CHAPTER 5
GERMAN BARS DON’T have happy hours. They have hubris hours. There is no designated time for hubris hour. It happens unexpectedly and without warning. The bartender doesn’t ring a bell at five P.M., announce that for the next two hours drinks are two for one, and that sage advice and unmitigated superciliousness are on the house. In fact, the only way I can tell when it’s hubris hour is by the look on Lars Papenfuss’s face.
Lars Papenfuss is Doris’s new boyfriend and my best friend. We met about two weeks after the unveiling of the jukebox. He’s a freelance journalist. A master spy who uses his cover as a pop-culture critic to prop up dictatorial movements like “trip-hop,” “jungle,” “Dogme 95,” and “graffiti art” instead of puppet third-world governments. He’s assassinated more visionaries than the CIA, but when we first met he was eager to come in out of the cold.
“Why are looking at me like that?” he asked.
“Because you look funny.”
“How do I look?”
“You look proud.”
“Then indeed I do look funny.”
I’d seen that self-satisfied smirk on a German face only once before. CitySports Bar was open until the wee hours of the morning so the Charlottenburg locals could watch Graciano Rocchigiani fight for the light-heavyweight title in Las Vegas. These storied German boxers never fight outside of Germany and are rarely even German, but “Rocky,” as his countrymen lovingly called him, wasn’t an adopted Pole or gargantuan Ukrainian, and that night the native Berliner beat a potbellied black man senseless in the Las Vegas heat. In the sixth round when the referee’s count reached ten and the American slumped into the arms of his cornermen, the fight fan next to me, Heiko Zollner from Wilmersdorf, swelled with a smug patriotism that his German guilt wouldn’t allow him to express. He wanted to say, “I’m proud to be German” but he couldn’t, it’s illegal. Even the slightly less salacious “I’m happy to be German” would’ve compelled him to turn himself in to the authorities, whereupon he would’ve been sentenced to six months probation and a hefty fine and required to recite the first fifteen lines of the kaddish in Hebrew or French kiss a leper.
After the fight Heiko and I drunkenly reenacted the bout over a frothy pitcher of beer. With the orange peels we’d stuffed into our mouths serving as mouthpieces, our hands cut through the stream rising from a stainless steel bin of freshly hard-boiled eggs. When we finally tired, Heiko, no longer able to contain his German pride over Rocky’s victory, raised a goldenrod mug of Bitburger beer brewed and poured to print-ad perfection. He pounded on the table. “Wie glücklich bin ich doch über dieses wunderschöne Bier heute morgen zum Frühstück,” he exclaimed. How fortunate I am to be able to partake in this beautiful glass of beer for my morning repast. That was all the displaced praise his champion and country would get.
Lars looked just like Heiko did that night. His face lit up with that same hubris-hour smirk. He ordered a round of drinks and stuck out a hairy hand. He was there to interview me. I’d seen him around. Sitting at a corner table by himself, drinking his wine and observing. Every now and then he’d walk over to the jukebox, put his hands on the glass, and peer into the machine like a mechanic listening to an engine.
He’d done a lot of record promotion disguised as objective music journalism for a record company headquartered in Berlin. Doris was tending bar at a meet-and-greet for an American boy band when he asked her to make him something different and if she’d heard any good music lately. She mixed him an Adios Motherfucker,* then offhandedly mentioned the Slumberland jukebox. Told him the bar’s patrons were so impressed by the jukebox selection that two or three times a night the place would go quiet for minutes at a time, that it wasn’t a rare occurrence for newcomers to get shushed for talking over Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” or for the crowd to applaud some particularly adroit Jackie McLean solo.
Intrigued, Lars had shown up once or twice the week prior to research his story by standing in the machine’s opalescent glow and pressing his nose against the glass.
I consented to the interview so long as he promised that he wouldn’t print my name or the name of the bar in the article, and, most important, that he wouldn’t tell any of his fellow hacks about the place. Nothing ruins a good thing like its discovery by aging rock ’n’ roll critics looking for a scene.
While Lars fumbled with his old-fashioned cassette recorder, I took out my minirecorder and placed it on the bar, answering the why-the-fuck-don’t-you-trust-me look on his face by explaining that I always tape random sounds and wanted to record the sound of the record button being pressed, telling him how I wasted the summer between fifth and sixth grades trying to press the record button fast enough to record the sound of its being pressed.
Lars laughed and said, “There’s some Einsteinian relativity to that somehow.”
I liked him immediately. I liked the word “Einsteinian.” I liked him enough to be jealous of how he managed to pull off wearing a turtleneck sweater. Whenever I wore one I moved about stiffly, craning my neck as if I’d been in a car accident and the turtleneck was less a masculine-magazine fashion statement than a way of hiding my neck brace. Doris sat down to join us.
I pressed record.
Lars pressed record.
I turned off my tape recorder and said, “Before we begin, I’d like to tell you that not everything I say to you will be the truth.”
He asked whether the jukebox had changed the bar’s notorious reputation as a meat market. I shrugged modestly, and Doris elbowed me in the side, forcing me to tell him the Carly Simon story.
The day after the new jukebox had been plugged in I stumbled upon a woman giving a guy head in the bathroom. Such Weimaresque displays of public affection, although common at raucous Berlin bars like the Kumpelnest and Café M, were unheard of at the race-mixing joints. For us Slumberlanders the sexual electricity was all about the pretense of taboo and stigma. If blacks and whites kissed in public it would take the fun out of the game. Sour the forbidden fruit gemütlichkeit, so to speak. Yet there they were, he leaning back against the sink, she squatting in front of him, her stringy blonde head plunging in and out of his nappy, ashen crotch, her hands grabbing onto the faucets for support, his hands wrapped around her neck for psychological and physical leverage. They were both crying and singing in tandem to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” the lachrymal ballad that dripped from the bathroom speaker. It was the most romantic and disgusting scene I’d ever witnessed. The scene played out like a page stricken from a long-lost Othello folio.
Act V, Scene I
OTHELLO
Lo, sweet Desdemona, many a knave and nobleman hath warned me, “Thou canst not maketh a ho into a housewife.” And yet, sainted wife, my dagger knows no other scabbard.
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If they saw me, they continued to sing, and I continued to look and listen. He was in astonishingly good voice, a princely Ugandan alto with a hint of Jagger’s pseudo-cockney accent. She, on the other hand, was understandably garbled. I can still hear their orgiastic duet.
“Yeah,” I answered blithely, “the Slumberland’s the same, but different.”
We talked freely and openly for hours, the interview finally ending with Lars inquiring in that strange fractured syntax that most people adopt whenever discussing anything niggeresque, “How come they ain’t no hip-hop on the jukebox?”