The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

“I want smoking permitted back of the first ten rows. There’s to be no public announcement. You’ll continue to run the ‘Fire Regulations Prohibit Smoking in Any Part of This Theater’ footage, but don’t do anything about enforcement. In the beginning you can have one or two of the ushers light up. This will serve as a signal. When the inspector registers a complaint, offer him a self-perpetuating free pass. If he doesn’t go for it, call the Fire Commissioner. Discuss it with him. Mention one thousand dollars. If he gives you static, go back three spaces, play it their way.

  “Candy: I want vending machines put in. No gum, of course. Gum fucks up a theater. Just good, relatively inexpensive stuff. Name brands. You can keep the soft-drink and popcorn apparatus where it is, but replace the candy with paperback versions of the books the movies are based on. With records of the score if it’s a good one. The Sting, for example, Love Story. As a matter of fact, stock up on all the good movie music. Get an inventory together. And movie mags: Silver Screen, Photoplay. Posters are very big. Get in some Robert Redfords, Marlon Brandos, W. C. Fieldses, that sort of thing. Why should the headshops get all the play? Let’s get off our asses, Lockwire. I want to make Cinema I, Cinema II a goddamned Grauman’s Chinese, a regular little Merchandise Mart of the spin-off. Use those shops in museums where they sell postcards, art books, and twenty-five-buck reproductions of famous statuary as your model, those goofy imported handmade toys. We’ll make the candy girl—that redhead—our curator. Take her uniform away. Get her a smock and a patch that goes on the shoulder that says ‘Volunteer,’ or ‘Friends of Cinema I, Cinema II.’ Something like that.”

  “But…”

  “I’m way ahead of you. You’re thinking about the movies, what happens if we try to turn the place into an art house. We don’t. We run the same stuff. Blockbusters. Every movie a picture. You even hear Al Pacino, Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Redford, you grab. They make a James Bond sequel you raise your finger, jerk your earlobe. And after the Academy Awards don’t fart around with reruns, ads in the paper ‘Nominated for Seven Academy Awards.’ Forget that crowd. Go on to the next blockbuster. Roll it! You got TV?”

  “TV?”

  “TV. Television. You got TV?”

  “Well, certainly. Of course. Who doesn’t have T—”

  “In your office?”

  “In my office? No. Not in my office.”

  “Get a little Sony. Watch Merv. Watch Johnny. Watch Mike. Get up early in the morning. Watch Barbara, watch Gene. They told us about The Exorcist. They told us about Last Tango. They told us about Harry and Tonto. What, you think it’s only the energy czars go on those programs? Stop, look, and listen, Lockwire. If you hear about it twice, it’s a blockbuster. Three times and it’s S.R.O. They have a lot to tell us.”

  “To tell us.”

  “To tell them. Us. Them. They have the franchise on the public taste. I don’t know how they do it. Magicians. But they know. They know and know. An exhibitor can learn more from those five guys than from forty junkets to the screening rooms of Los Angeles and New York. I’ll give you a tip. Don’t ever for one minute trust your own taste. Don’t trust mine. Where do you think I’d be today if I trusted my taste? Trust theirs—Barb’s and Johnny’s, Gene’s and Mike’s. Trust Merv’s. Those fellows are geniuses!”

  “We’ve been doing pretty well. I’ll show you the figures.”

  “You don’t have to. The figures are beautiful. I could qvell from the figures. You’d show me figures I’d go ‘hubba hubba,’ I’d follow them blocks and buy them a beer. We’re talking business—turnover, overhead, buy cheap, sell high.

  “I want free passes in every thousandth popcorn box. If they say the secret word at the box office, give them double their money back. Invent, inaugurate, introduce, make up. Let there be ‘Special Daylight Savings Time Matinee’; package deals—they pay two-fifty for the show at Cinema I, you take off seventy-five cents for a ticket to Cinema II. Cards. Print up reaction cards. They fill in the blanks, you give them a fifty-cent rebate. Four stars, three, two, one, a half. Let them feel like critics. You do different categories: lighting, best performance by an animal, an Indian, a bad guy, an orphan over nine. Stuff about costumes, crap about sex.

  “Look, Lockwire, hound them, please. Stick a line in our advertising that we run only those films that have no radiation hazards.”

  “But no films—”

  “Then where’s the lie? What’s the harm? Break their bad TV habits. Hound them, please. Did you know that more people collapse while jogging than while watching a flick, that there are fewer deaths per hundred thousand in motion-picture houses than in airplanes, football stadia, bathtubs, beds, restaurants, or living rooms?”

  “Are there?”

  “Who knows, but that’s where to hit them, in their life span. That’s where they live. Where we all live. If you would know me, learn my blood pressure, count my cholesterol, and taste my lipids. If you would look into my heart, read my cardiogram. Check my protein level every five thousand miles. A man’s character is his health, Lockwire, and I feel crummy, Egypt, crummy.”

  He had been pacing up and down in Lockwire’s small office, excited, thinking to slow the force of his new symptoms by ignoring them, by concentrating on business, making the staggered kidney-shaped journey about Lockwire’s desk, passing by the small, discreet safe, by the telephone-answering device that gave out recorded information about what films were currently being shown, their stars and ratings and show times. He looked at the telephone, glanced at Lockwire.

  “Put it on.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Put it on. Let me hear.”

  “It’s just a recorded announcement. It saves time, the girls don’t have time to—”

  “Put it on.”

  Lockwire fiddled with some buttons, played the tape. His voice said, “Thank you for calling Cinema I, Cinema II. Our feature presentation this week at Cinema I is The Longest Yard starring Burt Reynolds and Eddie Albert. The Longest Yard is rated R. No one under seventeen will be admitted unless accompanied by an adult. Performances of The Longest Yard will be at 1:00, 3:00, 5:10, 7:30, and 9:45. The feature at Cinema II is The Gambler, starring James Caan. Rated R, no one under seventeen may be admitted to The Gambler unless accompanied by an adult. Times are 1:15, 3:30, 5:50, 8:00, and 10:00. Cinema I, Cinema II is located in the Draper Lake Shopping Mall. Take Exit 11 off Interstate 35 or Exit 22 if you’re coming from U.S. 40. For additional information, please phone 736-2350. Thank you.”

  “Again,” Ben said. “Again, please.” He listened to Lockwire’s recording a second time. “That’s what I mean,” he said. “Lacks zip. Where’s the pep?”

  “Zip? Pep? It’s an information service, it’s supposed to be clear. People want to know what’s playing, when it goes on. They have to know if they can bring their kids.”

  Flesh nodded. “You think if we sent him a cassette we could get Burt Reynolds to read the copy? ‘Hi, this is Dinah’s great good friend, Burt Reynolds. Thanks for calling Cinema I, Cinema II. The feature this week, etc., etc.’ Then he finishes with ‘Ladies and gentlemen—James Caan!’ ‘Thanks, Burt. Burt Reynolds, ladies and gentlemen, a terrific guy and a dynamite H-bomb flick. At Cinema II today, I’m doing The Gambler, which I really think you’d enjoy. I read seventy-eight scripts, some of which I thought might actually work for me, but when they showed me The Gambler I knew this was it. I mean like, wow, this is the sort of part an actor could wait ten years to do. And while I guess I shouldn’t be blowing my own horn, I think I’m as proud of myself and my coworkers as it’s possible to be. You can catch The Gambler at 1:15, 3:30, 5:50, 8:00, and 10:00. Take Exit 11 off good old Interstate 35 or Exit 22 if you’re coming from good old U.S. 40. Fight cancer with a checkup and a check.’ ”

  Lockwire stared at him.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “what do you bet they’ll do it? You know how to reach these people. Find out and get back to me. It wouldn’t hurt to throw in a couple of Rona Barrett items eithe
r. Get back to me. I want to see lines. I want to see Oklahoma City policemen doing traffic control like it was the High Holidays and people are coming out of shul.”

  Lockwire shook his head in wonder.

  “Yeah,” Ben Flesh said, “that’s right. Get back to me.” And still the Jacuzzi Whirlpool was in the franchiser’s skin, Magic Fingers in his businessman’s tissue, all his body pinned and needled. Oh oh oh, his milled being, all his flesh grooved as the stem that winds your watch.

  Back at the motel there was a message for him. He called the desk.

  “Yes, Mr. Flesh, just a minute, please. I took it down myself. I put it—yes, here it is. ‘Please tell Mr. Ben Flesh that if it’s at all possible he should catch a flight out of Oklahoma City and come to New York. He is needed in Riverdale.’ ”

  IV

  It would have been wrong to call. The message was clear enough. He was needed in Riverdale, they said. To call, even to ask what was wrong, could be read as extenuation, a sort of plea bargaining. It had been their arrangement—his, the twins’ and triplets’—to serve, forever to come through, simply to be there when the chips were down, the mutual designated hitters of each other’s lives, the gut priorities of love. Yet did he love them? Had they loved him? How well? Was it not rather into a life-long category of mascot that they had enlisted him? (This thought out while still on the flight to LaGuardia, so, as far as he could determine, no damage done, those instincts still alive in him, for all the haywiring of his nerves, to set aside the at hand, the this, then this, then that sequences of his life, by which he meant, of course, his plans.) Yet emergency had its advantages, too. It took, like so many weeks in the sun, years off. There was, it was impossible to mistake it, a kind of bittersweet glamour in the big-time, big-stuff catastrophes of interruptions and drastically changed plans. He thought of scenes in pubs in certain films of the forties—Finsberg’s years—of men and women in nightclubs, in rich men’s mansions, their lawns and ballrooms done up in prom prospect, their dreamy society dance bands driving out the world, covering it with moony fox-trot and the claims of love. Then someone makes an announcement, the host himself, perhaps, that honest, understanding squire of a man. “It’s war, ladies and gentlemen.” Or glances at a scrap of paper the butler has handed him, nods, thanks his servant, signals his orchestra leader—it is almost prearranged, this transoceanic seriousness that shouts from his eyes like an agreement—and the music stops, though comically the drummer, looking down, still continues to work his traps and top hat and snares and the fiddlers bow their instruments and the saxophones croon till, hearing the silences around them, they look up, surprised as people on whom jokes have been played, and a few last dregs of music, even after they have stopped, clatter like dropped marbles, an orchestra tuning up in reverse, and, in the silence, the man finally speaks, almost apologetically. “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.” “The barbarians are at the gates.” “The British are coming.” “The Visigoths have entered Marseilles.” And the dancing partners push off from each other as if it were a step in the dance. “I have to get back to my unit. I’m sorry.” And a hundred young officers the same. And inside all this seriousness and farewell, within this altered mood while life zeroes in on the tragic, a joy, too. A joy and pride in deflection, in being deflected. Decamped. Debouched. No time really for the last embrace, kiss, which is, one feels, suffered, the young bloods reduced somehow to nephews again, their girlfriends avatar’d to well-meaning aunts. Yes. Years off. Years. So if he didn’t call, if he went automatically to his Finsberg unit, maybe it was no feather in his cap after all. He was returning to Riverdale a younger man than he had left, and perhaps it was not so much that he loved the Finsbergs as that he hated his life.

  Well, he did. He thought he did. What had happened to him. (His unbecoming, he meant, pulled back through geologic time to neanderthal condition. Perhaps his jaws would clamp and he would be unable to walk upright or use tools. Cold, cold, the descent of Ben, his pre-Leakey, pithecanthropic fate.) And yes, was pleased, was certain that whatever was waiting for him in Riverdale—he hadn’t called; “if it’s at all possible,” the message said; he hadn’t called, was that why? was “if it’s at all possible” the loophole of extenuation that could have kept him in Oklahoma City had he called and discovered what? that no one was worse off than himself?—it would be better than what he left behind. For all he had left behind—the lion’s share of his clothing, of course, his valises, the motel room he continued to pay for even though he would not be occupying it, his precious car, the latest of the late-model Cadillacs—was his itinerary. Which was what he had in lieu of a life. His ridiculous itinerary like an old treasure map, his itinerary, no master plan or blueprint but only his itinerary like a mnemonic string round his finger. Only that. His itinerary. He could have wept.

  When the plane landed in St. Louis for a fifteen-minute stopover, he briefly considered deplaning, calling New York, for if it wasn’t necessary that he come, then his coming was all the more an admission of his, Flesh’s, need to come. If he was ready to admit that, then he was ready to admit it all. That his life hadn’t worked. How awful. How terrible.

  He had flown first class, and while they were still on the ground he asked the stewardess for a drink. It was against federal regulations, she said. He could not be served till they were in the sky. “Sorry.”

  “I understand. It’s all right. I will be served in the sky,” he said.

  And was drunk—martinis—when he landed at LaGuardia. (Only two cocktails were permitted a passenger—more federal regulations—but he worked out a deal with a man across the aisle who didn’t drink.) And whiled away the two hours not with the headset or the magazines but by looking out the window, studying an America he was too far above to see. Studying the American heavens over Oklahoma, over Missouri, over Illinois, over Indiana, over Ohio, over Pennsylvania, seeing (or not seeing) from one angle what he knew so well from another, and feeling—wasn’t it odd?—its ultimate homogeneity, a homogeneity squared, the final monolithism of his country, the last and loftiest franchise, the air, the sky, all distinctions, whichever remained intact, whichever he had been unable to demolish in his capacity as franchiser, as absent, as blasted away as the tactile capacities of his poor mother-fuck fingers and his lousy son of a bitch hands.

  “Cole?” Ben said.

  “It’s Lorenz, Ben,” Lorenz said.

  “Hi, Ben.”

  “Hello, Gus-Ira.”

  “I’m Moss,” Moss said.

  “What’s happened?” One of the godcousins shrugged. “Jerome?” Ben said.

  “Maxene,” Maxene said.

  “I don’t get it,” Ben said. “What’s happened?”

  “Folks change, Ben.”

  “Is that you, Noël?”

  “Yes,” Noël said.

  “Jesus,” Ben said. It wasn’t anything he could actually put his finger on—but what was, eh?—but in the two or three years since he had last seen them all together they had changed. Though they were unmistakably brothers and sisters, even unmistakably twins and triplets, and even just possibly still unmistakably identical twins and triplets rather than simply fraternal, something had altered, the coarsening of a feature here, the flattening of another there; and now that they no longer looked absolutely alike he had, for the first time since he had known them, difficulty telling them apart. When he had mistaken Lorenz for Cole, Moss for Gus-Ira, and Maxene for Jerome, a few of the sibs had begun to make those nervous overtures of the nostrils and edges of the mouth prefatory to crying. (Christ, he thought, their identicals are in remission.)

  “Hey,” Ben said, “hey.”

  “It’s just that I’m pregnant,” Gertrude said. “That’s all. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m pregnant, I’d still look the same. When Ethel was pregnant with Anthony-Leslie she changed, too. Then afterward she, she—” Gertrude’s jaw trembled.

  “Hey,” Ben said.

  “I was never the same afterward,” Eth
el said.

  “It’s got nothing to do with pregnancy, Gertrude. It’s got nothing to do with pregnancy, Ethel. I never got knocked up, but it’s the same story. With me it was teeth. I had a couple of bad teeth that had to be pulled. The dentist made a bridge. I couldn’t get used to wearing it. My mouth—I don’t know—My mouth changed. It settled. Like a house.”

  “Your mouth looks fine,” Ben said. He wasn’t certain whom he was addressing.

  “Yeah? Does it? Yeah? I go into a men’s room and they think I’m the cocksucker.”

  It had to be Oscar. He had seen Irving in St. Louis and “the cocksucker” was what they called the mincing, epicene Sigmund-Rudolf, whose disease it was to act like a fairy but be none. It had to be Oscar. It was like being a participant in a brain teaser, set down live in some puzzle condition. Three men of equal intelligence stand in a straight line one behind the other. They may not look around. A fourth man comes by. He has five hats, three white and two black. He puts a hat on each man and says he will give a hundred dollars to the man who can first say what color hat he’s wearing. The first man in the line tells him the color of the hat on his head and wins the hundred dollars. What color is his hat and what is his reasoning? Cole, Lorenz, Gus-Ira, Moss, Jerome, and Noël had been accounted for. The person had said “men’s room.” Ben had seen Irving just weeks ago in St. Louis. Sigmund-Rudolf was called “the cocksucker.” It had to be Oscar. So now he lived on the high pure level of the logical. Ben Flesh like the featureless and perfect character in a conundrum. It had to be Oscar.

  “It’s true,” Kitty said. “Something happens.”

  “Kitty?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Hello, Kitty.”

  “It’s true. Hello. Something happens. You prime it out. In your thirties. You go off like milk.”

  “Well, I think you all look just fine,” Ben said. It was so. They would be what now? The youngest thirty-four, the oldest forty. Why, he was only forty-eight himself—though he thought of himself as older—and they had somehow become his contemporaries. Yet it was so that they looked fine, their paunches and heft only signals of the good uses to which life had put them. Evidence. The smoking guns of their existence. And if this made them less magical, it made them, for him, only a little less magical. (Then he did love them.) To them apparently a miss was as good as a mile, however.