The Franchiser (14 page)

“They found the elevator and rode to the eleventh floor and the countryman asked the colored girl who ran the elevator what it would cost them and she said it was free and he, the countryman and his friend, the neighbor, got off without a word, their faces solemn as they could make them. When the elevator doors closed behind them, the countryman hooted in wild laughter and the neighbor, seeing the joke at once, joined in.

“ ‘Fool nigger,’ the countryman said, laughing so hard his nose began to run, ‘she thinks you’re
sick
.’

“ ‘She thinks
you
sick, you mean. You the one aks her how much she charge.’

“ ‘ ’Cause I ’us makin’ out you too sick to talk for your own self.’

“Well, they giggled on this for a while and at last a nurse came up to them and asked if she could help them.

“ ‘We’s Paw’s kinfolks,’ the countryman said, recovering himself, ’come to see sick folks in ’leven and fifty-two.’

“ ‘This way, please,’ the nurse said, and she led them to the room where his, the countryman’s, father lay, not dying as it, the letter, had said, but sitting up in bed watching afternoon game shows on TV and laughing every time folks in New York or out on the coast answered the question wrong and lost their money.

“ ‘Dumb Eastern and Coastern fucks,’ the old man roared and laughed fit to bust. ‘Look that Eastern fuck, give the Captain the wrong answer and he just lost his car.’

“ ‘I brung chocolates, Paw,’ the countryman said.

“ ‘Thanks, son, they’s my favorites. Don’t never be like them Eastern and Coastern fucks, don’t never gamble.’

“ ‘I won’t, Paw,’ the countryman said.

“ ‘Saw a man this mornin’, Coastern fuck he was, dumber ’n dog shit, an’ he lost his dream house ’cause he didn’t know which curtain it ’us standin’ behind. His own house, an’ thet dumb Coastern fuck couldn’t remembers its
address!
Got all confused an’ all he could remember was where he’d left his pig. Don’t never gamble, son. You neither, neighbor. Special when you don’t stand to gain nothin’ by it. Have a chocolate.’

“ ‘Thanks, Paw. The letter said you ’us dyin’. You don’t seem like you dyin’.’

“ ‘
Ain’t
dyin’,’ his father said.

“ ‘You ain’t?’

“ ‘Naw. They run some tests. Figured what I got.’

“ ‘Yes?’

“ ‘Well, once they could name its name, there was a medicine for it that could fix it.’

“ ‘Can I aks you sumfin’?’ his boy, the countryman, said after a while.

“ ‘Sho,’ his father said. ‘Shoot.’

“ ‘This here medicine—they charge money for it?’

“ ‘Fool! Course they do.’

“ ‘That’s jus’ what I thought,’ his visitor’s neighbor’s neighbor, his son, the countryman, said.”

Ben Flesh paused. They were staring up at him.

“
Because
,” he said, “distance demands its road, the bowel its vessel, the disease its medicament. It is the lesson learned by the countryman the day he thought his paw would die. I have not mentioned it, but even after he saw his father on the mend, this
too
went through his mind: ’He’s got a body. If it dies it will have to be boxed, have to be buried.
They ain’t through with us even after we quit of them
. And it was as if he, a countryman, a farmer, a dealer in earth all his working life, thought about it—earth—for the first time. It was as if, my friends, he had discovered the uses of real estate. He had learned the secret of being—
that existence has its spare parts, that the successful life is only a proper knowledge of accessory!

“I am Benny in the Bucket, the spirit of Bernie Baruch upon me.
Baruch. Atoh. Adonai
. Bless this enterprise, oh, Lord.
Bahless
it. Give us a
bahreak!
Whet appetites left and right, visit cravings on the pregnant for carry-out chicken, impress upon Mums giving birthday parties the advantages of convenience foods and inscribe everywhere upon the universal palate a taste for the Colonel’s white meat and dark, hanging it there like wallpaper or a fixed idea; tangle its aromatics with the hairs of the nose and make consumers to go in the streets with fried skin chewy as gum in their mouths and licking on bones as on all-day suckers. Doggy my Americans, Pop, foxify them for me and the Colonel.” And looked up.

“Well, folks, I felt I couldn’t ask my manager, Sigmund-Rudolf Finsberg there, to open our doors for business without first making a few remarks appropriate to the occasion. Now I know you’re getting hungry, I know you’re anxious to get in there and find out for yourselves what all the fuss is about, why I and my colleagues have gone to such pains to bring Kentucky Fried Chicken to Yonkers—‘Meals the Whole Family Will Enjoy at Prices Every Family Can Afford.’ And in a few moments I’ll be giving Mr. Finsberg a high sign worked out between us just the other day. You’ll find special grand-opening specials that will have you picking chicken out of your teeth for a week, but first—uh—first—first…”

He wondered what he was up to. Even as he’d told them his story, he’d wondered. What was he doing? What was being done to him? It was nothing like stage fright, no amateur’s last-minute wish to be elsewhere, anywhere. He wondered something else. Not only why he was doing this, but what prevented him from stopping. He could not let them go. He couldn’t stop talking. He hadn’t prepared, he’d meant only to get their attention, Benny in the Bucket a simple stunt of welcome. But why this logorrhea? He suspected his character, a vessel thrust forward by resentment, his stalled personality waiting on anger like a player of a board game waiting on a pair of thrown fours, say, to advance his counter. And why
resentment?
He remembered when he had shouted over the long-distance telephone at his commanding officer. He grew in fits and starts, lived in phases and stages like a classic kid in Spock or Gesell. Why couldn’t he stop? What did he resent? And if he was angry, then why was he so happy?

“
Anyone want a ride in the bucket?
”

“Then I think it’s time we—”

“Know what? This is hallowed ground. It is. I was here last weekend checking our equipment. There was this fantastic crowd. In the parking lot, the mall. I couldn’t figure it out. Then there were these—these sirens. I thought, Jesus, what is it, is it burning down? The shopping center?
Is Macy’s burning?
I got a ladder and climbed up the bucket to see. There was a motorcade, limos. What the hell? That’s what I thought—what the hell? Nixon stepped out and was helped up on the roof of a big black Lincoln. I wondered if he could see me in the bucket. What about the Secret Service guys? What did
they
make of me?
ASSASSIN POPS CANDIDATE FROM FRIED CHICKEN AERIE
! Hallowed ground. Jack Kennedy a few days after. The media. Dave Brinkley up close, Cronkite standing. The truth squads of both parties, shadow cabinets. Paul Newman’s been by, Bob Montgomery. This is hallowed American ground of the twentieth century. A shopping center in a white suburb with good schools. One day it will be remembered like an old-time battlefield—some, some Gettysburg of the rhetorical. You heard ’em here first, all the campaigners to whose thumbs we entrust our red buttons and our black boxes. It’s the Lyceum here, the new stump! What merely civil acts could follow such performance and presence? What quotidian acts of the market basket and shopping cart? What out-on-a-limb toe balances and triples? How can I top
them?
My God,
friends
, it’s Colonel Sanders who should be here today! The Colonel himself in his blinding whites. Standing where I stand and tossing chicken parts like lollies from the float. Not Ben Flesh in the flesh but
him
. No surrogate—not after Nixon, not after Kennedy.
Him! His
State of the Union! But you know?” He beat his breast with his fists. “
You know? When you come right down to it, this—this is the State of the Union!
BEN IN THE BUCKET! BENNY IN THE BARREL
!

“Open up! I’m the truth squad! The secret ingredients of Colonel Sanders’ Fried Chicken from far-off Kentucky are, well, chicken of course, sage, onion, salt and pepper, flour, cornmeal, eggs, and shortening—And plenty of
ACCENT
!

“Open the doors, it’s opening day. Go on, go in. We ask only that you take a number!”

He pulled himself up to the lip of the bucket and threw his arms over its sides. He hung there suspended. He would appear to them, he thought, exactly like a man lying facedown on a diving board would appear to swimmers directly beneath him.

“They asked me,” Flesh said, “they asked me, ‘Ben, why chicken?’ ‘Everybody has to eat,’ I told them. ‘Each must eat, all must bite the calorie and chew the carbohydrate. We must be nourished. This is a need. The play goes to the man who makes necessity delicious.’

“Mrs.,” he called down to a woman in white shoes, “people have feet. There’ll always be a demand for shoes.” He saw a young man. “They have bodies which have to be clothed. The Washington clothing lobbies are among the most powerful in the country.” And another man: “They’ve got to live somewhere—houses, apartments. A landlord prospers.” He spotted an old lady: “Human feeling, the sense of family—
there’s
a bond. Greeting cards. The long distance. Cemetery plots. Real estate is real.” And a girl: “They have to be distracted. Books, records, trips to Nassau on the Youth Fare.” And a teenage boy: “Pornography is a growth industry!” He had his eye on a husband and wife, the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulder: “The course of true love never runs smooth. There are lovers’ quarrels. People fight. They kiss and make up. Say it with flowers. Sweets to the sweet.” There was a boy with glasses: “They have eyes that wear out with all there is to look at. You couldn’t go wrong in optometry!”

And just then he went blind in his left eye.

He was not with the Wine and Spirits Association of America people, not with the Toyota Dealers, not with the Midwest Modern Language Association. He paid top dollar for his room and walked the corridor of restaurants and expensive boutiques, tiny, some of them, as roomettes on trains, that linked the lobbies of the Chase and Park Plaza Hotels. He smiled at everyone. Without a name tag, in his sober suit of natural fibers he must have looked like one of the managers of the hotel, or like Koplar himself perhaps, or even a well-turned-out house detective. Except that there were no more house detectives. They were security personnel now, and some he knew in the better hotels spoke with cultured European accents. Whatever happened to the house detective, whatever happened to the house physician? The hotel dicks were all from Interpol and the docs were revolving pool personnel, family doctors on retainer. Less romantic than the old days of Dr. Wolfe. Oh yes.

He went into one of the shops and bought a purse of softest calf’s leather, paid for it with an American Express card which the girl checked against the February 1974 list of closely printed American Express numbers, American Express Deadbeats of February 1974. It was like a musical comedy. (“Do you take Diners? Master Charge? Carte Blanche? American Express? BankAmericard?” “Yes, sir, oh yes.” He could have paid for it—an $85 purse—with his driver’s license or Blue Cross card. He carried his credit cards in his inside jacket in a Bicycle Playing Cards packet.) He gave the woman Kitty’s address—she was Mrs. Roger Sayad now—and asked that it be sent.

“Will there be a card?”

“Yes. A card.” She handed him a small white envelope and a card. He wrote Kitty’s name on the envelope, tore up the blank she had given him, and enclosed his Sunoco credit card.

“It’s sentimental. This used to be honored at Best Western motels.”

The saleswoman looked at him.

“Among so many conventioneers—I represent only myself this trip—I am seized by the spirit. I am taken with a frenzy for the old days, you follow? My heart leaps up. You follow my heart leaping up?”

She smiled weakly and he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t drunk. And he wasn’t.

But he could tell no one anything anymore. His tears embarrassed them. The kid hitchhiker a few days ago was something else. That story had been one from old times. He went up to his room.

What reminded him, what started the whole damn thing, was the sight of all those businessmen. In Miami Beach—that would have been just four years ago, the prime rate had been 7½ percent—he’d attended two conventions at once, K-O-A and One Hour Martinizing.

Dr. Wolfe.

A pallid wafery man with thinning hair that seemed to grow out from a tuft of widow’s peak and stretch back over his head, growing uphill but somehow the dark individual strands like the ribs of a fan that covered almost all his scalp. A head of hair like a magic trick. Flesh with more was balder. A quiet man who spoke in a low monotonous voice. Dr. Wolfe. In order to hear him Ben found himself leaning into Wolfe’s speech, as if shouldering a stiff wind, heavy weather. With his head bent toward his host’s conversation, there was an odd nautical quality to his step. Flesh felt like a sailor rolling along beside him. They might have been walking upwind on a deck. The faint praise was faint. Dr. Wolfe. “Have lunch with me.” It was more command than invitation. The man was a bore. Ben could not rebuff bores, regarded their conversation as down payment on his own.

“Those K-O-A’ers needed to hear that.”

“Well—”

“It was interesting. But I’m not sure you were correct.”

“I’m new in the business. It was simply an outsider’s first impression.”

“No no, it was stimulating. But what would the presence of motorcycle packs do to our family trade?”

“I didn’t really say anything about motorcycle packs. I wasn’t thinking of opening up the campsites to Hell’s Angels.”

“Once the word got around they’d come, though. They could come singly, or in pairs. They might not
seem
motorcycle packs, but then, when they were all together, you’d see what you had.”

He didn’t care to argue the point. It was just something that had occurred to him during the open meeting and that he’d offered in the packed Fontainebleau Hospitality Suite during “Give and Take Hour.” “I thought you said you liked the idea.”

“I said it was interesting. It needs to be discussed.”