The Franchiser (36 page)

But just that I never dreamed of being wealthy, never expected it, never did what would have to be done to be it. And I’m not poor-mouthing the big dough, money so important it ceases to
be
money, becomes—what?—capital, some avatar of asset and credit and reserve and parity, all the complicated solvency of diversification and portfolio. Let them fiddle the tariffs at their pleasure, for the fiduciary is only another foreign language to me, and I leave to others the ins and outs of tare and cess and octroi. All that I ever wanted was enough cash. Death duties never bothered me, only death. (And even at that, even with all my opportunities, all my missed chances,
still
I have had to do with the stuff. More than most. A guy with his money “tied up.” Think, think: a fellow with tied-up money. Knotted dough, bread braided as
challah
. Ben Flesh like those strapped Croesi. Well, not in
their
league, of course, not even in the towns which hold their ball parks, but nevertheless, except for living expenses—high on the highway—with the rest of that fraternity, what I have all in the frozen assets of the frozen custard: the rent and payrolls and equipment and insurance, the petty cash, all the incidentals.)

But because in the last leg of my journey, on notice as I was, warned as I was, politely ultimatum’d, cautioned by the boys and only tenuously
laissez-faire’d
by the girls, who did not have the votes now anyway, Lotte’s suicide having shifted the balance of power and adulterated their fabulous consanguinity in some, to me, fathomless way—and how struck,
hurt
I had been to see them differentiated at last, to see
their
diversification, the awful introduction of nuance into their Finsberg portfolio—I knew that for the first time since the war, when I had put in those long-distance calls to my dead, killed parents—who died, as I lived, on the highway—that I was alone. That something had been withdrawn in Riverdale, taken from me, the godcousinship which had been my ace-in-the-hole, my letter of credit to the world, the carte blanche smeared,
shmutzed
, and that I had only one peeled wire of connection left, Patty’s IOU. That I could lie beside her in death like a puppy at the foot of a kid’s bed.

So what else was there to do? What choices
did
I have? Why, only to put on my decorous act of business-is-business propriety. To try to live as they had tried to teach me to live at Wharton. To try, as if I were cramming for an exam, to recall those principles of business administration, finance, and double-entry sobriety which are only finally solid solvency’s serious style.

For the fact is that in all those years he had merely gotten what he wanted—enough cash. That he had spread himself too thin, that there had been too many split ends. Mister Softee in the frozen north, a Robo-Wash in a neighborhood where half the cars were destined to be repossessed, a Radio Shack in a Kentucky town where reception was lousy and there was only one FM multiplex station, a Baskin-Robbins in a section of Kansas City too far from any neighborhood for there to be kids, a dance studio in a part of town where people wouldn’t even
walk
at night, a dry cleaner in a wash-and-wear world. As if he could live forever, outlast the phases, eras, and epochs of faddish geography and sociology. Like a player of Monopoly who built his hotels on Baltic and Mediterranean and Ventnor Avenues, say, all those low-rent districts of the spirit, whose strategy it was to go to jail as often as he could, to stay there as long as he could, and to win by attrition. Some strategy. Who did not turn out to have the body for strategies of attrition, for whom attrition was a reflexive disease. Who, going such distances, could not go the distance. Some strategy. And all it ever got him was all he ever wanted: enough cash, lolly, dough, brass, spondulicks—the ready. And if he bought and sold so much, if he was so active, perhaps, too, there was something else he wanted, something nobler and more spiritual even than enough cash: something no less than empire itself—to be the man who made America look like America, who made America famous. What had he called it for the murderously divided twins and triplets? Oh yes. The “Esperanto of simple need.” Convenience necessity and the universalized appetite. And if the outskirts of Chicago resembled Connecticut or Tulsa Cleveland and Cleveland Omaha and the north the west and the west the south and east, why
he’d
had a finger in it, more than a finger—some finger!—a hand. Some hand. There wasn’t a television in all the thousands of motel rooms in which he’d slept which wouldn’t show him in the course of a single evening at least two sponsored minutes of the homogenized, coast-to-coast America he’d helped design, costuming the states, getting Kansas up like Pennsylvania, Georgia like New York. Why he
was
a Finsberg! A Julius and his own father Flesh, too, loose and at large in his beautiful musical comedy democracy!

Yes.
Loose. At large!
Those were the operative words now. So what else
was
there to do? What choices did I have? None but to dredge up Wharton, recalling the patter like a foreign language.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’d like a word with Friendly Bob Adams, please, Miss. My name is Ben Flesh.”

“Ben,” friendly Bob, spotting him, said, “I expected you last week. When you didn’t come I tried to—”

“I’m sorry. I should have gotten you on the blower. I had to fly back to New York on some rather urgent business. I hope this isn’t an inconvenient—”

“No, no, of course not,” Adams said, smiling and taking his hand warmly. “Harriet, this is Mr. Flesh. Harriet’s our new receptionist, Ben.”

“How do you do, Harriet?” Harriet smiled. “She looks a crackerjack girl, Friendly. What happened to—it was Jean, wasn’t it?”

“She turned sourpuss, Ben. She wouldn’t let a smile be her umbrella. I had to get rid of her.”

“Of course. Nice to see you, Harriet. Miss—”

“Lapaloosa.”

“Look at the teeth on her, Ben. When she grins.”

“Very good to have you with us, Miss Lapaloosa. Oh, say, Adams, since I
am
running late, it might be a good idea if we skipped lunch this time. I’d like to take some things up with you.”

“Of course, Ben. Why don’t we go back to my office?”

“Splendid,” Ben said. Then, in his manager’s office, he let him have it.

“Cash flow,” he said, “hard times.”

“Demand has never been—”

“Hard times.
Hard
. The price of money to us. Ten cents on the dollar. The truth-in-lending laws. Price tags on our dollars like notarized statements from the appraiser.”

“But demand, Ben, the phone never stops ringing.
They
don’t care, Ben, they
don’t
. You think someone down on his luck comparison shops? We do the arithmetic for them, we show them the vigorish like a cop reading them their civil rights, and they
still
don’t care. ‘Where do I sign?’ they want to know. ‘How soon do I get the money?’ ”

“And this doesn’t make you
suspicious?
Wipe that smile off your face, Friendly. This doesn’t make you
suspicious?
You’ve got a good heart, you weren’t cut out to be a shylock. Schmuck, of
course
they don’t care. They know about bankruptcy. Sylvia Porter tells them in the papers.”

“But the credit checks, Ben, we run credit checks, we know exactly—”

“Yesterday’s newspapers, kid, history. Yesterday’s news, last year’s prospecti. The times have changed on them, their mood has, their disposition. A depression comes, the first thing that goes, after the meat on the table, after the fruit in the bowl, the first thing that goes is optimism, the belief they can pay back what they owe.”

“We can garnishee—”

“What?
What
can we garnishee? Their unemployment checks? Their workman’s compensation? What can we garnishee? Their allowance from the union? What,
what
can we garnishee? The widow’s mite? The plastic collateral? What can we garnishee? We going to play tug-of-war with the dealer to repossess the car? We take their furniture? Their color TV? And do what? We got a warehouse? We got storage facilities? Tracts of land in the desert for all the mothball fleet of a bankrupt’s detritus?
Credit checks!
On what? Old times? The good old days? It doesn’t make you suspicious white-collar guys come to you for dough? College graduates? The class of ’58?
That
doesn’t bother you? Your ear ain’t to the ground? Take your credit checks in the men’s toilet. Hear what they’re saying in
those
circles. Sneak up behind them where they eat their lunch, taking their sandwiches from a paper bag, their milk from mayonnaise jars, because these are the people never owned a lunch pail, a pencil box of food, who wouldn’t recognize a thermos unless it was beside a Scotch cooler on a checkered cloth spread out on the lawn for a picnic. Fuck your credit checks, cancel them they bounce. Overhear the rumors they overhear—the layoffs, the open-ended furloughs coming just after the Christmas upswing, the plants closing down in this industry and that, and only a skeleton crew to bank the furnaces, only the night-watchman industry booming because we live in the time of the looters, of the plate-glass smashers, in the age of the plucked toaster from the storefront window and somebody else snitches the white bread. This is the credit you’re running down? No no. They won’t pay. They can’t. And they don’t care.”

“But so far…”

“Sure so far, certainly so far. So far is no distance at all. I’m shutting us down, I’m getting us out. Even now I am negotiating with banks and savings and loans and even with shylocks to buy up our paper at a discount.” Friendly Bob Adams had stopped smiling. It was the first time Flesh had seen him unhappy. It was very strange. His expansiveness gone, he seemed not so much sad as winded. Ben gave him a chance to catch his breath. Adams shook his head slowly. He moved from behind his desk and past the safe where they kept the money and to the window, where he looked out onto the street.

“You’ll find something,” Flesh said. “I tell you what. If nothing turns up you can always come back to me. I’ll find a place for you in a different franchise. I’m not getting out of everything. I’m simply taking stock, inventorying my situation, trimming my sails. Don’t worry. You’ll be all right. I swear to you.”

“It isn’t that,” Adams said.

“It isn’t what?”

“It isn’t that. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I can make it.”

“Sure you can,” Ben said.

“It isn’t me.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” he said. He looked stricken.

“What is it?”

“Miss Lapaloosa,” he said. “You know me, Ben,” he said, “my make-up. I’m sunshine soldier, summer patriot.”

“Yes?”

“Jean was different. When she turned sourpuss I had to let her go. She depressed me. She tried my friendliness.”

“You want me to fire Miss Lapaloosa? Is that it?”

“You saw,” he said. “That smile. That was from the heart, Ben.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll do it,” I said.

“Would you?”

“No problem.”

“That’s swell, Ben. That’s a load off my chest.”

“She’s as good as out on her ass this minute.”

“You’re all right, Ben,” Friendly Bob Adams said.

And giving them the benefit of his best judgment at Railroad Salvage.

“It’s all wrong,” he said, walking with his manager up and down the big hangar-like room, past the bins of canned goods, the stands of steamer trunks and open drawers of hardware—nails, tacks, screws, bits of pipe, washers, bolts, and nuts—like boxes of font, the appliances, mixed, blenders next to portable radios, side by side with steam irons, waffle irons above pressure cookers, toasters and hot plates and bathroom scales laid out on shelves like prizes in a carnival booth. Past the toys, the bins of practical jokes—fake dog poop, joy buzzers, dismembered suppurating fingers, whoopee cushions—like a warehouse of toy pain and joke shit. Through wall-less, shuffled rooms of cheap furniture, kitchen tables set up beside bedroom sets and next to raised toilet seats, vanities, double basins, sinks heavily fixtured as consoles in control towers next to porch furniture, lawn—swings, hammocks, chaise longues, big barbecues like immense cake dishes—beside living rooms that melded into each other, stocky Mediterranean alongside Mapley Colonial and near art-deco Barcaloungers, stack tables, glass and aluminum pieces, a dozen different kinds of lamps. Polyglot as the site of a tornado. “It’s all wrong, it won’t do.”

“Business hasn’t been bad, Mr. Flesh. Sure, the economy’s in a bind right now. Things are a little tight, but our figures are only marginally behind last year’s. Down maybe 7 or 8 percent, but there’ll be an upturn. The President says, his advisers think—”

“It won’t do. Bring a hammer. Get a nail.”

“A hammer? A nail?”

“Have you got a piece of glass somewhere? From costume jewelry. Fetch a zircon.”

“But I—”

“Do it,” Flesh said.

His manager whispered something to a stock boy who was passing by. When the boy returned Flesh took the hammer from him, beckoned them both to follow. The kid caddied Ben’s zircon, his nail.

They returned to the bins of canned goods. Ben set a can of peas down on the cement floor and, stooping, carefully slammed at the top of the can. “See?” he said, holding it up, “now it
looks
damaged. Hand me the nail. See,” he said, “you make a little scratch on the label. Don’t tear it all off, just a little scratch.” He straightened up. “Here and there. I don’t mean everything. But here and there. Use the zircon to scar the glass tabletops, the legs of coffee tables. Get tools that etch your driver’s license into metal. Burn long numbers on the back of TV sets. They’ll think stolen goods. Be careful. Don’t cut yourself. I don’t want anybody hurt.” He looked at them. “Goodwill Industries is killing us, they’re busting our brains. All right, I’m not really frightened of Mr. Goodwill Industries. Mr. Goodwill Industries is in for a kick in the ass, too. People aren’t so quick in these times to clear out their junk. They’ll make do. They won’t rifle their wardrobes or wring out their basements. Mr. Goodwill Industries is living on borrowed time. His sources are drying up. That’s when we make our move.