Authors: Darryl Pinckney
* * *
By her old age, Sissieretta Jones had run out of money. She sold her houses. She sold her jewels and her medals, one by one, then in lots.
* * *
To kill a buffalo bull you must first cut off its tail when it is at full speed. Cello’s hair smelled of smoke. Maybe I was losing my sense of smell, but I detected smoke on her breath.
“Where have you been?”
Her practice room, she said.
Anyone could see that she had been crying. She was nearly an hour late. I wasn’t alone in the hut and was glad of it. They were packing up the enclave for Rosen-Montag’s archives. The billboard advertisements along the perimeter from corporate partners that Rosen-Montag had had his final preopening tantrum about were going up. The show was over for us now that the public was lining up to see his futurist village of good taste.
I guided Cello to the same empty restaurant in the hotel near the Zoo Station that Hayden had taken me to. Her driving was a worry. Rosen-Montag famously bunked off the day after his openings. Even before the party, it was clear that his wife was relieved to be getting him out of town.
Cello admitted to nothing, confided nothing. I asked her no questions. Maybe she hadn’t washed her face and hair since the Lessingsdorf opening the week before. Maybe she just stared at her children in their baths. Perhaps Dram was in Dortmund again. Manfully, I ordered for us both, and she spooned carrot soup and tear spit for a while. Through me she was reaching out to my mother in this, her woman’s hurt. She was squeezing Mom’s hand, not mine.
It had been the worst day. I was in awe of my discretion with Cello, but I took it as a consequence of the shock I’d had. Manfred had also got out of town, in a matter of days.
The family of a girl in Rosen-Montag’s entourage had a small
Schloss
, a little palace, in West Germany that needed extensive work on its wiring, plumbing, and interior decoration. He needed a break from Irma’s flowers, Manfred said. He brought up his backpack from his storage cubicle. He wanted to give me things, but I’d nowhere to put them. He threw out his furniture and Irma’s plants. He dumped as much as he could, quickly. We loaded his boxes and lamps in a moving van run by former junkies. We took my boxes up to his empty apartment. I would have to do something with them soon.
I had several coffees and he several beers at his pub in farewell. He controlled our hug in the dawn’s early light, holding my neck down on the edge of his shoulder so I couldn’t kiss his cheek, in case I was tempted. His crotch was an insulting distance.
I’d not slept and I ate more french fries and swilled more coffee as Cello lost herself to her heartbreak in the blessed desertion of the hotel restaurant. The one waiter stood far away. I wondered if we looked like a story about black deportation. Instead, we were a story of when there is no one else to turn to, when you did not want to be alone, alone in Europe though you were, when music of any kind would be only a prelude to suicide, alone and black as you were.
One of Odell’s session musician friends, Afer, once explained to me how he fled his Johannesburg township the night rumor reached his uncle that the security police were coming for him. He spent a long time in the Cameroons, trying to find a school in the West that would take him. He had a chance to go to East Berlin. From there, he crossed over. There had been nothing to stop him. He was not a Third World guest worker living in a concrete tower in one of the outlying districts of East Berlin. Once across the border, once in West Berlin, you ask for asylum. His case had been pending for a while, then got settled in his favor. His story was real, whereas my story sounded to me like an imitation of others I’d read.
I don’t know what told me that Cello was “holding,” though she would not have understood what the word meant in that context had I asked her. I made her give me the cocaine she had on her. I went to the toilet and flushed it. She’d needed someone to take from her this last remembrance. That was why she was eating and sobbing. She was crashing; I was crashing. I was a fellow addict, someone you ask to watch over you when you’re in withdrawal, when you’re facing cold turkey, when you don’t want anyone in normal life to see you. I made up my mind to abandon Manfred’s futon on my next move.
I ordered ice cream and Cello laughed at last. What got to me was that Manfred must have been planning, not merely contemplating, his exit for some time and he’d not told me. Irma didn’t want to see me, because she believed I’d known all along. I had no idea that Rosen-Montag’s entourage included a countess. Manfred had made arrangements to give up his place, to redirect his mail, and behind my back as well as Irma’s. I didn’t want to feel “left,” as he’d left her. On the other hand, I was obscurely flattered, obscurely turned on to have a share in his strange fashion of forsaking.
“He loved the flashlight more than he did the hearth,” Dad said of guys he’d heard had left their wives.
I thought of the time I flapped around inside a car as it rolled over into a ditch. It was eerie, the disconnect between knowing what was happening and not being able to do anything about it, that having to go through with what was happening, unable to do anything about it.
You couldn’t get away from your own authorship fast enough; you couldn’t run from the deed fast enough; you couldn’t wait to be the white-haired person decades later, full of regret when the intrepid young journalist tracks you down.
Cello was drained and my stomach was taut and round. I used to wait outside her door on our third floor when she cried from shame because of the madness of her father, how public his mania liked to make itself. Then there was her mother, proud of her nightclub engagement at a hotel over in Hammond, Indiana. I’d just wanted to sit with her, to keep her company, the only thing you can offer someone in misery.
* * *
Aunt Jemima was hired to cook pancakes and tell stories at the Chicago Exposition. Her booth was a giant flour barrel. They said she made more than a million instant pancakes at the fair that one summer. Buttons featured her image, the fat, shiny-cheeked, big-eyed black woman in a kerchief: “I’se in town, honey.” They called her the most famous colored woman in the world.
Aunt Jemima liked to run her mouth, but black people didn’t like her, because she told stories about how happy she’d been on the plantation. In one story, she cooked such delicious pancakes she saved her master’s life. The Yankees decided to spare her master; or the Yankees were so enjoying their pancakes he had time to sneak away. Cello’s father couldn’t remember which.
Ralston Jr. told us that Aunt Jemima never made any money from that pancake recipe. He was dressed in pajamas. It was Christmas Eve. He fell asleep. Rhonda got Cello to come downstairs then. We argued over whether Aunt Jemima had been a real person. Cello and I didn’t want to believe it, even after Dad and Mom had stepped in, dispensers of the facts.
Because I was fat, kids in the school corridor who’d never seen Mom chanted behind me, “Ain’t yo mama on the pancake box?”
* * *
I was going to random AA meetings in German. Dram had come to Schöneberg to help fetch boxes of books and take them back to their cellar. I was not following my books to Charlottenburg. Yet through Cello’s intervention I got out of Friedenau before I ran out of the money to pay for my room of blue carpet. A friend of theirs, a professor of North American Studies, had been kicked out by his wife of three decades. He had a new place near the university in Dahlem, with a cheap room he thought suitable for a graduate student type. He liked that I cleaned up in the kitchen. He sat and talked. He was a specialist in the hideous Francis Parkman and called things by Indian—Native American—names. Hashish was “shongsasha.”
I cleaned a lot, while he complained to his estranged wife’s answering machine that she had not thought about what he was to do with his laundry. He called his friends and saw them often. He talked so much about his marriage and separation it drove me to my first heterosexual incident in some time.
He accompanied me to the Waldbühne, filled with indignation that his wife had got their adult daughter on her side. I’d wanted it to be one of those magical nights of music asking for my forget-yourself attention. The glitter Jessye Norman wore soared upward, answered by the stars. The birds quieted and the dark pulsed with love for her. Deep, deep. But it was as though my landlord professor had not been listening, had been instead watching for the concert’s end so he could pick up where he left off, right along with the mosquitoes, so many bouncing above the grass they looked like the tips of reeds.
His English was idiomatic, fluent, and he had to use all of it on me. I saw her check me out in the crowd of people filtering through the tunnel away from the band shell hidden in the forest. I’d been hurrying, to get away from my landlord professor’s circular analysis of his family dynamic. She’d kept up with us, this bold girl in worn-down flat shoes. She was trying to attract me, not him. Since Manfred’s going, I had been drifting about, as useless as Telstar. I suddenly veered onto her side. She had a strong odor and dark hair. It took my landlord professor a moment to register what was going on. Then he increased his pace ahead and away. Guys understood.
I bought condoms at a gas station. I lifted the heavy sack of all my pointless, fruitless pining and bore down on her, the sweet, lonely Polish loading dock. Nothing is mysterious to a seaman, they say, unless it be the sea itself. I didn’t keep our next appointment and she had no phone.
* * *
One Saturday, I left the AA meeting in Dahlem early and went to one of those free Bach concerts in the ugly modern church at Europa Center. The musicians were visiting students, but it was another place where I could escape my landlord professor and myself.
Cello and Dram were both there. I was sure they’d wandered in on impulse. We got up and went outside at the same time. Cello shook off the bad experience, swinging her hair back and forth and making animal sounds. Dram lit up. They were young again. I was nostalgic for that sad, drifting feeling of a few weeks earlier. Money, the expatriate’s enemy, was ending my days with the frightened professor, he who was so unprepared for bachelor life. But I could see where his wife and his daughter might think his conversation a poor return for waiting on him hand and foot.
They’d maybe had something to drink, Cello and Dram. They’d maybe had one of those where-are-we-now conversations, without either being irrevocably honest. Dram stepped on his cigarette. “Okay, he decided he is straight,” he said in English, as if Manfred had come to his senses. Cello lightly cupped my chin. Dram got behind me and said over my shoulder that I was not to give up hope. Cello took my hands, backed up, and let go.
Dram doubled back to thank me for being there for Cello during her recent cancer scare, but he’d been so unable to guess what was up with his wife that he wished I had told him she was consulting a specialist in Switzerland, someone his family did not know. Cello, swinging her arms and her hair, stayed off in the distance as he told me what she evidently had had no trouble getting him to believe. Dram said her music foundation had never before had so many meetings, so he’d been concerned. He knew that something was up. He tapped my shoulder and caught up with Cello. Dram and Cello pulled on each other as they walked hand in hand across the plaza toward the Ku’damm, their children, and home.
Their atmosphere of hearts still beating gave me permission to be friends again with the ChiChi. I was not feeling at all vulnerable to the promises, the lies of white wine. But in one of those addict’s crazy minutes, as soon as I saw Bags, I asked if he had any coke. He handled the heavy side of his business himself. Hash put me to sleep and Berlin asked for a brother to be somewhat awake, I explained. He called me Cuz.
The streets had been busy ever since I got back. Small parades and street fairs and demonstrations and ceremonies and bands and protests. There were official and unofficial festivities marking the city’s birthday. Lessingsdorf had been one of those parties for the intelligentsia, for the arty, for what Manfred called the schicki-micki. I paid no attention when I heard the honking outside. It just sounded very loud. The ChiChi usually muffled most of the city noise, what little found its way behind Europa Center.
A regular who was leaving came back immediately and spoke to Odell. His body language alerted Zippi, who came flying. Odell ordered her to stay put, no cops. His buddies were with him. If Bags and Big Dash were among them, then I was going to be as well. I was in no mood to stay behind with the girls.
I recognized Afer, the guy from South Africa with the ancient name, who had been granted asylum. I saw blood on his forehead as he lurched toward the curb. He went down. He’d been hit so quickly, I thought somebody had thrown something at him. I didn’t realize he’d been socked again by a burly man who jumped into a small car of other burly men holding small flags.
Odell’s buddies stormed the car and cut it off. Big Dash was rocking the vehicle by its door handle. Three or four languages accompanied the assault. The burly passenger rammed his door against Big Dash, and Bags pulled the passenger from the car. We set on him. The other burly East Europeans—Bulgarians, Odell said later—were out and swinging metal pipe.
Bags went down and I jumped on an East European’s back. It was not like the movies. To be kicked in the stomach by a goat could not be much worse than an East European elbow. Moreover, he spun, and I with him. The law of physics predicted my flight over the hood of a parked car. I banged my head going down on the other side. I saw spots.
“‘Fly me to the moon,’” Big Dash sang to an East European. The big white dude paused and Big Dash kicked his attacker hard in the nuts.
It was a black-white, African-American-African-Slav melee. Afer lay unconscious and Big Dash was on his knees, blood overflowing his mouth, his lower lip a fountain. Two men had Odell, whose free arm punched at the ribs of an assailant. Two session men grunted with an East European, and Bags had the fifth man from the tiny car. It was like the movies. He slammed his forehead down on the man’s nose. The huge man lay between parked cars. I rolled over and raised myself onto his throat. I was not dead. He kicked. I was not a eunuch. I let go. I struck before I got up. His teeth cut my knuckles.