Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“Fulton’s a pretty good size.”

“Yeah, I was gonna take it but then they told me about Erlanger. Said it had an institution of higher learning. I switched.”

“And it doesn’t?”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it does. It does surely. It got the Seminary of Pius X.”

“Oh.”

“You ever try selling stereo to them fellows? Police band? Headsets? Tape decks? Shit. Well — Good luck to you.”

“Same to you.”

“I’ll lay in Gregorian chants, ‘Perry Como Sings the Lord’s Prayer.’”

“Sounds good.”

“Yeah, sure. Meanwhile, you get the real college kids. Marijuana, the Pill — Those are the turn-ons, man. Biggest thing ever to hit the music industry. Know what I heard?”

“What?”

“That R.C.A., Zenith, Sony, and Panasonic gave E. Y. Lilly and Pfizer and the rest them drug companies money to develop the Pill.”

“No kidding?”

“The truth. Heard they sponsor the Mafia and the drug traffic.”

“I don’t see—”

“Why you think a lid of grass so cheap? It goes against every law of supply and demand. That’s the record companies, mister. The record companies do that. They give the pot farmers price supports.”

“Oh.”

“Subsidize poppy fields.”

“Really?”

“Pot and poppy parities, yes sir.”

“I see.”

“Sure.”

“I never thought about it.”

“I will. Open your eyes.”

“God bless.”

The displays are compelling. Each screened booth with its shelves of sound equipment glows, buzzes like cockpit, like miniature war room, like listening posts in science fiction. Meters of fine tuning like green pies closing. Needles that travel against arbitrary scales, past the reds and oranges of distortion toward baby blues of pitch-perfect harmony and balance. Round clocklike dials across dashboards of sound. Stereo cartridges like decks of cards, that look, sunk in their slots, like open tills, like queer, spit product. Cleverly notched steel spindles, turntables like reels of computer tape. And the gorgeous cargo of speakers like splendid crates, blank black domino shapes tight in their mahogany frames. The grooved and handsome ferruled knobs — AM, FM, AFC, vol. and bass, treble and balance, filter and phono, auxiliary tape. Contour control, “joy sticks.” Jacks and fuse lights. Sliding levers, smoked-plastic dust covers. Headsets like the ears’ furniture, their thick foam stuffing, their leathery vinyl skins. The broad wide-eyed faces of cassettes, the immense and careless weave of the 8-tracks. Digital AM-FM clock radios, their neon numerals the color of struck matches, the broken verticals and horizontals of the numbers like fractured bones, unkindled ghost digits just visible behind them like the floating, germ-like transparencies that drift across the surface of an eyeball. Other styles — card numbers that flip over like scores on TV game shows, or that rise into the radios like figures on odometers. There are pocket-size tape recorders, microphones built into them like snipers’ scopes. And portable televisions like pieces of luggage. There are antennas like fishing rods, like whips, like window screens, like swatches of fence, like pen-and-pencil sets, like huge metal combs, like immense paper clips. There is specialized stuff — marine radiotelephones; citizen’s band transceivers; base stations, mobile; 8-channel FM scanning receivers with their movie marquee light sequences. Tuned to crime, tuned to fire, tuned to weather, tuned to all the ships at sea — earth, fire, air, and water tuned. The notches of wavelength-like lines on rulers or the scale on maps, all the calibrated atmosphere of frequency.

I have been in the Bowling Green shop just once. I am a personnel man finally, only an absentee landlord, a silent owner in the sound trade. They rip me off, my managers, my hired help. They aren’t to be trusted. They skim. I know that. I’ve taken bartenders and put them in charge of my franchises. I’ve turned vice-squad detectives into bosses. Clerks in liquor stores, ticket sellers, head-waiters, gas-station attendants — all those technicians in larceny. My gray-collar guys of good judgment who know just where to draw the line and just when to stop. What can it cost me in the long run? Less than fringe benefits, less than Blue Cross, pension plans. I tell them up front what I’ll stand for. They appreciate that. If they take advantage I send the auditors in or go myself. But that’s rare. The rule of thumb is, they work their asses off in order to increase the profits from which they are allowed to steal. In the long run I’m probably even, maybe a dollar or two ahead.

I came to the Radio Shack bash to buy. Chelton should have come. He knows the stock better, the clientele. I’m his operative really, just following orders.

It’s just that I’ve got to do some thing.

We were all in our seats. They dimmed the lights in the Century Ballroom. The great collar of equipment from the display booths that lined three sides of the ballroom glowed like electric Crayolas. It was really rather pretty. The franchisers applauded. Even I started to applaud but it hurt my hand. Then someone yelled, “Bravo, bravo,” and this was taken up and soon everyone was clapping and cheering, giving a standing ovation to a lot of colored dials. It was like applauding dessert, the waiters’ parade of cherries jubilee at a catered dinner, luminous baked Alaska at a golden wedding anniversary. Businessmen are so dumb.

Then — I don’t know how they did this, some linked rheostat arrangement or something — they brought down the lights on the equipment until the ballroom was pitch black. A white pin spot flared on some Fort Worth guy on the dais and we sat back down.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there’s to be a demonstration.”

The pin spot, round as a pancake, large as his face, reduced itself, burned briefly on the tip of his nose, and went out. The Century Ballroom was bereft of light, blackness so final it was void, a vacuum of light. We could have been locked in the subterranean on the backside of moons. I thought of the brownouts I’d fled, but this was darker, melanistic, the doused universe and the pitch of death.

And they applauded this , applauded darkness. So dumb. And I thought — the Wharton Old Boy — it’s a miracle Dow Jones has an average, a miracle that there’s trade at all. The dollar’s a miracle, the dime a wonder, America astonishing, all organization a wondrous serendipity. Higher the handicapped and Excelsior to all. Applauded darkness!

Self-consciously — oh, the demands of level good will — I thought perhaps I should join them. Even in the darkness — who could have seen me? — I felt this pressure to join in, to add my two-cent increment of invisible loyalty, pressured like men at ball parks to stand with their fellows for the anthem, to move their lips over the words flashed on the scoreboard, and make a noise here and another there when the song descends to their key. But it hurt my hand to applaud and I kept still. And then, the oddest thing.

A man called, “Bravo, bravo.” Then the chant was taken up, and through the sound of applause and cheers I could hear chairs scraping all about me as they were pushed back and the Radio Shack people stood. It was ludicrous. Cheer darkness! As well applaud lawns, crabgrass, hurrah the sky and clap for rain. The givens are given. I wouldn’t move. I hadn’t the excuse of my game hand but I wouldn’t move, would not rise with my clamorous colleagues.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Fort Worth man said, “there’s to be a demonstration.”

The lights came on in the Century Ballroom. The Fort Worth man was not on the dais. No one was standing. The chairs were just where I had remembered their being when we had sat down after applauding the new line of equipment. We looked at each other.