The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  He fumbled with the amplifier and found the button that cut off the power, and he stood on his father’s old cutting tables and spoke to them from his heart.

  “My dearest ladies,” he said, “my most charming gentlemen. Please, this is very important. What’s sacred is important. You don’t know this, you’ll not be able to follow it all. Try not to blame yourselves. There’s no blame here. We are all swell people. Do you know what’s happening here? (Don’t sidetrack me, God; let me stick to the point, oh, Lord.) Everyone concentrate. I am going to link the world for you. I am going to have it make sense, but you must concentrate. Same here.

  “All right. What am I talking about? How, if I’m to link the world, can I get sidetracked? Not possible. It’s all relevant. Be patient. Everything will come clear. Then—Who has water? I’m very dry. Luis, pleeth. Jenny, any?

  “I stand on my father’s long old cutting tables. Bolts of graduation cloth unwound here like spools of film, the texture of the trim like oil slicks. Costumes were made for ballerinas. We are in a room with a musical tradition. Yes, and what made this possible, this room, this night, our gala, were the selfsame songs you danced to earlier, written by pals of my godfather, who was able to leave me the prime rate of interest because of those songs. You see? We dance to the prime rate of interest itself. We compound it. Nothing is lost. Follow? That’s one circle. Earlier I spoke of the rhythms, motion. Ah, God, we thank Thee for Thy do-si-dos, our hithers and yons, the wondrous cake walk and hopfrog of reality. We thank Thee for dressage and our Lippizaner life. Clara, you understand, don’t you?”

  “No,” Clara said.

  “I does,” the black man said.

  “Yes, but that’s not my point. Do you know how good the world is? Listen, it’s better than you think and better even than it has to be. I go with Clone. Politeness, gratuitous as flowers, counts. It structures life like scaffolding. Under this stage is scaffolding, the carpenter’s hundred wooden X ’s. Would a man do that for money? The care, the nails like a driving rain. For money? Good Christ, friends, the man built to hold us all, to let us jump.” He jumped. “I believe the amazing world of Kreskin is amazing, and who could invent a card trick or make up a good joke? The lady who dropped the ketchup—”

  “That was an accident,” she said.

  “No, no, there are no accidents. The lady who dropped the ketchup—I saw into her shopping bag. There are Hefties there, liners for garbage cans. How civilized! Maybe all that distinguishes man from the beasts is that man had the consideration to invent garbage can liners. What a convenience! We die, yes, but are compensated by a million conveniences. Hefties are just the beginning. We perfect ourselves, we reach toward grace—I foresee a time when there will be flowered sheets and pillowcases in motel rooms. This is a deflection to convenience and the magnitude of the human spirit, the leap to comfort. The chemical creams,” he said excitedly, “the chemical creams. You know, the little sacks of powder you put in your coffee. I foresee a day—someone may be working on this right now—when non-dairy creamers shall be mixed with saccharine in the same packet! There you go: convenience! And do you think for one minute that the man now waiting for this great idea’s time to come will have thought it up for mere money? No. Unthinkable. It will hit him on an airliner like an inspiration, for the grace of the thing, only that, for the convenience it would make, and if he profits by his idea, why the money will be only another convenience. Someday a visionary shall come among us. He will lobby Congress to legalize pot on the principle that it would be a terrific boon to the snack-food industry! Oh, friends, the quality of all our lives shall rise like yeast. I love this world, this comfortable, convenient world, its pillow condition.” He was breathless. But he had more to tell them. Mystery was on the tip of his tongue. He studied them, watched them watching him.

  “I come,” he said, “from Fred Astaire! I bring Ginger Rogers’ spicy ‘Hi.’ Fred says tell them. He says make them understand. He says when you see Miss Clara, Miss Jenny, and Miss Hope, when you see Mr. Luis and Mr. Al, when you get to Chicago and stand on the cutting tables on the evening of the Nineteenth Annual Fiscal Year Gala, when you hang suspended from your suspenders in the convenient clothes of romance, your uniform of cruise and ceremony, suspended in them, your feet barely touching your hose, your hose your shoes, your shoes your pop’s cutting tables, your pop’s cutting tables your planet, let them know that our work, the work we do, is important, that to walk is good but to dance is better, that what we do here is the ultimate leap; to go behind gravity’s back and spit in the face of the heavy. Hah? Heh?

  “Listen, Fred didn’t say about this part, this part’s mine—Fred ain’t in it—but I want to give you some notion of the world we live in. I drive the road. I go up and down it. I stay in motels and watch the local eyewitness news at ten. Murders are done, town councils don’t know what to do about porno flicks, everywhere the cops have blue flu, farmers nose-dive from threshers, supply and demand don’t work the way they used to, and even our President’s at a loss and his advisers divided. The left hand don’t know what the right is doing and only the weather report touches us all. The time and the temperature. What we have for community. Only that. The barometer adjusted to sea level, the heat wave, the drought, the cold front stalled over Wisconsin, today’s low and if it’s the record. And the fuss that’s made! My God, the fuss that’s made and only because it’s what the local eyewitness news thinks holds us together. Some view of us it has, pals. As if we lived in the wind under the same umbrella. I see this. City after city and state after state. And, oh yes, something else, the good will and chatter, the hard-news guy lying down with the sports one, the jigaboo weatherman with the lady reporter. We should take over the stations and put out the real news. For everyone murdered a million unscathed, for every fallen farmer so many upright. We would put it out. Bulletin: Prisoners use sugar in their coffee! Do you see the sweet significance? We argue the death penalty and even convicts eat dessert. The cooks do the best they can. They have their eye out for the good fruit and the green vegetables. Oh, the astonishing manifestations of love! Rainbows wouldn’t melt in our mouths! The state’s bark always worse than its bite, brothers, and goodness living in the pores of the System, and Convenience, thank you, God, the measure of mankind. Nobody, nobody, nobody ever had it so good. Take heed. A franchiser tells you.

  “Smile, you fuckers, laugh, you shitlings. I come from Fred Astaire, everybody dance!”

  He jerked a record from its sleeve and slapped it on the machine. He turned the volume up and shrieked into the microphone. “Business is bad but we do a big volume.” He turned the sound down some. They had gathered beneath him at the foot of his tiny stage to watch him and listen. He swayed above them. He might have been a band singer in the forties. The music was “Dance, Ballerina, Dance.”

  “Do it,” he commanded. “Dance, dance.” He made spiraling gestures with his fingers. Some of the people he had brought with him began to shuffle aimlessly. A few eyed each other, seeking partners. “That’s right, mother,” he told an old woman who held her arms out to Luis. He climbed down from the stage and began to move people around like a chess master playing several games at once. He pulled them to him in pairs, holding them by their wrists as if he would force them to shake, like a peacemaker, he thought, like love’s policeman.

  “Fred Astaire sent me,” he whispered. “I’m this social traffic cop.” He moved among them and started them dancing like a spinner of plates on sticks in nightclubs. “Good,” he said, “good, good.”

  He scrambled back up on the stage, powdering his tuxedo trousers with paw prints of dust. He loosened his tie. “Caveat emptor,” he crooned. “This is only the fabulous introductory offer. It’s going to cost you. What, you think it’s cheap to throw the sheets over modern times while the owners are away? You think illusion is free, buddies? This shipboard ideal we make here, this Queen Mary ambience? I got a shine on my shoes it cost me two dollars. You want to see real stars
, go to the country, look up, get a stiff neck. Ours have six points and you can reach out and touch them on the walls—convenience, convenience—like the astronomy decor in airplanes. Come, come, we’ll lie together in the time machine. When 1933 comes we’ll Carioca down Main Street, everybody do the Varsity Drag. We’ll Beer-Barrel Polka in the high-rent district and nobody leaves till he does the Continental!”

  He explained the rates to them. The music was “Fascinating Rhythm.” He told them it would cost them thirty dollars an hour and that they had to sign up for a minimum of twenty-five hours. Calmly he explained that it was cheaper than psychoanalysis. They were dancing now. The song was “But Beautiful,” then “Dancing in the Dark.” If they thought the thirty an hour was stiff, he said, they should understand that a lot of the fee went into outings and galas like this one and that, if they chose, they could take up to ten of their hours with a private instructor, with Luis or Al, with Miss Jenny, Miss Hope, or Miss Clara.

  “These aren’t bimbos,” he said while the stereo played “Dream.” “These are accredited people. Most of my people trained with Alex Moore’s International Society of Dance Instructors. Al and Miss Clara are two-time winners of the New York Daily News Harvest Moon Ball, the third jewel in dancing’s triple crown.”

  The song was “Flat Foot Floogie” and several dropped out. They chewed his sandwiches and he made them a solemn promise. It was a tradition in ballroom instruction that an hour was only fifty minutes. Fred had authorized him to throw back the missing ten minutes into each hour. Did they have any idea, he wondered, how much of a leg up—he laughed delicately at his joke—that would give them on the Arthur Murray people? That was four hours and ten minutes of additional instruction. If they applied themselves they would run the Arthur Murray people off the floor. It was better than a hundred-and-twenty-dollar rebate. He didn’t understand how Fred could do it, but there it was. They danced to “Happy Days Are Here Again” and ate egg rolls from Don the Beachcomber. They moved over fallen hors d’oeuvres, stepping on the soft crusts and squashing them like bugs. Bits of pork and rice, of shrimp, chunks of chicken exploded like delicious gut under their weight. Dark sauces thick as blood stained the dance floor. He told them about “Recreation, companionship, instruction, and therapy.” That was their motto, he said. He told them they must understand that there was nothing authoritarian in the word “instruction.” If others he could name didn’t, the Fred Astaire people believed in freedom of individual expression. He saw, he said, in the movements of his black friend, a potential for the strong, masculine rhythms of Chassidic dancing. If that’s where the man’s talents lay he knew a rabbi in Skokie—They were dancing now with their drinks in their hands. The song was “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” and as the men dipped the ladies, liquor spilled from their plastic glasses onto the dance floor. He tried to explain how the dance field was like karate in a way. Oh, it wasn’t combative, of course, the reverse if anything, a karate of the inside out. He meant that just as there were degrees, levels of competence in karate, white belts, brown, green, he thought, and black, there were the same sorts of measurements in dance. There had to be. One had to know where one stood. Someone had placed a plastic glass on the floor with a cigarette in it that was still burning. Ben watched the hole, outlined like a filament in a light bulb as it grew wider and wider. The song was “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” What was he saying? Oh yes, karate. In ballroom dancing it worked differently. They didn’t get belts. Medals. There were bronze, silver, and gold medals. One could earn these, though of course there was no guarantee. You had to know where you stood, but there had to be standards. Some people made silver at the end of the twenty-five-hour course, but he’d be frank, this was the exception. Usually it didn’t happen until forty hours and often, he had to be frank, he wanted them to know what they were getting into, seventy-five, sometimes not then. Gold medalists were rare. He had a feeling they were born. Independent judges were brought in. Incorruptible men who couldn’t be bought. If you got a medal you knew you’d earned it.

  “Like the Olympics,” he said. “Swing, waltz, fox trot, cha-cha, and tango. All the high stepper’s catchy pentathlon.”

  Were they necking? Necking?

  “Is everybody happy?” he asked softly. “I come from Fred Astaire. He looks forty-eight. All old movie stars look forty-eight.” For some reason he was on the verge of tears. “Why,” he wondered aloud, “were there never any black streakers?” The song was “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” He was winding down. Who was he, fucking Cinderella? Would he cry in front of them? Snap out of it.

  “Hey,” he said, “they found tuna fish on Mercury!”

  It was “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll give it to you straight. I saw Fred Astaire one time at a franchise convention. He seemed embarrassed. You want to know the truth? I don’t dance, don’t ask me, and the outings I was talking about, you know where we take you? To places where they rewrite the lyrics and do special material. You know? Like at summer camp. That’s the gala. The band plays these show tunes and Al changes the lyrics to whatever’s topical or institutional. The bronze medalists get their name in a song and we boost the outfit and ain’t that something? Jesus.

  “Listen,” he said, “I have this Cadillac. I’m a dancer. I go north in it and west. I do all the directions and turn corners and stay in my lane and trace the cloverleaf and cross the bridges. Good God, am I a dancer! America’s my ballroom. It’s my eats, listen to me! Something’s happening. I’ll tell you a secret. This dancing. I think it may be evil. As comedy is evil. I don’t think salvation has either a sense of humor or a sense of rhythm. Life is the conversion of the individual. God’s piecework. A custom-tailor God, every attention paid to details, the slant of the pocket and come back Tuesday. I think I may be doing evil with my franchises.”

  “Hey, Mr. Flesh,” Luis said.

  “There may be something genuinely evil in the idea of an N.F.L. Maybe the Miami Dolphins is an evil concept, the Houston Astros, Burger King, the American League. Franchises like some screwy version of Manifest Destiny.”

  “Mr. Flesh.”

  He heard his name called and made Hope out in the queerly lighted room, Band-Aids of blue and purple, of yellow and red sliding across her face and bare arms as the revolving mirrored ball punched out refracted messages of spectrum. She was shaking her head.

  “Yes, Hope,” Flesh said. “I come from Fred Astaire. Everybody dance.”

  He turned from the microphone and placed another recording on the turntable, setting the volume high as he could.

  “The free dance lesson!” he announced, roaring into the microphone and clapping his hands—the right hand had begun to tingle again—in time to the music. “Left foot forward, right foot back. Basic left turn, right box turn. Butterfly, serpentine, advance right turn. Lilt left fleckerl, quarter turn right. Left rock, right rock, chassé swing step, three step cross. Pony trot and pony circle, Cinderella grapevine, fallaway grapevine, arch turn, breakaway, loop turn, she go, he go, right spot turn. Tuck-in, arch turn, change of place with right-hand lead. Right-hand loop, right-hand loop and change of hands. Push spin, rhumb square, promenade, pivot; Cuban walk and backward rock. Walk across basic, hinge and tuck-in, golf step, airplane, promenade twist. Side basic, swivel basic, shoulder to shoulder, and tap and point. Outside now and fan and corte, open left turn with outside finish, gauche turn, corkscrew, strike and samba. Choo choo, choo choo, boto fogos. Paddle turn, right turn, merengue chassé. Wheel. Arch. Step time, mark time, march time; promenade twist and wheel and cape. Right turn, left turn, left change, right change—everybody hold!”