The next time I saw Rachel was at a concert at the Overton Park Shell. The Shell was an outdoor amphitheater located in the forested midtown park that also contained the city’s zoo, and between sets you could hear the yowls and screeches of beasts and rare birds. It was really a summer venue, the Shell, with its broad stage arched over by a concrete crescent like the mouth of a horn of plenty, but despite the nippy March evening the concert had drawn a large crowd. Velveeta and the Psychopimps, at Elder Lincoln’s urging, had organized a roster of regional musicians, including old blues originals like Bukka White, Furry Lewis, and Sleepy John; they’d engaged other popular local rock bands such as the transgressive Mud Boy and the Neutrons, and guaranteed that the event’s proceeds would go toward funding the sanitation workers’ strike.
I would have invited Rachel to come along if I’d been able to contact her, but my calls to the Folklore Center had gone unanswered and her home phone wasn’t listed. I admit I might have done more to seek her out, but I was preoccupied with my own affairs. I had my hands full navigating between the bookstore and North Main Street, where Lamar was pressuring me to become a more aggressive peddler of his bootleg goods. The fact was, Lamar’s merchandise sold itself; all I had to do was make it available and can the double-talk that tended to discourage the consumers. But apparently Lamar’s extravagant lifestyle—the philanthropic activities that supported, among other things, a small harem in his suite at the Peabody Hotel—had caused bills to come due; and certain sinister parties were proving impatient. Meanwhile I was finding it increasingly difficult to negotiate between a past made manifest by my reading of Muni Pinsker’s book and the current scene; and to be honest, being in love with Rachel only complicated matters. I had to struggle mightily to keep my wits about me.
I was standing in line outside the Port-O-Potty when I saw her. Though I’d been busy filtering among the benches pushing pills, I wasn’t high on anything myself—oh, maybe a little Dex and some beer. But since I’d begun to divide my time between two worlds, my brain remained jazzed to the point of requiring no further stimulation. It was intermission and the line for the convenience was long, and in the quarter hour I’d waited to get to its head my need had become fairly urgent. Rachel was again without her fiancé, who had receded in my mind to nearly imaginary. She was accompanied by her two friends—the chunky one and the petite—from the bar, but spotting me she excused herself and broke away from her companions. Having gone native for the concert, she was wearing a macramé headband and a crocheted shawl along with a peasant skirt and boots. On the one hand, who was she kidding? While on the other, as she approached me beneath the staggered lamplight affecting a rangy stride, she looked like some spitfire Gypsy girl. What’s more, she was smiling for a change.
“Hello, stranger,” she greeted me genially, which was odd since the estrangement was largely owing to her.
I was about to apprise her of that fact when this biker dude strolled up, bear-like and piratical in his bandanna, earring, and nicotine-stained beard. He wore an embossed leather vest over a protuberant chest, bare despite the chilly night air. “Emergency, man,” he muttered, stepping in front of me in line and waiting for the door of the necessary to open. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said to me over his shoulder, the question purely rhetorical.
His shoulders were massive, but prompted by dire need, I tapped a hairy patch on one of them. “I don’t mind,” I said, “but they might,” indicating the queue of restless characters behind me. Then turning I shouted, “This guy wants to know if it’s okay to break in line?”
There was an instant uproar that included threats and flaunted fists, perhaps a brandished weapon or two. It was clear that the bladder-heavy column was prepared to turn into a mob at the least violation of protocol. The biker growled into his beard but waved his big hands in the air in a gesture of surrender as he slouched away.
Rachel stood agape, which gave me to realize what I had done. Lately the no longer so distant past had come to hold such sovereignty over the present that immediate events didn’t always make a strong impression. I sometimes misplaced my faculty for recognizing danger until after the fact; then it would strike me, what had just happened, and leave me completely unnerved. “Good one, Lenny,” Rachel applauded, which only served to highlight my foolhardiness. Her remark combined with a shove from behind caused me nearly to have an accident. Thankfully the Potty door opened and I bolted in after the previous occupant with a minimum of leakage.
When I emerged, still shaken, Rachel was waiting. She invited me to join her friends who, remembering my performance at the 348, received me warily: like a creature in need of housebreaking but otherwise harmless. We took our seats on the weathered wooden benches just as the show was beginning again. The Psychopimps had returned to the stage: Sandy Eubank flinging snaky curls and piping like the Queen of the Night, Elder Lincoln on his fiddle channeling Paganini via Congo Square. An illustrious local pianist in a magenta claw hammer was sitting in with them for the set, his fingers riding the keys like ocean swells. It was the kind of ensemble unique to the city of Memphis, which had birthed the blues and rock ’n’ roll and presided over their incestuous union. The air was fragrant with a mixture of weed and patchouli, the beam from a lavender spot scintillating with fireflies. Tonight the Aquarian tribes had descended on the park as one nation, at a juncture where music trumped history and the hoofbeats of the horsemen of the apocalypse were reduced to a minor chord.
Then came an interlude during which the Psychopimps presented an example of the type of gonzo theater that had become a standard component of their performances. The puckish Jimmy Pryor introduced his latest dummy, a little Negro in bib overalls with a melon-sized head and exaggerated ethnic features. He was modeled after Hambone of Hambone’s Meditations, a single-panel cartoon that appeared daily in the Commercial Appeal. Each day Hambone dispensed homespun wisdom, rustic chestnuts such as: “Mos’ folks, dey loses at de mouf what dey teks in at de ears.” Jimmy’s figure had a sign around his neck reading I AM A MAN.
“Mayor Loeb,” said Hambone, seated on Jimmy’s knee (Jimmy himself was perched on a stool in a crushed opera hat), “Mayor Loeb, he say de wukker cain’t have no checkoff fo’ dues. I say don’t need no Checkoff, nor Dustyevsky neither. Jes’ need the union and a mite uv dignity.”
Rachel touched my arm in a gesture meant to signify our shared sympathy regarding this issue: she’d come on board. I looked at the arm she’d touched and then at her soft aquiline profile, her jet-black hair in its stylized liberation, and felt a twinge of conscience, because I hadn’t paid much attention to the headlines of late. Later on, when the concert was over and she took me aside to report some new findings in her research—did I know that Elvis Presley had been the Dubrovner family’s shabbos goy?—I refrained from offering any information in return. Her dark eyes had gone somewhat lynx-like in their expectation, and I wanted in my soul to take her with me; I wanted to show her the ladies flicking chickens in the back of Makowsky’s butcher shop or Hekkie Grussom’s wife braiding flax into rope in the yard behind his hardware store. I wanted to watch her peek through the curtain of the women’s gallery at the strange fire ablaze on the altar of the Market Square shul. But instead, in the face of her undisguised disappointment, I said good night and promptly turned away, intending to beat it back into Muni’s book, though I lay awake until dawn without reading a page.
Of course I wasn’t entirely unaware of what was going on. How could I be when the situation was all the talk at Beatnik Manor? Things were heating up, the strikers marching every day for their self-respect, though I wondered if there was enough of that article to go around. Strike leaders had been arrested for jaywalking, union officials jailed for contempt of court. A mock funeral was held outside city hall to mourn the death of freedom, and at night the horizon over South Memphis was coral-red from the trash fires the strike supporters lit. Moreover, it was rumored that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself was coming to the city to speak on behalf of the sanitation workers. The issue seemed to have become a cause célèbre. But when I wasn’t obsessing over my missed connection with Rachel, I was literally absorbed in The Pinch, though I still managed only a page or two a night—because the effort involved in reading that particular volume could be as exacting as the effort of living on earth.
At first I might have discounted the experience as the aftereffects of hallucinogens, which I wasn’t unfamiliar with. Such phenomena were common enough, especially when you’d stopped using the stuff as abruptly as I had: it left fluorescent echoes in the brain. But lately the echoes had more volume and substance than their original source. To read about the entertainments at the Idle Hour Theater, where every night was Talent Night, was to find myself in the audience among spell-struck neighbors. Onstage the citizens tried to outdo one another in performing wonders, though the miraculous had become relatively prosaic in those parts. Everybody was a magician. Harold Dlugach made a solemn show of lighting his brother Morton’s poots, from which fabulous salamanders materialized in the resulting blue flames; the Shpinker Hasids extracted the souls of local suicides from mirrors and ladies’ reticules, then released them like carrier pigeons with messages to God. (Muni wrote that, sequestered for so long, ben Yahya’s Hasids were now ubiquitous, whereas their rebbe seldom entered society anymore and looked peaky whenever he did.)
Sometimes I confused what I read with what I imagined I’d read, or passed through, as when wide awake I dreamed that I sloshed into Pinchas Pin’s General Merchandise: I climbed the stairs and padded down the short hallway to peer into the little cupboard of a room, where a gaunt man with pouched eyes sat on a bed in his skivvies inscribing the deeds of the neighborhood. What would happen, I wondered, if I nudged aside his shoulder, displacing his writing hand to make room for mine, instead of simply retreating back to my own half of the century?