The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  Forget the boho outlaw, a role that seemed to have run its course; Lenny remembered that he was essentially a bookworm, and as such had intuitions based on a lifetime of reading. Without the slightest idea of how to implement his plan, however, he contacted Philly Sacharin, hoping to prevail upon their mutual allegiance to North Main Street for some advice. The lawyer offered no encouragement but, admitting he had only scant knowledge of the publishing industry (“Not my bailiwick”), vouchsafed a suggestion: his wife was a shikse socialite whose circle of acquaintances included a local author of some renown. He agreed as a one-off favor to put Lenny in touch with her. The woman was delighted at a chance to demonstrate her noblesse oblige, and through her flighty offices secured the bookseller an audience with the author at his home out on the Parkway.

  Unwilling to let the book out of his sight, Lenny photocopied the entire volume with the last bit of cash from Avrom’s till; it was this unbound bundle of pages he hoped to press upon the author in his book-lined study. Something of a celebrity, the author appeared to his visitor as the very model of a modern man of letters: patch sleeves, briar pipe, august jaw affecting the spade beard of one of the colonels from his acclaimed multi-volume history of the Civil War. Clearly impatient despite the slow decanting of his treacly speech, he asked Lenny, “What kind of thing is this?” The question may have referred as much to the unkempt bearer of the bundle as to the pages themselves.

  Lenny wondered if he was expected to tremble as before the great and terrible Oz. Finally invited to sit down (he’d been teetering on his cane), the bookseller mumbled something about North Main Street when the author cut him short, assuring him: “You don’t have to tell me about the Pinch.” Lenny suspected that his was the Pinch of Davy Crockett and Big Jim Canaan, a wild and ungoverned place still barren of Jews, but did not say so. The interview was hardly a success, though at its abridged conclusion the put-upon author received the book as if in tribute from the tense young man. He riffled its contents, arched a brow over the illustrations (black and white in their Xeroxed version), then promised to take a look and deliver a judgment even as he waved his visitor away.

  Lenny could guess what the author anticipated—some vain amateurish history with at best a little anthropological interest. And when weeks passed with no news from that quarter, he began to think the busy man would not bother to keep his word at all. Meanwhile the Cotton Carnival proceeded in the shadow of the fixed cloud that hung over the city, and the demolition of Beale Street progressed in the name of urban renewal. A local Reform rabbi blasted the congregation that had turned its back on him for his defense of the garbage strikers, then retired soon after in despair. There were more riots, bloodshed; the segregationist George Wallace declared himself a candidate for president and named as his running mate General Curtis LeMay, who said, “I don’t believe the world’ll end if we splode a nuculer bomb.” Midsouth Select Properties Inc. dunned Lenny for rent and threatened him with eviction, and the hospital demanded prompt remittance of their bill. Lenny managed to forestall immediate action on the part of the latter by submitting partial payments with cash acquired from the sale of an occasional book. (There was of course no question of peddling drugs anymore, since the onetime vendor knew better than to apply to sources still smarting from having been burned by Lamar Fontaine.) Then, long after he’d abandoned the hope of hearing from him again, the author sent Lenny a letter.

  Dear Mr. Skarew,

  I’m afraid this reader’s tastes tend too much toward the traditional to allow for a plenary appreciation of the liberties Mr. Pinsker has taken with narrative convention. Nor am I a fan of violating common reality with such liberal incursions of the preposterous; whatever claims the book makes to historical authenticity are patently absurd. However, I am not entirely unaware of certain trends in contemporary culture, and I suspect there are camps in which Mr. Pinsker’s brand of whimsy might be indulged. I suppose there are even those who might take some pleasure in the calculated ingenuousness of the author’s voice, despite its clannish ethnicity. That said, I found the inclusion in the text of a character I assume is yourself to be a needless contrivance: it’s a gimmick clearly designed to give the work a “metafictional” stamp and seems a deliberate pandering to the fashion of the day. Still, though I judge the book to be finally a curio without enduring literary merit, it would be ungenerous not to concede that it nevertheless deserves its moment in the court of popular opinion, and I have forwarded The Pinch to my agent with that endorsement.

  Yours, & etc.

  P.S. I believe the illustrations, chimerical as they are, have also their own kind of currency in this climate and can’t hurt the book’s marketability (hateful word).

  Lenny was contacted by the agent in the fullness of time. At the suggestion of her valued client she was passing the book along to an editor at a well-respected publishing house who she thought might be receptive. She cautioned the book dealer, though, that he shouldn’t get his hopes up; the chances of a self-published volume being picked up by an established press were extremely remote.

  Things happened thereafter with a startling alacrity. The agent, confessing her own surprise, got back to Lenny in a matter of days with the news that the publisher had made a better than reasonable offer for The Pinch. There were legal issues that needed ironing out in order to resolve Lenny’s dual role as both executor and beneficiary of Muni Pinsker’s literary estate (he should see a lawyer). Once the details were settled, he would receive half the advance upon signing the contract and half on publication of the book. While Lenny’s head was still spinning from what sounded to him like an astronomical figure, the agent increased his vertigo with talk of print runs and marketing strategies. There had been some debate over just how to categorize the work, but it was finally decided the subtitle, A History, would be retained, further qualified by the sub-subtitle: A Novel. Ambiguity, it seemed, was a selling point. Though the publisher intended to target “the obvious niche audience”—Lenny wondered who exactly that was—it had a broader readership in mind, and toward that end engaged an eminent writer—Jewish though not to an onerous degree—to tout the book’s universality in a preface. The writer, unable to locate any biographical information about the author of The Pinch, was told all roads led back to a book dealer in Memphis; so he appealed to Lenny for a chronology of the major events in Muni’s life. Having spent the publisher’s advance on settling accounts with landlords and bill collectors and making initial improvements to the store, Lenny agreed, with his fledgling chutzpah, to provide the timeline for a supplemental fee.

  The book was published the following autumn in a handsome, octavo-sized volume, its contents printed in an elegant Garamond type font on acid-free, Bible-grade stock. The title was embossed, the glossy dust jacket a reproduction of one of Tyrone’s extravagant polychrome mirages, others appearing at intervals throughout the text. Removing it from its padded envelope, Lenny pawed the book and fanned its pages, hoping to revive something of the heart-stopping emotion he’d felt on encountering the original. (That particular volume had been filed away among the shop’s labyrinthine shelves under History.) But The Pinch no longer seemed to belong to him. He had the awful sinking sensation upon cracking the spine of the newly minted edition that, in selling the book, he’d betrayed Muni Pinsker and the entire vanished community of North Main Street. The feeling was not much relieved when he turned to his own contribution, attached as a historico-biographical appendix:

  Significant Biographical Events

  1889—Muni Pinsker is born to Zalman and Itke Pinsker in town of Blod in the Russian Pale of Settlement.

  1892—Enters as pupil in cheder of Reb Yozifel Glans, called by his students Death’s Head.

  1898—Transfers to more advanced school in Tzachnovka, thirty versts from Blod; Muni begins “eating days” and writing poetry.

  1906—Enters yeshiva of famed Chazon Ish in Minsk, where he is exposed to radical politics.

  1907—Passover pogrom
in Blod: Muni’s father is murdered, sister assaulted, mother left deranged.

  1908—Joins Jewish General Labor Bund.

  1909-10—Is arrested for distributing socialist paper the Hammer, accused of conspiracy, and sentenced to four years’ hard labor and permanent exile to Siberia; marched to the mica mines at Nerchinsk, a journey from Moscow of more than five months.

  1910–11—Escapes from the labor camp: walks from Nerchinsk to Irkutsk across frozen Lake Baikal; travels (funded by smuggled currency from American uncle) by train through Russia to Bremen; then by SS Saxonia to New York and train to Memphis, Tennessee.

  1912–13—Works on North Main Street (the Pinch) in the general merchandise owned by uncle Pinchas Pin; becomes romantically attached to funambulist Jenny Bashrig; earthquake occurs.

  1913–21 (an approximate span of years perceived by population as single cyclical day)—Stricken with graphomania, Muni retreats into room, begins writing chronicle of the Pinch in which events seem to happen concurrently if not all at once; after terminating pregnancy, Jenny joins circus.

  Children of flooded North Main Street begin fainting at will: entering hiver-betim (deathlike trances), they emerge with occult knowledge; permutate letters of Tetragrammaton with alphabet blocks to summon cosmic monsters for the purpose of remembering fear.

  Millie Poupko’s son Myron slices open big toe, inserts chit inscribed with name of God, sprouts wings; Izzy Grinspan’s daughters pluck scales from dragon Rahav, use as mirrors in which to view future husbands.

  Tinsmith Manny Schatz manufactures mechanical bird: inserts tongue of adder that causes automaton to speak prophecies suppressed since Babylonian exile.

  The floozy Katya Bimbaum wears in her marcelled hair the mystic thirteen-petaled rose; rose plucked by Hershel Tarnopol for his papa’s lapel, its radiance resulting in papa’s combustion.

  Zygmunt Tisch invokes as maggid (medium) the medieval cephalophore Rabbi Ashlag to interpret dream in which Theda Bara palpates his frontal lobe; in the absence of their rebbe Shpinker Hasids devise balloon raised aloft by lilin (aerial demons) spawned from Hasids’ own seminal emissions.

  Sam Alabaster uses, for fishing bait, a toxic worm that causes birds to fall from the sky by merely crawling over their shadow; Mrs. Bluestein invites ushpizin (spirit guests) from the Circle of the Unique Cherub to her canasta table.

  Pantsed by dog-faced imps at belated bar mitzvah (revealing his petsel like a licorice whip), the aged changeling Benjy Padauer nevertheless succeeds in delivering his Torah portion.

  Returned from underworld, Katie Pin celebrates renewed menstrual cycle; her child is born six weeks later.

  Et cetera …

  1921—Blind fiddler Asbestos, longtime fixture of North Main Street, is lynched after aiding and abetting convict escapees; Pinch resumes Central Standard Time.

  1921–22—Muni abruptly ceases writing; retired from circus, Jenny Bashrig returns to Memphis; Muni and Jenny wed, become guardians of orphaned Tyrone Pin and proprietors of Pin’s General Merchandise.

  1922–28—After years of financial struggle and compromised health, Muni succumbs to pulmonary tuberculosis (1927); Jenny dies the following year from kidney disease aggravated by alcohol narcosis; young Tyrone, self-designated custodian of Muni’s abandoned manuscript, becomes virtual charity case.

  1944-45—Tyrone is conscripted into US Armed Forces, sees action after D-Day in northern Europe, witnesses liberation of Dachau.

  1945–52—Tyrone returns to North Main Street enervated from battle fatigue, begins to paint; immigrant camp survivor Avrom Slutsky, having followed Tyrone to America, recovers Muni Pinsker’s buried manuscript, edits and redacts text—which he titles The Pinch—and funds its printing along with the plates of Tyrone’s illustrations.

  1953—Over Slutsky’s protests, Tyrone is declared mentally incompetent and confined to Western State Psychiatric Hospital at Bolivar.

  1968—Book dealer Leonard Sklarew, legatee of Muni’s printed book, sells rights to the venerable Frigate Press for publication as The Pinch: A History; a novel.

  Significant Historical Events

  1881–84, 1903–7—Major waves of pogroms in Russia, mass emigration of Jews.

  1887—Artesian well water becomes available in Memphis.

  1894–99—Dreyfus affair.

  1897—General Jewish Labor Bund formed.

  1899—Blood libel trial in Bohemia (the Hilsner case); black millionaire R. R. Church funds Church Park and Auditorium, first Memphis park and entertainment center for African Americans.

  1903—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in the newspaper Zamnye; Kishinev pogrom.

  1900—Casey Jones leaves Memphis’s Central Station bound for catastrophic train wreck at Vaughn, Mississippi.

  1905—Failed Russian revolution; pogroms ensue.

  1906—W. C. Handy writes “Mr. Crump Don’t Like It” (later “Memphis Blues”); opening of Overton Park Zoo.

  1908—Wild Bill Latura murders five Negroes in Ashford’s Saloon on Beale Street, acquitted by all-white jury despite concern that such behavior might lead to killing white people; Mose Plough loans son Abe $125 to start Plough Chemical Company, also on Beale.

  1909—Edward Hull Crump elected mayor of Memphis.

  1913—Riots at Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring; Mendel Beilis on trial in Russia for ritual murder.

  1914—World War I begins.

  1915—Lynching of Leo Frank.

  1916—E. H. Crump illegally “votes” illiterate blacks, pays city budget deficits with bond issues, protects political allies who abuse offices, ignores prohibition laws; Clarence Saunders opens first Piggly Wiggly self-service grocery at Third and Madison.

  1917—Bolshevik Revolution: approximately 200,000 Jews murdered as counterrevolutionaries and bourgeois profiteers; Harahan Bridge completed over Mississippi River.

  1918—Spanish flu epidemic.

  1919—Treaty of Versailles.

  1920—Henry Ford prints 500,000 copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  1923—Ku Klux Klan candidate Clifford Davis elected Memphis city judge; old Orpheum Theatre burns.

  1924—Reunion of Confederate veterans in Memphis.

  1925—“Fee system” of blacks sold into peonage exposed; New Peabody Hotel opens at Main and Monroe; Tom Lee, “a good Negro,” rescues thirty-two people when excursion boat capsizes; Mein Kampf published; Scopes “Monkey” Trial begins.

  1926—Last Valley Line packet boats retired from Mississippi River.

  1927—Sacco and Vanzetti executed; The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, released; Mississippi River floods.

  1928—Jimmy Lunceford’s Orchestra plays roof of Shrine Building; Bessie Smith at the Palace on Beale.

  1929—Stock market crashes; Memphis adventurer Richard Halliburton lost at sea in Chinese junk.

  1931—Cotton Carnival launched.

  1933–41—German Jews stripped first of rights as citizens, then of rights as human beings.

  1937—Amelia Earhart vanishes; Great Flood brings thousands of homeless refugees to Memphis.

  1938—Two runs shy of Babe Ruth’s record, Hank Greenberg walked rather than be given shot at home run. Kristallnacht.

  1939—Germany invades Poland.

  1941—Pearl Harbor.

  1943—Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

  1945—Victory in Europe; atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

  1948—State of Israel established; Gandhi assassinated; WDIA radio station adopts all-black format.

  1950—Senator Joseph McCarthy mounts anti-Communist crusade; Sam Phillips opens Sun Records Studio.

  1951—Phillips records Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88,” first rock ’n’ roll hit.

  1952—Night of Murdered Poets in Moscow; Kemmons Wilson opens first Holiday Inn on Summer Avenue.

  1953—Rosenbergs executed.

  1954—E. H. Crump dies.

  1955—Emmet Till murdered.

  1956—�
��Million Dollar Quartet”—Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley—jam at Sun Records; Elvis appears on Ed Sullivan Show.

  1958—Stax Records’s “Memphis Sound”organized.

  1961—Eichmann trial.

  1962—Cuban Missile Crisis.

  1963—Martin Luther King gives “I Have a Dream” speech; John F. Kennedy assassinated.

  1964—Beatles come to America.

  1965—Malcolm X shot; American troops sent to Vietnam.

  1967—Six-Day War in Israel.

  1968—Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated; massacre at My Lai.

  1969—Despite designation as National Historic Landmark, Beale Street area demolished and buildings (with exception of Schwab’s Emporium) condemned.

  1970s—Bisected by Interstate 40 as part of construction for Hernando DeSoto Bridge, Pinch district becomes target for slum clearance.

  It didn’t happen overnight, but against all reasonable expectations Muni’s book struck a chord with the reading public. There was, apparently, still a reading public. The reviews, such as they were, were mixed: the favorable, perhaps influenced by the psychedelic ethos of the day, praised the kaleidoscopic nature of the narrative. Some said it evoked a kind of folk consciousness and even delighted in the book’s refusal to conform to a specific genre. Soberer judgments—and these were in the majority—suggested that The Pinch was the product of a puerile sensibility and dismissed it out of hand. There were those, too, who complained that the surplus of “tribal” content was off-putting and exclusive. But somehow a gradual groundswell of word-of-mouth sentiment began to create a stir in various quarters, and the book—like an awkward dance step that turns out to be liberating—started to catch on. By the time Lenny received the publisher’s biannual statement, The Pinch had made up its advance and begun to generate royalties. By the end of the fiscal year the book had attained a minor cult status, a paperback edition was in the works, and Leonard Sklarew was on his way to becoming solvent.