The Franchiser (32 page)

Beautiful Naugahyde benches clear of the Thermopane and near twin easels of Coming Soon with their startling—it’s a first-run house—new posters, novel, like a king’s proclamation, banns, latest policy, fresh law, new rules. My patrons sidling up to these, studying them while they wait for the show to break.

The movie’s thick carpets, a bright, gentle meld and tie-dye of color giving ground to color like the progress of landscape, laws of geography. My movie’s toilets, its Women’s rooms and Men’s, with its urinals white as pillowcase, its stalls of decorator colors not found in nature, and its tiny discrete colored tiles like squares on a board game, its modern, functional sinks with their cockpit fixtures, their wonderful dials for hot water, cold, the pushbutton for soap pink as bubble gum. Paper-towel dispensers built into the walls like pewter mailboxes. My movie’s toilets’ textured walls with my movie’s toilets’ motifs, its indirect lighting and its hidden, gentling sound system that plays the themes from big hits at the box office.

Have I mentioned my movie’s sign? An immense white rectangle of tabula rasa, split down the middle by a length of black metal—
CINEMA I, CINEMA II
—and looking like a domino in a negative. The simple statement of the titles—
The Longest Yard, The Gambler
—in sharp black letters like the font of scare headlines, brooding and important as assassination or a declaration of war. The name of one actor up there, or none at all. This is my single whimsy: From time to time I call my manager. “What’s playing?” I ask. He knows I mean, “What’s coming soon?” “
Godfather Part II
,” he’ll tell me. “I’ll get back to you,” I’ll say. I do my homework. “We’ll go with Robert De Niro.” “It’s Al Pacino,” he tells me. “They’re doing a major piece in
Time
. Al Pacino is hot.” “Robert De Niro.” “We’ll catch shit from the distributor. It’s in the contract. We’ve
got
to put Pacino up there. It would only confuse people.” “They know by now. They know how I operate. They’ll love it.” It’s the truth. My sign has read “
That’s Entertainment
, Ann Miller”; “
Airport
, Helen Hayes.” And people
do
enjoy it. If they even notice. They think they’re in on some inside joke. And the film buffs—the Draper Lake Mall is close to Norman, where the University of Oklahoma campus is located—somehow have the idea that seeing a big commercial blockbuster—the only pictures I ever show—at Cinema I, Cinema II somehow endorses the film, makes it
Cahiers du Cinéma
material, themselves—what’s the word?—cineasts. But the truth is, I do not intend it as a joke, or even as a means of drawing people to my theater. (Though it may have that effect, I think. In the early fifties certain independent exhibitors took the chains to court on the grounds that their exclusive right to show particular films was in restraint of trade. People can go almost anywhere to see my movies. I saw in the paper that
The Longest Yard
and
The Gambler
are playing in at least five different first-run houses in the greater Oklahoma City metropolitan area.) It is an act of willfulness on my part, a blow against my franchise being. To see if I can take such blows. That go against the homogeneous grain of my undifferentiated heart. I cannot. But this is how I worry my loose tooth, push against my character, isometrize habit and inclination and the interchangeable parts of my American taste. I am really more comfortable that the sign reads “
The Longest Yard
, Burt Reynolds;
The Gambler
, James Caan.” I am glad that the girls behind my candy cases look like ex-babysitters, my ushers like high-school seniors who lack force, who will go on to junior colleges or take their courses at the extension centers of the state university. I am glad I show blockbusters, all the “PG’s” and “R’s” of our collectivized soul and Esperanto’d judgment.

I enjoy my customers. (My Travel Inn isn’t open yet, but I look forward. It will be the capstone of my career, I expect.) I enjoy watching them, being among them. Better than the Fred Astaire folks, the DQ and McDonald’s trade, One Hour Martinizing, the Jacuzzi Whirlpool bunch—arthritics—my Radio Shack and Chicken from the Colonel clientele. I prefer them to the patrons of any of the franchises I’ve owned. It’s the grandest part of my Grand Tour. This is the public I love. Oh, not the weekly matinee crowd so much, the Golden-Agers and widows and kids cutting school. The night-shift bunch and all those of the off-center life who come to my movies to nurse their wounds, or to sit quietly in my dark. (I have heard them weeping at my comedies.) But this is a Friday night, the seven o’clock show. In the lobby I mingle with the cream of my American public. Who have driven the Interstates to come here, the wide four-lane bypasses, the big new highways, median’d, cloverleafed, the great numbered exit signs every two and a half miles, every mile and half and quarter mile, the off-ramps that segue to on-ramps, such and such North, so and so South, over the great concretized, bulldozed no-man’s-lands of the new America. Shuttling at fifty-five miles an hour, sixty, better, past, through, the almost invisible suburbs, under the overpasses with the fine, clean names—Birch Road, and River, Town and Country Lane, Five Mile Road, Country Club Causeway (Port Wonderful, Heaven on Earth Way, Earthly Paradise Park, Good Life Gardens: this is not satire, only the realism of our visionary democracy)—going by so fast that the cyclone fences are a blur, the back yards and barbecues, the aboveground and in-ground pools seen as through a scrim, the cheesecloth vision flattering as mirrors in the suburban Saks Fifth and branch Neimans that perch the landscape, the low high schools like architects’ sketches. The prize-winning glass churches. Driving to the movies in their splendid, multi-thousand-dollar machines, and snappy, perky compacts—these would be the younger people—like bright sculptures or cars like tennis shoes. Where have all the headlights gone? What, has night been done away with? Where are the windshield wipers? What, it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more? See the aerials of the car radios laminated in the windshield glass, the ruled rear-window defrosters like blank sheet music, unfilled-in scales.

Two and a half dollars they pay, three, handing over their tens and their twenties with more nonchalance than people inserting tokens into subway turnstiles. A beautiful people, a confident, lovely paired public, casually well groomed and boisterously gracious, the clothes of the men bright as tattoos, of the women color-coordinated as the appointments in bathrooms. Later they will go to the International House of Pancakes and work their way down the sweet stacks and through the exotic combinations, experimental, choosy as chemists among the alembics of syrups. Polishing it all off, cleaning their plates. What could be better, more innocent? Their hunger piqued, whetted, honed, keened by the emotions in the film they’ve just seen, hunger an emotion itself now, at nine-thirty, at midnight. The cathartic omelet, the denouement of waffles and sausage and coffee.

“Do you want to go over the stats, Ben?” Cliff Lockwire, my manager, asks. “It’s remarkable. The economy’s supposed to be in a slump, but it hasn’t affected attendance much. Not that I can see. The other exhibitors tell the same story.”

“The play’s the thing.”

“Yeah. Hah. Want to see the stats?”

“Later.”

“I wanted to ask you about an idea for kiddies’ matinees on Saturday mornings and school holidays. I hate a dark theater.”

“Later, Lockwire. It’s show time. I’m going to look around.”

“You want to see a picture? I’ve got some calls to make. You want to see a picture?
The Longest Yard
. Terrific.
The Gambler
, good but too sophisticated, you know? I was a little disappointed. I thought it would do better than it has. I bought it for two weeks with a third-week option, but I don’t think I’ll pick it up. But if you want to see a picture—”

“I just want to look around.”

“The place is clean as a whistle, Ben. This crew is terrific. Your shoes don’t stick to the floor. We Scotchgard the seats once a month. They’re as good as the day we opened. Farts bounce off them. The image is bright, the sound is excellent.”

“Who am I, the Inspector General? I’m a mingler, I mingle. Make your calls. I just wanted to look at the auditorium. I’m absolutely all business. I want to get a sense. I think in the dark.”

“In the dark?”

“You didn’t know that? Oh yes. Go, go to your office. I’ll think in the dark and get a sense and be back to you in half an hour.”

Who thinks in the dark? The blind? I enter my movie’s auditorium.

The houselights are still up. I take a seat, change it, change a third time. The crowd is a good one, but no sellout. Here and there the seats are empty, the auditorium like an incomplete crossword, the vacant seats like dark squares on a puzzle, five down and three across like a roomful of
L
’s of the absent. There is music, sourceless, anonymous, background, standards flattened to international Palm Court arrangements, the ticky ticky of the snares and cymbals vaguely Latin, all percussion’s cushioned bumpy paradiddle, the roof-garden strings urban alfresco, the hotel horns of high-society bands, debs coming out, thousands to charity. I like it. It is the music in elevators and department stores and doctors’ waiting rooms. It is the music of all shopping-centered air-conditioned space, an anthem of the universal. In Norway it’s in people’s ears like wax. Hip hip hurrah for the brotherhood of man. They’re playing our song, Finsberg’s brassy showstoppers tamed, declined to lame fox-trot, the threatless noise of motivational research like the soothing pasteurized pastels of walls in women’s prisons. (My movie’s walls are colorless. I mean, I do not know their color. They are neutral, I’d guess, as primed canvas behind a landscape. Right now concealed spots blue the auditorium like east twilight, golden the curtains like a glass of beer.) All about me I hear a snug delicious chatter like peppertalk around an infield. I cannot quite catch what’s being said, but I know that it is optimistic, spoofing, vaguely—they’ve come in pairs, in pairs of pairs, the engaged, the double dating, the married—flirtatious, mock aggressive. It’s the sound of prosperous good humor. (The prime interest rate is through the roof and counting, rising like tropical fever into the treacherous red end of the dial face, but here, in my movie, the talk is manic, the will chipper, bright as the checks and plaids of their styles. Why is it I think the men are dressed in Bermuda shorts? They aren’t, yet they have about them this Miami and island aura, a heraldry of the golf course and day trip, this cruise nimbus.)

“What do you like, chocolate-covered cherries? I’ll bring chocolate-covered cherries. I’ll bring caramels and lollipops. I’ll bring licorice and jujubes. I’m the tooth-decay fairy and what I say goes.”

“I won’t eat it.”

“Take it home to the kids in a doggy bag, Ginny. A souvenir from Uncle Pete like saltwater taffy from the boardwalk. Anybody else? Last orders. Time, gentlemen. Anybody else? All right, that’s it then.” People up and down the row are laughing.

“He’s very nice,” I tell Ginny.

“Pete’s sweet,” she says.

“Pete’s a sweet tooth,” her husband says.

“No,” I say, “he’s a good man in a good mood.”

Pete’s wife and his two friends look at me. I am an intruder, but an older man, well-dressed, clean. Alone on the aisle, perhaps someone recently widowed. They let me in under their mood as if it were an umbrella.

“The best,” Ginny’s husband says.

“What business are you folks in?” (Where do I get my nerve? From my remission.) It is a strange question, but what can
I
do to them, a clean, older, well-dressed, wifeless man? They will answer, but before they can I reach into the pocket of my suitcoat and take out four passes. (My fingers can do this. Blind they can find the flap of the pocket, lift it, go in with all five fingers extended, no pinky unconsciously snagged on the lip of the pocket, discriminate between my car keys and the paper passes, count out four from the dozen I have taken from Lockwire, and bring them out.) “Here,” I say, “I happen to have the franchise for this theater. I’d like you to take these passes and use them at your convenience.”

“Say,” Pete’s wife says, “are they really passes?”

“Sure,” I say. I give them to her. “Pass them on. Pass on the passes.”

She looks at them. “They’re real.”

“What did you think, counterfeit? You’ll see they’re not good on Friday or Saturday nights, but otherwise there are no restrictions.”

“Well thanks.”

“I’m a good man in a good mood.”

“Well thanks.”

“What business? What line of work?”

“I’m a supervisor with Southwestern Bell,” Pete’s friend says.

“Name’s Eckerd.” He looks down at the passes. “Mr. Lockwire?”

“Oh no. No no. Mr. Lockwire’s my manager. I’m Benjamin Flesh. I’m not normally in the Oklahoma City area. I’m here on business about the theater. I’m here on show business.”

“Oh,” Eckerd says. “I didn’t think you sounded like an Okie. Got an Eastern accent, sort of.”

“We’re all Americans.”

“Well, that’s so,” Eckerd says. “This is my wife Ginny, and that’s Angie Solberto. Pete, Angie’s husband, has Solberto’s Pharmacy in the Draper Lake Mall.”

“That so? Solberto’s? I parked nearby. That’s very nice.” We shake hands. (Hands!) “Yes,” I say, “all Americans. There are over fifty thousand people throughout our land who will see this picture tonight. Who are going to watch Burt Reynolds as he whips his team of convicts into shape. In New York, a different time zone, they’re already seeing it. The game’s already started. In California they’re still picking up their babysitters, but fifty thousand of us and tomorrow another fifty thousand. And over the course of the week say another seventy-five thousand, and in a month maybe close to a million people. That’s what holds us together, you know.” Pete had come back and we were formally introduced. He’d heard of me. Owning Solberto’s, he knew Lockwire and he’d heard of me.

The music stopped in the middle of a phrase and an image came on the screen while the lights were still up. I rose. “Enjoy the picture, folks. It was nice talking to you. Mr. and Mrs. Eckerd, Mr. and Mrs. Solberto.”