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.