ALAN LELCHUK
599
ment and slide open its huge doors on both sides, like a cattle car on a train.
The floor of the elevator served as a bridge between places, Jackson's Hole,
as Mosey termed it, and Schulte's fiction basement.
Jackson himself was a congenial fellow, with a big warm smile and Vic–
torian handlebar mustache. After Bernie had introduced us one day, Jackson
invited me to come over any time I wished.
"Just remember you're eighteen," he grinned broadly, "in case anyone
ever should enquire."
It
was Mosey who immediately warned me against going over there.
"Sheet," he said, shaking his dusky head over coffee when I told him of
jackson's invitation, "that man'd hustle his mother for a silver dollar. You stay
away from that joint, if you know what's good for you. He'sjes lucky I don't
blow the whistle on him and his doings."
I listened to Mosey, and trusted him, but the thought of that den of sin
just a few steps away from my house of fiction seemed to put the right fin–
ishing touch on life in the basement. I mean, I was learning all about the full
powers and peculiar charms oflife uptown, even though a brothel alongside a
bookstore was a little more than my imagination had allowed for. No wonder
I felt that real life was to be found downstairs, while simple, shallow com–
merce was above, and I resented being called upstairs to help out. My place
was in the basement, my niche amidst the used novels, and if the lure of illic–
itness sirened my way on occasion, via that secret peephole, I felt in a way
that I was only extending my education.
Immersed in fiction, lured by pornography, semi-tutored in literature, I
felt excited and raw, a kind of rookie in Americana. Back in Jefferson High, I
was involved in the basketball season and adventures with pals, but all that
seemed high schoolish stuff next to the challenges uptown. I'd sense this, as I
bumped and rattled my way up to Manhattan on the New Lots Avenue El,
which went underground at Utica Avenue, while I journeyed with Eugene
Cant or the new fellow I had discovered in the basement, a Chicago kid
named Augie March. (I finally had gotten hold of a life of Rimbaud, a small
New Directions volume.) Once a week or so also, I walked from Fourteenth
Street via Broadway in order to get a peek at my royal Royal, just checking
to make sure it was still there, waiting. All was in order. And as soon as I
entered Schulte's, and went downstairs, and changed into my drab uniform of
worn flannel shirt and old dungarees, and settled in amidst the used tomes,
motes of dust and broken spines, I felt at home, secure. Private again. Firmly
ensconced as fiction boy.
Maybe part of the reason too why I felt so secure and firm down there
was the confusion taking place in my real home, our Brooklyn apartment.
Things had grown somewhat hectic there, with Sam the new man and lover,
