Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

He mourned the full time. A few had to leave early but he stayed on in the house in Riverdale. His position in the family restored now, they believed he would outlive them. (It had given them a new respect for him, their own sudden sense of having been condemned altering their opinion, his promise that there were no ludicrous deaths oddly reassuring to them.)

Stayed on for a week to sit an improvised, crazy shivah , in which Ben played the old ’78’s, original cast recordings from their father’s hit shows: Oklahoma! Lady in the Dark, Showboat, Brigadoon , and Bloomer Girl. Allegro. Call Me Mister. Carousel. Finian’s Rainbow . All of them.

Listening, concentrating, as if at a concert, as if stoned. Not “ You’ll Never Walk Alone” or any of the songs of solace that Ben, or any of them, might have expected, not “Ol’ Man River,” or any of the you-can’t-lick-us indomitable stuff, not even the showstoppers—“Soliloquy,” “My Ship”—but the chorus things, the entire cast, all the cowboys and their girls singing “Oklahoma!” the veterans singing “Call Me Mister,” the elf and townspeople singing “On That Great Come and Get It Day,” the fishermen and their families doing “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.” It was, that is, the community numbers that reinforced them, the songs that obliterated differences, among men and women, among principals and walk-ons, not the love songs, not even the hopeful, optimistic songs of the leads who, down and out, in the depths of their luck, suddenly blurt their crazy confidence. Again and again it was the townsfolk working as a chorus, three dozen voices singing as one, that got to them, appealing to some principle of twin- and triplet-ship in them, decimated as their ranks now were. The odd bravery of numbers and commonality, a sort of patriotism to one’s kind. And Ben, more unlike them than ever, now he looked so old and felt so rotten, as cheered and charmed as any of the Finsbergs could have been.

And talking, talking non-stop, neither a stream of anecdote nor reminiscence nor allusion to their dead brothers and sisters, nor even to themselves, but a matrix of reference wholly out of context to their lives, telling them, for example, of the managers of his franchises, people they hadn’t met, didn’t know, had never heard of, people, he realized, he himself rarely thought of except during the five or so days a year he spent with each of them during his Grand Rounds.

“I go,” he said, “with the Dobbs House heart, with the counterman’s White Castle imagination, his gypsy’s steam-table life. Hillbillies, guys with nutsy tattoos on the insides of their forearms. People called Frankie, Eddy, Jimmy — the long e of the lower classes. Men with two wives and scars on their pusses, with clocked socks and black shoes. One guy, the manager of my Western Auto, was totally bald, and instead of a wig he sprung for a head of tattooed hair. From fifteen feet you couldn’t tell it from the real thing. It had a tattooed part, I remember, and when sideburns came in back in the sixties he had them added on; only the color, the dye, wasn’t an exact match and it looked a little goofy.

“But that’s where I pick them. My middle-management people from the barrel’s bottom. Bus depots my employment agencies, the waiting room of the Cedar Rapids railroad station. If you can’t find reliable people there, you can’t find them anywhere. You didn’t know that? Oh, sure. Certainly. An eye out always for guys who pump quarters into jukeboxes and bang the pinball. I cover the waterfront, I hire the handicapped.

“Yes, and your dropout always your best bet, battered children from broken homes and alcoholism in the bloodlines like a thoroughbred’s juices. Bringing on line entire generations of those who live with expectations lowered like the barometric pressure, who neither read the fortune cookie nor spell out even their own horoscopes in the funny papers. Can you imagine such indifference? Not despair, not even resignation finally, just conditioning so complete you’d think bad luck was a congenital defect or a post-hypnotic suggestion. Yes, and the statistical incidence of failure Euclidean, pandemic. These are the people I work with, who work for me, these are my partners, the world’s put-upon, its A.W.O.L.’d and Article 15’d and Captain’s Masted, its chain-ganged and undesirably discharged, all God’s plea-bargained, all His sharecropper’d migratory-worked losers, His scummy, heavily tail-finned Chevrolet’d laid-off. Last hired, first fired. This is company picnic we’re talking, Softball, bratwurst, chug-a-lug’d beer. The common-law husbands of all high-beehived, blond-dyed, wiry waitresses and check-out girls.

“And I as fairy godfather to them as Julius to me. Having to talk them into it. Having to talk them into even talking to me, talk them into listening to my propositions, who think at first I’m just some queer — and that itself working to my advantage, because they think I’ll buy them beers and they’ll pretend to go along with me, thinking: Afterward, when he makes his move, I’ll hit him on the head, roll him in the alley — looking for action, rough trade, God knows what. And using even that, their low opinion of me — always kept to themselves, always suppressed and even, in an odd way, polite , not ever, you understand, condescending, simply because I’m well dressed and well spoken and outrank them good-luckwise, which they mistakenly take for a sort of talisman or voucher, Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval, the earnest money of my faggot-or-no-faggot superior humanity — confronting them with it, hitting the nail smack bang dab on the head like the palmist or astrologer they don’t go to, not because they’re not superstitious — they’re superstitious: Catholic saints on their fundamentalist Protestant dashboards, rabbits’ feet, dice adding up to seven whichever way they’re turned — but because they don’t believe they have a fate, and behind that, the bottom line of that, not really believing that they even have a life — such patient people, such humble ones — laying it all out for them, their plans to rob me, to knock my head even as they maintain a genuine respect, for me, for the clothes I wear, so that afterward what they’ll remember of the knockabout won’t be the body contact but the feel of my wool suit and silk shirt and rep tie and felt hat and the soft leather of my shoes. Second-guessing their plans and conspiracies, an armchair quarterback of my own muggings and beatings. And all that just to get their attention!

“And only then, when I have it, hitting them with what even they can see is just good business, no scheme, no wild-ass proposition, no sky-high pipedream, but a plan. Plain as the cauliflower on their ear, true as a calendar.

“That who was there better in this world to bet on than guys who have nothing? References? I don’t want references. If anything the reverse. Records let them show me. Strange, unexplained lacunae in their curriculum vitae . Bad write-ups from Truancy, Credit, Alimony Court. Then convincing them that they can do the job, a lead-pipe cinch for persons like themselves who had, some of them, actually used lead pipes, or anyway pickaxes, handles, the tough truncheons of the strikebreakers, the ditch digger’s hardware, who’d horsed the unskilled laborer’s load, and done the thousand shit details, all the infinite cruddy combinations. ‘Putz,’ I’ve said, “you’ve hauled hod and worked by smells in the dark the wing nuts of grease traps. What, you’re afraid of a pencil?’ ‘I never got past the fifth grade,’ they’d say. ‘Terrific,’ I tell them, ‘then you know your multiplication tables. Long division you can do. Calculus there’s no call for in the Shell-station trade.’ ‘But I ain’t no mechanic,’ they object. ‘Who? You? No mechanic? A guy who jumps wires and picks locks? You’re fucking Mandrake. Look, look at the hands on you. Layers of dirt under the nails like shavings from the archaeologist’s digs. Enough grease and oil in the troughs of your knuckles to burn signal fires for a day and a night. You ? No mechanic? You got a feel for leverage like Archimedes. Don’t crap me, pal. Don’t wear my patience. You’re a bum, you know character. You can hire trained mechanics from the Matchbook Schools of Repair. I’m making you Boss, you can sit back and interview guys who take jet engines apart.’ ‘But why me? I’m a nobody. Why would you give me this chance?’ ‘Because you’re a nobody. I raise your expectations like a hard-on. Where else can I buy the loyalty and devotion I’m looking for if not from a nobody like you?’