Free Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney Page A

two toilets held a number of previously ordered and uninstalled improvements. The new piece of equipment wouldn’t be what he’d wanted or right for their look and he’d send it back, eventually.
    He did everything for the business, for the ChiChi. He washed the bar every morning, mopping around the dozing and the drugged up. It was theirs, his and Zippi’s; it kept them us-against-the-world, however much they battled each other on a slow night. I felt that they stayed understaffed in order to keep themselves up to their necks. Odell had been in the army, stationed forever in Giessen. One year he didn’t re-up, but the cops back in Los Angeles were making life too hard for black men. He missed not having to worry about them, a feeling he’d never got tired of in Europe. He came back to Berlin to take pictures. He was drawn into his own pictures, like an anthropologist. He stayed.
    I knew that much from his conversation about politics. He and the man I had right away taken to be his new dealer went on for some time in Black Power fashion. I thought it was risky for someone who was a dealer to go by the name of Bags. My height, but twice my girth, dark-skinned Bags had a shaved, shiny head. The tattoo on his left forearm was very evolved. Everything about him made me uncomfortable, as though I knew that one day I’d be questioned about him under oath. He, too, was ex-military. Bags would have the latest unemployment figures for black men his age in the States. When guys in their circle talked about going back, he would point to black unemployment. “They don’t want us.”
    *   *   *
    The authentic mattered to Odell, wherever he came across it, and he liked Big Dash, didn’t seem to notice anything off-putting about the man. They went back a ways, but I didn’t know anything more. I was not in their circle. My place was over by Zippi and her cash register. I was her regular, much as I longed to be one of Odell’s, a masterpiece of muscle bundles. But she claimed me, and she commented a great deal in between glances on what her man was probably getting up to with his buddies over there.
    She’d appeal to Big Dash to tell her what was going on, but as queenie as he was in the muumuu-like roominess of his unpleasant shirts, he would not sell out a man to his woman. Though a gay guy, he was not a “girlfriend.”
    “If I’m going to be dealing with Odell when he’s in this kind of mood,” he said by way of accepting my offer of a drink.
    Zippi signaled to me. She told me that that was enough. Big Dash could barely stand as it was. I mustn’t treat him anymore. They were taking care of him, keeping him up to a certain amount of alcohol per day, but no more.
    “Oh no, she’s not talking about my business tonight,” Big Dash pleaded with the ceiling just as we both turned to look at him.
    I thought that Zippi was also looking out for me, letting me know that I didn’t have to keep up the grandiose level of generosity. It was okay for The Party to be over. I was permanent, a regular, not leaving on a jet plane. But more than anything, she wanted Big Dash to be able to walk, because she spoke to Odell through him for much of the night. To bring lemons, to get the glasses their one busboy forgot. A mediator was supposed to prevent either one of them from misreading the tone of the other, a thing they never did by themselves, whether in English or German, as far as I could tell.
    “You’ve burned your hand.”
    “Well, you know my hand. It’s like a wall.”
    And yet at some point in the evening, because of the game of Chinese whispers they played through Big Dash, one or the other would explode.
    Zippi avoided my questions about how they met, saying only that they had both been with other people and it was complicated. They’d been together eleven years. I couldn’t tell how old she was. I suspected she was probably older than Odell, who had not been sent back to Nam because of his skill with engines,