Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“You’d better leave, I think.”

“You give me a number where I can reach him.”

“I’ll see to it that your license is revoked.”

“ My license? How are you going to do that? How are you going to revoke carte blanche? You think the system’s an Indian giver? Listen, LL.D., you could be disbarred easier. Poor Withers. Twenty-five hundred a month. Some lawyer. Twenty-five hundred a month for a broad who went down on every depositor in Ohio First Federal Savings. She gave it away to every guy who opened an account. In all the branches. Or are you talking about my license for the gun? I got papers on it like a naturalized citizen or the warrantee on your toaster. I got instruments for it like General Eisenhower’s honorable discharge.”

The man stares at me; he’s never seen such a performance in all his fancy practice. But suddenly I have run out of steam. I finish lamely. “Make sure he’s around. See to Withers.”

In the lobby I wait for each of the elevators to appear. I promise myself that should the old man be in one of them I will buy his trick, but the man is gone.

Back on the street. He’s tired. He’s made very little money for a Monday. It’s late, but not late enough to call the desk sergeants. When is the best time to call? Midnight when they’ve closed the books? Too late. The others will have skimmed the cream. The only sure thing would be to buy all the desk sergeants, but that would be prohibitive. Best to make it almost a social call, work it that way. Too much money shouldn’t change hands. If bondsmen had a trade journal I’d write a paper on it. This afternoon in Covington they voted to cooperate. Threats were made in my absence. My little leverage is leaking.

The street has changed. Not so much money here, not as much taste, but even more style. The shops burst with an egoism of the present tense, the bright letters of the bright wood signs molded in a sausage calligraphy like those quick, clever strokes that leg and backbone animals in balloon-blowing acts. Or black, no capitals, a svelte, spare geometry of case. He remembers these shops, could tell you stories, recalls like a perfect witness their former, failed incarnations. The woman’s shoe store, Bootique, was once Kefauver’s campaign headquarters, then a bookie joint with empty cigar boxes and tire irons half-heartedly showing form’s flag in a casual, lip-service hypocrisy in the front window. After that nothing at all for a time — though once, initially, Tyson’s Liquors, as he still thinks of it, really. Most of the shops won’t last the year. But never till now, the witness thinks, so uniform, locked into style’s faddish contagion, a terminal domino theory. What discrepancies he perceives between will and doom, these tenants’ signs like life’s campaign buttons. He looks for reasons but sees only the irrational, a self-conscious hedonism. The signs, these shops, this business and that enterprise, this landscape, seasonal as the pictures on one of his calendars, are all jokes. The toy shop, with its expensive Creative Playthings and Chinese boxes and big stuffed animals and folk dolls and folk tops and folk sticks and folk hoops and folk balls and miniature green and black boilers of real steam engines for curator kids who never existed, is called — in rainbow letters, yes, it is the rainbow sequence: yellow catching green, green blue and so on, on the glass—“Kinder Garden.” And the butcher shop, sawdust on the floor like cereal and the butchers in boaters, and skinned, unrefrigerated rabbits, plucked chickens and carcasses upside down on hooks that could hold coats, is “The Meating House.” A fabric shop: “Knits and Bolts.” An Italian restaurant: “Pizza Resistance.” “Sole Food”: a fish ’n chips. “Diaspora Travel.” A head shop: “Headquarters.” A cinema: “The Last Picture Show.” “Save Face”: a beauty parlor. A health food store: “Mother Nature’s.” “The Basic Premise”: a realtor. A carry-out chicken place: “Marcho Polio.” “Rock ’n Roll”: a lapidary and bakery. A tie shop: “Get Knotted.” A rug store: “Underfoot.” “Captain’s Courageous”: a men’s hat shop. A watch repairman’s: “Time Out.” “Howard Johnson’s.” (How the hell did that get there?) Even a small moving company: “Gutenberg’s Movable Types.”

They spoke of the breakdown of law and order, of crime in the streets, but what a discipline was in these streets, what a knuckling under and catering to the times. It is beyond his capacity to conjure up the future, he cannot even imagine what the safety razors will look like twenty-years from now, or a snow shovel. He passes a drugstore and sees a sign on the window: “Established 1961.” He laughs before he realizes that it is no joke. If it were a question of just this one neighborhood — but it isn’t; it’s spread now even to the shopping centers, even to the ghettos. In his own area—“Alexander Main, Licensed Bailbond Broker”—he has seen wide-windowed tour buses, the sight-seers’ attention close-order-drilled by the tour guide. What can they be looking at? Survivors for a lousy generation and a half? In history already? So soon? He’s not young. He’s seen good times and bad, but never times like these, time itself doing in a season what once it had taken a decade to accomplish. Shall he get paint? Send Crainpool to the window with a brush? Have him paint in…what? “Bail Out?” “I Been Working on the Bailbond?” “A Surety Thing?” It’s as if he lives trapped in the neck of an hourglass. Style, he thinks. As a young man he wanted it, hoped that when he wakened it would be there like French in his mouth. Now he sees it as a symptom of a ruinous disease.

He needs sleep, a nap. He pushes past the strollers and lovers and shoppers — it’s past three, the high school kids are out, the students from the university are — moving in the garishly dressed crowd like someone hurrying down an escalator. He brushes the arm of a young man in an ordinary white shirt with a master sergeant’s chevrons sewn to the sleeve. He dodges a girl in an ammunition belt, kids in flags, yarmulkes, the girls braless, their nipples erect, puckering their T-shirts as if they moved in perpetual excitation, the genitals of the young men askew, crushed packages in their tight jeans, both sexes horny, literally, their sex antlered inside their binding clothes. He sees colors which till now have never been printed on cloth. He sees all the good-looking young who seem some new species in their furred shoes, their boots, bags suspended from the shoulders of the young men, oddly courierizing them. The girls in pants, the ground rounds and roasts of their behinds, the lifting tension of their crotches making it appear as if they are actually suspended in their trousers, like parachutists perhaps, sunk in them up to their hips and the small of their backs. There is something strangely military about this crowd. Perhaps it is the stripy patterns of their clothes, like the tricolors of decorations.

The Phoenician yawns and a young man turns to him. “Hey uncle, I dig your sport coat.”

“What, this?”

“No, it’s nice.”

“You think this is nice? You should see my doorman’s uniform.”

“You got a doorman’s uniform? Wow.”

“Yeah, well my daughter’s getting married Sunday and I’m giving her away.”

“Getting married? No shit?”

He talks to him as if asleep. (So accustomed am I to chatter, to giving as good as I get, coming on strongest, dialogue alive on my teeth like plaque. How long has it been since I’ve had a conversation? A long time. Since my wife died.)

He spots a taxi rank — black, right-hand-drive Austins imported from London: “Guv’s Taxi Company, Ltd.”—and goes over to the first cab, gets in and sinks back into the leather seat.