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.”
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.
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 visited 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.
I knew there were artists who cultivated such crackbrained visions, could even name some that might be cited as Tyrone’s “masters.” But this was the authentic horror vacui, and it was humbling, if not downright stupefying, to be standing there in the presence of a certified maniac.
Having seen us into the room, our minder entered behind us and shut the door, compounding the claustrophobia that already gripped my gut. We were now completely immersed in the painter’s element, and I wondered: had Tyrone been spurred by his dementia into interpreting Muni Pinsker’s fabulations, or had the fabulations themselves driven Tyrone mad? Meanwhile our escort, peering owlishly over his horn-rims, had turned curator: “He works in a number of mediums, mostly cheap watercolors, though in recent years he’s used the tempera poster paint the Hadassah ladies send him.” His intonation itself was as unctuous as oil from a tube. “They also provide him with preprimed canvases, though he still prefers cardboard and construction paper. The art is quite primitive, as you can see, without logic or perspective, but the blockish figures have a certain folkish charm.”
I could have brained him with a brickbat. Did he think the artist was deaf and dumb? From Avrom I knew that Tyrone Pin had been born late in the lives of his parents, Katie and Pinchas, so late in fact that neither survived his childhood. Orphaned, he was looked after by his cousin Muni, who inherited him along with Pinchas’s store, and at a relatively tender age the boy had gone to war.
The mirrored door of a small medicine cabinet hung on the wall above a sink, its glass smeared with enamel in the shape of a mask, with a beard like surf and a deep-creased brow. Looking into it Tyrone would see his own eyes peering out from the face of an Ancient of Days, into a cell in a madhouse appointed in the spitting images of those that decked the inside of his skull. “Hab rachmones,” I heard myself say under my breath, a Yiddish phrase I’d picked up from my reading, meaning “Have mercy.” I vowed then and there to curb my use of mind-altering substances.
Rachel, in the interim, had assumed her professional demeanor. Removing a small handheld tape recorder from her purse, she asked permission with the arch of a brow to switch it on. Then she edged closer to Tyrone and inquired of him calmly, “What are you working on?” I was proud of her for ignoring the curator or keeper or whatever he was, who cautioned her that the patient was beyond her reach. Tyrone continued daubing with his brush at the composition in front of him, his mouth still speaking silent instructions to his hand. He gave no indication of having heard his interviewer. “Do you know where you are?” she asked, again with delicacy, and in my mind I answered for him: “Somewhere else.” The radiator twanged like a Jew’s harp, the heat in that hermetic room intensifying the chemical taint of the assorted pigments. Rachel persisted softly in her questions, holding her device close to Tyrone’s lips as if to catch a stray mumble or sigh, though the artist never showed the least awareness of her presence. But at one point the words he was mouthing became briefly audible.
“I can sleep in the window,” he said, the statement half a question, “with the curly dog coats?” His voice was a rusty hinge.
“Yes,” said Rachel, gently encouraging. “Sleep wherever you want.”
He became a touch more declarative: “And tomorrow we’ll go to the circus under Jenny’s dress.”
Rachel blushed a peachy pink. “Sure thing, the circus.”
“When I would jump on the bed,” he mused, still without looking up, though his lips twitched as if in an effort to smile, “my head got stuck in the ceiling and my legs would go …” Here he actually kicked his legs a bit under the table.
Rachel said she was sorry.
“One time I pulled the barnacle goose out from the ground by his beak,” he continued, “and hid him inside the pendulum clock.” We were all—even the keeper who’d cupped an ear—straining to make sense of his utterances, when he suddenly raised his head from its former focus with an expression of acute distress.
“My back aches where they pulled out the wings,” he proclaimed. He looked at us then and began to snigger so uncontrollably that I wondered if he’d been putting us on all along. But just when it seemed that he might be in danger of coming undone, the tears streaming in freshets down his cheeks, he inhaled and abruptly ceased; again he bent toward his watercolors, muttering “The people there were made out of flies.”
For the first time since we’d entered his room, Rachel turned toward me, her oval face stricken in an echo of the artist’s agitation. By this time, however, his language had ebbed back into soundlessness, his face bent in its fixated attention to the picture at hand.
On the drive back to Memphis, still a little unstrung from the encounter, I only half-listened to Rachel expressing annoyance. “Well, that was a waste of time,” she complained; she seemed to be talking to herself for my benefit. “What did I learn? Not to go chasing after wild geese … barnacle geese yet.” Despite a moist eye she blew a derisive raspberry, then further irked by my enduring silence, persisted: “I know what you’re thinking, Lenny.” I wasn’t aware of thinking anything. “You’re thinking we’re in one of those movies where the mismatched couple meets some holy fool and then bond over the experience?” She groaned at the very idea, while I, still trying to recall if I’d ever seen such a movie, said nothing: let her fume. I bit my tongue rather than tell her how much, at that moment, I wanted to kiss her neck.
It had turned bitterly cold outside, the delft-blue sky retreating from an onslaught of dark clouds. I caught a glimpse out the window of a scarecrow in a stubble of cornstalks, just as Rachel reached across the seat to squeeze my hand. My breath caught: the gesture seemed to effectively erase our previous intimacy—the night that never happened—and replace it with something more durable. I knew enough to stay mute, since any blurted declaration from me might undo the moment. A few seconds passed and she removed her hand anyway, having perhaps thought better of it. But the reason turned out to be purely practical, because it had started to snow, great saucer-sized flakes of a kind rarely seen in Tennessee. The fallow pastures and tilted silos were turned almost instantly into features out of Currier and Ives, an absurdly precious landscape that neither of us, hazardous driving conditions aside, were of a mind to disparage.
I told Avrom we’d visited the madman and he asked me what did I want, a Good Samaritan medal? But it was one of his talkative days and, after his habit of doling out information in short rations, he let it be known that Tyrone had been among the troops who liberated the camps.
“How do you know?” I asked, expecting the usual bull.
“Because I was in it, the lager.”
I assumed that his reply was intended as a conversation stopper; any reference to that place usually was. But I had acquired, at least provisionally, a girlfriend and so considered myself a man of some substance, and on the strength of that credential pressed him to elaborate. To my astonishment he made a terse admission: as he lay fevered and anemic in the camp, he was the captive audience of a meshuggeh GI who hunkered beside his cot and hokked him a tscheinik; told him a tale no one who could walk away would have listened to. It had to do with a fabled place called the Pinch, which became entangled in the survivor’s delirium, and when he recovered he (the survivor) conceived the desire to make the journey to see for himself.
“I came, I saw,” said Avrom, picking a nit from his beard and flicking it; then a shrug conveying volumes of disenchantment. “I’m still here. Sitzfleish it’s called.”
I felt privileged to have received the disclosure but was damned if I’d let him know it.
Outside the shop the strikers were marching from Beale Street to city hall and from city hall back to Beale again, tramping through the slush left over from the deepest snowfall the city had known. All the world’s woes had slept for a day under a white counterpane then woke the next morning to sunshine and took back the streets. Beyond Main there was a war on: place-names like Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu were dropped as commonly into conversation as one might say Electric Kool-Aid. I hadn’t heard from Rachel in days, though how could I? I had no phone. Of course she might have called Avrom’s shop or dropped by the 348, and I might have sought her out at the Folklore Center in its mossy mansion on Peabody Avenue. But for the time being I liked recollecting her in tranquility, isolating her constituent parts—the curl the size of a finger ring at the nape of her neck, her calves as slender as bowling pins, her occasionally envenomed tongue. I was also reading The Pinch at a page or two every night, advancing hesitantly the way you’d enter a cavern whose sunlit mouth you’re afraid to lose sight of.
My besotted affection for Rachel somehow contributed to the intensity of my reading, or vice versa. Whatever the case, when I shut the book I was still flocked about by its contents; merchants, thieves, and errant souls continued to divert me from my own historical moment. I remained anchored to the past by the weight of the washbasins, lard presses, and canister mills in Pin’s General Merchandise, which I dragged about in my mind like the clanking strongboxes that trailed Marley’s ghost. Avrom would remove his dentures and clack them at me to get my attention; Lamar would poke a finger at my chest, exhorting me to raise the price of cannabis; he was apparently in some kind of trouble. Sometimes I was afraid my transported involvement in the book put Rachel out of reach as well, and I would try and resist reading further. I’d try to get back to the familiar desolation of North Main Street, leave the apartment and run downstairs as I did this morning, only to find myself waist-deep in a morass of floating sundries like Alice in her pool of tears.