Black Deutschland (14 page)

*   *   *

I was little. I heard Mom telling Dad about it. He had not gone with her to the airport to welcome home Uncle Ralston and Ralston Jr., Dad’s sedated and unsteady best friend. Dad said he’d gone to the United Center and followed what Chicago’s new team had accomplished in the Western Division just so he could have something to say to him.

The trip back from Africa had done more than just exhaust Uncle Ralston. Rest was not the answer, from the look of him, Mom was saying. There was that tone in her voice that I would come to know well, a tone that said how deeply engaged in the problem of this human being she was—not in this human being’s problems, but in the problem that this individual’s life represented, what this particular life meant. In this instance, the long trip back from Africa in the company of his mad son had taken something out of Uncle Ralston that would never be put back.

Mom meant something different from the utter fatigue she and Dad experienced after getting back from our turn at the lake cabin nobody loved or the forgiveness she meted out after that last attempt to take the five of us children somewhere cultural. As with everything I overheard as a child, I didn’t understand until much later what I had managed not to forget of what came my way. I never thought of Uncle Ralston as walking around with a hole, but then one day he’d come down to the editorial room to see if anybody was there, and finding only me—which was the same in his view as no one being there—he’d gone back up to his office. The sun went right through him and hit the floor. I remembered what Mom had said about the part of him that would never be put back.

To have met Mrs. Williams’s grandson rekindled in me that panic I was ashamed of. But I was crawling all over myself. I decided to fish in the virus-free Mattachine generation. I took an action, as they say in AA. I could tell that the grizzly guy in the meeting at the Episcopal church liked me. Twenty years my senior, he saved a seat for me. I let him get me water, too. I wasn’t interested in what he said in the meetings, but he’d been stationed at an ordnance ammunitions depot near Bamberg in the early 1960s and had spent some time around the university in Erlangen.

“Segregation was a way of life. Something we expected,” he said over his black coffee. “Major Schuler was fairly decent,” he continued after a while in his blown-fuse drawl. “Fräuleins who only associated with whites avoided you.” I had asked him what Germany had been like for him. He stopped talking again. The ease of the silences was a pleasant surprise.

Another surprise about this older man was that he lived so far out. I found a pay phone. Dad didn’t know what to say. “A friend from the meeting…” They’d heard so many of my concoctions. They couldn’t help it, the only place they trusted me to be safe was under their roof, in front of their eyes. In the beginning, they took my interest in Berlin as an extension of a school project—and Cello was there. But then they appeared to understand when I spoke about the need to start over. I didn’t talk about it as getting away. I suppose I didn’t want to know what they really thought of it.

He breathed heavily into his collar as he drove. He took me to a short-stay motel out in Aurora. You can’t offer anyone anything, so you get to it. He hadn’t had it in a while either. His sperm was very warm, as if his scrotum had a thermostat. He’d been sober eight years, he said again, and was separated from his wife, not divorced. I wouldn’t let him drive me home. I took the West-Northwest back downtown. I wouldn’t give him Mom and Dad’s number.

He’d taken classes somewhere when he was stationed over there, but he was mysterious about Erlangen, after all. “Asians coming from Korea and Vietnam associated with you.” He brought me a present, an old but pristine textbook,
A First German Course for Science Students
. He translated: “Air is a body. The bottle looks empty, but it is full of air.” He snapped the book shut and handed it to me. I thought of the way he made the condom snap when he got up and pulled it from his dick. I agreed to go back to the lopsided motel. “A friend from the meeting…”

He tried to sell me on Bebop. Charlie Parker gave me an anxiety attack. I returned his precious tapes to him. He presented me with a copy of Harvey W. Zorbaugh’s
The Gold Coast and the Slum
. It was slightly bowed. He’d underlined “A nondescript community may be interesting, of course, but it will not be restful and will not be satisfying merely as an object of contemplation.” I said that my mother had the book in her sociology shelves.

I found it impossible to think. He could make the chewing gum between his corner teeth snap and crackle. Or click like fingernail clippers. He’d quit smoking eight years ago, when he went off painkillers for the last time. He said I looked healthy. He wanted to phone me from his job at UPS, though he couldn’t tell his AA sponsor about us yet. He said I needed a sponsor. He wouldn’t kiss me. Because of him, I wasn’t the desperate size queen I had been, but I stopped going to the Episcopal church meeting. He had grandchildren photos in his wallet. My parents didn’t.

*   *   *

“Now we must put our finer feelings to bed as the great task of sleep devolves upon us,” Dad laughed on the stairs.

“Sleep for America,” I heard Mom say.

In the book of my heart, pages keep falling out, many of them marked “Mom and Dad.”

*   *   *

Manfred said again he was sorry he’d not answered my letter. I phoned rather than not hear from him. I told him that what was considered cold in Berlin was nothing. He’d had winters in Boston, which were, indeed, nothing compared to one winter he failed to last out in Minnesota, he reminded me.

*   *   *

Line 1, the subway from Zoo Station to Kreuzberg—then the Turkish quarter close to the Wall—left its tunnel and became an elevated train by the time it reached Hallesches Tor, more Isherwood territory, but nothing like it had been before the war, given how much of it had been bombed and rebuilt. Sometimes in Berlin, at the right time of day, the bleak apartment towers that I could see from the train at the raised platform of Hallesches Tor would make me think of Chicago, that dog growling at me as I walked along but unable to get at me through the fence.

Then one morning when the cold was letting up and I had a briefcase full of summonses to hit people with, it was my being on the El that made me remember Line 1. I began to think of the kebab stands downstairs at Moritzplatz, the next elevated stop. Not far away were the really hip gay clubs, the Kreuzberg I wished I’d gone to with Hayden. He said once that he loved nothing more than that first spring night when everyone in Kreuzberg was out, even grandmothers. He ran up and down Oranienstrasse, from performance cabaret to New Wave club, stopping in between to sit outside with friends at the anarchist cafés or in the squares noisy with Turkish men. He raced from one possible story to another, and fell asleep wherever he was.

As an American in West Berlin, I did not think about the law. I was above it, a camp follower of the occupier. The law was a historical subject—Berlin as the bureaucratic center of crimes against humanity, scene of the Congo Conference, scene of the Wannsee Conference. When I saw someone with white hair, I wanted to accuse: What were you thinking? You’re sitting around the dinner table and your ambition is to overrun France and kill the Jews?

Like Odell, I wanted to live where authority had little interest in black men. Checkpoint Charlie, a border station for Americans between West and East Berlin, a gray arena of mortar passages, electric gates, and tin sheds, was a terrifying place, but back in West Berlin I probably could have got away with petting a policeman on his head. A wave of homesickness came over me, right there on the El, within sight of meatpacking plants, making me wonderfully ill.

FIVE

You tried to stay in Berlin, to hang on to your life there, like greenhorns in the films about riding broncos and steers. You got thrown from time to time, you fell clean off, you slipped and you slid and got pelted by sharp blows as you stumbled back to your corner. It was not the most open of states of mind, and you needed your head to be wide-open.

Nights in West Berlin, the involuntary island, that petri dish of romantic radicalism, were strenuous because they never ended. In the cordoned-off city, it was time that could be manipulated, either stretched or discounted. Space was limited, the square meters were finite, if not all in use, and the broadest thoroughfare had to change its name, dissolve into a park, or turn back on itself. To repeat yourself was a pleasant option.

West Berlin had none of the frantic, last-call activity around four in the morning of major American cities. There was no equivalent to that sinking feeling that came over you in a pub in London when the landlord called, “Time, gentlemen.” The bar stools were not hauled up, the doors not bolted. Nobody was hunting for an obscure after-hours joint or passing the hat for a taxi ride to some heard-of place on the edge. The empty streets were ours; they belonged to the young. That was how we knew we were young. Iggy Pop said that there were no children in Berlin and everybody laughed because his observation revealed what time he got up—after children had gone to bed. They called it the Berlin Effect.

It was the Wall that kept alive Berlin’s fame and pride as a dangerous city. You needed to find a way to get back into the mix of Berlin. It was okay to take time out, to go someplace where you could make fast money or get over a failure of some kind, but if you didn’t come right back, then you risked not getting back at all.

Dietrich sang about still having a suitcase in Berlin for a reason. She had to threaten herself. That suitcase was a saddle, but life was not a rodeo. It was a buffalo scramble. You stampeded, mane stormy, tearing up the ground, bellowing opposition, freedom.

*   *   *

I paid homage to the Mercedes-Benz star and crossed the plaza toward the ChiChi. I’d missed the smog, but I had stored-up, Dad-derived basketball remarks. I used the names Dave Corzine, Michael Jordan, and Scottie Pippen in one sentence; I said the Bulls were at last in sync on offense and defense.

Odell leaned back on the bar. “Listen to Chi-Town.”

“Full of the bull and the woad,” Big Dash said, doing a Hawaiian dance with himself.

Beyond him the miniature Christmas bulbs strung around the walls blinked and twinkled. What a place to worry about acceptance—but the black guys talking to Odell were session musicians who’d been working in Europe for a while now, one of them said the last time I tried to engage him in conversation, two years or more before. They laughed at Big Dash’s jokes, but not at mine. They remembered me drunk. Across from them at a table, two German women I used to get smashed with checked their compacts and called out to Zippi for another round.

Odell’s buddies sometimes avoided newspapers in order to enjoy a game from the States that they were to watch a day or two later. I thought I was talking to guys who might as well have been living in Upper Saxony when it came to being up on the latest in the NBA back in the States. I forgot that they all knew someone with access to AFN. They didn’t want my praise of the communication skills between Chicago’s players. They were also for the Lakers. Expatriates, not chauvinists, they were as interested in the Rugby World Cup as they were in the NBA finals.

My trove of Chicago basketball remarks had little value in the international marketplace of sports. Yet I refused to exit Odell’s orbit. I’d waited for Bags, stepped into the kitchen with him and Zippi, bought him a drink, but I would not get lost. Zippi was back down by her cash register, arms folded. Even barricaded inside the ChiChi, I could feel that a clear spring night in Berlin was about to happen, that the downtown streets were gleaming with what West Berliners considered traffic. Cars had been controversial in the winter because of the smog attack. But now people could breathe again. Working mothers were stopping at the butcher’s; divorced men were hurrying home to telescopes; lights in big apartments were going on.

I’d missed it, not shared in a Berlin winter of hardship, the high-pressure system of Central Europe. Odell’s guys drew closer together and left the rest of the bar out. The music got a little louder. More German women entered, staff of some kind from a nearby discount department store, ChiChi regulars getting their weekend binge going a day early. I waited until no one could hear me. I asked Bags if I was talking to a new daddy.

He said the woman he lived with didn’t care that he’d got another woman pregnant so long as he stayed where he was, with her. He had a son and daughter back in the States, he said. They were teenagers. Where they lived people had only one reason to want a handgun. “A motherfucking rifle won’t motherfucking fit in your glove compartment.” He pressed his nozzle of fingers against my temple.

*   *   *

To continue the celebration of the second anniversary of my not having had a glass of white wine, I was prepared to burn off more of what I’d got from Bags. Manfred put my glass of water before me and pointed at the little rectangle of hashish I’d unwrapped.

“Irma is against stuff,” he said in German.

I put it away. “Here progress has come to die,” I repeated, in German.

If Venice was a museum of the Renaissance, then Berlin was the museum of Modernism. “
Na, ja, Mensch
,” Manfred finished.

I was familiar with his rap and enjoyed the feeling as I listened to him that I could comprehend a complex argument in another language. Manfred once took me down to Free University to sit in on a lecture given by Klaus Heinrich, a philosopher and a cult figure among students in West Berlin. After
der Herr Professor
said good afternoon in German, I understood not a single word of what he went on to say for over an hour. I didn’t even hear conjunctions—and, or—I was so stunned by the isolation my ignorance had pitched me into.

After I left for Chicago, Manfred carried my books down to his storage cubicle in the cellar. There were various plants around his apartment, signs of the blonde oncologist’s presence in his life. I took the first opportunity to get out of their way. Her greeting when I got back had been warm, but clearly Manfred was under orders to let me make my own arrangements for dinner. He offered to take me with him in the mornings and bring me back to Schöneberg in the evenings and that was going to be enough.