The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “Christ, Ben,” Irving whispered, “don’t talk like that. These girls carry switchblades and razors.”

  “She don’t mind,” Flesh said, not bothering to lower his voice. “You mind—what’s your name?”

  “Gloria.”

  “You mind, Gloria?”

  “Naw,” she said.

  “See? Gloria doesn’t mind.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Irving whispered, “they have no morals.”

  “Irving,” Ben said.

  “I know, I know,” Irving said softly.

  “The books,” Ben said.

  “I want you to see them, Ben, but there’s something I’d like to discuss with you first.”

  “Something wrong with the books? I’ll catch you out in a minute. I went to Wharton. I speed-read double-entry wise.”

  “No, of course not. The books are perfect. This is something else. I was going to write you.”

  “Because if there was something funny about the books I wouldn’t laugh, Irving.”

  “The books are fine. Look, can we go over by the sign?” Irving moved toward the front of the store. Ben followed. “Listen,” Irving said, “there’s something I have to…What are you doing?”

  “This poster.” He held up a large cardboard poster. Men and women were smiling in their dry cleaning. He rubbed his hand across the front of the advertisement. “Jesus, Irving, it’s a dry-cleaning plant. Look at the dust. The damn ads are schmutzick!”

  “They’re filthy in their habits,” Irving said, “they’re not a clean people.”

  “Look here,” Ben said, taking a display from the front window and holding it for Irving to see, “look at the lapels on this suit. Look at the guy’s tie. These fashions are from 1955. Look at the dress the broad’s wearing. Look at their fucking hairstyles. What is it, the nostalgia craze? Can’t you get new displays?”

  “Ben, I would, but they steal them. You know how they are. They rob them to hang up on their walls for paintings.”

  “Come on, Irving.”

  “It’s a sickness, Ben.”

  “Get well soon, you’re running a business here. Look at the One Hour Martinizing sign.” He pointed to the neon tubing—an enormous green ‘I’ framing successively smaller green and red I’s, I’s within I’s within I’s like hashmarks. He touched the sign. “My finger isn’t even warm. The tubing’s insulated by dust. It hums and crackles like shortwave. Look at the dark spots where the neon ain’t flowing. The fucker’s got hardening of the arteries, blood clots, neon myocardial infarction. Does it even shine in the dark, Irving?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The equipment. It’s old, Ben. They have Valclene now. It’s odorless and it does a terrific job. With Valclene we wouldn’t need a steam tunnel, we wouldn’t need a stretcher.”

  “We’ve got a steam tunnel, we’ve got a stretcher.”

  “You’re missing the point, Ben. We could get rid of at least one girl. It would practically pay for itself. We’d save money.”

  “What’s Valclene? How much is it?”

  “It’s an entirely new process, Ben, odorless. I don’t know the exact cost. Maybe $17,000, $20,000 tops.”

  “Yeah? How many years would that girl you’d get rid of have to work to earn that much money? Three? Four?”

  “That’s not the point. That’s not the only advantage. All right. These people work cheap, but—”

  “Irving, listen to me. You know what the dry-cleaning business is worth today? How many pair of slacks did you do this week?”

  “I don’t know, I’d have to—”

  “A dozen? A half dozen? You haven’t noticed the wash-and-wear fabrics are knocking us on the head? They put suits in the washing machines now. Suits. Sport coats!”

  “Not winter suits, Ben.”

  “No, not winter suits. So suddenly it’s a seasonal business.”

  “Ben, with the new equipment—”

  “With the new equipment, what? What with the new equipment? Forget the new equipment. And I don’t have to look at the books. I don’t even want to see them. I can guess what they say. I know all about the books. Best sellers they ain’t. So what’s this shit about new equipment? Irving, you forgot your anthropology so quick? You don’t know that the do-it-yourself coin-op places are changing the dry-cleaning culture in this country? That they’re kicking our brains off? That this new outfit—what’s its name?—American Cleaners, yeah, American Cleaners, will take any garment and do you a job on it for 69 cents? A suit 69 cents, a sport coat. A dress. What do we get for a dress, a buck ninety-five?”

  “They don’t do the kind of job we do, Ben. They don’t turn out a product like ours. Not for 69 cents. How can you compare?”

  “Irving, I’m delighted by your pride. I really am. I am. That’s good. That’s beautiful. Really.” He lowered his voice. “Irving, you’ve got white pride. But let’s not talk about machines, all right? Unless maybe you want to take the stuff in and run it over to American Cleaners. We could use their machines. The coin-ops. We’d clean up, yes?”

  “Why are you making fun of me?”

  “I’m not making fun of you.”

  “I work like a nigger in this place. Damnit, Ben, my brothers and sisters and I guaranteed your loan. $14,000. My father made you our responsibility in his will. Why do you treat me like this? Why do you mock our relationship?”

  “I don’t mock our relationship. I cast it in bronze. Ping ping. I chip it in marble. Tap. Tap tap. I baste, tack, braid, plait, stitch, sew, and crochet it in fabric. In fabric, Irving, fabric. Fabric is the fabric of our relationship! Skin of my skin, cloth of my cloth. Don’t you know anything? Anthropologist! What’s the matter, don’t you recognize these digs? It’s the Finsberg Memorial Library here, my allegiance to costume, my tribute to Godpop. Fitting. Hah! Fitting’s fitting. Needles and pins, Irving, pins and needles. Needles, pins, and thread warped us and woofed us. Yay for yarn. Rah for ribbon. Whoopee for wool. Lest we forget, Irving, manager, godcousin, kid, this is for Julius, this is for him, the yellow tape around his shoulders like a tallith, around his neck like an Old Boy’s tie, pins in his red lips like a cushion tomato. Lest we forget! We owe everything—you, me, Estelle, the sibs, all of us—to dress, garb, caparison, wardrobe. We are what they wore. Millinery made us. Raiment did, weeds. Vestments, trousseau, togs, layettes. Traps, Irv, habits, duds, and mufti. Regimentals, jungle green and field gray. Redcoats. Canonicals and academicals. Sari, himation, pallium, peplum. Tunic, blazer, leotard, gym suit. Cassock, soutane, toga, chiton. Trews, breeks, chaps, and jeans. Jodhpurs, galligaskins, yashmaks, burnoose. Breechclouts and sou’westers. Spatterdashes. Greaves and ruffs. Unmentionables and Sunday-go-to-meeting. Irving, Irving, call the pelisse!”

  “We don’t do much greaves, we send the yashmaks out.”

  “Well I’m very pleased with what I see,” Ben Flesh said. “The place is in good hands.”

  “We’re dying on the vine, Ben. Smell it in here. Feel how hot it is. All right, they’re niggers—I couldn’t ask white people to work in a place like this—but even the jungle bunnies have to have their Coca-Cola. Christ, Ben, you know what I pay for salt tablets? No dry-cleaning plant’s like this today. They’re modern, cool as drugstores, with no more odor to them than lobbies in airports. Ben, we’re in violation of the health codes. It’s a good thing the spades ain’t union or we’d really be in trouble. As it is, I think the inspector wants to be paid off.”

  “Pay him.”

  “But why not convert? Why not meet the new specs? It doesn’t make sense, Ben.”

  “Pay him. Raise the girls’ wages.”

  “I used to smoke. Two packs a day. I can’t touch cigarettes anymore. They taste like this, like chemicals.”

  “The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health.”

  “What’s this? Good for my health? It’s poison. Look, I have my inheritance. I’ll put the stuff in myself.”

&nb
sp; “You’re my manager. I own the place. The manager doesn’t put in a gum-ball machine without my approval. He doesn’t put in a can for charity. I like everything just as it is. I like the smells. I like the way they make my eyes sting and contract my nostrils like toxic snuff. This is for Julius and for my father, who was once his partner. This is what they would have known. I like it the way it is.”

  “You like? You run it.”

  “You’re quitting?”

  “Yeah. Why not? What am I doing managing a dry-cleaning joint? I’m worth almost half a million dollars, you know that? I’m educated. I have advanced degrees. Yeah, why not?”

  “And Frances, your house nigger, you’re worth a half million, you’re educated, you’re quitting Frances, too?”

  “What’s Frances got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. Except she’s part of your cure, that was your idea. And this place, this is part of your cure, too. You were exactly the right man for the job. That’s right. You. Because your genes crackle like static electricity in the presence of schmutz, cleaning syrups, and your indoor heat waves. Your fate is to scrub, scour, mop, wring out, to run the world through the mangle. You dip, rinse, sluice, and douche. You don’t hate niggers, you’re in love with the cleaning lady! For Christ’s sake, look around you, you’ve put together a harem in here. When you die laundresses will stick you in a tub and lower you in fuller’s earth.”

  “It’s a sickness.”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  “Yes.”

  “You kinky dummy! Earth turns you on. Look at your fingernails. You look like you’ve been on your hands and knees in the garden.”

  “Why do you talk to me like this? Aren’t we friends?”

  “Friends?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  Ben took Irving’s face in his hands.

  “The same nose, eyes, lips, teeth, ears. The same hair. The same give to the flesh, the same resistance. I close my eyes and I feel your tan. The same tan.”

  “The same?”

  “As your sisters’.”

  “Are you on about that again?”

  “Ah no, lad, of course not. Slip on something from a polyethylene bag. We’ll kiss. You’ll drive in drag to Kansas City with me. We’ll stop at rest areas on the Interstates and neck. We’ll put two straws in our Coke. We’ll sip and giggle.”

  “Jesus, Ben. I’m kinky? What are you?”

  “A family man.” He raised his voice. “A family man. The whole damn Finsberg family. A family man!”

  “Listen,” Irving said, “I’ll stay on until you can get someone else.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Or I’ll look. I’ll find somebody trustworthy.”

  “Okay. All right. Whatever.” He was waving his right hand as if it had cramped, shaking it back and forth at chest level, clenching and unclenching his fist.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Paresthesia.” Ben started to laugh.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Poetic justice, symbolism. Irony and fate. Life’s rhyming couplets, its punch lines. The goblins that get you when you don’t watch out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Needles and pins. What form does, what made us what we are today. Cloth of our cloth, etc. Me. I’m the Finsberg Memorial Library! They stitched it in my body and used my nerves for thread. I’m a fucking pin cushion!”

  From Wolfe’s mouth to God’s ears.

  He’d been driving for hours, on his way from his St. Cloud, Minnesota, Dairy Queen to his Mister Softee in Rapid City, South Dakota—his milk run, as he liked to call it. His right hand had fallen asleep and there was a sharp pain high up in the groin and thigh of his right side.

  Mornings he’d been getting up with it. A numbness in his hand and hip, bad circulation, he thought, which left these damned cold zones, warm enough to the touch when he felt them with the freely circulating blood in the fingers of his left hand or lifted his right hand to his face, but, untouched, like icy patches deep in his skin. Perhaps his sleeping habits had changed. Almost unconsciously now he found the right side of the bed. In the night, sleeping alone, even without a twin or triplet beside him, the double bed to himself, some love-altered principle of accommodation or tropism in his body taking him from an absent configuration of flesh to a perimeter of the bed, a yielding without its necessity or reason, a submission and giving way to—to what? (And even in his sleep, without naming them, he could tell them apart.) To ride out the night sidesaddle on his own body. (No godfather Julius he, not set in his ways, unless this were some new mold into which he was pouring himself.) Pressing his head—heavy as Gertrude’s marrowless bones—like a nighttime tourniquet against the flesh of his arm, drawing a knee as high up as a diver’s against his belly and chest, to wake in the morning cut off, the lines down and trailing live wires from the heavy storm of his own body. Usually, as the day wore on, the sensation wore off, but never completely, some sandy sensitivity laterally vestigial across the tips of his fingers, the sharp pain in the region of his thigh blunted, like a suction cup on the tip of a toy arrow. Bad circulation. Bad.

  Unless. Unless—Unless from Wolfe’s mouth to God’s ears.

  He checked into the Hotel Rushmore in Rapid City and asked the clerk for a twin-bedded room. And then, seeing the width of the single bed, requested a rollaway be brought, narrower still. This an experiment. In the narrow bed no place to go, his body occupying both perimeters at once, returned as it had been in the days before he’d shared beds, the pillow beneath his head almost the width of the bed itself, tethered by a perfect displacement, lying, it could be, on his own shadow. But in the morning the sensation still there, if anything worse, not to be shaken off. (Never to be shaken off.)

  And a new discovery. At Mister Softee handling the tan cardboard carton of popsicles, as cold to the touch of his right hand as dry ice. He thought his blood had thickened and frozen. Something was wrong.

  He got the name of a doctor from his Mister Softee manager, saw Dr. Gibberd that afternoon, and was oddly moved when the doctor told him that he would like him to go into Rapid City General for observation.

  A black woman took him in a wheelchair to his bed.

  It was very strange. Having voluntarily admitted himself to the hospital, having driven there under his own steam—his 1971 Caddy was parked in the Visitors’ lot—and answered all the questions put to him by the woman at the Admissions Desk, showing them his Blue Cross and Blue Shield cards, his yellow Major Medical, he had become an instant invalid, something seductively agreeable to him as he sat back in the old wheelchair and allowed himself to be shoved up ramps and maneuvered backward—his head and shoulders almost on a level with his knees—across the slight gap between the lobby carpet and the hard floor of an elevator and pushed through what he supposed was the basement, past the kitchens and laundry rooms, past the nurses’ cafeteria and the vending machines and the heating plant, lassitude and the valetudinarian on him like climate, though he had almost forgotten his symptoms.

  “Where are we going? Is it much farther?”

  “No. We almost there.” She shoved the brass rod on a set of blue fire doors and they moved across a connector through a second set of fire doors and past a nurses’ station, and entered a long, cinder-block, barracks-like ward in which there were perhaps fifteen widely spaced beds down each side of a broad center aisle. Except for what might be behind a folding screen at the far end of the ward, the beds were all empty, the mattresses doubled over on themselves.

  “This is the boondocks,” Ben said. “Is it a new wing?”

  “You got to ask your doctor is it a new wing,” she said and left him.

  A young nurse came and placed a hospital gown across the back of the wheelchair. She asked Ben if he needed help. He said no but had difficulty with his shirt buttons. Unless he actually saw his fingers on them, he could not be sure he was holding them.

  “Here,” she said, “let me.” She s
tooped before him and undid the buttons. She unfastened his belt. “Can you get your zipper?”

  “Oh sure.” But touching the metal was like sticking his hand into an electric socket. The nurse made up the bed. He sat back down in the chair and, watching the fingers on his right hand, carefully attempted to interlace them with the fingers on his left.

  “Modest?”

  Ben nodded. It was not true. In sickness he understood what he never had in health, that his body, anyone’s, everyone’s, was something for the public record, something accountable like books for audit, like deeds on file in county courthouses. If he was ashamed it was because he couldn’t work his fingers. He stood to take off his pants and shorts. Then he smiled.

  “Yes?”

  “I was just thinking,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Mister Softee.” She turned away and completed the last hospital corner. “No,” Ben said, “I am. I have the local Mister Softee franchise. It’s ice cream.” She folded the sheets back. “It’s true. Anytime you want a Mister Softee, just go down and ask Zifkovic.

  Zifkovic’s my manager.”

  “Please put your gown on.”

  “Tell him Ben Flesh sent you,” he said and burst into tears.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” she said, “so we can find out.” She helped him out of the chair gently, unfolded and held open the gown for him. “Just step into it,” she said, “just put your arms through the sleeves.” He had to make a fist with his right hand so his fingers wouldn’t touch the rough fabric. She came toward him with the gown. His penis moved against her uniform. “Can you turn around?” she said. “I’ll tie you up the back.”