Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

And a few minutes later — he was on the way to Cinema I and II, the hell with what his manager might think — he saw something which made him stop his car. He looked about desperately for a place to park, a vacant meter. Someone was pulling out a dozen yards down the street. He moved quickly to protect the parking space. He had no change for the meter and only about five minutes of parking time remained on it. To hell with it, let them give him a ticket, let them tow.

He walked inside.

“You’re next, mister.”

“The works,” Flesh said, and climbed into the barber chair.

“Shine?” a black man asked.

“Yes, yes, please,” Flesh said. He whispered to the barber.

“Dorothy,” the barber said, “the gentleman wants a manicure.”

“Get the cuticles,” Ben said, “don’t forget the cuticles.”

The girl brought her tray and stool up to Ben’s chair. “The cuticles are part of the treatment,” she said.

“Yes,” Ben said, “of course.” She held his right hand powerfully and began to file his nails. “Yes,” he said, “that’s good. That’s very good. And a soak?”

“It’s all part of the treatment,” she said.

“Part of the treatment, yes,” he said, and surrendered his hand to the warm soapy water and his face to the hot towel and his feet to the vigorous movements of the black man’s hands, the wonderful tickling sensation when he ran the polish-dipped toothbrush around the base of Ben’s shoes. And to the tears under the towel that came from his connection to these three people, and even to the sobs, the huge heavy heavings of his cured chest that they would see under even the great loose barber’s sheet that covered him.

The Franchiser goes to his movie.

My movie is wonderfully splendid. The white stone building looks something like a naval officer’s hat. I know only approximately what a parabola is, but my movie is paraboloid, I think. It isn’t rectangular, it isn’t flat; the rear wall — where the screens are, the cyclorama, I believe — is higher than the front or side walls. A naval officer’s hat, a pilot’s, something pinched and rakish, like, given distance, low furniture. The entrance is boulder and Thermopane, the boulders tan as Hush Puppies, broken ovals and oblongs of stone, snugged in their mortar mounting like facets. In daylight the tall, thick Thermopane is faintly green, pale as martini or bath water. Outside, along an angled, projecting corridor of bouldered wall are the movie’s locked framed glass cases — I have a key to these displays, I carry it on my Prince Gardner, top-grain cowhide key holder — where my movie’s beautiful posters are sealed beneath the permanent rubric: Now Playing. (And the posters are beautiful, so much better than the stagy, glossy stills of the old days with their look, even if the picture was actually in Technicolor, of having been tinted, cosmetized, rouge on the actors’ cheeks, eye shadow visible as birthmark above their eyes, stills like tableaux in a wax museum, like the mortician’s finagling. The posters are much better. Art work. Line drawings. Spare and promising. Logotypes even the shut-in — the big weekend ads in the Friday and Sunday papers — has by heart. As much a part of the film’s image as its theme music. No, but I saw the poster.)

Inside the lobby — more later — to the side, the movie’s twin ticket booths like tellers’ cages, the stainless chrome panels like a double sink, which spit out my movie’s lovely oversize tickets, wide as 35-millimeter film, yellow with a narrow blue edge like a soundtrack, and capable — depending who springs, how large the party — of producing a string of tickets long as a yardstick, longer.

The movie’s glass candy cases as big around as a boy’s bedroom. With their gorgeous tiers of cellophane-wrapped, cardboard candy boxes with their miniatures — their individually sheathed Heaths and Peter Paul’s Mounds and Almond Joys and Milky Ways and Mars. Milk Duds and jujubes like boxes of marbles. No bars any more. Oh, the immense dark Hershey’s of course, yellow Butterfingers long as a ruler (seventy-five cents some of them, practically nothing under forty-five cents). And popcorn in cylinders large as Quaker Oats boxes, with dollops of my movie’s drawn butter and high drifts of buff popcorn in the greased glass case like a spell of cockeyed weather. (We have done away with the hot dogs, slow rolling in grilled place like logs in a river.) And my movie’s juices, its carefully sized grape drinks and orange, its Pepsi and Fresca and Seven-Up. My movie’s immense carats of crushed ice, its napkin dispensers and straws.

Beautiful Naugahyde benches clear of the Thermopane and near twin easels of Coming Soon with their startling — it’s a first-run house — new posters, novel, like a king’s proclamation, banns, latest policy, fresh law, new rules. My patrons sidling up to these, studying them while they wait for the show to break.

The movie’s thick carpets, a bright, gentle meld and tie-dye of color giving ground to color like the progress of landscape, laws of geography. My movie’s toilets, its Women’s rooms and Men’s, with its urinals white as pillowcase, its stalls of decorator colors not found in nature, and its tiny discrete colored tiles like squares on a board game, its modern, functional sinks with their cockpit fixtures, their wonderful dials for hot water, cold, the pushbutton for soap pink as bubble gum. Paper-towel dispensers built into the walls like pewter mailboxes. My movie’s toilets’ textured walls with my movie’s toilets’ motifs, its indirect lighting and its hidden, gentling sound system that plays the themes from big hits at the box office.

Have I mentioned my movie’s sign? An immense white rectangle of tabula rasa, split down the middle by a length of black metal — CINEMA I, CINEMA II — and looking like a domino in a negative. The simple statement of the titles— The Longest Yard, The Gambler —in sharp black letters like the font of scare headlines, brooding and important as assassination or a declaration of war. The name of one actor up there, or none at all. This is my single whimsy: From time to time I call my manager. “What’s playing?” I ask. He knows I mean, “What’s coming soon?” “ Godfather Part II ,” he’ll tell me. “I’ll get back to you,” I’ll say. I do my homework. “We’ll go with Robert De Niro.” “It’s Al Pacino,” he tells me. “They’re doing a major piece in Time . Al Pacino is hot.” “Robert De Niro.” “We’ll catch shit from the distributor. It’s in the contract. We’ve got to put Pacino up there. It would only confuse people.” “They know by now. They know how I operate. They’ll love it.” It’s the truth. My sign has read “ That’s Entertainment , Ann Miller”; “ Airport , Helen Hayes.” And people do enjoy it. If they even notice. They think they’re in on some inside joke. And the film buffs — the Draper Lake Mall is close to Norman, where the University of Oklahoma campus is located — somehow have the idea that seeing a big commercial blockbuster — the only pictures I ever show — at Cinema I, Cinema II somehow endorses the film, makes it Cahiers du Cinéma material, themselves — what’s the word? — cineasts. But the truth is, I do not intend it as a joke, or even as a means of drawing people to my theater. (Though it may have that effect, I think. In the early fifties certain independent exhibitors took the chains to court on the grounds that their exclusive right to show particular films was in restraint of trade. People can go almost anywhere to see my movies. I saw in the paper that The Longest Yard and The Gambler are playing in at least five different first-run houses in the greater Oklahoma City metropolitan area.) It is an act of willfulness on my part, a blow against my franchise being. To see if I can take such blows. That go against the homogeneous grain of my undifferentiated heart. I cannot. But this is how I worry my loose tooth, push against my character, isometrize habit and inclination and the interchangeable parts of my American taste. I am really more comfortable that the sign reads “ The Longest Yard , Burt Reynolds; The Gambler , James Caan.” I am glad that the girls behind my candy cases look like ex-babysitters, my ushers like high-school seniors who lack force, who will go on to junior colleges or take their courses at the extension centers of the state university. I am glad I show blockbusters, all the “PG’s” and “R’s” of our collectivized soul and Esperanto’d judgment.