Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

It was all set out. The new dispensation. But not for him. Not for Ben. He was an old-timer. If he lived he would live crippled in the new world, would tch tch and my my at its strange new ways. Modern times county-courthousing him, old-timering his personality, shoving shucks in his vocabulary, thrusting by gollys into his mouth, whooshes, goldarns, I’ll be’s, all the phony awe and mock disgust. For he knew no other way, only the old vaudeville routines of the stagy quaint. Why, this was a problem. Gee whiz, shucks by golly whoosh goldarn. I’ll be. I’ll be.

I’ll be old.

This alone had not occurred to him.

I’ll be old. And I won’t know how.

And it was frightening to him as it had been when as a small boy he knew that one day he would be grown up and he hadn’t a clue how he would handle that either, convinced he was the only child in the world who would not know how to be an adult. Yes, and he’d been right. What sort of an adult had he been? A halting, stumbling one (and don’t forget his disease, his M.S., which was perhaps merely the physical configuration of his personality) who made up adult life as he went along. Was he married? Did he have children? Family? Only a dead godfather and an ignored sister, only godcousins— that strange fairy-tale crew. Who were now only a remnant, fragmented, scattered, marginal as Shakers.

His godcousins like a chorus line or the chosen sides of childhood. How could there ever have been eighteen of them? How could they have been identical? How could they have guaranteed his loans, unconditional as magic wishes? How could he have taken all the girls for lovers and all the boys for pals? How could they have had those fantastical diseases, illness like signature, like customized curse? How could they have died off of mean drunkenness, bed wetting, monkey-wrench bones, baldness, termites, prejudice, constipation, cradle cap, and all the rest? Was all that imagined? No. None of it. He’d told them there were no ludicrous deaths. He’d been right. There was only ludicrous life, screwball existence, goofy being.

Well, he thought, I’d best get on with it, and phoned the bank manager and went into town and recruited his staff. The wives of farmers would be his maids, their teenage daughters and sons his waitresses and busboys, the poor whites of Ringgold his bellboys and clerks and maintenance people. A pick-up combo culled from the unit school’s marching band his Entertainment Nitely. The mother of the man who ran the Gulf station his chef and the girls and men laid off at the nearby carpet factories his kitchen help.

RINGGOLD, GA. INNKEEPER: BENJAMIN FLESH P.O. BOX 18 (30702) 404-727-4312 INN-DEX: 225

I-75 @ Ringgold/Chickamauga Exit. Dwntn I mi. Lookout Mtn 6 mi. Chickamauga Nat’l Mil Pk 4 mi. Color TV. Pool open May-Sept. Dixieland Room Restaurant. Live Entertainment. Babysitters. Kennels.

2 Stories. 150 Rooms. Suites. Meeting Rooms to 100.

1 Person, 1 Bed, $12 to $16. 2 Persons, $19 to $22. Extra Person, $3. Full American Plan Available @ $14 Additional per Person. Tax 3 %.

He opened for business July 22, 1975, four months after his original target date.

He was, he realized, nowhere. It was not a place. Not geographically viable. It had been, he supposed, before the Interstate had cast down its pale double lanes of coming and going with their white margins and their long stuck Morse of broken dashes— l ’s, t ’s, m ’s, and 5 ’s — down the center of the highway like great cement stitches — forest, foothills, frontier. A trace, perhaps, for deer, bear, or that Indians passed through to be somewhere else. But it was not a place. As most of earth was not a place. It took its significance from its proximity to Ringgold, to Chattanooga, to Chickamauga (which itself had become a place 112 years before and then only for a few days, for only as long as it took the Confederate and Union soldiers to kill each other, and was then returned, after the battle, to nowhere again). But even after the road had been laid, it was something, somewhere, seen only in passing, not even observed — for it was not spectacular, pleasant country enough but never spectacular — so much as registered peripherally, there only in the marginalia of the eyes. So it was not a place until he made it one, until he had spent money to clear, chop, bulldoze, raze, as if place lay sunken beneath stone, trees, brush, the natural cloud cover of ordinary unbeautiful earth.

And now, in the fullness of his expended fortune and of a time that went back to a time before his disease had declared itself — so ambitious had he been in those days, Ben, the empire builder, the from-sea-to-shining-sea kid connecting the dots, Howard Johnson to Burger King, Burger King to IHOP, IHOP to Midas Muffler — he had made it — what? A sort of place. A feeder or way station of place — Chattanooga, Atlanta, Disney World. A sort of place as Collinsville, Illinois, was a sort of place outside St. Louis. (As the Sunoco service station which went up only after Ben had built his motel was.) As all suburbs were only a sort of place throughout the world. Throughout the solar system. (As the moon was only a sort of place because of its relation to earth.) Everywhere place sucking sort of place into its orbit.

And this, on the day he opened, is the sort of place it was:

First of all, nothing spectacular. In keeping with the sort of place it was before the furrows of Interstate had been turned.

From the outside a bracket of double-storied buildings like immense rows of mailboxes in a lobby. Brushstrokes of gold stucco the color of drying sand veneered the pile of cinder blocks that framed each unit — a wide wall of intersecting Thermopane set in aluminum splints the color of warships.

The corridors were just wider than the passageways in steamers and a long runner of carpet deep and rich as flowerpot supported a design like the thick geometry on a bandanna.

The rooms endlessly repeated themselves behind each door on either side of each corridor on each floor of each building. Eleven rooms long at the top and bottom of the bracket (times two times two), sixteen rooms long on one floor of the long center building (times two) fifteen (times two: here were the pair of suites) on the other.

Two beige headboards like the carved, distressed lengths of a child’s casket were mounted like trophy at the level of one’s belt on the wall and presided above an illusion of bed — box springs, mattress, thick metal frames set into large inverted “nails” like the panties on lamb chops — that was sustained by bright caramel paneled, olive bedspreads studded with a long, unbroken ganglion of print stem and leaf and flower, a Möbius strip of fabric vegetation repeated on the thick lined drapes (the lining vaguely the texture of good shower curtains). There were two captain’s chairs upholstered in a tough Naugahyde the shade and texture of the cushion on a physician’s chair in a consulting room. The cushions, like the mounted headboards, were inseparably joined to the chairs, as almost everything in the room was locked or bolted to something else. (A wooden wall mounting like a forearm and fist — the wood, like all the wood in the room, the color of the skins of Idaho potatoes — clenched a lamp. The mirror, the notches of its frame like those in harmonicas, was locked flush with the thin wallboard. The room’s two paintings — one tenuously abstract, bold, black-stroked bark, a jagged vertical timber against a clouded, milky silver; the other strongly representational, a tobacco-colored barn that seemed to float on a field of 24-carat wheat, scratchy black trees like the tank traps on Normandy beaches, a sky blue as water in a swimming pool, Van Gogh’s huge black birds like widely spreading W’s — were screwed steadfastly into the wall above each headboard. A lamp on thick linked chain looped like immense fob from two fixtures in the ceiling. The television set was locked in its clawed metal tee and seemed tied to the wall itself by a broad-gauge rubber cable.) The only other furniture was a wide nightstand between the two beds; a table next to the drapes whose octagonal top bloomed from phlebitic newel; a long low dresser with two deep drawers and a composition top — the same that surfaced the night-stand and table — which looked exactly like the leather corners on a desk blotter. There was a chair on casters. There was a two-headed lamp on the nightstand. There were electric sockets like surprised hobgoblin. There was a plastic wastebasket the color of chewing gum. There was a telephone exactly the shade of ham in a sandwich, with a red message bulb blossoming from it like a tumor. There was a thermostat with a knob for High, Medium, and Low; there was a wake-up buzzer, a grill for the heating and air conditioning, a carpet the color of coffee grounds, a Bible opened to Psalms 105 and 106. There was a rough ceiling the texture of sandpaper magnified a hundred times. There was a white plastic ice bucket and four plastic glasses in a plastic tower. And a dashboard of bathroom fixture, bottle opener sunk like a coin-return slot into a wide projecting vanity, its contact paper a ruled cirrus of grain not found in nature. A shiny toilet-paper dispenser with an extra roll in the chamber. Butterscotch slabs of tile like so many pieces of toast above the bathtub and a foolscap of successively smaller towels and cloths folded like flag in a vertical rack. A spotlight of heatlamp. A grill like a speaker set in the wall. Outside the bathroom was an open recessed closet with chrome-plated pipes and slotted key rings of hanger. The metal door with its locks and chain link of bolt, its reversible multilingual DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob by the narrows of a perfect punched-out pear. And the framed glass fine-print innkeeper statutes of the state of Georgia, two long columns like the tiny font in accounts and dispatches from the front in old newspapers — one big Welcome and a hundred codicils of warning. The Room.