The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “Business hasn’t been bad, Mr. Flesh. Sure, the economy’s in a bind right now. Things are a little tight, but our figures are only marginally behind last year’s. Down maybe 7 or 8 percent, but there’ll be an upturn. The President says, his advisers think—”

  “It won’t do. Bring a hammer. Get a nail.”

  “A hammer? A nail?”

  “Have you got a piece of glass somewhere? From costume jewelry. Fetch a zircon.”

  “But I—”

  “Do it,” Flesh said.

  His manager whispered something to a stock boy who was passing by. When the boy returned Flesh took the hammer from him, beckoned them both to follow. The kid caddied Ben’s zircon, his nail.

  They returned to the bins of canned goods. Ben set a can of peas down on the cement floor and, stooping, carefully slammed at the top of the can. “See?” he said, holding it up, “now it looks damaged. Hand me the nail. See,” he said, “you make a little scratch on the label. Don’t tear it all off, just a little scratch.” He straightened up. “Here and there. I don’t mean everything. But here and there. Use the zircon to scar the glass tabletops, the legs of coffee tables. Get tools that etch your driver’s license into metal. Burn long numbers on the back of TV sets. They’ll think stolen goods. Be careful. Don’t cut yourself. I don’t want anybody hurt.” He looked at them. “Goodwill Industries is killing us, they’re busting our brains. All right, I’m not really frightened of Mr. Goodwill Industries. Mr. Goodwill Industries is in for a kick in the ass, too. People aren’t so quick in these times to clear out their junk. They’ll make do. They won’t rifle their wardrobes or wring out their basements. Mr. Goodwill Industries is living on borrowed time. His sources are drying up. That’s when we make our move.

  “For people need junk,” he said. “There’s a hunger for the secondhand, the used, the abused. I don’t understand this need—me, give me a shiny motel by the side of the road and be a friend to man. But others, our others, the people who come here, there is a flotsam tropism in such people. The jetsam set. A longing deep as lust for the overboard, the castoff, what’s found in the plane wreck, what’s seared in the riot or ruined in the hold. The dead man’s new suit, the suicide’s coat, her shoes and her slip. People want such things. They have a sweet tooth for remnant, for rubbish, remainder. All the derelict and marooned, the ditched and scavenged. Debris, dregs, lees. Dregs addicts. All the multitudinous slag of the ordinary. Is it economy that puts this thirst in them? I don’t know but I don’t think so. I think acquisition, some squirrel vestige in the instincts, something miserly and niggardly, basic but not base, the things of the world as heirloom. The world as heirloom, handed down and continuing. History’s hugged dower. A sort of pin money in the shit in the attic.

  “Bang the canned goods. Put little holes in the shirttails. Dent the toasters, nick the toys. We’re Railroad Salvage, all aboard. We’re Railroad Salvage. Give them train wreck, give them capsize, give them totaled, head-on and what’s spilled to the road from the jackknifed rig.

  “Is this good business?” It was as if he were appealing to the Finsbergs rather than to his help. “Is this sound business practice? Efficient management? Solid policy?”

  As everywhere he went these days he was thinking of Finsbergs, addressing Finsbergs when he addressed his managers, their auras with him like cartoon consciences.

  “I want,” he told his people at Fotomat, “to see the pictures.”

  “The pictures?”

  “The pictures, the photographs, yes.”

  “That’s invasion of privacy, it’s like opening someone’s mail.”

  “We’re professionals. We’re developers here. It’s a customer service. Quality control. An audit. Show me,” he said, when they had shut down for the evening and he was assured no customers would come to claim their snapshots—it was a small butke of a building, a Checkpoint Charlie, a Mandelbaum Gate thing, a booth in the open center of a shopping mall—“Bring me a viewer for the slides, a magnifying glass for the contact prints.”

  “Mr. Flesh—”

  “It’s an audit, I tell you.”

  It was. Of American life. The human condition as it relaxed, as it sat for its portraits at birthday celebrations and family reunions, at weddings and picnics and summer vacations—it was just past the season of summer vacations—at special celebratory dinners and homecomings—soldiers, sailors with their duffels up on their shoulders, perched there like the parrots of adventure.

  “Look, look,” he said, providing the commentary, lecturing them like a man with home movies. “See, here’s the snowman in the yard, the children in leggings, in mittens on strings. See? Look how the girl has grown. How much higher her shoulders seem against the fence in the background, how the hedge has flowered. Oh, God, it’s the same roll. Three seasons on the same roll. Their aboveground pool stands closed like a piece of giant canned goods—see, see the tarp—yet in this one it’s open. The neighbor kid splashes. Oh oh. Three seasons. One roll of film. My. My oh my. Three. And only one roll shot.

  “Look, look here. Black and white. And—what’s this name?—Daigle. Daigle’s pictures are black and white, too. And Libby’s. And Rosenthal’s. Wheat’s are, Colameco’s. Black. Black and white. Tch tch.”

  “Black and white’s a faster film, Mr. Flesh.”

  “Of course it is. Yes. But—oh, oh,” he groaned, “these are outdoors. Outdoors and black and white!”

  “Some photographers prefer it. It’s better at stopping action.”

  “These are people,” Flesh cried. “These are people, not photographers. And what, you need a fast film for this? Can’t you see? It’s their house. They’re selling their house. What’s the address here? Let’s see the envelope. Two sixty-one Crownsville. Where’s that? What sort of neighborhood? Changing I’ll bet. Sure, that must be it. See? Here in this picture, the kids in the street, two of them black. The neighborhood’s changing, the film’s black and white. All over the same story. Oh the inroads and encroachments. Posing their houses for realtors’ books. This block is busted. You can kiss it goodbye.”

  “I don’t—”

  “They have Polaroids. The blacks. They have Polaroids! It’s only natural, what do you think? They’re impatient. They‘ve had to wait. They have Polaroids. They want results. They hold the film in their hand and watch the faces bloom like flowers. It reminds them of Madam Palmyra’s crystal ball. We’re ruined, ruined.”

  “Mr. Flesh, do you think you could hold the photographs by the edges? If the customer sees—”

  “We’re ruined,” Ben said, “we’d best cut our losses. See? See the strain on these people’s faces? Uh oh. I don’t like it. I don’t like the looks of this.”

  “The looks of what, sir?”

  “The monuments. Something about the monuments. Here, hold the viewer. Look at the Herman Schieke family. The Schiekes at Yellowstone, Old Faithful going off behind them like a liquid firework. At the rim of the Grand Canyon. Here, look, some Schieke kid standing on a petrified log in the Petrified Forest. And, here, this one, Herman himself probably, the photograph angled so Schieke’s face appears beside the Presidents’ at Mount Rushmore.”

  “That’s a darned good picture,” his manager said.

  “Good? Good? You don’t understand? We’re living in the last days. Schieke thinks so. He’s making a record. These pictures, the others, the ones in Europe, they all say the same. They say, ‘We were there. Us. Here’s the proof.’ Because they never expect to go again! It’s a last fling. Open your eyes. It’s a last fling in the last days. Because a man of confidence doesn’t mar a Colosseum with his worn-out children—why, the whole family’s there; worse, worse and worse; they’ve asked some stranger to take the picture—unless he believes he’ll never return. In London the same. In Paris, in Greece. Terrible, terrible, a terrible thing these terrible times. It’s lucky I saw these. We know what to do.”

  “What to do?”

  “Shh, go, go home to your familie
s, I’ll close up, I have work. I’d rather be by myself just now. Go. You can pick up the keys at my motel in the morning.”

  “But…”

  “It’s best that you go. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like it. I’m forced to sell. I’ll give you wonderful references. Maybe I can get the new man to take you on. Have you saved money? Maybe you can go in with someone and buy me out. I want only what I paid. Go home, think about this. Sleep on it. Discuss with your wife.”

  Then, alone, by a Tensor lamp on a desk in the qualified dark, he sat, rummaging the photographs like a numismatist, prying detail from his customers’ lives. That they had dogs, cats, gerbils, plants. Tapping, for the first time it could have been—he’d lied to his manager, he didn’t intend to sell; this wasn’t good business; he was as bad a franchiser as ever, as indifferent to his prospects as ever, as distant as ever from motives of money and as close to his single interest, the backstage Finsberg propinquity to staged life, his need to costume his country, to give it its visible props, its mansard roofs and golden arches and false belfries, all its ubiquitous, familiar neon signatures and logos, all its things, all its crap, the true American graffiti, that perfect queer calligraphy of American signature, what gave it meaning and made it fun—into a ring of the domestic. Father’s chair, the television/stereo/tape recorder hidden in its monstrous cabinet like a Murphy bed in the wall, some teenager’s set of drums in the family room, the boy’s name like lush spangled fruit on one face of the bass, palms on the taut skin, dice, champagne glasses, the painted liquid jaundiced as specimen and the bubbles rising like smoke signal, tilting up and back like a stupa of suds. He saw crosses on walls, pictures of long-tressed Christs, here and there a menorah in a breakfront overwhelming the miniatures—he passed his magnifying glass over these—around it. Mah-Jongg sets, decks of cards, poker chips, chess boards, magazines, Reader’s Digest condensations like grammar-school dictionaries. Where the rug was worn, where the paint was peeling. The landscapes above the sofas—he could tell which ones had been done by the wives—and the framed glass portrait photography on the mantels. What newspapers they took, what the news was months ago. Tapping into a ring of the domestic. Seeing behind the principals—it could have been Asia it was so strange to him—boxes of soap flakes, pails, brushes in the cabinets beneath the kitchen sink, the iron elbow joints of plumbing. Seeing kids’ bedrooms, the pie slices of pennants, ship models, model airplanes. A daughter’s collapsed doll looking breathless, unconscious against the baseboard. Seeing—there would be company—heaped coats, wraps upon a bed in the master bedroom. Formal poses—children sitting in pri-mogenitive succession on a sofa. A wife fixing her hair, a husband shaving. (The medicine cabinet, ointments saved years, the last chipped pills of ancient prescriptions, yellowing aspirin, toothbrushes caked with paste.) And it forcibly struck him. Why, I have lived my life like an outdoorsman. Itchfoot the Peddler, Westward the Itinerant, Footloose Flesh, Ben Bum, the Horizon kid. Not to have been—this was true, excepting childhood, excepting the Finsbergs and Riverdale—inside, indoors, even as a guest; never to have bought, never to have rented, never to have lived in an apartment, to have signed a lease, lived a lodger. How does it happen, I wonder, that I have never killed anyone, that I am not a wanted man?

  “I think,” he told his H & R Block man, “that I shall have to shut down this office.”

  “It’s the off-season, Mr. Flesh, that’s why it seems so slack. From January to May you can’t hear yourself think. The phones never stop ringing. Most of our off-season work is audits, people called in to bring their records down to IRS, go over their returns. The spot check, you know? I’ve got twenty appointments of that nature this month alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said.

  “Mr. Flesh, there’s a saying, ‘The only thing you can be sure of is death and taxes.’ This is a sound business, Mr. Flesh.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you’ll just look at the commissions, even in these off-months—”

  “Where’s the return in returns?” he asked. “Look,” he said, “I know you do a good job. But that was yesteryear. You own your own home? Rent?”

  “We rent, but—”

  “You don’t get around like I do. I’m Wharton, I know things. My ear’s to the ground like the white line on the highway. They’re closing the loopholes, they’re graduating the taxes, gaudeamus igitur. Texas Instruments has us by the short hairs. With the pocket computers any kid can figure his old man’s taxes. They teach this shit in school now. Like good citizenship. Like Driver Training. Anyway, what’s the matter, you never heard of the Taxpayers’ Revolution? Shh, listen, they’re dumping tea in the harbor.”

  “But without a warning, with no notice—”

  “Finish your case load. Take twice your commission. Triple. We’re closing shop, we’re going out of business, everything must go.”

  “But—”

  “I told Evelyn Wood the same. What, you think you’re a special case? I told Evelyn Wood, I told her, ‘Eve, there’s trouble in Canada, in the forests. The weather’s bad, the stands of trees are lying down. There’s no wood in the woods, Wood. The pulp business is mushy. Where’s the paper to come from for the speed readers to read? They’re reading so fast now they’re reading us out of business. Publishing’s in hot water. Magazines are folding, newspapers. (What, you never heard of folded newspapers?) If we want to keep up with the times we have to slow down, go back to the old ways. We have to teach them to move their lips.’ ”

  “Mr. Flesh—”

  “A month, I give you a month’s notice.”

  Which was good business. And now he was conscious always of Finsbergs on the other end of his line. He performed for them. His best foot forward. Living as if within the crosshairs of their sharp-shooter observation and understanding. Every move a picture. His deals dealt for them more than for himself. Like a kid behaving for Santa Claus.

  At night he dreamed of them, changed now, grown apart, the shifting sand-dune arrangement of their bone structure—all gone now their ’50’s and ’60’s tract-house mode—their features left out overnight in a human weather, hair colors changing, styles, growing piecemeal paunches, gestures, asses, the girls moving toward some vague Estelledom while the men grew more like Julius and less like each other. An expanding-universe theory of Finsbergs. The Big Finsberg Bang. In his dream he was like some archaeologist at the Finsberg digs, reconstructing their old mass individualism, only with difficulty putting them together, a painstaking labor. Not something for someone with his hands. All the king’s horsing them. And getting somehow the idea that if he could only shape his franchises in some more coherent way—this occurred to him: that if he could pace the routes from New York to Chicago, from St. Louis to Denver, Omaha to Los Angeles, Fort Worth to Dallas, Boston to Washington, planting the land mines of his franchising in such a way as to coincide with a traveler’s circadian rhythms, his scientifically averaged-out need to pee, eat, rest, distract himself with souvenirs from Stuckey’s and Nickerson Farms or get off the main route for a bit and go to town—all would be well, he would clean up, regain the respect of the boys, the love of the girls, and that respect and love for him would somehow force them back into their old odd single magical manifestations. But it was too hard, a job for a younger man, a healthier. All wouldn’t be well, the Finsberg features would never again collect at the true north of their old selves. There was no way.

  All he could do was tack, trim. Sacrifice Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics and H & R Block for Dunkin’ Donuts. Trading them off like baseball cards. If a depression came, Dunkin’ Donuts would prosper. He felt that. He knew that. That was good business. With what he got for the franchises he dumped, he reinvested heavily in doughnuts and coffee.

  Then the price of cream shot sky-high and sugar went through the fucking roof.

  3

  It was early 1975. The banks had begun to chip away at the prime rate, every two or three weeks bringing down the boiling
point of money, its high tropical fevers, a quarter percentage point here, a half percentage point there. The temp tumbling like a crisis in old-time films. The price-of-money fix was in. The gnomes of Zurich and the Fed had put the brakes on. Gold, legal to own, went begging. Stocks recovered ground in their long Viet/guerrilla/Hundred Years War.

  By his recent good husbandry, Ben Flesh had divested himself of many of his investments, adjusting his strange portfolio, his eggs in fewer baskets now than they had been for years. Money in the bank. The Finsbergs protected. A high wall of the respectable around them while his health failed daily, his own energy crisis unresolved, his body still demyelinating a mile a minute. Like a thaw revealing litter, garbages, horror.

  He spoke with two or three Finsbergs daily, pressing them with his new goduncle love, the phone a genuine expense. (He subscribed to a WATS line, got special rates, dialing his coded numbers even at the public phones in gas stations and drugstores.)

  Not wanting to nuisance them, as aware as any tentative, cautious, unsure-of-his-ground lover of the thinness of his welcome. So coming at them from another side, not deferent, not submissive. No Lear, no Stella Dallas. Not Père Goriot. Not asking for their healths, giving his.

  “My testicles are acting up,” he told Gus-Ira. “They feel weighted. A very peculiar sensory symptom. Annoying. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s as if I had loaded dice for balls. Or like those, you know, Mexican jumping beans.”