“If you kissed her smelly white feet I’m leaving,” Klaudia would declaim, examining my lips and tongue for who knows what. Nail-polish chips and toe-jam residue, I guess.
Despite delusions of a potential ménage a noir, the chicken-fucking song didn’t work on Klaudia and Fatima. The first time I played the tape, the only articles of clothing that came off were their shoes.
“Hey, that’s the man who suggested I go to the Torpedo Käfer that night we met,” Klaudia said, flinging her espadrilles at the man on the TV screen.
“Stasi,” growled Fatima, pointing at him.
“So offensichtlich!” Klaudia said, which is German for “Duh!”
While not devotees to the Schwa in the historical sense that Lars was, the von Robinson sisters, at first familiar with his music, soon became deeply fervent fans.
His music seemed to call out to them, especially Fatima, who more than once showed up at my place with a medical bracelet tied around a bloodstained wrist bandage. Sometimes in the middle of a tune Little Sis would hyperventilate. Gasping for air, her eyes would roll into the back of her pretty head and her chest would heave in time with the song. Once she OD’d on his music, passing out and falling to the floor unconscious with the cultic smile of a Beatlemania-stricken coed plastered on her face. It took a loud, cold, bracing splash of Joy Division to bring her back, and the first thing she said upon regaining consciousness was, “When I die I want to be listening to Charles Stone.” I didn’t see the von Robinsons for a while after that. Then one Sunday night Klaudia showed up at my door alone.
Most women think they’re strong. They like to wrestle men down to the floor and put them in what they think is some inescapable choke hold. Instead of tossing these delusional wannabe grapplers effortlessly out the window, we males humor them. Feign submission. Praise their yoga-toned physiques. “Whoa, look at those muscles! No, really, I couldn’t breathe.”
When I opened the door that fateful Sunday night Klaudia stormed inside, a kiai blur of martial arts expertise unseen since the likes of Lady Kung Fu. Little Miss Fists of Fury kicked off her shoes and judo flipped me over her shoulder, slamming me hard onto the living room floor. Before I could ask what I had done wrong, I was knee dropped in the groin, elbow struck in the larynx, and nearly strangled to death with my own shirt collar, all in rapid succession.
With a belch redolent of fine tequila, she clambered off my contorted heap of flesh and bone and announced she’d broken up with her boyfriend and that Fatima was in the hospital. Without asking permission, she stuck the chicken-fucking song into the VCR and poured herself a drink that she obviously didn’t need.
I parted the curtain of stringy clumps of dirty blonde hair that covered her flushed red face.
“Was ist los?”
She told me Fatima was in the hospital. She’d swallowed a bunch of pills and chased them down with a bottle of tequila.
I pressed the play button and the chicken-fucking song lifted her out of my arms. She began to dance. Arms cocked at oblique angles, she moved as if the song had been written for her. Her lithe body the spindle, the record playing around her.
Slowly, almost contritely, she corkscrewed herself into and out of the ground. There wasn’t much room, but she managed to express herself. The black soles of her bare feet slapped and pawed softly on the hardwood floor. As she danced, she told me the story of the von Robinson sisters.
Growing up black in all-white East Germany—a totalitarian state where there was free education, no unemployment, and no discrimination—the concept of race didn’t officially exist. Being proletarian and, as Klaudia put it, “inofficially black” was hard. At least she had her judo and her studies. She was good on both the mat and in the classroom. She had heroes like East German judo champion Astrid Timmermann and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. She’d contemplated a run at the Olympic games until her late mother made a big show of taking away her vitamin supplements and mentioning that Astrid Timmermann had a clitoris the size of an earthworm. She considered majoring in physics and applying for the Soviet space program until her quantum mechanics teacher told her that the Russians had already sent a monkey into space.
Fatima didn’t have hobbies or interests. All she had were pronounced bouts of depression and her sister’s broad shoulders to lean on.
It was hard being black in red East Germany. But the von Robinson sisters were determined to find out if they were indeed black. And if so, how black were they, and did it matter? They set upon developing a self-taught black curriculum. Theirs was an extremely independent course of study that consisted of lots of Pushkin and the Voice of America radio show.
“I’ve come to understand love wasn’t made for me . . .” was a favorite quote from the black Russian poet, one that carried them through many a lonely and dateless weekend night. And when their tired eyes could no longer focus on the books, Willis Conover’s Voice of America radio program tucked them into bed. Conover’s voice was indeed America. “This is the music of freedom,” he’d say, enouncing each letter with propaganda perfection. At first, all the then non-English-speaking sisters understood was “Duke Ellington.” They could, however, hear the respect Conover had for the music and the musicians. The way he said, “This week the immortal Zoot Sims is in Seoul, South Korea, at the Matchstick Club. Oscar Peterson, Caracas, at the Mephisto.” They loved the music, but his interviews with the musicians were best. Unhurried. Measured. They could hear colors in the language, the relaxed whiteness in Conover’s shirt, his teeth and skin, the black cautiousness in his subjects’ voices and minds. Other than the Muhammad Ali rants on the news, and Pushkin’s poetic voice in the poems of which they’d grown so fond, these interviews were the only times they’d ever heard a black man speak. They reminded them of the father neither of them had ever seen. They sounded so close. Maybe Conover was a Soviet-bloc jazz fiend disguising himself as an American disc jockey, thinking it would never occur to the authorities to look for him in a rooftop studio in Prague or Belgrade. One night, Conover introduced a record with such anticipation in his voice that Klaudia looked up from Eugene Onegin. “Here’s a song you have not heard before,” Conover said, his voice cracking. His voice never cracked. “Charles Stone with ‘Darn That Dharma.’ ” When the song came on Fatima literally shook with happiness. She had found her blackness. After that it no longer mattered that her mother never told them who or what their father was beyond being “asshole-colored.” White, black, Arab, Mexican, asshole, it didn’t matter. They’d been reborn black. Pushkin black. Black belt black. First-woman-in-space black. German black. That was their story.
It was my mother’s feet that drove me to white women. Every other Sunday she’d drop those crusty appendages in my lap. Her toes hammered and gnarled at the knuckles with corns harder and darker than tree knots. Her nails were ridged like party-dip potato chips, and the ones that weren’t black were spectrograph bands of fungus brown. On Sundays I was forbidden to leave the house until I’d clipped her nails, filed down every bunion, barnacle, and callus, scraped the lint and gummy grit from her cuticles and crevices, chiseled the dead skin from her cracked and dried-out heels. Afterward my hands would smell like wet leather and my shirt would be caked with filings, rolls of toe jam, nickel-sized flakes of dead skin, and baby powder.
Klaudia’s dancing feet could pass for white. Her toes plump and unhammered and corn-free, they smelled like fresh-cut grass. When she was in the mood she’d hoist her pants above the knee, place a cool sole on my face, and with my cheekbone framed in the arch, massage my temples with her big toe.
“I can tell you’re in tension,” she’d say.
I’d deny being “in tension” and pop that toe into my mouth. Marshmallow soft and tasty as children’s vitamins, I’d suck on it, tracing every loop and whorl. Dip the tip of my tongue in ink and I could sketch her feet from memory.
As a result of her judo training, Klaudia experienced the world with her feet. When they weren’t touch
ing the ground she was an uprooted tree, listless and silent as the romantic poet’s fallen bough.
Ifa woman has an orgasm and there isn’t
anyone to hear it, does it make a sound?
Klaudia believes that all vibrant energy, from the human heartbeat to music, emanates from the earth’s core. Though she’s never been in an earthquake, she theorizes my deep sense of foreboding comes from always waiting for the big one to hit. There’s some sense to that. Anyone who’s grown up in the ring of fire never crosses a high suspension bridge or reaches the apex on the Ferris wheel without thinking, “What if an earthquake hits right now?” Supposedly I’ve got it all wrong. An earthquake isn’t a catastrophe, but is simply stress leaving the planet. A 5.5 on the Richter scale that spills the dishes from the cupboards and topples thatch huts in Micronesia is just the earth cracking its knuckles after a long day. The 7.7 tremor that derails Japanese bullet trains and levels the business district of a major city? That’s the earth arching its back and popping its vertebrae.
Making love to Klaudia was like having sex with a snooker player: No matter how contorted the position, she had to have at least one foot on the ground. Her orgasms were loud, rumbling moans, quivering pelvic seismic temblors often in the same growling key as Coleman Hawkins’s tenor. Sometimes I’d ask where a certain passionate grunt came from and she’d say, “That was an earthquake epicentered in the seas off the coast of Sumatra,” then she’d close her eyes and announce, “Now I take a short sleep.”
I enjoyed watching her sleep, her face resting on her powerful arms, her feet smooth, almost white, and as sculpted as a Parthenon Athena’s hanging off the futon and resting gently on the floor. But I liked listening to her sleep even more. She snored loud and sharp as if some miniature salsero were stuck inside her throat, scraping her larynx like a guiro. If I pressed my ear to her heaving chest I could hear the beat of her arrhythmic heart. A rapid baboompbaboomp baboompba that sounded exactly like the conga riff that starts “Manteca.” While the snoring and the heartbeat were most-satisfying aural pleasures, listening to her nighttime farts was damn near orchestral. Hers were a cool-jazz modal flatulence that featured all the measured vibrato and impeccable intonation of a Ray Draper tuba solo. Sometimes after a hearty meal of cabbage stew and an especially passionate session of lovemaking, Klaudia’s irritable bowels would rumble and the nocturnal flatus welled up inside her intestines would be jettisoned with a force loud enough to wake her up. And when that happened, she’d sit up, inhale deeply like a proud farmer at daybreak, and exclaim, “Ah, a fresh wind is blowing.”
CHAPTER 4
ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about Europe is that you can cruise the streets pedaling a turquoise women’s three-speed with a purple plastic basket attached to the handlebars and not feel effeminate. Secure in my sexuality and prospects of finding Charles Stone, I biked along the route of the old Wall.
About a month before my little bike trek, I was at the Slum-berland doing routine maintenance on the jukebox. To fill the void I pumped some of my own music through the in-house speakers. As I replaced the amplifier capacitors and installed a new stylus, a regular or two would stop by to compliment my taste. They liked the music, but their inability to categorize it made them nervous. They needed music that told them in no uncertain terms how to feel, how to behave. My music never ordered the listener to “Dance! Think! Wash the Dishes!” It simply said, “Be! or Don’t Be, I Couldn’t Care Less!,” and the Slumberland couldn’t handle that kind of freedom.
“Hey, Dark.”
“Yeah.”
“Doris says this is your music.”
“It is.”
“It’s really fucking good, man. I mean that.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s too good, really. Like a plum so sweet you can’t eat it because it makes your heart beat too quick and you end up throwing it away.”
“Okay.”
“So when’s the jukebox gonna be fixed?”
“In a few minutes.”
“Cool.”
“Later.”
“Late.”
I had my head buried in the machine’s belly and was delicately soldering in a few replacement chips when I heard the squishing of someone walking across the sandy floor. That same someone kicked the sole of my foot.
“What? I’m busy.”
No response.
I never bothered to look to see who it was. At first I figured it was Doris wanting to play a quick game of backgammon, or an impatient and feverish regular in bad need of a Teena Marie fix. But the grainy sloshing was too deep, too leaden. I reran the squishy footfalls in my head. Matching them up against the hundreds of different Slumberland steps I’d had filed away in my head. It hit me. They belonged to the crazy-looking black guy who asked for donations to rebuild the Wall.
Ten seconds later I heard the voice on my answering machine coming from the bar: “For the nigger, it niggereth every day.”
The Schwa.
Finally.
As long as I’d been looking for him, there he was, around a corner, no more than twenty feet away from me, and I couldn’t chase him down or shout him out. Not with the jukebox doors open wide, exposing its antiquated circuitry to the piles of sand I’d kick up scrambling to greet him. Not with the white-hot tip of the soldering iron clenched between my teeth, precariously close to melting an irreplaceable quartz crystal.
I heard him lift his squeaky wheelbarrow and head out the door. After I finished my work I started up the jukebox and asked Doris what happened.
She didn’t answer right away. She was holding me hostage. Waiting for me to pay the ransom. If I wanted her to set Charles Stone free I’d have to confess my undying love for her. Tell her that our breaking up was the dumbest separation since Frankie killed Johnny.
The jukebox buzzed and flickered to life. Van Morrison began to serenade the barflies. Two lovers standing beneath the overgrown banana tree kissed. I knew when the Irishman hit the chorus she’d cave. Crazy Love. Doris sang softly to herself and I pounced.
“What happened?”
“I give him some money. He bows and says, ‘For the nigger it niggereth every day.’ And that’s it. He didn’t say anything else.”
“But it was Berlin Wall Guy?”
“Yes.”
“But there was a pause between him talking to you and him leaving.”
“He was listening to your music. Smiling.”
I got light-headed. Smoking-California-homegrown-and-drinking-Hennessy-at-the-beach-my-God-look-at-that-fucking-sunset-how-come-nobody-ever-talks-about-Zen-anymore light-headed.
Not wanting to alarm me, she ran her thumbnail down the length of my sideburns and softly said, “His wheelbarrow was filled with brand-new bricks. I think Mister Stone readies to build his wall.”
I cupped Doris’s pretty face in my hands.
“Yes?” she asked expectantly.
“Can I borrow your bike?”
They say the Berlin Wall no longer exists on the street but in the mind. When it was extant, the Wall didn’t meander through the city, it bogarted. Its inexorable ghost is just as belligerent. It cuts uninvited through vacant lots and pricey new condominiums, rattling its hammer and sickle, spooking the tourists and locals who travel along this invisible barrier.
With one eye out for the chickenfucker, who I knew was somewhere watching me, I cycled through the Berlin spring looking for the Schwa. I popped wheelies as I ran red lights, fish-tailed into clouds of mosquitoes breeding over pools of stagnant water, bunny hopped over long-haired subway buskers who didn’t need the money, laid down senseless skid marks in historic plazas, rode no-hands down wide thoroughfares whose street names read like places on a Communist board game called Class Struggle: Paul-Robeson-strasse, Ho-Chi-Minh-strasse, Paris-Commune-Brücke. You’ve been accused of Left Opportunism. Go back three spaces.
In the middle of Leninplatz I cruised past a bearded black man stacking bits of broken brick and ill-fitting rocks i
nto a makeshift barricade. I joined the other onlookers and watched him extend the wall into the street.
I have a tendency to remember the names but forget the faces, and I wished that I’d been born with a photographic memory and not a phonographic one. Because here was a man who, during the interminable time I’d been looking for him, I had heard but not seen. He’d been in the Slumberland, asked me for money on numerous occasions, and this was the first time I’d bothered to truly look at him.
Charles Stone looked nothing like I’d imagined, yet how could I have missed him? A garish, evergreen three-piece suit set off his complexion nicely. The redbone, wrinkled skin, more photosphere than epidermis, still had a faint, rusty, Creole glow and reminded me of the setting sun I missed so much. His hair burst from his skull like an erupting solar flare. I don’t know if he or the wind was responsible for combing it, but the gigantic afro swept from back to front, a graying red-tide tidal wave that crested over his forehead as if it were about to crash onto his freckled brow. Emaciated yet exceedingly energetic for his age, he moved in jangled fits and starts like a string puppet.
Though his face and physique were new to me, I already knew exactly what he sounded like. He breathed through a deviated septum in labored, wheezy, whistles. Sometimes when he closed his large, snarled hands, his knuckles popped loud and clear like oily kernels tossed into the frying pan. He gnashed his teeth. His wristwatch ticked softly, like a hushed cricket unsure of the temperature. He always carried large amounts of change that, with each step he took, jingled as if he had sleigh bells in his pocket. When he scratched the back of his dry, bristly head, it sounded like a little boy gathering kindling in the forest.
Heroes. Idols. They’re never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there’s something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.
Blaze always said that one of my best qualities was that I’m never impressed by anyone. He was afraid that if I did locate the Schwa I wouldn’t be fazed, and my lack of acolyte appeal would make him not want to play with me.