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.
I didn’t have time for the guilt.
I only had time to blow air kisses and whispered witticisms.
“Where’s Stone?”
Lars lifted his chin toward the back. There, perched above us, on the thickest branch of the banana tree, was the God of Improvisation. The sight and twisted symbolism of a black genius in a banana tree unnerved me, but I understood why he was up there—the mental Lebensraum. Sometimes you have to elevate yourself above the fray; bananas, monkey inferences, and misappropriated Nazi terminology be damned.
He was talking to a reporter, shyly fiddling with his cuff links and addressing his shoes. I couldn’t hear the conversation over the murmur and the Rahsaan Roland Kirk blaring from the jukebox.
“What do you think they’re talking about?”
Lars dubbed the dialogue in the affected pitchy drawl particular to the black thinking man. “Rothko . . . harmonic translucency . . . Gerhard Richter, right, right, chromatic color fields . . . exactly . . .”
Stone looked ashen, shell-shocked. There was even more of a paranoid bulge to his eyes than usual. Between questions he blinked at me with the deliberateness of a POW trying to convey some coded message to the boys back at the command center. Not sure if he was looking at me or past me, I wavered between soul-brother salutations—a light thump of my fist to my heart or the chin-up nod—finally settling on a discreet peace sign.
“. . . Leibniz . . . an alphabet of thought...”
I imagined that Stone, like any guest of honor, wanted to arrive fashionably late, avoid the hoopla, but the pro forma punctuality of the German transportation system wouldn’t let him. That’s one of the drawbacks of German reliability: There are no excuses, and that’s half the fun of being black, the excuses. The negative attention.
“Pollock...linear harmony . . . visceral pointillism . . .” Lars was on a roll. “I’ve interviewed a hundred jazz musicians, and every time I ask them, ‘What are your influences, Mr. Blackman?’ they come back with the same impress-the-white-boy-with-white-boys shit—Rothko, Bartók, Pollock, John Cage.”
Lars looked at me expecting an answer, but I couldn’t tell him the other half of the fun in being black is name-dropping Rothko and Liebniz in an interview. Crediting abstract impressionism and the stoics as the biggest influences on your avant-garde art, and not your two tours as a machine gunner in the army, Muhammad Ali, or the white ingenue (aren’t they all) who broke your heart by choosing economic stability over eight and three-quarter inches of dick.
“What’s he talking about now?”
“Heidegger.”
“Heidegger?”
“Heidegger, nigger!” Lars shouted, jokingly snapping out a fascist salute that guilt lowered almost immediately.
“Wow, that’s the first time I ever did that.”
“Yeah, the first time out of uniform.”
“We start after the song’s over, okay?” With that Lars withdrew to the bar, leaving me to my thoughts and the Roland Kirk.
At the moment, I needed Rahsaan Roland Kirk more than Ronald Reagan and Eazy-E had needed their ghostwriters. Kirk, as is his recalcitrant wont, was blindly misbehaving like a coun
try cousin at the Thanksgiving dinner table, chewing with his mouth full. I shut my eyes and concentrated on his blowing. Stritch, tenor, and manzello, he played three saxophones at once, somehow braiding each instrument’s distinct timbre into one tensile melody. Rather than playing his notes, he played with his notes; chewing and gnawing on them until they were sweetened bubblegum chaws that he pulled pink and sticky from his horns, then reeled back in just to chomp on it and start the process all over again. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was telling me to relax. Letting me know that it’s okay to misbehave. Perfectly fine to once in a while play with your food, your blackness, and your craft. It was a message I needed to hear, especially since when the song ended I was going to have to introduce the Schwa, in all his musical rudeness, to the world.
Introductions are a serious matter, the import of which I think only the Mafia truly understands. In the criminal underworld there are consequences to expanding the sewing circle. You introduce somebody to the family and your goombah from the neighborhood turns out to be a fuck-up or an undercover cop, you’re held responsible, and the person who vouched for you is held responsible for your transgression, and so on down the line. I feel the same way about music: Problem is, there are no repercussions. Some irresponsible uncle drags you to a GBH concert at the Roxy before you’re ready and it’s like going on a bad acid trip. You’re never quite the same. Yet given all my misgivings about making an introduction, I insisted on being the one to introduce the Schwa to the world and I was willing to assume full responsibility for what ensued.
I had prepared by studying all the great emcees. Brave toast-masters like Symphony Sid, whose houndstooth-sport-jacketed “Oh, man, daddy-o” afternoon-radio equipoise ushered in the swing era. I sat up nights staring at album covers and lip-syncing Pee-Wee Marquette’s slurring, whiskey-breathed “Welcome to the Birdland” castrato. I thought that these masters of ceremonies would inspire me, but when I sat down to write my intro, nothing past the mundane came to mind; lots of words that start with in- and ended in -able: in-domit-able, in-defatig-able, indubit-able, and I swear I took my hand off the pen and, like a player piano mechanically reproducing a hokey Bourbon Street rag, it scribbled out, “Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction . . .” If anybody ever needed an introduction, it was the Schwa.
I had half a notion to reverse protocol and introduce the audience to the band. Clear my throat and say, “Over-rehearsed and underpaid musicians, allow me to present your fawning fan base. Charles Stone and members of the band, I give you the last group of people on earth with an attention span—the free-jazz audience.”
I finally phoned the Schwa and asked him how he wanted to be introduced.
He simply said, “In German.”
His answer surprised me because I’d never heard him speak a lick of German. He was the stereotypical lazy expatriate for whom German is a dour, unnecessarily serious language. He feels life is morose enough without the mooing umlauts and throat-irritating diphthongs. Even though I knew better, I asked him politely if he spoke German.
“Thirty-some-odd years,” he said proudly, “thirty-some-odd years I’ve lived in this country, and all I can say in German is, ‘Kann ich reinspritzen?’ Can I come inside you? What can I say, man? The language just don’t taste right in my mouth.”
He had managed to offend what few sensibilities I have, and I was about to hang up the phone when his voice sputtered through the receiver. “Wait, I can say something else,” he said in an excited pant, “‘Kann ich in Ihnen kommen?’ May I come inside you, woman whom I don’t know well enough to address in the informal variant of you?”
“If you don’t speak German, why do you want me to introduce you in German?”
“So I don’t understand the fucking lies.”
“Lies?”
“Are you going to say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce Charles Stone, an old, persnickety, impotent everyday-except-Thursday, muscatel-in-a-plastic-cup-at-four-in-the-afternoon-drinking motherfucker. Let’s give him a warm welcome and hope this jazz dinosaur completes the set before he dies’? No, you’re not. So whatever you say, say it in German. Bullshit sounds good in German.”
He was right, bullshit does sound good in German. In any of the dialects high, low, middlebrow, or guest worker, I can never tell if a person is lying. Come to think of it, I never even suspect them of lying. I think it started with the cigarettes and Günter Grass, but more so the cigarettes. I never had much of a habit, a pack a week, pack and a half if I was waiting on the results of an HIV test, but as my German improved I began reading The Tin Drum, The Rat, and the cigarette warnings on my Marlboro boxes. The print was the size of a newspaper headline and just as starkly worded: SMOKERS DIE EARLIER, SMOKING DAMAGES THE SPERM AND DECREASES FERTILITY, SMOKING IS A SIGN OF LOW SELF-ESTEEM, FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY, AND IS SCIENTIFICALLY LINKED WITH GROUP THINK AND MOB VIOLENCE. There was none of the microscopic wishy-washy wording of the American warning labels. No “may causes” or “might lead tos.” Gradually I stopped smoking and began to believe everything I read and heard as long as it was in German or the New York Times (a paper printed in a font that looks suspiciously like German). However, agreeing to introduce him in German didn’t solve all my problems. I still didn’t know what to say.
It’s no accident that I’m a DJ: I’m a copycat at heart, and as a plagiarist of rhythm I need a source. Someone else’s idea that I can cut and paste into an “original” creation, but I couldn’t translate Alan Freed, Funkmaster Flex, or Symphony Sid—there’s no words for daddy-o or fresh new joint in German. I tried to think of a German impresario and could come up with only one name. Ruldolf Hess, the master of ceremonies for the master race. His signature line echoed in my head. “Hitler ist Deutschland! Deutschland ist Hitler!”
I winced, yet with a little alteration and less flying spittle it’d make a fine closing statement. I’d be paraphrasing the Third Reich’s publicity agent, who himself was only paraphrasing Keats.* I’m rationalizing, I know, but I take some comfort in the fact that humanity is united by its latent fascism, and that is as true now as it ever was and will ever be.
I stepped in close to the microphone, enjoying the sensuous tease of the cold crosshatched steel on my lips. Nothing sounds as believable as little white lies told in amplified German.
“Ich bin sehr stolz, jetzt den Star unserer Show zu präsentieren. Sein Klang ist der Klang des Jazz, der Klang der Freiheit—ein Klang, der nicht zu imitieren ist, die durch hundert berühmte Platten in aller Welt bekannt geworden ist. Er wird von Uli Effenberg am Piano, Yong Sook Rhee an der trompete, Sandra Irrawaddy, Soulemané Eshun, und Willy Wow begleitet. Meine Damen und Herren—Charles Stone ist jazz. Jazz ist Charles Stone.”
The applause was gracious, warm, and buoyant, and though it wasn’t mine to bask in, I stepped off the stage and waded into it,letting the clapping and huzzahs lap at my body in small, exuberant waves. The lies were nothing serious, exaggerations of opinion more than falsehoods. What I said was, “He’s the sound of jazz, the sound of freedom, a sound that cannot be imitated, that has become known worldwide through a hundred celebrated records. With Uli Effenberg on piano, Yong Sook Rhee on saxophone, Sandra Irrawaddy, Soulemané Eshun, and Willy Wow accompanying. Ladies and gentlemen—Charles Stone is jazz. Jazz is Charles Stone.” Okay, the “hundred celebrated records” was an outright lie. And, I confess, I cribbed the intro from Leonard Feather’s 1954 introduction of Billie Holiday to Cologne.
The Schwa took the stage before an audience as still as a herd of antelope who’d caught a predator’s scent. It was that rare absolute stillness that occurs only after accidentally breaking a neighbor’s window, shooting your best friend in the belly, or before the creation of the universe. And having busted many a window, witnessed a shooting or two, and created more than a few mix-tape universes in my day, I knew that that preternatural silence is usually momentary and often followed by earsplitting frenzy. So as a man haunted by a lifetime of sound
, the silence was a condition to be cherished, held onto, and appreciated the way an overwrought mother appreciates a sleeping baby.
The band had been onstage for more than ten minutes and hadn’t played a solitary note. Thus far the concert consisted of the star attraction Marcel Marceau-ing across the stage in his socks. I didn’t care if the quiet was stupefied awe for his tipsy traffic-cop Butoh minuets or impatient politeness for his double-jointed Thai stripper contortions. This was as close to the tranquility of deafness as I would ever get. For the first time in my life I’d forgotten my sonic past. My head hushed as the eighteen minutes of erased Watergate tape played in deep space. It was the blissful quietude of being buried alive in cotton. An indelible nothingness I would remember for the rest of my life.