That night I wanted to get trashed. I wanted to find a like mind to talk treason with, and thought again of the girl who’d shared my bed the week before. Together we would decry the death of the soul, then jump holding hands from the Harahan Bridge. Then I remembered I was a loner; I burned with a solitary gem-like flame. I read the tales of brain-fevered authors who were similarly lit, though their works sometimes distracted me from my own combustion. In any event, instead of going to the 348 to peddle the goods I hadn’t already smoked or swallowed, I opened the book.
I’d been reading it since my encounter with the lady folklorist, absorbing information I might regale her with if I ever saw her again. I’d begun at the beginning, reading leisurely, lingering over the lush but uncooked illustrations. I resisted the temptation to skip ahead, reluctant to spoil an ending in which I myself might play an unwonted part. For that reason, whenever I opened the book I felt myself caught in a tug-of-war between curiosity and fear, and I confess that fear often seemed to win the day.
Avrom was wrong about The Pinch; it was an authentic history, at least in its grim prologue, which recounted the arrival of the first Jew at the site of what would become the city of Memphis. This was in the year 1541 and his name was Rodrigo (né Ruben) da Luna, a Portuguese secret Jew, or Marrano as they were called. Having eluded the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition, he’d hitched his fate to that of the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. De Soto had traveled via a circuitous route up from Florida with a way-weary brigade of lancers and musketeers. In their train were the ever-thinning ranks of carpenters, clergy, camp followers, and tailors (to which latter group Rodrigo belonged). These, if they hadn’t already perished from the flux or the poisoned arrows of native tribes, were disillusioned by an expedition more inclined to pillage than colonize. For de Soto was determined to push on in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, as described in the depraved hallucinations of the explorer Cabeza de Vaca. The author Pinsker chronicled the moment when the rapacious conquistador, sitting astride his Barbary steed atop the Chickasaw Bluffs, looks across the broad expanse of the river that separates him from the golden cities; while from the ranks Rodrigo da Luna is thinking you could go farther and fare worse. He would have liked to try and trade with the natives — maybe swap a starveling mule for fresh fish and persimmon bread — rather than slaughter them as his captain preferred. He thought that maps made a more enduring means of marking a trail than de Soto’s method of paving it with corpses. And wasn’t the real estate atop these rust-red bluffs eminently well situated for civilized habitation? After all, what was to keep the indigenous folk, once they pointed their weapons in another direction, from becoming the tailor’s devoted clients? (“Allow me to custom-fit you for a nice suede breechclout.”) But already the soldiers and carpenters were constructing the barges that would ferry them across the river, and rather than be left behind, Rodrigo da Luna would travel with them into an even more hostile landscape and obscurer death.
Then give or take a hiatus of three and one-third centuries and the next Jew makes his frontier debut. This one is the educated peddler Pinchas Pinsker, who arrives in Memphis from Eastern Europe in 1878, just as the town is in the throes of an epidemic that has transformed it from a vital river port to a pesthouse.
Nearly a century and a few nights later I’m in the 348 listening to live music, when in walks Rachel sans fiancé. It frightened me how glad I was to see her. Over the week since our encounter I’d given up expecting her to return; I’d even stayed away from the bar so that I wouldn’t have to experience the disappointment, at the risk of missing her while I was truant. She was wearing her long herringbone coat and a knit tam-o’-shanter that gave her an Anne of Green Gables sort of look. Then she removed the cap and her dark hair, unpinned tonight, spilled out as from an opened sluice. She was with a couple of girlfriends who took a table not far from Lamar’s, where he sat like a grandee in his brocade vest. A weeping-willow-looking girl leaned against him, her languid arm draped over his shoulder. If she was looking for me, Rachel gave no indication of it. She and her friends — chunky and petite — were convivial, their heads nearly touching in an effort to talk over the music. From my stool at the end of the bar I waved a hand to get her attention, but when she eventually caught sight of me, she merely squinched up the corners of her mouth in the parody of a smile. Like a curtsy of the lips in which her eyes did not participate at all. Crushed, I turned back toward the band.
They were the house band, Velveeta and the Psychopimps as they called themselves, a jokey name signifying nothing: there was no Velveeta, no dictionary definition of psychopimp. But comic sobriquet aside, they played infectious music, their own subversive blend of raunchy, gut-bucket blues and straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll. Much of their repertoire was inspired by classic Delta bluesmen, neglected old duffers whom the band would seek out and recall from extreme destitution. Students of musical history as well as accomplished musicians, the band members venerated these old men, some of whom were in advanced stages of illness and disability. They bought them whiskey and dispatched willing groupies to wash their bunions (and sometimes drink the water like broth). They were a diverse bunch, the Psychopimps, versatile, streetwise, and racially mixed, a fact that consolidated their singularity among Southern players. A chief supplier of their recreational stimulants via Lamar, I was a tolerated hanger-on of the band, something in the nature (I liked to think) of a mascot.
You better tell McNamara, tell Curtis LeMay, J. Edgar Hoover, and LBJ, they sang, we gonna pitch that wang dang doodle all night long …
With their combination of electric and traditional instruments, they made a joyful ruckus that turned your intestines to live wires: Elder Lincoln alternating effortlessly between keyboard and kit fiddle, Jimmy Pryor scratching his washboard like a breastplate with fleas, Cholly Jolly vexing the strings of his guitar with a bottleneck to set your teeth on edge. A cause célèbre among regional blues buffs, the band nevertheless disdained record deals, as if success would dilute their authenticity and betray their mentors. They sang about kingsnakes, hellhounds, dead presidents, and crosscut saws, items that mingled with the ingredients of the mild chemical cocktail in my brain to giddy effect.