“Yes, and your dropout always your best bet, battered children from broken homes and alcoholism in the bloodlines like a thoroughbred’s juices. Bringing on line entire generations of those who live with expectations lowered like the barometric pressure, who neither read the fortune cookie nor spell out even their own horoscopes in the funny papers. Can you imagine such indifference? Not despair, not even resignation finally, just conditioning so complete you’d think bad luck was a congenital defect or a post-hypnotic suggestion. Yes, and the statistical incidence of failure Euclidean, pandemic. These are the people I work with, who work for me, these are my partners, the world’s put-upon, its A.W.O.L.’d and Article 15’d and Captain’s Masted, its chain-ganged and undesirably discharged, all God’s plea-bargained, all His sharecropper’d migratory-worked losers, His scummy, heavily tail-finned Chevrolet’d laid-off. Last hired, first fired. This is company picnic we’re talking, Softball, bratwurst, chug-a-lug’d beer. The common-law husbands of all high-beehived, blond-dyed, wiry waitresses and check-out girls.
“And I as fairy godfather to them as Julius to me. Having to talk them into it. Having to talk them into even talking to me, talk them into listening to my propositions, who think at first I’m just some queer—and that itself working to my advantage, because they think I’ll buy them beers and they’ll pretend to go along with me, thinking: Afterward, when he makes his move, I’ll hit him on the head, roll him in the alley—looking for action, rough trade, God knows what. And using even that, their low opinion of me—always kept to themselves, always suppressed and even, in an odd way, polite, not ever, you understand, condescending, simply because I’m well dressed and well spoken and outrank them good-luckwise, which they mistakenly take for a sort of talisman or voucher, Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval, the earnest money of my faggot-or-no-faggot superior humanity—confronting them with it, hitting the nail smack bang dab on the head like the palmist or astrologer they don’t go to, not because they’re not superstitious—they’re superstitious: Catholic saints on their fundamentalist Protestant dashboards, rabbits’ feet, dice adding up to seven whichever way they’re turned—but because they don’t believe they have a fate, and behind that, the bottom line of that, not really believing that they even have a life—such patient people, such humble ones—laying it all out for them, their plans to rob me, to knock my head even as they maintain a genuine respect, for me, for the clothes I wear, so that afterward what they’ll remember of the knockabout won’t be the body contact but the feel of my wool suit and silk shirt and rep tie and felt hat and the soft leather of my shoes. Second-guessing their plans and conspiracies, an armchair quarterback of my own muggings and beatings. And all that just to get their attention!
“And only then, when I have it, hitting them with what even they can see is just good business, no scheme, no wild-ass proposition, no sky-high pipedream, but a plan. Plain as the cauliflower on their ear, true as a calendar.
“That who was there better in this world to bet on than guys who have nothing? References? I don’t want references. If anything the reverse. Records let them show me. Strange, unexplained lacunae in their curriculum vitae. Bad write-ups from Truancy, Credit, Alimony Court. Then convincing them that they can do the job, a lead-pipe cinch for persons like themselves who had, some of them, actually used lead pipes, or anyway pickaxes, handles, the tough truncheons of the strikebreakers, the ditch digger’s hardware, who’d horsed the unskilled laborer’s load, and done the thousand shit details, all the infinite cruddy combinations. ‘Putz,’ I’ve said, “you’ve hauled hod and worked by smells in the dark the wing nuts of grease traps. What, you’re afraid of a pencil?’ ‘I never got past the fifth grade,’ they’d say. ‘Terrific,’ I tell them, ‘then you know your multiplication tables. Long division you can do. Calculus there’s no call for in the Shell-station trade.’ ‘But I ain’t no mechanic,’ they object. ‘Who? You? No mechanic? A guy who jumps wires and picks locks? You’re fucking Mandrake. Look, look at the hands on you. Layers of dirt under the nails like shavings from the archaeologist’s digs. Enough grease and oil in the troughs of your knuckles to burn signal fires for a day and a night. You? No mechanic? You got a feel for leverage like Archimedes. Don’t crap me, pal. Don’t wear my patience. You’re a bum, you know character. You can hire trained mechanics from the Matchbook Schools of Repair. I’m making you Boss, you can sit back and interview guys who take jet engines apart.’ ‘But why me? I’m a nobody. Why would you give me this chance?’ ‘Because you’re a nobody. I raise your expectations like a hard-on. Where else can I buy the loyalty and devotion I’m looking for if not from a nobody like you?’
“And this way with all of them—the fast-food franchises, the goods and services, the Roto-Rooter and Burger King. This my edge as much as the prime rate: that if you want somebody who’ll work like a dog you get a dog. And no one in the business with better employee relations, no one with as good an efficiency record. Because we’re talking business, you see, small shopkeep and the bourgeois heart. Certainly. Yes.”
“Yes,” Gus-Ira said.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s late. I’m wearing you out. I’ve worn myself out. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
But Gertrude died. Even with some of the Finsbergs gone, dead, or returned to their homes in other parts of the country, the Riverdale house was still quite full: the twins’ and triplets’ wives and husbands and their small children crowding the huge home. Ben offered to stay in a motel, but the others wouldn’t hear of it. They doubled up, rented cots from Abbey Rents. Ben himself sleeping with his godcousins’ small sons and daughters in Julius’s and Estelle’s old room, the big bedroom lined with Porta-cribs and rented cots and looking oddly like some specially outfitted casualty ward.
One of the wives said she’d heard Gertrude say she felt sort of grotty and that she thought she’d take a shower, but the bathrooms were occupied, all but the maid’s, which had a deep tub but no shower. They found her in the morning. She had drowned. From her position—her belly to the bottom of the tub—and from a discrete kneecap-shaped dent in the Cashmere Bouquet, they determined that she had evidently dropped the soap and was searching for it on her hands and knees in the cloudy water. Apparently she’d struck the bar with her knee, slipped, and gone under. With her heavy marrowless bones she’d been unable to raise herself.
“She couldn’t swim of course,” Cole said.
“Well, she had wonderful form, but she couldn’t float,” Ethel said.
“She never took baths,” Irving said.
“Doctor’s orders,” Lorenz said.
“Just sponged herself off in the shower,” said LaVerne.
“Why couldn’t she wait till a shower was free?”
“She was always impatient.”
“She was a damned fool,” Cole said. “You know, you have an affliction like that, a frame like the Petrified Forest, you take a bath you’re just asking for it.”
“She died,” Ethel said, “a gangster’s death.”
“A gangster’s death? Oh no, darling, she was just a little careless is all. Don’t say she died a gangster’s death,” Ben said.
“A gangster’s death, yes,” Ethel said, “like some hoodlum in a cement kimono, a lead coffin, steel galoshes. Oh no,” she sobbed, “it’s awful, it’s so grotesque.”
“There are no ludicrous deaths,” Ben said.
“There are,” she cried. “Oh, Ben, there are. We die them.”
“Don’t jinx us,” Irving said. “Why do you talk like that? Are you trying to jinx us? I think we should bury Gertrude and get the hell out of here before anything else happens. It’s been some week.”
They looked at racially prejudiced Irving. They seemed to agree with him. Even Ben agreed. Gertrude was cremated and it took three men to carry her ashes.
“Slag,” the funeral director said. “I never saw anything like it. The woman was slag.”
They left New York after the funeral. Ben went back to hi
s Travel Inn site. Where there was a message from Lorenz.
Bad weather in St. Louis had caused Irving’s flight to be diverted to Chicago. Bad weather in Chicago had caused it to be diverted to Detroit. The weather in Detroit was beautiful but Irving, out of sorts from his tiring journey, died there in a race riot of his own devising.
Ethel had a simple, or limited, mastectomy. They got all the cancer but accidentally cut off her heart.
Cole complained of headache one morning and was dead that afternoon. The autopsy revealed that his brain was crawling with termites.
Sigmund-Rudolf called.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Ben said.
“Listen to me, Ben, it’s—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
…important.”
“I don’t want to hear it. No,” Ben said, “I’m hanging up. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Ben, listen, will you?” Sigmund-Rudolf said.
“I don’t want—”
“There are only a few of us left.”
“…to hear it! I’m not listening to this!”
“There are only a few of us left and the prime rate is going up and down like a Yo-Yo. Father couldn’t have anticipated when he wrote his will that so many of us would die.”
“I won’t hear this,” Ben said. “I don’t want to hear about one more death. I won’t listen. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Nobody’s dead, Ben. I mean nobody else. Gus-Ira, Lorenz, Oscar. Myself. La Verne, Patty, and Mary. Maxene. We’re still alive, Ben. Nothing’s happened to us.”
“Nobody else has died?”
“No. I’m trying to tell you.”
“Gus-Ira and Lorenz? Oscar? Patty? La Verne and Mary? Maxene? You? You’re all well? ”
“We’re fine. I’m trying to tell you.”
“That’s all right then.”
“Sure. It’s just that Father couldn’t have known. When he stipulated that we’d guarantee your loans—There were eighteen of us. Ten are gone. Listen, Ben, you’re welcome to live in Riverdale. Everyone’s agreed on that. God knows, none of the rest of us wants the place, but that other stuff, the prime interest thing, we can’t go along with that anymore. We’d be spreading ourselves too thin. You’re on your own, Ben. I mean, I know you’ve never stuck us for a penny, but with so many gone, with conditions the way they are, the risk is too great. We can’t hold your paper, Ben. You understand, don’t you? Don’t you, Ben?”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
4
In Ringgold, Georgia, the prime rate was 7½ percent. Elsewhere it was 8 percent, 8¼, 7¼, 9. Ben had never seen anything like it, the economy heavily fronted, arbitrarily banded, whorled with high pressure and low, laid out like yesterday’s weather on the meteorological map in today’s paper. All climate’s swayback boundaries like wavy strokes of chocolate on scrunched layer cake, the jigsaw arrangements of contested territory. Freak, unseasonable economy.
He needed additional funds. The strike, cost overruns, forced him to take out a second loan. He wanted more, but all Modell Sanford would let him have was an extra $125,000. He offered his ice-cream interests, his Dairy Queen and Baskin-Robbins and Mister Softee, as collateral. (They were already into him for his Western Auto and his Taco Bell. Indeed, almost all his franchises were pledged, hostage to the success of the motel.)
Sanford had asked to see the list again, his portfolio of franchises.
“The One Hour Martinizing,” the banker said, “the One Hour Martinizing and the ice-cream parlors, and we’ll shake hands, part friends, and have us a deal.”
“Not the dry cleaners,” Ben had said.
“Well, heck,” Modell Sanford said, “I don’t see why you’d stick at that. I don’t figure you have you more than twenty, twenty-five thousand tied up in that place.”
“Sentimental. The One Hour Martinizing is of sentimental value to me.”
“Yeah, but lookee, friend, you’re about fifty thousand shy.”
“But you’d have the motel,” Ben said. Modell was dubious. “All right,” Ben said, “here’s what we’ll do. Keep the ice creams, forget about the dry cleaners, and I’ll put up my Cinema I, Cinema II.”
Modell Sanford looked at him.
“Mr. Ben, that’s funky. Them theaters is worth ’bout a quarter million. They your biggest asset. You a serious businessman. Why’d you want to make a deal like that?”
“Because I’m very confident. I feel very confident about the Travel Inn venture. Look, Mr. Sanford, it’s my risk. You can run an audit on the theaters. I’ll pay for it myself. If everything isn’t exactly as I’ve represented it, throw me out. Take all my flavors and the two picture houses and the motel, too.”
“Don’t have to run no audit. Just have to make one phone call to my credit people in Oklahoma City. All right, Mr. Flesh, you come on in tomorrow morning and I’ll give you my decision.”
The decision was yes, of course. And since the banker didn’t wish to take advantage of him, Ben was permitted to withdraw his Dairy Queen stand. But before he drew up the papers, Modell Sanford reintroduced the One Hour Martinizing. For some reason he fixated on the dry-cleaning plant in Missouri, perhaps because he sensed that Ben was telling the truth about its importance to him. Flesh was incensed. He said that if Sanford still wanted the One Hour Martinizing he would take back all his ice-cream businesses, plus his Cinema I, Cinema II. He refused to budge. “I’ll borrow money in Chattanooga,” he said.
“Interest rate’s a point higher in Chattanooga.”
“Fine,” Ben said.
“Oh, come on now,” Modell Sanford had said, “what you want go grandstanding me, what you want get so hot for? This motel is gone be good for you and good for Ringgold, Georgia. Tell you what, you promise to make sure all your help is Ringgold folks and I’ll drop the One Hour Martinizing.”
“Where we stand?” Ben asked. “I forget.”
The banker explained where they stood and they shook hands and signed the papers.
By the time the Inn was ready, he had had to take out a third loan. His godcousins, as Sigmund-Rudolf had warned, withdrew their support. Ben would not contest their decision in court, but by now his investment in the Inn was so great that all his franchises, the One Hour Martinizing included, were hostage to it, his businesses held for ransom.
Lorenz’s temperature dropped from its constant 102.4 degrees to 98.6. He hung on for three weeks and froze to death.
Though the surviving Finsbergs were all invited to the opening, none could come.
“But I don’t care about the prime rate thing,” Ben told them on the telephone. “I don’t even blame you. We’re still godcousins. Please,” he said. “Please come. Let’s be together.”
Patty promised to try to make it, but even she did not show up. Ben meant it, understood, and forgave their reluctance to co-sign for him—the motel would cost about a million dollars—but was hurt when not a single Finsberg would accept his invitation.
The truth was, they would not go out. They were afraid to die.
Ringgold, Georgia, population 1,381, is a mile east of Interstate 75, less than ten miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Interstate 24 crosses 75. It is 539 miles north of Orlando, Florida, and Disney World.
Ben Flesh had chosen it for the site of his most important venture with a good deal of exactitude and care. Indeed, almost five years before, even before Disney World had officially opened in October 1971, or Interstate 75 and 24 were completed, Flesh had consulted the Automobile Association. He had wanted to know near which large city a family of four, starting out from the Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Columbus metropolitan areas and hoping to make it to Disney World in two days, might be likely to stop for the night. Chattanooga, Tennessee, seemed, according to all the parameters that could be known at the time, the most probable location. Though it would be a long, difficult drive from Chicago or Cleveland, it was merely a pleasant day’s ride fro
m Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Columbus, and an absolutely leisurely one from Cincinnati. There were, however, either built, or projected, or already under construction, four Travel Inns in Chattanooga. A fifth would have been redundant. Flesh looked at his maps again.
Of course, he’d thought, the state line. Chattanooga sat exactly on Tennessee’s straight, ruled southern border like a house on a blueprint. The state line, America’s and distance’s gravitational pull, and Georgia, beneath it, even northern Georgia, the South, the deep South like a trench in the ocean. The South for those vacationing Midwesterners anyway, their one-night stand and grits for breakfast in Dixie, an edge to the trip, for somehow one knew, even if one had never been there, that Florida was not the South. Florida was the deep East, and Tennessee was not southern either but merely defunct hillbilly, some queer smudge of country and industry. Georgia was the South, Georgia was where they would stay, the father driving, breasting—if not for the romance, then for the accomplishment—one more state line, one more milestone, like a runner busting a tape.
He felt that way himself; traveled as he was, he felt that way himself, a mystique about state lines, a sense one had that there was something not just foreign but perhaps even illicit, perhaps actually illegal, about the devices offered there. They were, for a few miles this side and a few miles that, free ports of a kind, where ordinary ordinance and day-to-day due process could be fudged—law’s and territory’s olly olly okshen free, an odd three-mile limit where fireworks were openly sold, gas discounted, and liquor and cigarettes offered at reduced prices, where kids could drive cars at fifteen, and couples got married without waiting for blood tests, where you could bet on horses or purchase lottery tickets and the pinball machines paid off in cash, where whorehouses thrived and gambling in roadhouses. West Memphis, Arkansas; West Yellowstone, Montana; Covington, Kentucky; Crown Point, Indiana; Calumet City, Illinois—American Ginzas. Wide open, but somehow cutting both ways and watch out for the speed traps. And everything up front, Wisconsin pushing its cheeses at you once you left Illinois, Florida its oranges, Georgia its pecans, Louisiana its pralines.
The Franchiser Page 33
