Free Slumberland by Paul Beatty

brownish-red diarrhea spewing from his watercolor butt like lava. In another section of the painting the word power was underlined by a veiny, rock-hard penis attached to a well-muscled torso whose owner, apparently, no longer suffered from erectile dysfunction.
    I sat at the bar and introduced myself to the bartender as the new jukebox sommelier. Doris shook my hand, poured me a scotch the size of which you’d find only in a John Ford western, and told me that the owner, Thomas Femmerling, wasn’t sure when to expect me, but would be happy to see me when he got back from the Canary Islands.
    â€œIf he has to listen to ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ one more time . . .”
    There was no mistaking that wonderfully alluring husky voice. Doris was the same woman who answered the phone when I first placed that long-distance call to the Slumberland.
    I took out the envelope the chicken-fucking song came in and asked if she knew anything about it; maybe the writing was familiar.
    Doris examined it and beckoned me to look at the postmark.
    â€œThis was mailed from
East
Berlin.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œAn East German can’t just mail a package to America. That’s high treason. Whoever mailed it probably works for the government or the Stasi. What was in the envelope?”
    â€œA videotape of a man having sex with a chicken.”
    â€œThat’s very German,” she said.
    I’d soon come to learn that to a German, anything involving sexual perversion, punctuality, obsessive-compulsiveness, and oblique references to the deep-rooted national malaise was “very German.” Of course, for me it wasn’t these concepts or behaviors that were very German, but rather it was the reflex to characterize such things as “very German” that was very German.
    I asked Doris if she knew Charles Stone. She shrugged and asked me to describe him. I got out, “Black . . . musician . . . older gentleman,” before I realized I was describing half the bar’s clientele, and that I didn’t even know what the Schwa looked like.
    Stone wasn’t a self-promoter; he never appeared on his album covers, gave interviews, or posed for publicity head shots.
    Doris licked a fingertip and lifted a tiny grain of coal-black detritus from my glass.
    â€œHey, don’t worry,” she said, rolling the almost-microscopic piece of dreck between her fingers. “If he’s a black man, he’ll come through here sooner or later. They all do. Look at you.”
    For a second I panicked. What if he isn’t black, I thought. Not that it mattered; in fact, my respect for Wolfman Jack, Johnny Otis, and 3rd Bass’s Pete Nice and MC Serch increased when I found out they were white. A part of me hoped the Schwa waswhite; maybe then he’d be more congenial, less embittered than those Slumberland Negroes.
    I spun around on my stool and looked down my broad black nose at those men. There but for the grace of my record collection go I, I thought to myself.
    This was Berlin before the Wall came down. State-supported hedonism. Every one-night stand a propaganda poster for democratic freedom and third-world empowerment. In my mind I made a vow that I’d never be like those sex warriors who subsisted only on their exoticness. These men of the diaspora who smiled meekly while libertine frauleins debated as to who was the “true black”: the haughty African with his tribal scars, gender chauvinism, and piercing eyes, or the cocksure black American, he of the emotional scars, political chauvinism, and physical grace. This was a time when if a white women saw a black man she wanted, she’d step to him and dangle her car keys in his face. The customary response on the part of the buck was to take those keys in hand and drive her home.
    Next to me a middle-aged
Grossmutter
jabbed her tongue down the throat of a handsome African half her age and twice her height. I made my “I smell