598
PARTISAN REVIEW
something else occurred of interest, also down below.
I was in the midst of emptying yet another carton of long-dead books
when Bernie appeared, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and said he
wanted to show me something "special" in Americana. Sure, I said, wiping
my hands of the endless dust and happy for the invitation to his private inner
sanctum, my first.
"You're about to see the
real
powers ofAmericana," he advised, as we
made our way through the swinging saloon doors. Immediately he put his
finger to his lips, silencing me, and then , pointed me to a ladder leaning up
against a high shelf. What the hell was he talking about?
At his prompting, I climbed up four or five rungs, and there, on the
shelf marked Southwest, I found a space cleared between the books. A faint
buzzing sound arose, alongside
Arizona:
Land
ofPlenty.
Looking closer, I saw
a round peephole facing me, maybe the size of a large knothole in the wood;
at his gesturing, I leaned closer and peered through. At first my eyes couldn't
fathom what was going on, except for a flickering darkness; but presently I
realized that I was in a home-movie of sorts, maybe an eight-millimeter
showing on the wall. And there, the picture expanding with my familiarity, I
perceived a busty woman entering the apartment of two well-dressed men,
smiling and sitting down , allowing her skirt to hike high above her knees.
Soon she was having her drink, laughing with white teeth protruding, and
leaning far over for a cigarette, her full breasts almost spilling out entirely of
her blouse. My throat grew dry, my chest expanded with my breathing, and
I threw Bernie a quick glance just to show him I was in full control. He
stared at me with a cheap grin. Returning to the peephole, I now also real–
ized something else; inside the room on the other side of the wall a man was
whispering to a woman, they were drinking, and there was a brushing
movement. Cheesus! I almost fell over. Meanwhile on the screen the woman
was already loosening her skirt and blouse, with the two men following suit,
undressing.
Bernie was tugging at me. "Hey, better get going-old Lewis is buzzing
for you, and I already gave him the bathroom excuse a few minutes ago."
(
. . . .
)
Later on, in the next few weeks of winter, I began to learn a little
more about the entire basement, and what went on in the far side ofAmeri–
cana. It seemed that Jackson, the large black man who operated the elevator
for the rest of the building, ran a kind of after-hours gambling and whore–
house in his rooms downstairs. The gambling took place chiefly on Friday,
payday, about six o'clock, when there was a regular card game, liquor, and
several women hanging out. From outside, you could enter into Jackson'S side
of the basement via his freight elevator, which would descend to the base-
