Apparently my perfect beat has had a far less reverberatory effect. Not that I expected much, though an instant Grammy airmailed to my bedside would’ve been a good start. Is a call from the U.N. secretary-general asking if it’d be okay to commission my track as the anthem for planet Earth too much to ask? A show of appreciation from the sick and crippled children who were healed by the curative powers of my creative cut mastery would’ve been nice. Shit, it was only the day before yesterday that I transformed modern music from this very bar, and no one’s even bought me a drink. I bought my first drink tonight. I’m not buying another.
Doris and Tyrus slip into my side of the booth, squeezing me against the wall, crashing my pity party without so much as putting a three-mark beer on the table. Tyrus can’t contain his excitement. He’s flapping a Guggenheim Fellowship check in my face and insisting that I’m the only one who can do justice to his new musical.
“What’s it called?”
“Real Recognizes Real. It’s a one-man performance piece about an African-American expat from Los Angeles who returns from Germany with the perfect specimen of white womanhood in tow, a blonde Saxon named the Venus Hot-to-Trot. He and Venus tour the chicken ‘n’ waffle circuit charging sexually frustrated black men to touch her corporeal peculiarity, a completely flat ass. A condition the scientists refer to as noshapeatallpygia.”
“I’ll think about it,” I lie. I’d never score anything titled with black street vernacular. But it’s the only compliment I’ve gotten, so I’ll placate for now. Surely if I string him along long enough there’s a beer or two to be had.
“Hey, we went by the wall today. Sat there for two hours and never heard your beat. What’s up with that?”
“I erased it from the loop. I didn’t want my beat to be just another brick in his wall.”
“So where is it?”
“It’s on top of my refrigerator.”
Doris says nothing. She knows the space atop my icebox is where I keep my most precious valuables. I’d put my dreams up there if I could. Silently she hands me two pieces of paper. One a telegram from DJ Blaze that just says, “NIGGER!”* The other a long list of musicians who’d called the bar asking to get in touch with me. The list smells strangely familiar. I hold it to my nose.
“Your…”
She winks.
Now Lars hurtles himself into the booth. “Black is back, baby!”
Groan.
“Don’t you want to be relevant?”
“No way. Who needs the fucking pressure?”
“That’s the beautiful thing about you people. You stay bitter. I bet when Martin Luther King Junior got on his first integrated bus, he said, ‘C’mon, can’t you make this motherfucker go any faster?’ ”
Thanks to my misguided efforts, blackness is back. The Schwa’s musical munificence hadn’t rendered blackness irrelevant, only darkened it in even further. They say fifty is the new thirty. Iraq is the new Vietnam. Gin is the new vodka. Now that black is the new black, Lars had plans. Big plans.
He’d already conspired with a major computer manufacturer to take the Schwa on a concert tour of cities with a history of being bisected by walls. Tentative dates had already been scheduled in Jerusalem, Baghdad, Belfast, and the Calexico-Mexicali border. The Schwa would play a series of cutting contests against the company’s latest showpiece, Deep Blues. A jazz-playing computer that rumor has it has already beaten Wynton Marsalis three jams to none.
In comparison, my itinerary is rather limited. Apparently I’m booked to appear on Wetten, dass. .?, a German game show whose title best translates as Attention-Starved People with No Discernible Talents Doing Seemingly Amazing Things. I love that show and it’s easy to imagine the prime time course of events.
I’ll be pitted against a man who claims he can distinguish between brands of mineral water from how the carbonation bubbles settle on a spoon placed inside the glass. He can’t. Next week I’ll best a crane operator who brags that while standing in a dark room he can identify any car made after 1978 simply by the brightness and layout of its headlights and the blinking pattern of its left turn signal. He can, but no one will care. Then, in a long-awaited semifinal showdown, I’ll embarrass a blind girl from Bremerhaven who insists she has the ability to identify any bird indigenous to continental Europe by touching a single tail feather. The sympathy vote will be hers until her delicate finger-tips betray her on the plumage of the Bulgarian blue-breasted swamphen.
Undefeated and unbowed, I’ll face Karl-Heinz Schmidt, a telemarketer from Cologne who can identify the color of a colored pencil by taste. Going first, I’ll dutifully impress the judges and studio audience to no end with my phonographic recall. “That’s a McDonald’s straw being inserted into a vanilla shake. . a video gamer vanquishing a turtle, capturing a star, and eating a large polka-dotted mushroom in world one, level three of Super Mario Brothers…one more time, please. . Norma Desmond sashaying down the stairs on the way to her close-up. . that’s the sound of the other shoe finally dropping, and yes, that’s my final answer.”
Blindfolded, Karl-Heinz will then take center stage to a live orchestral accompaniment of Boléro. The host will hold up a sharpened brown pencil for all to see, and as Boléro’s insidious melody shifts from the flutes to the piccolos, he’ll doodle on our savant’s lumpy, outstretched tongue. There’ll be lots of wet lip smacking as if our star were tasting a delicate fine wine, then a dramatic pause and a ventured guess: “Burnt Sienna?”
“Unglaublich!”
Germany will be flabbergasted. Ravel’s oboes shall sing out in celebration. He’ll cleanse his palate, and as the melody increases in intensity the host will switch pencils and scribble.
French horns.
“Dark Gray.”
Correct.
Bass clarinet.
“Moss Green.”
Correct.
Bassoon. “Turquoise Blue.”
Correct.
Violas.
“Light Malachite Green.”
Correct.
It’ll be an amazing display, no doubt, yet it’ll still be anybody’s game until the host simply places a pencil under Karl-Heinz’s nose. He’ll take two deep hound-dog sniffs and in perfect synchronization with Boléro’s crescendo, correctly proclaim the color to be Salmon Pink.
* * *
Still no one has offered to buy me a beer. I’d buy one myself, but it’d be like giving myself a surprise birthday party by turning out the bathroom lights, flicking them back on, and yelling, “Surprise!” in the mirror.
Look at Klaudia, her judo bag slung over her shoulder, kicking up sand and smiling that sheepish we-have-to-talk smile. I’m already imagining our post-breakup encounters. When most couples stop fucking they meet for tea and pretend to be happy with one another’s successes or content with the lack thereof. Our run-ins will be more spontaneous. They’ll be attempted robberies and sexual assaults that’ll take place in darkened stairwells and twenty-four-hour Laundromats. Frame-by-frame surprise attacks straight out of the self-defense textbooks. I’ll have to brace myself for a lifetime of pellet guns pressed to the small of my back and kitchen knives to the gullet.