Authors: Steve Stern
“Jenny—” Muni grabbed her wrist to detain her. Maybe this was it, the ideal opportunity to propose to her, but the very thought flooded his head with an excess of emotion that robbed him of speech. The girl slid fluidly from her perch into his arms, as though in pronouncing her name he held an empty garment for her body to slip into. She leaned against him, pinning him to the crotch of a dirt-caked root with the pressure of her small breasts and hips. They had yet to repeat the deed that preceded the quake, when their fused bodies tolled like a clapper in a bell. But now the heat of their contact, for all its urgency, served only to enhance for Muni the delight he took in observing the very rich hours of North Main Street. It was an appallingly pure sensation, the kind that begged to be recorded the way sins and mitzvot are inscribed on the Jewish New Year in the Book of Life; because nothing in experience was real—this was his thunderous conviction—until it was wedded to the word. That was the marriage over which Muni, with Jenny’s blessing, felt a sudden blind compulsion to preside.
“Don’t go away,” he blurted, leaping clear of the abyss to hit the ground running. “I’ll be right back,” he shouted over his shoulder, though he was already out of earshot.
The grand canal of North Main was lit by lanterns, moths, and toy gondolas with guttering candles for masts, with silk tallises and celluloid shirtfronts for sails. The buildings that bordered the water, despite their hobbled condition, assumed such a look of stability that you’d have thought they’d always been so skewed, and the shops were open for business though there was little left to sell. As a result, commerce was more a performance than an actual exchange of goods and services, the citizens like children who played at being entrepreneurs. Only Pin’s General Merchandise, once the flagship enterprise of North Main Street, stood in darkness; for these days Pinchas Pin remained mostly sunk in despondency at the kitchen table. He roused himself only to inquire of his wife’s health from the visiting doctor or to receive the consolations of Jenny Bashrig, who came and went. But even the gloomy store, an aberration in that glimmering neighborhood, had for Muni an air of deepest mystery.
He foraged among the mildewed shelves, poked with matches into shadowed recesses until he found what he was looking for: a chirographic fountain pen with an automatic inkstand and a quire of white octavo stationery. The pen’s tapered handle was split and the paper moldy, its virgin leaves cockled and water-stained but nonetheless sufficient for his purpose. Muni tiptoed up the stairs past the kitchen in order not to disturb his brooding uncle. He could hear Pinchas lamenting aloud and even caught snatches of his blaming himself for Katie’s ailment, for the barrenness of his marriage. And while his uncle’s plaint made no immediate impression, it nevertheless penetrated Muni’s awareness, lodging in some remote corner of his brain from which it might work its way out like a splinter over time.
Muni took the pen and paper into his matchbox room, its only furniture the folding cot and squat deal dresser upon which stood a porcelain ewer and basin. He peeled off a single page from the stack and shoved the rest beneath the slopjar under his cot. From his uncle’s bookshelf in the hallway he selected a substantial volume, the Yiddish translation of Kropotkin’s
Conquest of Bread
as it turned out. He sat on his cot, placed the book on his knees, and spread the paper across its smooth cloth binding. Then with a galloping heart Muni took up the inkpen and prepared to begin: he had some vague idea of making notes for future reference, of quickly acquitting himself of his renegade impulse then hurrying back to Jenny; it was after all with her that the real inspiration resided. But he found himself paralyzed.
He hadn’t actually indited anything to paper since the doggerel verse of his yeshiva days, though lack of practice wasn’t the only reason for his hesitation. For one thing, he couldn’t decide what language to write in: his Hebrew was rusty from disuse and he regarded Yiddish as the holy tongue’s poor relation; nor had he yet taken full possession of his host country’s idiom. But even if he were able to choose a vernacular appropriate to his undertaking, what precisely was his subject? Everything he observed was replete with meaning, and he stood ready to make of himself a kind of conduit: the postapocalyptic Pinch would speak through Muni Pinsker as its primary means of expression. But how does one distill
everything
into a cogent narrative? His uncle, quoting a favorite Russian author, once told him that all happy families are alike, and there was certainly a democracy of elation among the families of North Main. Some were as possessed as Muni, literally so, claiming that the voices of dead folk lately spoke to and through them. But those voices were not wanting for interpreters.
There was also the matter of the time that composition demanded, time that could be better spent in the company of your beloved. But wasn’t there, given its apparent immutability, plenty of time to go around? Still Muni felt that what he contemplated amounted to a betrayal. What had come over him that he’d left his girl dangling alone among that mare’s nest of undulating roots? He should hasten back to her at once and offer his most fervent apologies. “Jenny, sweet kichel, forgive me! Be my bride!” Conjugal fever was anyway in the air, several couples having already succumbed to matrimony since the flood. Hadn’t the hidebound Rabbi Lapidus from the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue just been enlisted to perform a triple wedding? A barge had been outfitted with singing oarsmen and a pavilion-sized canopy for the ceremony. Muni decided on the spot that he and Jenny should be a part of the ongoing celebrations, which looked as if they might never end. A
scribe!
What had he been thinking?
He was at the point of running back to the girl when he heard his uncle’s groan from the kitchen. It was a full-throated animal groan that was answered by the corrosive strains of the fiddle from somewhere outside. Since the quake and the numinous period that followed, Asbestos’s playing had evoked more than ever a pathos at odds with the general gaiety. To be sure, other sour notes had been struck in the Pinch, other characters out of step with the prevailing high spirits. The blacksmith, for instance, still sat dejected with his bamboo rod on the bank of the bayou, which the dike had restored again to a shallow cove. And Mr and Mrs Padauer remained deeply unsettled by the resemblance of their child to the host of fey creatures that flitted in the margins of everyone’s vision. Muni’s uncle sat slumped in the kitchen like a husband banished from a room where a wife is giving birth; only, Pinchas understood it wasn’t shtik naches, it wasn’t a new life that Katie was being delivered of. Then there were the memories that persisted in bubbling up from Muni’s own sorrow-laden past. Such contrary elements stood out like loose threads that wanted weaving back into the otherwise harmonious tapestry of the street; they called attention to themselves, in fact, with a needling insistence that superseded every other affection on earth.
The next time I saw Rachel was at a concert at the Overton Park Shell. The Shell was an outdoor amphitheater located in the forested midtown park that also contained the city’s zoo, and between sets you could hear the yowls and screeches of beasts and rare birds. It was really a summer venue, the Shell, with its broad stage arched over by a concrete crescent like the mouth of a horn of plenty, but despite the nippy March evening the concert had drawn a large crowd. Velveeta and the Psychopimps, at Elder Lincoln’s urging, had organized a roster of regional musicians, including old blues originals like Bukka White, Furry Lewis, and Sleepy John; they’d engaged other popular local rock bands such as the transgressive Mud Boy and the Neutrons, and guaranteed that the event’s proceeds would go toward funding the sanitation workers’ strike.
I would have invited Rachel to come along if I’d been able to contact her, but my calls to the Folklore Center had gone unanswered and her home phone wasn’t listed. I admit I might have done more to seek her out, but I was preoccupied with my own affairs. I had my hands full navigating between the bookstore and North Main Street, where Lamar was pressuring me to become a more aggressive peddler of his bootleg goods. The fact was, Lamar’s merchandise sold itself; all I had to do was make it available and can the double-talk that tended to discourage the consumers. But apparently Lamar’s extravagant lifestyle—the philanthropic activities that supported, among other things, a small harem in his suite at the Peabody Hotel—had caused bills to come due; and certain sinister parties were proving impatient. Meanwhile I was finding it increasingly difficult to negotiate between a past made manifest by my reading of Muni Pinsker’s book and the current scene; and to be honest, being in love with Rachel only complicated matters. I had to struggle mightily to keep my wits about me.
I was standing in line outside the Port-O-Potty when I saw her. Though I’d been busy filtering among the benches pushing pills, I wasn’t high on anything myself—oh, maybe a little Dex and some beer. But since I’d begun to divide my time between two worlds, my brain remained jazzed to the point of requiring no further stimulation. It was intermission and the line for the convenience was long, and in the quarter hour I’d waited to get to its head my need had become fairly urgent. Rachel was again without her fiancé, who had receded in my mind to nearly imaginary. She was accompanied by her two friends—the chunky one and the petite—from the bar, but spotting me she excused herself and broke away from her companions. Having gone native for the concert, she was wearing a macramé headband and a crocheted shawl along with a peasant skirt and boots. On the one hand, who was she kidding? While on the other, as she approached me beneath the staggered lamplight affecting a rangy stride, she looked like some spitfire Gypsy girl. What’s more, she was smiling for a change.
“Hello, stranger,” she greeted me genially, which was odd since the estrangement was largely owing to her.
I was about to apprise her of that fact when this biker dude strolled up, bear-like and piratical in his bandanna, earring, and nicotine-stained beard. He wore an embossed leather vest over a protuberant chest, bare despite the chilly night air. “Emergency, man,” he muttered, stepping in front of me in line and waiting for the door of the necessary to open. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said to me over his shoulder, the question purely rhetorical.
His shoulders were massive, but prompted by dire need, I tapped a hairy patch on one of them. “I don’t mind,” I said, “but they might,” indicating the queue of restless characters behind me. Then turning I shouted, “This guy wants to know if it’s okay to break in line?”
There was an instant uproar that included threats and flaunted fists, perhaps a brandished weapon or two. It was clear that the bladder-heavy column was prepared to turn into a mob at the least violation of protocol. The biker growled into his beard but waved his big hands in the air in a gesture of surrender as he slouched away.
Rachel stood agape, which gave me to realize what I had done. Lately the no longer so distant past had come to hold such sovereignty over the present that immediate events didn’t always make a strong impression. I sometimes misplaced my faculty for recognizing danger until after the fact; then it would strike me, what had just happened, and leave me completely unnerved. “Good one, Lenny,” Rachel applauded, which only served to highlight my foolhardiness. Her remark combined with a shove from behind caused me nearly to have an accident. Thankfully the Potty door opened and I bolted in after the previous occupant with a minimum of leakage.
When I emerged, still shaken, Rachel was waiting. She invited me to join her friends who, remembering my performance at the 348, received me warily: like a creature in need of housebreaking but otherwise harmless. We took our seats on the weathered wooden benches just as the show was beginning again. The Psychopimps had returned to the stage: Sandy Eubank flinging snaky curls and piping like the Queen of the Night, Elder Lincoln on his fiddle channeling Paganini via Congo Square. An illustrious local pianist in a magenta claw hammer was sitting in with them for the set, his fingers riding the keys like ocean swells. It was the kind of ensemble unique to the city of Memphis, which had birthed the blues and rock ’n’ roll and presided over their incestuous union. The air was fragrant with a mixture of weed and patchouli, the beam from a lavender spot scintillating with fireflies. Tonight the Aquarian tribes had descended on the park as one nation, at a juncture where music trumped history and the hoofbeats of the horsemen of the apocalypse were reduced to a minor chord.
Then came an interlude during which the Psychopimps presented an example of the type of gonzo theater that had become a standard component of their performances. The puckish Jimmy Pryor introduced his latest dummy, a little Negro in bib overalls with a melon-sized head and exaggerated ethnic features. He was modeled after Hambone of
Hambone’s Meditations
, a single-panel cartoon that appeared daily in the
Commercial Appeal.
Each day Hambone dispensed homespun wisdom, rustic chestnuts such as: “Mos’ folks, dey loses at de mouf what dey teks in at de ears.” Jimmy’s figure had a sign around his neck reading I
AM
A MAN.
“Mayor Loeb,” said Hambone, seated on Jimmy’s knee (Jimmy himself was perched on a stool in a crushed opera hat), “Mayor Loeb, he say de wukker cain’t have no checkoff fo’ dues. I say don’t need no Checkoff, nor Dustyevsky neither. Jes’ need the union and a mite uv dignity.”
Rachel touched my arm in a gesture meant to signify our shared sympathy regarding this issue: she’d come on board. I looked at the arm she’d touched and then at her soft aquiline profile, her jet-black hair in its stylized liberation, and felt a twinge of conscience, because I hadn’t paid much attention to the headlines of late. Later on, when the concert was over and she took me aside to report some new findings in her research—did I know that Elvis Presley had been the Dubrovner family’s shabbos goy?—I refrained from offering any information in return. Her dark eyes had gone somewhat lynx-like in their expectation, and I wanted in my soul to take her with me; I wanted to show her the ladies flicking chickens in the back of Makowsky’s butcher shop or Hekkie Grussom’s wife braiding flax into rope in the yard behind his hardware store. I wanted to watch her peek through the curtain of the women’s gallery at the strange fire ablaze on the altar of the Market Square shul. But instead, in the face of her undisguised disappointment, I said good night and promptly turned away, intending to beat it back into Muni’s book, though I lay awake until dawn without reading a page.