The Franchiser (23 page)

He is out of West Village but still in Crown Center Shops. The stores are more conventional here but still—for him—troubling. Here and there along the corridor there are benches, like benches in museums. Lord Snowden is a men’s haberdasher, Habitat a furniture store, Ethnics a gallery of folk art. There are too many specialty shops, a place that sells yarn, another that does soap. There is The Board & Barrel, with its gourmet cookware; The Factory (a hardware store). There are The Bake Shop, The Candy Store, The Cheese Shop, The Flower Shop, The Sausage Shop, The Fish Market, The Meat Market, The Poultry Market, The Produce Market. And these, with their bare, spare generics, are somehow even more coy than the shops that are puns and double entendres. Though he feels that they have missed a bet, that they might have put in a broker and called it The Stock Market.

Yes. It is
precisely
what he had thought. As if America has lost a war with France, say, or England, or with, perhaps, its own past, knuckled under to its history. What’s a nice guy like me doing in a place like this? he wonders. A man of franchise, a true democrat who would make Bar Harbor, Maine, look like Chicago, who would quell distinction, obliterate difference, who would common-denominate until Americans recognize that it was America everywhere. The Stamp Pad, indeed. He would show them rubber stamp!

He sees a sign for the Crown Center Hotel and makes for it. No detours. No doglegs. No catwalks. No ups, no downs.

And is standing in the lobby of the hotel. There is, incredibly, along the width of its western wall, a
waterfall
, a tall slender stream of water no wider at its source than the stream that might come from heavy firehose, but opening out as it drops, spreading, diverted to two channels like the twin barrels on a shotgun, hugging, lower down, rocks, slipping over what appear to be mossy boulders, splashing plants, lichen, citrus trees, and spilling finally into a collecting pool, a sort of hemisphere of walled-off bay. The waterfall is reached by escalators, by exposed balconies two stories above him. Guests, tourists, stroll along iron-railed gangways that crisscross the waterfall like bridges in Japanese gardens. They stand at different levels, as if on scaffolding, spread out and up and down like notes on sheet music. And Flesh watches a woman toss change in the pool. Several sit for their photographs. He has guessed the appeal. It is the appeal of surrealism and odd juxtaposition. Something pit-of-the-stomach in the notion of bringing the outdoors in, just as the elevators at the tower end of the lobby, though entered from the lobby itself, climb the outside of the building, riding up gravity like effervescence in club soda. An appeal in inversion. He suffers a sort of vertigo for the people displaced above him in the air on their balconies and catwalks and scaffolds like so many window washers or house painters or construction workers. He has himself just come from the Center’s suspended cubes, sick in his stomach and feeling the heavy, off-center nausea of the weight, for example, in loaded dice.

He looks away from these human flies and sees that he stands above an excavation, an upholstered pit, roughly at the center of the immense lobby. It is a sunken barroom, the depth of the shallow end of a swimming pool. Low, handsome furniture—chrome, leather the color of the cork tips on cigarettes—is grouped in a deliberate randomness which gives the illusion of a house made up entirely of living rooms. There is something odd about the bar, though he cannot at first put his finger on it. He still holds his light suitcase, his garment bag rests on his arm like a towel on the sleeve of a waiter. He walks around the perimeter of the bar. The tops of the drinkers’ heads are at a level with his knees. The waitresses, carrying their trays, come up to his chest.

Then he realizes what is so strange about the bar. There is no bar. People are served from low consoles about the size of shields. (An impression reinforced by the crown and heraldry emblazoned on their fronts.) But that still isn’t it. Not entirely. Now. Now he knows. The consoles are not unlike the rolling carts pushed up and down the aisles of airplanes. The girls might be stewardesses, the young men stewards.

The franchiser understands the place now. With its nature brought indoors and its machinery out, with the lowest point in the lobby giving the sense of flight. The elements have been split, transposed, not just inversion but an environmentalist’s hedge against the continuity of the present. He might be, he might be in some zoo of the future. This is what a waterfall was like. Those were called trees. Those smaller things plants. When there was still fuel, people used to fly in heavier-than-air machines to go from one place to another. They were served food and drink on them. If you’ll come this way and step into the machine, you can get a good view of the outdoors, the “streets,” as they were called in those days. People used to move about in them.

They were way ahead of him, way ahead of the franchiser with his Robo-Washes and convenience-food joints, with his roadside services and dance studios and One Hour Martinizing, with his shopping center movie houses and Firestone appliance stores and Fotomats. Why, he was decadent, a piece of history, the Yesterday Kid himself, Father Time, OP Man River—his America, the America of the Interstates, of the sixties and middle seventies, as obsolete and charming and picturesque as an old neighborhood.

(Later that night he would go with other men to a restaurant called The Old Washington Street Station. He would read the legend on the back of the menu: “Surrounded in an atmosphere of early Kansas City history, The Old Washington Street Station invites you on a journey through our historic past. Ninth and Washington was the location of one of Kansas City’s first cable railway powerhouses. For your dining pleasure, an authentic reproduction of an early Kansas City streetcar has been provided in our main dining room. We invite you to make yourself at home, enjoy our good food, your friends, and fond memories of Kansas City’s rich heritage.”

“Is this true?” he would ask the waitress. He had a few drinks in him.

“Is what true?”

“What it says here. Is it true?” He would point to the legend on the back of the menu.

“Oh yes.”

“Terrific,” he would say, and bring his finger down smartly in the middle of the paragraph. “That’s what I want. That’s just what I want for my dining pleasure. Wheel it over.”

“What?”

“The Kansas City streetcar. And don’t tell me you’re all out. I can see it from here. Boys,” he would say, “I’m very hungry.”

And would study the menu like a map, asking, genuinely unsure, “Should we stay here? Look, look what’s upstairs. It shows you. We could eat in the jailhouse, we could eat in the courtroom or the barber shop. We could eat in the haberdashery or the penny arcade. We could eat in the orchard. We could eat, we could eat in the library or the parlor or the governor’s mansion or on the porch or gazebo and wet our whistles in the Brass Bed Cocktail Lounge.”

“Benny’s a little loaded.”

“Benny’s whistle is lubricated.”

“Come on, Benny, calm down, son. Let’s just stay right here in Grandma’s Garden.”

“Macintyre,” he would say, “you silly bastard. Grandma’s Garden. You hear that, Lloyd? You hear that, Frommer? Grandma’s Garden. The stupid son of a bitch calls it Grandma’s Garden.”

“Hey, come on, now,” Macintyre would say, “watch your language. I know you’ve got a few drinks under your belt, but there’s a lady present. Now, come on, Ben, just try to behave yourself.”

“Watch
my
language? Watch
my
language? I
am
watching my language. Take a look at your own, you fuckhead. You wanted to eat in Kenny’s Newsroom, you wanted to go to Harlow. What were some of those other places? Lloyd? Frommer? Wait, wait, don’t tell me: Yeah. The Snooty Fox. He wanted to eat in a railroad car, he was willing to try a
warehouse
. Jesus!”

“The Warehouse is supposed to have the best K.C. strip steaks in K.C.”

“Yeah,” he would say, “and you know why? ’Cause they’re so aged, you asshole.”

“I told you before. I warned you.”

“Forget it, P.M., he’s had too much to drink.”

“Sure, Paul, take it easy, he’s three sheets to the wind.”

“Oh, my God, ‘P.M.,’ you lousy afternoon, you dumbass evening, ‘three sheets to the wind.’ “ He would be laughing. There would be tears in his eyes. “And, yeah, wait, wait, somebody said something about The Monastery. And which one of you fatheads wanted to try Ebenezer’s? Which one Yesterday’s Girl? You want yesterday, you schmucky hickshit?
Yesterday?
They’ll give you—they’ll give you…Listen, you really want picturesque? Let’s get out of here. I know this charming Holiday Inn.” And would stand up, shouting, his voice carrying through the entire restaurant: “Who here remembers Thursday? Huh? Anybody recall Saturday? How about it? Thursday? Friday?
Saturday?
Those were the days, those were the good gold goddamn candyass days. Huh?
Huh?
”

And would be pulled down, Frommer and Lloyd peacekeepers still, but pulling him by his bad arm, holding on to his paresthetic right hand, Lloyd’s metal graduation ring against Flesh’s skin like an electric prod, the hands restraining him—how could they feel what he felt?—as alien nervewise and texturewise as moonrock.

“Oh,” would scream, “Aiee,” would call, “
God!
” would cry.)

He presents his confirmation at the desk, registers, asks if his room is near where the other Radio Shack franchise people will be.

He strolls through the exhibits in the Century Ballroom.

“Hey,” says Ned Tubman from Erlanger, Kentucky. “How you doin’?”

“Fine.”

“I seen your name tag. Bowling Green, hey?”

“Right.”

“Western Kentucky State University?”

“Yes.”

“What’s shakin’?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Foxy. Close to the chest. Well, I’ll tell you.—When’d you say you opened up?”

“About three years ago.”

“Three years. Well. How long Fort Worth sit on
your
application?”

“I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

“What was it? You slip ’em somethin’?”

“Who?”

“You know—Fort Worth.”

“I bought it outright.”

“Oh. Outright. Say listen, I didn’t mean—But if you bought it
out
right—Me, I had my application in fourteen months. By the time they okay’d me, Lexington was gone, Richmond was took, Berea, Bowling Green—” He pointed to Flesh’s badge. “Every last college town in the state. They come up with Fulton.”

“Fulton’s a pretty good size.”

“Yeah, I was gonna take it but then they told me about Erlanger. Said it had an institution of higher learning. I switched.”

“And it doesn’t?”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it does. It does surely. It got the Seminary of Pius X.”

“Oh.”

“You ever try selling stereo to them fellows? Police band? Headsets? Tape decks? Shit. Well—Good luck to you.”

“Same to you.”

“I’ll lay in Gregorian chants, ‘Perry Como Sings the Lord’s Prayer.’”

“Sounds good.”

“Yeah, sure. Meanwhile, you get the real college kids. Marijuana, the Pill—Those are the turn-ons, man. Biggest thing ever to hit the music industry. Know what I heard?”

“What?”

“That R.C.A., Zenith, Sony, and Panasonic gave E. Y. Lilly and Pfizer and the rest them drug companies money to develop the Pill.”

“No kidding?”

“The truth. Heard they sponsor the Mafia and the drug traffic.”

“I don’t see—”

“Why you think a lid of grass so cheap? It goes against every law of supply and demand. That’s the record companies, mister. The record companies do that. They give the pot farmers price supports.”

“Oh.”

“Subsidize poppy fields.”

“Really?”

“Pot and poppy parities, yes sir.”

“I see.”

“Sure.”

“I never thought about it.”

“I will. Open your eyes.”

“God bless.”

The displays are compelling. Each screened booth with its shelves of sound equipment glows, buzzes like cockpit, like miniature war room, like listening posts in science fiction. Meters of fine tuning like green pies closing. Needles that travel against arbitrary scales, past the reds and oranges of distortion toward baby blues of pitch-perfect harmony and balance. Round clocklike dials across dashboards of sound. Stereo cartridges like decks of cards, that look, sunk in their slots, like open tills, like queer, spit product. Cleverly notched steel spindles, turntables like reels of computer tape. And the gorgeous cargo of speakers like splendid crates, blank black domino shapes tight in their mahogany frames. The grooved and handsome ferruled knobs—AM, FM, AFC, vol. and bass, treble and balance, filter and phono, auxiliary tape. Contour control, “joy sticks.” Jacks and fuse lights. Sliding levers, smoked-plastic dust covers. Headsets like the ears’ furniture, their thick foam stuffing, their leathery vinyl skins. The broad wide-eyed faces of cassettes, the immense and careless weave of the 8-tracks. Digital AM-FM clock radios, their neon numerals the color of struck matches, the broken verticals and horizontals of the numbers like fractured bones, unkindled ghost digits just visible behind them like the floating, germ-like transparencies that drift across the surface of an eyeball. Other styles—card numbers that flip over like scores on TV game shows, or that rise into the radios like figures on odometers. There are pocket-size tape recorders, microphones built into them like snipers’ scopes. And portable televisions like pieces of luggage. There are antennas like fishing rods, like whips, like window screens, like swatches of fence, like pen-and-pencil sets, like huge metal combs, like immense paper clips. There is specialized stuff—marine radiotelephones; citizen’s band transceivers; base stations, mobile; 8-channel FM scanning receivers with their movie marquee light sequences. Tuned to crime, tuned to fire, tuned to weather, tuned to all the ships at sea—earth, fire, air, and water tuned. The notches of wavelength-like lines on rulers or the scale on maps, all the calibrated atmosphere of frequency.

I have been in the Bowling Green shop just once. I am a personnel man finally, only an absentee landlord, a silent owner in the sound trade. They rip me off, my managers, my hired help. They aren’t to be trusted. They skim. I know that. I’ve taken bartenders and put them in charge of my franchises. I’ve turned vice-squad detectives into bosses. Clerks in liquor stores, ticket sellers, head-waiters, gas-station attendants—all those technicians in larceny. My gray-collar guys of good judgment who know just where to draw the line and just when to stop. What can it cost me in the long run? Less than fringe benefits, less than Blue Cross, pension plans. I tell them up front what I’ll stand for. They appreciate that. If they take advantage I send the auditors in or go myself. But that’s rare. The rule of thumb is, they work their asses off in order to increase the profits from which they are allowed to steal. In the long run I’m probably even, maybe a dollar or two ahead.