The alcohol suppository is a technique passed down to journalists and music-industry insiders the world over by Finnish rockabilly bands. “Besotted” is an ethnic group in Finland, and those Stratocaster hellions are the country’s most notorious drinkers. It’s their alcoholic ingenuity and the recent advances in the menstrual sciences that have allowed many music-industry peons to show up for work stone-bachelor-party drunk with no one the wiser, because their breath is odorless.
I’ve tried consuming alcohol through the rectum. It’s the dipsomaniac’s equivalent of a hype’s mainlining junk. The porousness of the rectal walls and their proximity to the digestive system make the onset of insobriety instantaneous and deeply spiritual. The flash flood of drunkenness must be what it’s like to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
“You drunk?”
“Yeah, man, I’m high sky.” Lars answered. “You want one? I have vodka, gin, and a really nice single malt back in the car.”
The offer was tempting, but I remembered that I had to play tonight — and besides, removing a tampon from a dehydrated anus involved rubber gloves, scented lubricants, tweezers, and a high pain threshold.
“That’s okay. Unlike you, I don’t drink to get drunk; I drink for the taste.”
Most of the concert reviews in the next day’s paper would describe the crowd milling about the Slumberland as “diverse” without saying what made them so. In polite democratic society it’s important to note stratification but impolite to label the layers. For the journalists in attendance, diverse meant that they had gone to a concert in a small venue on a narrow West Berlin side street and didn’t know everybody there. The astute reader looked at the concert photo of the nappy-headed Schwa and surmised that diverse implied the concertgoers were of various ages and class backgrounds, with a significant percentage of them being of black extraction. But not even an expert cryptologist would be able to infer from the word that the streets surrounding the Slumberland were jammed with a cross section of Berliners who’d come together to celebrate the city’s resegregation. A black African peddler vainly tried to sell roses and sandwiches to a platoon of Iron Cross skinheads who were without money, appetites, or lovers. Three Japanese hep cats, bearing gifts and unsigned memorabilia, traipsed over the grounds in open-toed sandals, dutifully upholding the legacy of the Eastern magi being on hand for the birth (in this case resurrection) of every musical messiah from Scott Joplin to DJ Scott La Rock. Yippies, yuppies, hip-hoppers, and pill poppers gathered on the stairs of Saint Matthias church and shared joints and stories. In the center of the plaza, next to the marble likeness of the patron saint of alcoholism, an unkempt beat junkie of about sixteen pressed a set of headphones tightly against his skull. Red eyed and wired, I knew the look — he was a DJ. A fledging turntablist subsumed by melody. Strung out on overdub. Trying with all his might to prevent even a single hertz of sound from escaping his purview.
Although he didn’t have a deadline to meet, Lars took notes out of habit. His notations were bare-boned, mostly one- or two-word phrases in German and misspelled English. A young Arab woman wearing a head scarf and a black Stooges T-shirt moonwalked past us. She glided over to her friends, locked eyes with a white dude in a Yankees cap, and started pop locking. After a medley of double-jointed moves, she laid hands on the boy’s head and, like a healing evangelist, passed the energy to him. The boy broke out into a spasmodic shock of electric boogie. Pressing down hard with his pen, Lars wrote “Dali-esk.”
“Is this a crowd, a mob, or a throng?” he asked.
I’m used to his questions about the subtleties of the English language substituting for real conversation. “Which is more, some or a few? When someone tells you they are happy to find you safe and sound, what does sound mean? To express the indirect object of an action do you use an objective pronoun directly after the verb, or a prepositional phrase?”
“I’d say it’s a throng.”
“Why not a mob?”
“In English you label groups of people by their moral intentions and collective needs. A mob tries to convince itself it’s right and needs to prove it. A crowd knows it’s right because if it weren’t right, they would all need to be someplace else. A throng doesn’t give a fuck about moral imperatives, it just wants and needs something to happen.”
Most of those folks were there thanks to Lars’s efforts. I imagine the scene wasn’t much different along the old Wall’s borders. In light of all the hoopla around the Berlin Wall of Sound, his interview with the Schwa had been reprinted in Der Spiegel, and suddenly the rediscovery of Charles Stone was akin to the unearthing of the Delta blues musicians in the mid-sixties or Dr. Leakey finding a heretofore theorized hominid species. To many, the Schwa, like Muddy Waters, Mance Lipscomb, and Ötzi the five-thousand-year-old iceman found in an Alpine glacier, was a well-preserved mummy, a music primitive seemingly unspoiled by commercialism and modernity. Lars was the musical paleontologist and I his pickax-wielding native assistant. I didn’t mind that he garnered the fame and the credit; all I wanted from the Schwa was a song. He wanted answers. He wanted to test his DNA and carbon-date his instrument so he could theorize about when and how exactly blackness became passé.
Lars removed a pack of Drum tobacco from his pocket. The crinkling pouch reminded me of the radio static in the days when radio KROQ was good. Me and DJ Blaze parked on the Malibu bluffs at dusk ruining our minds with Thai stick and Jane’s Addiction.
Exhaling a measured plume of cigarette smoke, Lars jotted down the word Throng in his notebook. The gathering was indeed a throng, and depending on how the night went, the shit could’ve ended in melee or orgy. In either case I figured I’d need some energy, so I decided to buy a sandwich from the peddler. He pushed me to buy a rose in addition to the sandwich, and he almost had me, but I couldn’t figure out, Who do you give a rose to at an orgy? Your first fuck or your last?
As we shouldered our way inside, Lars pointed out the cables worming through window transoms and under doorjambs. “That one’s for the international radio simulcast. .DAT recording. . check this out. .” He flicked some lever and a matchbox-sized switch box attached to an electrical cord quietly descended from the ceiling.
“When Stone presses that red button, the Berlin Wall of Sound will come to life.”
I wasn’t worried about the audiovisual technology. I’d long gotten used to the fact that in this country everything works. The vending machines never shortchange you, the pay phones unfailingly deliver that tinnitus-inducing European dial tone, and the suction of the vacuum cleaners is so powerful that vacuuming the living room throw rug gives one the same don’t-fuck-with-me rush as filling a human silhouette with bullet holes at the gun range. Charles Stone, on the other hand, was about as reliable as an American bank pen.
I scanned the crowd. Though the Schwa wasn’t among them, most of the faces were all too familiar, and I became overwhelmed with heart-searing guilt. Local musicians, tavern owners, regulars, bartenders, and groupies, I owed nearly every single person in the room something, various combinations of money, return phone calls, apologies, and my life. In today’s Germany the interpersonal bridges don’t burn as easily as those that spanned the Rhine in 1944; the more selfish my actions, the more irascible my behavior, the more those people were drawn to me.
Many of my past one-night stands were there, and Ute, Astrid, and Silke, women whom I’d forgotten even existed, all stared at me as if I’d just gotten out of prison. Bernadette, Karin, Petra, Ulrike — those women were heiresses, herbalists, radio engineers, bookbinders, milliners, but I’d treated them like gun molls. Day after day I swore at them and swore myself off them. Only to return to their arms, a pussy recidivist doomed to repeat my crimes.