The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  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.”

  Whatever the case, Rachel was determined to put together an accurate time line for the history of the Pinch. She’d gone to the public library to check old newspaper records and discovered that there had indeed been seismic activity along the New Madrid Fault in the summer of 1913. But apparently the temblors were barely perceptible and damage to the city minimal. She’d looked high and low for references to physical consequences around North Main Street but so far had turned up zilch.

  I enjoyed watching her grow animated as she described her vocational sleuthing and at one point exclaimed, “Nancy Drew!,” which she ignored. Then coming to the heart of the matter she asked me, “Do you know of any local documentation about the quake?”

  A grin unzippered itself across my face. “I’ve got pictures,” I said.

  Rachel actually clapped her hands in excitement, and the sound reverberated in my insides like rosy thunder.

  In my apartment we knelt on the knobbly floor and I opened the book to show her an illustration of the upside-down oak tree in the park. Its tortured roots were thronged like a grandstand with creatures running the gamut from ordinary citizens to grotesques with articulated wings. The colors were eye-popping but conformed to nothing under heaven.

  “These are just fanciful illustrations,” she complained, bewildered and disappointed. “I want photos, documents …” But when I affected offense and made to take the book away from her, she refused to let it go, her eyes still fixed on the images.

  “He’s still alive,” I told her.

  “Who?”

  “The illustrator, Tyrone Pin, he’s still alive.”

  Heaving a fretful sigh, she said I could perhaps introduce her to the artist sometime: who knew but he might fill in some of the holes in her investigations. She had yet
to remove her cap or coat, and when I invited her to do so she said she had to leave. My throat contracted like Chinese handcuffs, the tip of my tongue aching to trace the orchid pink whorl of her ear; her scent alone was a volume of The Arabian Nights. To her back as she departed I murmured that I adored her, and scarcely turning her head she admonished me to get over it. When I followed her onto the landing, she called up from the bottom of the stairs, “And forgodsakes don’t cry.”

  Driving east out of the city in Rachel’s Buick Brontosaur, as she called it, I could hardly contain my high spirits. “We’re just like Jack and Neal,” I remarked, which earned me a mildly withering look from Rachel. The truth was, she had appeared a bit tense from the moment she picked me up that morning, which was crisp and sunny after days of overcast skies. Was her mood owing to the unlikely presence of myself in her passenger seat or to the questionable excursion we were undertaking? She was after all making a large detour from the geographical locus of her research, with nothing to justify it but wanton curiosity. Whereas I was determined to view the trip in the light of an adventure. I’d done my part, was proud of my yeoman endeavor in phoning ahead to the hospital to arrange a visit, apparently the first the patient had received in memory, and now felt entitled to relax and enjoy the ride. Also, I’d nibbled just enough of a peyote button to give the monotonous landscape a lucent edge. It was Rachel and my first outing together.

  Of course she was right to suspect the legitimacy of our junket. Making a pilgrimage to meet some dabbler locked up in a lunatic asylum since 1947 (incidentally the year of my birth) was not, on its surface, a very promising proposition. Never mind that his paintings served to illustrate a narrative in which yours truly figured among the dramatis personae. With a drum-rolling heart I’d peeked ahead at the passage where Lenny takes The Pinch back to his apartment, opens it, and begins to read. But farther than that I was still reluctant to go. What, in any case, would I learn? Probably just that Lenny Sklarew finds a book in which he reads that Lenny Sklarew found a book, ad nauseum. Which is not to say that Muni Pinsker’s North Main Street didn’t feel like a welcome home every time I stuck my nose in those pages. This was despite the old Shpinker rebbe’s caution to his flock that “it’s impossible to come back to someplace that you never been there before.” Tshuvah, he called it: return. But whenever I put down the book and looked out the window at the forsaken street, from which you could smell the stench of the planet’s decomposition, it was then that I felt like a stranger. The whole business was enough to “strangle up your mind,” as Dylan says.

  I glanced out the car window at a herd of cows lowing in a red-dirt pasture. “What do you get when you breed a Guernsey with a Holstein?” I asked Rachel, who shrugged her disinterest. “A Goldstein,” I said contemplatively.

  Then looking for some neutral subject, I brought up the strike, which turned out to be anything but neutral. Since the confrontation with the cops in front of Goldsmith’s Department Store there’d been boycotts and marches every day, the strikers carrying placards reading I AM A MAN. The signs were mesmerizing in their repetition, broadcasting the notion that, like independence or imports, manhood was something that needed declaring. At any rate the issue was a sore point for Rachel, since the strike had driven a wedge between her and her so-called fiancé. This much she affirmed, which I might have taken as a confidence if it hadn’t sounded so much like she was simply dismissing the subject. Vaguely miffed, I pictured myself on the picket line carrying a placard reading I Am a Hippocampus or something like that.

  “Dennis is probably right,” she conceded, as if obliged in his absence to defend his side of the argument. “He says it’s a legal, not a moral issue.” She began outlining the details of the failed strike negotiations, about which she was well informed. “So he has a point when he says it’s all about the union contract and the dues checkoff. You have to give the mayor and his council some credit. They’re honorable men and they dealt in good faith with the union representatives.”

  I was imagining her Roman-nosed profile engraved on ancient coins that might be placed over my eyes when I died.

  “Rachel,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, umbrage threatening to override my infatuation, “do you have any idea what it’s like to be a garbage collector in the city of Memphis? No place to wash, no place to pee, laboring in filth for a wage that won’t even support your family.” I was encouraged by the accidental rhyme. “The heavy lifting cripples your spine but you never see a penny in workmen’s compensation. Comes a storm, you take shelter in the barrel at the back of the truck, where the antiquated compressor shorts out and the hydraulic ram starts up and the truck eats you, bones and all.”

  I was repeating almost verbatim things I’d heard Elder Lincoln say at Beatnik Manor, but in saying them I surprised myself by how whipped up I became. “The union made every reasonable argument, but the mayor wouldn’t deal. Now he won’t even listen. Labor leaders, national labor leaders, and ministers were Maced on Main Street!—and still Mayor Loeb sits in his chamber with his thumb up his butt.”

  Rachel patted my knee. “Calm down, Lenny,” she said soothingly. “You’re preaching to the choir.”

  To congratulate myself on having achieved such a pitch of self-righteousness, I pulled out a joint and lit it. Rachel grabbed it and threw it out the window, admitting a blast of cold air that reinforced the rebuke. Afterward, however, she patted my knee again as if to say no hard feelings. Nor did she object when I switched the radio from the soft rock to the alternative station, where the DJ was introducing the musical stylings of the Insect Trust.

  We arrived in the town of Bolivar—shoddy Greek Revival buildings surrounding a courthouse square complete with Confederate monument and hanging tree. When we stopped at a gas station to ask directions to Western State Hospital, the pump jockey, wearing a sleeveless shirt in the thirty-degree weather, merely grinned at me. Then he turned his head to squirt amber juice through a gap in his teeth.

  The hospital grounds, once we’d located them, were bare but for the sentinel poplars that lined the drive like umbrellas without canopies. The building itself, with its moon-gray turrets and gables, was the kind of place you were meant to approach on a stormy night illuminated by flashes of lightning. It was sinister to the point of laughable, appearing even in daylight as the haunted institution it was rumored to be. The interior, when we’d parked the car and crossed the overheated threshold, was no less oppressive, with its scuffed linoleum and walls of pea-green tiles. There was a poker-stiff receptionist, who seemed to seethe as she announced our arrival over a switchboard. Minutes later an officious individual in horn-rims and lab coat, whose status we never learned, padded forward. Gravely, he bade us follow him through a series of locked doors with wire-glass windows, his keyring clattering like a medieval jailer’s.

  I tried to break the tension: “You and me,” I whispered to Rachel, “Hansel and Gretel,” which fell flat, and after that our surroundings effectively neutralized any attempt on my part at humor. Rachel anyway kept her eyes straight ahead, laconically answering our escort’s questions: No, we weren’t related to the patient; he’d made some paintings she was led to believe might be a key element in her ethnic heritage inquiries, and so on. The lab coat’s only response was an all-purpose Cheshire-cat smirk.

  We passed through a dust-moted dayroom, its windows encased in steel mesh, where a nurse with a mastiff’s face sat beside a potted plant in the spraddle-legged posture of a lavatory concierge. Oyster-eyed inmates in seersucker bathrobes and paper slippers were bent over incomplete jigsaw puzzles and zigzagging concatenations of dominoes. An old man with a shaved head, crosshatched with what I took for a lobotomy scar, stood fidgeting in place; another, obese as a human archipelago, deployed toy soldiers on a tray in his lap. A woman in a gown like a pillowslip manipulated the rabbit ears on the snowy TV as if grappling with the horns of a bull. I was beginning to feel a guilty identification with the bourgeoisie of previous centuries who vi
sited asylums on Sundays to view the insane as in a zoo. They paid a penny and were given sticks to poke the inmates with to coax them out of their lethargy.

  Having bypassed an empty ward, we followed our chaperone down a long ammoniac corridor toward the end of which he rapped on a closed door. “Though he has his walking privileges, Mr. Pin seldom leaves his room,” he informed us, then had us to know it was generally against hospital policy to allow patients to keep to themselves. “But in Mr. Pin’s case the staff feels his hobby is the best therapy.” And having received no answer from within, he turned the knob.

  No wonder the door had been shut. Because the riot of color that escaped the narrow horse stall of a room threatened to subvert the bilious atmosphere of that grim facility. If not contained, it might deluge the place in a brilliance that could wake up the loonies from their stupor and excite them beyond electroshock to flat-out mutiny. I don’t know what I expected—maybe some poor gibbering soul chained in a catacomb, his palette hung round his neck like an albatross. Instead, surrounded by exotic panels plastered to every surface, including the ceiling, sat a slight, bird-boned man in his mid- to late forties. He had cheeks white as meerschaum, sleepy green eyes, and a crop of fine auburn hair. He was wearing a bulky blue fisherman’s sweater several sizes too large, his moist lips mouthing a silent language as he stirred a brush in a yogurt container on a table scattered with children’s art materials: a Winky Dink Magic Paint and Crayon set with a plastic palette, and a tin tray of Kopy Kat watercolors. The composition before him, slathered in rich, incongruous hues on a flap from a cardboard box, depicted, as did all the others, a phantasmal streetscape. The street was represented in every season, or rather all seasons were simultaneously evoked. There was the floating North Main, North Main Street populated with shopkeepers haggling with celestial messengers and fish with feet, Hasidim riding Torah pointers, wild Indians and peddlers with wagons harnessed to dragonflies, fiddlers and fox-faced pipers serenading a wedding in a tree. Snow fell on fleshred magnolias in full blossom; children slid down awnings out of firetrap tenements that crumbled behind them into skirmishes of honeysuckle and wisteria. A girl frolicked on a wire over an open pit filled with higgledy-piggledy corpses blanketed in stardust. The only relief from that assault on the senses was the small window looking out onto an afternoon that was blessedly leaden by contrast.