Slumberland (9 page)

Eight hours later I awoke to Doris in the front room watching television with her eyes closed. She was swathed in a terry-cloth bathrobe I never wore and rewinding the chicken-fucking video. I turned up the radiator and I sat next to her. The VCR whirred and jolted to a clunky stop. She pressed play.

“How long you been up?”

“I don't know, an hour maybe? You listen to this song and you get lost in time.”

Doris curled into the fetal position and put her head in my lap. After every phrase the Schwa played, she'd mutter something about the harmonics, coloration, and Stravinsky. Five minutes went by before she'd stopped shaking her head in disbelief and making faces whenever my stomach rumbled.

“I did it,” Doris said, speaking into my belly button.

“Did what?”

“On television I once heard an American homewife tell her UFO encounter. She spoke the usual bullshit—‘bright object in the sky,' ‘incredible speed,'—but then she said the spaceship flashed a color she'd never seen before, and speeded off. Ever since then I've tried to imagine a color I've never seen before. And now I just did it. It was the music.”

She opened her eyes. They were a color I'd seen before.

“But if we find him, no one will purchase the music.”

“Why not?”

“It's too good. Too much.”

“Come on, people are starving for this music.”

“Exactly, but when you have hungered for a long time, if you eat too much, you die.”

Doris sank her teeth into my nipple. I turned up the volume to a deafening loudness that no doubt violated the Berlin laws against Sunday-morning noise. No one complained.

I PUT THE SEARCH
for the Schwa on hold while Doris and I had a one-night stand that lasted the month and a half the owner of the Slumberland was on vacation. We never truly got to know each other. Past a weakness for screwball comedies, the only thing we really had in common was our appreciation of the Schwa.

At our most intimate we'd play lazy games of backgammon and listen to his records. As soon as the music ended we'd fight. My Calvinist tendencies and her gloomy German stoicism clashing like two kindergartners playing musical chairs and attempting to squeeze their behinds into the last remaining plastic seat. We'd argue bitterly over the frequency of my showers and her refusal to turn her thermostat above sixty degrees in the dead of winter.

Doris, of course, blames our breakup on the frequency and length of my showers. In her eyes I'm a religious fanatic who every morning takes a hot-water baptismal to the gods Proctor and Gamble. My “obsession” with cleanliness symbolizes two hundred and fifty years of American sanctimony. If my finger-nails are clean, my soul is pure and lemony fresh. I'm 100 percent Puritan. A squeaky-clean American.

Doris: You crazy, uptight Americans. Do you know what we call “skinny-dipping” in Germany?

Me: No.

Doris: Swimming!

On our last night as a couple Doris sat on the floor of her spacious, impeccably furnished, penthouse igloo, bundled up in three layers of thrift-shop sweaters, settling an argument we had earlier in the day about Chico Marx's piano virtuosity by making a list of piano players in descending order of greatness, while I washed the dishes and stared at the plastic frog with a thermometer for a spine suctioned to the kitchen window.

I could never explain Doris's thermal frugality. I knew it'd been passed down from her parents, who, having been raised in the moldy-potato austerity of postwar Germany, made sure that she had a healthy respect for creature comforts like heat, clothes, salt, and toothpaste. She wasn't cheap. She'd often splurge on pricey nonessentials that she then treated like foster children. She put regular gas in her BMW 7 Series sedan and her silk blouses in the washing machine. She drank expensive wine out of paper cups. Used African artifacts as doorstops and had a state-of-the-art central heating system installed, one capable of warming the bathroom floor and the towel racks but whose thermostat was as off-limits as a North Korean nuclear plant.

“Doris, it's eight degrees in here. Do you know what that is in Fahrenheit?”

“About fifty degrees.”

“Fifty-one-point-eight degrees to be exact, which is the temperature at which black men lose their fucking minds. In 1967 when my Uncle Billy turned down a scholarship to UCLA and volunteered to go to Vietnam, it was eight degrees Celsius. On that clear, blue, carry-me-back-to-Ol'-Virginny morning when Nat ‘Crazy Like a Fox' Turner looked directly into a solar eclipse
and decided there and then to kill every white person in the world—it was eight degrees Celsius. In
Rocky II
, when Apollo Creed agrees to give Rocky Balboa a rematch in Phila-fuckingdelphia, Rocky's hometown, it was eight degrees Celsius, fiftytwo fucking degrees.”

Doris and the cackles of the chicken-fucking song snuck up on me from behind. She burrowed her head between my shoulder blades and ran her hands under my shirt. She hadn't bathed in three days, but she was warm.

“And you, black man,” she asked, tweezing my nipples with her nails, “how will you lose your mind on this fifty-two-degree night? Perhaps you go so crazy and finally give me oral sex, yes?”

“I would, but you smell.”

She unbuttoned her sweaters and yanked her shirt over her head. An earthy, almost steamy pungency closed my throat.

“Do I smell bad?” she asked.

I cupped my hand and passed it through the air like a chef wafting the vapors of the soup du jour toward his nostrils.

“You smell, but you don't smell bad. Sort of like a basket of rotten fruit.”

We both paused to listen to a jaunty movement in the chicken-fucking song. Doris took the first page of her list, wiped her hairy underarms with it, and handed it to me. I held it gingerly because a single strand of black underarm hair, long enough to bisect pianist number nine, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, like an editor's strikethrough, was epoxied to the page with a natural adhesive of perspiration and grit.

“Smell it,” she commanded.

I pressed the tip of my nose to Mozart and inhaled. The page smelled of nutmeg and paraffin with a hint of fresh bacon grease. I searched the rest of the page for Chico Marx. He wasn't on it. I had him just behind Fats Waller and ahead of Chopin. Doris removed her bra and slid page two along the
sweaty folds of her breasts. The dampness smudged Debussy, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Dave Brubeck. It was a damn good compendium. It smelled like a mothballed down jacket on the first cold day of winter. And still no Chico Marx. It went on like that for five minutes. She'd peel off a page, lick it, rub it over her scalp, run it between her toes, her pubes, the backs of her knees. Each page smelled different. Each body part and erogenous zone imparting its own aroma, every piano player and keyboardist emanating his or her own unique, musty funk. Mary Williams, Nat King Cole, and Doris's right elbow smelled like hijiki salad, Grandma's immutably stuck-to-the-wrapper butterscotch candies, and boiled
Kutteln
. Ray Manzarek, Thelonious Monk, and her inner thigh were redolent of burning rubber and a flat diet soda. Stevie Wonder, Glenn Gould, and the back of her neck reeked of day-old pizza, a blue urinal cake, and Laurel Canyon eucalyptus trees. Doris slid the last sheet of paper down the crack of her ass, and there, at the bottom of the page, sandwiched between her twelve-year-old nephew Andreas and Schroeder, the piano-playing Beethoven fanatic from the Charlie Brown cartoons, was Chico Marx, smelling like ass and “un-scented” two-ply toilet paper; nevertheless I had a raging hard-on.

The Schwa was in full swing and suddenly I understood why Doris, a woman who loved music unconditionally, kept her flat so cold. The cold heightened your senses. I not only heard it, I felt, saw, and tasted the music. My ears were suddenly bionic, and if I concentrated and made the
didudidudidudid
Bionic Woman sound effect, I could hear the stud's distended nut sack slapping against the bird's shiny belly plumage. I could hear the Schwa's breathing. See iridescent polka dots of sound float from the speakers and pop suddenly in midair like music-filled soap bubbles. The cold electrified my skin like a charged prison fence; the glistening notes that landed on my skin sparked and fizzled.

I swirled the song in my mouth, isolating its sweet complexities as if it were a vintage Château d'Yquem stolen off the shelves of Trader Joe's and downed between mouthfuls of chili-cheese fries. I couldn't smell the song. Doris and her body odor were hanging onto my neck and biting my lip. There's something beautifully Taoist about two people kissing when one partner is naked and the other clothed.

“Do I smell?” she asked.

I nodded. We kissed again.

“Good,” she said.

We fucked. Intermittently and passionately, in time we both stank. Our spooned bodies stuck to the linoleum floor and each other with cold sweat. With her back toward me, Doris propped herself up on her elbow. Pages two and five of her list were stuck to her shoulder blades like deformed angel wings.

“You know if someone got up after making love to me and showered like they do in your American movies, I'd fucking kill them.”

I pulled off her crumpled wings. She had Liberace, Neil Sedaka, Prince, and Brian Eno ranked ahead of Tom Waits and Art Tatum. The chicken-fucking song had ended. There was only the hum of the refrigerator and the swinging tick-tock of the Kit-Cat clock's tail. We were doomed to start fighting.
Liberace?
It would be our last argument. The inevitable clash of puritanical Americanism and German pragmatics. I should have known from the start it could have never worked. We both were fond of hip-hop, but she was strictly Queensbridge, a proponent of MC Shan, Marley Marl, and Roxanne Shanté. I was down with BDP, Boogie Down Productions. KRS-One, Bronx-sworn Capulet to her Queensbridge Montague.

Doris grabbed my penis and pulled me in closer to her and, without turning around, asked, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why in American movies do they make so much noise when they kiss?”

I shrugged and slipped my frozen feet in between her fleshy calves.

“Is it the more smacking, the more saliva, the louder the kiss, the more in love? Is that what it is?”

Liberace. Prince. Schroeder. MC Shan. Fuck
.

“Ferguson?”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

I took her question seriously, but I felt like Schroeder at his toy piano, exasperated by Lucy Van Pelt's persistence and the dreamy glaze in her black pinprick eyes.

Do you love me?

I'd never been in love. I'd always thought love was like reading
Leaves of Grass
in a crowded Westside park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, having to suppress the urge with each giddy turn of the page to share your joy with the surrounding world. By “sharing” I don't mean quoting Whitman's rhythm-machine poetics to a group of strangers waiting for auditions to be posted at the Screen Actors Guild, but wanting to stand up and scream, “I'm reading Walt Whitman, you joyless, shallow, walking-the-dog-by-carrying-the-dog, casting-couch-wrinkles-imprinted-in-your-ass, associate-producer's-pubic-hairs-on-your-tongue, designer-perambulator-pushing-the-baby-you-and-your-Bel-Air-trophy-wife-had-by-inserting-someone-else's-sperm-bank-jizz-in-a-surrogate-mother's-uterus-because-you-and-your-sugar-daddy-were-too-busy-with-your-nonexistent-careers-to-fuck, no-day-job-having California Aryan assholes! I'm reading Whitman! Fuck your purebred, pedigreed Russian wolfhound! Fuck your WASP infant with the Hebrew name and the West Indian nanny! Fuck your Norwegian au pair who's not as hot-looking as you thought she'd be! I'm reading Whitman,
expanding my mind and melding with the universe! What have you done today? It's ten in the morning, do you know where your coke dealer is? Have you looked at the leaves of grass? No? I didn't think so!” That's what I thought love would be like. Reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority.

Doris turned to face me, her cheeks calcified with tearstains.

“Do you love me, Ferguson?”

“No.”

She released my penis and clambered over me, placing her forehead to my temple. A tear ran down her cheek and onto mine. I didn't bother to wipe it off.

Why? She asked over and over. Why, if I didn't love her, why was I with her? I told her the truth. Probably the first time I'd ever been completely truthful in my life.
I was lonely
. She raised her hand and I flinched, expecting to ward off a blow; instead she stroked my face as softly as she ever had. “That's a reasonable answer,” she cooed. No voodoo curses were cast. No demanding the return of shit I'd thrown away without telling her. No vengeful postings of my nude photo, phone number, and salacious fisting fantasies on gay dating Web sites. Doris simply returned the chicken-fucking song, asked if I wanted to go to the movies on Thursday, and if she could help me find the Schwa.

The security guard at the Amerikahaus was right. Berlin is heaven.

ON MY FIRST DAY OF WORK
, Thomas Femmerling, the owner of the Slumberland, did two things: He gave me a set of keys to the bar, then he showed me how to properly pour a pilsner.

“It takes exactly seven minutes for
ein gutes Pils,
” he said, handing me an effervescent glass of beer with a head so thick it could support a silver piece. “And I figure if it takes that long to pour a good beer, it'll take at least seven or eight months to program a good jukebox, so take your time, DJ man. Take your sweet time.” Then he plucked his coin from my beer and left me to my duties.

Bars in general are depressing places, but especially at eight thirty on a serene Monday morning. And there I was, alone and unbreakfasted, drinking a seven-minute beer, unable to block out the disconcerting chatter of children skipping merrily to school.