Authors: Steve Stern
On the night Rachel turned up again at the 348, I had come back only a short time before from a band rehearsal in midtown. Lamar Fontaine had received a shipment of high-grade Owsley acid from California, and I’d made a delivery to the once genteel neighborhood where Velveeta and the Psychopimps had set up their ménage. Before going I’d scooped the powdered LSD into gelatin capsules, which I invariably made a sloppy job of; I dropped more on the floor than I got into the caps. A portion of the spilled powder was transferred via a licked forefinger from the floor to my tongue. So I was pretty wasted by the time I hitched a ride out to Madison and Cooper with the newly criminalized drug. My destination was a gaily painted turn-of-the-century pile known as Beatnik Manor, headquarters of the Psychopimps and their circle, among whom I counted myself. I was as much drawn to the atmosphere as the music. The place was regularly filled with young people faithful to the watchword of the
poètes maudits
, to be always drunk “on wine, poetry, or virtue,” give or take the virtue. They were originals, the tenants of that steep-gabled manse, and I felt that by association so was I. Traveling between Beatnik Manor, Avrom’s shop, and 348 North Main, I moved from one safe house to another, passing only briefly through the fallen world. Though lately, between sanctuaries, I often risked slipping into the past.
The freaky aura of Beatnik Manor had spread to the tree-arcaded neighborhood, where a coffeehouse, a head shop, and other signs of incipient bohemia had begun to appear. Inside the house, thanks to my sprung psyche, I had difficulty in distinguishing between the natural and supernatural beings; I ran a gauntlet of gorgons and magi and even a North Main Street matron in a shirtwaist and patch wig before the band came into focus sitting around their smoke-filled parlor. They were jamming with a one-legged old blues legend named Bunky Foote. In keeping with their ethnological mission, the band had resurrected the gin-soaked Bunky from a North Mississippi swamp, redeeming his flat-topped “ax” from a Beale Street pawnshop along the way. He sat in a ladder-back rocker as he played his guitar, his prosthetic limb—which he’d detached to further his relaxation—leaning against the wall behind him. (In departing he would strap on the limb, lift the cap from his woolly tonsure, and declare, “Now y’all can call me Bunky Feetes.”) Beside him Jimmy Pryor with his Prince Valiant do alternated scratching his washboard with blowing into a ceramic jug. Between sets he would dart into his basement shop to work on his puppets, returning with caricature effigies of friends and historical figures, sometimes combining them with eerie effects. The fair-haired Ira Kisco fingered his prized twelve-string guitar, a joint stuck in the capo and a Claude Lévi-Strauss paperback folded over his knee. Sandy Eubank, the curly-locked chanteuse in a loose-fitting smock whose translucency left little to the imagination, improvised dance steps she called the Eubanky Stomp. Meanwhile assorted hipsters came and went. They got stoned and added, between trips to a nefarious upstairs, lurid colors to the surreal images that lined the interior walls. Beyond those walls Moloch and the military-industrial complex ruled the day, but the scene at Beatnik Manor remained a bulwark against their incursions.
They generally greeted me as one of their own: “Candy Man Lenny!” “Twenty-Three Sklarew!” “Breath ’n’ Britches,” this from Elder Lincoln, de facto leader of the band. Even their groupies would seem pleased to see me, at least until I’d made a few typically churlish advances, after which their eyes glazed over. I didn’t mind, having lately conceived a fidelity to Rachel Ostrofsky.
Taking my place on the floor among the other devotees, I listened as the band sang in fiendish harmony along with Bunky:
Jelly roll done killed my pappy, drove my mama stone blind
… They played a song that itemized all the things Mr. Crump, the deceased political sachem who’d run the city of Memphis for decades, didn’t ’low, which included easy riders and “protonihilistic boogie blues.” Their traditional instruments—fiddle, Dobro, mouth harp—mingled in an unholy alliance with Cholly Jolly’s electric guitar, its sound the snarl of a tomcat in rut. Then the band took a recess, and, snapped back into an awareness of why I’d come, I broke out the contraband, for which they passed the hat. My gentleman landlord, Lamar Fontaine, self-appointed benefactor to the Psychopimps, was content with whatever token donations they made.
The band members then began to talk shop, and I was impressed as always with their musical sophistication, having none of my own. Sometimes I thought they spoke a secret language. Sweet-scented hash pipes floated from hand to hand while Cholly Jolly, his sorrel eyebrows thick as his walrus mustache, praised Bunky Foote to his face. Bunky’s broad grin contracted, however, as Cholly included such rivals as Furry Lewis, Sleepy John, and Mi’sippi Fred in his canon. The grin expanded again when Cholly, in a burst of muggle-tueled fellowship, insisted, “Everything comes from you guys. You say more in a bent note than Clapton can in the whole twelve-bar scheme. The inside stuff, Cap’m, the shades of light and dark in your sliding chords, that’s where the sweet spots lie.”
The classically trained Ira Kisco seconded Cholly’s assertion. “I thought I knew my way round a blues progression pretty good, but I didn’t know diddly ’bout the structures: the thirteen and a half bars and the whole gonzo cabala of modal tunings and turnarounds—”
“Show-off,” from Sandy Eubank, her loose limbs displayed to good advantage in a beanbag pouf.
Having returned from the basement with an odd new puppet, Jimmy Pryor recalled the first time they’d had Bunky over to the manor. “We threw you a banquet like the one Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein made for Henri Rousseau. That one was a sham soiree, really, which they intended to rag the old naïf, but the Douanier received the honor with such courtly dignity that he turned the tables on his hosts. The Bunk, he did the same with us.”
By now Bunky Foote, without losing his grin, had begun to writhe in embarrassment. Elder Lincoln, silent so far behind his keyboard, his mahogany jaw set and tense, finally spoke up. “Yeah, y’all white folks sure been good to us ’sploited coloreds.”
There was a moment when the room seemed duly chastised. Elder, by dint of his golden throat and expertise with a range of instruments, was the Psychopimp’s front man; he was respected as well for his hard-won street creds, and commanded an authority whenever he spoke. Given to radical mood swings, he had ample reason to be moody lately. The week before, out walking in the neighborhood with the lily-white Sandy—a decidedly provocative act—he was stomped by the cops. The bruises and a royal goose egg on his brow still bore witness to the assault. But Cholly seemed to suspect there was another cause of Elder’s flare-up.
“What’s eating you, man?”
“Man,” said Elder acidly, “I’m sick of this chickenshit town. The mayor and his stooges squat in their counting house, refuse to even negotiate with the union, while the garbageman,” he struck a sour note on the keyboard behind him for emphasis, “he still qualifies for welfare on a fulltime salary.”
Though the strike was on everyone’s mind, I was surprised to hear the issue noised about at Beatnik Manor. The Psychopimps were notorious for their grand schemes, their projected Dada events and dream carnivals, some of which even materialized. Cosmic revolutions they might entertain, but local politics seemed too pedestrian a topic to cross their radar.
Of course nobody was inclined to argue with Elder. “Mayor Loeb ain’t about to give a inch,” affirmed Sandy.
“‘Just like a tree that’s standing by the water,’” Elder bitterly intoned.
“Chandler and James and them on the city council,” submitted Jimmy Pryor, dandling the little puppet on his knee: it was a miniature bald-headed monk in a saffron robe, “they think,” lifting the puppet with its stick legs dangling, speaking ventriloquially through its beak-shaped mouth, “strike is part of worldwide Commie plot. Reds are inspiring peasants to revolt.” The Oriental singsong of Jimmy’s pitched voice had an unsettling effect on his audience.
Ira Kisco, ever the diplomat, tried to strike an optimistic chord. “The union’s bringing in some pretty big guns. Roy Wilkins turned a lot of heads the other night with his speech at the Mason Temple.”
“I know all about it,” Elder harrumphed. “He warned folks not to foul their own nest. Tell that to the local chapter of the Invaders: Black Power, baby; them young bucks are ready to burn the city down.”
That was the cue for Jimmy Pryor, kicking back the carpet, to place his little monk on the floor, strike a match, and set fire to its robe. The whole room flashed on those images of the Vietnamese monks who’d immolated themselves in protest against the decimation of their country. The flaming puppet crumpled and fell face-forward in a stinking mess of melting rubber, felt, and fleece. Then I sensed how the chilly menace of headline events had filtered through the walls of Beatnik Manor, which I’d previously thought were impenetrable.
Everyone’s attention remained glued to the greasy spot where the puppet had been; which was when, egged on by the chemical buzz in my brain, I decided it was up to me to break the spell. “I was with the marchers that got Maced at Main and Beale,” I announced. “We had to run like hell to keep from being beaten to bonemeal. My eyes are still stinging from the spray.” And as no one seemed properly agog: “You had bodies lying in the street just like sacks of uncollected garbage.” I realized, however vaguely, that the image was inappropriate; I’d confused the incident with the condition of the streets during the Yellow Fever epidemic as described in Muni Pinsker’s book. Still I throbbed with anticipation, waiting for the room to recognize the largeness of my experience and pepper me with questions. But beyond a polite grunt on the part of Ira Kisco, I was mostly ignored.
Elder Lincoln, the plastic pick stuck in his ’fro like a half-buried cleaver, was still nodding his head over Jimmy’s monk flambeau. “Martyrs,” he opined, “that’s what the movement needs all right. Specially martyrs that take a few pigs along with them.”
After the immense effort it had taken me to formulate my speech, I struggled against a tail-spinning temptation to sulk; I summoned the waning effects of the acid to see myself as “tameless, swift, and proud,” rather than just a boorish drug mule endured for the sake of the booty I brought.
She made a beeline toward me across the barroom, and while my heart hummed like the Lorelei, I tried to assume an air of careless unconcern.
“Red devils, yellow jackets, blue angels …,” I offered.
“I want to talk to you,” said Rachel, who’d yet to remove her corny tam-o’-shanter. A few tendrils peeked from beneath the cap to caress her downy cheek.
“Maybe you’d prefer some crystal meth for the business lady’s trip?” I said, as she was behaving in such a business-like manner.
“Can you please be real for a minute?” she asked.
I pondered the question: since having found myself a character in a book, I had, understandably, an ever more arbitrary sense of reality. “Where’s Dennis?” I inquired, pretending to yawn.
She frowned. “That’s none of your business.” It gratified me to have provoked her, though her dark eyes were already softening, nostrils unflaring. “Dennis and I decided we needed some time apart.” I must have shown some relief, because she cautioned me: “Look, Lenny”—I savored her invocation of my name; I enjoyed looming over her by half a head, though her slenderness made her appear taller than she was—“that night with you, it never happened, okay? Call it an out-of-body experience.”
I winced, my eyes involuntarily traveling over the body I’d remained outside of. “More’s the pity,” I muttered.
She gave me a look lest I forget my unspoken shame. “Like I said, it never happened,” she reiterated. Then she sighed, rolled her eyes toward the ceiling: this was not how the conversation was supposed to go. Here she’d come down all alone to the city’s seedy underbelly to find a guy who should have been flattered by the gesture but was instead being childishly difficult. Meanwhile the place was relatively quiet for a change. Lamar, in his bottle-green frock coat, was playing at master of ceremonies; he had pulled the plug on the jukebox, mounted a projector on a table, and was showing, through a dust-filled cone of light, an animated pornographic film: Snow White serially violated by industrious dwarves. I fluctuated between relishing Rachel’s embarrassment and concealing my own.
“Can’t we just be friends?” she asked.
Didn’t she know that those were the most dreaded words a woman can say to a man? On the other hand, it was a kind of touching if pathetic request that must have hurt her pride to make. But I was resolved to stand as firm against her humility as I did against her condescension. Remarkably clearheaded despite (or thanks to) the evening’s stimulants, I asked her point-blank, “What do you want?”
“I want to hear what you really know about the Pinch.”
I blinked: she’d pronounced the open sesame that relaxed all hostilities, instantly rendering me a helpless conduit for the particulars of Muni Pinsker’s world. “I know,” I began, “that the night they turned on the electric lights for the first time, Lily Altfeder found her long-lost parrot, stiff but still upright on top of her hall tree. I know that Emile Grossbart, the watchmaker, was accustomed to wearing his truss outside his pants. I know that Eddie Kid Wolf performed feats of strength onstage at the Idle Hour Talent Show. He started by lifting a longhorn calf over his head and continued through all the months it took the calf to grow into a steer. Then he kept it tethered in the yard behind his family’s rag shop till it drowned in the flood—”
“What flood?”
“The flood that followed the earthquake.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Because it seemed that a sampling of Rachel’s oral history informants had referred to some nameless event that occurred on North Main around the eve of the First World War. “That’s what they say, ‘Something happened.’ Of course they were just kids at the time, but while none of them seem able to specify exactly what took place, they all agree it was momentous and afterward nothing was the same. When I ask them about an earthquake, nobody remembers. Either they know something they’re not telling me or they’re suffering from collective amnesia.”