Not getting the anticipated response from me, the receptionist quickly folds her arms in disgust, her hands tucked tightly into her armpits. I want to ask her to do it again. Not kiss me, but fold her arms. The sandpapery sound of the linen sleeves of her lab coat rubbing together makes the tip of my penis itch. It’s time to say good-bye. I reach out to lift the name tag poorly fastened to the receptionist’s lapel. It reads, Empfangsdame, German for receptionist.
I begin to backpedal, expecting her figure to recede into the night. It doesn’t. Her lab coat is too bright. She stands there like a stubborn ghost of my satyric past, present and future refusing to disappear.
It’s a slow Monday night; the Slumberland is gloomy and quiet. Only the jukebox’s flickering lights and a Nigerian trying to impress a blonde with his Zippo lighter tricks punctuate the musty stillness. I order a wheat beer, then insert some money into the jukebox. I punch in 4701, “In a Sentimental Mood.” Duke Ellington’s languorous legato soft-shoes into the bar and, as advertised, puts me in a sentimental mood about the day before yesterday.
Most languages have a word for the day before yesterday. Anteayer in Spanish. Vorgestern in German. There is no word for it in English. It’s a language that tries to keep the past simple and perfect, free of the subjunctive blurring of memory and mood. I take out a pen, tapping the end impatiently on a bar napkin as I try to think of a English word for “the day before yesterday.”
I consider myself to be a political-linguistic refugee, come to Germany seeking asylum in a country where I don’t have to hear people say “nonplussed” when they mean “nonchalant” or have to listen to a military spokesperson euphemistically refer to a helicopter’s crashing into a mountainside as a “hard landing,” and I can’t begin to explain how liberating it is to live in a place where I can go through an autumn of Sundays without once having to hear someone say, “The only thing the prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.” Listening to America these days is like listening to the fallen King Lear using his royal gibberish to turn field mice and shadows into real enemies. America is always composing empty phrases like “keeping it real,” “intelligent design,” “hip-hop generation,” and “first responders” as a way to disguise the emptiness and the mundanity.
Ironically, though the sound of American rhetoric is one of the reasons I left, it’s the last remaining tie I have to the country of my birth. The only person back home I correspond with is Cutter Pinchbeck III, senior editor for the Kensington-Merriwether Dictionary of Standard American English. Our relationship is contentious, and like some exiled word revolutionary I try to improve the linguistic repression from afar. To date I’ve submitted four words for inclusion in the next edition: etymolophile, Corfunian, hiphopera, and phonographic memory. I like my words; they’re self-explanatory and, to my mind, much needed. Who’d believe that English is the only Indo-European language without an adjective to describe the inhabitants of the island of Corfu? Cutter Pinchbeck says we don’t need Corfunian. In his priggish rejection letters he states that the people of Corfu are called Greeks, and that an etymolophile wouldn’t be a lover of words, but a lover of the origin of words. He patronizingly says that hiphopera almost merited a lemma as an innovative, confluent melding of high and low culture; however, it didn’t possess the “straight gully, niggerish perspicuity of this year’s new entries, e.g., badonkadonk, bling, bootylicious, dead presidents, hoodrat, peeps, and swol,” just to name a few slang ephemerals. And despite my having enclosed signed affidavits from my mother and a video of me, age twelve, winning twenty-five thousand dollars on Name That Tune, Cutter Pinchbeck doesn’t believe that I, nor anyone of the hundred billion people who’ve trodden on earth in the past fifty thousand years, has ever had a phonographic memory—but I do. I remember everything I’ve ever heard. Every dropped nickel, raindrop drip-drop, sneaker squeak, and sheep bleat. Every jump rope chant, Miss Mary Mack Mack hand clap, and “eenie meanie chili beanie oop bop-bop bellini” method for choosing who’s it. I remember every sappy R&B radio lyric and distorted Hendrix riff. Every Itzhak Perlman pluck and squishy backseat contorted make-out session. I can still hear every Hey you, You the man, and John Philip Sousa euphonium toot and every tree rustle and streetcorner hustle. I remember every sound I’ve ever heard. It’s like my entire life is a song I can’t get out of my head.
“Ow.” The Nigerian has burned himself. He’s shaking his hand wildly and sucking air through his teeth. His date laughs, seizes his hand, and licks and nuzzles his seared fingers.
The jukebox ballad ends with a note that Ellington lays down with the gentleness of a child setting a wounded bird into a shoe-box lined with tissue paper. A series of English words for “the day before yesterday” dies in the back of my throat—penultidiem . . . prepretoday . . . yonyesterday . . .—and like an unwitting Tourette’s Syndrome utterance, a word for “the day before yesterday” flies from my mouth. “Retrothence!” The blonde and the Nigerian give me a strange look. I’m going to send that to Cutter Pinchbeck III at Kensington-Merriwether. Retrothence will look awfully nice on page 1147 of the Fourth College Edition, nestled between retrospective and retroussé.
“You still have some songs left.”
The Nigerian is standing next to the jukebox.
“Put in 1007. You can play anything you want after that.”
Rock ’n’ roll saunters into the room. Overdubbed guitar riffs that don’t come off as gimmicky, drums driving the song with the tough staccato love of a caring drill sergeant, and the bass, the bass is above the fray, suspended above the strings, synthesizers and percussion, brimming with a cocksure confidence, always threatening to show off but never doing it.
“Who is this?”
“The Magnum Opus.”*
They’re Southern California, sprawling, hazy, fickle, as underground as a rock group that sold twenty thousand records could be. The critics hail groups like the Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam as the purveyors of the new rock ’n’ roll, choosing heroin vapidity over depth, haircuts over musicianship, head-to-toe white-boy pallor over a Mexican/black/American/guapo–politic band whose music has nothing to do with being Mexican, American, black, or handsome. High-pitched and just this side of screechy and that side of cogent, the vocals hydroplane over the melody.
“They’re good,” the Nigerian says.
“They are good,” I wanted to say, “but two nights ago, not so far from where you’re standing now, me and the greatest musician you’ve never heard of played two minutes and forty-seven seconds of musical perfection as timeless as the hydrogen atom and Saturday Night Live. A beat so perfect as to render musical labels null and void. A melody so transcendental that blackness has officially been declared passé. Finally, us colored folk will be looked upon with blithe indifference, not erotized pity or the disgust of Freudian projection. It’s what we’ve claimed we always wanted, isn’t it? To be judged ‘not by the color of our skins, but by the content of our character’? Dude, but what we threw down was the content not of character, but out of character. It just happened to be of indeterminate blackness and funkier than a motherfucker.”
CHAPTER 2
I MISS LOS ANGELES, the place where the sounds in my head started. I miss the midday smog; I liked the way my lungs pained after chasing my dog around the backyard fig and lemon trees, the dog, nearly as winded as I, licking the grit off my face, the sting from my eyes. I miss my day job at Trader Joe’s, a convenience store for rich folks on gluten-free diets who, while I hand-pressed oranges into fresh-squeezed orange juice, would come up to me carrying two bottles of wine and ask which one would I recommend with light Indonesian fare, the Chianti or the Beaujolais? That was one of the good things about the job: You got to say “Beaujolais,” “Gouda,” and “Reblochon.” I miss saying “Reblochon.” I miss the landslides and the brush fires. For those of us who lived below the poverty line, which in Los Angeles is below five hundred feet above sea level, Mother Nature was the poor flatlanders’ great equa
lizer. Lo, the guilt-free schadenfreude of watching a Coldwater Canyon dowager on the nightly news standing on the rooftop shingles of her ranch house armed with a garden hose, dodging embers and fighting back flames fanned by the high winds and my cynicism. I miss the Malibu mansions tumbling down rain-soaked mountainsides. Their owners tromping through the mud in Italian rain slickers, their beachfront dream homes now five-million-dollar piles of driftwood. In Los Angeles memorable nights are as countless as the Fatburger double-king-chili-cheese permutations. They’re warm and prevailing as the Santa Ana winds that announce them and they play out like student films, scratchy, nonlinear, experimental, self-indulgent, and overexposed. Nights lubricated with stolen Volnay, Bordeaux, and magnums of Louis Roederer. Nights that dismissed themselves when the psilocybin-induced cartoon characters stopped frolicking on the shag carpet and climbed back into the television to become men with generic American drawls asking, “Has God touched you today?”
I miss those nights, but what I don’t miss is the fear. In Los Angeles my fear was audible. What up, cuz? Was happenin’, blood? Pinche mayate, what are you doing in this neighborhood, ese? Hands behind your head, face on the ground! Are you sure you can afford to pay for this? What with all the posturing, the slam dunk scowls, the hip-hop bravura, the What, me worry? middle-class nonchalance, and the condomless B-boy fucking on the down low, you’d never guess that we black men are afraid of many things, among them the police, water, and the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test; however, what we fear above all else is that out there among the 450 million other black men who inhabit this planet is an unapprehended habitual offender, a man twice as bad as Stagolee and half as sympathetic, a freeze-motherfuckeror-I’ll-blow-your-head-off nigger on the lam who looks exactly like us.
Moving to Berlin reduced the fear of being mistaken for someone else to almost nothing. I stopped having the recurring nightmare of being at the post office and seeing a poster tacked to a bulletin board that read, WANTED FOR GRAND LARCENY, WHITE SLAVERY, AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. The profile and face-front mug shots didn’t resemble me, but were me. Albeit a me I didn’t know. A hard, slit-eyed, sneering me who went by an assortment of dead giveaway aliases, Pol Pot Johnson, Steve Mussolini, Mugabe von Quisling. Underneath the background information would be the rules of engagement and the amount of civic recompense. “This man is considered armed, ugly, and nuclear-meltdown dangerous. If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of this person, please notify the appropriate authorities immediately! Reward: $500,000 and the Eternal Gratitude of Your Government and Fellow Citizens.”
But that fear of myself was who I was. It was all I and a lot of other little Los Angelenos had. I waited to be picked out of the crowd, actualized by white America, and if not by her, then a kiss from Velma Reinhardt, the big-bosomed, blonde-neighborhood vixen would do. However, as luck would have it, America beat Velma to the punch.
When I was fifteen I got a letter from the Los Angeles Unified School District notifying me that I was to report to the University of California Los Angeles for “special testing.” I’d finally been identified, picked out of the crowd. This letter frightened my parents and me to no end, for there was a time not too long ago when colored men were purposely infected with syphilis, forced to ingest large doses of LSD, and timed in the forty-yard dash all under the guise of “special testing.” His voice cracking, Daddy called the school board. “Yes, sir. I fully understand, sir.” He muffled the receiver with his palm and whispered, “It’s a math test. There’ll be three other Negroes, two Chicanos, and an Eskimo boy there.” Mother removed her eyeglasses and mouthed, “White boys too?”
“Yes,” Father nodded. The dog scratched at the back door. My mother cried and turned her pages. I didn’t think anyone could read E. L. Doctorow that fast.
I was one of those kids who liked to be first, and I made sure, without looking too rascally, that I was the first one in that classroom, pretending that I was the first black non-athletic-scholarship student to reintegrate UCLA since the death of affirmative action. I took a seat near the open windows overlooking the quadrangle and stuck my head out of the ivory tower, a nappy-headed Rapunzel. White people’s air more refreshing, I thought to myself. The wind brisker, more invigorating. The shade shadier. The squirrels squirrelier. The proctor called my name—Hey!—then thumbed me to the back row, a row now occupied by two Sunday-suited black boys and a colored girl in what must have been her mother’s cut-down wedding dress. The Eskimo kid, his bottom lip swollen with a tobacco chaw, was the last to arrive.
“Uukkarnit Kennedy?” the proctor asked.
Without skipping a beat Uukkarnit said in a deep, hickory-smoked, filtered drawl, “It sure ain’t Ladies Love Cool James.” Everyone laughed, as we West Coasters hated the sappy LL Cool J, much preferring Too Short’s perverse rap limericks.
“Sit anywhere you like, Mr. Kennedy,” he was told, and though the white section had plenty of open seats, Uukkarnit sat with us. He nodded hello in the chin-up Negro fashion. After coolly depositing a glob of brown drivel into his spit cup, he set it on the corner of the desk. His sitting with us was an act of solidarity. A late-twentieth-century equivalent to a lunch counter sit-in; and up to that point in my life, his placing that Styrofoam spittoon on that desk in full view of those white kids was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.
The proctor walked up and down the aisles, placing a mechanical pencil and a sealed test booklet on each desk.
“If you find yourself in this classroom, it means that you’ve scored in the ninety-eighth percentile on the Tennessee Mathematical Proficiency Test for Non-Asian Eighth Graders. This booklet I’m placing in front of you is the Math Skills Assessment measure given to all incoming freshman math majors here at the University of California at Los Angeles. Do not open the booklet until you are told.”
A nervous cough. From below, on the quad, the sounds of a coed touch football game. I leaned forward and asked Uukkarnit what his name meant. Without looking back he answered, “If you shave the polar bear, you’ll find his skin is black.”
“Is that true?”
“The meaning of the name or the shit about the black skin?”
“Both.”
“The former is true; as for the latter, I’ve never been north of Santa Barbara, much less seen a shaved fucking polar bear.”
The scores were posted outside the classroom in descending order. It was the first computer printout I’d ever seen. There was something affirming about seeing my name and score—FERGUSON W. SOWELL: 100/100—at the top of the list in what was then a futuristic telex font. I felt official. I was real. One by one we were summoned to a small office. When my turn came, the man behind the desk launched into a rapid-fire spiel about the Cold War and “finding suitable candidates for training in the aeronautical and nuclear sciences.” When he said “suitable,” he slowed down, finally stopping altogether mid–sales pitch. My inherent unsuitability having dawned on him, he had nothing more to say to me other than, “You may keep the mechanical pencil.”
The white students were placed in an advanced mathematics class at the university; we Negro boys, and the lone girl, were given instruments and sent to the Wilmer Jessop Academy of Music. I never saw Uukkarnit again.
I won’t say I didn’t learn anything at Jessop Academy, but they never taught Why? Why was I playing? Why was music so powerful? What can I do with music? Can it heal? Can it kill? They never taught me who Wilmer Jessop was, either, now that I think about it. I learned more about music from watching Spencer Tracy on Turner Classic Movies than from any composition class. Pick a movie, any movie—Boys Town, Bad Day at Black Rock—when Spencer Tracy enters a room, he stares hard at the floor, looking for his acting mark. He ambles up to it, squints at it, jabs his toe at it, casually places his hands on his hips, lifts that broad beatific face of his, then acts his motherfucking ass off. I tried to teach myself to play like Spencer Tracy acts
. Incorporating “looking for my mark” into my trumpet solos, playing with the knowledge that the search for identity and a sense of place is both process and result, and the trick is to fool the audience into thinking you know exactly where you’re going. That math test score was the first time I spotted my mark on the stage. I knew where to stand. I existed, and would go on to further differentiate myself from the rest of black maledom with an SAT math score that to this day I carry in my back pocket, so when anyone asks for my papers I can show them my test results and declare, “I don’t know what other nigger did what to whom, but it couldn’t be me. Look, 800 Math.”
Back then I harbored dreams of being the insouciant jazzman, figuring my given name, Ferguson W. Sowell, guaranteed that in a few years my pipe-smoking visage would be on the cover of a string of eponymous Blue Note albums. I had a desk drawer stuffed with scraps of paper bearing these unreleased titles: Sowell Brother, Sowell Survivor, O Sowell Mio, Sowell’d Out, Summer Sowellstice. I did have some talent; my phonographic memory allowed me to replicate any piece of music perfectly. But I never knew what I was playing. No matter how many times my music teacher reminded me that the tunes sounded like their titles, I couldn’t tell one Thelonious Monk composition from another.
“Bum baba bum. Bum baba bum,” he’d scat. “Bum ba bum ba bum bababa bum. What song is that, Mr. Sowell?”
“ ‘Epistrophy’?”
“ ‘Blue Monk,’ you tone-deaf ignoramus!”
I was “phased out” of the jazz program at Jessop Academy and became the only student enrolled in “Audiovisual Studies,” the music-school equivalent of special education. I spent most of my time preparing for a future career as a roadie by setting up drum sets, tuning instruments, and wheeling projectors and sound equipment from classroom to classroom. During my free time I locked myself in the storeroom and fucked around with the computers and the turntables. For graduation I was expected to hand in a thesis paper explaining how to properly mic up a drummer who sings background vocals, but instead handed in a version of Handel’s Messiah composed entirely of elements from the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill album. My baroque/brat-rap/mash-up oratorio became that year’s valedictorian speech. After graduation I decided to give up the trumpet, enroll in junior college, and become a DJ.