The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  Meager as was his offering, the girl received it like a gift and was moved to give him another more protracted kiss. Again Muni’s giddiness threatened to dislodge him from his perch, and grabbing him to steady his wobbling, Jenny was tickled, her laughter approaching a noisy hilarity. Then it was Muni’s turn to take the initiative, clapping a hand over her mouth to mute her cackling lest the strollers discover them in their leafy roost.

  After that the progress of their touching was a hole-and-corner affair, conducted exclusively in the tree that became their regular trysting place. Jenny was always the provocateur, assuming a sauciness on high that she would never have dared on earth in broad daylight. Given the right circumstances—stars, redolent breeze—she might bite Muni’s ear-lobe or peck his brow. Certainly her lambent attentions were prompted by a genuine fondness, but there was another more expedient motive behind them. Because for every kitsl or stroke he received, Muni felt it incumbent upon him to divulge another memory in return. Squeeze his hand and he might recall how even words froze in the Siberian immensity, so that you had to wait till the spring thaw to hear what was said months before. Buss his cheek and he told you that compared with what they were fed—brined cabbage garnished with a single goosefoot (“So tsedrait were we with hunger that we licked from the wheelbarrow the axle grease”)—his aunt Katie’s black pudding was a feast. Their cleavings and caresses, however, remained confined to their nocturnal fastness, untranslatable to solid ground where they maintained a discreet acquaintance.

  Nevertheless, the electricity between them when they were together was palpable. Though they feigned nonchalance, no one was fooled. Jenny’s expression remained fixed in a kind of cat-that-ate-the-canary simper, while Muni wondered if people could tell that his veins and arteries were flushed with quicksilver. Amused by his nephew’s distracted manner, Uncle Pinchas pretended impatience with him in the store, while his aunt might suspend her crabbiness long enough to pinch his cheek in passing. And once, with a dreary sigh, she said, “Faith but I’m not half jealous of you and yer flame.” There was a beat before Muni realized that by “flame” she meant Jenny.

  Then night would fall and he and the girl would withdraw into the branches of the oak. They went separately to the tree to ensure the clandestine nature of their meetings, and one would always find the other waiting among the lower branches. Then they would climb ever higher, scooting farther out along the nodding boughs, Jenny assisting Muni, who lacked her simian skills. They clung to aeries that afforded broad vistas over the tar-papered rooftops of the Pinch and the river, with its riding barges spangled in hurricane lamps. “I can see from here the Statue of Liberty,” Jenny might insist, “and the Eiffel Tower and the Wall of China.” While Muni: “I can see the depot at Poplar and Front,” which was only a few blocks away, but farther than that he didn’t care to look. Then they would kiss, kiss and embrace, and despite their dizzy swaying Muni learned to retain his balance. He trusted the girl to keep him from falling even as his dazzled brain remained steeped in a broth of wanting. How was it, he wondered, that things done in the tree seemed never to leave the tree, their consequences not extending past the reach of its branches?

  Muni understood that Jenny was no ordinary girl, and that by coaxing him into empyrean altitudes, she introduced him to a new order of being. Above the earth they were beyond the range of the rude world’s conventions. The fear he felt the first time she placed his hand over her breast gradually dissolved into an ambrosial delirium. And when, tentatively, she drew his fingers under her dress until they rested on the stocking fabric above her knee, he could believe that the warmth that infected his vitals was somehow holy. The sounds that reached them at that lofty height—train whistles and automobile klaxons—were muffled by the wind, though a measure from the blind man’s fiddle might still be audible. Although his music was not made a whit more cheerful for being tempered by tenderness.

  “Are we bad?” Jenny would whisper to Muni, who honestly didn’t know; he’d traveled too far from his largely forgotten youth when he had the statutes of the rabbis by heart. But while it may have been merely self-serving, he maintained that the rabbis had no jurisdiction over their aerial petting.

  Their conversation was still more conspicuous for what they didn’t say than for what they did: Muni continued doling out his somewhat unreliable memories, while Jenny invoked a wanderlust she was increasingly less invested in. Once or twice Muni asked her what she and his aunt Katie shmoozed about, since it was only in Jenny’s company that his aunt appeared untroubled these days. “Girl stuff,” Jenny assured him with a wink, as if he would know what that meant, and Muni nodded like he understood before admitting he didn’t. But in the language of their arboreal bundling each was becoming fluent. Muni could now reciprocate Jenny’s clippings and claspings with equal fervor if not virtuosity. The more graduated was his exploration of her person, the nearer he felt to inhabiting the place he’d been living in for a solid year. He needed only Jenny Bashrig’s express invitation to finally arrive.

  It came on a midsummer night during the first real heat wave of the season. The jaundiced sky above the Pinch contained the humid swelter like a bell jar, impelling neighbors to flee their airless apartments. They lolled about under the boughs of the great oak in Market Square Park, swapping complaints and fanning mosquitoes away from their sleeping children, while high above them Muni and Jenny disported themselves. Fireflies flickered in an intermittent semaphore answered by flashes of heat lightning over the Arkansas floodplain. Jenny sprawled among the rustling branches as if relaxing in a hammock while Muni straddled the fork of an adjacent limb, admiring her languor.

  Then he did something he hadn’t done before: unprovoked, he volunteered a memory—though the accuracy of his hindsight was always in question.

  “When I’m in the taiga a runaway,” he began, “the dogsleds are on my heels. They might be a party of trappers or they might be peasants out to capture and collect on the fugitive his bounty—” but he couldn’t afford to wait to find out which. Whips cracked, oaths were shouted, and Muni took off on his clodhopping snowshoes over the glassy expanse of the steppe. Ahead of him was a cloud bank he hoped to reach before the sleds overtook him. Hobbled by the broken racquets attached to his feet, however, he stopped to tear them off, but the snow’s brittle crust only slowed his progress. Then for all of his panic, he was aware of a stunning phenomenon: a burst of sunlight had turned the rolling steppe golden, illuminating the cloud bank before him in a celestial nimbus. At the same time the ground itself had begun to stir under him. “Comes a loud noise like, excuse me, the firmament is breaking wind—” then the ground beneath Muni’s feet erupted and he was catapulted into thin air.

  Despite the evening’s dimming half-light Muni could see that Jenny’s mouth hung open, and for once he felt like the seducer and savored his power. He assured her the event was no less remarkable for its logical explanation: that a grove of dwarf pines, bent horizontal by its burden of snow since the previous autumn, had been stirred by the first warm sunshine of spring. The trees were further alerted by Muni’s footfalls, which had cracked the ice that embalmed them so that they snapped in a sudden snowquake to attention. Thus did the reawakened trees fling the fugitive like a shot from a sling into the gilded fog, where he landed toches-over-teakettle on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal, the inland sea.

  “Jenny,” said Muni, his heart lifting heavy wings to confess, “when together we smotsken, I am flying again in the air.” His next utterance might have been to ask her to marry him, had she not spoken up first.

  “So what are you waiting?” she replied, smiling brazenly. “Ravish me already.”

  Muni knew better than to take her seriously. It was her talent to sound in deadly earnest even as she teased him, this time with a phrase she might have borrowed from some dime novel. After all, both of them were aware in their bones that the trespass they entertained was more than the Law (which who could remember?) allowed. Neverthele
ss, as Jenny still lay carelessly cradled by the pitch and sway of their perch, Muni was further inspirited by her boldness, intoxicated by their perilous altitude. Above their heads the Milky Way spiraled like cream stirred in black coffee and the blind man’s fiddle could be heard playing some incidental melody of the spheres. Leaning forward, Muni gingerly lifted the dust-ruffled hem of her skirt, as Jenny, biting her lip in concentration, fumbled with the buttons of his fly. She reached into his pants the way a naughty child steals into a jar to snatch a macaroon, only to find that she’s pulled out a serpent instead; but fascinated more than alarmed, she couldn’t let go—while Muni, submissive to that part of his anatomy that had leached the blood from his spinning brain, cried aloud as he seized the girl in an ultimate embrace.

  The initial shock of their coupling nearly jettisoned them from the top of the tree, each hanging on exclusively to the other. Muni’s rapture purged him of every concern that wasn’t Jenny. Released from the familiar world, he dangled in a hanging garden of sensations that were utterly strange in their sweetness, convinced that no one before him had ever known such bliss. But the seismic tremors they shared at the nether extreme of their passion had roots that troubled the depths of their fears as well. Because their shuddering embrace, Muni suddenly realized, had generated a contagion that prompted in its turn a universal trembling. Opening his eyes he saw from Jenny’s expression that she had reached the same frightened conclusion: they had gone too far and the impact of their union had unseated nature itself. Or was it the reverse? Nature was settling scores with the wayward lovers. Whatever the case, the great patriarch oak had become unstable; tilting slowly, it groaned as if mortally wounded, wrenching its roots free of the planet to which it was moored, and with a sound like a nail pried from the vault of heaven, it started to topple. The lovers, holding on to one another now for dear life, declared their mutual devotion even as they rode the tree down its windy decline toward the earth, which gaped open to receive them.

  5

  Bolivar

  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.”
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  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.