The Pinch (51 page)

He sat at a desk in the midst of his cluttered shop, where his moodiness tended to discourage the occasional browser, and commenced a task even more thankless than his chosen trade. He began to translate the crossbred language of Muni’s exhumed manuscript—worm-eaten despite the gunny sack it was buried in—into a negotiable English, his own becoming less rusty in the process. It took him five years. Then willing a functional dexterity into his shaky hand, he made a fair copy of the yet untitled book, which he called (what else?)
The Pinch.
He gave it the albeit tongue-in-cheek subtitle
A History
and oversaw its printing at his own expense at a local press. It was also Avrom’s idea, frankly an afterthought, to include as illustrations reproductions of the pictures the unhinged GI had painted with a holy vengeance on his return from overseas.

The general belief was that the bookseller had been scrupulously faithful in his redaction of
The Pinch
, but there were those who later suggested he took liberties with the original text. They argued that, frustrated with an inability to wring from Muni’s manuscript his fascination on first hearing its contents in the lager, he invented bits for his own amusement. He tampered and perhaps even perversely inserted himself and his assistant as characters. Avrom would of course have vehemently denied the allegation: it was shtuterai, patently ridiculous. The passages foretelling his own arrival in Memphis—along with so many other prophecies—had after all come as no surprise to him, who had lost the capacity to be surprised: “For me,” he might have said, “the future came already and went.” And as for the intrusion into those pages of the feckless kid who came to work in his shop: that one, he would have had you to know, existed in the book’s printed edition long before he’d turned up in the flesh at the Book Asylum. Regarding that issue the bookseller had responded with typical insouciance even to the inquiries of the employee himself: “It’s the gilgul, stupid.”

“The gilgul?”

Then Avrom had wearily explained the mystical process of the transmigration of souls, a concept he naturally had no truck with; on the other hand, he allowed for the necessity of some spiritual recycling in this day and age, when the availability of Yiddishe souls was severely depleted.

The employee, one Lenny Sklarew, had sighed in bewilderment, then gone back to alphabetizing the shelves.

When he’d delivered
The Pinch
to Shendeldecker the printer, who ran off the job on his greasy old six-cylinder rotary press, Avrom was glad to wash his hands of the thing. The labor of preparing the book for print had left him exhausted—a klippah, a husk. Why, he wondered, had he taken on the project in the first place? Why, for that matter, had he come to this Bluff City, America? If he experienced any gratification in having rendered Muni’s folly accessible to the common reader, he never located it in any part of his being. He made no effort to publicize the undertaking for all its pains, or even to acknowledge its existence, and had a customer decided on some stray impulse to buy the thing, he would have sold it for a song. When the volume was in fact discovered in a random stack by his employee, he disclaimed any personal connection to it, the completion of his self-assigned task having absolved Avrom of his commitment to
The Pinch
for good and all. Though his employee, confounded by his own appearance in its pages, thought he detected otherwise.

Lenny believed that his boss took a measure of pride in his possession of the book, just as he did in his ownership of the shop and all it contained. It was a proprietariness that extended as well to his sometime assistant, over whose fly-by-night progress Avrom maintained a paternal (if cranky) interest. An interest that went beyond his curiosity, no doubt already satisfied, concerning the character of the kid in the book—the one who swallowed the pills that made his brain swell like a hypertrophied heart and fell out of moving vehicles.

He came around on a ward in St. Joseph’s Hospital at about the time that Avrom, his organs failing, throat percolating blood on another ward in the same facility, passed out of this world. Lenny himself had sustained an impressive array of injuries—cracked ribs and skull, shattered knee, internal bleeding, et cetera—that kept him confined in bed tethered to tubes, ropes, and pulleys and moored to a catheter for better than a week. The injuries would have lingering aftereffects that served to get him declared 4-F by the local draft board. It was a deferral that the late Elder Lincoln would have advised him was undeserved: an arbitrary decision on the part of a committee that had an ample pool of black youth to draw from for its steady supply of cannon fodder. But Elder was no longer around to stoke Lenny’s guilt. Nor, as it turned out, was Avrom, whom Lenny—garbed in an open-backed hospital gown and escorted by a portable pole with its dangling saline drip, surrounded by an aluminum walker—had gone looking for as soon as he was able. But on the wing where he’d previously visited him, the former employee was informed that his choleric old boss was already departed, carted away and buried in an East Memphis memorial park at taxpayers’ expense. Lenny would plan, then postpone, pilgrimages to his gravesite ever after.

The crisis of identity that had predated Lenny’s day in the streets was naturally compounded by physical trauma and the liberal doses of morphine and painkillers that were afterward prescribed. Having forgotten his prior loss of memory, you could say that the patient suffered from a double amnesia, not that the condition deeply concerned him in his fuddled state. At some point he was visited by a small delegation from the band known as the Psychopimps, who assured him he was not to blame for Elder’s death in a tone that suggested he might well have been. But if their tidings penetrated the convalescent’s cloudy mind at all, they registered only as a muffled tympanum in the brain. Likewise the news of Dr. King’s return to Memphis, his valedictory speech punctuated by thunder and lightning after which he was said to be giddy as a child, and his subsequent assassination—though the rumbling from that event would eventually reverberate in the patient’s gut until his lunch backed up and spewed into the bedpan. Later he became aware that there was rioting all over the map, and thought it odd that his city, source of the wound that infected the rest of the nation, should remain so eerily quiet. It was during that lull that Lenny, leaning on a metal cane, with raccoon eyes and zipper-like stitches over his brow, was delivered an exorbitant bill and discharged from the hospital. He returned to the Book Asylum on a Main Street nearly deserted but for the patrolling reserves in combat gear.

He could have gone anywhere, become anyone, a notion that perhaps played a part in persuading him to take refuge in the bookstore. Whatever the case, reentering the shop was as close to a homecoming as any Lenny was likely to know. And if there remained some doubt as to Avrom’s final wishes with respect to his store, that doubt was put to rest by a phone call on the very afternoon of Lenny’s return. Still muzzy, he wondered before answering if the caller might be Rachel Ostrofsky, which was the first he’d thought of the girl since his hospital release.

“Is this Leonard
Sklarew
?”

The emphasis on the final syllable came across as fleering, but Lenny nevertheless confessed that he was he. The unfamiliar voice introduced itself as Philly Sacharin, a nephew of the North Main Street alumnus Sol Sacharin of Sacharin’s Buffalo Fish, and also coincidentally a junior partner in the law firm headed by Bernie Rappaport. He seemed confident that the information would carry some weight with his addressee. Unlike the ordinarily harried Bernie, Philly gave the impression of a cooler customer; he informed Lenny with glib assurance that the book-dealer had been in touch with him before his final illness, and that his “gift”—the passing along in writing of a shop leased these several decades from Midsouth Select Properties Incorporated—amounted, should he accept it, to Lenny’s very own mausoleum.

“You want to keep up the old man’s fixed-term?” piped the lawyer a little gleefully over the wire. “We’ll get your transfer certified with all due haste. All you gotta do is first sell your soul to Midsouth Select to the tune of a zillion shekels in improvements. They want the worn-out heat pump and swamp cooler—whatever that is—replaced, plus an upgrade of the drywall and insulation, and while you’re at it why not install a new septic system, which they stipulate. Then there’s your sidewalk maintenance …”

He continued rattling off a bewildering variety of technical terms—“prescriptive covenant,” “peppercorn rent, which you can forget about it”—further demonstrating his command of contract law.

“Ever hear of Jewish lightning? That’s when you torch a place for the insurance.”

Lenny thanked him kindly, satisfied that, insofar as it had been Avrom’s to give, the shop was his. Astonishingly, he found that he welcomed the news with all its attendant headaches—which, now that the big headache of his concussion had begun to subside, failed to intimidate him. The Book Asylum was a bulwark against the ill winds that wafted over the planet, a shrine to Muni Pinsker’s chronicle, which lay before him on the desk where he’d left it and was Avrom’s real legacy. It was altogether fitting that an individual waking up from injury and shock might seek comfort in such a place; emerging from the wreckage of his heart and bones, he might, from within the confines of his very own business, begin to reconstruct himself. He could start by shifting into an underutilized pragmatic gear and hatching a plan; maybe devise a strategy that would allow him to be both alone and not alone, to invite a portion of the public into
The Pinch
and perhaps acquire some revenue along the way.

Forget the boho outlaw, a role that seemed to have run its course; Lenny remembered that he was essentially a bookworm, and as such had intuitions based on a lifetime of reading. Without the slightest idea of how to implement his plan, however, he contacted Philly Sacharin, hoping to prevail upon their mutual allegiance to North Main Street for some advice. The lawyer offered no encouragement but, admitting he had only scant knowledge of the publishing industry (“Not my bailiwick”), vouchsafed a suggestion: his wife was a shikse socialite whose circle of acquaintances included a local author of some renown. He agreed as a one-off favor to put Lenny in touch with her. The woman was delighted at a chance to demonstrate her noblesse oblige, and through her flighty offices secured the bookseller an audience with the author at his home out on the Parkway.

Unwilling to let the book out of his sight, Lenny photocopied the entire volume with the last bit of cash from Avrom’s till; it was this unbound bundle of pages he hoped to press upon the author in his book-lined study. Something of a celebrity, the author appeared to his visitor as the very model of a modern man of letters: patch sleeves, briar pipe, august jaw affecting the spade beard of one of the colonels from his acclaimed multi-volume history of the Civil War. Clearly impatient despite the slow decanting of his treacly speech, he asked Lenny, “What kind of thing is this?” The question may have referred as much to the unkempt bearer of the bundle as to the pages themselves.

Lenny wondered if he was expected to tremble as before the great and terrible Oz. Finally invited to sit down (he’d been teetering on his cane), the bookseller mumbled something about North Main Street when the author cut him short, assuring him: “You don’t have to tell me about the Pinch.” Lenny suspected that his was the Pinch of Davy Crockett and Big Jim Canaan, a wild and ungoverned place still barren of Jews, but did not say so. The interview was hardly a success, though at its abridged conclusion the put-upon author received the book as if in tribute from the tense young man. He riffled its contents, arched a brow over the illustrations (black and white in their Xeroxed version), then promised to take a look and deliver a judgment even as he waved his visitor away.

Lenny could guess what the author anticipated—some vain amateurish history with at best a little anthropological interest. And when weeks passed with no news from that quarter, he began to think the busy man would not bother to keep his word at all. Meanwhile the Cotton Carnival proceeded in the shadow of the fixed cloud that hung over the city, and the demolition of Beale Street progressed in the name of urban renewal. A local Reform rabbi blasted the congregation that had turned its back on him for his defense of the garbage strikers, then retired soon after in despair. There were more riots, bloodshed; the segregationist George Wallace declared himself a candidate for president and named as his running mate General Curtis LeMay, who said, “I don’t believe the world’ll end if we splode a nuculer bomb.” Midsouth Select Properties Inc. dunned Lenny for rent and threatened him with eviction, and the hospital demanded prompt remittance of their bill. Lenny managed to forestall immediate action on the part of the latter by submitting partial payments with cash acquired from the sale of an occasional book. (There was of course no question of peddling drugs anymore, since the onetime vendor knew better than to apply to sources still smarting from having been burned by Lamar Fontaine.) Then, long after he’d abandoned the hope of hearing from him again, the author sent Lenny a letter.