs that were then just starting to take over the market share. Only two weeks old and the juke was already an antique. Still, it remained impressive and intimidating, and I approached the noble machine with the reverent caution that a game warden uses on the sedated grizzly bear.
“There, boy. Settle down, everything’s going to be all right.”