The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

 

 

 

1. GRAYSCALE

This life is inconceivably beautiful. It is a life of the mind. It is always late summer, the blacks are inky-rich, the whites are milky singularities, the grayscale between is perfectly-judged. Satchmo, an immolated saint, has burned clear, finally, of all kitsch and his rehabilitation proves that we are capable of anything.

T. and I are standing as far apart as two Bohemians can, while still holding hands, looking at different paintings, grunting or sighing our assessments, our cool contentments or stern critiques, protected by the gallerist’s approving leer. The gallerist is a friend; she lowers the volume of the background music to afford us whispers. The city lowers its volume to afford us whispers. The ability to whisper is a function of IQ., or so I have read. T.’s whispers are suggestive and wet as little berries hung ripe on the air. She is taller than I. For her, the world will always be new. 

-This is going to be great, tonight, at Bleeker Street, I say, pulling her close. She smells of everything fresh and healthy and young. Bertolucci’s first major statement in years, when it came out. A scandal. We have to get there early. 

-What’s it about again?  

-Existentialism.  Brando.  X-rated. 

-X-rated? How will I get in? If they card me I’m dead. 

-Think of it like Nick and Nora, I say, it’ll be an adventure and squeeze a muscular handful of her incredible ass through denim as soft as old money. She can’t understand why I prefer her to dress this way and she never will, because she’ll always be seventeen, just as I’ll always be forty two, older but not old, wise to life but not a fossil of cynicism and vigorously sex-possessed but not scary. I light a cigarette and touch it to my lips and sip it like ghostly grey wine through a straw, knowing it will never hurt me. Her bluejeans and sneakers and white dress shirt, tail out. And that striped t-shirt she sometimes wears, Seberg to my American Belmondo. I confess we own berets. I will teach her to smoke my cigars. 

We gaze on a minor Warhol with affectionate contempt.

What is that melody?

It seems like days since last we’ve made love, but it’s only been minutes. An hour. She rode me in a corner of my loft beneath an Arbus. We heard a distant gunshot through an open window so like the sound effect from a radio drama of the ‘forties that we laughed and took a break and switched positions. A joke about Bridge. But the second position was more intense. No laughing. Just gunshots. 

What is that melody? 

Even crime transcends its dictionary definition to function as a compositional element, a narrative texture, in the masterpiece of this island. Rape and murder are the black that contrasts the white of witty banter; they are not foregrounded, they are anecdotal; no one we know has been touched or threatened by this kind of pain or grief or life-altering inconvenience. They merely tell stories about it. Something you watch out for, distracted by main events, like hornets in autumn on the cape. It’s the colorful nonsense of the uneducated poor, as distant as whatever music they listen to (neither Gershwin nor Schubert). 

We both suddenly remember and hum the rest of the tune together, accompanying the scratchy, fifty-year-old recording the gallerist has turned up again as we nod our smiled goodbyes and back through the glass into the vibrant sheen of the Sunday-dappled sidewalk. Looks like rain, later. An aesthetically-perfect thunderstorm. 

Body and Soul. 

*** 

Over dinner at our favorite bistro, Y. and I wallow in the almost obscene luxury of complaining about our copious lives. It’s an old script. A litany. A call-and-response in which we take our tacit comfort. Y.’s job is too good (he wishes he were a starving artist) and I worry out loud about having a seventeen-year-old lover who looks like a model, is obsequious to the point of being a fuckable housepet and boasts a lineage that intimidates every doorman in this impossible-to-intimidate town. My brow is knitted as I enumerate, again, every relevant superlative over the down-to-earth pizza we can share without needing to eye its last slice awkwardly with angst or regret. We usually simply leave the last slice untouched; a sacrifice to our casual Gods. The background chatter is reassuringly lively. Yet not too.  

-She’s seventeen, I say, with a gesture more French than Rabbinical, though there is something vaguely and indefinably Jewish about the depth and pessimism of even my most light-hearted banter and there is something cozy in that; the ethnic weft; the white-but-not-too-ness. Also: it’s a devastatingly sexy contrast to the über-Wasp (Malevitch?) whiteness of my to-die-for lover, who’s so tomboyish, when I think about it, that she verges on being my catamite. I often fantasize about sodomy; the other kind. I touch the cool crook of Y.’s short-sleeved arm conversationally and say, with a Groucho Marks cadence, have I mentioned already she was a virgin when I first had Biblical knowledge of her? At the age of sixteen? In a hansom cab on Thanksgiving? 

Y. counters with a story. I’m reminded of Borges but don’t say so and don’t know why. Story as follows. 

A well-known director, otherwise associated with audience-pleasing romantic comedies, and known to write his own scripts, has an idea for a science fiction film, something dystopian, very dark, Owellian in the sense that a perpetual foreign war is described and slogans are everywhere and uniformed agents with unspecified powers keep the people in check. Dissent is not tolerated. Intellectuals sell-out, civilians disappear, the technology has reached a black-box level of godly near-magic that renders the regime invincible. A literal thousand-year-Reich is implied but never stated. The technology is both a giant’s oppressive fist and a drug-like distraction capable of soul-raping wonders. This is the scenario described. As I say: very dark. Bleak. Almost too dark to contemplate, but the well-known director, tired of being known for light fare, believes that this film will establish him as an artist of the first rank, up there with Welles. He throws himself into the project, despite his other commitments (the post-production of one romantic comedy and the pre-production of its follow-up), giving every extra moment; every gap of breathing-space in the continuum of his success-hijacked existence; to the conceptualization of this dark, depressing script. 

But these prior commitments are endless; money has to be made. Time passes. Months become years, then decades, as the dystopian project (working title: 2002) fades in the intensity of its claim on his actual working time, but never frees his mind. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about it, until the day he suddenly realizes that thirty years have gone by and the scenario of the film he was never able to realize has come horribly true. That is, the hellish dystopia is Now and no one can escape it by simply walking out of a movie theater. 

*** 

The cab ride home from the movie is wordless. That’s the difference between great art and mere entertainment: great art shuts you up. It’s a short ride but a long silence. I can read T.’s thoughts. Easy as perusing a book in a rack near the cashier in a shop at the Airport. 

I had forgotten, of course, that the movie is more than existentialist sex in lower-strata Paris. E.g., I’d remembered the butter scene but not the scene with the open casket; I’d remembered the shaving sequence but not the eponymous tango. T. and I were kissing passionately, already, through the opening credits, and then we weren’t and then we weren’t even holding hands. Agnès Varda’s Camus cribs. 

I’m thinking all this, and about Y.’s dinner story, while T. thinks only of the Jean-Pierre Léaud character, the single (hapless) innocent in the film. The hack is a regular Joe who can’t take his eyes off of T. in the rearview and I can read his little thoughts, too. In his mind, there’s nothing wrong with this morose little girl that his blue collar expertise in bed couldn’t cure by bringing her down a peg. By opening her to the smell of her own prejudices. The musk of her own prejudices. Barbieri’s sepiatone soundtrack invades the grayscale of my beautiful Gershwin thoughts; Barbieri’s soundtrack and Schneider’s bosomy tits. Should we have seen the Fellini instead? 

Was Brando cheated, ironically, out of that phallic Oscar that so looks like a self he once was? 

A pothole jolts me back to the actual. This borough after hours is a reflection of pearls in a flute of black water from the Lethe. Or the Styx? Anyway, every morning, all is forgiven as the slate is wiped clean; memories are chalk dust. I lean close to T. and whisper, Do you trust me? 

-Of course. 

-Play along. 

I say to the driver, She’s something, isn’t she? 

-Pardon? You talking to me?

-My date. I can see that you like her. 

He laughs and says nothing. I press further.

-Don’t think I have a problem with that, because I don’t. 

-Oh yeah? 

-Yes. Are you married? 

-Who isn’t? 

-How long? 

-The usual. 

-Any kids? 

-Not any more. What about you two? He winks in the mirror at T. 

-You love your wife?

-Why not? 

-How would you like to spend the night with my date here? 

The quality of his attention is instantly altered. His eyes are off  T. and dead on me, half-hidden and wary in the mirror’s black shine. 

-Funny, you don’t look like a pimp.  

-We’re not talking about a sum of money. 

-What are we talking about? 

-An experiment. A game. 

-Yeah? 

-You get my date and I get your wife. Six hours. Hotel of your choice. Tonight. 

-And what does she think of all this?

-She thinks what I tell her to think. 

-You look like a college professor but you talk like a what. I don’t know. 

-Are you interested or not? 

-I’m interested in everything. Oil crisis. The Knicks. That silly prick Carter, what he’s doing to this country, people say bring back Nixon. Nixon was a crook you could trust. Rich Arabs and uppity blacks. That Patty Hearst twat. I read the papers, I watch the evening news when I’m home. You think I’m uninformed? 

I squeeze T.’s hand and lean in close again and say, You see? It’s all just talk. It was just a movie. This is what real guys are like, afraid of their sexual shadows. Safe as milk. Never ever forget that Jean-Pierre Lèaud and Marlon Brando are just actors, but this is real life and it’s without consequences. Cinema is the art of the worst-case scenario and I can feel her relax into the revelation; the literal muscles involved. I congratulate myself on saving the evening. I tip the cabbie so big, in the end, it probably insults him. I want him to be insulted: to admit that is liberating. 

There is no sex tonight. We only murmur and spoon. 

Just to be safe. 

*** 

Y. and I stroll to the squash courts on a brilliant-yet-sunless Monday morning. A warm silver sky; the inhumanly reflective retina of a deity too close to distinguish. We both know what we will say before we say it, Y. and I. And so we say it, as we have and ever shall, without pleasure, but with the blank serenity that taunts free will with the brilliance of a nova-hot projector bulb, melting through time like a sign. 

-Jew eat? 

-No, Jew?

 

2.  The Red Taxi 

Leaving the Happy Ours at about four in the morning in an oblique drizzle with the collar of his jacket pulled tight around his throat, Salter is lucky to flag down a taxi about two blocks from the club. Soaking wet and shivery as he slips in the taxi, he is pleasantly aware of the voluptuous possibility of catching a cold, that sweet vision of being bundled in a soft warm bed in a dry warm flat and deserving lots of tender pity. But his mother is far away and his Nigerian wife has never been a bountiful source of tender pity. The taxi is on its way to rushing someplace before Salter even has a chance to specify where. The driver is of such an eccentric appearance that if it weren’t for the weather, Salter would’ve waved the red taxi on. 

The black vinyl streets in the downpour and the runners of light in the vinyl which the taxi chases like a red cat. The back of the driver’s massive bald head on which has been tattooed a barcode. The driver is wearing black goggles that no normal human could use in any situation other than sleeping or staring at the corona of a solar eclipse and he has tiny tuliping ears like a pig’s. He reaches for a vintage aviator’s cap on the seat beside him and slaps it on, flaps down, hiding his ears and tattoo. A blunt row of darkling choppers in the rearview as he scratches his neck and tilts his head to facilitate the scratching. 

The driver switches on the radio: from Bob Marley to NWA to Gary Numan in the space of ten minutes. Gary Numan suits Berlin’s sluiced nightscape better than Marley or NWA or anything else that Salter can imagine. Listening to Gary Numan in a taxi late at night in Berlin in the fall in a downpour is as good as Sunday morning fucking on a plump Lebanese virgin to Johnny Mathis or making a morning-after omelette for a spacey Japanese single mother to Ramsey Lewis covering Vince Guaraldi’s Cast Your Fate to the Wind. This is exactly what music is there for: to heighten reality’s value. Salter is cold and wet but inspired. He asks the driver in his halting German to crank up the heat and the driver complies without a word. 

Salter leans back on the seat of the taxi and closes his eyes and dwells on the impossibilty of the fact that fifteen years has gone by since the night he was first driven into town from Tegel airport, fresh out of America, possessed by a mutt emotion blending fear and excitement and giving off the stupid stink of his provincial manners. The taxi radio is now playing What Becomes of the Broken Hearted by Jimmy Ruffin and it is all Salter can do to prevent himself from crying all over this Russian’s taxi at four in the morning. But not with grief. It’s just the inherent drama of a life and to think he’s nearly lived a whole life already and the very thought of it moves him. Outside, too, the deluge sways and twists melodramatically like silver beaded curtains under the dripping streetlights of Friedrichstrasse, as though the weather too is moved by its own long story; the eons it has already seen, eons of raging against and then soothing the dumb face of the earth, futile as the activity may be. 

“Hey, wake up,” rumbles the taxi driver. “Is illegal for you to snore here.” 

They are gliding down the Strasse des 17. Juni in the red Merc taxi and the hookers burn brighter than roadwork flares in top-heavy spandex… they are silver or blue or magenta foil wrapping on soft bulging chocolates for Easter. Salter has a theory that modern sexual presentation taps into food cravings more than anything else… a glistening tan cleavage as seen in so many ads selling so many products is more than anything reminiscent of the sweating golden Thanksgiving Turkey or the greasy Christmas goose, not to mention the ripe red fruit of sugary lips… because of subliminal yearnings towards the modern taboo of cannibalism. Maybe not. The hookers pose on platform boots and the black wind tousles their umbrella-protected Victorian hair as their umbrellas twirl in the rain. They flare like a parade of new appliances in the taxi’s headlights. Some of them are movie-star beautiful… one after another Aryan goddess every fifty meters along the median of the long approach to the Brandenburg Gate. Some kind of inverted Nazi spectacle. The driver eyes Salter in the rearview and says, with what sounds like a Russian accent, in the Vodka-hardened octave of a bear, “Amerikaner?” 

Salter gets out his talisman… his passport… and waves it, for proof. He’s been mistaken for a Cuban, Pakistani, Brazilian, Moroccan, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, black Sicilian and some or another kind of African at various times in the past and is used to being challenged on the matter of his identity. “Born in Chicago, man.” 

The driver thumbs-up in the rearview. “Read my lips! It’s the real thing!” 

“Huh?” 

“I am American also!” 

“Really.” 

The driver bangs his breastbone with his knuckles. “In here.” 

“Ah.” 

“Soul brother,” says the driver, trying something out on Salter. 

Salter chuckles. The driver scratches his neck on the same red harried patch. 

“Uncle Tom.” The driver frowns speculatively into the mirror. “Uncle Tom is good or bad?” 

“Bad.” 

“Bad?” The driver indulges in a moment of skeptical reflection. “Okay okay,” he changes the subject, “Are you looking for something, maybe? Drugs? Leather pants? Persian Carpets? Sluts?” 

“No thanks.” 

“No? Soul brother needs sluts… marvelous sluts.” The driver jerks his head at a spectacular rain-whipped Circe with impossible legs and ship-prow tits and big flat eyes like roadkill coming up fast in the left corner of the windshield. They douse her in a plume of rain and a gust inverts her white umbrella. “Not like German bitch.” He makes a naughty-naughty finger in the rearview mirror. “Is Thai.”

“From Thailand?”

“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old!”

“Jesus.” 

“Don’t ask don’t tell.” 

“Sorry.” 

“Marvelous Thai sluts! Before twenty five they are granny.” He slaps the steering wheel for emphasis. “At twenty seven marry lonely citizen of E.U. and retire.” He laughs like a motor starting. “Never screw again. Only shop. Do you know famous book by great Russian writer about little girl who screws old man?” 

“No.”

“Is like that.”  

“I don’t read much.” 

“Is too bad. Good book.” 

Salter shrugs. 

“No?” 

“No.” 

Pavel makes an a-okay with his fat thumb and short fingers and shows his twilight teeth. 

“Soul brother.” 

They listen to Johnny Cash singing Ring of Fire as the taxi sails under the massive stone arch of the Charlottenburger Tor which straddles the boulevard. A minor landmark between the Brandenburg Gate behind them and the unremarkable fountain at the center of the roundabout at Ernst Reuter Platz ahead, the floodlit arch is being renovated and is covered in a gargantuan tarp on which is printed a retouched photo of the arch itself looking better than it ever did or could. Salter is finally feeling warm and it’s so good to feel warm… what else does anyone need, besides food, really? Warmth and food. Exactly what they probably had going for them in Africa for a few millions years… why bother with innovation when you have warmth and food and plenty of pussy? What else would Salter need but a leopard skin toga and a cozy grass-roofed mud-walled hut and a cow or two, a couple of pigs and a girl. The driver turns down the radio. They are about to make a left on Bismarckstrasse and the turn signal is going thek…thek…thek…

“America!” 

“Yes?” 

“My mother is good woman.” 

“Congratulations.”

“My father is good man!” 

“I hear you.” 

“Five brothers. Two sisters.” He held up an open hand for the first numerical value and a peace sign for the second. “Happy family.”

“Big family.” 

“Small family is no family. How many?”

“Me?” 

“Yes, America, soul brother… how many sisters?” 

“None.” 

“How many brothers?” 

“None.”

 The driver is shaking his head. 

Salter says, “No brothers, no sisters, no father… just a mother.”

“Good woman?”

“My mother is a very good woman.” 

“Cooks for you. Cleans for you. Feeds cat.” 

“No. She… uh… lives far away. Very far. Chicago. I haven’t seen her in…” And here Salter finds himself feeling too guilty and embarrassed to say what he’s about to say but then he thinks why the fuck do I care what some refugee taxi driver thinks? So Salter watches the driver’s face in the rearview closely as he says, “I haven’t seen my mother in fifteen years.” 

In response to which there is a long silence. The driver turns up the radio again as though he’d rather not contemplate the awful information that Salter has inflicted on him. They listen to the end of Ring of Fire and German DJ patter as Walk on the Wild Side fades up when the driver, as if struck anew by inspiration, again turns down the radio. Salter can barely hear a ghostly Lou Reed droning. You’d assume that a Lou Reed isn’t racist. But how would you know? 

“America! You are married?” 

Salter digs in his hip pocket for his wallet and produces a creased photograph of the beautiful African wife. She’s a model: it’s nice being able to say that your wife is a model, though all the apparent information in that sentence is misleading. Retrieving the photo from Pavel, Salter smiles: Sadie was once reading an article in The New Yorker about “Mystery writer” James Elroy and she looked up from the magazine with an expression of utter consternation on her small stunning face saying if they know who he is, how can he be a mystery writer?

“So, what about you?” inquires Salter. The low rumble of the motor of the driver’s laughter kicks in again and revs a little higher. At last he’s found something that he doesn’t have to feel ashamed of being luckier than the American at. No non-American is comfortable in the presence of an American who isn’t better off in something. “Are you a married man?” 

“Da,” he says. “Da! Pavel, too, is married!” He can’t stop laughing. When Salter doesn’t seem to get the joke, Pavel explains. 

“Wife of Pavel is young Thai granny!” 

They are only five or ten minutes from Salter’s flat and he begins to feel that same muted despondency he always feels near the end of a taxi ride home. The rain has let up and there are star-filled black rips in the cloud cover, but, speeding along the opera-house district of Bismarckstrasse, approaching his destination, Salter’s heart sinks like it’s been fumbled down a well.

What Salter likes about the taxi driver is that he’s a Russian who looks and sounds and acts like… a Russian… un-tormented by the ambiguities of identity that have dogged Salter his entire life. It must be fucking wonderful to fit so neatly in your pigeonhole. Downright cozy. A pigeonhole is not only an identifier but a tight-fitting form of shelter, remember. Salter says, “do you believe in God, man?”

Sounding aggrieved, Pavel says, “I think is vacancy for position.” 

“I agree.” 

“Anyone to apply. No experience necessary. Good salary and benefits. Retirement package. Now take application.”

“But who in his right mind would want the job?” 

“Your president of U.S. maybe? America!” 

“What?”

“Pavel shocked. Pavel thinks all soul brothers go church on Sunday, eat chicken, fear big Jesus. No? Is not true?” 

“Not for me it isn’t. I think one religion is pretty much as dumb as the next, if you think about it, but if a black man’s gotta choose, why choose the book that your slave masters forced on you? Give me a Bible and I’ll…” 

Pavel taps the top of his head. “Pavel has philosophy. Will change life. America curious?” 

“Sure.” 

“So what.” 

“What?” 

“Is my philosophy. Two words. So what.” 

“That just about covers everything, doesn’t it?” 

“Da.” 

“E equals MC squared.” 

“So what.” 

“All men are created equal.”

“So what.”

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” 

“So what.” 

“You’re right. It works.” 

“So what. Pavel has told you. So what.” 

Kant Strasse is a narrow commercial boulevard of cheapo grocery stores and buy-on-installment-plan jewelers and knock-off computer shops and all manner of discount, fly-by-night storefronts, almost entirely Russian-owned. It is also dotted discreetly with second story brothels and topless bars with velvet drapes for doorways. The surrounding neighborhood, which is Charlottenburg, was once the richest Bezirk in Berlin, and it’s still in many spots a showcase for 19th century Gründerzeit architectural splendor, cleaner than baroque but no less imposing and sweetly graced with the wedding cake detailing of the noble epoch. Charlottenburg is after all the home of the glorious 18th century Prussian Castle, the Schloss Charlottenburg. But the Allies bombed the dust out of the neighborhood as a morale-buster during the war, targeting the richest streets and the Germans didn’t have the will to restore most of the lost elegance afterwards, even in the breif period during which there was money to do it. Most of that money went towards buying back the dilapidated East from Moscow, final testimony to the entrepreneurial genius of the Communists. Salter watches his corner approach and says, “Don’t stop. Keep driving. Please.” 

“Keep driving? Is joke? Man with beautiful wife doesn’t want go home?” 

“Not yet. Keep driving.” 

Pavel leans forward and the taxi lurches through the red light at Salter’s corner. Up Kant Strasse in the direction of the main train station, the Bahnhof Zoo, and up along a side-street filthy with tourist shops and cheap restaurants (vibrant with colorful pickpockets when the weather is warm) past the tourist-trap/ruin of the Gedächtneskirche, the Allies-bombed gothic church preserved in a skeletal state as a monument to the hazards of fucking with the Allies… through clouds of neon-saturated droplets of rain and the not-quite convincing display of big city lights Berlin has to offer. Salter and Pavel are enjoying Desmond Dekker’s eerily catchy Israelites, making Salter wish it was London and the year 1969 instead. All that innocence. Pavel waits until the fade-out to break the spell, lifting his cap to scratch the barcode tattoo on the back of his smooth fat head.

“America! You are celebrity. Pavel is Oriana Fallacci for Rolling Stone magazines. This is scoop. How long? In Fatherland. How long?” 

“Fifteen years, man.” 

“Fifteen years!” Pavel slaps his side. “Nieren of Pavel are only ten!”

“Nieren? Kidneys. Kidneys?” 

“Da! Die beiden. Both.” 

“Transplant? Transplant.” 

“Da. Why?” 

“Why what?” 

“Why you leave homeland? Religious persecution? Famine? Trouble with crime lord?” 

“That’s a good question. I still don’t know the answer…I just…”

“If you go back ….” Pavel draws his yellow-nailed finger across his neck and grimaces. 

“Huh? Kind of. More like…” 

“Death of soul.” 

Two or more Ausländers together in Germany with nothing else to discuss will very quickly get to the Teuton-bashing, something Salter feels more and more guilty about as time goes on but the more sincerely he resolves never again to give in to the urge the more he finds the powerful tug of its catharsis, so he says, “By the way, I should pay you a compliment, man: I would never talk this much to a German taxi driver.”

“Pavel would never talk this much to German passenger.” 

“That’s why you always see so many Germans talking to themselves… no one else wants to do it.” 

Salter continues, “Man, about three years ago, it was four in the morning and I wanted to cross the street? It was a red light but there were no cars for miles in any direction and it was cold and I was tired and I just wanted to get home, you know, so I crossed the light against the red. Big deal. Only I hadn’t taken two steps across the street when this old Kraut is leaning out of his window in his goddamn pyjamas yelling at me for breaking the laws of the German Federal Republic!” 

Salter says, “One night I’m in this chick’s flat. She invited me over to watch a video. She asks if I want something to drink and I say sure, and she says help yourself. So I go into her kitchen, right? Look in the fridge and find a bottle of Coca Cola. I grab the first clean cup I can find which turns out to be a coffee mug and I pour some Coke in it and join her in the living room, where she gives me a look like I’m seriously fucking insane. Without a word she takes the mug from me, marches right back into the kitchen, finds a glass that says Coke on it, pours the Coke out of the mug into the glass…” 

Pavel and Salter share a good hard laugh at that and then Pavel, lifting his goggles to wipe the tears, says, “America! Want to play game?” 

“Depends on the game.” 

“We make gambling bet.” 

“Okay.”

“If Pavel show you crazy Berlin unbelievable thing, Pavel win one hundred Euro of your cash money. Las Vegas. If Pavel not show crazy thing, taxi ride whole night is kostenlos… free. Okay? Is deal?” 

Salter considers the offer, checks his wallet to make sure he has enough money to play and says, “Deal.” 

“Okay.” 

“Ready.” 

 ”Number one…America knows Der reinrassigen indo-germanischen Bruderschaft des Islam?” 

“Huh? The…Aryan pure race…brotherhood of…Islam?” 

“Da. Nazi Jihad. Mosque in Zehlendorf in woods. Unbelievable.” 

“Never heard of it.” 

“Blue eyes, blond hair, pray on rug to Allah and Allah’s son who is little man with funny mustache. German bitches in chador… headscarves… tall young good looking peoples… is crazy.” 

“Nazi Moslems?” 

“Jewhaters unite.”

“But it’s not so crazy, when you think about it. Germans are always forming strange unions and brotherhoods and committees and things. Gotta be crazier than that to win my hundred, man.” 

“Okay. Mr. America knows 24-Stunden Freikorper Waschsalon?” 

“24 hour nudist… uh… laundromat?” 

“Is in Stieglitz. Lots of crazy old peoples…” 

“Yeah, well, that does sound pretty crazy… but, see… I don’t really…” 

“Okay okay. America has heard of Permanent Party in crazy German’s flat in Kreuzberg?” 

“Yeah, I know that one. It’s a protest, isn’t it?” 

“Crazy German refuse to stop party until current American administration…” 

“I know. People from all over Europe come to it, bring their own drinks, sign a guestbook. Never been there. It’s been going for five straight years now, right? Listen, haven’t you got anything else up your sleeve, Pavel? Something really crazy?” 

“America is black Jew and drive hard bargain. Pavel must think…” 

Salter glances at his watch: in a few minutes he will be forty five years old. “As long as we keep driving…” 

But Pavel slows and stops the taxi in the middle of the street, an unremarkable street in East Berlin. There is a construction site a ways up the block, to the left, over which towers a cloud-penetrating crane. To their immediate right is the side entrance of a red brick structure that could be a hospital or a high school. Set waist-high in the structure’s wall ten paces from its side-entrance is an aluminum drawer or chute-cover, with a handle on it, which resembles very much an over-night depository at a library or a videothek. The taxi is idling. 

“Why are we stopping here, Pavel?” 

“America, may I introduce you to St. Hedwigs Krankenhaus… hospital of Saint Hedwig. Look, soul brother number one. Take peek.” Pavel points to the right at the aluminum depository thingy in the red brick wall. “Is Babyklappe. If girl have baby and don’t want she open little door and in put baby and go home. What a relief! Or maybe go dancing. Disco lights flash inside and nuns come take baby out box. Put in orphanage.” He adds, softly, “Crazy, no?” 

Salter hands Pavel his hundred Euro bill.

 

 

 

 

 

Two things are in fashion in Berlin that year: hookahs and riverside bars. Some riverside bars even feature hookahs. To the list of punny names like Chocolate Bar and Crow Bar and Gold Bar and Bar Nun and even All Holds Bar there was added, that year, a place along the absinthe-colored Spree on the bank of a kink in the Spree’s many twists through the part of Berlin called Kreuzberg. A place called the Zand See Bar. Not far from the indestructible ghost of The Wall.

Five tons of white sand have been imported from somewhere along the Baltic, along with five potted palm trees, none of which look well, and a concrete wet bar as long as a light-aircraft runway, and a Dj platform complete with search light which was once a guard tower, transplanted from one hundred and seventy five meters to the east.

Adjacent to Zand See Bar is a bandshell faced by fifty rows of rusting iron benches still warm with thousands of hours of Soviet march music. The flaking bandshell is called Oompah and a preppy American named Tony Gale owns both Oompah and Zand See Bar along with his rich German partner and boyfriend, Born. There is a warm, shaggy, dirty old breeze blowing. Ambient club tracks dingle and whum on speakers lashed to palms between string straggly Christmas light like sparks in the sky.

“This is not a date,” had said Salter, when Elke opened the door to her flat.

“Okay,” she saluted. “Just please give me one minute to fix myself up for this not date of ours you are too early for.”

Her heat-fluffed cloud of pyrite hair swished as she turned towards the bathroom, leaving Salter in a fog of roses. Her gentleman caller nodded at framed photos on an upright piano at the wall under the heavy curtains over the living room window. He studied a snap of her at eight or nine featuring platinum hair in thick flashes over a dark jacket as she knelt in a camera crew’s floodlight, chipping away at The Wall. Perched beside her in the photo,  rubbing shoulders, was a baldingly long-haired pedophile with a mustache, doing his bit with a bottle opener. Salter did not pay much attention to the pedophile. He was riveted by the beauty of his date at eight or nine.

Her hair was so long that she’d step on it sometimes climbing the ladder to her bed on top of the loft her father built with help from mechanically clever Uncle Heinrich. It took forever to dry at that length after a bath. Money-wasting showers were forbidden. Elke remembers with a shiver of horror how after they moved to the west her pennypinching mother would draw a bath for all four members of the family… first came Papa who would languish in there for an hour reading the paper and then came mama who was always number two after Papa and then came little brother Jörg who was just five or six and came before Elke in everything simply because he was a boy and who she knew for a fact considered it the height of luxury to float under the stream of his own warm urine in the tub (since by his turn the water was relatively cool) and finally, with horror and nausea, came Elke, already a budding woman at twelve who had to lower herself into the filthy family soup of the bathwater. Most times she faked it but her mother caught her once, sitting on the toilet and reading a Gala in a towel instead of stewing in the sedimented room-temperature broth and after that the bathings were supervised…

At the age of fourteen Elke had a little abortion adventure. She’d noticed something while sitting in the waiting room of the West Berlin gynecologist. This was a waiting room so comfortable and pleasant that it was almost an incentive for her to come back for another abortion, the opposite of the Trotskyite bedside manners of the East, where the doctors hoisted their eyebrows at female mistakes and tut-tut-tutted at female weaknesses; female horror of blood and female fear of pain.

She noticed something while sitting there not on the day of the abortion but during one of several consultations she was required to endure before having the fetus evacuated. What she noticed, sitting there in her skinny stonewashed jeans and her mid-metamorphosis- Michael Jackson t-shirt, while glancing up occasionally from a year old copy of Gala… was this: while not all of the unattractive women in the waiting room were there unaccompanied, not a one of the attractive females, whether there for a checkup or prenatal care or a termination, was alone. One bronze-haired, cruel-lipped beauty even showed up with two men, one her approximate age and the other old enough to be the father of either. With his hand on her knife-sharp knee…

Being chronically early, Elke watched the females come and go and she tried to imagine how life might look if she summoned the foolish courage to sneak out of the waiting room and raise the cell-bud instead of terminating it. She observed that the fattest, ugliest females invariably sat in the waiting room clutching badly-used magazines in postures of long-accumulated insult, sad-eyed and wise beyond their looks. The pattern was laughably consistent and Elke laughed, very softly, in fact: a sequence of three or four ponderously pregnant girls with stringy hair and unappetizing skin and inconsequential eyes would shuffle in and quickly find a seat with cringing deference as though ducking into a packed theater twenty minutes late. And next, some lethal blonde newlywed or magazine-haired mistress would breeze in, pulling a male by the ring through his nose, rolling her eyes with boredom.

“Have you been to Tony’s club yet?” called Elke, from the bathroom. “I think it is a trendy place.”

In the back seat of a taxi on the way to Zand See Bar she reached over and rested her hand on the crotch of Salter’s tight white American pants. She told him that one thing she remembered from her childhood before The Wall vanished were the ultraviolet gro-lights you’d see in all the bedroom windows along the quiet streets at night, glowing vivid nutrition on everyone’s treasured pot plants, especially beautiful on snowy nights, the black light spun through falling snow with festive devilishness and that was the first unforeseen disappointment, when her family migrated West (stepping carefully over the imagined bodies of all those shot for trying the very same walk too soon): where were all the pretty purple night-lights? It wasn’t long after that loss that she had the abortion.

The abortion was the rite of passage she’d expected losing her virginity would be. The gynecologist with the waiting room where they played a cassette of the greatest hits of The Carpenters performed on a synthesizer masquerading as a harp. The first time an authority figure ever touched her pussy. See, what was good about Donnal, Elke’s Irish statutory rapist, was not his workaday performance of the task of despoiling her and the diminishing returns of his several followups but rather Donnal’s sideshow of penance for each messy act of coitus. The auctioneering catechisms while pounding his thighs or yanking hairs off his scrotum or the time he drew blood raking his dirty (incl. dark news from her ass) bohemian fingernails across his own ruddy cheek with a howl. The sex was that good.

She’d been thirteen when they started, thirteen to Donnal’s twenty one, and yet he’d seemed to her far more innocent because of his wide-eyed superstitions; his credulity; that fantastic show he put on. Even at thirteen Elke knew it wasn’t the mother of God keeping an eye on you but the Stasi; those two-faced, nosy friends and neighbors who filed reports. And sex was the last thing you got in serious trouble over, anyway, but, rather, it was being an oddball and a rebel with a horror of filling out forms that could get you treated as though you’d been possessed by the devil. Elke’s hand rested lightly on the hill rising in Salter’s crotch.

Now Salter is trying to decide how much he likes her as she schmoozes energetically a hundred paces away from him at the bar, taller than all the men surrounding her, a skinny Amazon. A barge horn adds a perfect bass note to the music, thirty octaves down. Seagulls in the distance. Gnats close up. He recognizes Tony Gale as a friend’s ex-boyfriend and Gale stares at Salter a good long time, shading his eyes against the late afternoon sun, but doesn’t wave or wink or anything in case Salter doesn’t wave back; or maybe in case Salter expects a free drink. Elke knows Born from club life in general and goes over to the bar where he’s standing and chats a while, establishing not only her Club Cred, Salter guesses, but her independence as well. Or maybe she just genuinely feels like chatting. Salter can only hope that Elke noticed that Tony Gale was very pointedly staring at him. Not that Salter gives too many shits or percentages of a fuck how cool Elke thinks he is but he knows how carefully calibrated the point system can be.

How Elke can negotiate the sand in high heels Salter can’t imagine. In her heels she’s as tall as Salter. With fragile ankles like that. She’s wearing a very short brown suede skirt and a ruffled white blouse and her thick banana-blonde hair pinned up. Swaying next to her while she chats with blue-suited, flute-clasping old Born at the bar is another expat, with terrible posture, in a Take That t-shirt, balding and long-haired with a Fu Manchu mustache, called Nixon. Nixon looks like an American beachbum in Thailand c. 1976.

Nixon is a hard-to-parse amalgam of beatnik, hippie, and epicurean redneck from whom everyone at Zand See Bar this afternoon, at some point or another in the past, has purchased a controlled substance. Nixon, with his Shakespearean forehead, is one of those paranoid ex-stoners capable of shocking you with a massive I.Q. as demonstrated by a ferocious erudition in the service of a mad passion for angels-on-a-pinhead trivia. Among other things. Nixon is a genius. Nixon started out selling E but he realized that synthetics didn’t suit him…neither synthetics like E or LSD nor the hard currency drugs like blow and horse, as Germans now call them. Not for him. Nixon currently markets whole-earth drugs like pot or mushrooms to an exclusive clientele that reads Carlos Castenada and Aldous Huxley now that they and vinyl LPs are again in fashion.

Nixon is slouching close to Elke (with his queryingly curved spine and Biafra belly and thumbs hooked in the waistband of his cut-offs), a parasite feasting on the smell of her freshly washed hair. Just when he is beginning to worry that if someone doesn’t recognize and approach him soon he’ll be forced to join Elke with Born and Nixon at the bar, losing valuable points, Salter is recognized and approached by someone. A freckled weak-chinned man with a very low hairline in a three piece copper-brown Paul Smith suit and smart Italian shoes. He tip-toes through the sand like he’s never seen sand before, arms up and out for balance and taps Salter on the shoulder.

“My God, Cough” says Salter, giving his ex-drug-dealer a hug. Crushed in the hug, Cough pats Salter affectionately on the back in the manner of the loose approximation of an ex-in-law that some ex-drug dealers are.

“How long has it been do you reckon?”

They let the background music and ambient noise fill the intervening silence. They watch pretty girls trudge by alone and in mobs. Elke crosses the sand with Nixon in tow and an ironic formation of WW2 bombers overhead on the way to an airshow in Poland. You can almost see the quotation marks.

Cough bows at the lovely Elke with a flourish, very pointedly does not so much as look at Nixon and squeezes Salter’s elbow saying “We’ll talk later,” and trudges off across the shadow-stained sand towards the hurricane fence separating Zand See Bar from Oompah. Leaning on the fence looking bored are well-dressed young people possibly in need of Cough’s attention. Nixon snorts and executes an Italian chin-brushing gesture of derision at Cough’s back. Nixon, whose voice is incongruously dark and deep, says to Salter, with his ashtray breath and his Princetonian mumble, “The root of the word mulatto. Guess what it is. Mule. Guess why. You are sui generis, Sir. We’ve met before.”

“Salter this is Nixon,” giggles Elke and Nixon inclines his head and palms his breastbone with mock-courtliness. “Nixon is paranoid,” she adds.

Nixon chews a corner of his mustache, glancing thither and yon. Hither also. “The late great William Burroughs tells us that a paranoid is a person in possession of all the facts, ma’am,” he says.

“Funny,” says Salter.

Elke suddenly hops and waves at someone standing near a distant palm and flutters off again with a Be right back… leaving Salter there squinting at Nixon, who is staring at Salter with the tilted head and cautiously incredulous gaze of a parrot. He says, finally, “Little miss Elke tells me you’re in the popular music game the same as she is, but from the other end, I assume, by which I mean you’re not one of the puppets but one of the string-pullers. True?”

“How do you know Elke?”

“Known her for years. I was her tutor. Mentor. Role model and idol. Do you always answer a question with a question?”

“Do I?”

“You haven’t asked me what I do yet, Ishmael. Isn’t that the first thing us Americans do, ask people what they do? Germans try to pin that one on me all the time as if they haven’t noticed that Nixon displays zero curiosity about them. Ask me what I do.” Nixon’s rapid mumble was like little round boulders bumping into one another whilst rolling down a hill and was not an unpleasant sound. “Go on, ask me.”

Okay. “What do you do?”

Mock disgust. “That’s always the first thing Americans fucking ask you.”

Salter glares at him.

Impishly: “I’m a part-time drug dealer by trade.” Nixon lifts an instructive finger. “But a fulltime author by calling. In the middle of my fifth novel, in fact. All this,” he gestures dismissively at the sand and the palms and some nearby girls, “…research. You need a writing teacher? Hey, I have an idea. Highbrow pauper, meet well-to-do hack… join forces for the benefit of mankind. Why not? You want to learn to write, don’t you? Don’t look at me like I’m Uri Geller, son, Elke told me all about it over there at the bar. It was Elke’s idea. She thought we should get together. How much are you willing to pay? Per hour, I mean.”

“A real live novelist. Who are you published with?”

Nixon’s face, yanked up by his nose, wrinkles like a kneecap. “Published?” He takes a step back. “One more philistine comment like that, good Sir, and the deal is off, you hear me? By the way: philistine and Palestine share etymological roots. Of course I’m not published… I don’t write to put bread on the table; that’s what drug-dealing is for; I write to avoid not writing. Consider. I’m a truth-telling aesthete, man. My novels are imagination-powered thinking machines based on a centuries-old technology that they still haven’t managed to improve. I deal in bibles in the original sense of the word. Bible is from Byblos which was the name of the Phoenician port where papyrus was shipped from, which you already know, of course. You want to become an adept at this seminally spooky technology, I’m the guy at whose feet you must sit, brother. So how much is that worth to you? Give or take a drachma or two? How much?”

“Well, I’d like to… uh… can I, uh, read some of your… uh… before I…”

“Better idea. How ‘bout I recite some for you right here on the spot? Hold on to your hat, Ishmael.”

Without waiting for Salter’s response Nixon holds up the instructive finger again, improves his posture by many magnitudes, does some lip-limbering excercises that may or may not be comic relief, and intones, with the raised hand now on his heart, “From City of Amateurs by Nixon W. Prescott the Third. Chapter Three… Scottie’s Haircut.”
Nixon clears his throat.

“You wanna know when the despair hits? It hits on the day that it hits you that you’re better… truly and demonstrably better than many if not all of the ones who are at the so-called top… the ones everyone thinks of as ‘the best’… the ne plus ultra of the hegemony’s queer empyrean… you realize you’re better than they are after years of honing… honing and honing… honing the log to a club and the club to a spear and the spear to an arrow and the arrow to a needle and the needle to a ray of light and that ray of light right down to a single pure concentrated line of steel-burning thought, man… honing, honing… all this honing and one day you look up and it hits you: you’re fucking better than they are… goddamn! Whoopee! You can’t believe it at first but no, it’s true, you are simply better and… and… so what? So what? So fucking what? So what? Because hello, knock knock, anyone home… it ain’t about better! It ain’t about genius and craft and all that shit. It’s a social game, a herd game, a hierarchy with shibboleths and secret signs and antlers and big dicks and tails between the legs like any other activity that hunting and gathering Neofuckinlithic man indulges in… a pecking order determined by lots of things that ain’t got shit to do with intellect or talent. You wanna know why F. Scott Fitzgerald is still famous, an icon, exalted in the pantheon, as famous as ever, the so-called golden boy, while John Peale Bishop, for example, ain’t shit? Scottie’s haircut, motherfucker. His haircut. And you’re bald.”

He fires up a Pall Mall and lets that sink in while Salter nods, appearing to digest what he’s heard. Through the intervening gap bulges ambient club music and chatter and the grumpy chug of a rusty red barge negotiating the kink in the green Spree. Elke, with her high heels swinging from one hand and an empty champagne glass in the other comes marching through the cigbutted sand back towards them, wiggling her nose like Samantha Stevens and sniffing furiously. What has she been up to and with whom? A quick scan of the perimeter for Cough turns up no evidence but then Salter spots an aqua-blue Porta-Loo at the very edge of the sand, close to the parking lot, with a circle around it rather than a queue in front of it and he has his suspicions.

TESTING ONE-booms a voice, pronouncing “one” like “fun”. TESTING ONE TWO ONE TWO. The crowd is trickling from Zand See Bar over to Oompah. Salter searches the breast pocket of his blazer for the backstage passes, which are color-coded wrist bands.

“It is almost time for the show,” Elke gushes. “I am so excited.”

Twenty minutes later they’re all three standing backstage at Oompah while the girlgroup of which Elke was briefly a member, Q-Teez, mimes its way through the first song of the set, Come and Get Your Man. Elke the contrarian firebrand was summarily replaced by pliant, warm, full-bodied Inisha after Ollie, the senior A&R guy at the record company, fucked Inisha and found the deed to his liking. The chore of notifying Elke of her redundancy fell to Salter, a lesser A&R functionary, who parlayed the odious task into a very long and philosophical phone conversation that metastisized into a late lunch and a cinema date. It was Elke who then called Salter the day after and asked him to squire her to the Q-Teez showcase. No hard feelings, see?

Miraculously, the fifty rows of rusted iron benches facing the bandshell have filled with people, who stand on them. Even more miraculously, a goodly chunk of the audience (a mixed crowd, demographically; typical for Berlin: blame the high unemployment) seems to be miming right along with the lyrics and hopping in place and punching the air and behaving like genuinely unembarrassable lunatics… or loyal fans. Pathetically, Salter spots more than one bulky thirty-something mixed in with the semi-pathetic twenty-somethings and the red-faced teens and toddlers. Looking out into the audience from within the dirty ear of the bandshell, from behind the sound man and the light technician and the massive black scrim of richly cabled gear is a strangely, childishly, safe and secure feeling.

Salter has never noticed before how vulnerable a “singer” is out there in front of the mob. About whose intentions we only assume we know. That sea of flailing arms and bared teeth. The oldest part of the brain, the reptilian bit that tells us when to run and when to play dead, must suffer ramifying cascades of panic when confronted by such an unnatural spectacle for the real show is always in the audience and the bigger the crowd the greater the risk the bigger the spectacle. That’s what stage fright must really be. Not the modern fear of fucking up but the primordial fear of being ripped to pieces.

More banally, watching from behind as the Q-Teez prance back and forth across the stage in their carefully choreographed routine like amphetamined zombies, without even the token benefit of seeing their lips move, dilutes even further the illusion that the voices blasting out from the sound system are coming, in real time, from the singers themselves. They’re dressed in matching pink hot-panted satin uniforms… crowned with rhinestone tiaras… and high-heeled mules laced up to the knee… like Monegasque bordello chambermaids of another era.

Halfway through the bridge, as Salter knows, the sound man will have to activate Inisha’s headset for a live improv (a shrill “Come on, clap your hands, we love you Berlin!”) and kill it again and then bring up all three headsets at the very end of the vamp so they can introduce the next song and indulge in carefully scripted banter about how one of the girls’ adopted mother kinda, in a way, inspired this next tune. At Q-Teez’s very first showcase the soundman, who was let go on the spot for his sin of omission, forgot to kill Inisha’s headset after the four-bar bridge improv and the audience was treated to a horrendous 1:47 of her suddenly out of sync, out of breath, profoundly off-key and forgetting the words in a panic.

Nixon shouts, “Consider! The more huge a celebrity gets the more the celebrity functions as a kind of diagnostic tool for the sickness of the culture celebrating it, man…consider how the ghoulishly pathetic Michael Jackson… who wanted to represent a blending of races and genders and classes but in truth became a bloody, fatal, high-speed collision of everything… look how perfect an emblem he is for the ugliest decade in American history! We can only pray for the sake of your dancing slut puppets here that they never make it!”

“What?” shouts Salter.

Nixon turns to Salter. “I said… !” shouts Nixon.

“What?” shouts Elke. Nixon turns to her.

“I said… !” shouts Nixon.

“I can’t hear you!” shouts Salter.

“Never mind!” shouts Nixon. “Fuck it!” He puts his hands over his ears. But Nixon isn’t about to let Elke and Salter hang out there backstage together alone. He stands his ground between them and the three slut puppets in pink satin hotpants, seemingly in slo-mo, shake their booties at him to the idiot stomp of their hideous modern march music.

2. Checkers

They used to play checkers. Draw the board on a calendar spread flat, on two consecutive pages, inking in half of the squares, and using American coins as pieces. He: filthy pennies. She: smeary nickles.

“Do you really write books?” she asked once, after her opening move, pushing a bright lock out the blue beam of her eyes. This would have been shortly after the start of the Honecker trial, Nixon believes. She was twelve.

“Are you really a writer?”

“Yes.”

Clever little fox. He was rattled and nearly lost that game. Am I a writer? Do you mean the noun… or the gerund? I am definitely the gerund. From time to time during that checker match and at other times, too, The Bad Thing would stir in him, stretching and yawning in the folds of his baggy crotch, and he would think: an avid reader leads a rich life that doesn’t involve consequences. An avid writer toys with consequences. The writing is a rehearsal of actions and consequences which sometimes leads to real actions and actual consequences. Real actions are, at all costs, to be avoided.

If he were rich enough he’d just do it, as the phrase goes.

Nixon has a love-hates-love relationship with his books… the four already completed and the one he’s halfway through. His books are brilliant and he knows it but they aren’t about anything and he knows that, too, despite the fact that they average about three hundred and fifty pages apiece, single-spaced, reproduced and spiral-bound at the copy shop. Compulsive Creativity. He has four large cartons containing dozens of copies of each book and miscellaneous cartons containing other output: short stories, diaries, essays, aphorisms and a form he believes he himself must have invented: the fictional operating manual for the imaginary device or appliance, of which there are several dozen. WARNING: PLEASE READ INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE OPERATING THIS DEVICE. But no poetry. Writing new poetry is like recording new ragtime or painting new Russian religious icons, in his opinion.

His first novel (The Fun Haters) was about a man who’s writing his first book about a man writing his first book. The second book (Flicker) was about a man who’s writing his second book about a man writing his second book. The third book (City of Amateurs) was about a man who’s writing his third book, and so on. And all of them are about nothing, essentially… or none of them, that is, is about anything. That’s roughly seven years of work… roughly seven years of living he turned into roughly seven years of writing which became, in total, roughly fourteen years of a literary kind of half-life.

One thing he doesn’t love-hate but rather hate-hates is money. Hates thinking about it, dealing with it, being forced to genuflect to the movie-star beautiful bully of the idea of it. Money is everything bad about humanity in its liquid form. He can’t stand the idea that everything on earth…everything…has its calculable equivalent in cash. Can be reduced to a dollar amount. Even his ugly body. Even his brain. This means that Plato’s assertion that everything around us is merely a reflection of a purer, higher Truth… the theory of the Platonic Ideal… was really just a futuristic description of money.

Money is the highest authority and authority is all about pushing people around. Nixon hates being pushed around. He even hates having to stand there while a cashier counts out his change for a twenty like some shorthand lecture in good book-keeping. He wishes he could walk through shops picking out what he wants and throwing wads of cash and being gone.

For that you need to be rich. The way in which Ulysses was ahead of its time…what made it “modern” and why it’s still ahead of most everything in print, muses Nixon, is not in the fucked up sentences. Plenty of writers before Joyce tried fucked up sentences (they just didn’t make it into print with their experiments). It wasn’t the sex. The sex was in an obscure language. Most of the people who objected to the anal/excretory/masturbatory passages had to be led to the passages and have them translated before they could even feign outrage…no it wasn’t the sex. The Bible beat Joyce in the obscurely worded pornography field in any case. What was and still is revolutionary about Joyce’s Ulysses was that it was the first book of any importance that wasn’t, directly or indirectly, concerned with money.

Consider.

His father was rich. Nixon once heard his father, without much irony that he could detect, maybe even with delight, ask, “What’s this?” picking up a newly minted Kennedy Half from the steps in front of the gazebo and turning it in the sun. He thought it was some kind of medal. Nixon thinks that European money feels like old bandages and American money feels like old skin. Pliant, loin-warm, reeky. Nixon writes, above all, to avoid thinking about money. The only relief from the insult of money is when he’s buried up to his ears in his own safe sentences. Well if Joyce said there’s nobody in any of his books worth more than a few shillings Nixon can do him one better: there’s no one in any of Nixon’s books period.

But if Nixon were rich (like Montgomery)….

Nixon looks out across Berlin from his highrise penthouse in the hideous grey concrete plattenbau at Alexanderplatz. His neighbors pay twice the rent he pays because he got in the building before its bland grotesquerie became chic in a nostalgie de la boue kind of way, shortly after The Wall came down. Being a genius isn’t only useful for the making of Art… it can be applied to banalities like comfortable living, too. The wide tin snake of traffic that curls clattering around his flat block stuffing the street every morning seems muffled and far away, but it’s only ten stories down… the pedestrians resemble brownian molecules or icons on a high-res desktop. As a crowd they seem worthwhile, but as individuals, from this height, they seem pointless… just bits drifting off from a crumbling mass at the mercy of entropy. If Nixon can’t be rich he can be famous. Write a book…that kind of book. The kind that makes you famous. Some stupid fucking book about someone wanting something and getting it in three hundred and fifty pages.

If only I had a story, he moons. He stands on his balcony in his bathrobe, watching the morning sky assemble itself groggily from a scattered box of old components. His bath robe is as threadbare and comfortable as an old hound. He feels like a Callas doomed forever to sing scales. To clear her throat.

If only I had a story, sighs Nixon, scratching the dry blind eye of his bald spot. He reflects that the tremendous potential energy stored in his own body climbing the ten flights of stairs to his penthouse apartment every evening could be released like a bolt of lightning to smash him flat in less than three seconds by stepping over the low railing of his balcony in the morning. That’s a lot of energy and it comes from his own skinny legs. Not that he entertains such thoughts but the option to end it all at any given moment is a cherished freedom and Nixon’s source of power… for if suicide is an option, why not try anything, instead, then? Why not try everything? Because any situation can be brought under perfect and eternal control in the time it takes to sever the thin chord attaching us to Time.

There are no mirrors in Nixon’s penthouse. No mirrors and few if any reflecting surfaces… the occasional droplet of water or bead of perspiration, maybe… it’s all buff and rough and matte in Nixon’s flat. His drinking cups are made of wood, his cutlery and cooking utensils and bathroom and kitchen utensils are of buff aluminum or other dull alloys. Once there was this 14 year old Romanian prostitute up there, in her lace-up knee-high cuffed suede boots and leather bustier, sneering jovially at all of the American’s expensive stuff, but when it dawned on her (a conclusion she confirmed with a terrified check of the bathroom) that there were no mirrors to be found, none, not even tiny and incidental reflective surfaces, she started trembling uncontrollably and crossed herself, backing towards the door, bleating “Strigoi! Strigoi!” and making a hasty retreat for the elevator.

Which of course delighted Nixon who found it highly erotic and more than his money’s worth. He came right there in his pants in the foyer as the elevator doors muffled her screams. Ugly Nixon. An ugliness set in cruel relief against well-to-do parents so physically beautiful that even deep into their Alzheimered twilights they are in constant danger of being diddled by caretakers; the edible jewel that is his mother with her amphorae-green eyes and Hepburnish cheekbones and lunar mane; his father’s Caligulan profile. He imagines a burly Jamaican nurse in crepe-soled shoes weighing mama (accent on the second syllable) down on a freshly turned and neatly childish bed, wielding aluminum-light mama like a kite.

How could such an ugly Montgomery Nixon W. Prescott the 3rd be the result of Gaia and Montgomery Jefferson W. Prescott the 2nd doing the dick and pussy trick? At least junior turned out to be a genius. Maybe he was a genius because of the ugliness…maybe he had no other choice. Maybe the isolating power of ugliness was essential. The sun is rising and the moon is sinking as its counterweight. Nixon is thinking that we hate intellectuals so much on this planet that Nabokov knew he’d have to make Humbert a paedophile before we’d tolerate Humbert’s smug narration. But what does paedophile mean, thinks Nixon, when you break the word down into its two clear simple meanings?

Child.

Love.

Nixon is not only a literary genius without a story to tell: he’s a checker champion without a worthy challenger. Why is it that chess gets all the press? Why isn’t the “game” of checkers taken seriously? Checkers is not an activity for children. Nixon rarely gets the opportunity to quote Poe (because Americans always mistake him for an adjective and the Germans for an ass) but Nixon relishes it when he can, quoting the master on checkers and chess: In the latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound.

Amen, thinks Nixon, looking out over the fake bustle of Alexanderplatz.

The most terrifying thing about Poe was his eerie resemblance to mid-twentieth-century American comedian Bob Newhart. What is Love? Love is pleasure and need and poetry… that’s why animals can’t love… there’s the pleasure and the need but no poetry… not even the poetry of the beloved’s name. Elke. A twisting arrow of geese glides over, so low that Nixon flinches, and they are honking like a Turkish wedding, reminding him of a specialty of Weimar-era brothels in Berlin called Die Weinachts Gans… the Christmas Goose… you’d have a live goose sent up to your room. Right? Probably cost a million depression-era Deutschmarks. You’d fuck the goose and at the moment of climax lop the head with a cleaver, enjoying the writhing gush of its death throes. Das Huhn, das goldene Eier legt, schlacten. A treat for the rich. But what would stop a peasant from grabbing some goose behind the out house and doing exactly the same thing for free? Context is everything.

The first chance Nixon got to use the Poe quote was with his sweet little East German English pupil, back when he was forced to teach just to keep milk and wiener on the table, before he figured out how to sell Ecstasy in the long lines in front of the clubs, Ecstasy and then various organics, and his precocious pupil gave him the best checker matches of his life. Those checker games were so good that he wanted to marry her, despite the fact that she was eleven or twelve.

People talk of chess prodigies but rarely of checker prodigies but Nixon felt she was one. She was twelve at the time but now she was in her twenties and floating away from him. They’d first met, symbolically enough, perched on The Wall beside a thousand nobodies, both of them chipping away in the blinding smug glare of the CNN camera lights. Sheer luck. Sheer luck that he was in Europe when it all happened, the official death of white communism (no one seems to give much of a shit about those billion-and-change worth of yellow commies looming on the other side of the sunrise every morning, or that little brown crust of commies breathing and shitting their red beans and rice near Florida).What were the odds against these two, these special two, Nixon and Elke, Dante and his Beatrice, meeting? How old was Poe’s first cousin (Virginia Clemm) when Poe married her in 1835? Thirteen. Name one of the newlyweds’ favorite pastimes.

Checkers.

If only I had a story, swoons Nixon, high up above the morning bustle of traffic at Alexanderplatz. All this verbal firepower at his command… a fucking nuclear aircraft carrier’s worth of literary firepower at his finger tips… and not a single story to tell with it. His life is a blank. His childhood was just days that bunched into months and his adolescence was just weeks that clogged into years and his adulthood is a flickering, throbbing, inarticulated emission of interminable Now. The closest thing he has to a story is a subject, and he can’t even admit to that. She’d laugh at him if he did. Or shrink from him in horror. He buries the evidence in the prose. Bits and pieces of her: the smell of the insides of her gloves in winter, the almost imperceptible asymmetry of her nostrils (heightened to noticeability when she laughs); the way she still pronounces “clothes” as “clo-thus” or pluralizes “hair” and “spaghetti”. He thinks: I blew it with the writing lessons. I always blow it with the writing lessons. I always come on too strong. He hopes Elke isn’t too exasperated with him for blowing it…she tried so hard to get Nixon together with her handsome black pigeon but Nixon blew it by coming on to strong, like a fox who showed his sharp teeth in a smile.

Oh, that would have been such easy money.

3. Finnegans Wank

Nixon and Elke stopped by Salter’s around lunch time on Saturday and Elke left after about an hour (the pretty girl always leaves after about an hour; that’s a rule) but Nixon lingered and had a detailed look of just about everything in Salter’s flat. Nixon would pick something up…a matchbox memento or an old photograph and ask, with a child’s directness, what’s this? Nixon had no idea that Elke and Salter had already embarked on a sex life, in their peculiar way and Salter is tickled by Nixon’s hammy chaperone act, getting between the two of them whenever possible and making sly (and slightly effective) comments in Elke’s absence designed to discourage Salter from thinking about Elke in a romantic or sexual way.

Snooping around, Nixon had discovered Salter’s box of old photographs in the little room with the gold couch. He literally went on a room-to-room investigation of Salter’s entire flat; if anyone else had tried such a preposterous violation of his privacy Salter would have flung him bodily from the premises but Nixon has this holy fool aura about him… maybe simply because he’s so ugly… which gives him special license. Carefully examining one fragile old photo after another, Nixon had said, with a sidelong glance from the furthest corner of his eye:

“How old were you when you lost your virginity? I’m just curious. Arthur Brooke, who wrote the story Shakespeare ripped off to write Romeo and Juliet, made his Juliet sixteen, which is a tad young but just about squares with civilized modern standards, and if you ain’t never seen Olivia Hussey in the role for Franco Zeffirelli’s production do yourself a flavor and check it out, my man… talk about honeydews… talk about ripe… know where the word estrus comes from? You probably know this already. From the Latin word meaning, roughly, frenzy. Amen. But I digress.”

Nixon turned to face Salter for emphasis and continued,”Shakespeare, that dirty old fugger, made his Juliet fourteen years old, ain’t that scandalous? Fourteen! Of course, that was the sixteenth century, so, you know, who are we to get retroactively puritanical on a bunch of odoriferous Elizabethans who enjoyed a life expectancy of maybe forty, forty five years, tops…okay. But hold on to your hat, Ishmael. Elke… Dear Elke… our Elke… lost her cherry at thirteen. Ain’t that perfectly fucking disgusting? Fucked a twenty one year old bartender… some illiterate fucking harp from Derry with a chiselled jaw and the clap, prolly… and her parents knew about it. Thirteen! That’s even too young to play with anatomically correct dolls! Thirteen. Wouldn’t touch that pussy with a wax dick from Crete. Nuh-uh. Don’t tell her I said that.”

Nixon lifted a faded sepiatone photograph of Salter’s mother at the age of sixteen, combing her waist-long hair, and said “Who’s that?” Salter told him and Nixon then took an even older snapshot of Salter’s aunt Virginia at the age of twenty seven, in a one-piece bathing suit and a cap, holding a sea shell up for the camera, and said “Who’s that?” He dug out another picture of the aunt, even younger, crimped hair down to her shoulders, standing in a doorway with one foot forward and both hands on her hips and Nixon said “Be still my beating fucking heart. Goddamn, man. Is there some kind of law in your family that only the foxy chicks are allowed to live?”

Nixon said, “Nice cat.” Dusty threaded in and out between the legs of Nixon’s dirty dungarees and trotted out of the room again. “Artists should always have cats, not dogs, … dogs are too easy to please. Dogs radiate this incessant talent-eroding message: you’re great, you’re God, I love you, don’t change… everything you do impresses me, master! Any artist who owns a dog becomes complacent. You wanna know why Kurt Vonnegut, genius that he is, got so complacent over the years? And look at Hemingway…that was eighty percent of his problem… woof! The Old Man and the Sea… exactly the kind of book a dog would approve of. That was Faulkner’s problem. Steinbeck’s too. Jack
London, obviously. Have you been writing? Let me see something. I’ll give you a sixty second critique that will advance you by at least five years in your painful struggle towards self-expression, free of charge.”

Salter went and got something out of a kitchen drawer and handed it to Nixon saying, “It’s just a… “

But Nixon silenced him with the instructional finger, raised. “Never make excuses for anything you write. Would you make excuses for a crippled child?” Nixon glanced diagnostically at the tops and bottoms of each of the five pages that Salter had given him and noticed also that the word Elke appeared several times in the body of the text and said, “Junk.”

He turned his back to Salter and handed the pages back and said “Don’t get me wrong: junk is the standard. No shame in it. But three pieces of advice: one. Always start in the middle of the story. Nobody wants to read any once upon a time shit anymore; we don’t have the patience for it; this is a busy fucking century. Two. Contrary to that old saw, write about what you don’t know….nothing’s more boring than reading about something the writer is totally comfortably bored with. Three. You ain’t a writer. Writers are born, not self-invented. Oh, I forgot, there’s a number four, too. Four. Who the fuck am I to tell you that you ain’t a writer? That’s number four.”

Nixon says, “I gotta be honest, brother… I don’t get you.”

“How so?”

“You’re in showbiz, correct? Earning good bread, spending quality time with all kinds of tasty little slut puppets and getting paid for it… roof over your head and decent threads and the freedom to move through certain quasi-refined social milieus that are closed off to many of your tint… what the hell you want to write for? You need a hobby that badly? Bored with your life? What?”

“I need a reason to write?”

“Most assuredly, my good fellow. You need a reason to write. Your reason is your license… it’s your permission.”

“Ah, I see, now I need permission… “

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, yes. But it’s all on the honor system, unfortunately. No enforcement. That’s the problem with all these diarists and aphorists and workaday scribblers… these yuppies with their creative writing workshops… do you think if somebody told them that words are not a renewable resource and we’re reaching a global crisis point and the word pool is in danger of drying up completely they’d stop, or even cut back, tomorrow?”

“Man,” says Salter, “nobody looking at you… ” and here Nixon sees himself through Salter’s eyes as Salter gives Nixon the up-and-down: his scuffed suede shoes; his second hand corduroy pants; his army surplus raincoat over his fading Milli Vanilli Unplugged t-shirt, “would take you for an elitist.”

Nixon gives Salter an open-mouthed glare that changes like time-lapse photography into a smile. He thinks: I am forthwith going to be the most seductive motherfucker I have ever been in my life. I will spare no trick; I will utilize to the utmost my seductive intellectual wiles and make Raquel Welch look like Lucy van Pelt as a succubus in comparison.

“Okay, here’s the thing, Ishmael” says Nixon, buttoning his army surplus raincoat and flipping his long thin greasy hair up over its raised collar. “I can’t teach you to write, but you can buy me a cup of coffee. Let’s go.” He scratches his bald spot vociferously. “Out.”

“Now?”

Salter is intrigued. What can it hurt? Besides: he feels the faint hum of incipient friendship. It’s kind of thrilling. When was the last time Salter felt the pang of the kindrid? All his so-called “relationships” are political (showbiz related) or short-term (sexual) or small-talk-based and patently disposable; he says Wie gehts? to the Lebanese guy at the magazine kiosk on the way home every day after shopping or what not and counts that as some kind of friendship. He has buddies like Noland and Ollie he can go for months without seeing or thinking about. It’s a mysterious process, how two grown men become friends, real friends, in that compulsive way they were once able to as boys, bonding and splitting and bonding anew like molecules in hot water…what are the factors…where do these last little droplets of boyish enthusiasm come from, this late in the game? Salter thinks he can feel it happening.

“You want to go get a coffee now?”

“Yes now. Now. Why not? Out in the great wide open.”

“Sit in a café with some coffee and do what?”

“I talk, you listen. Stuff like that.”

“Will you talk about writing?”

“Inadvertently, yes. Let’s ride, man. Bring that box of old photographs with you. Come on… let’s go.”

Salter sits on the U-Bahn with the shoebox of photographic heirlooms on his lap. Nixon opines wryly that he couldn’t help noticing that half of the young girls they passed on the way snuck discreet or bold looks at Salter and he wondered if such chronic sexual attention was responsible for Salter’s… no offence intended… borderline illiteracy. This is how a man becames a mere footnote, ignorant of itself.

One fucking book in your whole flat, man… I counted. One. And that was a paperback with a picture of King Kong on the cover! It’s a wonder you can spell your name! Not that I’ve seen evidence that you can. Can you?

Are you saying that books make you smarter, frowns Salter.

Nixon says that reading doesn’t automatically increase one’s I.Q… raw intelligence is inherited at birth and activated, probably, during infancy by sensual stimulus: sights and sounds, mostly, but also touch; maybe certain smells and tastes, too… maybe certain smells even foster intelligence but that’s just conjecture. But reading a higher kind of literature with disciplined regularity definitely shapes the mind and focuses intellectual potential and spurs the mind’s will to express itself and this self-expression contributes to social standing. Intelligence incapable of self-expression is almost useless in broader society (though handy on a desert island, where the solitary challenges of survival might favor the introvert)… an intellectual gift incapable of self-expression is like millions in paper currency issued by a deposed government… the best you can do with the money is keep warm or make a little light by simply burning it.

In a way, Salter feels, that’s what he did with his native gift of intelligence… used it for kindling… simply because he’s never put the time into polishing it into something…

“…capable of impressing people?” asks Nixon, sardonically.

Salter shrugs. “Well, yeah. That’s what it’s all about, no? Anyway…” Salter shrugs. “It’s a tragedy, that’s all.”

Nixon says “Yes, but… dig: if we can agree on the classical definition of a tragedy as being an avoidable error that ends instructionally in a death… is being a Negro in this world really a tragedy, as you might consider it, or merely a catastrophe, like an earthquake?”

Nixon says, “Okay, another helpful hint about writing: deploy your exclamation marks sparingly.”

Nixon says: the word “maudlin” comes from the Italian pronunciation of “magdalene”, but you already knew that.

The train fills up at the next stop. Nixon stares hard across the aisle at Salter and says, “Ever notice how when the train is packed people are all smushed together on these long seats but then the train empties out but the person sitting next to you doesn’t exploit the newly available seat space but remains smushed next to you for several more stops? Germans are the only people I ever saw do that. I call it mandatory intimacy. A distant cousin of rape.” The red-cheeked Hausfrau at that moment sitting tight-up against Nixon with a bag in her lap sniffs diffidently.

The next station, a middle-aged beggar with a dog gets on, rattling a cup systematically up one side of the aisle and back the other. Nixon cups his hands around his mouth, highlighting his snaggling teeth, and stage-whispers, “Pssst. Ever notice the peculiar air of piety that some Germans affect when they beg? Like Shtetl Jews. Brilliant mimics these Germans.” He feigns frowning, intrigued, and adds, “How many Shtetls can you name? Let’s see, there’s Chortkiv, and Berdychiv and Drohobych… Pinsk… don’t forget Pinsk…”

Pretty girls get on and off the train in great numbers as they stop in station after station because it’s lunch hour at school and Nixon smirks with an I-told-you-so smirk as a considerable percentage pay Salter attention… staring and giggling from their seats or waving as they cross in front of him or strap-hanging in a swoon in groups. Nixon makes a joke, a loud joke, about being Salter’s manager and anyone interested in fifteen minutes with the stud will can purchase tickets from him, group rate or singles, but the girls’ English isn’t quite good enough to get the joke. Salter says, “Man, how long have you been in Berlin? Don’t you speak German yet?” and Nixon says he isn’t a collector of knick-knacks.

There’s that wreck of an Irish drunk who’s been busking on this line for ten years now, beating his three-stringed guitar and keening with the guttural wail of the Derry dead, authentic as hell and stinking of piss, his body and his guitar long-survived by his voice. Salter remembered when this feller was young and merely drunk all the time but not ruined: full of gab, doing Berlin on a lark, probably. But now he seems likely to die. The first really cruel winter will do it. Bloated baggy face like something fished out of the drink. Surprising full head of Dylan Thomas hair, though.

And then a perfect vision of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen enters the train, galvanizing the wagon. You’ve never seen anything like it. Salter had seen it before… every true Berliner has… they call it The Phantom of Line Seven and it talks like an old woman with a piping, chirping, sarcastic voice. It could be a mass hallucination but only some seem to see it or find it shocking… about a third of the passengers glance up without reacting and go back to their crossword puzzles or paperback romances. The rest of the wagon is horrified. One kid points, another kid cries. A chubby French tourist’s mouth gapes behind splayed fingers. Here comes skully-head in a red knit cap and knobby bone arms and legs in a bright orange ski vest over stripeless pyjamas and improvised tape and rags and feet swaddled in metallic duct tape-and-foam-made shoes… shambling on a crutch with sallow translucent skin and a skull grin. The grim reaper is homeless. It hands out printed material and begs for donations… a penny will do… it shambles in those duct-tape slippers, wobbling on the crutch, looking both impossible and exasperated.

It shuffles up the subway aisle in its improvised Easter raiment of foil-and-tape with its skull smirk and says, in German, “No no, don’t worry, no need to shrink from my nearness as I approach, you can’t catch it, it’s not a disease, I am not a filthy homosexual or intravaneous drug user suffering for my sins… contact with my words is definitely more dangerous to you than contact with the beautiful tissue of my flesh! For pennies you can read my latest tract!” It waves a sheaf of pamphlets (white and black printing on red paper) over its head. 

“Believe me, if I could do my work without ever walking among you, I would, but then, what would you have to stare at? Who would give you your best bad dreams? No, despite the fact that I have many other things to do with my time, ladies and gentlemen, I will never let you down, I will haunt you, in fact, so to speak, and bring my message to you, since I can’t really count on you coming to me in order to get it. In other words, this is a serious relationship, and in any serious relationship, serious talk is of the utmost importance.”

It breaks stride as it approaches Salter and gives him a strangely ambivalent look, making eye contact for long enough to make Salter hold his breath. A swarthy youth with monk-like facial hair and a matching hood across the aisle gestures for a copy and it senses the gesture and turns to him. Pleased, The Phantom hands him a tract, pockets three pennies and then continues towards the end of the wagon, intoning, 

“In these wonderful writings that cost even less than water, what do you find? You find the truth! Well, what is the truth worth to you? This most weighty of philosophical questions, I’m sorry to say, you must answer for yourselves in the few seconds left before this train pulls into the next station! Before you make that decision, ask yourselves if the creature you see before you, the like of which you have never seen before in this world, would appear to you at such a vast expense of will and energy for the sake of small talk?”

The train pulls into the next station, the doors pop open and the skeleton clatters off. The swarthy young man with the monk-like facial hair, bent over the pamphlet he has purchased, reads something that causes him to chuckle and nod vociferously. There are fellow passengers who now fret that they’ve passed up a bargain, but Salter himself is sure that he doesn’t care to know. 

“There it goes,” says Nixon, with a jerk of his chin. “The Phantom of Line Seven.”

“First time I saw her,” says Salter, talking towards Nixon but looking at the skeleton’s back as it shuffles along the platform, “Maybe ten, twelve years ago. I wouldn’t have given her a year to live. Damn if she isn’t still going strong. Probably outlive both of us. Being homeless can make you tough, I guess.”

“On the other hand,” adds Nixon, not as softly as Salter, “I’ve heard a very intriguing rumor that… he isn’t homeless at all.”

“He?”

“Indeed, my man. I’ve heard from more than one source that it’s not an old woman suffering from AIDs but rather a middle aged fiend named Stephan who hates his well-to-do parents with such a pathological passion that he has developed an awe-inspiring eating disorder to shame them. Possibly suffering from a time-delayed, sympathetic guilt reaction to…” Nixon winks. “You-know-what.”

The U-Bahn surfaces at some point after Kurfurstenstrasse and mounts a banked track on a brontosauran curve into the low sky over the river. They see Potsdamerplatz in the distance, rebuilt and garish, a neo-expressionist Oz. On the other side of the train, in the other distance, away from the sun, a black water tower looms like sinister Victoriana under the warm clouds over Kreuzberg. The train rocks to and fro. Nixon, in a voluble mood, rubs his hands together and says, “Man, I’m starving. You’re paying, right?”

There are block-long prison-gray housing complexes, and lots of stray dogs, and little girls in headscarves, and incomprehensible billboards, and ten year old boys with faint mustaches. Many of the housing blocks sprout dozens of satellite television dishes like inverted mushrooms tracking invisible suns. There are bakeries selling aromatic wheels of fladenbrot and fast-food joints hawking kebabs and falafel and schwarma and carbonated milk product beverages and lottery tickets promising windfalls in obscure currencies.

Walking up the street towards the place that he has in mind, Nixon says, out of the blue, as if in response to a remark Salter just made although they’ve both been silent for a quarter of an hour at least, “North American Negroes aren’t even a race, man, they’re a product… you were created, you were bred, you were a product designed to meet a specific demand. Created, perfected, marketed, shipped and sold. How are you not a product? Designed originally for back-breaking physical labor you are now used chiefly for entertainment. You know: sex, sports, buffoonery. Yo, my man, let me ask you a pertinent question,” says Nixon, chewing his mustache.

“What?”

“Isn’t there anything I can say to offend you?”

“Doubt it.”

“You don’t mind me trying, though, do you?”

Salter laughs. “Nope.”

“That’s what I like about you, Ishmael. Fucking unperturbable.”

They are at a corner diagonally across the street from a café displaying a red neon cursive in the window glowing softly with the hopeful message Morgenland in the intermittent daylight. Black chunks of ejecta from unclogged sinks in the sky are sliced by sunbeams. Directly behind them is a dimly lit storefront with half-drawn shades and white-bearded Turks in homely blazers and some also in skull caps, playing cards at various tables under roiling gray arabesques moored to the tips of two dozen Camel Filters and a handful of cheap cigars. Nixon reaches out and grabs Salter’s belt loop to prevent him crossing the street and…puts the other hand on the knob of the door behind him with its thick dark bevelled glass. He says, “What we are about to do here is walk into this Turkish social club… men only… and take a seat at a table like there’s nothing queer about it whatsoever, dig? I’ve done it before. They think I’m just a crazy gringo and you… you look like some kinda of Muslim, so as long as you keep your voice low we’ll be fine, trust me. It’ll be an experience, Ishmael.”

“Okay. But there’s just one thing,” says Salter.

“What?”

“Don’t call me Ishmael.”

Nixon winks and looks truly pleased with himself but Salter isn’t in on the joke.

4. Chocolate Chicken Theory

It smells like a combination of Salter’s grandmother’s pantry and ringside after a fight, there in the Turkish Male Social Club. Onions, stale smoke, dry rot and supermarket cologne. There is a splintery wooden counter and a large television bolted to a metal arm extended from a wall and mildewed wallpaper with a stained pattern of fleur-de-lis and racehorses. Behind the splintery counter is a florid man with a yellowing Gurdjieffian mustache under a proportional nose and jet-black hair, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, his scalded hands on the counter and his black black eyes glued to Nixon and Salter as they creep across the room like mice. On the high television young men kick and prance on eternal grass through eternal fussball games with unmediated facial expressions, sound off. There are only three widely-scattered round tables in the room that remain not surrounded by groups of three or four men playing card games such as Dost kazigi or Okey or Maca kizi. Nixon chooses the empty round table furthest from the others in a corner behind a coat rack with the non-sequitur of a woman’s yarny pink hat hung on it, at the window. The window is velvety with grime. The carpet feels scratchy even through the thick soles of Salter’s shoes.

There are framed photographs of a man resembling a long-haired Stalin in sun glasses nailed here and there to the wallpaper. Lots of men with sleek gray Omar Shariff hair here; lots of Elvis happening as well. Weren’t those two in a movie together once? Salter and Nixon sit at their wobbly table, and Nixon makes sure to sit in such a way that he’s facing the rest of the room and Salter’s back is to it. Nixon’s eyes dart to and fro. Salter places his box of photographs in the middle of the table.

Gurdjieff tosses a dishrag and comes from behind his counter…looking very much shorter than he’d appeared to be behind it… and stands facing Salter and Nixon with his hands on his hips and a deferential tilt of his head. He is wearing an immaculate white apron. Nixon raises a hand in greeting and says, with comedic emphasis, “Biftek!” and when Gurdjieff looks inquisitively at Salter, Nixon says “Biftek!” again. Giurdjieff looks at Nixon and Salter in turn repeating, softly, “Biftek.” Byifftyikk, byifftyikk. Nixon says “Oui, mon ami! Biftek!” and off Gurdjieff goes.

Nixon leans back in his chair. “I just ordered you a steak with my High School French. Most Turks speak a little and respect you more if you use it instead of German or English. Do you dig chocolate cake?”

Salter admits that he does.

“What is chocolate cake made of? Consider. You probably never baked one, but you, like I, have osmotic knowledge of a chocolate cake’s ingredients the way we both know the plot of Moby Dick in a vague way… flour, eggs, butter, chocolate.”

Salter shrugs.

“Can’t really make a chocolate cake without eggs, can we? Eggs give the cake that spongy, springy richness that we North American gluttons prize. But those eggs in the cake are chickens, remember…everything of importance in a chicken is already present in the egg. So we take these liquid chicken ova and mix them with powdered plant sperm and incubate it and call it a cake! If you think about this while eating your next chocolate cake I guarantee you’ll detect the flavor of chicken… what is a chocolate cake but a chocolate chicken? You see? Chocolate cake as we know it didn’t become chocolate cake until about a hundred and fifty years after it was first invented…by then it was a celebrity and the reality was irrelevant; it became chicken-free the way Lauren Bacall became Goyish. We don’t taste the chicken in the cake because we don’t want to anymore… we have consensus and voila: the modern, chicken-free flavor of chocolate cake… see?”

Salter confesses to not seeing. Nixon tries another tack.

“For about six months, once, when I lived in San Diego,” and here Nixon lowers his voice appreciably, glancing nervously around the room, “I was a Jew. I had just moved there from Philly… “

“You lived in Philly?”

“Yeah, but let me finish this parable first. Nobody knew me in San Diego and I decided to try life as a Jew and bingo, I was a Jew. It was easy! Not only did people treat me better as a Jew, but it was incredibly easy to get them to accept this lie. Know why? Because they wanted it to be true all along. They wanted me to be a Jew… I got that question in grammar school all the time… I was always the smartest kid anywhere I went and I was funny looking by their standards… scrawny and dark and balding by the time I was old enough to drive… they always asked me, are you Jewish? They didn’t want me in their gene pool. That’s how they wanted to explain me away: Jew. They were uncomfortable with me otherwise. So I finally decided to try to become what they always wanted me to be when I moved out to San Diego… I was richly rewarded for giving them what they wanted. Let me tell you.”

“Where in Philly?”

“Hold your horses. First girlfriend I’d had since High School I got by masquerading as a Jew. She’d never been with a Jew before. Yesterday’s insults are tomorrow’s compliments! First time she goes to blow me she asks me how come I’m not circumcized. Because I am a non-practising Jew, honey, I explain. She wasn’t bad looking! She was really rather cute! Name of Gretchen Hunt… daughter of well-to-do Republican bigots from Ohio. Escaped to California to be an actress, thought San Diego was so much nicer than L.A. and conveniently located only ninety minutes away from Hollywood by car… might as well have been in Alaska as far as her career was concerned… ended up a career waitress with a severe credit card problem she cured by dabbling in porno but oh well. What’s this beautiful girl doing sucking my cock, I used to think, with my Yarmulke tilted rakishly athwart my noggin. By the way, the root of Yarmulke is a Turkish word that means rain bonnet.”

Nixon did a Burlesquely Yiddish shrug and said “I pretend to be a Jew and suddenly I’m getting things I never had… a good job, a pretty All American girlfriend, and a bunch of All American buddies who slapped me on the back and called me bud when we talked about sports on television. I really liked being called bud… the weird conflation of derision and acceptance the word embodies is a uniquely American gesture, baby. It was heaven for about six months until I couldn’t take it anymore and fled town and never pretended to be a Jew again.”

“Did you know the part of Philly called Germantown?”

“We’ll get to that! Jesus! Where was I? Oh yeah: I discontinued the Jew Act. Not that I’d forsworn fakery as a practise. Far from it. In fact, I decided to up the ante. I skipped my lease and jumped a Greyhound bus to Minneapolis… from the palm trees and beach bunnies and perfect year-round median temperature of 77.5 degrees Farenheit to…Minnesota! The dick-snapping winters of the tundra! Lived and worked there for four years. Counselor at an Urban Youth Center. And just try to guess what I decided to be? Guess what sector of the American rainbow I chose to tap, despite the fact that I wasn’t quite hung for the role? Black.”

Gurdjieff is standing before them with a wooden serving tray upon which sizzle two large plates of bloody steak… cut into squares. Each square with a tooth pick in it. A very Tartar-like snack. Attila the Hun stuff. Gurdjieff gestures with his eyes that someone should move that box off the table and he slides the plates off the tray and bows out. Nixon says Merci. Salter is chuckling as he reaches for his first cube of steak.

“Black.”

“That’s right. Black. Well, an Octoroon, actually. Of course. Got me the foxiest black girlfriend you ever wanted to see, too… her name was… Johnny Rose. Put Pam Grier to shame, honey. Ever come in an Afro? Not on it… in it! Ah! Like fucking a Nerf Ball. Johnny Rose! Where are you now? My, that’s rare. Does blood make you squeamish? The Tarters ate raw beef. Turkish-Mongol tribe, of course. Did they even cook this… ?”

Salter likes it there in the clubby gloom of the Social Club; this is one of those rare places where Time stands still. Is it possible that it’s impossible for Time to stand still for men in the presence of women and therefore the informal ban? The girly pink hat on the coat rack is like the drop of black added to a gallon of white paint to make the white paint seem whiter, for this is the most masculine ambience that Salter has ever dared to soak up. Every few minutes a muted cheer rises around the room in general (fussball) or at specific tables (cards) but at no time does anyone but Gurdjieff pay any attention to the interlopers. Salter is in fact amazed that no one oozes an odor of hatred or anger their way, especially considering the global hostilities between one of the three major desert-based faiths on Earth and the other two.

“Hold on now, Nixie… rewind. An Octoroon… in Minneapolis.”

“Yes Sir. An Octoroon. I figured,” swallow, “as a swarthy white I’m near the bottom of the barrel, n’est ce pas, but as a pale-skinned black I’m an aristocrat. Claimed that my roots were Creole. Toothless black winos started calling me Professor Longhair with affection when I’d stroll by in the ‘hood. Are you familiar with Minneapolis? Let’s have a look at those now.” Chewing lustily, Nixon gestures for Salter’s box of old photographs.

Salter pushes it towards him and Nixon wipes his trembling hands (and even he is impressed at his own prodigious powers of invention! What has inspired him to lie so fluently, so outrageously, and with such instinctive accuracy? An Octoroon? Professor Longhair? ) on his t-shirt before opening the box. Salter says, portentously, “The ancestors. My grandmother Moose… she was part Cherokee…she’d say that our blood… was a flow of many rivers…”

Nixon says “Okay, now don’t give me any shit about your great great granny being able to conjure spirits or heal the sick or fry chicken without even using oil or whatnot, okay? I’m too clear-minded for that stuff.” Winking, he pushes his plate aside and spreads a few of the mothwing-fragile photos on the table like tarot cards, studying each very carefully as he lays it in a grid on the table, a finger at his temple, his tongue between his teeth. He feels like a vampire (”Strigoi! Strigoi!”) … a literary Nosferatu about to feed on the thick warm blood of Salter’s own story. He is very hungry. He experiences the fleeting, condescending guilt that a vampire might experience, but it is overriden by his terrible hunger.

“Tell me about… this one,” says Nixon.

5. The Dinner Party

“Ach, schade, I thought you might be Stephan.”

As Brigitte von Bredow stands smiling in the doorway, it strikes Salter what a brilliant and shameless pimp is Elke. Brigitte is wearing a velveteen choker and a low-cut semi-transparent blouse and spray-on jeans and silver stilleto heels. The effect. Her nipples are dark blurs floating in the Monet of the blouse. Noblesse oblige. There Salter stands in his steel-grey suit, attempting head-cocked belligerent unselfconscious black American class defiance on the threshold, in possession of not even a proper invitation from the hosts plus clownishly attired and doubly not-invited Nixon beside him, but the woman is patently unfazed. She gives Salter the up-and-down as though she’s checking the reality against Elke’s particularly glowing product description and delighted to find a very close match. She wants to touch that deliciously black bald head; crush it between her nutcracking thighs.

Salter hears dinner party clink-and-chatter behind the skinny bleached wind-sharpened countess. Or duchess or baroness whatever she is. Hair pulled tight in an equestrienne’s S&M pony tail. She smiles… beams… and ushers them both in with a flourish, betraying only the scantest modicum of disdain for Nixon in the brevity with which her gaze engages his image, calling out to her husband the duke or the count or whatever to set another two places at the table because this is Berlin aristocracy and the only servants they can claim are a poker-faced cleaning woman who comes in every Saturday morning and the building’s arthritic concierge who seems to spend half his life in their master bathroom with a bucket and a wrench, and she lays a hand on Salter’s arm and lightly squeezes his biceps.

Salter sniffs in Brigitte’s wake and glances at Nixon who makes some kind of Italian gesture of loose-wristed appreciation. She is faintly but movingly redolent of the kind and class and rarity of scent that civets and lemurs and various endangered species indigenous to Zanzibar get tossed on a bloody heap sans musk gland for. The elders of the antediluvian ghetto of Salter’s childhood would have referred to the countess dismissively as a chicken wing.

The entrance to the building was impressive compared to the entrance of Salter’s building and to general standards in Germany but nothing, of course, compared to intimidating foyers of New York or London. There wasn’t even a doorman or an elevator operator or a hindrance against walking right into the building of any kind but there was a red-carpeted, grandly curving staircase that reminded Salter of a visit he once made to a brothel. Mahogany banister, cracked plaster nymphs and grape vines impressed in the time-stained walls and a half ton of chandelier hung about thirty feet over the 19th century marble tiles which are troughed and warped and boot-worn by the glaciation of traffic. Salter took to the stairs rather than be stuck in close quarters with bad-breathed Nixon in the miniscule elevator and Nixon trailed up the staircase behind him, composing an ad hoc commentary with a radio commentator’s late night spooky velvet.

“Ever higher ascends the conquering hero, this supreme black figure of a brother man, unbowed by history’s ambivalence, unheralded yet irresistible, a swaggering cocksman with total penile recall of every glistening kootchie he has had occasion to lovingly distress with ample girth and indefatigable brio… attended by his valet, his faithful page, his clownishly attired Sancho Panza, the ambulatory brain the hero himself never had… yet never fully needed… higher and higher the bourgeois staircase they mount. Even as our hero grows weary of his sidekick’s self-consciousness-motivated burlesque of this earth-shaking occasion, the side-kick evinces a highly compressed…” and here Nixon paused on the stairs and winced, “… fart… to articulate his churlish disdain…”

“Nixie,” chided Salter. “Hush, man.” He rang the bell and there she stood.

The hallway leading to the wardrobe and then the dining room is a gallery of scores of black and white photos of the count and countess’s world travels. What do these pictures…of Brigitte in front of a tasseled elephant in wherever country it is that tasseled elephants live, or svelte bisexual Sebastian posing in a wide brimmed hat in front of some gorge or other… what do they say beyond that these people can afford the price of travel? Despite whatever else it is that these pictures are straining so hard to say. Brigitte and Sebastian in stylish matching outfits, leaning with rifle-caressing Masai on the flank of a muddy Land Rover. Brigitte topless and goggled and up to her waist in the Amazon. Salter and Nixon scan these and other pictures as they follow the slinky Brigitte down the very long hall. It’s as though the pictures are there specifically to irritate all visitors; to give them something to hate the hosts for in order to spice up the dinner a little; hate them for ageless good looks or affluency or global fluidity. When in fact you end up hating them for being crassly show-offy and letting you down by not behaving like your cherished age-old fantasy of wealth which is restrained, attenuated, bloodless and aloof. When did rich people start acting like poor people with money, wondered Salter. Probably soon after they started watching television. And then being on it.

Brigitte swings double doors open and the dining room is brilliant and mellow with silver details and polished wood and fat candles grandly crusted with time’s minute excreta. The banquet table is an Olympic swimming pool of polished mahogany and festooned with six basillica-scale candelabara and it is many meters long. Nine people, not counting Brigitte, are already seated at it, the first truly intimidating thing Salter has seen since entering the building. He can feel Nixon’s crisis of confidence flare up behind him in the form of Nixon pressing close as Brigitte introduces the two of them to the seated guests. Salter can feel Nixon’s fearful breath heating his shoulder. Nixon wants to be a puppy cringing behind Salter’s boot at this moment. There are times when being freakishly smart is no more of a defense than walking into battle with the original copy of the Magna Carta as a shield… and this is one of them. Behind Brigitte’s empty seat at the far end of the table roars a fire in a baronial hearth that Nixon tries to calm himself by imagining taking a leak into but his hot breaths on Salter’s shoulder accelerate as Brigitte claps and says,

“Everyone! Please.” She points. “A dear friend of Elke’s. Elke is late as usual,” polite tittering, “and here also we have the friend of the friend. But everyone is welcome. That is our motto.” She takes Salter by the hand and leads him towards a spot that has been cleared adjacent to her queenly seat and says, “One of those annoying traditions of dinner parties, I’m afraid. Always split up guests who arrive as a couple,” more tittering. “It facilitates the most fascinating conversation. No one leaves one of our soirees without learning something or someone new.”

Nixon sits timidly between the otherworldy Sylver Goldin to his left and a florid, well-dressed, pot-bellied man who resembles a 19th century British food critic… even appears to be wearing some kind of medal on a tri-color ribbon around his neck. Or, no. The Master, Henry James, is what he resembles. Pretending this puts Nixon somewhat at his ease. Goldin says, to no one in particular, “I know this black man from somewhere,” as Salter glides the length of the other side of the very long table being tugged possessively along by the countess.

Nixon can only hope that this will end up being one of those upper-class German dinner parties that will devolve after much pseudointellectual chatter into an absinthe-fueled orgy but who might he pair up with in that case? The last one of those type things he was invited to, he just kind of skittered pantless around the throbbing periphery, trying wherever he might to assert/insert himself and ending up with mixed (possibly ancient and homosexual but definitely shit-tipped) results. Important to stake the claim on a likely female early. It will have to be a female who is homely enough, of course. He’d prefer a slender body and an assymetrical or overweight face to the obverse, if he is able to choose. Then he spots the woman seated across from him whose main physical defects appear to be a highly visible mustache and a continuous gull wing eyebrow paralleling it and Nixon says to himself aha.

It isn’t until Salter takes his seat to Brigitte’s left, across from a stern blond bearded gentleman who doesn’t seem pleased with Salter’s arrival at all, that he gets a good look at the other guests around the table and discovers, at the far end, in a white turtle-neck and wire-rimmed glasses, looking appropriate indeed, Cough.

Cough glances away from the conversation he’s deep into and gives Salter the discreetest of acknowledging glances. Perhaps he’s not at this dinner in a professional capacity and noticing Salter too heartily will give both of them away. Still, Salter finds the sight of Cough sitting there a mind-spinning thing. It grants Cough too much of a backstory, too much of an inner life, too much validity, being seen out of context like this. Salter had bumped into him at the Zand-Zee Bar recently, but that’s to be expected… a drug dealer at a trendy bar. That’s only good business. But in attendance and completely at ease at this upper class dinner party, wearing wire-rim glasses and striking the pose of a deep thinker with a finger on his lips and one eyebrow raised?

Cough knows Brigitte and Sebastian… Gitte and Sebby… through Siegfried von Stummfeldt, a former client. Cough is interested in Art, suddenly… interested in becoming an Art Dealer (from Drug Dealer to Art Dealer is the distance of a handful of letters) and Gitte and Sebby have suggested that he attend this dinner party in order to make the acquaintance of the blonde fellow with the beard seated opposite Salter, who has connections both in Real Estate and the Art World. Cough wants to use his painstakingly accreted drug money to ease into an only slightly more legitimate business.

The blonde fellow with the beard, glaring at Salter as though Salter is the culprit in the foolishness he’s about to describe, continuing a conversation that Salter’s arrival interrupted, says, “People see a photo of Jack Kennedy playing touch football with his rapacious brother Bobby on the White House lawn and they think they know everything there is to know about the golden Kennedy. Mention bootlegging or Mary Jo Kopechne and you’re some kind of what… communist.”

“Paul,” says Sylver Goldin, with a smoked chuckle, “you are not up-to-date with your name-calling, darling. What American gets called a communist any more? That is precisely as damaging as calling someone a rascal.”

He smiles with disgust, “The only information that sticks with the masses is information that comes with an emotional charge. They only learn it if it frightens them, excites them sexually, or makes them cry. The cinema is the true classroom of the Republic. Take…”

Salter interjects: “Are you from Boston?”

“Yes sir, I am.” The bearded blonde Bostonian turns to Goldin again and says, “It’s ridiculous. Take…”

She chides him, “But why get excited about it?” and turns to Salter and smiles coaxingly, dropping her voice, “I am certain I know you from somewhere.”

The bearded blonde rubs his eyes and says, with great weariness, “Take Gandhi…”

Nixon, rediscovering his nerve, says, leaning shaggily across Sylver Goldin’s lap, “Gandhi, exactly. The greatest possible disjoint between image and reality. Gandhi the icon of brotherhood and good-living versus Gandhi the.. .gung-ho Sargeant-Major in the South African…”

“Yes yes, you see? The old hypocrite was a motivated participant in the Zulu slaughter when the Bambatta Rebellion broke out! A loyal citizen of South Africa for over twenty years and supported not only Apartheid as a practise but its philosophical underpinnings as well! And yet the… the…”

“Theatre going public… “ adds Nixon with perfectly judged sarcasm.

Brigitte is explaining the Tuareg ceremonial dagger everyone finds on the innermost right of the serving plate, after the beverage spoon and salad knife, exactly where the dinner knife should be. She notes that the daggers are over a century old (and have most likely performed the task well they were designed to perform) and are identifiable by their straight, double-edged blades decorated with incised geometrical patterns, the hilts of which are still protected from the tarnishing force of acidic Tuareg sweat by the original woven leather. She indicates the knob-like shapes at the end of each handle and explains that they’re called the pommel, and winks that any meat that can’t easily be cut by these knives should not be eaten.

The bearded blonde smiles for the first time since Salter sat down across from him. Then he laughs with a hand on his chin. “I do hope the ghastly things are sanitary, Gitte,” he quips.

Henry James, seated beside Nixon and until now silent, says, with a heavily Germanized Etonian accent, “I must say, Paul, until you just now mentioned it, I was as ignorant on the matter as our… Theatre-going brethren.”

Nixon says, using a voice that Salter has never heard him use before, “But Ben Kingsley as Gandhi is so adorable.”

“One can remember when wearing a suit and tie to the cinema was de rigeur,” sniffs Henry James.

Paul nods and lifts a finger, “Let me tell you, Mohandas K. Gandhi makes me look like a bloody secular humanist in comparison… ” everyone titters, “yet… “

“Come now, Paul,” chimes Sylver Goldin, “we all know that you like to indulge in a bit of kaffir flogging from time to time,” and there is much merriment. Brigitte is smiling with Queenly benificence as the conversation surges and flares. Henry James claps in an oh-goody way. “I say, this is jolly fun. Knocking plaster saints off their department store plinths. Who else can we debunk at?”

The ugly woman across from Nixon bounces in her seat and says “Marlene Dietrich!” and is ignored. Nixon finds her aura of extraneity and isolation extremely fetching. He wonders if she’s a poor relation and tries repeatedly to catch her eye. Voices lower and go local as the conversation shatters gently into intimate cells. Henry James nods at Paul Whittington and says, “Dickens.” Sylver Goldin leans towards Salter and frowns.

“I think it will drive me crazy.”

“People always think they recognize me from somewhere else.”

“Lovable old Charles Dickens, creator of Oliver Twist and defender of the poor