True to form, Klaudia grabs my wrist in a gonorrhea-piss-painful hold and climbs atop the table, pulling me up behind her.
I hadn’t noticed how crowded the bar had gotten.
Even Thomas, the place’s absentee owner, whom I hadn’t seen since he handed me the keys to the place, was there. Catching his eye, I tip an invisible glass to my lips, the universal sign for “Can I get a free brew?” He gives me the finger.
Klaudia plants a hard, wet Leonid Brezhnev Bruderkuss on me, flattening my nose into my lips and my lips into my incisors.
“May I have your attentions, please?”
Standing there, unable to avoid the stares, I realize the past thirty minutes of my life have unfolded like an episode of This Is Your Life. I half expect Ms. Belfour, my third-grade teacher, to make an appearance. Young Ferguson was a good student, not a great student.
“Ferguson Sowell, we, the regulars of the Slumberland Bar, in honor of your outstanding service to the arts, culture, and economy of the Slumberland and to the country, are proud to present you with the Order of Karl Marx and this proclamation designating your status as a Verfolgter des Selbstgenuss und Selbstsabotage, or victim of self-indulgence and self-sabotage.” With that she pins the shiny gold medal to my chest and shakes my hand and gives me another Bruderkuss, but I bet Brezhnev never slipped Nixon the tongue.
I finger the likeness of Karl Marx embossed on a red Soviet star and whisper over the applause.
“This thing is solid gold? Where’d you get this?”
She points to the vestibule. There the Stasi chickenfucker stands under the Ausgang sign, sipping a mojito. I’d never noticed the resemblance between him and Klaudia before.
“Is that your. .”
She cuts me off and hands me a coin.
“One last thing. .”
Lars whips a bedsheet off a gleaming, brand-new, state-ofthe-art Wurlitzer 2100 and with a gracious bow bestows upon me the honor of playing the first song. Leaping off the table I pop the coin into the machine, eager to peruse what I’m sure will be a massively wonderful song list. There’s only one selection. 0001 — THE PERFECT BEAT/DJ DARKY.
The song caravans through the room. A young brother whom I’ve never seen before, his gray pullover bearing the imprimatur of Yale University, steps to me with an awkward soulshake.
“Hey, man, I just wanted to tell you your beat’s thrown the entire School of Music into a tizzy.”
“They don’t like it?”
“No, everybody’s blown away. They just can’t agree on what it is.”
We talk briefly about Germany. He’s getting his doctorate in African-American studies and has come to Berlin to do research for his dissertation. “Did you know that seventy percent of scholarship on African-Americans is in German?” I didn’t know that but I’m not surprised. There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it’s impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We’re two insightful peoples constantly looking for reasons to love ourselves; and let’s not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks.
This novitiate doesn’t want to hear this. He wants what all the Negro newbies want, some advice on how to pick up white girls. If he’d only offer to buy me a beer I’d drop pearls of wisdom on him like, “White women with nose rings love black men. A diamond-pierced nostril and you’re in, man.”
I excuse myself and step outside. There’s a line of people waiting to get in so that they can hear the beat. Not a long line, but a line nonetheless.
A stout woman with her auburn hair matted into spiky plaits offers me an unsolicited cigarette, which I accept. If I wanted to I could light it with her stove-flame-blue eyes.
“Have you heard the beat?”
I nod and take a tight-lipped French-resistance drag on the Gauloise.
“Today morning in ethnography class my professor played an African chant, a Negro spiritual, a Robert Johnson ballad, some Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Marvin Gaye, and Kool Moe Dee, and asked the class if we could hear the similarities.”
“Did you?”
“No, except for a few Arschlecker in the front row, no one heard it. But when I hear that beat the other night, I hear all that music and more. I hear my grandmother raking the leaves. I hear a Volkswagen idling. I hear my father cheering Borussia Dortmund. My sister brushing her hair in the morning. I hear Sade. I hear Motown.”
“Naw, no goddamn way. You didn’t hear any Motown. Stax maybe, but not no fucking Motown.”
“Maybe I don’t. But you know what I hear most? I hear America.”
“And the rest of the world trying to sound like America.”
My curiosity got the best of me.
“What of America did you hear in the beat?”
“I’ve been to America. I was fifteen. My family went for a month. I hear the La Brea Tar Pits bubbling and chirps of the New York City subway escalator at Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street. I hear the nothingness blowing through the Mojave Desert Yucca trees. I hear black men on a Cleveland sidewalk, fighting over ten dollars. I hear Mexican deli workers speaking Korean and teasingly calling each other ‘mojados.’ I hear the false optimism in the ring and buzz of an Indian-reservation slot machine. I hear the runoff from Mount Shasta streaming through a bed of pine needles. I hear boiling shabushabu at Fisherman’s Wharf. I hear waves crashing into the Santa Monica pier at midnight under a red crescent moon. I hear my father talking over the tour guide at Universal Studios. ‘Wel-come to [America]! Before we begin, I’d like to remind you of a few rules we’d like you to follow while [in America] today: First, there is no smoking. Please extinguish all smoking materials [and unpatriotic thoughts] immediately. Second, keep children under forty pounds on the inside seats of the tram; some animated attractions [like ethnics and homeless people] can be intense. Keep your arms and legs [and private parts] inside the tram [and your pants] at all times, and do not stand up [or take your wallet out] while the cars [or any black people] are in motion. If you should require assistance at any time during the tour, pull the cord located above the window on either side of the car. [Most likely nothing will happen, but you never know.]’”
“You heard all that?” I ask this kindred spirit of phonographic memory.
She doesn’t answer. Too busy gazing at me with that skin-deep stare I don’t get much anymore. In an old gangster movie it’d be the blank, expressionless look Edward G. Robinson shoots a nosy flatfoot while deciding whether to ice him or not. Here on the streets of Berlin, it’s deciding whether to insult the black guy or not.
I’m expecting an impromptu ethnographic lecture on Orientalism and black infantilism or the standard “Hitler must’ve forgotten about you” rebuke. Instead she stands next to me shoulder to shoulder and measures off the difference in our heights.
“Height… slightly above average.”
Now she takes my chin and yanks it toward the streetlight to get a better view of my complexion.
“Skin color. . luminescent obsidian with a touch of purple.”
Roughly, like a horny sightless woman on a blind date, she begins to knead her heavy friendship-ring-laden fingers into my face. “Leptorrhine nose. . kumquat-headed dolichocephaly. . thin, almost Scandinavian lips, the small conchoidal ears, the pronounced prognathism common to most of the Negroid race. . tufted, no, fleecelike hair. . I bet you’re either from Lagos or Los Angeles. Now, if you show me your penis, I can tell by the size, girth, and curvature what African tribe your male ancestors hail from. It’ll be purely for ethnographic purposes, I assure you.”