The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  Beyond the brick wall was a coffee factory, its lights on and aromas emanating as they hadn’t for half a century. Next door the sheitel-wigged Hattie Zipper stood on an upstairs landing behind her apartment airing out a featherbed; she was exchanging gossip with Tillie Alperin in the window of the neighboring building, brushing periwinkles from her daughter’s tawny hair. From the bare branch of a chinaberry tree a creature with shaggy flanks and hooves (which I recognized from my reading as a millinery demon, a kapelyushnikl) hung by its knobby knees. A steamboat sounded its whistle, and a stringed instrument from somewhere nearby imitated its plangent moan. I could have hidden there circa 1900 in perpetuity, I thought, safe from cops and universal conscription. From where I stood, though, I could barely even remember Rachel’s face—or rather, I could cherish the memory of her face from afar with a poignant longing. But was Lenny Sklarew some craven pitsvinik who lived on unrequited passions? Well, maybe. But touching the past, for all its allure, tonight made me want even more the solid portion that only my own place in time could provide. Ashamed of myself for hesitating, I climbed the wall and trotted along a back alley as far as Poplar Avenue. Still afraid to return to my apartment, however, I boarded a trolley and rode it until it dissolved into thin air, leaving me to walk the rest of the way to the midtown refuge of Beatnik Manor.

  The house was flush as usual with “the mad ones, who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn like roman candles,” at least those whose flames hadn’t been snuffed out already by cynicism and substance abuse. A few of the Psychopimps were sitting around the parlor along with their customary hangers-on—some of whom shuffled in place to unheard music or contributed with colored markers to the kaleidoscopic walls. Hunkered among them was a small contingent of black brothers, the tag Invaders spray-painted in Day-Glo across the backs of their leather jackets. Elder Lincoln was holding forth from a rocker, his acoustic violin propped upright on his knee.

  “My grandmama Abishag, she done come one time upon a lynched man after the mob have departed,” employing the folk speech he reserved for storytelling. “Not a soul even standin’ guard. The victim he was a old feller, a fiddler by the look of him ’cause his broken instrument have been hung round his broken neck. Got also no eyes lef’ in his hade. See, my grandmama didn’t have no chirren and her husband’s long gone, so she look bofe ways and unbutton the hung man’s fly to see do the legend be true. Then she look round, hitch up her skirt, ain’t nothin’ but a ol’ nation sack, and scoot her booty smack up against his Johnson erectus. Tha’s how my daddy that I didn’t never know got born and how I come by my musical aptitude.”

  He grinned saucily as the hippies groaned, having perhaps heard this one before. The brothers, younger than the general run of freaks in the room, voiced their annoyance at such frivolous smoke. One of them, a razor part in his bushy ’fro, muttered, “Niggah, that’s fucked up,” while another, wearing a baseball cap with the bill turned sideways, said, “Yo, Elder, you down with us or what?”

  Elder cocked his head in puzzlement, feigned or otherwise.

  Then the third Invader, who commanded a certain air of authority (by virtue of his aboriginal brow?), said, “Bro, you gon’ be our podnah in crime?” It had the ring of a rehearsed request.

  “Ezackly what’s on y’all’s mind?”

  The beetle brow shifted his sallow eyes to and fro. “It ain’t for the ears of all these zebras.”

  “These zebras are my friends, Sweet Weeyum,” submitted Elder.

  Sweet Weeyum jutted his lower lip till it matched in protrusion his overarching brow. Still clearly suspicious, he nevertheless relaxed his guard enough to get down to cases. He spoke frankly, even boastfully, about sabotage, offhandedly alluding to items such as peashooters and Molotov cocktails.

  The tension that permeated the room brought Ira Kisco to his feet. “Elder,” he asked, “what you doing listening to these punks?” His voice wavered between accusatory and apologetic.

  Elder frowned. “These punks are my brethren.”

  Ira hung his head in momentary surrender, then raised it. “What about the movement, man?” One of the Invaders wondered aloud what did a mothafuckin’ Viking know of “the movement”? He spoke the words with a biting sarcasm, but while perhaps a touch embarrassed by his Nordic features, Ira persisted all the same. “Remember nonviolent civil disobedience? Gandhi and King and all that?”

  At the latter name Sweet Weeyum remarked truculently, “Doctah Kang ain’t nothin’ but the president’s house niggah. The man done had his day.”

  Ira forced a laugh and rested his case, but in the absence of a similarly dismissive response from Elder he left the room. He was followed soon after by a broad-toothed Cholly Jolly in his six-gallon hat, pumping his fist and shouting an ironic “Black power!” The remaining hippies, their spans of attention spent, fell to gazing at the roiling bubbles inside a glass bong.

  Elder continued rocking thoughtfully as he gave ear to the Invaders stating their insurrectionary objectives. Their spokesman, Sweet Weeyum, had begun to list specific targets, businesses run by councilmen who’d been especially vocal in their opposition to the strike; perhaps even the councilmen themselves. At one point Elder noticed that I was still lingering at the edge of their conversation. Actually, I was fascinated, not so much by the substance of their parley as by Elder’s indulgence of it. A gifted young black man who moved with relative impunity between both sides of the color line, Elder Lincoln was much admired by those who didn’t deem him a traitor to his race. (“Oreo” was the word sometimes bruited about.) As a consequence, he was torn between two cultures, and being more or less in the same boat myself, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the guy.

  “Yo, monkey man,” Elder was suddenly addressing me, less hospitably than I was used to. “Can we hep you?”

  Trying to hide my hurt feelings, I replied, “I ain’t no ear hustler, know what I’m sayin’, but y’all do be talkin’ some off-da-hinges drama. Copacetee, my brothas,” I assured them, rising from the ash-strewn carpet. “Holla back atcha boy Lenny now and then.” And having exhausted all the street jargon I knew, I straggled out of the parlor to the tune of nasal sniggering behind me.

  In the kitchen assorted Psychopimps and their camp followers were seated round a square table solemnly passing slab bottles and spliffs. “The cops raided the 348,” I announced in my capacity as messenger from the world at large—though it came to me my more compelling message was from another world altogether. “They arrested Lamar Fontaine,” I added, mentioning also that I was on the lam, but that wasn’t heard due to the rumblings of general solicitude. Their concern, however, seemed not so much for the bar or its proprietor as for the ruptured chemical pipeline between North Main Street and the manor.

  I thought their reaction unworthy of them. Where was the sympathy for their benefactor? Certainly Lamar had his idiosyncrasies, not the least of which was his sartorial pride in his antebellum heritage and penchant for adolescent flesh, but his largess toward the band and their outlandish projects had been princely. How could they be so unmoved? Of course, if I were honest I’d have had to admit to being almost as heartless: I was more worried about the threat to my livelihood and tenancy than I was about my landlord’s incarceration. What did I really care about drug traffickers or maverick musicians, or for that matter garbagemen and foreign wars—when what I wanted most at that moment (peace, Rachel) was to get back to the book I’d left in my apartment, which I figured was still too risky to return to that night?

  Knackered from the long evening, I went nosing about that funhouse looking for a place to crash. In most rooms, including the hallways, the sleeping bags wriggled from the bodies twining inside them like chrysalises about to hatch. Stepping over them, I eventually discovered at the dark end of the house a small conservatory, its walls and ceiling composed of weather-scored quartz glass panes. On one of the panes was a large orange thumbprint that I assumed was the moon. I settled into a canvas deck chai
r amid a jungle of unlawful plants and luxuriant ferns, squinting through them toward the vanished civilization I was homesick for.

  In the morning I took a bus back downtown. The shop reeked of geriatric must, Avrom breathing like an accordion, hacking up unsightly matter into his Luzianne coffee tin. His color was the yellow of the skim on hollandaise. When I suggested he call Doc Fruchter, a Pinch alumnus who still made house calls, he told me, “A calamity in your navel.” His curses often more riddle than sting. Still he ran me ragged with fetching the nostrums that the old quack had prescribed him and shelving the termite-bored library of a recently deceased entomologist. So it wasn’t until my lunch break that I managed to get to a phone booth. I called the office of Lamar’s attorney, Bernie “the Mouthpiece” Rappaport, and asked how things stood with my landlord. I braced myself to hear I didn’t know what: he’d been tortured, electrodes applied to his genitals until he named names. For all I knew I was a marked man.

  “He won’t let me put up his bail,” said Bernie, sounding insulted. I’d met the lawyer once at the 348, a baggy little man with a threadbare comb-over dressed in discordant plaids. His only concession to the unconventional lifestyle of the clients he tended to represent was a pair of rufous muttonchops.

  “What’s that?”

  “He advised me against posting his bond.” I thought I could smell his cheap aftershave through the phone. “He wants to stay in stir.”

  “Why, forgodsakes?”

  “Let’s just say there are people on the outside who pose more of a threat to him than the courts.”

  I knew that Lamar’s finances were in disarray, that he purchased his stuff from nefarious sources, but he’d made such a haven of 348 North Main Street, to say nothing of his lavish suite at the Peabody, that I thought of him as untouchable. Besides, there was his thoroughbred family who for all I knew still held slaves. Couldn’t their influence be brought to bear?

  “You didn’t hear they already disowned him, their disgraced scion? They’re the type of family that got scions.”

  I wondered where his imminent trial and conviction would leave me.

  Late that afternoon I returned to the scene of the previous night’s flight. It was a somber slate-gray homecoming, North Main Street more deserted than usual, barren of its lately invasive long ago. The bar was padlocked, a hand-scrawled placard in the window reading Closed Til Further Notice By Order of the Oinks; the neon numbers above the door were extinguished, perhaps forever. What’s more, there was a barge-sized aqua sedan parked across the street in front of my building, containing no doubt a plainclothes cop waiting to apprehend me. Then I remembered that the vehicle was Rachel’s own rust-trimmed Buick Brontosaur, and the face in the driver’s-side window, once she’d unrolled it, was the girl herself. Disheveled and dog-weary from sleeplessness, I nevertheless felt my whole countenance distorted by an imbecile grin. As I approached the car she got out and smiled as well, though inscrutably.

  “I’ve been asking some of my informants about Tyrone,” she began without preamble, infuriatingly matter-of-fact. “Seems there were a couple of years after the war when he was—what did they call him?—the shtot meshuggener, a kind of village idiot. He was everybody’s pet, harmless until he began trying to harm himself.” That’s when the street intervened to have him committed to Bolivar. But now the old Pinch survivors, themselves living in a luxury often subsidized by their comfortable children (it seemed they hadn’t all died “over there”), were in a position to help improve the artist’s situation. With Rachel’s prompting they might be willing to bring his plight to the attention of their respective synagogues: contributions could be made and funds raised to transfer him to the relative serenity of the B’nai B’rith Home, a well-endowed facility under the hawthorns across from Overton Park.

  Oh, she was a pretty girl. She was wearing a short patchwork skirt and her perennial leather boots, a Navajo poncho with the hood thrown back. Her hair was woven in plaits like military braids. Every time I saw her she seemed to have graduated to some new stage of bohemianism. Could this be my influence?

  “How long have you been waiting for me?” I asked, wishing for: All my life.

  “I just arrived,” she replied, looking confused by my obvious disappointment.

  Then pretending it was only natural to do so, I invited her upstairs, and she followed as if custom dictated. My heart sank when I found the door to my apartment ajar, then remembered that I never bothered to lock it; I likewise balked at discovering that the place had been ransacked until I recalled that trashed was its normal condition. Once we’d entered I was acutely aware that Rachel Ostrofsky stood again in my drafty flat with its rancid odor for no other reason than I had asked her to. She seemed as awkward with this knowledge as I was, and for an immeasurable moment we could neither of us think of anything to say. I offered her the single chair, a rickety rattan job I’d scavenged from an abandoned toolshed strangled by creepers. Cautiously sitting, she crossed her shapely legs, which enflamed me all the more for the unshaven fuzz on her shins. Did I love her? I confess that she oscillated in my brain between the unassailable idea of her and the warm and fallible thing herself; though this evening she seemed emphatically three-dimensional, her presence a lodestar toward which a rudderless shlemiel might claw his way back from lost worlds.

  Can I touch your aura? Jump your bones? “Would you like a beer?” I asked her. Not waiting for a reply, I went into the galley kitchen and opened the little fridge which was bare of beers, just a puckered apple and a deviled ham sandwich gone chartreuse with mold. When I returned to her empty-handed, Rachel seemed not even to notice but instead said to me diffidently, “Lenny, I’ve been thinking I’d like to do”—all the most degrading things we can think of—“LSD.”

  I won’t pretend to understand the feelings her request evoked in me. Certainly there was lust, an ache and a throb; there was the memory of the botched consummation we’d yet to repair. But there was something else as well—a gratitude that nearly choked me, sadness like a hymn. It was as if she’d asked to meet my imaginary friend. I reached down to pry her fingers from the arm of the chair and pulled her to her feet, ignoring her bewildered expression, which intensified when she felt how I was trembling. I led her over to the fetid mattress where I knelt and bade her do the same. I willed her to trust me, summoning an unfledged authority, praying she wouldn’t suddenly come to her senses and cut and run. Then I took up the book that lay facedown on the rumpled sheets, its splayed covers like a rooftop in a flood, and began to read aloud from its pages.

  10

  The Pinch: A History

  1878

  Once upon a bone-dry July afternoon, a solitary pack peddler by the name of Pinchas Pinsker came down the road. Pushing a wooden handcart, which he leaned against at an angle almost parallel to the ground, he turned into an avenue of oaks that led toward a colonnaded plantation house. His cart was a low, two-wheeled affair that had recently belonged to a greengrocer in Crab Orchard, Kentucky, and for it Pinchas had swapped a quantity of sateen ticking that the man’s wife had admired. He pushed the contraption by a pair of spindled handstaffs that he hoped one day to hitch to a horse’s flanks. The cart contained the tarp-covered contents of a small racket store: razors, carpet slippers, snuffboxes, and tobacco; there were spectacles, kitchen utensils, candles, oilcloth, dress patterns, and yard goods; dolls for the children, kickshaws for the ladies. Though he wasn’t born to this profession, when he removed the tarp from his merchandise, Pinchas—a short, bespectacled man with a nap of sandy hair under his bowler hat—felt like a conjuror revealing treasures.

  As he neared the broad-porticoed house, he anticipated the servants and children coming out to greet him. That’s what he was accustomed to. The occupants of sharecroppers’ shacks and planters’ mansions alike would trickle forth from their habitations to welcome the Jew peddler and sample his wares. It was why he’d been drawn to the South in the first place, having heard that the population viewed
the Hebrew with reverence as a person of the Book. Never mind that in the years since his bar mitzvah, rather than holy writ, the book Pinchas had most cherished was a Yiddish translation of the first volume of Das Kapital, a copy of which was secreted in his cart.

  It was his political sympathies that had compelled him to leave his family and the Russian Pale of Settlement one step ahead of the czar’s police. But despite arriving in the New World with his ideals intact, Pinchas had since conceived a healthy tolerance for free enterprise. His pulse was quickened by the babel of the hagglers and shmeikelers along the jostling thoroughfares of the Lower East Side of New York. No stranger to labor himself, having served apprenticeships as a draper and grain broker back in Blod, Pinchas began peddling flour sifters and mousetraps from a stall on Ludlow Street. Restless with how his ignorance of the native language confined him to the ghetto, however, he took to straying into outlying quarters. He wandered among the arrant residents of the Five Points and the complacent burghers of Kleindeutschland above Fourteenth Street, picking up snatches of the American tongue along the way. Here was a mobility he’d been denied in the Old Country, and while he remained disapproving of their acquisitive values, Pinchas was nonetheless infected by the yeasty energies of these Yankee citizens. Addicted now to the habit of movement, he secured a small loan from Yarmolovsky’s Bank on Canal Street; he purchased forty dollars’ worth of goods from a nearby supply house and set off to broaden his orbit, taking a train as far as Cincinnati, whence he proceeded on foot along the sun-baked highways into Kentucky and farther south.