11 Man without a Country
When I wasn’t at the bookshop or waiting around my digs for Rachel, I still hung out at Beatnik Manor, even though I had nothing to sell. While nobody told me to get lost, I sensed a coolness that made it abundantly clear that a Lenny Sklarew who wasn’t holding was less welcome than the Lenny who was. This hurt my feelings, though not enough to keep me away, admiring as I was of the Psychopimps’ counterculture bona fides. The most bona fide of them all was Elder Lincoln, master musician and erstwhile hustler, though these days he made his presence at the manor pretty scarce. Increasingly alienated from the band, he spent his time conspiring with the circle of young turks who’d gathered about him; he was talking a brand of black nationalism and violent overthrow of the system that exceeded the humbler objectives of the other band members. On the evening I took Rachel to the manor, however, Elder was there, seated in the parlor at his upright piano, striking keys and listening to the respondent hum of a steel tuning fork. With the garland of paper blossoms that a groupie had strewn in his puffy ’fro and the fork one tine short of a triton, he looked like some black Neptune perched astride his throne.
I introduced him to Rachel a bit anxiously, wanting to gain merit in her eyes by my familiarity with the player but a little leery of his legendary attraction for women. He raised his drooping lids a fraction by way of acknowledgment then tilted his head back toward the vibrating instrument. Hoping, I suppose, to score points with him, I mentioned in passing that I’d been reading about a blind street musician of the 1910s, a fiddler who used his busking money to pay the bail and court costs of jailed brothers. “And one time when the costs were too high, he contrived to break them out of jail. He wormed his way through the sewer system and popped up from a grate in a holding cell, then took out a dozen or more …”
But Elder was way ahead of me. “That would be the same celebrated fiddler used to read the whiplash stripes of former slaves like they was some kind of Braille? Sucker could hear like with his fingers the whole harmonic progression. Found his own groove in them grooves that later on the Delta bluesmen would put words to, and later still some snake-hip yokel with hair like Lucite paint sped up the tempo — and that’s how the Southland gave birth to rock ’n’ roll? Yeah, I heard tell of him.”
Feeling scooped, I wanted to ask how Asbestos’s music had made its way into not-so-common knowledge, but Elder wasn’t done.
“As for them court costs you speak of, see, the cops used to round up your nigra”—he gave the word a cutting emphasis—“on bogus charges — adultery, say, or eavesdropping. Then the judge would fine them what he knew they couldn’t pay. That’s when the whip boss from the cotton plantation or the turpentine camp’d step up to defray the expense. ’Cept the nigra had to work it off like a pee-on in the field or the camp or the coal mine, where he was treated even worse than slavery times. ’Cause your endless supply of convict labor meant it was cheaper to work him to death than provide even the creature comforts you’d give a common slave. And as y’all can see from the treatment of our boys the sanitation workers, ain’t much changed. However,” he grinned the visual echo of his piano keyboard, “‘everything under heaven is in chaos; the situation is excellent.’ Chairman Mao said that.” Then the grin collapsed. “That’s your history lesson for today, young ofays. But what do y’all puff-the-magic-dragon-headed hippies care about history?”
“That’s not fair …” I began feebly to protest, wavering between resentment and guilt. But Elder was no longer listening, and Rachel tugged at my sleeve that it was time to move along.
Still I was stung by the indictment; it was wrong to think I wasn’t concerned about the current state of things. Didn’t I want the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as much as the next dude? I was aware that the mayor had backed off from a compromise, that strike leaders were being arrested on frivolous charges and the National Guard was staging riot drills. I knew there was a war on. But I was lately subject to a condition I hadn’t previously experienced, which altered my attitude regarding the urgency of the political situation; it was a condition I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed until it took hold of my heart and genitals: I was in love.
Rachel was pure oxygen, and while her association with me had seemed to make her less conventional in manner and dress, mine with her secured me more firmly to the family of man. Menschlikeit is what Avrom might have said I was acquiring, if Avrom were in the business of paying compliments. It was a consequence about which I still had reservations, since my role as Rachel’s companion threatened to jeopardize the image of L. Sklarew as unreconstructed misfit. And too, there were times when I felt that, for all her Gypsy concessions to fashion, Rachel was still slightly embarrassed to be seen with me in public. Unhygienic as was my apartment, she preferred to meet me there, and though I’d seen her place in midtown — an ivy-clad greenstone edifice with a courtyard — I’d yet to be invited to spend the night. These things were finally immaterial in the face of what really mattered: that the girl could short-circuit my instinct for self-sabotage with a finger to my lips; with a well-timed furrowing of her brow she could break me of a lifelong habit of longing.
Whereas before we met I’d been in a stupor of self-medication — as stuporous from books as from drugs if the truth be known — now I lived in the real world with a girl and only occasionally resorted to reading a book. Or rather the book, which we read together, so that with Rachel I struck a fine balance between fiction and fact.
We read slowly, interrupting the narrative at random points to fool around. Sometimes the narrative itself inspired a friskiness that broke the rhythm of our reading; sometimes the friskiness, acquiring gravity, overwhelmed the narrative’s affecting influence. I might be reading aloud a passage in which the barber Ivan Salky, asked to give a trim (close back and sides) to the angel Ben Nez, took umbrage at the angel’s patronizing tone and clipped his wings — when Rachel, whose nakedness beside me I never got used to, would interrupt to offer some item from her research: “You know, Ivan’s son Oscar started Salky’s Paper Bag after the war, which made him a mint. His wife, Sophie, is very active in Hadassah and on the board of the Lightman Nature Preserve.” Then I would thank her for the edification and devour her with kisses. But much as I wanted, I was never able to lose myself wholeheartedly in our lovemaking, since the moment always came — often at the height of passion — when I remembered that I couldn’t take Rachel back with me to Muni’s street of amaranthine time. That’s when I missed the intimacy with characters that were at least temporarily immortal, especially given the surplus of mortality outside the book.
Because like I said, I knew well enough what was going on in the world. I knew about the Tet Offensive and Khe Sanh and Hue, and the major who said, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” I knew, pace Elder, about the protesters murdered by the highway patrol at a bowling alley in South Carolina. I knew that Life magazine declared Jimi Hendrix the most spectacular guitarist on earth, and that 116 strikers were arrested in Memphis for sitting in at a council meeting at city hall. I knew that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who some said had had his day, was coming to town to march. Sometimes I thought the state of the planet was bodeful enough to make you want to trade all of creation for an instant of righteous make-believe.