Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

The prime interest rate is 11 percent and he stands in the five-story lobby of the Crown Center Hotel, the first jewel in Hallmark’s Triple Crown.

He has seen, from the highway, the twin saddles of the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex, two sloping stadia like counters in shoes, home of the Chiefs, home of the Royals — what, he thinks, what a franchise! — glimpsed the three-million-dollar scoreboard, tall as a high-rise, the glassed-in private boxes and suites along the rim of the stadia like handsome molding. (He has read that some of these rent for $18,000 a year. Eighteen Thousand Dollars.) And has proceeded through Kansas City’s squeezed downtown with its decaying warehouses and skyscrapers, some abandoned, nostalgia in the making like a bacteria culture, and out Truman Road and onto Grand Avenue to the Crown Center, passing the hotel with its high cantilevered tower like a machine-gun-emplacement on a prison wall, the windows like stereo speakers or light meters on cameras. Passing the Crown Center Shops on his right, the squares and plazas and fountains and open ice rink on his left, Hall’s huge office complex, vaguely — he has seen line drawings, even knows where the apartments will stand — like a locomotive, and turns right into the parking garage, and parks — no room on the Jack of Hearts, no room on the Jack of Diamonds, no room on the Queen of Spades — on the Queen of Clubs level. Of course! Hallmark cards. And has pulled his grip out of the trunk, his garment bag. An attendant comes up to him. “Better lock your car, sir.” And it is as friendly as — he’s Queen of Clubs — an admonishment not to show his hand. He wonders as he walks toward the double set of doors what is above him, a king? Of what suit? Does the parking lot hold a pair of kings? What is above the pair? And is now close enough to read the sign above the double doors: TO WEST VILLAGE AND CROWN CENTER SHOPS. Ah. Aces high for hotel parking. He has been dealt a losing hand, trumped, out cut. He stands pat however and continues on through the doors.

And is in West Village, Chelsea Court, the shops like five-sided open-ended cubes hanging suspended in multileveled space and attached to each other by catwalk, the black-painted iron stairs of fire escape and spiral staircase. And is unsteady on his feet, overcome by a sense of standing among the fallen blocks of giant children. It is a theater of merchandise, he is overwhelmed by an impression of having stepped backstage. He looks about him, is momentarily confused, cannot tell audience from actors. Each store is a perfect set. And trade is dialogue. It’s like market day in some European town, it’s like a fair. He could be in a shop window, he could be in the street, in a crazy, zigzag perpendicular of streets; he could be standing ankle deep in some archaeology of the retail, the palimpsest digs of commerce. Nutty, displaced bourses, bazaars, booths and kiosks, the chic salesmen and saleswomen become mongers, costers, colporteurs, discreet tradesmen, hawkers, cheapjacks, chapmen. Some actually wear aprons over their mod clothing; others, their sleeves rolled above their forearms, posture like artisans, as if they have just this minute put the finishing touches on wares they have made themselves. He listens for and momentarily expects to hear work songs, street cries, folk solos, rags, arias: “Straaaw berreez! Nay-ills and hat chets! Tenniss rackettsz, skeee wear here! ” He sees a credit card change hands and is mildly surprised. Even cash would have surprised him here. He expects barter, solid elemental stuff — silver, gold, pinches of gold dust laid out on scales. There is something claustrophobic in this three-dimensional marketplace. The clever names of the shops oppress him. He reads them but has as much trouble taking them in as he has had when he has tried to read the news moving by in a huge electric typeface along the side of a building. Athlete’s Foot (sport shoes); The Candle Power & Light Co. (sculpted wax candles); Sunbrella (sporty sun goggles); The Signal House (model railroading). Some shops are of a sort he has never seen before in his life. There is a place called Wine-Art where one buys the equipment and essences for making wine. There is a place called Bits and Pieces which sells nothing but miniature handcrafted furniture for dollhouses. He looks closely at a grandfather clock no more than two inches high. Its pendulum swings, its minute and hour hands register almost the same time as his wristwatch. (There is a two-minute discrepancy; he is certain it’s his watch which is slow.) Another shop, The Stamp Pad, sells customized rubber hand stamps. He casts about somewhat wildly for an exit, finally spots one, makes his way by means of necessary detours — once he had driven this way, doubled back and forth, taken sudden instinctive, erratic swings south and north, looking for a hole in a heatwave — doglegs, travels a maze, climbs up one level in order to get to another beneath it.

He is out of West Village but still in Crown Center Shops. The stores are more conventional here but still — for him — troubling. Here and there along the corridor there are benches, like benches in museums. Lord Snowden is a men’s haberdasher, Habitat a furniture store, Ethnics a gallery of folk art. There are too many specialty shops, a place that sells yarn, another that does soap. There is The Board & Barrel, with its gourmet cookware; The Factory (a hardware store). There are The Bake Shop, The Candy Store, The Cheese Shop, The Flower Shop, The Sausage Shop, The Fish Market, The Meat Market, The Poultry Market, The Produce Market. And these, with their bare, spare generics, are somehow even more coy than the shops that are puns and double entendres. Though he feels that they have missed a bet, that they might have put in a broker and called it The Stock Market.

Yes. It is precisely what he had thought. As if America has lost a war with France, say, or England, or with, perhaps, its own past, knuckled under to its history. What’s a nice guy like me doing in a place like this? he wonders. A man of franchise, a true democrat who would make Bar Harbor, Maine, look like Chicago, who would quell distinction, obliterate difference, who would common-denominate until Americans recognize that it was America everywhere. The Stamp Pad, indeed. He would show them rubber stamp!

He sees a sign for the Crown Center Hotel and makes for it. No detours. No doglegs. No catwalks. No ups, no downs.

And is standing in the lobby of the hotel. There is, incredibly, along the width of its western wall, a waterfall , a tall slender stream of water no wider at its source than the stream that might come from heavy firehose, but opening out as it drops, spreading, diverted to two channels like the twin barrels on a shotgun, hugging, lower down, rocks, slipping over what appear to be mossy boulders, splashing plants, lichen, citrus trees, and spilling finally into a collecting pool, a sort of hemisphere of walled-off bay. The waterfall is reached by escalators, by exposed balconies two stories above him. Guests, tourists, stroll along iron-railed gangways that crisscross the waterfall like bridges in Japanese gardens. They stand at different levels, as if on scaffolding, spread out and up and down like notes on sheet music. And Flesh watches a woman toss change in the pool. Several sit for their photographs. He has guessed the appeal. It is the appeal of surrealism and odd juxtaposition. Something pit-of-the-stomach in the notion of bringing the outdoors in, just as the elevators at the tower end of the lobby, though entered from the lobby itself, climb the outside of the building, riding up gravity like effervescence in club soda. An appeal in inversion. He suffers a sort of vertigo for the people displaced above him in the air on their balconies and catwalks and scaffolds like so many window washers or house painters or construction workers. He has himself just come from the Center’s suspended cubes, sick in his stomach and feeling the heavy, off-center nausea of the weight, for example, in loaded dice.