I opened the lid and counted fifty record slots. Room enough for one hundred songs, approximately thirteen hours of continuous music. That meant I had to come up with a playlist of fifty songs so compatible with one another that any one jam had to be able to seamlessly follow, precede, complement, supplement, and riff off any other jam. I also had to take into account fifty additional B-sides. Songs whose strains might be less familiar but, if mistakenly punched into the jukebox, wouldn’t bring the mack-daddy maneuvers of the Slumberland’s miscegenation menagerie to a screeching halt, and might even hip a funk-drunk listener to some classic James Brown besides “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” I needed songs that would make the bar’s black male clientele feel important, knowledgeable, and, yes, superior. Songs whose intricacies and subtext they could explain to the fräuleins without feeling like racial quislings to the Negress mothers and wives left back home to toil over the Serengeti and Amana ranges. I needed songs that spoke to the white woman’s inner nigger. The nigger who had so much in common with these defeated and delusional men, the bipolar white nigger woman in all of us who needs to be worshipped, whistled at, and sometimes beaten.
I’ve always maintained that one could make the case for the white woman being the most maligned personage on the planet. Like Pandora and Eve, white women have been built up as paragons of virtue and beauty only to be unjustly blamed for the world’s ills when they decide to come down off the pedestal to exercise their sense of entitlement and act human.
Yes, the Slumberland jukebox would be stuffed with perennial pop songs, bebop sui generis, and Memphis soul. It would be a fifty-pfennig musical library capable of dispensing stereophonic hope and salvation to the downtrodden from Harlem to Wies-baden. It would help a haughty German woman come down off her high horse and put a discouraged, diasporic black man on his.
This wouldn’t be like making a mix tape for a schoolyard crush filled with slow jams, conscious rap, James Taylor, saccharine jazz, and rainstorm interludes. I had to program that jukebox so it’d be me DJing on autopilot. Turn it into an electronic doppelgänger flashing its rainbow lights, blowing its plastic bubbles and my trademark shit. “Goddamn, get off your ass and jam” eclecticism. All I needed was that one record that would get the party started. Make the ladies say, “Ho,” the homosexuals say, “Hey,” and the skeptics say, “Fuck it.”
I sipped my beer, the second-best beer I’d ever had,* and asked the question I imagined all great artists ask themselves before engaging in the creative process: “Is there a God?” I weighed the arguments pro (Hawaiian surf, Welch’s grape juice, koala bears, worn-in Levi’s, the northern lights, the Volvo station wagon, women with braces, the Canadian Rockies, Godard, Nerf footballs, Shirley Chisholm’s smile, free checking, and Woody Allen) and con (flies, Alabama, religion, chihuahuas, chihuahua owners, my mother’s cooking, airplane turbulence, LL Cool J, Mondays, how boring heaven must fucking be, and Woody Allen), not so much to prove or disprove the existence of a powerless almighty, but to engage my increasingly tipsy thought process with so much conscious prattle that an idea might strike me when I wasn’t looking. After about twenty minutes of this I’d come as close as anyone with an associate’s degree in library sciences has come to disproving the existence of God,* but was no closer to programming the jukebox. Such is the way of the amateur atheologian and the professional jukebox sommelier.
Squweeek.
There was a cautious, almost shy squeak coming from outside the bar. Squweeek.
I lifted the bamboo window shade to investigate and, to our mutual surprise, revealed a startled schoolboy writing on the dew-covered windows with his fingertip. He blinked once, smiled, then resumed his condensation graffito. Though he wasn’t finished, it was obvious he was writing, “Ausländer raus!”—Foreigners Out! — on the pane. No one ever writes, “Ausländer, Bleibt! Wir brauchen, mögen und schätzen die kulturelle Vielfalt, die ihr uns durch eure Anwesenheit schenkt.” Foreigners Stay! We need, enjoy, and respect the cultural diversity your presence provides us. Ausländer raus is a phrase most commonly associated with racist skinheads after German reunification; it was in fact popular in West Germany long before Ronald Reagan wreathed Nazi graves at Bitburg and demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall. However, it wasn’t the boy’s xenophobia that intrigued me: It was the sonorous screeches his finger made as he wrote on the glass. It reminded me of a sound that I couldn’t quite place, and I went outside to get a better listen.
Just as the kid was putting the finishing touches on his public ignorance, he saw me coming and tried to run away. He was weighed down by his haversack, so I easily ran him down and marched him back to the window. He went obediently to erase his work, but I stopped him.
“Nein. Nein,” I said, waving my finger in his panic-stricken face. “Bitte ende.” Please finish. I held his hand to the glass and he timidly completed his opine, the squeaking letters loud and pitched in a distinct minor blues key I recognized as C minor but whose timbre and color I still couldn’t place. When the little xenophobe made the long downward stroke of the exclamation point, it hit me. The squeaks sounded exactly like Oliver Nelson’s tenor in “Stolen Moments.” I had my first tune for the jukebox.
“Stolen Moments” is Oliver Nelson’s signature tune, a song I find to be the ultimate mood setter; it’s a classic jazz aperitif. Oftentimes, when I play hardcore underground hip-hop or punk gigs, after three or four especially rambunctious tunes the mosh pits begin to resemble the skirmish lines of a Bronze Age battle-field, the warehouse windows start to shake, the record needle starts to skip, the women have that “I’m down with the pogrom” whatever-motherfucker look in their eyes, and I know the party is one more Wu Tang killa bee sting or Bad Brains power chord from turning into Attica, I play fifteen to twenty seconds of “Stolen Moments” to ease the tension, keep the peace. Its incongruous beauty brings about the wry existential lugubriousness of the Christmas Eve carol coming from the enemy encampment on the other side of the fog-covered river in a hackneyed war movie. “Stolen Moments” is that type of intrusion, a lull in the fighting, a time to finish that drink and forgive and forget. The people know I’m providing a respite from the real by granting them a temporary gubernatorial death-row reprieve before I hit them with the next piercing Mobb Deep fuck-you falsetto, Bounty Killer lick shot, or soul-splitting, pre-sellout, angst-ridden, Biohazard scream.
I knew immediately that “Stolen Moments” would be the Slumberland’s signature tune; a smooth midtempo song, it would provide a sticky, almost humid, languorous background to an already sexually charged atmosphere. If a female failed to become aroused by a Tanzanian peacock unfurling his tail feathers, it’d bring out the pavonine sheen of his olive-green polyester slacks, burgundy silk shirt, and tan patent leather shoes. When the middle-aged West Berlin lioness slinks about the place flicking her feather cut and stalking her prey, Dolphy’s flute would gently lift both her sagging breasts and spirits, Paul Chambers’s bass would enhance her rear end with some downtown Detroit rotundity, and Bill Evans’s piano would unaccent her English, put words in her mouth that she didn’t know she knew and make her immune to egotistical black-male bullshit. Maybe one day Doris, while stocking bar, would hear the song and forgive me for stealing her moments. I know the song has yet to be written that would allow me to forgive myself.
The schoolboy dotted the exclamation point, and I thanked him. “Ausländer raus!” never sounded so beautiful. I went back inside to finish my beer and watch the sun erase his slur.