Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“The best,” Ginny’s husband says.

“What business are you folks in?” (Where do I get my nerve? From my remission.) It is a strange question, but what can I do to them, a clean, older, well-dressed, wifeless man? They will answer, but before they can I reach into the pocket of my suitcoat and take out four passes. (My fingers can do this. Blind they can find the flap of the pocket, lift it, go in with all five fingers extended, no pinky unconsciously snagged on the lip of the pocket, discriminate between my car keys and the paper passes, count out four from the dozen I have taken from Lockwire, and bring them out.) “Here,” I say, “I happen to have the franchise for this theater. I’d like you to take these passes and use them at your convenience.”

“Say,” Pete’s wife says, “are they really passes?”

“Sure,” I say. I give them to her. “Pass them on. Pass on the passes.”

She looks at them. “They’re real.”

“What did you think, counterfeit? You’ll see they’re not good on Friday or Saturday nights, but otherwise there are no restrictions.”

“Well thanks.”

“I’m a good man in a good mood.”

“Well thanks.”

“What business? What line of work?”

“I’m a supervisor with Southwestern Bell,” Pete’s friend says.

“Name’s Eckerd.” He looks down at the passes. “Mr. Lockwire?”

“Oh no. No no. Mr. Lockwire’s my manager. I’m Benjamin Flesh. I’m not normally in the Oklahoma City area. I’m here on business about the theater. I’m here on show business.”

“Oh,” Eckerd says. “I didn’t think you sounded like an Okie. Got an Eastern accent, sort of.”

“We’re all Americans.”

“Well, that’s so,” Eckerd says. “This is my wife Ginny, and that’s Angie Solberto. Pete, Angie’s husband, has Solberto’s Pharmacy in the Draper Lake Mall.”

“That so? Solberto’s? I parked nearby. That’s very nice.” We shake hands. (Hands!) “Yes,” I say, “all Americans. There are over fifty thousand people throughout our land who will see this picture tonight. Who are going to watch Burt Reynolds as he whips his team of convicts into shape. In New York, a different time zone, they’re already seeing it. The game’s already started. In California they’re still picking up their babysitters, but fifty thousand of us and tomorrow another fifty thousand. And over the course of the week say another seventy-five thousand, and in a month maybe close to a million people. That’s what holds us together, you know.” Pete had come back and we were formally introduced. He’d heard of me. Owning Solberto’s, he knew Lockwire and he’d heard of me.

The music stopped in the middle of a phrase and an image came on the screen while the lights were still up. I rose. “Enjoy the picture, folks. It was nice talking to you. Mr. and Mrs. Eckerd, Mr. and Mrs. Solberto.”

“Aren’t you going to—”

“Oh dear me, no, I’ve seen it. Wonderful meeting you. You seem very nice. Like you know what you’re doing.”

“Hey, shh,” someone said behind me.

“Yes, sorry. Yes of course. Quite right. Enjoy the picture. I’m sorry, sir. It’s just the trailers, only the coming attractions. A lot of late-model cars being destroyed. I saw that one, too. Well, again — it’s been a genuine pleasure. We’re all Americans. We all love Burt. He reaches something in each of us, and though he’s the star, we needn’t take a backseat. Not for a minute. How competent people are! How their authority bespeaks some grounding in natural law itself, God’s glorious injunction to be. My godfather was wrong, I think. Life not only is not flashy, a kick in the head of the rules of probability, it’s normal, fixed as thermostat.”

“Hey, buddy—”

“Come on, mister, up or down, in or out. We paid good money.”

“Efficiency and integrity around like the gases and elements. How we do our homework, every mother’s son of us. Enjoy the picture.”

“Come on, will you?”

“Yes, yes, I’m going.” I backed up the aisle. On the screen— Freebie and the Bean —cars were screeching around corners and slamming through plate-glass windows, flipping over guard rails, and landing on cars below like bombs dropped from planes. “We’re all Americans. Look, look. Do you spot the motifs? This couldn’t have happened before the Yom Kippur war and the energy crisis. We’ve become disenchanted with our automobiles. This too will pass.”

“Fella, if you don’t shut up—” a man said. Lockwire was beside me and I beside myself.

“Enjoy the picture. You know? I think Burt Reynolds once lived in Oklahoma. I think I read that somewhere.”

“Hey, Ben,” Lockwire said, “what is it? Come on.”

“Lockwire,” I whispered, “did someone report me to the manager?”

I retreated with him up the aisles, my face to the screen and quiet now, as he gently held me. “Take it easy, Ben,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“Yes. I will,” I said softly. We were standing at the back near the doors. “Wait. Just a minute. Wait. I just want to see this part.”

On the screen it said, “Cinema I Feature Presentation,” and then there was the big animated image of a sort of gear, like the sprocket flywheel of a wristwatch, or like a kid’s mandalic picture of sunshine. It turned around and around, ticking to weird electronic whistles and beats. “Yes. This is the part.” It was supposed to represent a projector spinning off film like line from a fishing reel. It was the logotype of Cinema I, Cinema II, and all over America in the eastern time zone and the central, mountain, and Pacific ones, people were watching it, as if Greenwich Mean Time itself were unwinding, unwinding. But it was the gears, the gears with their deep notches and treacherous terrible teeth that held me, that translated the zippered nerves which were just then coming unstuck again, the remission remissed, in my hands and fingertips, in the stripped caps of my knees and the scraped tines of my ears, loose as rust, as nuts and bolts in the blood.

It was to be his last remission, and he was to remember it like a love affair, like some guarded, precious intimacy, parsing it like a daydream, an idyll, the day he broke the bank at Monte Carlo. (And would dream about it, too, the dreams realistic but with a certain cast of sepia-tone nostalgia, like dreams of dead parents, bittersweet with love and recrimination.)

Lockwire had thought he’d gone crazy of course, and in a way he had, though not crazy so much as heroically excited — M.S. is a stress disease — his febrile talk like the aura of migraine, the incoherics of inspiration. But in a minute he was all business: More than ever. His plans and off-the-cuff schemes a desperate attempt to make a connection to his health, fear’s black coffee.

This is what he said:

“I want smoking permitted back of the first ten rows. There’s to be no public announcement. You’ll continue to run the ‘Fire Regulations Prohibit Smoking in Any Part of This Theater’ footage, but don’t do anything about enforcement. In the beginning you can have one or two of the ushers light up. This will serve as a signal. When the inspector registers a complaint, offer him a self-perpetuating free pass. If he doesn’t go for it, call the Fire Commissioner. Discuss it with him. Mention one thousand dollars. If he gives you static, go back three spaces, play it their way.

“Candy: I want vending machines put in. No gum, of course. Gum fucks up a theater. Just good, relatively inexpensive stuff. Name brands. You can keep the soft-drink and popcorn apparatus where it is, but replace the candy with paperback versions of the books the movies are based on. With records of the score if it’s a good one. The Sting , for example, Love Story . As a matter of fact, stock up on all the good movie music. Get an inventory together. And movie mags: Silver Screen, Photoplay . Posters are very big. Get in some Robert Redfords, Marlon Brandos, W. C. Fieldses, that sort of thing. Why should the headshops get all the play? Let’s get off our asses, Lockwire. I want to make Cinema I, Cinema II a goddamned Grauman’s Chinese, a regular little Merchandise Mart of the spin-off. Use those shops in museums where they sell postcards, art books, and twenty-five-buck reproductions of famous statuary as your model, those goofy imported handmade toys. We’ll make the candy girl — that redhead — our curator. Take her uniform away. Get her a smock and a patch that goes on the shoulder that says ‘Volunteer,’ or ‘Friends of Cinema I, Cinema II.’ Something like that.”