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Authors: Stanley Elkin

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BOOK: The Franchiser
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“Ben,” his father would say, outside his son’s locked bedroom, “it’s only a cold. Don’t be such a hypochondriac. What are you frightened of?”

Pretending sleep, he wouldn’t answer.

And no reason at Wharton to suppose that the household names of ordinary American life were not living, breathing people, actual as himself, only luckier, better off. There had been classes where when the professor called the roll it was like hearing the listings on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Bendix.”

“Present.”

“Boeing.”

“ Here, sir.”

“Braniff.”

“Here.”

“Burroughs.”

“Yo.”

Carling. Crane. Culligan. Disney. Dow. Du Pont. Elgin. Fedders.

“Flesh.”

Firestone nudged him.

“What? What is it?”

“He called your name.”

“What? Oh. Yes. Here, sir. Yes, sir. Present.”

So there was no lack of contact. Yet—this was before his godfather’s telegram, before, in fact, he came to accept that he would not pick up shorthand—he never actually thought of them as contacts, not in the sense that others used the term. He could not get over the idea that certain men had certain things going for them, that it was in their nature, even in the nature of duty itself, perhaps, to perpetuate it through brothers, sons, some primogenitary circle of the inner that closed upon itself and made a wall. If he had any expectations they were not great so much as marginal. Perhaps Goodrich might write a letter for him someday, open a door—if he could prove himself—to a branch manager or personnel director of one of the more remote plants. All he wanted was what he never believed he could have. All he wanted was a job. Enough money to pay his rent, purchase his food, buy his clothes, to save against the day when he might have enough to make a down payment on an automobile.

So of course he believed in a man named Howard Johnson, and what the twins and triplets had suggested seemed as naive to him as anything he’d ever heard.

It was Lotte, the girl who made the wish, who had looked into it, who found out that for $40,000—this was 1951—he could purchase a Howard Johnson franchise from the headquarters in Boston.

“What? He sells his name? His
name?

“Oh, there are rules, Ben. You have to buy everything direct from the company.”

“The eggs?”

“No, I don’t guess you have to buy the eggs, but the fried clams, the ice cream, the syrups and cones. And you can’t serve after midnight unless you’re on the turnpike or something. There are all kinds of procedures you have to follow.”

“He sells his
name?

“Ben, you graduated from the top business school in the country. Didn’t you learn anything?”

“I made Dean’s list seven times. They didn’t give Shorthand, they didn’t give Franchises.”

“ Oh, Ben.”

Lotte was seventeen. They were standing in the driveway of the house in Riverdale beside the bus.

“He sells his
name
” was all Ben could say. “His
name
. Do other people do this, do you know?”

“Oh yes, Ben, lots. Lots do.”

He was excited because he knew that he had something going for him now. He would discover which men’s names were for sale and he would buy them and have that going for him. He would have them at the rate banks gave their favored customers and he would have
that
going for him, too. He was very excited. He had never been so excited. They stood in the driveway on the left-hand side of the bus and Ben took Lotte in his arms and kissed her beside the sprigs of mistletoe, the painted, official flower of the state of Oklahoma.

4

It was something like the beginning of his fiscal year. His dealings with Nate, his brief stay in Youngstown, his drive with the kid he’d dropped in Chicago, all that was outside of time.

He’d gone to Youngstown to discuss the purchase of the Westinghouse affiliate there. He dealt with Strip and Girded, Cramer’s lawyers. He’d known them for years.

He’d misunderstood. It was a television station.

Not radio?

No, TV.

I’ll be damned, television. Well, how much?

Two and a half million was the asking price.

He’d thought it was radio.

Television.

How could he have gotten something like that mixed up?

Strip didn’t know. Girded asked why he hadn’t called first or written a letter. These things had to be cleared with the FCC. It could take years.

He’d thought it was radio. Well, it was good to see them again anyway. They were his lawyers, too. Did they remember when they’d handled the 7-11 deal for him?

Oh yes.

Well.

He really should have called.

“It’s all right. I’m on my way to Chicago anyway.”

“Chicago!”

His Fred Astaire Dance Studio.

“Oh yes.” How was he feeling? Strip wanted to know.

“Fine.”

That was good, Girded said.

“What are you looking down? Your shoes match. Fine means fine. F-I-N-E.”

Well, that was good.

“Remission.” If he could think radio, they could think remission.

“Really?”

“Knock wood, yes.”

Well, that really
was
good.

TV. Jesus, he could have sworn radio. Two and a half million for television. “What’s the market?”

“A quarter million.”

Ten bucks a head?

Something like that, yes.

Gee, he’d thought radio.

They took him to lunch and shook hands and he went back to his hotel.

Well, not his
fiscal
year, his geophysical one, his minute rounds. He patrolled America. In a way Nate was right. He
should
fly more. He recalled how astonished he had always been watching through the oval windows of airplanes the gradual dissolving of the clouds, America appearing like an image in a crystal ball, and he could look down and see the land, the straight furrows in the plowed ground like justified print, the hard-edged Euclidian geometry of survey and civilization. From his Cadillac he could get just the barest sense of this, a ground-level geophysician.

Mr. Flesh stands tux’d, his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect architecture. He might be standing in the skin of a ripe bright black apple. He feels, in the inky clothes, showered, springy, bouncy, knows in remissioned tactility around his shins, his clean twin sheathing of tall silk hose, can almost feel the condition of his soles, their shade like Negroes’ palms. He is accessoried.

In his old-fashioned white dress shirt his delicious burgundy studs are as latent with color as the warning lights on a dashboard. Onyx links, round and flat as elevator buttons, seal his cuffs, and dark suspenders lie on him with an increment of weight that suggests the thin holsters of G-men, and indeed there
is
something governmental in his dress, something maritime, chief-of-staff. The golden fasteners beneath his jacket could be captain’s bars. A black bow tie lies across his throat like a propeller.

The studio is in the Great Northern Building on Randolph Street, in a loft. (Or this is how it seems. He knows there are floors above this one.) He remembers the days when the seventh-floor corridor had been flanked with the branch offices of costume jewelry and watchband firms, a barber shop, lawyers’ offices, his father’s theatrical costume business. Now, except for the barber shop, there is only the studio ballroom and the rooms for private instruction made over from the old lawyers’ suites. A sort of stage is at one end of the large room. He knows it is only his father’s long old cutting tables shoved close together—nailed and covered over with Armstrong vinyl asbestos Chem-tile. He knows that the waterfall of velvet that flows over the lip of the “stage” conceals only the carpenter’s reinforcing scaffold, scaffold like a wine rack; that the flats, flies, tormentors, teasers, and borders that ornament the stage with perspective are only a plywood contact paper studded with a kind of gritty sheen like the surface of a ping-pong paddle.

He knows it is a losing proposition. Yet feels good anyway. Reassured by Randolph Street invisible at his back behind the opaque drapes, by the restaurant, a Henrici’s he can almost feel, the Woods Theater, the Oriental, the novelty jokes and tricks shop he remembers from his youth across the street, the out-of-town-paper stand on the corner, the proliferating porno bookstores he finds so appealing, as all muted lust is appealing to him, bringing out qualities of shyness and the awkward, the peremptory imposition of respected distances, boundaries, the territorial waters of self. Like his students. Wallflowers who bought their courage with their lessons, who came out—as if it were an accredited finishing school—at the parties and balls and galas they threw themselves every few weeks at the end of one session or the getting-to-know-you beginning of the next. Getting to know again and again—the turnover never as great as the recidivism—those they knew from before. He had seen them, expansive as the fathers of brides at the punch table, or stopping the hors d’oeuvres tray as it went past carried by an instructor, demanding that their guests, themselves hosts, eat, drink, at last forcing the instructors themselves into accepting a hospitality that was by its very nature communal, and disguising this by a boisterous, reflexive generosity. Ballroom dancing? They had taught themselves to solo.

Clara was with a private student. She had said that she would turn the student over to Jenny or Hope, but Flesh insisted that she finish the hour. He had left the Office of Admissions and come into the ballroom. He sat down in a straight-back chair—a chair like a chair at a dinner table—near one of the staggered, tall, smoked mirrors that offered the room the illusion of several entrances.

He had not looked at the books but had a pretty good notion of how things were. He could tell from the music—or lack of it—that business was bad. In the old days he could stand in the Office of Admissions and hear fox-trot, bossa nova, cha-cha, waltz, polka, rhumba, and tango rhythms coming from record players in the private instruction studios. It had been like being in a bazaar where many tongues were spoken. Now only the “Carousel Waltz” wafted through the thin wallboard of one of the private instruction studios. After sitting a moment he got up and went back into the Office of Admissions.

“For God’s sake,” he told Luis, his Latin rhythms instructor, who was working the switchboard, “it’s like a morgue in there. Why isn’t there any music in the ballroom?”

“Overhead.”

“Suppose the phone rings? If there were music the caller would hear it in the background. He might think something’s happening here.”

“I got that FM you brung last time. It’s tuned to this all-music station, just like you said. If the phone rings I turn it on.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a good idea. Suppose there’s a commercial? I think we should go back to the old system.”

“Sure, Mr. Flesh. What do you want to hear?”

“What is it, you do requests? I don’t care. It’s too quiet. Turn on the stereo. Where’s Clara?”

“Clara’s still back there with the waltzer.”

“And Hope and Jenny? Where’s Al?” Al was his other male instructor.

“Jenny and Hope are around somewhere. I think they’re doing each other’s hair for the gala. You want me to get them?”

“No, the phone might ring. How many do we expect at the gala tonight?”

“Gee, Mr. Flesh, I can’t say. There’s the Fishers, they’ll be here. Runley said he was coming. Johnson and—”

“You can name them? My God, you can
name
them? It’s bad as that? That’s terrible.”

Luis nodded.

“Where’s Al?”

“Al went to get cookies for the gala.”

“Cookies.”

“It’s pretty quiet, Mr. Flesh. The old people stay in their condominiums. Those buildings got social directors who teach them the steps. A lot are afraid to come downtown. It’s different times, Mr. Flesh.”

Flesh nodded. “Here,” he said. He took his Diners Club card out of his wallet. “Run down to Fritzel’s. Have them make up a tray of sliced turkey. Get roast beef, too. Rare. Tell them rare. Make it so we can serve at least fifty people.”

“There won’t be no fifty people, Mr. Flesh,” Luis said.

“They can take what’s left over in fucking doggy bags!” Flesh roared. “I’m feeding fifty people! The gala’s at nine, right?”

“Nine, yes, sir. Nine.”

“It’s not yet eight. All right, give the guy ten bucks. Let him bring the stuff over and set it up for us. When you’re through at Fritzel’s, cross over to Don the Beachcomber and have them do us some hot hors d’oeuvres. They deliver?”

“No, sir, and Don the Beachcomber ain’t no take-out joint either, Mr. Flesh.”

“Luis,” Flesh said, “I got five people working for me—you, Clara, Al, Jenny, and Hope. One is off somewhere buying cookies and two are having their hair done. Now if a busy guy like me with a hot commercial property like the Fred Astaire Dance Studio can let his personnel crap around on company time, Mr. Beachcomber can send someone in a rickshaw with the hors d’oeuvres. Here, give him twenty bucks. I want the stuff at nine-thirty. Liquor, what about liquor?”

“We ain’t licensed, Mr. Flesh.”

“I ain’t selling, Trini, I’m giving it away. Martinis. Scotch. Bourbon. And plenty of ice. I don’t want to run out of ice.”

“Jesus,” Luis said. “Holy shit.”

“Goddamn,” said Flesh, “that’s brilliant, Babaloo. Can you lay your hands on some pot?”


Pot?

“Pot, yes, some nice good grass. For me. And
good
stuff. Go into a head shop and have them roll it. Custom. Stitches were taken here once. They followed each other like teeth in zippers.”

“Yeah, well, but like those cats don’t take Diners Club.”

Ben peeled off about a hundred dollars and shoved it into Luis’s hand. He had not been this excited in a long while. “Here, take this. If anything else looks good to you. We’re going first class.”

“First class?”

“All right, I won’t mince words. We’re going
down
first class. Go now, Desi. Run, boy. Fetch the goose. If you see Al, send him up with the cookies. If they’re stale I’ll have him grind them up on the stage for a sand dance. Is that in our curriculum, Pancho? Can you tell me that, Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria? Wait, before you go—the sound system. Turn on the bubble machine. Hit the lights, please, Cisco.”

BOOK: The Franchiser
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