The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “I said,” he said, “I want to talk business. I’m no businessman, but I know all there is to know. I want you to know, too. I’m talking to you, Noël. I’m talking to Cole and Gus-Ira and Oscar and Sigmund-Rudolf and Moss and Lorenz. You, Jerome, I’m talking to you. Because I see what it is here. Lotte’s dead—Estelle. I see what it is here. The men have the votes.”

  “The votes,” Sigmund-Rudolf said, “oh, please.”

  “The men have the votes,” Ben said. “I’m answerable to the corporation. All right. You want to know about business? You want to be filled in, I’ll fill you in. The economy. All right. The energy crisis…There isn’t enough.”

  “Come on, Ben,” Lorenz said.

  “I’m talking energy,” Ben said. “There isn’t enough. There isn’t enough in the world to run the world. There never was. How could there be? The world is a miracle, history’s and the universe’s long shot. It runs uphill. It’s a miracle. Drive up and down in it as I do. Look close at it. See its moving parts, its cranes and car parks and theater districts. It can’t be. It could never have happened. It’s a miracle. I see it but I don’t believe it. The housing projects, for God’s sake, the trolley tracks and side streets, all the equipment on runways, all the crap on docks. Refineries, containers for oil, water tanks on their high tees like immense golf balls. The complicated ports with their forklift trucks and winches. All the hawsers, tackle, sheets, and guys. All the braided, complex cable. All the gantry, all the plinth. The jacks and struts all the. The planet’s rigging like knots in shoes. The joists and girders, trivets, chocks. Oh, oh, the unleavened world. Groan and groan against the gravity in stuff. How’s business? How’s dead weight? Archimedes, thou shouldst be living at this hour! How do we handle the barbell earth? With levers and pulleys and derricks and hoists. With bucket brigades of Egyptian Jews tossing up pyramids stone by stone. How’s business? They’re not hiring in Stonehenge, they’re laying them off in the Easter Isles. How’s industry? Very heavy.

  “Where shall we get the churches, how shall we have the money for the schools and the symphonies and stadia, for the sweet water and railroads, all the civilized up-front vigorish that attracts industry and pulls the big money?

  “It ain’t in me. I couldn’t have made the world. I couldn’t have imagined it. My God, I can barely live in it.

  “Though it may be a franchiser, I think, who’ll save us. Kiss off the neighborhood grocers and corner druggists and little shoemakers. A franchiser. Yes. Speaking some Esperanto of simple need, answering appetite with convenience foods. Some Howard Johnson yet to be.

  “But I don’t know. There isn’t enough energy to drive my body. How can there be enough to run Akron?”

  “Oh, Ben.”

  “But I may lie with you? You heard her, Cole; you’re a witness, Lorenz. I may tuck in with Patty. I have her word.”

  “You have her word,” one of them said.

  “What’s all this shit about dying?” Ben said. “For God’s sake, cheer up, we’re going to an unveiling.”

  They did not withdraw their pledge, their father’s pledge, to guarantee the prime rate. Though he had to pledge not to test them—in truth, he had rarely done so, except at the beginning—and when he left Riverdale nothing had really changed. Though he knew he had been given warning, was on notice, posted ground, thin ice. The boys had the votes.

  2

  He resumed his tour, his businessman’s Grand Rounds. From Oklahoma City he went to Amarillo, Texas, from Amarillo to Gallup, New Mexico, and then to Albuquerque. He did Salt Lake City and Elko, Nevada (where he made a two-hundred-mile dogleg to Boise to trade in his car for a ’75), and pushed on, Cadillac West, to Sacramento, California. Up through Oregon he traveled—Eugene, Portland—and climbing Washington—Seattle, Bellingham. Resting there, breathless, slouching along the broken coastline’s broken jaw like the underedge of a key. It was now high summer.

  Never, having told the Finsbergs that he was no businessman, was he one more consummately. At a time when the country was dragging the river for its economy, when inflation and stagflation and depression were general, he calmly carried on his shuttle finance.

  Nor am I talking merely about money now. For if I told the Finsbergs that I was no businessman, at least one of the things I meant was that it was money I had never properly understood. By which I mean coveted in sums large enough to make a difference. By which I mean rich. By which I mean so many things: seeking the tax shelters like lost caves, Northwest Passage, the hidden, swift currents, all those fiscal Gulf Streams that warm the cold places and make fools of the latitudes, topsy-turvying climate with the palm trees of Dublin and Vancouver’s moderated winters. Swiss banking my currency, anonymating it behind the peculiar laws of foreign government. Hedging against inflation with diamonds, gold, pictures, land. Seeking hobby farms or going where the subsidies were, the depletion allowances, all loophole’s vested, venerable kickbacks. Though I am not disparaging, have never disparaged, the value of money and understand full well, understand with the best of them—the richest and poorest—that peculiar sensation of loss and even insult concomitant with—not picking up checks; that’s never bothered me; no, nor getting stuck with the bad end of an unequal division, paying for wine I didn’t drink, splitting down the middle the cost of appetizers or desserts I never ordered, the lion’s share of the food going to the couple I am with (I am alone) but paying anyway, dollar for dollar, as if what is being paid for is a wedding gift one goes in on with a pal or a present for a secretary in the office, say, who’s going to Europe for the first time; and not even purchase, springing for an admired but overpriced jacket or shirt, yet feeling anyway because I do admire it, that I have gotten the best of it somehow, have only given money and gotten goods, fabric—the leakage of money: the terrible disruption of sensibility if, in a taxi, in the dark I have mistaken a ten for a five or a five for a single. Or breaking a fifty or even a twenty, disturbing the high, powerful round numbers of currency, and feeling actually wounded, or at least unpleasantly moved, irritated, insulted, as I say, suffering inordinately, as if from a paper cut or a chip of live cigarette dropped on my skin. Mourning like God my lost black-sheep bucks. Getting nothing for something’s what’s terrible. Misplacing change or not being able to account for twelve dollars which I knew I had. Oh awful, awful. Ruined, wiped out. A hole in my substance.

  But just that I never dreamed of being wealthy, never expected it, never did what would have to be done to be it. And I’m not poor-mouthing the big dough, money so important it ceases to be money, becomes—what?—capital, some avatar of asset and credit and reserve and parity, all the complicated solvency of diversification and portfolio. Let them fiddle the tariffs at their pleasure, for the fiduciary is only another foreign language to me, and I leave to others the ins and outs of tare and cess and octroi. All that I ever wanted was enough cash. Death duties never bothered me, only death. (And even at that, even with all my opportunities, all my missed chances, still I have had to do with the stuff. More than most. A guy with his money “tied up.” Think, think: a fellow with tied-up money. Knotted dough, bread braided as challah. Ben Flesh like those strapped Croesi. Well, not in their league, of course, not even in the towns which hold their ball parks, but nevertheless, except for living expenses—high on the highway—with the rest of that fraternity, what I have all in the frozen assets of the frozen custard: the rent and payrolls and equipment and insurance, the petty cash, all the incidentals.)

  But because in the last leg of my journey, on notice as I was, warned as I was, politely ultimatum’d, cautioned by the boys and only tenuously laissez-faire’d by the girls, who did not have the votes now anyway, Lotte’s suicide having shifted the balance of power and adulterated their fabulous consanguinity in some, to me, fathomless way—and how struck, hurt I had been to see them differentiated at last, to see their diversification, the awful introduction of nuance into their Finsberg portfolio—I knew that for the first time since the war,
when I had put in those long-distance calls to my dead, killed parents—who died, as I lived, on the highway—that I was alone. That something had been withdrawn in Riverdale, taken from me, the godcousinship which had been my ace-in-the-hole, my letter of credit to the world, the carte blanche smeared, shmutzed, and that I had only one peeled wire of connection left, Patty’s IOU. That I could lie beside her in death like a puppy at the foot of a kid’s bed.

  So what else was there to do? What choices did I have? Why, only to put on my decorous act of business-is-business propriety. To try to live as they had tried to teach me to live at Wharton. To try, as if I were cramming for an exam, to recall those principles of business administration, finance, and double-entry sobriety which are only finally solid solvency’s serious style.

  For the fact is that in all those years he had merely gotten what he wanted—enough cash. That he had spread himself too thin, that there had been too many split ends. Mister Softee in the frozen north, a Robo-Wash in a neighborhood where half the cars were destined to be repossessed, a Radio Shack in a Kentucky town where reception was lousy and there was only one FM multiplex station, a Baskin-Robbins in a section of Kansas City too far from any neighborhood for there to be kids, a dance studio in a part of town where people wouldn’t even walk at night, a dry cleaner in a wash-and-wear world. As if he could live forever, outlast the phases, eras, and epochs of faddish geography and sociology. Like a player of Monopoly who built his hotels on Baltic and Mediterranean and Ventnor Avenues, say, all those low-rent districts of the spirit, whose strategy it was to go to jail as often as he could, to stay there as long as he could, and to win by attrition. Some strategy. Who did not turn out to have the body for strategies of attrition, for whom attrition was a reflexive disease. Who, going such distances, could not go the distance. Some strategy. And all it ever got him was all he ever wanted: enough cash, lolly, dough, brass, spondulicks—the ready. And if he bought and sold so much, if he was so active, perhaps, too, there was something else he wanted, something nobler and more spiritual even than enough cash: something no less than empire itself—to be the man who made America look like America, who made America famous. What had he called it for the murderously divided twins and triplets? Oh yes. The “Esperanto of simple need.” Convenience necessity and the universalized appetite. And if the outskirts of Chicago resembled Connecticut or Tulsa Cleveland and Cleveland Omaha and the north the west and the west the south and east, why he’d had a finger in it, more than a finger—some finger!—a hand. Some hand. There wasn’t a television in all the thousands of motel rooms in which he’d slept which wouldn’t show him in the course of a single evening at least two sponsored minutes of the homogenized, coast-to-coast America he’d helped design, costuming the states, getting Kansas up like Pennsylvania, Georgia like New York. Why he was a Finsberg! A Julius and his own father Flesh, too, loose and at large in his beautiful musical comedy democracy!

  Yes. Loose. At large! Those were the operative words now. So what else was there to do? What choices did I have? None but to dredge up Wharton, recalling the patter like a foreign language.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’d like a word with Friendly Bob Adams, please, Miss. My name is Ben Flesh.”

  “Ben,” friendly Bob, spotting him, said, “I expected you last week. When you didn’t come I tried to—”

  “I’m sorry. I should have gotten you on the blower. I had to fly back to New York on some rather urgent business. I hope this isn’t an inconvenient—”

  “No, no, of course not,” Adams said, smiling and taking his hand warmly. “Harriet, this is Mr. Flesh. Harriet’s our new receptionist, Ben.”

  “How do you do, Harriet?” Harriet smiled. “She looks a crackerjack girl, Friendly. What happened to—it was Jean, wasn’t it?”

  “She turned sourpuss, Ben. She wouldn’t let a smile be her umbrella. I had to get rid of her.”

  “Of course. Nice to see you, Harriet. Miss—”

  “Lapaloosa.”

  “Look at the teeth on her, Ben. When she grins.”

  “Very good to have you with us, Miss Lapaloosa. Oh, say, Adams, since I am running late, it might be a good idea if we skipped lunch this time. I’d like to take some things up with you.”

  “Of course, Ben. Why don’t we go back to my office?”

  “Splendid,” Ben said. Then, in his manager’s office, he let him have it.

  “Cash flow,” he said, “hard times.”

  “Demand has never been—”

  “Hard times. Hard. The price of money to us. Ten cents on the dollar. The truth-in-lending laws. Price tags on our dollars like notarized statements from the appraiser.”

  “But demand, Ben, the phone never stops ringing. They don’t care, Ben, they don’t. You think someone down on his luck comparison shops? We do the arithmetic for them, we show them the vigorish like a cop reading them their civil rights, and they still don’t care. ‘Where do I sign?’ they want to know. ‘How soon do I get the money?’ ”

  “And this doesn’t make you suspicious? Wipe that smile off your face, Friendly. This doesn’t make you suspicious? You’ve got a good heart, you weren’t cut out to be a shylock. Schmuck, of course they don’t care. They know about bankruptcy. Sylvia Porter tells them in the papers.”

  “But the credit checks, Ben, we run credit checks, we know exactly—”

  “Yesterday’s newspapers, kid, history. Yesterday’s news, last year’s prospecti. The times have changed on them, their mood has, their disposition. A depression comes, the first thing that goes, after the meat on the table, after the fruit in the bowl, the first thing that goes is optimism, the belief they can pay back what they owe.”

  “We can garnishee—”

  “What? What can we garnishee? Their unemployment checks? Their workman’s compensation? What can we garnishee? Their allowance from the union? What, what can we garnishee? The widow’s mite? The plastic collateral? What can we garnishee? We going to play tug-of-war with the dealer to repossess the car? We take their furniture? Their color TV? And do what? We got a warehouse? We got storage facilities? Tracts of land in the desert for all the mothball fleet of a bankrupt’s detritus? Credit checks! On what? Old times? The good old days? It doesn’t make you suspicious white-collar guys come to you for dough? College graduates? The class of ’58? That doesn’t bother you? Your ear ain’t to the ground? Take your credit checks in the men’s toilet. Hear what they’re saying in those circles. Sneak up behind them where they eat their lunch, taking their sandwiches from a paper bag, their milk from mayonnaise jars, because these are the people never owned a lunch pail, a pencil box of food, who wouldn’t recognize a thermos unless it was beside a Scotch cooler on a checkered cloth spread out on the lawn for a picnic. Fuck your credit checks, cancel them they bounce. Overhear the rumors they overhear—the layoffs, the open-ended furloughs coming just after the Christmas upswing, the plants closing down in this industry and that, and only a skeleton crew to bank the furnaces, only the night-watchman industry booming because we live in the time of the looters, of the plate-glass smashers, in the age of the plucked toaster from the storefront window and somebody else snitches the white bread. This is the credit you’re running down? No no. They won’t pay. They can’t. And they don’t care.”

  “But so far…”

  “Sure so far, certainly so far. So far is no distance at all. I’m shutting us down, I’m getting us out. Even now I am negotiating with banks and savings and loans and even with shylocks to buy up our paper at a discount.” Friendly Bob Adams had stopped smiling. It was the first time Flesh had seen him unhappy. It was very strange. His expansiveness gone, he seemed not so much sad as winded. Ben gave him a chance to catch his breath. Adams shook his head slowly. He moved from behind his desk and past the safe where they kept the money and to the window, where he looked out onto the street.

  “You’ll find something,” Flesh said. “I tell you what. If nothing turns up you can always come back to m
e. I’ll find a place for you in a different franchise. I’m not getting out of everything. I’m simply taking stock, inventorying my situation, trimming my sails. Don’t worry. You’ll be all right. I swear to you.”

  “It isn’t that,” Adams said.

  “It isn’t what?”

  “It isn’t that. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I can make it.”

  “Sure you can,” Ben said.

  “It isn’t me.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “Sure,” he said. He looked stricken.

  “What is it?”

  “Miss Lapaloosa,” he said. “You know me, Ben,” he said, “my make-up. I’m sunshine soldier, summer patriot.”

  “Yes?”

  “Jean was different. When she turned sourpuss I had to let her go. She depressed me. She tried my friendliness.”

  “You want me to fire Miss Lapaloosa? Is that it?”

  “You saw,” he said. “That smile. That was from the heart, Ben.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Would you?”

  “No problem.”

  “That’s swell, Ben. That’s a load off my chest.”

  “She’s as good as out on her ass this minute.”

  “You’re all right, Ben,” Friendly Bob Adams said.

  And giving them the benefit of his best judgment at Railroad Salvage.

  “It’s all wrong,” he said, walking with his manager up and down the big hangar-like room, past the bins of canned goods, the stands of steamer trunks and open drawers of hardware—nails, tacks, screws, bits of pipe, washers, bolts, and nuts—like boxes of font, the appliances, mixed, blenders next to portable radios, side by side with steam irons, waffle irons above pressure cookers, toasters and hot plates and bathroom scales laid out on shelves like prizes in a carnival booth. Past the toys, the bins of practical jokes—fake dog poop, joy buzzers, dismembered suppurating fingers, whoopee cushions—like a warehouse of toy pain and joke shit. Through wall-less, shuffled rooms of cheap furniture, kitchen tables set up beside bedroom sets and next to raised toilet seats, vanities, double basins, sinks heavily fixtured as consoles in control towers next to porch furniture, lawn—swings, hammocks, chaise longues, big barbecues like immense cake dishes—beside living rooms that melded into each other, stocky Mediterranean alongside Mapley Colonial and near art-deco Barcaloungers, stack tables, glass and aluminum pieces, a dozen different kinds of lamps. Polyglot as the site of a tornado. “It’s all wrong, it won’t do.”