I set down the stack of books, raising dust from the floor I’d neglected to sweep. “Avrom,” I was suddenly moved to confess, “I don’t hardly seem to live here anymore. It’s like I learned another language and now I’m forgetting my mother tongue.”
“‘Thou art greatly despised,’” he replied. “Obadiah chapter one, verse two: ‘for Rome possesses neither script nor tongue.’” “Come again?” I asked, when he fairly barked at me, “Here you didn’t never live.” He endeavored to raise himself upright amid the cushions that buttressed his rump. “Poor pisher”—saliva sprayed from his lips—“the lostest of the lost generation.”
“That one was before my time,” I countered, sorry to have made myself vulnerable to the old man. But he wasn’t finished.
“What do you want I should say to you? I should give to you wisdom like I’m some lamed vovnik? I’m the prophet Elijah in disguise? Okay: for virility, mix with ground kohl a seven-hued scorpion; against a succubus say, ‘Bar tit, bar tamei, bar tina, kashmaggaz …’” Then, with gnashing of dentures, “Tahkeh, from my own life I didn’t learn nothing!”
I’d never known him to get so worked up. “Why are you being such a”—what was the Yiddish for “bastard”?—“momzer?”
“Because,” he said, still exercised, squeezing his beard like a sponge; a molasses-like tear formed at its tip and plopped onto his desk, “because, Reb Pinocchio, you got in your life no strings attached, you can go where you want, even in Paradise. Me, I got only memories that by them I’m pinned in this farshtunkener chair.”
His gouged face showed a ferocity that dared me to contradict him, and for a moment we were deadlocked in our feelings of mutual inadequacy. Then, defeated by his stare, I hung my head and made a mumbled effort to change the subject; I had to clear my throat to hear myself speak. “Are there other copies of it, The Pinch?” It was a question I’d been meaning to put to him for a while. There was after all no copyright, no Library of Congress number; I knew nothing of its provenance. Maybe a fellowship of readers were plodding even now through Muni’s tangled narrative, encountering one another in and out of time.
Avrom sighed as if heaving a demon from his pigeon breast and reverted to his usual bemusement. It was, he attested, the one and only volume. “The meshuggener Tyrone that he gave me for safekeeping the manuscript. Then I gave with his cockeyed pictures to Shendeldecker the printer when they locked him up.”
“So you were responsible for its printing?”
He didn’t say no.
“But you said you never read it?”
“I opened,” Avrom shrugged, his eyebrows like caterpillars rampant. “It’s the same story that I heard it already from the horse’s mouth, or anyway the nephew of the horse. I heard in the lager and wondered can you get to North Main Street from here. When I arrived, is mostly gone with the wind, the street. It’s anyhow better I should reside here in this charming dacha.”
He looked out through the glass door where a garbage striker with a sandwich board was passing.
“Avrom,” I asked, ignoring his mood — as what could I do about it anyway? — “what became of Muni Pinsker?”
He turned back to me and belched softly, made a face at the ill wind he’d expelled. “Happened what always happens: he died there like everybody else. Mr. Hanover that he died there. Mr. Elster died there. Mr. and Mrs. Sebranig died over there. Everybody stayed and they died there. Didn’t nobody just run away.”
That night I’m involved in a business transaction at the back of the bar when the heat burst through the front door. They were wearing duty jackets and graven expressions, standard issue guts lapping over belts that drooped in turn from sidearms, radios, handcuffs, and pepper spray. For a few moments they seemed implausible, so out of place was their martial presence amid that ethereal crowd. Then the cold facts kicked in and I recalled that Lamar, so generous with his illicit gifts, had never bothered to secure a proper beer license for the 348. Moreover, the barroom was dense with muggle smoke and cellophane packets of legend drugs, a quantity of which could be found on my person. I remembered that I was a felon, a concept I’d never quite gotten my head around. Outlaw, yes, but felon?
I expected the cops to begin arresting every acid eater and underage drinker in sight. But instead, parting the patrons like tall grass, they made straight for my landlord, spruce in his plantation attire, his insouciant posture advertising his proprietorship. They yanked him out of his chair and read him his rights. He received the handcuffs as if he were being attended by valets, while an unripe nymph draped his coat over his shoulders like an opera cape. As the cops frog-marched him toward the door, I turned tail and made for the rear of the premises. If Lamar was busted, wouldn’t his associate be next in line? With the draft hanging over my head and now the threat of police, it occurred to me I was a desperate character. I ducked into the musty storeroom at the back of the bar, which contained a pyramid of aluminum kegs and an oxidized toilet from a bygone era. Scrambling up the kegs — some of which rolled from under me to trip up imagined pursuers — I reached for the narrow casement window, yanked the rusty latch, and threw open the sash as far as it would go; then I slithered through the casement, tumbling headfirst into a paved backyard.
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.”