Slumberland (15 page)

“Excuse me, Herr DJ Darky.”

Klaudia von Robinson wore a strapless designer dress that shimmered and clung to her rolls of baby fat like wet sealskin. I
acknowledged her with a papal you-may-approach-the-DJ-booth nod. She had big, brown, mackerel begging eyes and wore her hair pulled back in a scalp-tingling tight chignon. It'd been years since I'd talked to a black woman, even longer since I'd touched one. At least I assumed Frau von Robinson was black. I couldn't tell, her buttery-soft skin was the color of ten-million-year-old amber and nearly as transparent. Hers was an epic epidermis that seemed to have fossilized around her reluctant smile, wary heart, and the dragonfly tattoo on her shoulder. She wasn't black, she was gold. The aboriginal gold of a Solomon Islander's sun-kissed shock of an afro. The gold of my Auntie Marie's incisor. The gold of the Pythagorean golden ratio. How I longed to say to her, “Baby, in the words of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Kepler, you are as fine as 1.618033989.”

Behind Klaudia stood her younger sister, Fatima, a stunningly beautiful woman whose own African heritage oozed “dream on, motherfucker” from her sloe-eyed Ethiopian features and her full, permanently puckered lips. She had been, as the Germans say, hit harder by the “nigger stick” than her sister. I suspected that they had different fathers. Princess Fatima daintily proffered a peola-brown hand, face down as if she were introducing herself to a prostrating underling. I shook her hand weakly. It was cold and bony. There was something sad and restive about her. She wore her blackness like the heroine in that Chekhov play who, when asked why she always wears black, replies, “I'm in mourning for my life, I'm unhappy.” Fatima reminded me of myself. Omniphobic—scared of everything.
Omniphobic
. That's a good one. I'll have to submit it to
Kensington-Merriwether
and see what Cutter Pinchbeck has to say about it.

Klaudia, smug and even more stuck-up, never bothered to introduce herself. She just presumptuously pressed a finger to my chest as if my sternum were a doorbell.

“Do you have Sixto Rodriguez?”

“ ‘Sugar Man'?”

“ ‘Sugar Man.' ”

I nodded. Great song. Probably do wonders for my cocaine headache. One often hears that Germans don't have any taste. True, though it's not that they are connoisseurs of schmaltz, it's that they appreciate everything. When a German shows good taste, I've learned not to be surprised. Here subjectivity and objectivity have a way of canceling each other out like common cultural denominators, so out of necessity they've invented a new nonqualitative state of perception, an all-appreciative “neutertivity,” if you will. Everything's good. Nothing is bad. And if it is bad, it doesn't matter because somebody likes it.

I flipped through my crates and lifted out the Sixto Rodriguez album. Took me three years to find that record. This was before the Internet. When record collecting meant excursions to the suburban rec rooms of cracked-out, disbarred, no-longer-rich-as-hell affirmative-action uncles. Getting to the Ray Barrettos,
Artur Rubenstein and the NBC Orchestra Plays Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2
s, and Booker T. and the MGs before they ended up at the bottom of an empty kidney-shaped pool covered with silt, rusted lawn chairs, and barbecue grills. I had to send all the way to Auckland for Sixto. Sixty dollars plus eight for shipping and handling.

Eyes hidden behind the darkest pair of shades I'd ever seen, Sixto peered out at me through the glare of the shrink-wrap. Quintessentially seventies, he sits on some wooden stairs in front of a small A-frame ghetto brick house. His polyester bell-bottoms, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, feather-cut movie-Indian silky black hair complete with David Cassidy flip—there's no doubt in my mind he's the absentee father of someone about my age.

Sixto's plaintive wail pulsed in and out of the half-calypso and half-mariachi guitar lick and the cheesy, warbled sci-fi
sound effects.
Sugar Man won't you hurry
. . . A simple 3?4 time bass line and a three-note muted horn announced the chorus.
Su-gar-man . . . Su-gar-man
. . . The Torpedo Käfer, not loud to begin with, went totally silent. Oblivious that he's singing over what sounds like the climactic battle scene in Orson Welles's
War of the Worlds
, Sixto continued on undaunted, calling out to his drug dealer like a sick dog howling at its last full moon.
Su-garman
. . . Klaudia slow danced with herself, eyes closed, hands tucked into her underarms, softly singing the chorus. Like me under the tanning lamp, she left the door slightly ajar. Providing me a peek,
me
being the closest embodiment of dopehead stereophonic pathos. A patron raised an eyebrow and a
bierflasche
in my direction.
Su-gar-man
. . .

Somehow Sixto slipped through the cracks of the album cover stairs he sits on and missed out on soul-man immortality. I'm not one of those DJs who thinks every underappreciated crooner should be deified in the same breath as Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone. But it's a shame he wasn't at least a one-hit wonder. No reason this song shouldn't be on some compilation album, generating enough residuals to at least paint the A-frame, keep the child-support checks from bouncing.
Su-gar-man... Su-gar-man... Su-gar-man
... Powerful stuff. Not the Mona Lisa, but seminal.

The bartender set a bubbling pilsner on the table. I'd been playing about two hours straight and wanted to enjoy it uninterrupted, so I removed my headphones and put on the longest record I had with me, “Lizard” by King Crimson, twenty-three minutes and twenty-six seconds. Despite the shift from black to blacklike music, no one protested. The foam mustache made my upper lip tingle, and I didn't wipe it off until I noticed Klaudia was still standing there, circling her index finger over the record as if she were making it spin through telekinesis.

“Why are your turntables . . .
oberseite unten?
” “

What?”

She turned to the bartender. “Wie sagt man ‘Oberseite unten' auf English?”

“Upside-down.”

“
Genau
. Why are your turntables upside-down?”

“I'm left-handed. This way it's easier for me to move all the things I have to move—the tone arm, these switches, knobs—they're less in the way.”

“And that's the main important thing—to have things less in the way or so?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“As a DJ you try to tell a story? Achieve a certain linearity, no?”

“No, I just play what I feel like hearing.”

“No, you don't. You play what you think we should hear.”

One day I'm going to call those folks at the Berlitz School of Language, tell them I want money back, that there is no such thing as conversational German, only argumentative German. She had a beautiful voice. The timbre of the German female voice is pitch-perfect. Every time I go to kiss one I'm afraid I'm going to catch something. They all sound like Marlene Dietrich with a head cold. The rasp denotes a woman who's able to take care of herself and, if need be, me too (in a film noir, femme fatale sense). I've come to realize that the high-pitched American-female “Oh my God!” squeal is a ploy for attention. A soprano subterfuge for a weakness sometimes feigned, sometimes in-grained, but always annoying.

“But you tell a story with what you play.”

“What story is that?”

“A love story.”

“It's soul music. It's like new-wave French cinema, it's always about love.”

“But tell me why are the turntables
Obersiete unten
?”

It wasn't that she wooed me; it was that she was the first person to ever ask me twice.

The left-handed explanation is partially true. To compensate for a right hand so useless that it could barely place a record on the spindle, I've experimented with every configuration of gadgetry and form. Both decks on one side, no cross fader, hamster style, reverse hamster, S-shaped and straight tone arms—but even after my right hand became dexterous enough to perform the perfunctory party skills such as stabs, cuts, and scratches, I still felt unsettled behind the tables. Standing behind my decks was like sleeping in somebody else's bed.

The closest my work gets to ritual is the cleaning of the records. Hands gloved in thin white cotton, I treat the rare acetate 78s and the reissue-vinyl LPs with equal amounts of welcome-tothe-Waldorf-Astoria doorman respect. I follow the instructions on the cleaning fluid as prescribed. Removing static, crackle, and pop-producing dust particles and/or oily contaminants by handling the discs by the edges and labeled surfaces only.

I was cleaning an especially dirty record, something I never played, Earl Klugh, maybe, when it dawned on me why I was so uncomfortable behind the turntables: The records spin in the wrong direction. They turn clockwise when every other naturally occurring vortex, from spiral galaxies to hurricanes to flushing toilets to red-white-and-blue Harlem Globetrotter basketballs, spins counterclockwise. Looking at the Earl Klugh album, the dust particles clinging to the shiny black vinyl like stars to the desert sky, I realized that in my hand I held a dusty twelve-inch microcosm of the Milky Way. The LP is a grooved mini-whirlpool down which the needle spirals to produce sound. In the case of Earl Klugh, saccharine crap, but sound nonetheless. So I turned my turntables upside down. Now my records spin counterclockwise in concert with the spinning universe itself.

My explanation impressed Klaudia. She placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. It seemed to be pressing down on me, forcing
me into place as if I were a misshapen puzzle piece. In the new jigsaw Germany, where does this strange one go? Her fingers, nails unpainted, cuticles chewed raw, dug into my shoulders.

King Crimson still had another three quarters of an inch of playing time left. I started to give some thought to the next song. When I play in front of a crowd, I don't sample. I play the entire recording. Live sampling is like taking a quote out of context.

I wavered between Brick's “Dazz,” “Children of the Sun” by Mandrill, and readdressing my narcosis subtext with “Riding High” by Faze-O. Klaudia's hand slid off my shoulder. But she didn't go away. I settled for “Children of the Sun.” For a plump woman she had a long neck, and I wanted to run the palm of my hand against the grain of blonde fuzz on its nape. I suppose she wanted me to ask her name. But I didn't want to know it. I wanted to know why the dogs in this city didn't bark, and that was about it.

I drained my beer, mixed in the chimes from “Children of the Sun” a shade behind the pounding downbeat of King Crimson's Mellotron, and realized there was something I did want to know.

“Do you know where I can see the sunset?”

“The sun is hard to find here. Does that go on your nerves?”

“Well, if you think of a place . . .”

Klaudia stuck out her hand and finally introduced herself. I gave her my card, making a point of handing one to her boyfriend, Horst, a bald-headed, rugger-nosed translator who looked like an IRA terrorist who moonlighted as a mountain crag between car bombings and kneecappings. He introduced himself by slipping a beer in my hand and an arm around Klaudia's waist. Maybe her sidelong glances were just that, sidelong.

Two days later, she called.

“Hallo? Please, may I speak to DJ Darky?”

She wasn't frumpy enough for me, too ladylike and, even at a Rubenesque 165 pounds, too skinny. I've always been slightly disappointed that German women ran thin. I expected buxom prison guards with flabby arms, fullback thighs, and mean streaks as wide as their broad, flat, Aryan asses.

“I was in a record shop when I found a song I thought you might like, an old GDR propaganda tune from the early sixties, ‘Affenschande (Amerika stopft Affen in die Satelliten).' Would you like to know the English?”

I speak German but sometimes it's best never to let them know I
spreche
the
Sprache
. It's safer that way.

“In English the title is something like, ‘Crying Shame (America Stuffs Apes in the Satellites)' or so.”

“That's funny.”

“Yes, it is. I also thought of a place where we can see the sunset as well. Shall I give you the record then?”

On the evening of my first Berlin sunset, only the thriftiest East Berliners hadn't spent the complimentary one-hundred-deutschmark note they received as Bundestag howdy-dos to the Free World. When we met that night at the base of the Fern-sehturm, Klaudia von Robinson still had hers.
Fernsehturm
is the first German word any Berlin émigré learns. Built to commemorate the launching of the Sputnik satellite, the Fernsehturm is a forty-story television antenna that resembles a Soviet-era ICBM. Since the late fifties every guest worker, asylum seeker, and honorably discharged black American male with a predilection for white women has pointed at the city's tallest structure and asked, What the fuck is that?

Standing at the base of the TV tower, Klaudia turned the bill over in her hands, contemplating the strange-looking money the way Jack must have contemplated his magic beans. The elevator doors opened. The bean stalk sprouted. We entered wondering
what magical adventures lay ahead. Inside the elevator a placard written in German, Russian, and English said the elevator would ascend two hundred meters in thirty seconds.

The Fernsehturm has always frightened me. It looks operational. I'm convinced the tower is the Communist Trojan Horse wheeled up to the Brandenburg Gate as a gift and that, somewhere deep in the backwoods of Saxony, in an underground bunker hundreds of feet beneath the Hungarian oak, firethorn bushes, and black bears, a top-secret cadre of East German scientists still fights the Cold War, memorizing the day's launch codes over breakfast.
Swie-Zulu-Foxtrot-sieben-sieben-Whiskey-fünf. Mach mit, Kamerad. Mach mit
.

Klaudia, sensing my nervousness, pointed to the face on her banknote.