The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  When Ben reached the exit he took him to the first service station.

  Sure, he thought, back on the highway, the manageable ordinary, yes. And where was it to be found?

  Under the unicorn fast asleep.

  He had said big deal his remission was back, big deal he could shuffle a deck of cards, but in his motel room in Oklahoma City he used and savored his suddenly recovered powers.

  He trawled his right hand over the brocade spread, digging his fingers pleasantly into its rough plains, bristled as underbrush or stubble. He knew that his nerves were lying to him, that his brain had scrambled his sense of touch, that his fingertips moved over only temporarily coded textures, but there was a lump in his throat, and he was happy. This was the only reality he needed, had ever needed, to receive sensation in its more pleasant disguises, quenching after three years his nerves’ long thirst for the smooth, the soft. Happy is he, he thought, for whom gunny is as silk, burlap as cashmere, wool as percale, instead of—his experience of the past years—the other way around. He would have browsed textbooks of textiles like large tomes of wallpaper samples, would willingly have caressed all dry goods, all bolts, rolls, lengths, and swatches. He wanted jute between his fingers, sackcloth, linen, cambric, mohair. He longed to touch toweling, vicuna, worsted and jersey, tweed, homespun, duffel and mull. Serge, he thought, flannel. Muslin and calico. Chintz. He would have set his fingertips against the grain of sharkskin and dimity, gingham and voile, handled poplin and madras, satin and taffeta, the chiffons and the velvets. Corduroy, tulle, organdy, lace. Grosgrain, chenille. He was a sucker for seersucker, would have felt felt.

  Oh oh, he thought, son of his tailor pop and godson of many-costumed Finsberg, how queer a fit my punishment has been. How unsuitable. How wickedly fate has taken my measure. For three years and more, health’s yokel, its clock-sock boob, fetching stares from the natives, those fashion plates, all the customized robust. Men and women with muscle tone, good color, sound tactile good sense, their protein levels in the Swiss banks of being. What I have missed! How deprived! And of all the fabrics the one most missed was woman’s, and next to that, perhaps even before it, the natural feel of his own now middle-aged skin.

  He took himself in hand. Entered the shower. (He would not use soap, had no need for the protective glaze of lather.) Adjusted the temperature of the water with the thermostat of his body, his skin like a good thermometer, registering for the first time in years hot as hot, cold as cold, lukewarm as ecstasy. And focused the showerhead like a portrait photographer, shooting with needlepoint, fine spray, the splat of raindrop and heavy weathers of cloudburst. His body calling a spade a spade, even with his eyes closed discriminating, calling out the f-stops of velocity and feeling, feeling—God, had that gone too? had that abandoned him?—a strange sensation now, something new under the sun, no, something rerecognized—feeling wetness, distinguishing dampness, all the marvelous degrees from dry to soaked, the splendid spectrum of humidity.

  And when he left the shower stall—he had no need for the traction of bathmats, his balance, which had been slipping away now for months, had returned—he dived into the thick motel bath towels no longer rough to his skin as sandpaper or ground glass or cat-o’-nine-tails. He rubbed himself down, however, with a pulled-punch vigor, making the stinging noises of hygiene—bahrruh, prrrt, shashashashasha—but holding back at last, fearful lest he accidentally press some raw nerve which would, like a linchpin tumbler falling into place in a lock, cause his brain to renege on his remission and return his body to its zipper condition. So he dried his scalp gently, even as he made his curious warpath movements, and ventriloquized the whoops and yaps of a remembered zealousness. And combed his hair wet.

  And froze, alarmed and despairing because there was suddenly a queer, faintly burning, salt-in-wound sensation in the outside corners of his eyes. Oh, Christ, he thought. “Oh, God,” he said, “time’s up. I have counted my chickens. Death is not mocked.” And touched the tender spots where the gates of his disease were still open, where his M.S. had stood stupidly in the draft. And the tips of his forefingers came away wet. “Why, they’re tears,” he said in the profoundest wonder he had ever known. They’re tears and I felt them, my skin as honed as that! Feel them, feel them, delicate and baroque as the tracings of snails or the feathery strands of spiders. “Thank you,” he said. “Thanks. Thank you.” And lay naked on the bed, his skin taking the full force of the impression of the spread, imagining he could feel the warm reds and cool blues and neutral browns of its pattern beneath him, while the tears—he would not touch them, would not stanch them—flowed and flowed and finally stopped. And he could feel, enjoy, their evaporative lift. And even the molecular heft of the salt they left behind.

  Then he touched with the fingers of both hands every square inch of his body. And the insides of his ears. And explored his nostrils. And poked about in his mouth to feel his teeth on his fingers, his cavities, to touch his tongue and dip it into the well behind his jaw. And reached into his asshole, going deep as a doctor.

  His body was still there.

  He called the front desk and asked that a bellman be sent to his room.

  “Listen,” he told the man, “I’m going to give you ten dollars. I want you to send a woman. Cheap, expensive, I don’t care. I don’t care what color she is or what she looks like or anything about her age. I just want—”

  “You want to be chucked out of here, that’s what you want.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand—”

  “Mister, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning. Oklahoma City isn’t New York.”

  “Oh, I see,” Ben said, “the call girls haven’t started yet. I misunderstood. Oh, I see. Oh, that’s different.” He was addressing the bellman like a pimp but in his heart he felt as rehabilitated as Scrooge on Christmas morning. In another minute he would give him money to fetch a goose.

  “Put your clothes on,” the bellman said.

  “What? Oh.” He was still naked. Christ, had he traded his sanity for his remission? He couldn’t hope to explain. “Will you take the money anyway? I’m not—I didn’t know—look, I know what you’re thinking, what you’d have to be thinking, but it isn’t—It’s—Where’s my Bible?” he asked desperately.

  The bellman sneered and Ben, when the man had gone, laughed his ass off, the same one he could touch again with his fingers and feel when he wiped himself.

  Which didn’t butter any parsnips. He should have been at his Cinema I and Cinema II in the Draper Lake Shopping Mall, but he wasn’t leaving the motel till he got laid. He called his manager and said he was still in Wichita but was about to leave and would make it down by that evening.

  He dressed and went into the dining room and had his lunch. The waitress was a young and pretty girl, and under the napkin on his lap he had an immense hard-on. He chewed his food nervously and stammered when he asked the girl for water. He made her stand by while he added up his check and his brain raced with schemes to engage her personally. He ordered desserts he did not want, commented on the weather, what people did before there was air conditioning, how interesting it must be to work in a motel, meet all those people, American people, who lived—he recalled his rider’s phrase—in the middle of the middle class. “You learn,” he said wildly, “about their different tastes. I mean, coming from all over as they do, they bring, they, uh, bring their customs with them, their peculiar, well, er, folk dishes. That would be, uh, be a, a fair statement, wouldn’t it?”

  “Very fair,” she said. “In the morning the kids want Sugar Frosted Flakes and the grownups eat bacon and eggs.”

  “Yes. Well…”

  “Was there anything else? One of the girls is out today and I have her station, too.”

  “Anything else? No no. It was, er, delicious. My compliments to the chef.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “Yes. Well…Good luck, good luck to you. Only you can prevent forest fires,” he added lamely. He felt like an idiot
and tipped her two dollars for a three-dollar lunch. His salvation now, his only hope not to seem like a fool in her eyes, was to seem insane. Madness had a certain integrity which stupidity lacked.

  He started back to his room. It was absolutely necessary that he have a woman, yet, in a strange way, his desire had little to do with lust. Even his hard-on had been more a fact of his remission than of lasciviousness. He had told his brain what to do and it, in its new health, flexing all its recovered muscles, had done it. “See,” his brain said, “watch this. It’s like riding a bicycle.”

  A maid was making up the room across from his. He let himself in with his key and cleared the motel soap off the bathroom shelves and hid it in his suitcase. He scooped up the towels he had used and shoved them into the shower stall.

  “Miss,” he said, standing in the doorway of his room, “oh, miss?”

  “Yes yeah?” She looked to be a woman in her late forties or early fifties, but it was difficult to tell. She may have been an Indian. She was extremely short, very fat.

  “I don’t seem to have been left any soap.”

  “No yeah? Take from cart what you need.”

  “Oh.” He had had the idea she would bring it to him. He made a great to-do about selecting the soaps, strolling about the big canvas wagon as if it were a sweet table or a notions counter, looking into the cartons of matchbooks and the sheaves of treated shoe-shine cloths like bundles of fresh dollars in a teller’s drawer. He examined the cutlery of ballpoint pens and poked about among the waxy motel postcards and stationery. “Well,” he said, when the Indian woman came out with a roll of dirty bed linen, “there’s certainly a lot of things you have to remember to give out. All these pens and cloths and”—he looked directly into the woman’s face—“sanitary napkin disposal bags.”

  “Mnh.”

  “Oh hey,” he said, “look at that, will you? The sheets.” From where he was standing he could not see the sheets. “All crumpled and soiled…A lot goes on in a motel room, I bet.”

  “What yeah?”

  “I say, a lot goes on in a motel room that you and I wouldn’t know about. Or that I wouldn’t. You must see it all though. I mean, if you could only talk I bet you could tell some stories.” She had walked back into the room and started to make up the bed. Ben followed. “Could you use some help? I don’t claim to be much of a hand at making beds, but—uh, a little lady like you, I mean, well, if both of us…” She moved very quickly, so short she barely had to stoop to tuck in the sheets. Ben watched as, inverting the pillowcase and aligning one end of the pillow with it while holding the four edges, two of pillow and two of pillowcase, she flipped the pillow into its case. “That’s good,” Ben said. “I’m going to watch you closely on the next one. That’s a real time-saver.” She seemed unaware that he was in the room. “That’s really something,” he said when she had done it again with a second pillow. “That’s one of the tricks of the trade, I guess, what you pick up over the years. Yep yeah?” She had covered the bed with its spread. Ben took a deep breath. “I can’t get over how fast…I’ll bet you could muss up a bed and make it again with the same sheets without the housekeeper ever…Let me ask you something up front. Do you know what the hell I’m talking about?”

  “No yeah.”

  “All right. We’ll put it this way: You must get all kinds in a place like this. You must even get kinds like me.”

  “Yes yeah? You yeah?”

  “Lonely.”

  That was not it, of course. He was not lonely. He was coated with the need to use himself. Ben Flesh, the restored Bourbon, the found Louis, the exile returned and looking for ways, literally, to feel and make himself felt. He did not so much want to screw—he had screwed in the last three years; he had not run out of god-cousins; there was the “Looks-Like Lady,” the “Way to Make a Million Dollars Lady,” there were others, some even who were not his godcousins—as to touch another human being, to hold someone, to feel their two lives, his, the other’s, like sparks arcing between two rods, to catch a pulse—this morning, lying on the bed after his shower, he had taken his own pulse, able to feel for the first time in years in the tips of his fingers the rhythm of his blood—his hands like heat-seeking devices, holding the life signs and interior parameters of another human, to feel her tremble, to hold her and feel her sweat, to know her body temperature and search out beneath her skin the muscles and bones, to feel hair and know it from flesh and flesh from cosmetics and with his eyes closed trace the calluses on her fingers and distinguish the fine down on her arms. His disease had deadened others as well as himself, had turned whole populations to wood and stone and given them the dead, neutral texture of plastic. It needn’t even be a woman. A child would do. He would have pinched cheeks and held their small heads, or dandled babies on his lap, and the squirmier the better. Oh yes. And been arrested. The curious fact of his civilization was that all intimacies save the ultimate were out of the question. You could fuck but not touch. He wanted nothing more now than to stand beside this small woman and close with her, feel her breath on his hand, or even, just to shake hands with her. But it was impossible, finally, to ask. She would have to know his life. From the beginning to this moment. Then, the most curious thing of all, she would yield, lending him her humanity as eagerly as if he had been her child. They would lie beside each other and he could touch her wherever he wished. She would run her finger across his palm. He would let down her hair. Everything would be permitted, nothing withheld. But it was impossible. There were no words save those of proposition and he could humiliate neither himself nor her any longer. “Thank you,” he said, “for the soap. You’re very kind.”

  And a few minutes later—he was on the way to Cinema I and II, the hell with what his manager might think—he saw something which made him stop his car. He looked about desperately for a place to park, a vacant meter. Someone was pulling out a dozen yards down the street. He moved quickly to protect the parking space. He had no change for the meter and only about five minutes of parking time remained on it. To hell with it, let them give him a ticket, let them tow.

  He walked inside.

  “You’re next, mister.”

  “The works,” Flesh said, and climbed into the barber chair.

  “Shine?” a black man asked.

  “Yes, yes, please,” Flesh said. He whispered to the barber.

  “Dorothy,” the barber said, “the gentleman wants a manicure.”

  “Get the cuticles,” Ben said, “don’t forget the cuticles.”

  The girl brought her tray and stool up to Ben’s chair. “The cuticles are part of the treatment,” she said.

  “Yes,” Ben said, “of course.” She held his right hand powerfully and began to file his nails. “Yes,” he said, “that’s good. That’s very good. And a soak?”

  “It’s all part of the treatment,” she said.

  “Part of the treatment, yes,” he said, and surrendered his hand to the warm soapy water and his face to the hot towel and his feet to the vigorous movements of the black man’s hands, the wonderful tickling sensation when he ran the polish-dipped toothbrush around the base of Ben’s shoes. And to the tears under the towel that came from his connection to these three people, and even to the sobs, the huge heavy heavings of his cured chest that they would see under even the great loose barber’s sheet that covered him.

  The Franchiser goes to his movie.

  My movie is wonderfully splendid. The white stone building looks something like a naval officer’s hat. I know only approximately what a parabola is, but my movie is paraboloid, I think. It isn’t rectangular, it isn’t flat; the rear wall—where the screens are, the cyclorama, I believe—is higher than the front or side walls. A naval officer’s hat, a pilot’s, something pinched and rakish, like, given distance, low furniture. The entrance is boulder and Thermopane, the boulders tan as Hush Puppies, broken ovals and oblongs of stone, snugged in their mortar mounting like facets. In daylight the tall, thick Thermopane is faintly green
, pale as martini or bath water. Outside, along an angled, projecting corridor of bouldered wall are the movie’s locked framed glass cases—I have a key to these displays, I carry it on my Prince Gardner, top-grain cowhide key holder—where my movie’s beautiful posters are sealed beneath the permanent rubric: Now Playing. (And the posters are beautiful, so much better than the stagy, glossy stills of the old days with their look, even if the picture was actually in Technicolor, of having been tinted, cosmetized, rouge on the actors’ cheeks, eye shadow visible as birthmark above their eyes, stills like tableaux in a wax museum, like the mortician’s finagling. The posters are much better. Art work. Line drawings. Spare and promising. Logotypes even the shut-in—the big weekend ads in the Friday and Sunday papers—has by heart. As much a part of the film’s image as its theme music. No, but I saw the poster.)

  Inside the lobby—more later—to the side, the movie’s twin ticket booths like tellers’ cages, the stainless chrome panels like a double sink, which spit out my movie’s lovely oversize tickets, wide as 35-millimeter film, yellow with a narrow blue edge like a soundtrack, and capable—depending who springs, how large the party—of producing a string of tickets long as a yardstick, longer.

  The movie’s glass candy cases as big around as a boy’s bedroom. With their gorgeous tiers of cellophane-wrapped, cardboard candy boxes with their miniatures—their individually sheathed Heaths and Peter Paul’s Mounds and Almond Joys and Milky Ways and Mars. Milk Duds and jujubes like boxes of marbles. No bars any more. Oh, the immense dark Hershey’s of course, yellow Butterfingers long as a ruler (seventy-five cents some of them, practically nothing under forty-five cents). And popcorn in cylinders large as Quaker Oats boxes, with dollops of my movie’s drawn butter and high drifts of buff popcorn in the greased glass case like a spell of cockeyed weather. (We have done away with the hot dogs, slow rolling in grilled place like logs in a river.) And my movie’s juices, its carefully sized grape drinks and orange, its Pepsi and Fresca and Seven-Up. My movie’s immense carats of crushed ice, its napkin dispensers and straws.