3 Champion of the Oppressed
“So where did it come from?” I asked Avrom at my next opportunity. Of course there were nothing but opportunities in Avrom’s shop, since hardly anyone came in to browse. Downtown Memphis had entered its slow economic decline. Main Street’s perennial holdouts, the department stores and old movie palaces — baroque facades like layer cakes left in the rain — were giving way to discount clothiers, quick lunch counters, and wig emporiums. Full of vacancies, the office buildings were largely occupied by bail bondsmen and jackleg lawyers with tufty sideburns and plaid pants. Besides, the Bluff City, as it was called, would never be mistaken for a bookish town.
“From outer space it came,” replied old Avrom, his cough like a rooster’s ragged crow. “Where did what come from?”
“The book,” I said, trying my best to maintain an even tone.
“The Book? It was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Who wants to know?”
I sighed. “I thought I was the wiseass here.”
“Get in line, boychik.”
He liked playing these games with me, Avrom, as what else did he have to amuse himself with? Think of him, if you want, as some hermit sage dwelling in his cave of esoteric tomes, but in the end he was just an exasperating old fart. But since he was fossil enough to remember something of the local history — only recently had it occurred to me that the city had a history — I persevered.
“You know what I’m talking about—The Pinch. Where did it come from?”
“Are you talking the place or the book?”
“The goddamn book.”
Reclining in his cracked leather office chair, he raised a crooked forefinger. “But the book and the place are one.” The springs of his chair screeched the way it must sound to tug at a mandrake root.
“Swami Bullshitzky,” I said, “you’re such a pill.”
At that the old geezer actually tucked his thumbs in his suspenders. I suppose he was only giving me back some of my own medicine, which today left a bitter taste. I fished in my pocket for one of Lamar’s antidotes.
Then he deigned to answer my question. “From where you think comes the book? It comes from the author that his name is on the cover.”
“Muni Pinsker. So who’s Muni Pinsker?”
“Was proprietor of a general store on North Main Street. The place is empty now for years, but I believe there’s living above it still a tenant?”
“And that would be …?”
A perfunctory nod in my direction.
“Is he still alive?”
“Who?”
I made a fist and he raised his mottled hands in mock surrender.
“Too many questions,” he complained. “You’re giving me already a headache. Since when do you got questions? You who don’t care from nothing.”
“That’s right,” I replied a touch defiantly. “Like Zappa says, ‘What’s there to live for?’” Turning on my heel. “‘Who needs the Peace Corps?’” Sloping off into the stacks where I pretended to be busy. My whole situation at Avrom’s Asylum was predicated on make-believe, as my practically imaginary salary attested. I was as much Avrom’s charity case as he was mine. Luftmensch was the word he used to describe himself: a man who lived on air; and I supposed his minimal support of his employee was by way of passing on that condition from one generation to the next.
Unable to keep up the charade any longer, however, I stepped back up to his desk and cried, “But I’m in the book!”
“You think that’s strange? Back in my town of Zhldze a piece buttered toast once fell on the unbuttered side. Good on you that you should be someplace, because by me you are no place at all.”
His eyes behind his thick lenses floated like jellyfish in twin aquariums, and I knew the conversation was over. But while it hurt my pride to belabor the subject, I inquired with all the humility I could summon, “What am I doing in it, the book?”
“Sweetheart, we are all people from the Book, which it got a long time ago lost, and now every book is from the lost book only a dim imitatzieh.” Then changing his tune, he snapped, “Have I read it? How should I know?”
Sorry I’d asked, I slammed out the door.
I had anyway an errand to run. Avrom had given me earlier the scrip for some medication meant to relieve one of his revolting afflictions. I was to get it filled at the Rexall drugstore on the corner of Main Street and Beale. I’d always heard Beale Street touted as the infamous Negro tenderloin, but you couldn’t have proved it in broad daylight. By day the closed nightclubs and dives were upstaged by the barbershops, funeral parlors, and dentists’ offices that shared the same blocks. All you could anyway see of the street from the corner at Main was a row of pawnshops run by superannuated Jews — the trios of brass balls hung above their doorways giving rise to bad jokes.
It was toward Beale that I assumed the small army of black men trudging up Main Street past Goldsmith’s Department Store was headed. They were a wintry throng in porkpie hats and doleful shoes, some wearing clerical collars and singing hymns. I knew enough to identify them as an alliance in support of the striking sanitation workers whose protests were all over the news, which I heard through the distortion of Avrom’s antique wireless. The hotly debated topic of the strikers’ demands had earned them a mention in the national press, which was noteworthy; since seldom was anything that happened in farthest Memphis brought to the national awareness.
Having exited the Rexall, I crossed Main in front of the crowd and stationed myself against a Goldsmith’s show window full of new spring fashions to watch the proceedings. It appeared to be an orderly march, patroled on the street side by black-and-white squad cars crawling alongside the procession to keep them in line. But the cars, with their revolving red lights slashing the mole-gray fabric of the afternoon, kept edging into the crowd, forcing the marchers to bunch up against the curb and spill onto the sidewalk. There was grumbling in the ranks at the provocation, and at one point a parading lady — one of only a pair in that company — perhaps thinking that her gender might afford her some respect, indignantly reproached the police. Immediately thereafter, as the squad car inched forward, she screamed, “He runned over my foot!” and crumpled to the pavement. Several men broke ranks to assist her, one of them, a boy really, stooping to tug down the woman’s skirt which was rucked up to her girdle. The veil of her pillbox hat still shadowed her face. Angry others, youthful members of the demonstration, attacked the vehicle that had injured her and began to rock it back and forth. Stone-faced cops poured out, more of them in fact than I’d have thought the car could contain, wielding truncheons and aerosol cans. Sirens began to blare.
Abandoning any pretense of discipline, the police erupted in a paroxysm of furious aggression, clubbing and Macing everyone they could reach. Bloodied men fell to the pavement and were beaten where they lay, some dragged semiconscious into the back of a waiting Black Maria. There were shouts of “Don’t rub your eyes!” though big men bawled, cursing as they staggered in circles. A woolly-bearded old minister was on his knees with his hat in his hands as if offering up his skull to be cracked. People were trying desperately to take shelter inside the department store only to find that the doors had been locked. Riveted by the sight, I stood with my back to the plate-glass window, which suddenly shattered from the combined weight of the marchers shoved up against it. A niagara of shards cascaded about me, a mannequin in a garden-party dress toppled onto the sidewalk, and a cop began heading my way. His partly unbuttoned tunic revealed his undershirt and a bit of hirsute belly beneath, his mirror glasses reflecting myself as he must have perceived me: nigger lover, agitator, pervert, and freak. That’s when, terror-struck to near paralysis, I nevertheless managed to goad my feet into motion. I beat it with the other demonstrators who had scattered across Main Street and were retreating east on Beale. Sprinting among them, I had a healthy portion of their shock and nausea, my eyes and lungs smarting from the clouds of gas drifting our way. But I also experienced a heart-stirring exhilaration, a sense of pride as if I’d been an active participant in the march: Lenny Sklarew, champion of the oppressed. Then, chagrined at the thought, I remembered that the whole affair was none of my concern. Having fled as far as the postage-stamp park with its verdigris-stained statue of W. C. Handy, I peeled off down an alley and made my way back toward the opposite end of Main.