Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Thanks, Phoenician,” Farb says.

“Rudy, you used to be a big shot, Rudy. The syndicate you had, ax murderers.”

“I’m slowing down, Phoenician. Doctor’s orders.”

It’s true. He looks shitty. I recall talk. He’s been to the hospital for tests. “Rudy, I appreciate your business, but you’ve got to specialize. The way you’re going with this nickel-and-dime we’ll both starve. I’ll give you a tip. In the next year the big thing in crime will be ripping off the guys who collect for insurance companies in the bad neighborhoods. That’s the new action, Rudy, that’s the wave of the future. It’s going to be bigger than cab drivers. If you like I’ll put the word out that Rudy Farb is the best defender of debit-man murderers in the city. The kids will come running, they’ll pay your retainer in loose change they took from the body. Think it over, Rudy, think it over, kid. See you in court.”

So I’m Alexander Main, the Phoenician Bailbondsman, other men’s difficulties my heritage. Alexander Main the Ba’albondsman, doing his duty by the generations and loving it, thriving on the idea of freedom which is my money in the bank, which is my element as the sand was my ancestors’.

So give the Phoenician your murderer, your rapist, your petty thief yearning to breathe free. Give him your stickup guy and embezzler, your juvenile delinquent and car robber. Give him your subversives and menslaughterers. I like dealing with the public.

Yes, and the private too. Tell me. If a man climbs his bathroom scale in the morning and the dial spins, settling finally on his weight, and then suddenly he shivers, say, or barks his morning hack and jiggles the scale and the dial goes spinning again though his feet have never left the scale, jerking a few pounds more or a few less, I ask you this: does that man in those few seconds weigh more? Less? Has he become momentarily weightless? This is philosophy. Do saints have more rights than ordinary men? Which is more important, Arcturus or Jupiter? Do people living in Nome, Alaska, get less out of life than Parisians? The Phoenician loves his philosophy, is charmed by the sharp propositions that precede the thick texts and weighty arguments. As for the rest, the proofs that win, the arduous, numbing connections — I have no patience, or perhaps the equipment is wanting. But the examples, ah ! I’ve a weakness for example, a sweet tooth for instance and all the gossip inherent in idea. A joke better than a story, an hypothesis richer than a case. I’m queer for conditions, I say, a scientist distracted by personality. Farmer Brown has an apple, Farmer Jones a pear. If a pear has a sixth more market value than an apple, how much apple must Farmer Brown give to eat a quarter of Farmer Jones’ pear? The Phoenician loves such problems. Make it figs and he’ll hug you.

But I am merely a bailbondsman. I spring you, something neutral in the freedom I sell. At least you won’t be cornholed, or beaten by the guards, or have to eat the civic slime. For the time being and the duration of due process you’re your own man still, and may it serve you better than it did before. For the time being. Yes, I am chained to the calendar. I live by it. What your watch is to you my calendar is to me. As it happens, I got calendars all over the place, tools of the trade. I get them from garages (French maids in satin uniforms, their bloomers like white carnations), funeral directors (Audubon prints, Niagara Falls), banks (kids with fishing poles, covered bridges in New England), the Hong Kong tailors (panoramas of the harbor), insurance companies (views of downtown Hartford); from trucking firms and liquor stores and laundries. I hang them all in my shop, a storefront across from Cincinnati police headquarters. What views I have! Not a window in the place — the Venetian blinds, always drawn, across the width of the shop — but everywhere I look nature in its green abundance and staggering formations. You’ve come a long way from Phoenicia. But I don’t look. All I see are the numbers like seven columns of sums, the red Sundays like a bankrupt’s homework and the glowing, feverish holidays, New Year’s, Washington’s birthday, clean March, April, June and August. May’s flush Memorial Day and July’s gaudy Fourth and all the burning rest. I note who’s to appear where, circle when they show and the case is closed, and make a thick arrow where I’m disappointed. My calendars are like maps and I am secretary to the year itself, up on all its appointments.

The shop looks as if it had once been something else — the source of its own calendars, perhaps, like a liquor store or a real-estate office. It never was. It was always what it is now. Like the sixteen other bondsmen’s offices in the three blocks around police headquarters and the municipal and federal courts. Your bailbond architecture is storefront gypsy, nigger church. The city has a referendum coming up next year, a proposal for a bond issue that would provide a new civic courts complex on some cleared land near the stadium. If it passes I’ll have to move — a nomad still — and if I can’t buy out the small one-man grocery I got my eye on, what I put up will look just like this place, a replica like a little tourist attraction. I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a bond in one of those chrome and naugahyde bank manager places with their big notched-leaf plants and their clear aquariums with cruising iridescent fish. I need wooden desk from the high school teacher’s office, a broken set of unmatched folding card-table chairs, squat black telephones, a pencil sharpener on the lintel of the window, green metal wastebaskets, dirty linoleum, walls that will take the nails to hold my calendars and a bare floor that can stand up to my small, heavy safe. I need a toilet and washstand in something that used to be a closet, the scaly ceiling and the cheap glass ashtrays, plugs for space heaters and a transom over the front door like the place where they put the old air-conditioning unit in a barbershop. And a place for my arsenal. (I’m armed. I have what the cops have: pistols, mace, a helmet, handcuffs, a rifle, a cosh, even a bulletproof vest.) And shelves, of course, for my library of statutes from those three quarters of the fifty states where bailbonding is still legal. Like a clinic for the poor, something crummy and vaguely volunteer in the air. And tough.

And this is what I seem to look like. Mid-fifties, a hairline like a tattered flag, and something in my mug placid and vicious, some kinky catered lust perhaps, used two times a month, say on fourteen-year-old black chicks, my cock moon-pulled, tidal-torn, and you think here’s a guy that turns the tables on those girls, who produces not the fifty he’s promised but the fiver that will not even cover their expenses, and a boot in the blackbird’s ass if she whines, power and cynicism planted there on my municipal kisser and in my eyes that puts me beyond law or retribution or redress, the mien of the mean, the phiz of the respectably ferocious, like a hunter who drinks sour mash. I look professional, you see, a cross between a railroad conductor and a deputy sheriff. You’d expect to see yourself fun-housed in my sunglasses. This is the look of me, the reputation I propagate with my cliché of a face, my death’s pan, the features actually trained into the face. Because the truth is your hood looks up to the impassive: he loves the anesthetized look of the deputy, the sober cosmetics of the hanging judge. Give the public what it wants; the customer is always right. Yes, and business never better. No complaints. Let them scream law and order, yell crime in the streets like the tocsin of a leper. Our times — here’s to ’em. Here’s to the complicated trade routes of the drug traffic, to micro-dot tabs of LSD, to folks’ vengeant itchiness as the discrepancies bloom apace and injustices shake the earth like underground faults. Here’s to moonshots and the confusion of priorities. To TV in the ghetto and ads in the glossies and whatever engines that raise expectations like the hard-on, and drive men up one wall and down the other. To hard times and our golden age of blood!