“You’re forgetting the chicken-fucking song,” I said, somewhat out of breath from the return sprint. “The guy takes an improbable bestial coupling, like man and fowl, and makes it seem like you’re watching the secret bedroom tapes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Whatever his reasons, it’s impossible for his music to trivialize anything. His music is an honorific to life — the good, bad, and the ambiguous.”
“There’s no denying the chicken-fucking song,” Doris said, her voice inflected with a sexual nostalgia I thought Klaudia might take offense to. She didn’t. Instead she erased any apprehensions we had with an ironic memory of totalitarian life.
She held out the radio.
“See this power button? In East Germany we didn’t have power buttons. The word ‘power’ was too aggressive.”
“That’s hilarious.”
“We had the ‘Netz’ button.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s like ‘network.’ So when you turned on the television or whatever, you were plugged into the people. Everybody was sharing the power.”
“That’s deep.”
Klaudia handed me the radio.
“Here.”
There was a little bit of resignation in her voice that I took for the residue of thought control.
“What now?”
“There’s no place to put it.”
She was right. We were standing on the only thirty-meter stretch of Berlin sidewalk without trees. The closest thing we had to a tree was a street-lamp stanchion. A truck zipped passed us, illuminating our dumbfounded faces in bright xenon light.
The plan was simple. For the most part the old Wall ran along existing streets. Berlin is easily one of the most tree-lined cities in the world, so we’d stick satellite radios in the trees, where they’d dangle from the branches like transistorized fruit. In the treeless places where the Wall’s footprint had been erased by progress in the form of condominiums or vacant lots that would soon be turned into condos, there was no shortage of local artists who were willing to fill in the blanks. For instance, Steffi Rödl strung a clothesline made of barbed wire across the trash-strewn vacant lot that sat behind a row of apartment houses on Stallschreiberstrasse. Using wooden clothespins, she hung a twelve-foot-high curtain of shiny charcoal-gray silk that billowed majestically in the wind, a brilliantine representation of the Berlin Wall aired out like so much dirty laundry. In Potsdamer Platz, where the Wall had been eradicated by commercialism and skyscrapers, in lieu of radios — which would never have been heard over the din of downtown traffic — Michael Harnisch projected a musical stave across the white limestone base of the Sony Center. A computer instantly annotated the music and projected the notes onto the wall, the concert’s score running through downtown Berlin like a ticker tape opera. Using the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop, Uwe Okulaja lined up a bank of high-powered green and red lights that, like a giant equalizer, shot a pulsing LED readout 250 meters into the night sky. There were other installations: a dancing fountain, an oscilloscope, and pushcarts where you could rent a set of those chintzy museum headphones and take a sonic tour of the new Berlin Wall; of course, none of these things would mean much if we couldn’t find somewhere to place the second speaker. It’d be like the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific coming up a few tracks short at the joining of the first transcontinental railroad. Some top-hatted CEO pocketing the golden spike with a “Fuck it, that’s close enough” shrug.
Overhead the telephone lines buzzed. A car cruised past at that odd not-too-fast, not-too-slow L.A. street-corner drive-by speed that made me instinctively duck behind the streetlight for cover. There, crouched behind the stanchion, I remembered the telephone lines buzzing on a warm night back in Westwood, California. We were playing hooky from Emerson Junior High. Lounging in Julie Koenig’s spacious backyard celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday before it was a holiday. Bong hits. Two cases of Hamm’s beer. Devin Morris listening to the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” and declaring that, just like Glenn Frey, he too had seven women on his mind. A spirited Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small versus Richard Pryor’s That Nigger’s Crazy debate. Sneaking off into the guesthouse to lose my virginity to Lori Weinstein (and Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do for Love”). Blaze and the rest of my boys finding out about it and jumping me into manhood, pinning me to the ground, snatching off my bleach-white Converse All-Stars and tossing them overhead onto the telephone wires that crisscrossed Com-stock Avenue. Those shoes were loyal to me. Twelve points in the Robinson Park rec league. Hopped the fence when Loretta White’s Doberman pinscher attacked me for no good reason. Sneaked me down glass-strewn Sherbourne alleyway past the Crip-ass Boyd family. So loyal were those shoes, I expected them to untangle themselves from the wire and slither down the pole and back onto my feet. But night fell with my size tens still hanging from those buzzing telephone lines like some surreal Duchamp castoff. Walking home barefoot, chewing on a plastic straw, a black Tom Sawyer whistling Rush’s classic “Tom Sawyer.” The world is, the world is. .
The patrol cop calling me over to his black-and-white squad car with a crooked finger and a sneer.
Love and life are deep. .
“What are you doing over here, boy?”
“I was visiting my girlfriend; she lives. .”
“I don’t give a fuck where she lives, I don’t ever want to see you in this neighborhood again. Now get the fuck out of here — and where in the hell are your shoes?”
His eyes are open wide.
Klaudia caught me daydreaming. “What are you thinking about?”
“I was just listening to the buzz of the telephone wires and thinking about ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” I said, kicking off my shoes.
“The book?”
“The song.”
They watched as I knotted the shoelaces around the radio handle, and then bola’d the three-piece menagerie over the telephone wire, gaucho-style.
The New Berlin Wall of Sound was nearly complete. All that remained was for the golden spike to be driven: the first note struck by the Schwa during the next day’s concert. Until then the Berlin Wall of Sound would remain silent.
We pressed on home. Mühlenstrasse felt warm beneath my tired feet. It felt just like Comstock Avenue or Robertson Boulevard. It felt like home.
CHAPTER 4
LARS COOLED IN front of the Slumberland, checking his watch and taking notes. Above him, strung between two trees, the concert banner sagged in the middle like a rainbow tweaked on angel dust. THE BLACK PASSé TOUR — BUILDING WALLS, TEARING DOWN BRIDGES. He looked proud. If everything went according to plan, in two hours he’d have saved blackness.
Doris sidled up to us to say hello. She was proud too. Proud of her man who, since his newfound purpose in life, had seemingly stopped drinking—seemingly being the key word. She leaned in for a peck on the lips, more a Breathalyzer test than a show of affection.
It was a good try. Unfortunately for her, Lars had a tampon stuffed up his ass. An ultra-absorbent, soft-scented tampon, designed by a woman gynecologist to provide eight hours of day or night protection and that little something extra. His tampon indeed had that little something extra the packaging promised, because it’d been soaking in absinthe for the past two days.