Black Deutschland (8 page)

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 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, someone whispered. He remained on the base in Germany. They said Zippi had broken with her mother over her black lover. The one time I pretended to be so drunk I could ask about the gossip, she hunched her shoulders and swiped at her adorable black bangs, as if to say, “You know how it is.”

She paid me the compliment of speaking to me in cryptic expressions, half phrases, sighs, as if I, too, understood the helplessness of her kind of love for Odell, that hip-film total surrender to his animal presence that her bearing told me she experienced daily, a submission, a sexual drowning that was the secret of existence. I was going to be excluded from the mystery for the rest of my life, AIDS promised.

“That son of a bitch owes me one hundred and twenty marks. He promised,” Big Dash complained suddenly into his fists on the bar.

“The amount of farting that must go on in your brain,” someone, a “brother,” yelled at him after a while.

Everyone was performing, because of the new element I’d introduced, so I thought. Manfred wanted to sit at the bar and the whole joint scoped him, so I imagined, talking to Bags about something called
foti seng
that elephants ate.

Bags said that for years he didn’t know fresh asparagus and didn’t know that eating asparagus made your urine smell. He thought the urinal where he was standing needed cleaning or that his towels were going moldy. He didn’t know until his woman at the time told him. He said he thought she would save him, but she was too busy removing the asbestos in buildings that went up in the city during the construction boom to have any love left over for him.

“Six hundred and thirteen ways to go nuts,” Big Dash said, arms raised in exhortation of the bottles behind the bar. “Vectors of existence,” he pronounced, hissing like a black preacher.

Bags went over to investigate a possible customer, and Big Dash rolled along the bar in our direction, stopping far from Odell, who usually stayed where he could also keep an eye on the kitchen door. The ChiChi’s snack menu was erratic, even with a microwave back there.

“Why don’t you walk on my back for a good half an hour.” Big Dash’s breath could have stopped a dog race.

“Okay, pal.” Burt Lancaster stuck his nose into his tall glass.

“No, tread on me. For real.”

I’d wanted to show Zippi what complicated was; I’d wanted to show off Manfred, and Cello’s end-of-the-week business trip to Zurich removed her as a threat to my playacting. Dram was more than happy for Manfred to be mine. They got on well because of their leftist pasts and their consequent mistrust of the left. The nanny from Kent made bangers and mash of the most elegant sort. Dram didn’t go back to the office, but then Cello had called to say good night to the children later than expected.

One of Dram’s husky sisters had set up a Ping-Pong table in the smaller salon. After the nanny and then Dram had left us, Manfred and I played. The to-and-fro with him eased me into a light-footed condition he moved to end quickly, gently. He simply laid his paddle aside and suggested we head toward his pub in Schöneberg. I proposed the ChiChi instead, one of those crazy places that gave rise to the very Berlin expression Big Fun.

He turned down his sleeves before we headed inside. Once acclimated to the smoky dark, he’d been powerfully relieved—it was clear—to find himself in a sort of black vets’ bar and not the auntie bar he’d braced himself for. His formal manner toward Zippi was his way of saying that he could make himself at home among my black brethren.

Odell’s jazz tape got him going in a near monologue about Dexter Gordon in Denmark. Sometimes there was more English speaking going on in the ChiChi than German. We didn’t often get to hear how really fluent Odell was. He rewound the tape so that they could go over this or that fine point. Manfred said he’d have to go because he had to get his car home. But one of Bags’s customers sent him a U.S. Army–style boilermaker.

Manfred rolled a cigarette, dropped the shot glass in the beer, and took his boilermaker around Big Dash’s ass. He was down at Odell’s end of the bar, with Dexter Gordon, and in a flash of her scarf Bags’s German customer joined them. Zippi made me another coffee. Their coffeemaker was like a miniature vending machine. A button caused the milk to pour into the cup with the coffee. I lit a cigarette and gave Zippi a look that said things were complicated. But her look as she placed the saucer on the bar and rested her hands on either side of it said that actually things weren’t that complicated.

Sure enough, Manfred bowed to Zippi and gave my neck a massage with one paw. All of Bags’s cheaply dressed but attractive customer swayed as Manfred held the door for her and her scarf and saluted Odell once more.

Zippi marched down to Odell’s end of the bar and had words with him. He took his time changing the music and taking over down by her end. As he came toward the cash register, I moved to the other side of the bar in the opposite direction and followed Zippi through the door to the kitchen, where she was walking toward the spliff Bags and the busboy were sharing. She held it out to me and I drew in the smoke.

*   *   *

Manfred pressed my left hand flat between his hands and said that I had a Balzac thing going with coffee. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know Balzac had died of caffeine poisoning. I didn’t know that Balzac believed in ghosts. I was never going to know how fat it was, but to sit with him, to receive Manfred’s thoughts, to be impressed by his expressiveness made me happy. I didn’t know that Balzac was masturbating under the cloak in Rodin’s statue.

He told me of the best date he’d ever had. A girl who’d torn off his clothes made him drive from Greenwich Village to L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. They stopped in New Hampshire to buy booze. She just stuck her hands down his pants and they were off. They did it five times their first time. He loved her, but she was bulimic, and he could not get along with her mother. Manfred was both touched and embarrassed that I cried.

Yet I no longer accepted rides in his Deux Chevaux from the Lessingsdorf site, his yellow hard hat flung onto the back seat with the mess of his life. All roads he took led to his pub in Schöneberg. Instead, I had those soulful walks at last, in the brisk late autumn air, the waning light turning even nearby figures into silhouettes. I went into the Tiergarten, in a way that I would not have dared to enter Chicago’s Midway at the same hour. I emerged at the Great Star, Der Grosser Stern, a large traffic circle around a several-story monument finished with cannons captured from the French after the fall of Sedan in 1872. I took the long way around and dived back into the landscape of wet branches in the evening streetlights.

I ignored the boys not giving me a second look and made my way to the workshop, a forgotten encampment, with so many inside the Nissen huts unsure of what to do next, how to proceed. Women ran Rosen-Montag’s life until he broke out for however long he chose to, reminding them whose court it was. When he was away, and had refused to allow his wife to accompany him, his wife was impossible, sick with rage at the staff in the huts, sick with rage toward the contractors at the different sites, and sick with the unexpressed. Manfred had heard that three firms of builders were about to be dismissed. Everyone was staying out of everyone else’s way, it felt like to me, as though not to be noticed was a way to keep your job.

But I came on stronger than ever. I swaggered. Rosen-Montag’s wife even sent me to brief American journalists in her place. I requested Manfred specifically. He was acute about Rosen-Montag’s models. I didn’t let it get to me that I couldn’t introduce him to the anxious women around the huts; they’d been on the project far longer than I had. Yes, we know each other, a pretty girl would say, in German all of a sudden, with nothing further to add, she smiling, Manfred smiling, both looking at me and not at each other.

From the workshop huts I walked south, out of my way, in order then to go west along the Landwehr Canal. It was a long way to Europa Center and the ChiChi from there, but I always got to where I was going. The ChiChi was my café, my Dôme, my Deux Magots, my Blaue Reiter hangout.

I committed myself anew to the warrior architect who’d brought me back to Berlin. I believed that my articles helped protect him. I compared Rosen-Montag’s architecture to the filmmaking process. I said his few buildings that had been realized and his planned ones that we knew about were scripted, crafted, languorous and deliberate, casual and controlled, and I dared anyone to ask what that meant. Each building was a self-portrait, I said for no reason whatsoever, intimate, personal, and I concluded with something about his having achieved an organic pace in the development of his ideas since he was the first non-Japanese to win the coveted Hotta Prize in 1970, which launched his international career. I wrote seated at the bar, across from Zippi’s cash register and the coffee machine.