by Steve Stern
3
Champion of the Oppressed
“So where did it come from?” I asked Avrom at my next opportunity. Of course there were nothing but opportunities in Avrom’s shop, since hardly anyone came in to browse. Downtown Memphis had entered its slow economic decline. Main Street’s perennial holdouts, the department stores and old movie palaces—baroque facades like layer cakes left in the rain—were giving way to discount clothiers, quick lunch counters, and wig emporiums. Full of vacancies, the office buildings were largely occupied by bail bondsmen and jackleg lawyers with tufty sideburns and plaid pants. Besides, the Bluff City, as it was called, would never be mistaken for a bookish town.
“From outer space it came,” replied old Avrom, his cough like a rooster’s ragged crow. “Where did what come from?”
“The book,” I said, trying my best to maintain an even tone.
“The Book? It was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Who wants to know?”
I sighed. “I thought I was the wiseass here.”
“Get in line, boychik.”
He liked playing these games with me, Avrom, as what else did he have to amuse himself with? Think of him, if you want, as some hermit sage dwelling in his cave of esoteric tomes, but in the end he was just an exasperating old fart. But since he was fossil enough to remember something of the local history—only recently had it occurred to me that the city had a history—I persevered.
“You know what I’m talking about—The Pinch. Where did it come from?”
“Are you talking the place or the book?”
“The goddamn book.”
Reclining in his cracked leather office chair, he raised a crooked forefinger. “But the book and the place are one.” The springs of his chair screeched the way it must sound to tug at a mandrake root.
“Swami Bullshitzky,” I said, “you’re such a pill.”
At that the old geezer actually tucked his thumbs in his suspenders. I suppose he was only giving me back some of my own medicine, which today left a bitter taste. I fished in my pocket for one of Lamar’s antidotes.
Then he deigned to answer my question. “From where you think comes the book? It comes from the author that his name is on the cover.”
“Muni Pinsker. So who’s Muni Pinsker?”
“Was proprietor of a general store on North Main Street. The place is empty now for years, but I believe there’s living above it still a tenant?”
“And that would be …?”
A perfunctory nod in my direction.
“Is he still alive?”
“Who?”
I made a fist and he raised his mottled hands in mock surrender.
“Too many questions,” he complained. “You’re giving me already a headache. Since when do you got questions? You who don’t care from nothing.”
“That’s right,” I replied a touch defiantly. “Like Zappa says, ‘What’s there to live for?’” Turning on my heel. “‘Who needs the Peace Corps?’” Sloping off into the stacks where I pretended to be busy. My whole situation at Avrom’s Asylum was predicated on make-believe, as my practically imaginary salary attested. I was as much Avrom’s charity case as he was mine. Luftmensch was the word he used to describe himself: a man who lived on air; and I supposed his minimal support of his employee was by way of passing on that condition from one generation to the next.
Unable to keep up the charade any longer, however, I stepped back up to his desk and cried, “But I’m in the book!”
“You think that’s strange? Back in my town of Zhldze a piece buttered toast once fell on the unbuttered side. Good on you that you should be someplace, because by me you are no place at all.”
His eyes behind his thick lenses floated like jellyfish in twin aquariums, and I knew the conversation was over. But while it hurt my pride to belabor the subject, I inquired with all the humility I could summon, “What am I doing in it, the book?”
“Sweetheart, we are all people from the Book, which it got a long time ago lost, and now every book is from the lost book only a dim imitatzieh.” Then changing his tune, he snapped, “Have I read it? How should I know?”
Sorry I’d asked, I slammed out the door.
I had anyway an errand to run. Avrom had given me earlier the scrip for some medication meant to relieve one of his revolting afflictions. I was to get it filled at the Rexall drugstore on the corner of Main Street and Beale. I’d always heard Beale Street touted as the infamous Negro tenderloin, but you couldn’t have proved it in broad daylight. By day the closed nightclubs and dives were upstaged by the barbershops, funeral parlors, and dentists’ offices that shared the same blocks. All you could anyway see of the street from the corner at Main was a row of pawnshops run by superannuated Jews—the trios of brass balls hung above their doorways giving rise to bad jokes.
It was toward Beale that I assumed the small army of black men trudging up Main Street past Goldsmith’s Department Store was headed. They were a wintry throng in porkpie hats and doleful shoes, some wearing clerical collars and singing hymns. I knew enough to identify them as an alliance in support of the striking sanitation workers whose protests were all over the news, which I heard through the distortion of Avrom’s antique wireless. The hotly debated topic of the strikers’ demands had earned them a mention in the national press, which was noteworthy; since seldom was anything that happened in farthest Memphis brought to the national awareness.
Having exited the Rexall, I crossed Main in front of the crowd and stationed myself against a Goldsmith’s show window full of new spring fashions to watch the proceedings. It appeared to be an orderly march, patroled on the street side by black-and-white squad cars crawling alongside the procession to keep them in line. But the cars, with their revolving red lights slashing the mole-gray fabric of the afternoon, kept edging into the crowd, forcing the marchers to bunch up against the curb and spill onto the sidewalk. There was grumbling in the ranks at the provocation, and at one point a parading lady—one of only a pair in that company—perhaps thinking that her gender might afford her some respect, indignantly reproached the police. Immediately thereafter, as the squad car inched forward, she screamed, “He runned over my foot!” and crumpled to the pavement. Several men broke ranks to assist her, one of them, a boy really, stooping to tug down the woman’s skirt which was rucked up to her girdle. The veil of her pillbox hat still shadowed her face. Angry others, youthful members of the demonstration, attacked the vehicle that had injured her and began to rock it back and forth. Stone-faced cops poured out, more of them in fact than I’d have thought the car could contain, wielding truncheons and aerosol cans. Sirens began to blare.
Abandoning any pretense of discipline, the police erupted in a paroxysm of furious aggression, clubbing and Macing everyone they could reach. Bloodied men fell to the pavement and were beaten where they lay, some dragged semiconscious into the back of a waiting Black Maria. There were shouts of “Don’t rub your eyes!” though big men bawled, cursing as they staggered in circles. A woolly-bearded old minister was on his knees with his hat in his hands as if offering up his skull to be cracked. People were trying desperately to take shelter inside the department store only to find that the doors had been locked. Riveted by the sight, I stood with my back to the plate-glass window, which suddenly shattered from the combined weight of the marchers shoved up against it. A niagara of shards cascaded about me, a mannequin in a garden-party dress toppled onto the sidewalk, and a cop began heading my way. His partly unbuttoned tunic revealed his undershirt and a bit of hirsute belly beneath, his mirror glasses reflecting myself as he must have perceived me: nigger lover, agitator, pervert, and freak. That’s when, terror-struck to near paralysis, I nevertheless managed to goad my feet into motion. I beat it with the other demonstrators who had scattered across Main Street and were retreating east on Beale. Sprinting among them, I had a healthy portion of their shock and nausea, my eyes and lungs smarting from the clouds of gas drifting our way. But I also experienced a hea
rt-stirring exhilaration, a sense of pride as if I’d been an active participant in the march: Lenny Sklarew, champion of the oppressed. Then, chagrined at the thought, I remembered that the whole affair was none of my concern. Having fled as far as the postage-stamp park with its verdigris-stained statue of W. C. Handy, I peeled off down an alley and made my way back toward the opposite end of Main.
That night I wanted to get trashed. I wanted to find a like mind to talk treason with, and thought again of the girl who’d shared my bed the week before. Together we would decry the death of the soul, then jump holding hands from the Harahan Bridge. Then I remembered I was a loner; I burned with a solitary gem-like flame. I read the tales of brain-fevered authors who were similarly lit, though their works sometimes distracted me from my own combustion. In any event, instead of going to the 348 to peddle the goods I hadn’t already smoked or swallowed, I opened the book.
I’d been reading it since my encounter with the lady folklorist, absorbing information I might regale her with if I ever saw her again. I’d begun at the beginning, reading leisurely, lingering over the lush but uncooked illustrations. I resisted the temptation to skip ahead, reluctant to spoil an ending in which I myself might play an unwonted part. For that reason, whenever I opened the book I felt myself caught in a tug-of-war between curiosity and fear, and I confess that fear often seemed to win the day.
Avrom was wrong about The Pinch; it was an authentic history, at least in its grim prologue, which recounted the arrival of the first Jew at the site of what would become the city of Memphis. This was in the year 1541 and his name was Rodrigo (né Ruben) da Luna, a Portuguese secret Jew, or Marrano as they were called. Having eluded the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition, he’d hitched his fate to that of the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. De Soto had traveled via a circuitous route up from Florida with a way-weary brigade of lancers and musketeers. In their train were the ever-thinning ranks of carpenters, clergy, camp followers, and tailors (to which latter group Rodrigo belonged). These, if they hadn’t already perished from the flux or the poisoned arrows of native tribes, were disillusioned by an expedition more inclined to pillage than colonize. For de Soto was determined to push on in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, as described in the depraved hallucinations of the explorer Cabeza de Vaca. The author Pinsker chronicled the moment when the rapacious conquistador, sitting astride his Barbary steed atop the Chickasaw Bluffs, looks across the broad expanse of the river that separates him from the golden cities; while from the ranks Rodrigo da Luna is thinking you could go farther and fare worse. He would have liked to try and trade with the natives—maybe swap a starveling mule for fresh fish and persimmon bread—rather than slaughter them as his captain preferred. He thought that maps made a more enduring means of marking a trail than de Soto’s method of paving it with corpses. And wasn’t the real estate atop these rust-red bluffs eminently well situated for civilized habitation? After all, what was to keep the indigenous folk, once they pointed their weapons in another direction, from becoming the tailor’s devoted clients? (“Allow me to custom-fit you for a nice suede breechclout.”) But already the soldiers and carpenters were constructing the barges that would ferry them across the river, and rather than be left behind, Rodrigo da Luna would travel with them into an even more hostile landscape and obscurer death.
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 dresse
d 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?”
