The Pinch (53 page)

1961—Eichmann trial.

1962—Cuban Missile Crisis.

1963—Martin Luther King gives “I Have a Dream” speech; John F. Kennedy assassinated.

1964—Beatles come to America.

1965—Malcolm X shot; American troops sent to Vietnam.

1967—Six-Day War in Israel.

1968—Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated; massacre at My Lai.

1969—Despite designation as National Historic Landmark, Beale Street area demolished and buildings (with exception of Schwab’s Emporium) condemned.

1970s—Bisected by Interstate 40 as part of construction for Hernando DeSoto Bridge, Pinch district becomes target for slum clearance.

It didn’t happen overnight, but against all reasonable expectations Muni’s book struck a chord with the reading public. There was, apparently, still a reading public. The reviews, such as they were, were mixed: the favorable, perhaps influenced by the psychedelic ethos of the day, praised the kaleidoscopic nature of the narrative. Some said it evoked a kind of folk consciousness and even delighted in the book’s refusal to conform to a specific genre. Soberer judgments—and these were in the majority—suggested that
The Pinch
was the product of a puerile sensibility and dismissed it out of hand. There were those, too, who complained that the surplus of “tribal” content was off-putting and exclusive. But somehow a gradual groundswell of word-of-mouth sentiment began to create a stir in various quarters, and the book—like an awkward dance step that turns out to be liberating—started to catch on. By the time Lenny received the publisher’s biannual statement,
The Pinch
had made up its advance and begun to generate royalties. By the end of the fiscal year the book had attained a minor cult status, a paperback edition was in the works, and Leonard Sklarew was on his way to becoming solvent.

A few readers, when they discovered that both the Book Asylum and its young proprietor were extant, sought them out. At first Lenny had welcomed the pilgrims; the book’s notoriety (and the capital it generated) had helped to assuage his lingering guilt, and he was willing now to bask a bit in its reflected glory. But for their part the visitors were unable to hide their disappointment on meeting the book dealer in person: an unprepossessing, thickly bespectacled guy growing a paunch and bookish in the extreme, with no hint of the restless miscreant from the text. Ultimately Lenny would have them to know that the letdown was mutual.

Another consequence of the book’s growing popularity was a renewed interest in the geographic Pinch (which few Memphians had ever even heard of) as a historical site. The curious began to visit it, looking for traces of the old ghetto community from Muni’s tales. Most, finding mainly ruins, passed on, but a handful of young artists, imbued with nostalgia for a place they’d known only in print, took advantage of the cheap real estate; they purchased loft space to convert into studios in an old coffee factory that had so far been spared the wrecking ball. Soon after, a coterie of utopian-minded friends, for whom
The Pinch
had become a kind of holy book, pooled their resources to make a down payment on one of the few remaining tenements on North Main. They lived there as a collective, renovating the apartments upstairs and opening a crafts shop on the ground floor. In the shop, along with feather earrings, macraméé bracelets, and scented candles, they sold—in a nod toward an “oriental” theme—homemade hamantashen and chocolate Hanukkah gelt. Thanks to a growing host of
Pinch
-inspired tourists, the shop prospered, its success spurring another young entrepreneur to open a tavern in a face-lifted building across the way. In deference to the spirit of place he served draft beer from a samovar.

This vest-pocket commercial revival lured more foot traffic into the area, people milling about the sidewalks as if waiting impatiently for the further transformation of the street. Their presence attracted the notice of a group of progressive local investors, who became interested in redeveloping the district on an enterprising scale. They formed a consortium and submitted an ambitious plan to the city for construction of a number of edifices along both sides of North Main. Included in the plan was a self-imposed provision that the design of the new buildings—which would house an assortment of businesses and apartments—conform to the architecture of the original structures, thus preserving the flavor of the turn-of-the-century neighborhood. Newspapers and city fathers applauded the North Main Street Renaissance, as the development was called, and businesses jockeyed for a spot in what they now perceived as a prime location. When the ribbon was cut at the quarter’s inauguration, the public, like runners at the start of a race, bolted into a street lined with retail attractions. Alongside the boutiques and period cafés (one called unavoidably Catfish Bayou) there were traditional artisans’ shops, where visitors could observe cobblers, cigar rollers, pretzel bakers, and bespoke tailors at work on antique sewing machines. There was even a quality delicatessen with the gilt inscription
in the window, though there was of course no kosher fare on the menu.

Residents of the luxury apartments above the shops enjoyed a relaxed urban lifestyle in an appealing if somewhat artificial environment, a secure community of like-minded affluent types; this at a time when the rest of the city, as viewed from the rarefied vantage of the Pinch, still wallowed in a swamp of ignorance and rising crime. It’s true that the street’s advance-guard pioneers—the loft dwellers and tchotchke-mongers—were eventually priced out of the gentrified neighborhood; but there remained enough of a bohemian-inflected atmosphere to ensure North Main’s continuance as a fashionable destination for citizens and tourists alike. Nor did the new Pinch forget its debt to the Old World milieu that had fostered its revitalization in the first place. The vestibules of several condominiums were decorated with murals displaying large-scale reproductions of the paintings of Tyrone Pin. (These included mildly sentimentalized versions of the inverted oak, lit like a menorah and hung with fiends and earlocked children in beanies riding rafts like giant afikomens.) The paintings themselves, enhanced by the legend of the mad artist, now fetched princely sums. The proceeds from their sales were placed in a trust established by Leonard Sklarew through the connivance of his attorney, Philly Sacharin. As executive officer of the Tyrone Pin Trust (“Pin money,” its recipients called it), Mr. Sklarew, flush from the thirteenth printing of
The Pinch
, could allocate the funds as he saw fit. Needless to say, he made certain that the artist, himself unaware of his success and protected from curiosity seekers by the staff at his facility, would be well looked after until his death. Then there were donations to pet charities and causes, plus an endowment (supplemented by a memorial concert) that allowed the B’nai B’rith Home for the Aged to break ground for a lavish new Elder Lincoln Wing.

Perhaps the crowning element of the North Main Street Renaissance was the construction of a streetcar line, which stretched from the Pinch along Main Street proper as far as the refurbished Central Station on South Main. The new trolley had an old-fashioned character, featuring heritage-style wooden cars with reversible mahogany seats and brass handles. Along its route once-vacant commercial premises began to reopen, their tenants including famous-name chain stores, gourmet markets, chic bistros, and wine bars. The mercantile fervor that had infected North Main and its contiguous district also reawakened the dust of Beale Street, which began again, Lazarus-like, to show signs of life. In time its vintage restoration became the hub of the city’s musical nightlife, and downtown Memphis, risen from its longtime repose, flourished like never before.

I woke up in the hospital under a morass of memories I thought had been lost forever. Wishful thinking, I guess. They must have been dislodged from whatever wrinkle in the brain they were stuck in when I was hit on the head, then—after I was launched full-throttle into a solid brick wall—released altogether. Memories of wanting and misspent time, they weighed on me; disappointments crushed my ribs, pinched my left leg, stung me like hornets in every joint, to say nothing of the pain in my aching head. They left me defenseless to the clinical invasions of the hospital staff, defenseless as well when, from behind the privacy curtain surrounding my bed, the female person I recalled as my sometime girlfriend, Rachel Ostrofsky, stepped forth.

She was wearing her black boots and blue raincoat, a Spanish-fan barrette like an unfolding wing pinning back one side of her shimmery hair. Her expression was full of a solicitude I expected to dissolve along with her physicality. But morphine pump notwithstanding, it seemed she was no hallucination. Her glow was so palpable I wanted never to traffic in hallucination again.

“You’re a memory come alive,” I heard myself mutter.

“Kafka?” came a voice from in back of Rachel. “The quote is from Kafka, am I right?”

The voice belonged, after he’d edged to her side—natty in his navy blazer and the woodpecker’s crest of his strawberry hair—to the diminutive party who’d decked me an age ago in the 348. I remembered (what didn’t I remember?) that he was a law student and could be an even smarter aleck than me. I remembered also that Rachel had once referred to him as her fiancé, though who even used that word anymore?

“We thought we’d find you hounded by reporters,” she said, with the breezy air of somebody trying to put a good face on a strained situation. Nor did her “we” escape my attention.

They stood over my bed, Rachel and her companion (Dennis, wasn’t it?), observing me like they might have a child they thought cute despite (or because of) its deformity. In one hand Rachel held a bouquet of purple flowers, in the other a newspaper. The paper was folded to a page displaying a grainy black-and-white photo, which she waved under my nose like smelling salts. “I started phoning hospitals the minute I saw it,” she said, pooching a lip in token of how much the image had disturbed her. I extended a hand to still her wrist and felt her blench at my touch. It was an alternative paper, a hippie rag, and the photograph was of poor quality and a bit out of focus. But you could make out clearly enough, amid the chaos of the panicked crowd and the club-swinging cops, a frizzy-haired white guy collapsed in the gutter near a fallen Negro with a bloody head. It took me a studious second to recognize the victims of what the paper called “needless brutality.”

I shut my eyes until the awful pressure in my chest was a little relieved. When I opened them Rachel was calling to a passing nurse to please bring her a vase for the flowers. The sharp-featured nurse fairly snarled as if to imply that her job description did not include responding to imperious requests.

There followed an awkward silence during which I wondered what Rachel had told Dennis about me. Whatever it was, his smug expression suggested he’d made his peace with it; I could only guess at the terms of the treaty. The nurse returned to hand Rachel, uncordially, a small water-filled Mason jar. Rachel placed the flowers in the jar, which was too shallow for their long stems and tipped over as soon as she set it on the nightstand.

“You shouldn’t have,” I said.

When she went to fetch a towel, Dennis scooted closer to the bed to ask, “Are you in pain?” the way a torturer inquires of his victim on the rack. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of answering in the affirmative, but I suppose he could tell from my squinched brow that I was hurting, because he grinned; though he resumed his masquerade of compassion on Rachel’s return. Squatting beside the bed to wipe up the spill, she made small talk, talk so trivial, in fact, that it was hardly worth replying to: she hoped I’d recover soon from my injuries, praised me for taking part in the march …

“I was only sightseeing,” I assured her, suspecting that she continued to wipe the floor in order to avoid having to get to her feet and face me. “I had no business there.”

Finally standing again, Rachel countered, “I disagree,” though she might have mustered a little more conviction. She added for good measure that my participation in the march was plainly heroic. “Quixotic,” inserted Dennis, his tone suggesting that the cause was lost all along: case closed.

It was then I felt the tears beginning to well up from some sulfurous source deep in my bowels. They’d always been my special brand of incontinence, the tears, and I bit my lip to try and hold them back, but the words that escaped my mouth gave me away.

“Rachel, what about us?”

She looked downright horror-struck before the pity set in. But rather than succumb to it, she straightened her spine and chose that moment to drop her bombshell. Ignoring the question that still hung in the astringent air, she stated with a forced informality, “Dennis and I have set a date.” It was to be a midsummer wedding, a small interfaith affair with a rabbi and a priest, for which they’d already chosen an ideal location on the river bluff. “We’d be pleased if you came,” she said disingenuously, while next to her Dennis bared his barracuda grin.