The Pinch (2 page)

“Acid, mescaline, grass,” I advertised sotto voce, though my voice tended to rise a decibel with every item I pronounced. “Nembies, bennies, crystal meth.” I was a walking apothecary.

“You sure this stuff is pure?” my potential customer might ask, inspecting the tab of orange sunshine or windowpane in my sweaty palm.

“Pure as morning dew,” I’d affirm, “if the dew was cut with a little strychnine.” I couldn’t tell a lie. But to reassure them I might pop a tablet into my mouth and chase it with a swig of beer.

Then I would look askance at Lamar, slouched at a table against the wall surveying his domain. He wore tropical suits even in winter and sported a drooping mustache, goatee, and shoulder-length chestnut hair like General Custer. A gentleman alcoholic, he drank whiskey from a silver hip flask, since the bar was only licensed to serve beer. A less scrupulous supervisor than old Avrom, he didn’t seem to mind my unprofessional salesmanship; for all his pretensions he was a lousy businessman himself. He preferred being thought of more as a philanthropist than a merchant, so long as it was understood that I was his creature and the drugs had their source in him. Descended from old money, slaveholders, and cotton barons, Lamar liked to give the impression that his funds were unlimited. Whatever I rendered unto him when I turned out my pockets at the end of an evening, he considered gravy. Still, I made an effort after my fashion. I was grateful to him for the goods I was allowed to sample free of charge, to say nothing of the excuse the job gave me to approach the ladies.

On the night in question I’d already alienated several. When, for instance, a Pre-Raphaelite-looking young woman failed to guess my name (she hadn’t actually tried), I introduced myself as Rumpleforeskin, to which she replied unamused, “Funny man.” I asked another if she would like to swap her honor for some magic beans, and got a similar response. I knew, of course, that my brand of patter (call it a tic) was more apt to offend than intrigue, but if I disqualified myself first, you couldn’t say I’d been outright rejected by the girl of the moment.

I had chased an assortment of pills with a couple of beers and was feeling pretty frisky when I saw her. She was a touch more put-together than the usual run of hippie talent in the bar. Her nose was of the chiseled variety (think Nefertiti), her umber eyes given to a feline narrowing when she spoke. Her hair was that shade of blue-black called “raven” in gothic novels, its texture fine as record vinyl. It was done up in a schoolmarmish twist, unlike the free-flowing tresses of the liberated types that swayed near the jukebox or conspired at the tables. Also, this one—when she’d removed her coat—was wearing a burgundy dress, a slinky vintage number at odds with the prevailing hip-huggers and miniskirts. A tourist, I concluded dismissively. She was engaged in lively conversation with a compact character in a navy blazer and a loosened necktie. He was smooth-shaven, with a shock of strawberry hair that hung like a breaking wave over an earnest eye.

I had hair like a burnt shrub.

“Acid, mescaline, grass,” I interjected.

“No thanks,” the dude replied, scarcely bothering to look in my direction. To his date he continued asserting, “Mayor Loeb will never cave in to their demands.”

“But don’t you think the mediation of the clergy will have an effect?” she wondered, batting her eyes contrarily. “They’ve got a pressure group that includes ministers and priests, even a rabbi—”

“The strike is illegal, Rachel. The city can’t negotiate with the union until the men go back to work.”

“Blue cheer, purple haze …” I persisted, which finally got the guy’s attention.

“Excuse me, we’re having a private conversation here.”

I nodded in sympathy till he turned away, but still couldn’t bring myself to stop eavesdropping on their exchange.

“Who cares if it’s legal, Dennis?” the girl Rachel was saying with some impatience. “I’m talking about fundamental injustice.”

“And I’m talking about strikers in contempt of the Chancery Court. Their union is outside the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board—”

“There used to be a slave auction just down the street,” I offered. I had this tidbit on Avrom’s authority and thought it somehow demonstrated evidence of my social conscience.

Dennis turned back to me with a poisonous glare. He was very self-possessed for such a runty guy. “And this is relevant to what?” he asked.

“Also a tree that was used for lynchings.” The tree was my own invention.

Rachel tilted her imperial head inquisitively.

“Exactly what part of ‘fuck off’ don’t you understand?” wondered Dennis.

“Sorry,” I said, but something about the girl (her flaring nostrils? the hand on a slightly canted hip?) kept me glued to the spot.

When I didn’t move, Dennis feigned interest. “Just what kind of a nitwit are you?”

“I’m a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

Dennis sniffed. “Oh, an English major,” was his derisive verdict. He turned away again, satisfied that he’d effectively put me in my place.

Continuing his defense of the municipality, he cited various health hazards that rotting garbage might breed: “Typhoid, cholera …,” counting off diseases on his fingers as Rachel made an effort to listen. But I could tell she was growing annoyed with him. As he persisted in ignoring my presence, I took the occasion to revise his original judgment, aware that I was crossing beyond a point of no return.

“Lapsed,” I said.

He never looked at me, but Rachel did, once again staring quizzically.

“Lapsed English major,” I clarified for her sake. Then I thought I saw the ghost of a smile flit across the girl’s soft-hued face. That was all it took to light a pilot in the hollow of my rib cage. The unembellished barroom held a complementary warmth that made me feel as if its occupants were sheltering from a storm, though there was nothing but an icy drizzle outside. A lemony, fin de siécle-style ambience enfolded the place: I saw absinthe drinkers at the tables, the barmaid a dead ringer for the one in the painting by Manet. The chemicals were being gentle with me tonight.

“Reform takes time,” Dennis was explaining, his tone level and instructive, but his voice broke off abruptly when he noticed that Rachel was no longer listening. He followed her gaze toward the object she seemed to be taking the measure of, that being myself. “And until the strike is resolved,” he said, raising his voice to make sure he was heard, “trash like this”—indicating me with his chin—“will remain uncollected.”

“And rats like you will grow fat from the swill.”

The remark cleared my lips without premeditation, and while it admittedly didn’t make much sense, it nevertheless had the ring of a rapier-like rejoinder in my ear. Not always so fast on my feet, I was pleased with myself. In the event, I didn’t anticipate what came next, which was that Dennis, pint-sized as he was, knocked me down. He dispatched me handily with a one-two punch that consisted of an uppercut to the solar plexus and a roundhouse to the skull: I saw asteroids and imagined exes marking the spots that were my eyes, as the floor rose up to smack me as well.

What followed after that didn’t figure in any category of possibility I understood. Because, when the pain had dulled enough to let me draw breath again, I found that my head was cradled against Rachel’s genuflected knees. I heard sharp words exchanged between her and her date: he telling her in effect that she must choose between him and me. “What cornball script are you reading from?” she barked back at him, after which he flung a parting oath and was apparently gone.

Then, before a dozen onlookers who probably assumed I’d gotten what I deserved, she offered an apology. “I’m sorry,” she said, releasing an essence like vanilla roses. The bar had grown silent but for the jukebox playing a rock anthem by Iron Butterfly. “He’s a bit of a hothead sometimes,” she explained.

Despite my acute discomfort, I felt jealous:
I
wanted to be the hothead. At the same time, humiliation notwithstanding, I was enjoying the humid warmth of her thighs through the thin fabric of her dress. The blood that pulsed so percussively in my temples throbbed as well in remoter parts. I opened wide the eye that wasn’t already beginning to swell shut and asked her, God help me, if she’d ever been mounted by a troll. The cushion of her thighs was abruptly removed from under me as she got hastily to her feet, leaving my head to bounce on the sticky hardwood floor. Seeing that I was still prostrate, however, she relented, and with a charity that surpassed understanding leaned over to drag me upright and back to my feet.

With the drama ended, the bar’s clientele had retired to their tables, while Rachel and I remained facing each other awkwardly in the center of the room. When she released my sleeve, I began to teeter perhaps more than my actual dizziness warranted, so that she grabbed me again to keep me from keeling over. Then, having steadied me, she let go and wiped her palm on her dress as a prelude—no doubt—to washing her hands of me entirely. I started to teeter again. Out of the corner of my good eye I caught sight of Lamar, whose shit-eating smirk I interpreted as a kind of benediction.

“Could you maybe help me across the street?” I asked her, having as I saw it nothing to lose.

“What are you, blind?”

“I live across the street.”

“Nobody lives around here.”

I made a face to suggest that it wasn’t exactly living.

With a put-upon sigh, she fastened an arm round my shoulder and escorted me out of the bar and over the road; then having come that far, she assisted me the rest of the way up the steep flight of stairs to my apartment. My brain was pounding like a tom-tom, my ribs bruised if not broken, but the rubber legs were pure theater. At the top of the stairs I pushed open the unlocked door with a knee.

“Welcome to Xanadu,” I said contritely.

What hit you first on entering the apartment was an odor of gamy clothing so keen it stung the retina. When your eyes grew accustomed to their watering, you could make out the few items of furniture I’d salvaged from sidewalks and dustbins in the vicinity. In fact, the garbage strike had provided me with some odd late additions: a cardboard wardrobe, a slashed bucket seat. For all the radiator’s Gatling-gun clamor, the place remained chilly. There was an unshaded bulb hanging from the concave ceiling, a fleabag mattress on the floor near the windows, and the tumulus of books in the middle of the room. They looked, the books, like a pyre awaiting the burning of a heretic.

Rachel dumped me unceremoniously on the mattress. I fully expected her to disregard my unsubtle groaning and depart, but instead she began to pick her way toward the kitchen. The
shush
of her stockinged calves brushing against one other was the rhythmic respiration of an angel. She returned with a dirty sock full of ice cubes that might have resided in that ancient refrigerator since the Pleistocene age. She offered me the sock (whose stiffness she may have detected) like you’d dangle a dead mouse by the tail.

“Hold this over your eye.”

I sat on the mattress with my back against the windowsill, amazed at having lured a mortal woman into my digs. Affected though I was, I felt a little like her guilty captor, and as her captor it was my reluctant obligation, now that her duty was done, to let her go. Still she lingered in her tweed coat buttoned to the throat, observing the mound of books like an obstacle she had to climb over to reach the door. She nudged them with the toe of her boot as if stirring embers.

“Is it just a coincidence that so many of these authors killed themselves?” she wanted to know.

I smiled my idea of a dangerous smile. “I like your accent,” I said. “Where are you from?”

Her expression was the perfect mixture of curiosity and disdain. “Are you trying to make conversation?”

Something in her tone of voice opened a tiny porthole of lucidity in my brain, through which I spied my little life in all its squalor. Then the porthole slammed shut and I smiled again, albeit sheepishly.

“I have to go,” she announced abruptly though she continued to study the pile. Then she stooped to pick up a book,
the
book. “This one looks like somebody’s bound dissertation.”

“Don’t touch it!” I blurted, starting up from the mattress but constrained by my aching ribs.

She dropped it like a live coal.

“It’s a cursed book,” I alleged.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s … I stole it from the library of a satanist.”

With absolute confidence she assured me, “No you didn’t.”

“He was rumored to perform human sacrifice,” I added. She rolled her eyes and I promptly changed the subject. “So, what do you do?”

Rachel peered at me as if trying to decide what species I belonged to, then shook her head in perplexity. “You’re some piece of work,” she concluded matter-of-factly. Then just as flatly she told me, “I grew up in Larchmont, New York. I came to Memphis on a grant from the Mid-South Folklore Center to research the roots of the Southern Jewish community. Dennis is my fiancé, sort of, and I only stayed with you because I was mad at him. So why am I still standing here in this pesh”—for she’d had some wine this evening—“pesthole?”

Ignoring her question, I submitted, “
I’m
a Jew,” though the fact had not occurred to me for some time.

“Oh well,” she said, her voice dripping irony, “that makes all the difference.” There was a moment when her eyes narrowed like Lauren Bacall’s, her mind gnawing a thought. Then she seemed to have reached some kind of decision, because she unbuttoned her overcoat, allowing it to drop onto the floor among the empty medicine vials. She began to walk toward me as far as the edge of the mattress upon which she knelt, raising a small cloud of dust. Unclasping a barrette, she shook out her hair so that it spilled like India ink over her forehead and shoulders. She had almost no waist at all. “So you’d like to defile me?” she teased, alluding, I guessed, to my unfortunate pickup line from the bar.

I tried to swallow but it seemed that my Adam’s apple was caught in my windpipe. Watching me, her large eyes grew even wider.