Authors: Steve Stern
Then give or take a hiatus of three and one-third centuries and the next Jew makes his frontier debut. This one is the educated peddler Pinchas Pinsker, who arrives in Memphis from Eastern Europe in 1878, just as the town is in the throes of an epidemic that has transformed it from a vital river port to a pesthouse.
Nearly a century and a few nights later I’m in the 348 listening to live music, when in walks Rachel sans fiancé. It frightened me how glad I was to see her. Over the week since our encounter I’d given up expecting her to return; I’d even stayed away from the bar so that I wouldn’t have to experience the disappointment, at the risk of missing her while I was truant. She was wearing her long herringbone coat and a knit tam-o’-shanter that gave her an Anne of Green Gables sort of look. Then she removed the cap and her dark hair, unpinned tonight, spilled out as from an opened sluice. She was with a couple of girlfriends who took a table not far from Lamar’s, where he sat like a grandee in his brocade vest. A weeping-willow-looking girl leaned against him, her languid arm draped over his shoulder. If she was looking for me, Rachel gave no indication of it. She and her friends—chunky and petite—were convivial, their heads nearly touching in an effort to talk over the music. From my stool at the end of the bar I waved a hand to get her attention, but when she eventually caught sight of me, she merely squinched up the corners of her mouth in the parody of a smile. Like a curtsy of the lips in which her eyes did not participate at all. Crushed, I turned back toward the band.
They were the house band, Velveeta and the Psychopimps as they called themselves, a jokey name signifying nothing: there was no Velveeta, no dictionary definition of
psychopimp.
But comic sobriquet aside, they played infectious music, their own subversive blend of raunchy, gut-bucket blues and straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll. Much of their repertoire was inspired by classic Delta bluesmen, neglected old duffers whom the band would seek out and recall from extreme destitution. Students of musical history as well as accomplished musicians, the band members venerated these old men, some of whom were in advanced stages of illness and disability. They bought them whiskey and dispatched willing groupies to wash their bunions (and sometimes drink the water like broth). They were a diverse bunch, the Psychopimps, versatile, streetwise, and racially mixed, a fact that consolidated their singularity among Southern players. A chief supplier of their recreational stimulants via Lamar, I was a tolerated hanger-on of the band, something in the nature (I liked to think) of a mascot.
You better tell McNamara, tell Curtis LeMay, J. Edgar Hoover, and LBJ
, they sang,
we gonna pitch that wang dang doodle all night long …
With their combination of electric and traditional instruments, they made a joyful ruckus that turned your intestines to live wires: Elder Lincoln alternating effortlessly between keyboard and kit fiddle, Jimmy Pryor scratching his washboard like a breastplate with fleas, Cholly Jolly vexing the strings of his guitar with a bottleneck to set your teeth on edge. A cause célèbre among regional blues buffs, the band nevertheless disdained record deals, as if success would dilute their authenticity and betray their mentors. They sang about kingsnakes, hellhounds, dead presidents, and crosscut saws, items that mingled with the ingredients of the mild chemical cocktail in my brain to giddy effect.
As the music conspired to reverse my ill humor, a quaint phrase wormed its way into my head: “Faint heart ne’er won fair lady.” Did I really want to win her, and what would I do with her if I did? But the fact that an alternative life—unexamined though it was—perhaps awaited me in Muni Pinsker’s book made firsthand experience seem somehow less hazardous lately. So damning the consequences, I approached Rachel’s table and stood there some seconds before I was noticed, when I had to shout over the din to be heard:
“Was I just some degrading episode you had on your to-do list?”
I hadn’t meant to sound so hostile, but as all three ladies cupped their ears, I was forced to repeat the question at even greater volume. Rachel’s friends looked to her, as did I, for an answer, and saw an angry crimp in her satiny brow. I read her lips more than heard her reply: “Don’t flatter yourself.”
I made an effort to grin to stave off what emerged as a full-throated sob.
Rolling her eyes toward the string of colored lights overhead, Rachel let go a querulous sigh then excused herself. Rising, she callipered my arm with her fingers and escorted me through the jangling music to the front of the bar. I half-expected her to shove me out the door and slam it behind me, but while she did push me onto the sidewalk, she stepped outside as well. She was wearing a shaggy cable-stitched sweater and a pair of distressed blue jeans, which on her looked a little like a costume, as if she’d dressed for a night of slumming. The wind whipped strands of her hair across her face, which she brushed away as if swatting locusts.
“What’s wrong with you?” she hissed.
I wiped my snuffling nose with the back of my palm and straightened in an effort to recover some dignity. “I don’t need your pity,” I said.
She exhaled. “Does this look like pity?” she asked, presenting an implacable expression—tight ocher lips, hard hazel eyes—i lluminated by the streetlight. “Do you think showing your vulnerable side makes you more appealing?”
I decided her pity might be preferable after all.
The scent of rotting refuse that pervaded the city, even despite the February chill, had drifted as far as North Main. The power station down the block was winking like a wrecked constellation, and from inside the bar you could hear the band singing,
Hello, Central, give me no-man’s-land …
“I guess I’m a little fragile,” I admitted, and searching for a reason: “since I saw the cops maul the garbage collectors. They were marching up Main Street when the cops started clubbing them bloody and dragging them away.”
She studied me in earnest a moment then smirked. “You’re clearly a sensitive guy.”
I began to make a case for my political engagement, which she cut short.
“You embarrassed me in front of my friends.”
Inclining my head I inquired, “You’re ashamed that you slept with me?”
“Damn straight—and don’t make it sound like more than it was,” she reminded me. “Sleeping was the extent of it.”
I felt another sob coming on.
“Oh for God’s sake,” sighed Rachel. “Would you like me to call your mother?”
Again I endeavored to rally. “I don’t have a mother,” I told her. “I was raised by wolves in the fastness of the Caucasus Mountains.”
“I’m going back inside,” she said.
Desperate to detain her, I changed course. “Do you know when the first Jew came through here?”
She hesitated despite herself, succumbing to a sudden professional reflex. “There were German Jews in Memphis in the 1840s,” she grudgingly replied. “Goldsmith’s Department Store was founded just after the Civil War.”
“I’m talking about the first Jew in the Pinch.”
“I know about the Pinch,” she stated as if I’d challenged her. “I’ve already conducted some oral history interviews with people who lived there.”
“You mean
here.
So how did you learn about the Pinch?”
“You told me.” The admission must have cost her something, as her fidgeting seemed to imply. “After you mentioned it I did some homework,” she continued. “The Pinch was an Irish neighborhood until the Russian Jews started trickling in during the eighteen eighties and nineties. The Irish eventually moved on, and the district was Jewish till after the war.”
“Did anybody tell you about the earthquake?”
“What earthquake? People talk about the synagogues, the shops—the Pinch was like every other ethnic urban ghetto. Nobody mentions anything about an earthquake.”
“It happened; it practically swallowed the neighborhood. The epicenter was in Market Square Park, just over there. I can show you.”
“You’re batshit.”
“It’s just a block or two away.”
She cleared her throat somewhat nervously. “I’d have to get my coat.”
I was afraid that if she returned to her friends she might never come back. Remarking that she was indeed shivering from the cold, I took off my own overcoat, a worn-to-threads rag with no lining, and draped it over her shoulders. I hoped she would be impressed by the gallantry of the gesture.
She eyed me with grave suspicion. “This better be quick.”
On the way I congratulated myself for having once again exploited Rachel’s gullibility; her resistance was not nearly as intractable as she liked to project. The truth was that in all the months I’d spent on North Main Street I’d scarcely noticed the park myself. It was there opposite the old Ellis Auditorium: an acre of unattended crabgrass bordered by a Catholic church, a low-rise housing project, and some empty lots from which the structures had been recently razed: the kind of poky city vacuum that nature can’t abide. As we entered it Rachel asked me, incidentally, what was my name, and I told her Captain Blood, a.k.a. Lenny Sklarew. Hers was Rachel Ostrofsky. Such a doughy Slavic mouthful for such a svelte American girl.
Of course I knew there would be no sign of the great tree that Muni Pinsker had described, the one that capsized into a hole during the quake. It was clear from the first that the author of
The Pinch
, however much he drew from actual events, could not be considered a reliable narrator. Still, his version of the past seemed so much truer than the present tenantless decay.
“You can see how the ground gives way in the middle of the park,” I said, playing at cicerone.
“I don’t even see a park,” said Rachel, looking a little like a refugee—which became her—in my fluttering overcoat.
The patch of land that was all that remained of the original park resembled so many other orphaned tracts fallen victim to so-called urban renewal, tracts designated for face-lifts that never happened.
“But look, Rachel,” I said, aware of calling her by her given name for the very first time. “See the way it dips …”
There did in fact seem to be a slight depression in the sparse grass, a concavity I marched into in my effort to make the point. In so doing I slammed into a solid object snout-first. Stunned, I fell backward onto the hard ground with a throbbing head, my nose oozing blood. Opening my eyes I expected to see—what? Maybe a swag-bellied cop or Rachel’s battling fiancé? But there was nothing there.
The girl was standing over me, this time not bothering to kneel. “What are you on?” she asked.
“Methamphetamine, Tuinal, alcohol, caffeine, but that’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Do you think these kinds of theatrics are endearing?” she wondered, since my lying prostrate and bleeding was where we’d begun. Regardless, there was enough moonlight for her to perceive that my nose was indeed hemorrhaging, and just how did she account for that? How did I?
“Rachel,” I said, trying to sound prophetic despite being flat on my back, head tilted to reverse the flow of blood, “there are more things in heaven and earth than you dreamed of in your folklore classes.”
“No doubt,” she replied without conviction.
“Rachel,” I confided in a voice that trilled a bit from the fluid draining into my throat, “I walked into a tree.”
“Uh-huh,” she breathed, hovering impatiently above me, the wind waving the showy black standard of her hair. “Listen, Lenny, my friends will be wondering what became of me.” Whereupon she removed my overcoat and spread it over me with the care she might have bestowed upon an invalid or a corpse, then set off in the direction of the bar.
The next day on the way to the Book Asylum I barged into a rack of vintage kangaroo-calf bicycle shoes, pleased at my ability to identify them even though they weren’t there. The rack clattered noisily nonetheless as it toppled in front of me. Of course I was an old hand at confusing what was there with what was not. An intrepid psychic traveler, I’d crossed thresholds into unexplored regions encountering dragons and bugbears of every stripe and paisley (keeping the Thorazine handy in case I couldn’t vanquish the dragon on my own). So what was the big deal about occasionally crossing over from what passed for real life into the pages of a bogus historical chronicle? Never mind that I approached the book with an ostrich-egg lump in my throat, since, in reading
The Pinch
, I was conscious of also approaching a rendezvous with myself.
Apprehension aside, the past put the present in the shade. The world from my North Main Street window was a toilet: the government was sliding toward fascism, the planet dying from neglect, and my lottery number put me in line to be shipped off on short notice to Vietnam. There, if I escaped the rockets and jungle rot, I would doubtless stumble into a man-trap and be impaled on envenomed stakes. Moreover—to offset the mind-fucking effects of
The Pinch
—I’d begun to read the newspapers, which reported that negotiations were at an impasse and no end in sight for the garbage strike. Undiscouraged by police harassment and the mayor’s inflexible stance, however, the sanitation workers persisted in marching every day. Their ranks had been joined by students, clergymen, and ordinary citizens, a few of them white.
In that atmosphere Avrom’s Asylum was as good as its name. The crowded shelves provided insulation from the unrest beyond its door, and there were times, I confess, when I thought I might like to hunker down in that dimly lit shop till the hard rain that was coming passed over. Then I reminded myself that I belonged to a reckless tribe, who ran out to greet the winds of change with open arms; I remembered that I was, albeit at my own speed, in pursuit of a beautiful girl.
“Avrom,” I said, as he gummed his fried egg sandwich (mine was pimento cheese), “I keep sort of stumbling into the past.”
I wasn’t really expecting an answer, though Avrom, his mouth crusted with yellow yolk dribbling into his beard, offered an offhand response: “Rabbi bar Hana that he once bumped into a frog as big as Mount Tabor, and like the eyelids of the morning were its eyes.”