Tyrus was good for one thing, though: He kept up with contemporary African-American male literature. That night he was reading a trade-paperback tome entitled Want Some, Get Some. Bad Enough, Take Some. Like everything else he read, it invariably bore a series of blurbs comparing the author’s biting satire to Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, a comparison that I never understood because Richard Wright isn’t funny.
“Can I borrow that when you’re finished? I’d like to read it.”
“No doubt. This cat’s a hell of a writer. Damn near as funny as Richard Wright.”
I loved reading these books. The black tweed-jacketed eruditeness mixed with street-corner irreverence, the honesty about racial turpitude coupled with the dishonesty about its manifestation. Like the authors, the protagonists are always brilliant, underappreciated men in search of white approval and, therefore, self-affirmation. I know these cats. These are the dudes from the neighborhood who got white-boy SAT scores, attended small Midwestern liberal arts colleges, and married frumpy white girls with hairy legs who douche with rainwater. Yet the female love interest who grounds their protagonists to their fragile blackness while they trek through the absurdist, mine-laden landscape that is America is always a demure, brown-skinned female with a refined intelligence, no personality, and no problems, the kind of woman guys like the ones who inhabit these novels would never be attracted to. I needed a real woman exactly like the fictional ones that always showed up in Part III of those novels. Where was my Melba? My Wanda? My African queen without the African features?
When I looked up from my musing, a full-chested, auburn-haired woman splattered with freckles from her cheekbones to her clavicle was seated at our table, jingling her car keys in my face. Lars slipped his pompous-looking mug over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow. Doris’s bumptious face suddenly appeared over the other shoulder. Together they looked like a smug, three-headed Aryan hydra.
“I know you’re thinking about giving up looking for the Schwa,” Doris said. “Don’t.”
The middle head smiled broadly, licked her lips, and this time jangled her keys so that the BMW logo on her rubber-tipped ignition key was prominently displayed.
Lars raised the other eyebrow. He was drunk, drunker than I’d ever seen him, which was saying a lot.
“Hey, man,” I said to him, “you never told me, why so proud tonight?”
He leaned in, speaking very softly. “Don’t tell anyone, but tonight, tonight I’m proud of the holocaust. Not the killing per se, but the efficiency. The drive. The single-minded devotion to a task. Is that so wrong?”
At that moment I needed a black woman in my life like never before. However, my venture into the mysteries of black carnality would have to wait, because the middle hydra head had taken my hand and placed it on her left breast. I kneaded the doughy appendage. It felt like strudel. And I love strudel.
PART 3
THE SOULS OF BLACK VOLK
CHAPTER 1
MY FAVORITE BERLIN DAYS are those rare late afternoons when I go outside full of an unflappable faith in mankind that only a double espresso and a clean T-shirt can muster, only to find the streets deserted. It’s like entering the set of a postapocalyptic 1959 film. The traffic is nonexistent and all the shops are closed. I’ll wonder if I’ve slept through the air raid sirens. Missed the mandatory evacuation pending the invasion from outer space. On the way to the newspaper kiosk I’ll hear a plaintive yelp, then I’ll sprint around the corner expecting to see a fifty-foot-tall, one-eyed, iridescent green robot zapping a stray dog with a ray gun. Is that a dust cloud churning down Kantstrasse, or some comet-borne, incurable, and highly communicable virus that liquefies innards and turns eyeballs to smoke? In the tiny chain-link confines of Albertus Magnus Park the rusted swings will creak, their meager ridership consisting of only the breeze and me. Eventually a hump-bearing dowager will sit in the next swing over, kick her varicose-veined, knee-high-stocking legs back and forth, and complain about the cold and the verdammte türkisch-polnische Neger-Ausländer Kanaken. Then I’ll know my fears of the apocalypse were unfounded and that it’s only some national holiday no one bothered to inform me about before their visit to Oma und Opa. Maybe it’ll be May Day or Three Kings Day or International Women’s Day or My God What Were We Thinking When We Voted for Hitler? (Twice!) Please Forgive Us—It’s Been Fifty Years Already! Day.
For fun I’ll ask the muttering old woman how she feels about the Neger-Neger (Nigger-Niggers) like myself and she’ll say, “Love them. Slept with a couple after the war. Nice boys. Polite. Big Schwänze, small minds, and even tinier ears. Maybe that’s why they’re so stupid, they don’t hear everything.” Oh, I love those Berlin days, empty streets, yowling dogs, and swinging on the swings with kindly, racist, octogenarian sex addicts. So it stands to reason that I hate undeclared and impromptu holidays like the fateful one when I’d flung myself into the streets with my usual hangover Weltschmerz and dirty-underwear petulance, and found the sidewalks packed stoop to curb with giddy, overly inquisitive Germans drinking Coca-Cola and noshing bananas and all moving in the same direction. As they passed me by, each one took a long moment to stare at me like a child on a field trip to the Völkerschau—people zoo. One boy, ignoring his mother’s don’t-feed-the-animals admonition, offered me a Coke and a smile. Both of which I gladly accepted.
At first I wasn’t quite certain they were German. They spoke German. They looked German, albeit with even tighter pants and uglier shoes, but there was something different about them. I figured maybe the Austrian national soccer team was in town or there was a kartoffelpuffer famine in Luxembourg. What was really eye-catching about the horde was how incredibly un-eye-catching they were. Not to say they were unappealing. On the whole they weren’t any uglier than any other mass assemblage since Bon Jovi’s last concert date. Yet even the most stunning physical specimens among them carried themselves without the slightest hint of pretension. The people seemed to be a lot like their clothes. They were a sturdy wash-and-wear group who favored comfort and practicality over style and flash. For them it wasn’t the clothes that made the man. It was the person who made the clothes.
A towering blonde Calliope exited the perfumery pressing cardboard samples to her Linda Evangelista nose and blissfully inhaled for all she was worth. Somehow, against all odds, that breathtakingly beautiful woman with the statuesque figure and the tweaked oblique eyebrow countenance of a Vogue covergirl wasn’t vaingloriously strutting the catwalks of Paris, twirling a Givenchy bag and scanning the frigid fashionistas for her heroin dealer, but clomping the streets in the most ungainly pair of dog-shit-brown flats, digging wax out of her ears, and wiping the viscous find on the sleeves of her denim jacket. And she gawked at me like I was the monkey masturbating in the trees.
An impossibly ordinary-looking man interrupted the stare down.
“How much does such an automobile cost?” he asked me in English, running a hand admiringly over the fender of a parked Mercedes-Benz sedan.
“I don’t know. Fifty, sixty thousand?”
He looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. Returning to the Benz, he peered into the car with his hands cupped around his eyes, drooling at the leather interior and dashboard gadgetry.
“Scheisse, that’s ten years’ pay plus bribes, plus five . . .” he mumbled something that sounded like “assassination bonuses,” then with a giddy, almost criminal look on his face spat out a dare disguised as an innocent question: “Ever ride in one?”
“Once.”
“Smooth?”
“Like I was flying in a dream, maybe better.”
“I knew it.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Bitte.”
“Where did all these people come from? Was there a soccer game?”
The bland man stopped looking at the various pipe-cleanersized metal rods he’d removed from his jacket pocket.
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
 
; “The Wall fell.”
I boldly stepped into the second-most embarrassing moment of my life and asked, “What wall?”*
Thus confirming every stereotype of American ignorance about world affairs and geography. I, of course, knew of the Berlin Wall and its storied history, but as so often happens to black Americans abroad and domestically, I found myself trapped in a culturally biased break in the race-time continuum. Just as the bright but underprivileged inner-city child will correctly and for all the wrong reasons answer “b” to the following PSAT puzzler:
Mademoiselle Chiffon took a soothing sip of oolong tea and smiled mournfully at the strains of chamber music coming from the conservatory. Her genteel mind flashed to the carefree days she’d spent summering in the Tuscan hills before the war. Oh, Gaston, she thought to herself, am I forever doomed to hear your voice only in a string quartet’s violins? Silently, she cursed Bartók and returned the teapot to the __________while absentmindedly fingering her warm __________ __________.
a. sink, first-edition Molière
b. saucer, tea cozy, wet coochie
c. table, Chinese exercise balls
d. cupboard, baroque lute
I too nearly fell victim to the ignorance resultant from a lack of exposure. Like the tea cozy to the ghetto child, the Berlin Wall was not a part of my lexicon. I’d never seen it. When the indescribable man mentioned “the Wall,” any number of walls flashed through my mind. The Great Wall of China. The Wailing Wall. Pink Floyd’s classic album. The blue wall of silence the LAPD erected at the disciplinary hearing held for officers Bar-bella and Stevenson after they’d beat me and Blaze’s ass in the ninth grade for suspicion of stealing a car while we were at the bus stop waiting patiently for a bus.
The Mercedes’s door popped open with a satisfying click.
“Typical,” the faceless man said before sticking his mundane mug underneath the steering column and fiddling with the wires.
“You Americans own the world but never bother to venture into your own backyard. That’s the attitude that allowed us to steal the basketball final in the ’76 Olympics from under your noses, use Leo Strauss to infiltrate the Republican Party with his madcap philosophy of cruelty parading as humanism, convince you that VHS was superior to Betamax, and lure you into the Vietnam, Korean, and cola wars. New Coke? That was Vita Cola, the swill we East Germans have been drinking for forty years. No doubt your president will take credit for the fall of the Wall as signaling the end of Communism, but it’s all part of the master plan. It’s a misdirection maneuver somewhat analogous to your trick plays in American football, a geopolitical Statue of Liberty or fumblerooski, if you will. Soon, my dense Afro-American friend, you’ll be casting invisible digital votes in the name of democracy. Enslaving the vast majority of your work-force with a negligible minimum wage in the name of liberty. Charging mobile-phone users to make and receive calls in the name of free enterprise. Training the very same religious zealots of the desert who’ll . . .”
The robust revving of the eight-cylinder engine drowned out the rest of his prognostication and my question about what in hell was a mobile phone.
“Come,” he said, patting the passenger seat. “Come see the breach in the Wall through which the four horsemen of the American apocalypse will ride.”
“Are you some kind of spy or just a well-informed car thief?” I asked, closing the door behind me.
“I’m a spy, though by tomorrow I might be a war criminal.”
“Me too.”
Traveling in four-door, heated-leather-seat luxury, we drove slowly through the masses. The man with the run-of-the-mill face told me he was stealing the Benz to replace his Trabant, a piece-of-shit socialist sedan that could be completely assembled and disassembled with a crescent wrench.
“How do you double the value of your Trabant?” he riddled me rhetorically. “Fill it with gas!”
When we reached the Wall, I turned down his offer of a tour of the bowels of the evil empire. I’m one of those folks who poses for photos standing next to the sign that says, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING SUCH AND SUCH STATE, then sleeps through the windy drive through the majestic Grand Tetons.
Otis Redding’s distinct rhythm ’n’ blues profundo bellowed from the car speakers. I couldn’t figure out if the refrain to “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” was prophetic or not because it seemed as if everything was changing and yet remained the same.
Two East German border guards, hats askew and tunics unbut-toned, sat at their post taking alternating slugs and pulls from a Jack Daniel’s bottle and an American cigarette. The first day-trip sojourners into Western imperialism were just starting to return to their homes. Exhausted families of four and only four walked past the guards, the parents dragging their sluggish, candy-smeared, toy-laden, lumpen proletarian progeny behind them. I half expected to hear an announcement saying, “Disneyland, excuse me, West Germany is now closed. Mickey, Pluto, Helmut, NATO, Japan, the United States of America, and the rest of the G7 thank you for your patronage and servitude. Get home safely.”
The invisible man pressed a button and unlocked my door. “The one thing I regret is that we created the Beatles,” he said apologetically, “then killed Otis Redding.”
“We?”
“Yes, ‘we.’ The dirty Reds killed Otis Redding. Mystery solved, okay. Look, the Beatles had been on top four years in a row, doing the job we gave them, which was to lull the West into a sitar secular stupor, and here comes this majestic black man with a haunting voice knocking them off the charts. We couldn’t have a Negro on top of the pop charts in 1968 blurring the racial hegemony. Bad for propaganda. Everybody—Moscow, Washington, Capitol Records—everybody agreed on that. Otis Redding and Martin Luther King both had to go. Made a two-for-one deal with the FBI.”
“C’mon, he died in a plane crash.”
“Ever notice the talentless, the harmless ones, never die young? Vanilla Ice, Lawrence Welk, the Disco Duck. You know how the monks scour the countryside and choose a small child to be the Dalai Lama? In Memphis there’s a bratty little boy named Justin Timberlake who’s been chosen to be the next King of Pop. He’ll live to be a hundred. It’s all part of the plan to keep you people docile.”
Unable to bear any more achingly plausible conspiracy theories, I moved to leave the car before I was exposed to the pointy, bloodletting half of the Stasi’s shield-and-sword motto. I was too late. The man of a thousand and one faces, each one more bland and forgettable than the one before it, had a Walther PPK pointed at his temple. He held back tears. His face convulsed, yet his hand remained steady. He whistled along with the classic outro of “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” backed up by the sounds of the crashing surf and the giddy laughter of East Berliners returning home from their first day of freedom.
When the song faded out he said, “Before I shoot myself, Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, isn’t there something you want to know?”
“ ‘Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann?’ It was you who sent the chicken-fucking tape?”
“It was.”
“How did you know I was looking for Charles Stone? And if you knew I was looking for him, why didn’t you just call and tell me where he was? Why fuck with me like that?”
“I fucked with you like that because I’m an East German secret agent and I’m trained to fuck with people like that. I don’t say, ‘Good morning, how are you feeling?,’ which is the American way of fucking with you, as if you people really care how someone is feeling. I fuck your mind.”
“So why me?”
“Well, Herr Darky, I first heard your music at a very exclusive stag party I attended. We were watching a film you might be familiar with, a pornographic western called High Poon.”
“Some of my best work.”
“Indeed, personages no less than Heiner Müller, Valeri Borzov, Nicolae Ceauscescu, and Deng Xiaoping commented on how wonderful your score was. It was your work during that final scene that brought home the film’s point tha
t the gang bang is the truest form of existentialism.”
“Thank you.”
“After that I became your biggest fan, which meant that I showed my appreciation not only by smuggling in your films and mix tapes, but I bugged your phone and intercepted your communiqués.”
“Communiqués? I didn’t know black people had communiqués.”
“When I found out you were corresponding with DJs around the world as to Charles Stone’s whereabouts, I decided to help you find him.”
“And you sent the video.”
“I couldn’t just contact you. No way to justify that to the higher-ups. See, we knew this day was coming, and a few of us lower-echelon guys at the agency who are huge Charles Stone fans were afraid that his unreleased masters would be burned along with the rest of the nefarious evidence. We couldn’t take the chance that this great man and his music would be lost to time and capitalism. So we arranged with the pornographers to use his music in their films as a way to preserve it.”
“There’s more music?”
“I’ll send you a coprophagia short entitled Eat Shit and Live! His playing on that one is so unworldly that when someone puts a spoonful of shit in their mouth, you’d swear they were eating caviar.”
“So the Schwa’s alive?”
“Very much so. I don’t know where he is, but you’ll find him. That’s why I put the Slumberland’s address on the envelope. He’ll come through there—all you soul brothers do.”
“So why shoot yourself?”
“That was my dick in the chicken.”
“Fire at will, motherfucker.”
The chickenfucker laughed and lowered his gun. I scrambled out.
“One more thing,” he said, starting the engine. “In time you will meet a woman named Klaudia von Robinson.”
“Von Robinson?”
“It’s not part of the master plan, but marry her anyway.”
Blaring its horn, the Benz parted the crowd and drove through the gate. The Spy Who Loved Chickens flashed his ID and the guards scrambled to their wobbly feet and bowed and scraped and saluted and raised the tailgate all at the same time. I wondered what the Schwa had to do with East German scat porn and the collapse of Communism.