Free Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney

It was not a threat to my adult life. It was my time off, my skip through the looking glass, the boys’ club where in my head I scored all night, gently moving the poet’s thigh, that second thigh, and that left leg.
    The loveliness of autumn in Berlin could not penetrate the ChiChi’s door. Behind it the atmosphere was like that of a ship far from land. Travelers tired of one another’s company, the regulars remembered that they’d bought me drinks every summer when I ran out of money. To them, I had arrived via helicopter, bringing supplies, more troops, the USO, or something. I bought everyone in the bar a drink my first night back. I paid off Big Dash’s tab. I wanted to wash after he smothered me in a humid embrace.
    The windows of the ChiChi were painted over and then completely obscured by the haphazard decoration: a mass of tiny Christmas lights, the wires stapled to the walls; plastic ferns and plastic ivy everywhere on nails, hung with dozens of mutilated garden elves, some just torsos with dusty knives still in them. There were some good things from Odell’s collection of music posters and walls of postcards from servicemen and refugees and former barmaids who hadn’t forgotten the help and home Zippi and Odell had given them in cold, indifferent Berlin. The place looked like the inside of a shoebox of secrets. It was so swathed and coated and coded, no one ever knew what time it was outside. Nights passed unseen.
    The dark toilets were beyond the ebony dance floor. The red kitchen was behind the green bar; the racks of green and brown and clear bottles and glasses looked over the bar at the crazy windows. Small round red tables were placed under the windows and along the remaining wall space. You took a seat and maybe someone interesting would join you.
    I was always going to be in Zippi’s good books, I felt, because I found postcards from the turn of the twentieth century, racist cartoons, images of grinning black clowns over words such as “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.” I had a whole wall to myself of these sociable postcards that laughed at black people. It was behind the bar, off to the side of Zippi’s cash register. She admitted that Odell had to explain them to her. She put the wine bottle back without comment when I held up my hands and ordered a cola.
    I’d come back on a good night, but then I had to stay away until the next fat envelope of cash was pushed toward me across the magenta-headed girl’s metal table in the office hut. I had to lie low again after another insane night of throwing money around in the ChiChi. Big Dash and some of the other black guys lined up along the bar raised glasses and cheered me, The Party. I didn’t tell them I’d stopped drinking and they apparently hadn’t noticed the colas and water with gas, no ice.
    Big Dash was oblivious, unaware that he smelled of the restaurant where he washed dishes, not caring that two foreigners, Italians, deep into whatever they were talking about, were not in the least charmed by his 2:00 a.m. Bessie Smith impersonation. When really high, he’d lean on the bar and sway and sing stupidly. “Does he hold your head down … till you can’t breathe … Does he grab your head and wish you had a ponytail…” He thought he had a black diva’s power. What voice he ever had he’d destroyed a long time ago.
    Odell could be depended on to walk over and turn up the music on the deluxe cassette player on its own shelf below the glasses and bottles. Odell usually played funk until midnight and jazz until dawn. He controlled the selections and the volume. The mood in the ChiChi was sometimes determined by how Odell was feeling, what he wanted to hear. Everything came back to what was the latest in his stormy marriage to Zippi, and often, to prove a point, he’d throw himself into some aspect of the business, whether designing a new ad or ordering a new outside lamp, but always at a weird hour. A storeroom between the