The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “Hey, come on, now,” Macintyre would say, “watch your language. I know you’ve got a few drinks under your belt, but there’s a lady present. Now, come on, Ben, just try to behave yourself.”

  “Watch my language? Watch my language? I am watching my language. Take a look at your own, you fuckhead. You wanted to eat in Kenny’s Newsroom, you wanted to go to Harlow. What were some of those other places? Lloyd? Frommer? Wait, wait, don’t tell me: Yeah. The Snooty Fox. He wanted to eat in a railroad car, he was willing to try a warehouse. Jesus!”

  “The Warehouse is supposed to have the best K.C. strip steaks in K.C.”

  “Yeah,” he would say, “and you know why? ’Cause they’re so aged, you asshole.”

  “I told you before. I warned you.”

  “Forget it, P.M., he’s had too much to drink.”

  “Sure, Paul, take it easy, he’s three sheets to the wind.”

  “Oh, my God, ‘P.M.,’ you lousy afternoon, you dumbass evening, ‘three sheets to the wind.’ “ He would be laughing. There would be tears in his eyes. “And, yeah, wait, wait, somebody said something about The Monastery. And which one of you fatheads wanted to try Ebenezer’s? Which one Yesterday’s Girl? You want yesterday, you schmucky hickshit? Yesterday? They’ll give you—they’ll give you…Listen, you really want picturesque? Let’s get out of here. I know this charming Holiday Inn.” And would stand up, shouting, his voice carrying through the entire restaurant: “Who here remembers Thursday? Huh? Anybody recall Saturday? How about it? Thursday? Friday? Saturday? Those were the days, those were the good gold goddamn candyass days. Huh? Huh?”

  And would be pulled down, Frommer and Lloyd peacekeepers still, but pulling him by his bad arm, holding on to his paresthetic right hand, Lloyd’s metal graduation ring against Flesh’s skin like an electric prod, the hands restraining him—how could they feel what he felt?—as alien nervewise and texturewise as moonrock.

  “Oh,” would scream, “Aiee,” would call, “God!” would cry.)

  He presents his confirmation at the desk, registers, asks if his room is near where the other Radio Shack franchise people will be.

  He strolls through the exhibits in the Century Ballroom.

  “Hey,” says Ned Tubman from Erlanger, Kentucky. “How you doin’?”

  “Fine.”

  “I seen your name tag. Bowling Green, hey?”

  “Right.”

  “Western Kentucky State University?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s shakin’?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “Foxy. Close to the chest. Well, I’ll tell you.—When’d you say you opened up?”

  “About three years ago.”

  “Three years. Well. How long Fort Worth sit on your application?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

  “What was it? You slip ’em somethin’?”

  “Who?”

  “You know—Fort Worth.”

  “I bought it outright.”

  “Oh. Outright. Say listen, I didn’t mean—But if you bought it outright—Me, I had my application in fourteen months. By the time they okay’d me, Lexington was gone, Richmond was took, Berea, Bowling Green—” He pointed to Flesh’s badge. “Every last college town in the state. They come up with Fulton.”

  “Fulton’s a pretty good size.”

  “Yeah, I was gonna take it but then they told me about Erlanger. Said it had an institution of higher learning. I switched.”

  “And it doesn’t?”

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it does. It does surely. It got the Seminary of Pius X.”

  “Oh.”

  “You ever try selling stereo to them fellows? Police band? Headsets? Tape decks? Shit. Well—Good luck to you.”

  “Same to you.”

  “I’ll lay in Gregorian chants, ‘Perry Como Sings the Lord’s Prayer.’”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Yeah, sure. Meanwhile, you get the real college kids. Marijuana, the Pill—Those are the turn-ons, man. Biggest thing ever to hit the music industry. Know what I heard?”

  “What?”

  “That R.C.A., Zenith, Sony, and Panasonic gave E. Y. Lilly and Pfizer and the rest them drug companies money to develop the Pill.”

  “No kidding?”

  “The truth. Heard they sponsor the Mafia and the drug traffic.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Why you think a lid of grass so cheap? It goes against every law of supply and demand. That’s the record companies, mister. The record companies do that. They give the pot farmers price supports.”

  “Oh.”

  “Subsidize poppy fields.”

  “Really?”

  “Pot and poppy parities, yes sir.”

  “I see.”

  “Sure.”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “I will. Open your eyes.”

  “God bless.”

  The displays are compelling. Each screened booth with its shelves of sound equipment glows, buzzes like cockpit, like miniature war room, like listening posts in science fiction. Meters of fine tuning like green pies closing. Needles that travel against arbitrary scales, past the reds and oranges of distortion toward baby blues of pitch-perfect harmony and balance. Round clocklike dials across dashboards of sound. Stereo cartridges like decks of cards, that look, sunk in their slots, like open tills, like queer, spit product. Cleverly notched steel spindles, turntables like reels of computer tape. And the gorgeous cargo of speakers like splendid crates, blank black domino shapes tight in their mahogany frames. The grooved and handsome ferruled knobs—AM, FM, AFC, vol. and bass, treble and balance, filter and phono, auxiliary tape. Contour control, “joy sticks.” Jacks and fuse lights. Sliding levers, smoked-plastic dust covers. Headsets like the ears’ furniture, their thick foam stuffing, their leathery vinyl skins. The broad wide-eyed faces of cassettes, the immense and careless weave of the 8-tracks. Digital AM-FM clock radios, their neon numerals the color of struck matches, the broken verticals and horizontals of the numbers like fractured bones, unkindled ghost digits just visible behind them like the floating, germ-like transparencies that drift across the surface of an eyeball. Other styles—card numbers that flip over like scores on TV game shows, or that rise into the radios like figures on odometers. There are pocket-size tape recorders, microphones built into them like snipers’ scopes. And portable televisions like pieces of luggage. There are antennas like fishing rods, like whips, like window screens, like swatches of fence, like pen-and-pencil sets, like huge metal combs, like immense paper clips. There is specialized stuff—marine radiotelephones; citizen’s band transceivers; base stations, mobile; 8-channel FM scanning receivers with their movie marquee light sequences. Tuned to crime, tuned to fire, tuned to weather, tuned to all the ships at sea—earth, fire, air, and water tuned. The notches of wavelength-like lines on rulers or the scale on maps, all the calibrated atmosphere of frequency.

  I have been in the Bowling Green shop just once. I am a personnel man finally, only an absentee landlord, a silent owner in the sound trade. They rip me off, my managers, my hired help. They aren’t to be trusted. They skim. I know that. I’ve taken bartenders and put them in charge of my franchises. I’ve turned vice-squad detectives into bosses. Clerks in liquor stores, ticket sellers, head-waiters, gas-station attendants—all those technicians in larceny. My gray-collar guys of good judgment who know just where to draw the line and just when to stop. What can it cost me in the long run? Less than fringe benefits, less than Blue Cross, pension plans. I tell them up front what I’ll stand for. They appreciate that. If they take advantage I send the auditors in or go myself. But that’s rare. The rule of thumb is, they work their asses off in order to increase the profits from which they are allowed to steal. In the long run I’m probably even, maybe a dollar or two ahead.

  I came to the Radio Shack bash to buy. Chelton should have come. He knows the stock better, the clientele. I’m his operative really, just fo
llowing orders.

  It’s just that I’ve got to do something.

  We were all in our seats. They dimmed the lights in the Century Ballroom. The great collar of equipment from the display booths that lined three sides of the ballroom glowed like electric Crayolas. It was really rather pretty. The franchisers applauded. Even I started to applaud but it hurt my hand. Then someone yelled, “Bravo, bravo,” and this was taken up and soon everyone was clapping and cheering, giving a standing ovation to a lot of colored dials. It was like applauding dessert, the waiters’ parade of cherries jubilee at a catered dinner, luminous baked Alaska at a golden wedding anniversary. Businessmen are so dumb.

  Then—I don’t know how they did this, some linked rheostat arrangement or something—they brought down the lights on the equipment until the ballroom was pitch black. A white pin spot flared on some Fort Worth guy on the dais and we sat back down.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there’s to be a demonstration.”

  The pin spot, round as a pancake, large as his face, reduced itself, burned briefly on the tip of his nose, and went out. The Century Ballroom was bereft of light, blackness so final it was void, a vacuum of light. We could have been locked in the subterranean on the backside of moons. I thought of the brownouts I’d fled, but this was darker, melanistic, the doused universe and the pitch of death.

  And they applauded this, applauded darkness. So dumb. And I thought—the Wharton Old Boy—it’s a miracle Dow Jones has an average, a miracle that there’s trade at all. The dollar’s a miracle, the dime a wonder, America astonishing, all organization a wondrous serendipity. Higher the handicapped and Excelsior to all. Applauded darkness!

  Self-consciously—oh, the demands of level good will—I thought perhaps I should join them. Even in the darkness—who could have seen me?—I felt this pressure to join in, to add my two-cent increment of invisible loyalty, pressured like men at ball parks to stand with their fellows for the anthem, to move their lips over the words flashed on the scoreboard, and make a noise here and another there when the song descends to their key. But it hurt my hand to applaud and I kept still. And then, the oddest thing.

  A man called, “Bravo, bravo.” Then the chant was taken up, and through the sound of applause and cheers I could hear chairs scraping all about me as they were pushed back and the Radio Shack people stood. It was ludicrous. Cheer darkness! As well applaud lawns, crabgrass, hurrah the sky and clap for rain. The givens are given. I wouldn’t move. I hadn’t the excuse of my game hand but I wouldn’t move, would not rise with my clamorous colleagues.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the Fort Worth man said, “there’s to be a demonstration.”

  The lights came on in the Century Ballroom. The Fort Worth man was not on the dais. No one was standing. The chairs were just where I had remembered their being when we had sat down after applauding the new line of equipment. We looked at each other.

  “What happened?” my neighbor asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was all that clapping? Why did you get up when the lights went out?”

  “I didn’t. Why did you?”

  “I never moved.”

  All around me people were asking the same questions of each other. It seemed that no one had applauded, no one had stood.

  “Where’d what’s-his-name, Fort Worth, go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There he is.”

  “Where?”

  “By that console. There. Beside the dais.”

  The man from Fort Worth, his arms folded across his chest, stood smiling at us. He moved toward the microphone stand again.

  “How did you like the demonstration? We played a little joke on you. We played a little joke on you and you’ve just heard the future.”

  “What’s this all about, Sam?” This was called out by a man in my row.

  Sam, the Fort Worth guy, nodded and smiled. He shaded his eyes, pretending to look where the question had come from. “We recorded your initial response and played it back for you.”

  “Was that some kind of quadraphonics?”

  “Quadraphonics? Honey, it was decaphonics. It was quinquagintaphonics. It was centophonics. Myriaphonics. It was the whole-kit-and-caboodlaphonics! The system’s perfected. It’s on line now. Well, there’s nothing to it from an engineering standpoint, or even from a recording standpoint. All they have to do is plant a mike wherever they want. The technology’s been licked since stereo. We could do that all along, make as many tracks as we wanted. It’s just multiplex. It was at the other end, the delivery system, where the trouble came in. Now we’ve got these miniaturized speakers that we can plant anywhere. Well, you just heard.”

  “Is it expensive?” I had the impression there were shills in the audience.

  “Initially. Initially the customer buys the receiver. That’s that console over there. That one’s professional of course and costs about four grand, but we can give him something almost as good, at least for his home entertainment purposes, starting at about eleven hundred and fifty dollars and going up to about eighteen or nineteen hundred. About the same price as professional-quality stereo equipment.”

  “It’s high, Sam. These are kids, newlyweds.”

  “They’ll go crazy for it,” Sam said. “You still haven’t caught on, have you? Anybody here with the vision to see what we’ve done?”

  “I have.” Ben spoke. He rose and stood beside his chair.

  “Pardner?” Sam said.

  “I have. The vision. I have. It’s the Barbie Doll principle gone sound. It’s Mattel. Mattelio ad absurdum in spadessum. We kill them with accessory. They start with three speakers, four, and build toward infinity. Like model railroading—all the crap you could get. The station and stationmaster and a little signalman waving his tiny lantern with the teensy light inside. The gates and the bridges, the tunnels and tracks. The switches and couplers, the toy towns and trees. The Rockies and billboards and whistles that blew. The smoke. The freight cars and passenger. Cabooses. The observation car where the weensy President stood. The refrigerator cars cold to the touch. The flatcars with their lumber and perfume of evergreen. All the specialized carriers for oil, gas (non-flammable, nontoxic), natural resources. I have. I do.”

  “Yes,” Sam said, “that’s it. That’s right.”

  “I have,” Ben said. “I do.”

  “Sign that pardner up,” Sam said, the man from Fort Worth. “Get an order blank back there, someone.”

  “Because,” Ben said, “we live in a century of mood and until this afternoon only headphones gave the illusion of ‘separation.’ There is no separation. There are no concert halls in life. Nor do we see in 3-D. The chairs do not stand out. Only in stereopticons are the apples closer than the pears. We will Ptolemaicize men and have them move in their rooms as in a headset. I have. I do.”

  “Hey now,” Sam said.

  “And pour percussion in the porches of their ears. Their left ear and right. Tumble treble and crack the sax into the helix. A trumpet in every tragus, and violins in the semicircular canals. The flute in the fossa, the bass in the stapes. Quinquagintaphonics in the adolescent’s bedroom, the whore’s house, and doctor’s office. I have. I do. Mattel their minutes, Lionel their lives. Accessory them.”

  “Hey,” Sam said, “you doin’ too much.”

  “Cole Porter,” Ben said. “Hammerstein.”

  “Buddy?” Sam said. “Buddy, you hear me?”

  “In both ears.”

  “Settle down, friend. We’re talking the new line.”

  “That’s what I’m talking,” Ben said. His hand hurt him, his legs.

  Everything tingled. Only his ears. I am up to my ears, he thought.

  “Come on, now,” Sam said, “give us a break.”

  “Put another record on. I’m having a Rodgers and Hart attack. Hah!”

  Macintyre and Frommer were beside him. Lloyd has come up. He spies Ned Tubman through his nystagmic eyes. Ned and all
whirl like pinwheels.

  He put a call through to Riverdale.

  “Yes?” It was Cole, the one who suffered from plant diseases.

  “Hello, Cole. How are you? It’s Ben.”

  (Not “Hi, who’s this?” but “Hello, Cole. How are you?” Even though they’d reached an age—Cole would be almost thirty-seven—when distinctions, were they to appear, would have begun to reveal themselves. But time itself thwarted, something in their Contac, time-released lived lives that stalled the oldest and ever so slightly aged the youngest prematurely, the seven-year point spread of their existence narrowed to an arithmetic mean so that they all seemed to be about thirty-three years old—in their prime his guarantors of the prime rate. But withal, the solidarity broken for him like a code, known like a secret, his best gift—poor Ben, poor sick, sad Ben—his connoisseurship for their voices and faces, his wine buff’s palate for their Finsberg body and Finsberg being. A gift. God-given. Poor Ben. Poor sad, sick Ben. Then why, for God’s sake, did he prefer Lorenz to Irving, Irving to Oscar, Cole to Lorenz? Did he see nuances in twin and triplet character as well? Character? He? Him? Poor Ben? Poor Ben.)

  “Ben. How are you? Gee, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you for about two weeks. We called Phoenix Ford, we tried your H. Salt Fish, your Arthur Treacher in Stockton, the Jacuzzi Whirlpool in Columbus. Everywhere. We thought you might be at the Mister Softee in Rapid City, but the lines are down and we couldn’t get through.”

  “I’m in Colorado Springs.”

  “Colorado Springs? Are you looking over a new franchise, Ben?”

  “Why were you trying to reach me?”

  “It’s Mom, Ben.”

  “What happened? Cole, is something wrong with Estelle?”

  “She’s dead, Ben. She died ten days ago.”

  “Estelle?”

  “I guess that makes you head of the family.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean ‘head of the family’?”

  “Well, you’re the oldest, Ben. We figure that makes you our godfather.”

  “I’m your godcousin, your godbabybrother. How can I be your godfather?”