Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

He stopped for a hitchhiker and bought the kid breakfast at a plaza. The boy was about nineteen, Levi’d, his denim work shirt covered by a denim vest of a brand called Fresh Produce. He’d seen an ad on Nate’s color TV in Harrisburg.

“That was an odd place to hitch a ride,” he told the kid when they were back on the turnpike.

“No, I look for out-of-state plates. That time of day salesmen come by to get back on the highway.”

“Clever,” Ben said approvingly. “I like to know such things. Other people’s tricks of the trade, the shortcuts and gimmicks they live by, that’s always interesting to me. Cops wear clip-on neckties so they won’t be strangled in fights. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“That’s an interesting thing, isn’t it?”

“Cops aren’t my bag.”

“You’re not into cops.”

“No.”

“There’s where you make your mistake. A boy your age. You should be into everything.”

“I got time.”

“Sure. I’m in franchises. I have about a dozen now. But I’ve had more and I’ve had less. I’m like a producer with several shows running on Broadway at the same time. My businesses take me from place to place. My home is these United States.”

“You’ve got Idaho plates.”

“I buy my machines in Boise. I get a new one every year. You think we need the air conditioning?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll set the thermostat for seventy.” Ben thought the boy was laughing. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing. I was thinking. A drifter in swell threads and a late-model car.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t have the threads and I ain’t got the car.”

“Otherwise we’re the same,” Ben said.

“I haven’t got a dozen businesses.”

“I’ll give you a job. I’ll make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins in Kansas City.”

“Sure you will.”

“Sure I will.”

“My mom said never take ice cream from strangers,” the kid said. He tried to pass it off as a joke but I could see he was uneasy. Probably he thought I was a fairy. I understand. An aging guy in a Cadillac, a breakfast buyer. Only the knowledge that he could take me kept him from telling me to stop and let him out. He made moves in his mind. He was thinking he could push in the cigar lighter and burn me if I tried something. He was thinking karate chop, the advantage of surprise. Break my arm with the armrest, he was thinking. Get me with his backpack that he held in his lap, that when he wore it in the city where I picked him up it made him look like an astronaut. Actually a kid like this, probably on spring vacation, going to see his girlfriend in South Bend, Indiana, or toying with the idea of dropping out maybe, what good to me was he? Every day I try to be ordinary, routine as the next guy. I drop my diction like an accompanist. Sing, sing your key, I’ll pick you up. But the kid? His assumptions soured the air and I turned on the radio.

“You’re not Baskin-Robbins material,” I told him and could almost smell his relief as I ignored him. And I did what I always do when I’m with healthy good-looking people. I saw myself from his viewpoint, saw my gnashing jaws, a thing I do when I drive and which dentists have pointed out to me, saw my ugly Indian-nickel features, my long coarse sideburns, my pot which seems larger than it is because I have no ass. I felt his physical smugness and could have shot holes in his Frisbee.

“What’s with you? You into meditation?” Ben asked.

“Meditation?”

“It’s twenty-five miles since we spoke.”

“I was listening to the music.”

I turned the radio off and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. “I’ve got to pee,” I said and pulled the keys from the ignition. That was to make him think I was afraid of him and set him at his ease. Even so he could have misinterpreted me, thought the pee a stratagem to get him to pee and thus expose himself to me. I went deeper into the woods than necessary, almost hiding. When I got back he was gone. I drove off. He was hitching about two hundred yards up the road. He spotted me and made to go off into the woods. That made me mad and I stopped. I opened the door and signaled him closer. He looked miserable, shamefaced, but he stood his ground.

“Hey, you,” I said.

“I ain’t riding with you.”

“Never mind you ain’t riding with me. You haven’t thanked me for the ride you already rode with me.”

“Thank you.”

“Let’s hear it for the breakfast.”

“For the breakfast. Thank you.”

“And the lessons I taught you about life.”

“What were those?”

“What, you forgot?”

“You didn’t say much.”

“You weren’t paying attention. What about those twenty-five miles? They were the first lesson. The second was that opportunity strikes once. I want you to know something. Never forget this. You blew it, you fucked up. I was prepared, such was my mood, to make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins franchise in the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. If you knew shit about locations you’d know that that’s the flagship of the chain in Kansas City, the crème de la crème, we’re making it a flavor. I want you to know I trusted you. I would have given you ice-cream lessons. And here’s the part I hope eats your heart out. I still trust you. I am an equal-opportunity employer, your putzship, and all there was to it was for you to say the word. Not saying the word cost you about $30,000 a year. In the neighborhood of. I want you to know that the word was yes. I want you to know that the word is always ‘yes.’ ”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe what? What don’t you believe?”

“That you’d give a job like that to a stranger.”

“Of course I wouldn’t give a job like that to a stranger. Who mentioned strangers? It was what you said about salesmen having to come up that street. I figured you for a kid with a head on his shoulders.”

He came a little closer.

“No,” I said. “Stay where you are. You’re all washed up in the ice-cream business. You won’t ever understand this next part, but it’s the truth, real as my Cadillac. I’m a benefactee. A benefactee benefacts. That’s the tradition. That’s fitting. I went to Wharton. Books must balance. You could have gotten me off the hook but you blew it. You want a ride? You are no longer in the running upward-mobilitywise, but it’s starting to rain and if you want a ride I’ll give you one.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“In the back seat,” Ben told him. “I don’t care for your dirty aspersions. You’re too suspicious to hitchhike.”

When they were on their way Ben told him about his cousins. He knew what the young man didn’t, that the boy was entitled to the story. Since he had disinherited him, obligations had been created. Legally the kid was entitled to nothing, but Ben felt bad about this. The boy, a guest in his Cadillac, was already out $30,000. Ben owed him something.

“This is the true story,” he began, “of Julius and Estelle Finsberg’s children, my godcousins, or ‘How I Got to Play the Palace.’

“Julius Finsberg was a bachelor almost all his life. He didn’t marry until he was past fifty. He was, at that age, settled, a man of habits deep as grain. As I reconstruct it, nothing ever happened to him. He was that rare being in our go-getting country, a man whose life had never been touched by our public events, whose convictions had never been nudged, shoved neither north by northwest by war nor south by southeast by peace. He would already have been thirty-eight in the First War, too old by a whisker for conscription. And forty-nine in 1929, the prime of life for a man in a small sedentary theatrical costume business, a business almost impossible to wipe out in a Depression, for everyone knows there’s no business like show business and the show must go on. He was a paradigm for a man. I mean, he might have served as a model for the uncontingent life, a man who would probably have got by in any century. And that’s significant, too. Born in one century, he died in another. We think of such men as respectable, responsible. They are the average from whom we get our notions of tone, our ideas of stability. Consider, for example, the year of Finsberg’s birth—1880. By the time he came to awareness photography was an established fact, trains, electric light, the telephone, automobiles. Even radio and aviation were in the air. He lived, that is, in conjunction with the incipiency of things, taking for granted all those objects and ideas that developed as he developed, in neck-and-neck relation to the world, so that he moved, or seemed to, as it moved, creating in him alphas of stability and settlement and an imagination which could take anything the world could dish out. He died in 1950 at threescore and ten, as if God Himself were an actuary.