by Steve Stern
Every ladder was a type of Jacob’s Ladder; every mired but still spinning bicycle wheel—a rainbow in its spokes—was a version of the wheel Ezekiel saw. The flood was a reprise of the Flood. During sanguine sunsets the canal of North Main Street became the River Sambatyon, beyond which dwelled the lost tribes of Israel. When Tillie Alperin’s little Esther burned her tongue on a hot knish, Isaiah’s lips were seared again by the angel’s lump of coal. Jakie Belz proudly presented his soiled linen as evidence that he’d been visited in the night by the demoness Lilith. Every gas pipe, base burner, and bedpan contained a trapped soul demanding release. Ike Petrofsky complained (or was he boasting?) of having to wade through several past lives in the morning in order to get back to the here and now—“And tomorrow I can step if I want into today.”
Muni supposed he might also get around to recognizing a future that infiltrated the present at every turn, but there was no rush. For the time being he was captivated by current events that were themselves still encrusted with the past, his own and others’. Memories once too painful to revive—of prison and the katorga and the hopeful time before—seemed as if refined into luminous tintypes in the alchemical air. When he’d read them as a child in cheder, the stories of the Torah were converted before his eyes into tangible experience. Now, though he was blindsided by the prospect, Muni’s experience of the Pinch seemed to clamor for a translation back into text. He remembered how the tales from holy writ, conveyed through the medium of Hebrew characters, could filter the grayest shtetl light into a Joseph’s coat of colors; so how much brighter would words make a light that was already resplendent. The neighborhood was tohu v’bohu, a mishmash of stories that needed only some designated scribe to apprehend and record them for all time.
“Somebody ought to write it all down,” Muni told Jenny one evening, when they were huddled together among the Medusa’s hair roots of the inverted oak.
Her reply was a suggestion she would regret till her dying day: “So why don’t you already?”
They had picked up their affair of the heart more or less where they’d left off before the quake. Of course the entire community was now stricken with a kind of pandemic infatuation, a free-floating euphoria that perhaps lent spice to the lovers’ feelings; though a gleeful Muni preferred to think it was the other way around: his passion for Jenny had enlivened the whole neighborhood. But whereas his spirits were practically lighter than air, Jenny, whose medium had been thin air itself, seemed to keep at least one foot on the ground. She almost resented that their affair was nothing special in a place where everything was special, and she worried about Katie Pin. She even admitted to feeling some guilt over being happy while Katie lay at death’s door. “It isn’t nice to be romantic under her nose,” she cautioned, sensing that their amorousness may have served to aggravate Katie’s lamentable state. Muni couldn’t have disagreed more.
“Does her good, I think, to see young people in love,” he insisted, unable to understand Jenny’s reservations.
Then one night in the tree, in a burst of spontaneous sentiment, he’d confessed to a youthful folly.
He was gazing at her barefoot countenance, her slender form in an embroidered smock backlit by a red-orange dusk that caused the twisted roots to do a fair impression of a burning bush. Other couples occupied those wavering boughs as well, flirting with each other more boldly than they’d have dared on dry land, dry land having become a scarce commodity. Above them Muni also caught sight of an ill-shaped little entity in a brass hat, which, when he squinted to sharpen his focus, was gone. A grin wreathed his face as he wondered if all this immoderate gladness was merely a function of his desire for Jenny.
“You know,” he was suddenly moved to confide in her, “I used to make poems.” There was one he remembered—remembered for the first time in an age—about the prophet Samuel in a foul mood after being recalled from death by the Witch of Endor; there was another about the sheydim, the elementals, who wove elflocks into Samson’s beeswaxed hair …
“And now you make what?” mused the girl, tickling his middle with an uplifted toe. “Whoopee?”
But instead of divulging another memory, as her touch had routinely prompted, Muni swatted away her foot like a housefly. “Be for a moment serious,” he scolded, shocked at his own thin-skinned response. But he was not done mulling over his recollection of the poems, which were admittedly callow and immature though not without a certain … he searched for the word.
The girl had screwed up her face and crossed her eyes in a burlesque of seriousness, defusing Muni’s mood. “We are not by you amused,” he pronounced, his peevishness already dissolved into parody.
“Okey-doke,” said Jenny, still playing along, commencing as if to climb down. “Drop me a line when you get a chance.”
“Jenny—” Muni grabbed her wrist to detain her. Maybe this was it, the ideal opportunity to propose to her, but the very thought flooded his head with an excess of emotion that robbed him of speech. The girl slid fluidly from her perch into his arms, as though in pronouncing her name he held an empty garment for her body to slip into. She leaned against him, pinning him to the crotch of a dirt-caked root with the pressure of her small breasts and hips. They had yet to repeat the deed that preceded the quake, when their fused bodies tolled like a clapper in a bell. But now the heat of their contact, for all its urgency, served only to enhance for Muni the delight he took in observing the very rich hours of North Main Street. It was an appallingly pure sensation, the kind that begged to be recorded the way sins and mitzvot are inscribed on the Jewish New Year in the Book of Life; because nothing in experience was real—this was his thunderous conviction—until it was wedded to the word. That was the marriage over which Muni, with Jenny’s blessing, felt a sudden blind compulsion to preside.
“Don’t go away,” he blurted, leaping clear of the abyss to hit the ground running. “I’ll be right back,” he shouted over his shoulder, though he was already out of earshot.
The grand canal of North Main was lit by lanterns, moths, and toy gondolas with guttering candles for masts, with silk tallises and celluloid shirtfronts for sails. The buildings that bordered the water, despite their hobbled condition, assumed such a look of stability that you’d have thought they’d always been so skewed, and the shops were open for business though there was little left to sell. As a result, commerce was more a performance than an actual exchange of goods and services, the citizens like children who played at being entrepreneurs. Only Pin’s General Merchandise, once the flagship enterprise of North Main Street, stood in darkness; for these days Pinchas Pin remained mostly sunk in despondency at the kitchen table. He roused himself only to inquire of his wife’s health from the visiting doctor or to receive the consolations of Jenny Bashrig, who came and went. But even the gloomy store, an aberration in that glimmering neighborhood, had for Muni an air of deepest mystery.
He foraged among the mildewed shelves, poked with matches into shadowed recesses until he found what he was looking for: a chirographic fountain pen with an automatic inkstand and a quire of white octavo stationery. The pen’s tapered handle was split and the paper moldy, its virgin leaves cockled and water-stained but nonetheless sufficient for his purpose. Muni tiptoed up the stairs past the kitchen in order not to disturb his brooding uncle. He could hear Pinchas lamenting aloud and even caught snatches of his blaming himself for Katie’s ailment, for the barrenness of his marriage. And while his uncle’s plaint made no immediate impression, it nevertheless penetrated Muni’s awareness, lodging in some remote corner of his brain from which it might work its way out like a splinter over time.
Muni took the pen and paper into his matchbox room, its only furniture the folding cot and squat deal dresser upon which stood a porcelain ewer and basin. He peeled off a single page from the stack and shoved the rest beneath the slopjar under his cot. From his uncle’s bookshelf in the hallway he selected a substantial volume, the Yiddish translation of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread as it
turned out. He sat on his cot, placed the book on his knees, and spread the paper across its smooth cloth binding. Then with a galloping heart Muni took up the inkpen and prepared to begin: he had some vague idea of making notes for future reference, of quickly acquitting himself of his renegade impulse then hurrying back to Jenny; it was after all with her that the real inspiration resided. But he found himself paralyzed.
He hadn’t actually indited anything to paper since the doggerel verse of his yeshiva days, though lack of practice wasn’t the only reason for his hesitation. For one thing, he couldn’t decide what language to write in: his Hebrew was rusty from disuse and he regarded Yiddish as the holy tongue’s poor relation; nor had he yet taken full possession of his host country’s idiom. But even if he were able to choose a vernacular appropriate to his undertaking, what precisely was his subject? Everything he observed was replete with meaning, and he stood ready to make of himself a kind of conduit: the postapocalyptic Pinch would speak through Muni Pinsker as its primary means of expression. But how does one distill everything into a cogent narrative? His uncle, quoting a favorite Russian author, once told him that all happy families are alike, and there was certainly a democracy of elation among the families of North Main. Some were as possessed as Muni, literally so, claiming that the voices of dead folk lately spoke to and through them. But those voices were not wanting for interpreters.
There was also the matter of the time that composition demanded, time that could be better spent in the company of your beloved. But wasn’t there, given its apparent immutability, plenty of time to go around? Still Muni felt that what he contemplated amounted to a betrayal. What had come over him that he’d left his girl dangling alone among that mare’s nest of undulating roots? He should hasten back to her at once and offer his most fervent apologies. “Jenny, sweet kichel, forgive me! Be my bride!” Conjugal fever was anyway in the air, several couples having already succumbed to matrimony since the flood. Hadn’t the hidebound Rabbi Lapidus from the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue just been enlisted to perform a triple wedding? A barge had been outfitted with singing oarsmen and a pavilion-sized canopy for the ceremony. Muni decided on the spot that he and Jenny should be a part of the ongoing celebrations, which looked as if they might never end. A scribe! What had he been thinking?
He was at the point of running back to the girl when he heard his uncle’s groan from the kitchen. It was a full-throated animal groan that was answered by the corrosive strains of the fiddle from somewhere outside. Since the quake and the numinous period that followed, Asbestos’s playing had evoked more than ever a pathos at odds with the general gaiety. To be sure, other sour notes had been struck in the Pinch, other characters out of step with the prevailing high spirits. The blacksmith, for instance, still sat dejected with his bamboo rod on the bank of the bayou, which the dike had restored again to a shallow cove. And Mr and Mrs Padauer remained deeply unsettled by the resemblance of their child to the host of fey creatures that flitted in the margins of everyone’s vision. Muni’s uncle sat slumped in the kitchen like a husband banished from a room where a wife is giving birth; only, Pinchas understood it wasn’t shtik naches, it wasn’t a new life that Katie was being delivered of. Then there were the memories that persisted in bubbling up from Muni’s own sorrow-laden past. Such contrary elements stood out like loose threads that wanted weaving back into the otherwise harmonious tapestry of the street; they called attention to themselves, in fact, with a needling insistence that superseded every other affection on earth.
7
Flashbacks
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 aft
er 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.”