Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Co-op members raised their glasses to us from the bar inside and from another table out front. We watched a Frisbee game on the second floor of the old brewery. It was like one of those old-fashioned stage sets of
La Bohème
that showed house life floor by floor. They had a good time over there, those architects. In the chilled-out Potsdamerplatz milieu, I did not consider it racializing to wait tables or to wash dishes at the Café Rosa.
No one helped me clear the plates. It was my party. “Remember, I come from a long line of house slaves,” Cello swore their grandmother had said to her on her deathbed. “I pass this knowledge of me on to you.”
I seemed to remember that Cello’s grandmother couldn’t talk at the end. I’d wanted to ask Bags why his girlfriend didn’t just have an abortion, but I never did.
* * *
We were the younger generation, but we behaved as a faction within the house. We may have been the children’s table, keeping company with some terrified kids who’d come with their confused mothers or grandmothers for the night, but we appealed to Mom as a chairman. To lobby her in the morning worked best. You could get things out of Mom if you waited for her in the hall when she was shuffling papers, on her way to remind someone when was her appointment down at Medicaid and she’d better leave now and she had to take that nasty bag with her.
Dad was refuge. We could not go down to his den, but when he surfaced we could sit with him and his newspapers in the kitchen. The strict rule was silence. We were never with him for very long. We stopped looking for him when we got older. Mom didn’t like Solomon listening to rock on his earphones when Cello practiced, but Dad told her she had to let the point go; their son wasn’t a little boy anymore.
* * *
“I can’t believe I’m having strudel down the street from the Berlin Wall,” Rhonda laughed. “This is wild,” she continued, dipping her spoon into a muff of cream.
The woman who baked was one of the original squatters. Afer said that she could be a problem. I already got in house meetings that she was assertive at the wrong moments, obstructionist because of some principle of anarcho-purist living that meant continued discomfort for the house as a whole. But she baked so divinely that Cello was impatient for the water to boil and Dram picked up a random spoon and scooped from his sister-in-law’s plate.
Yao shot him a look. I could tell he was attracted to Rhonda. It excited him that she, so lovely, had a doctorate. He had spent some time studying in the U.K. He claimed to be at work in absentia on his dissertation, about how excessive acid-tripping among workers adversely affected the Japanese shipbuilding industry in the 1970s and British automobile manufacturing in the same period. He hadn’t been back to Ghana in years. I doubted he’d left West Berlin in ages either. He was a quiet man, stateless, older than he looked. He said probably more sharply than he meant to that the border guards still shot and killed people trying to escape from East Berlin.
My new part of town was not easy to get to, which was why they always drove to the Philharmonic, Dram said. Yao had been pleased to lend me a squeaky bicycle and I was embarrassed when Dram walked in wheeling a new silver Schwinn. He said I couldn’t be part of the Autonomen if I did not have a bicycle. Cello said she hated cyclists and that there was a great deal of Bicycle Fascism in West Berlin. They’d come by U-Bahn with it as far as they could and walked the rest of the way, leaving the car in Charlottenburg so that they could have a good time among the Far-Out Far Left, as Dram phrased it in English.
“You are a hard man,” Afer told him.
After meatballs, we had to go into the gallery, the hallway outside the bookstore, to look at the cheap shirts Yao splattered with paint in his spare time. They were for sale. He worked “black,” or off the books, in a nearby laundry. He was very good in the garden and was so put off by my fear of the soil that I got over it that first Saturday of weeding. Cello was more interested in the bulletin board.
Hayden and Father Paul didn’t come inside with us. Hayden was having a smoky talk with Uwe, the sweet-looking Afro-German boy from the fifth floor who hung out more with the young German couples than he did with us, the other black guys. “The thing about our time is that later has arrived, we’re in it now, later is here.” Father Paul’s English was not keeping up. “What do you think accounts for the interest in preppydom?” Hayden answered his own question. “The decline and fall of the West.” He and Father Paul were due to leave for the Tyrol for the summer in a few days’ time.
Rhonda treated the shirt she’d been given like a dishrag and at the same time scrunched her nose at the cigarettes, even outside. Dram accepted another beer and lit up anyway. He watched Uwe prepare a spliff while Hayden held forth. Lucky shrugged in answer to my look of dismay. Rhonda shook her head when Uwe offered it to her first. Except for Afer, we all declined. Yao excused himself.
I was safe in the divided city and Uwe insisted to Hayden that he was treated as a German in the United States, though I was pretty sure that even after he opened his mouth he was still a light-skinned black to most Americans. If he was an African in Germany, which he was nowhere else on earth, then he was at least a foreigner in both countries, maybe everywhere he went, except West Berlin, haven of mongrels.
He sucked on his joint and said that he was at home nowhere, for which he blamed his parents. He blamed his parents for being strangers to each other after making him, and for being strangers to him. He blamed his father for abandoning his mother when his tour of duty was up at the end of the 1960s, causing her many years of starting each morning with shots of whiskey. He blamed his mother for letting her family ignore them all his life, for letting him leave school in order to discover the land where his father lived, and for his father turning out to be a stupid fuck in the middle of the Los Angeles ghetto.
Everyone was quiet. Cello wouldn’t look at Rhonda, but she let Dram reach down the back of her chair for her hair. I put my hand sympathetically on Uwe’s back as I inched by with cups. He leaned far forward in response. Hayden gave me an Oops look, his arms soon to be around superbly formed Father Paul.
* * *
Dad whistled while he worked over schedules of deductibles. Mom did not like to make too much of a fuss about the holidays. Her crazies were usually depressed at that time of year and we ourselves didn’t much want to get together with family. Uncle Ralston’s dynastic fantasies of a clan celebrating in style were thwarted by Aunt Loretta’s inability to countenance guests, not to mention his own obnoxiousness.
“You don’t want to die for something,” I heard Ralston Jr. say to Dad one Christmas Eve. “I have a bus schedule to El Salvador. I want to die. In Eliot, it’s Greek. I want to die. What’s the difference between doing and being? The difference is infinite.”
* * *
Hayden had kept Father Paul waiting to go until the last minute, not wanting to miss what he knew would happen between Uwe and Doctor Rhonda. I could hear her down the hall getting pounded. Elsewhere, Afer’s girlfriend shouted Afer’s praises. Loud, thumping reggae was going in the young Germans’ rooms, to which I had not been invited. Yao and Lucky hadn’t come back from their first-Saturday-of-the-month ritual, a visit to a one-story slot machine/porn cabinets/whorehouse establishment on Potsdamerstrasse, next to a used-car dealership. Dram had taken a melancholy Cello home, his love for her burning in his eyes. Everyone in Berlin was getting laid, except me.
I didn’t have any hash. I could make out a couple going at it in a lit bedroom in the brewery across the dark. Nobody ever had any trouble asking me to cover for them on Sunday mornings doing whatever, because to them, I was very acceptable as the nonpracticing kind of ’mo. They only needed for me to be black. I could see them when I came downstairs on Sunday mornings to open up for someone, a couple asleep on the floor under a duvet by the sofa, the door ajar, or a couple half naked and drowsily postcoital at a kitchen table.
“The cat’s here.”
“I know. It’s very moving.”
Berlin was full of people who hated you for what they’d told you, Lotte said. We were alone all morning in the café, she and I.
Lotte said that 1934 had been a very bad year for queers, maybe the worst since Oscar Wilde’s conviction.
I couldn’t forget Rock Hudson’s face. Saintly and shriveled, he talked cheerfully, but the lost-eyelashes look would not suit him. A big man had climbed from this sick man’s side and loped off to an all-night diner, never to return. He’d been dead three years, but the ravaged face flashed behind that of every cute boy I cut a desperate look at, even in faraway Berlin.
* * *
“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go,” Big Dash said. “But I’m waiting for that lost-looking dude down there to hit the can and I’ll join him.”
Zippi opened the big rectangle of aluminum foil and swept her bangs at the sight of the soft, moist black hash. It was coming into Europe again, I explained in German. Afghani chieftains and Russian officers had worked things out, I said, though I’d no idea where I got that news.
A football game was on TV. Odell let out a cowboy yelp. I didn’t have to lie either. I’d not seen Bags, I said in English. Regulars along the bar made what they thought were coyote sounds. Zippi said in German that I could tell Afer this didn’t make up for things. I let her look away first. The hash was a gift from me, but I didn’t volunteer that I purchased it from Afer’s girlfriend and I didn’t follow Zippi into the kitchen either.
I was a big boy now. I got a white wine from Odell and took it to a thin older woman I used to put them away with. She’d had a few glasses already. We laughed at how my German had advanced. Was I reading in German the German literature I liked so much, she wanted to know. I was flattered that she remembered that I liked Heinrich Mann. Two hours later my joker was wrapped and I was balling her. To stay interested I had to pretend I was commanding her with that fat one of Manfred’s I’d never seen.
* * *
My thing for this German dude was still very much alive. I slowed and looked up when I cycled past the building where his betrayed oncologist worked. I took to parking across from the Nissen huts. Even at a distance I could tell that the enclave looked and felt nothing like the militantly organized and clean encampment Rosen-Montag had insisted that it be every day. It wasn’t clear what the site was being used for now. On the other side of the Tiergarten, I wasn’t yet ready to go as far as Lessingsdorf. I turned back at the Academy of Arts.
I had a theory. The feelings for Manfred that I carried around Berlin changed in emphasis depending on my mode of transportation. On foot, my thoughts about him were sorrowful; by subway and train the images of our times together were fractured and comic; in a taxi or on a bus I was passive, the weak one, someone not in charge; but by bicycle I experienced gratitude in having enjoyed his company, acceptance that as an ideal he belonged to German history and as a man to himself, not to me, and maybe not even to his countess, taking the Rilke view of patrons in castles.
I cycled as far as the Schlachtensee. Every family on the banks of the lake was a nudist colony. Buck-naked fathers climbed trees and dived and grandmothers wiped the mouths of cherubs, the loose flesh of their grandmotherly arms sagging beside breasts content to have done their job, retired, and gone to sleep above their cascades of flesh.
The sun was going to be out for a good while yet. I was in a rowboat. Experimentally, I removed my sneakers and socks. My shirt came off next. I rowed farther into the lake. My skin was slippery from the effort and the sun. My trousers and underwear I got rid of in a single motion. I lay down in the rowboat, knees above me. It was too much on my eyes, even with clip-on shades. I sat up. I did that German thing. I looked at my navel. I noted mostly the absence of definition around it. I did the boy thing next, deliciously.
“Jed,
Mann
,” Manfred might have said, pulling on my arms. He got excited when I took to something characteristic of Berlin:
bouletten
, George Grosz, controlling the line I was standing in at the cinema, his reckless parking, too much cake on Sunday, hatred of authority, exhibitionism. “How cool is that then,” he’d say.
I was willing to masquerade as him on the sheets again, but my former partner in white wine didn’t want me. Everything she said to me under her breath in the ChiChi was humiliating. I was, like every black man in the free city, a hustler when it came to white women. She nodded in Odell’s direction. If I couldn’t get what I wanted from her I’d discard her. True, I admitted. If she wanted that, she would hire from the bar one of the talented, skillful musicians, she said. She pushed away the glass of wine I’d brought her and called for one she’d pay for herself. I should have given her my black man’s Who-are-you-kidding look, but I doubted at that moment that I had one.
After that, the time I would have given to the ChiChi went instead to piles of dishes and miles of bike lanes. I didn’t want to lie to Zippi even if I wasn’t coming around. I didn’t like my gentleman’s debt to Afer’s girlfriend. When I asked Afer if he’d seen Bags, he said he’d gone to see his family in America. But he was coming back. He rushed over it, like a salesman covering up something defective about the product. Afer wasn’t good at intrigue. He had a way of letting on that he was involved in something, keeping big secrets. But he tricked me. I hadn’t expected him to understand when I quit smoking dope.
Lotte was at her table in the window one morning and we saw five guys from the architects’ collective rush around from the front of the building to their cars. They had blueprints rolled up under their arms and waved big notebooks. They ran like the Keystone Kops, like they were having a good time. Lotte said it was a circulated fact that since the Cold War, German architects on both sides of the Iron Curtain were expected to spy for their governments.
I put off having a coffee that day and fell asleep without having had any. I didn’t take a break while on café duty the next day and fell into bed without having had a cigarette. It was going to be easier to ride the bicycle, I told myself. I couldn’t stop sweating. I ignored the content and Technicolor of my recurring dreams.