The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  And an answer came, Ben reading it like stock-market quotation as it ticked out on the Inn-Dex:

  YES. YOU ARE. A CONVENTION’S IN TOWN. WE’VE SEEN EIGHT HOOKERS GET INTO THE ELEVATORS SO FAR. EARLIER THIS EVENING WE HAD A CALL FROM TOM KLEINMAN IN 317 OBJECTING TO THE NOISE THAT THE HONEYMOONERS, EARL AND DELORES SIMMONS, WERE MAKING IN THE NEXT ROOM. MR. KLEINMAN SAID HIS BOY, TOM, JR., ELEVEN, COULD HEAR EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOING ON BETWEEN THOSE TWO. HE ASKED THAT EITHER WE CALL THE SIMMONSES AND TELL THEM TO HOLD IT DOWN, OR PUT HIM AND TOM, JR., IN A DIFFERENT ROOM. WE COULDN’T DO THE LATTER BECAUSE WE’RE FULL UP—THE CONVENTION. AND WE WERE RELUCTANT TO DO THE FORMER BECAUSE, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW IT IS, YOU CAN’T CALL GUESTS UP AND TELL THEM NOT TO FORNICATE. IT IS THEIR HONEYMOON, AFTER ALL. WHAT MR. PITTMAN, OUR INNKEEPER, FINALLY DID WAS TO CALL EARL SIMMONS UP AND TELL HIM HE’D HAD A COMPLAINT HE WAS PLAYING HIS TELEVISION TOO LOUD. YOU HAVE TO BE DIPLOMATIC. BUT YOU PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, RINGGOLD, THE WORLD IS A VERY SEXY PLACE.

  They Inn-Dex’d Chicago, contacted Denver, rang up L.A. Everywhere it was the same story. Not even the time differential made any difference finally, Ringgold’s nighttime, California’s evening, love’s mood obliterating time and space and all zones erogenous.

  They put out all-points bulletins, calling Fort Wayne, Indiana, Springfield, Missouri, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Burlington, Vermont, Wichita, and Great Falls, Montana and Albuquerque, Phoenix, and towns up and down the Pacific coast. It was the same. Sperm was in the air like—like humidity. Heavy breathing was and squeals like imprint sounds in nature. Love’s high-pressure systems and lows, its fronts and squall lines and small-craft warnings only a sort of generic weather at last. Everything reduced finally to the skin’s friction, the fusion of agents and objects and all the moleculars of love.

  Flesh couldn’t stand it. He had hoped to be torn off the air, to have been comeuppanced, jammed like the Voice of America, warned by Richmond itself perhaps. What he had not wanted was endorsement, all hunches confirmed. He should like to have been told by Houston that, no, folks round there seemed tuckered out, content, after a long day’s drive from Lubbock or a rough flight from Cleveland, to shower, in clean p.j.’s take their dinners on trays from room service, watch the telly, read the local papers, doze off.

  “What’s this, what’s this?” he asked Kingseed. “Look, look,” he said, taking up the long printout. “Oh my. Oh. Oh my oh my.”

  “Why are you upset?”

  “Why? Because love happens,” he said. “It really happens. It actually takes place. It occurs. Why am I upset? Because love is sweeping the country and lyrics are the ground of being, singing the literature of the ordinary, and romance is real as heartburn. Because guys score and stare at the women next to them and trace their fingers gently over their sweetheart’s eyebrow breaking like a wave. Twelve million are epileptics.”

  “Sir?”

  “Twelve million are epileptics. A million and twenty-one thousand three hundred and eighty died of cardiovascular diseases. Three hundred and nineteen thousand of cancer. A hundred eleven thousand were killed in accidents. Pneumonia and influenza knocked off seventy thousand. Diabetes thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and seventy. Bronchitis and emphysema and asthma thirty-three thousand. Twenty-nine thousand died of cirrhosis of the liver and seventeen thousand of birth defects. Kidney diseases got twenty thousand and hernias close to eight, for Christ’s sake. TB killed sixty-six hundred and there were twenty thousand homicides. And one died of heaviness and one of bed wetting and one of prejudice and another of cradle cap and one of constipation and one of a blindness to metal and another of orneriness and one of household pests and one of left tittedness and one of female hard-boiled eggs and another froze to death when his temperature hit 98.6.”

  “Where do you get this? What is this stuff?”

  “Two million,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Two million a year die. It’s a ball-park figure.”

  “Only two million? I would have thought more.”

  “Be patient. I told you. Twelve million have epilepsy.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “If thirty-eight thousand four hundred seventy died of diabetes, how many more have it and are still alive? Ten times that number, twenty? I should think twenty. Conservatively twenty. Be patient.”

  “But—”

  “And if twenty have diabetes for each one that dies of it, and diabetes is only the fifth biggest killer, how many people do you suppose live with bad hearts, with cancer growing in them like food turning in the refrigerator? Be patient. How many have Parkinson’s disease, how many VD?”

  “Every other?”

  “We’re standing water, fucking roosts,” Flesh said. “Plague builds its nests in us.”

  “Gee,” Kingseed said, “put that way, it’s kind of depressing.”

  “Kind of,” Flesh said. “There’s scarlet fever and muscular dystrophy and Hodgkin’s disease and a special strain of kid leukemia. There’s the heartbreak of psoriasis.”

  “The doctor told me my pressure’s a little high.”

  “There you go,” Flesh said.

  “Gee.”

  “And still they smooch.”

  “What? Oh. Yeah.”

  “They come calling, call coming, go courting, hold hands, sip soda through a straw, French kiss with their throats sore and their noses running.”

  “My gosh.”

  “My gosh.”

  Flesh stares blankly at the silent IBM typewriter and suddenly it begins to clatter out a message:

  INN-DEX 225. INN-DEX 225. *¢&%#% $@*¢&%%#@!*& THE INN-DEX IS NOT A TOY! YOURS, INN-DEX OOO, RICHMOND.

  Then the top button, like Hold on a telephone, fills with a square of solid yellow light. “We’re off the air,” Ben says. “Love Night’s over. Richmond pulled our plug. ”

  “Will we get in trouble?”

  Ben shrugs. He comes out from behind the registration desk and sits down in one of the velour chairs. He yawns.

  It is Kingseed’s snores which finally awaken him. His clerk is sleeping with his face on the desk. It’s three-thirty. The man will have a stiff neck when he gets up.

  Ben stretches. He can have slept no more than an hour and a half, yet is fully rested. He could go to his room now, but he doubts if he could sleep. Still, Kingseed’s heavy snores are unpleasant to hear, though he has no wish to wake the man, no wish either to disturb the night auditor working on her accounts in the small office behind the wall of keys and letter slots. He rises, intending to go to his room, when his eye is caught by the map on the big display board opposite the registration desk. The concentric hundred-mile circles make the states behind them a sort of target, twelve hundred miles of American head seen through a sniper-scope. He goes up to the map, to dartboard America, bull’s-eyed, Ptolemaic’d Ringgold. He examines it speculatively. And suddenly sees it not as a wheel of distances but of options. It’s as if he hadn’t seen it properly before. Though there are dozens of road maps in the glove compartment of his car, he has rarely referred to them. Not for a long while. Not since the Interstates had made it possible to travel the country in great straight lines. Why, there are signs for Memphis and Tulsa and Chicago in St. Louis now. Signs for Boston and Washington, D.C., in the Bronx. Seen this way, in swaths of hundred-mile circles like shades in rainbows, he perceives loops of relationship. He is equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Centralia, Illinois. He could as easily be in Columbus, Ohio, as in Petersburg, Virginia. New Orleans rings him, Covington, Kentucky, does. He is surrounded by place, by tiers of geography like bands of amphitheater. He is the center. If he were to leave now, striking out in any direction, northwest to Nashville, south to Panama City, Florida, it would make no difference. He could stand before maps like this one in other Travel Inns. Anywhere he went would be the center. He would pull the center with him, the world rearranging itself about him like a woman smoothing her skirt,
touching her hair.

  It was the start of his ecstasy attack.

  V

  He turns the ignition key. Hey, he’s down a few gallons. He sees that one side of the island of pumps nearest him is clear, but keeps his Caddy idling in neutral until he knows what the fellow in the Pontiac Grand Am just pulling in off the street means to do. It, too, is an out-of-state car—Minnesota. The land of sky-blue waters.

  Ben smiles and waves expansively at the Grand Am to go ahead of him. The bells ring as Minnesota drives over the rubber line that signals the attendant. Jack comes back out and goes up to the driver’s side of the Pontiac, clears the gas pump, and carries the heavy hose toward the gas tank. Ben presses down the electric window on his side and leans his head out. “Can you get to her, Jack, or should I back off some?” he calls.

  Jack looks at him quizzically. “No,” he says, “there’s room.”

  “There’s room? You sure? It wouldn’t be any trouble for me to back it up a bit.”

  “No,” he says, “that’s all right.”

  “Okay,” Ben says, “think I’ll just stretch my legs a bit while I’m waiting.” He gets out of his car with difficulty. Jack has begun to wipe the windshield and Ben goes up to him. “She’s a scorcher, ain’t she?”

  “Radio said 92 at noon,” the young man says.

  “Ninety-two degrees! At noon? Is that a fact? She could bust 100 then.”

  “I guess,” Jack says.

  “Say, look there, will you?” Ben Flesh points to an elderly woman on the sidewalk who is holding a parasol above her head. “You don’t see that up north much,” he says. “It’s a good way of preventing sunstroke. I wonder why more people don’t carry sun umbrellas in weather like this. It’s kind of pretty, too, don’t you think?”

  “Pretty?”

  “Well, old-fashioned. Reassuring. Pretty, yes. I think so. Many folks carry sunshades around here?”

  “Mostly the older women, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” Ben says. “It’s very charming and genteel. That sort of thing makes heat itself charming.”

  Jack asks the driver if he wants him to check under the hood and the man nods. He pulls out the oil stick and wipes it with a rag.

  “Gee whiz,” Ben says, “will you look at all the machinery down there?”

  “You’re down just over a half,” Jack tells the driver. “Shall I put in a quart?”

  “Please,” the driver says, “and could you check the water level in my battery?”

  “That’s a good idea,” Ben tells the man. “It probably evaporates on a day like this. That young man told me it was already 92 at noon today.”

  “ It feels it. It must be almost 100 now,” the man from Minnesota says.

  “You probably aren’t far off,” Ben says. He looks at the man. “But you know,” he says, “the hottest I’ve ever been was once when I was up in your part of the country.”

  “Minnesota?”

  “Well, South Dakota. Rapid City. This was a few years ago. 1971.”

  “Yeah,” his friend says. “I think I remember. It was hot that summer.”

  “Hot? It was in violation of the Geneva Conventions, it was so hot. It was brutal. And the air conditioning wasn’t of any use.”

  “No?”

  “Heck no. There were power failures. I was in the hospital at the time. This was when I had my multiple sclerosis diagnosed—I’m a multiple sclerotic—and though the hospital had its own generators, it wasn’t enough to drive the air conditioning and—”

  “She took sixteen gallons, sir. A dollar five for the quart of oil makes it $10.06.”

  “You take Master Charge?”

  “Sure.” Ben’s friend slips the card out of his wallet and hands it to Jack.

  “Sixty-one and nine tenths for a gallon of Regular,” the man says. “Sixty-two cents.”

  “It was really something. They put me in a ward with a young British lieutenant named Tanner. He was on detached duty from the Royal Air Force. He pronounced it ‘Raf.’ That’s the first time I ever heard it pronounced that way. God, the poor guy was in bad shape. He had a rare tropical disease called Lassa fever. It’s fatal. Ever hear of it?”

  “No,” his pal says.

  “Well, neither had I. As a matter of fact, he was only the ninth person in the world to come down with it. He actually sweated blood. That’s not a figure of speech, either. The man perspired blood. It was a symptom of the disease, though I don’t suppose the heat helped any. I would wipe it up for him. I’d use Kleenex or toilet paper. Well, you know how it is, guys get close in a situation like that. We really did anyway. We were the only people in the ward. I don’t think it would be too much of an exaggeration to say that he was the best friend I ever had.”

  Jack has returned from the office with his clipboard. He goes around behind the Grand Am to take down the Minnesotan’s license number. “We were thick, my friend. He kidded the pants off me about how worried I was about my disease. I had the Mister Softee franchise up there, and every time I’d whimper about my bad luck he’d say, I remember, he’d say, ‘Be hard, Mister Softee.’ And you know? I was that scared I needed to be talked to like that back then. Oh gosh. We had some time of it.” Jack has brought the charge slip for the man to sign. Ben has to move his head, standing behind Jack’s back, talking to him over the young man’s shoulder. “There wasn’t much power to give the loonies their electric shock, so the poor guys were up all night screaming their heads off. We could hear them. It was awful.”

  “Thank you,” Jack says. “There’s your card, sir. Come back and see us.”

  The man nods and starts his car.

  “Wait up,” Ben says. “I wanted to tell you something. Oh yeah. So, as I say, it was during those long hot nights when neither of us could sleep and the crazies were screaming like the damned and Tanner and I just, well, we just told each other everything. I’ve probably never been that close to anyone. I know he helped me. I hope I helped him.

  “So. Anyway, to make a long story short, there wasn’t much they could do for my M.S. in the hospital and they discharged me.

  “Well, sir, Tanner didn’t say much. I figured he must have figured, here I was going off, and there he was, strapped to a goddamn wheelchair and condemned to die. Friends or no, he must have thought, well, that I was deserting him. So…What can I tell you? I went back to where he was behind the screen to shake hands and say goodbye and to wish him luck and, well, he was—he was dead.”

  The Minnesotan shakes his head. Ben understands. What else can he do? Ben acknowledges his friend’s sympathy with a nod of his own and backs away from the Grand Am to let it drive off. “Well,” he says cheerfully, turning to Jack, “I guess you can pump me full of Premium.”

  “You’ll have to pull the car up, the hose won’t reach.”

  “Oh, sure,” Ben says and, stumbling, gets back into his car to bring it abreast of the young man.

  It’s while the tank is being filled that he remembers his promise to Tanner. Oh, Christ, he thinks, and his eyes moisten. Then he remembers something else.

  There’s only a quarter in the shallow little dish on his dashboard where he keeps change. It would be too unpleasant to have to reach into his pocket to see if he has a dime. “Say, Jack,” he says to the attendant, “trade you this quarter for a dime.” He fumbles the coin into his left palm by brushing it with the side of his right hand. “What do you say, is it a deal?”

  Jack gives him two dimes and a nickel for the quarter. He doesn’t want to hurt Jack’s feelings by insisting he keep the fifteen cents. Also, he remembers he’s already tipped him ten dollars to tell him what city this is. Ben smiles at him and thinks of him fondly. He’s not just another greedy kid. That’s good, Ben thinks. Moral fiber like that. The country’s in safe hands. “Thanks,” Ben says. “Is there a phone in the office?”

  “Just to your left as you go in the door.”

  “Thanks a million,” Ben says.

 
He has some difficulty lining the dime up with the slot, but finally he’s able to do it. He dials the operator.

  “Operator,” he says when she answers, “could you please get me Rapid City, South Dakota, Information. I have some trouble with my fingers or I’d dial it myself. Thank you, dear. Oh, and Operator? Would you hang on, please? This will be a credit-card call. Thank you.”

  “What city, please?” the operator in South Dakota says.

  “Rapid City.”

  “Yes, sir, go ahead.”

  He gives the operator the name he had remembered in the car.

  “Eight seven three, two zero nine six,” the South Dakota operator says.

  “Did you get that, Operator?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He gives the operator his credit-card information and in a moment he can hear the phone ringing all the way up the country in South Dakota. Ben smiles at Jack, who has come into the office, and he holds up a finger to indicate that he’ll just be a moment. The young man steps out to take care of a car that has just driven up to the pumps.