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.