Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground Read Online Free Page A

under a musty rack of topcoats that hung in the plate-glass window, I would bury my nose in a book. Virtually concealed from the rest of the shop, I made myself at home, though the noisy procession of customers, which seemed to increase by the day, put even my powers of concentration to the test.
    En route to some volcano island on board a shanghaied junk, for instance, I might be rudely recalled to Beale Street by the chimes over the door. I might get sidetracked by some colored tailor in fire-engine-red suspenders, boasting the magical properties of a broken sewing machine. Or some blowsy, russet-faced auntie, hitching up several layers of skirts to detach a homemade wooden leg, explaining as she clunked it over the counter, “I be’s tired but it still want to dance.”
    So maybe I liked the business of furtively parting the coat-sleeves, like leaves in a hunter’s blind, to spy on a gambler twirling a key chain. Observing without being observed, I would watch as the gambler grinned hugely so that my father could appraise the diamond set in his gold-capped tooth.
    â€œAn unusual cast for a solitaire,” said Papa, making professional noises that who could believe. “Seriously flawed in the center, but the crown facet—oy, what a fire!”
    Later on I might watch him give the nod to a hearing trumpet posing as the speaker on a gramophone. He’d make a “hmmm” like a sage physician as he assessed an asthmatic squeezebox, a telescope with a missing lens, a set of worm-eaten Indian clubs, or a pin-bristling voodoo figurine. If ever Papa objected to an item’s quality or questioned its authenticity, it was only for the sake of form. Take the case of the crooked old party with the patent-leather face who came in proclaiming, “This am the riginal same coat whooch I wo when the marsah have made I’n the wife to jump over the broom.”
    â€œUncle Joshua!” Papa clucked his tongue as he fingered the tatty material. “What you’re hocking is you’re hoken a tchynik.” But he took the coat anyway, in appreciation of its sentimental, if not historical, value, while the old man stood blinking as if the Yiddish for bunkum was a gentle rain in his face.
    From the amount of worthless merchandise that he so indiscriminately took in, you’d have thought Sol Kaplan was running a junk shop instead of a loan. He was becoming the curator of a seedy dime museum, of a sort that even P. T. Barnum wouldn’t have been caught dead in. On the other hand, I’d begun to think I wasn’t the only member of the family who was a pushover for a good story.
    Because Kaplan’s Loans was turning into a regular clearinghouse for tall tales, its proprietor swapping cold cash for the moonshine that his clientele carried in. The rusty weapons and nameless musical instruments, the two-headed sheep embryos in pickle brine, the Rube Goldberg inventions, the homespun clothes, the encyclopedias eighty years out-of-date—they were merely thrown in for good measure. They were mementos of the exotic places the stories came from, places that lay, by my reckoning, somewhere to the east of Third Street in a district that had begun to arouse my interest, though I didn’t let on. While my father continued to pretend that he was a serious pawnbroker, I kept on pretending to read.
    The rains came to Beale Street at approximately three in the afternoon on a Saturday toward the end of March, after an unseasonably muggy couple of days. I recall that I was busy for a change, assisting Papa in the never-ending inventory of his stock. This was how he occupied himself in the interludes between customers: he checked and rechecked the merchandise that he already had almost by heart, cross-referencing recent acquisitions against the ever more elaborate entries in his multiplying account books. From the high solemnity with which he called the roll of his purchases, he might have