The Franchiser (22 page)
He’d gone to Kitty with the proposition, told her the money—what had it cost him? under $12,000 probably—wasn’t significant enough to trouble the sibs with, and asked her to co-sign for him personally.
Kitty, the bed wetter, had never married. She did not think it fair to ask her husband to sleep on rubber sheets. Strangely, she never pissed her sheets during an afternoon nap or when she dozed off reading in a chair or watching TV. Only at night did she lose control, at night when the dreams came. The dreams, Flesh thought, the
dreams
she must have!
“This is really something, Kitty,” he’d said on their way to the place in Queens where he had first seen the Robo-Wash. “Wait, you’ll see.”
“Ben, it isn’t necessary. You know I trust your judgment. We all do. I don’t have to see the car wash. If you say it’s good, I believe you.”
“No. You have to see it. I want you to know just what you’re getting into. After all, I’m asking you to guarantee the loan personally. I want you to get an idea of the potential.”
“That’s the part I
don’t
understand. Why come to me? If it’s all that great, my brothers and sisters would go along with it as a matter of course, and you say the money isn’t significant.”
“Well, that’s the point. See, this is what I have in mind, Kitty. Up to now I’ve hit you kids collectively because the sums more often than not have been considerable, but suppose we do this, suppose I start up a series of small businesses and approach you one by one. We might all make more money.” Years before he had begun to cut them in, as co-signers of his loans, for a small share of the profits, though they had never actually had to put up a penny. He’d argued that they were entitled to it. Under the terms of their father’s will he was not obliged to do this, but he insisted. The sibs, though well off, were none of them making the fortune their father had made. Some, profligate, had already gone through a good deal of their capital. And that, of course, was the argument he had used to convince them, for they truly had not wanted to change an arrangement which had never actually cost them anything. “Look, Gus-Ira, I know
you
don’t need it. You’re a doctor, you do very well, but Oscar, the rock band, the bus he paid for and outfitted to travel in, what about him? Until he cuts a hit record he could really
use
the money. What the hell, even if it only pays the gas and oil for one of those trips he makes to the rock festivals, it would come in handy.” In this way, addressing the generosity of each, he had finally gotten them to accept the six or seven hundred dollars a year apiece that he gave them.
“Well yes,” Kitty said, “but I don’t know anything about business. I trust your judgment.”
“I just want you to see. I don’t want you to trust my judgment. You shouldn’t go into things with your eyes closed. Wait, Kitty, it’s just a bit farther. We’re almost there.”
He turned off Queens Boulevard and went out Jamaica Avenue. They had to go more slowly now. There was much traffic. It was a densely commercial street. He honked at the double-parked trucks. They drove along under the elevated tracks, saw the shower of sparks from passing trains burn themselves out like meteors, shooting stars. They proceeded past Laundromats, $5 a pair shoe outlets, gas stations, Chinese restaurants, taverns.
“Where is this place?”
“It’s only a few more minutes.”
And turned into the Robo-Wash. He maneuvered the Cadillac carefully into place, guiding it gently as he could to the struts and chocks. They were in an odd cinder-block building like a tiny covered bridge, the walls tapestried with machinery, the ceiling veined with pipes that ran overhead like rods for shower curtains. Flesh read the instructions:
1. Make certain front wheels are properly aligned with T-bar. Both tires must be in contact with metal chocks.
2. Turn off ignition.
3. Car must be in neutral.
4. Lower window on driver’s side and insert 50¢ in slot. Quarters or half dollars only.
5. Raise all windows! Do
not
touch brakes or steering wheel.
“You’ve got to watch this, Kitty. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
He slipped seven quarters into the machine.
“But that’s $1.75. It says fifty cents.”
“This will give us a better opportunity to see what it can do. Raise your window. Is your window up?”
“Yes.”
“Here we go then.”
They heard a subterranean growl as some sort of metal hook rose below them, engaged and grappled the axle. “She’s locking it,” Ben said. “It’s amazing. It adjusts universally. Like the tone arm on a phonograph that mixes ten- and twelve-inch records.”
Then there was a long hiss like the sound of air escaping from a tire.
“Oh, Ben,” Kitty said.
And then, as the car began to be pulled forward, sheets of water, panes of it—the extra dollar and a quarter, Ben thought happily—slapped at them from every direction at once, like waves, like a riptide, and so thick that the illusion was they were
indeed
in the sea under water, Kopechne’d. Detergent added now, dropping like snow, foaming the windows, frothing their vision, Kitty grabbed his hand and squeezed.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, “the extra money you put in, you must have jammed it or something. Oh, Ben.”
While the car rocked back and forth—he had not turned off the ignition, had left it in drive; it was being tugged back as it strained against the hooks; Kitty, of course, hadn’t noticed—the heavy brushes came out of the walls, closing in on them like the trick rooms of matinee serials. The timing was off, the brushes embracing the car even as the water continued to shoot out of every pore in the pipes, crushing the detergent against the windshield, twirling, lapping at the car like the bristled tongue of some prehistoric beast. Kitty had both arms around his neck. “Please, Ben. Oh God. Please, Ben. When does it stop?”
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong,” Flesh said, pressing the brake and causing them to lurch forward. “Jesus, do you think it’ll crush us? I can’t see out.” It was true. The interior was almost totally dark.
The brushes were all about them now, scraping the long sides of the car, settled on the roof, rolling and bumping as the Cadillac, in drive, threw their timing off still further and Ben pulled at the bottom of the steering wheel with one hand. From his side he lowered his electric window a bit. “I want to see if—” Then lowered Kitty’s.
“Ben, let’s get out,” Kitty said nervously. “It’s beginning to come in. We’ve got to get out.”
“We can’t,” he shouted over the sound of the water and the grunt and grinding of the brushes, “we’d never be able to open the doors. The brushes are up against us. Even if we could get out, the bristles would tear us to pieces.”
“Oh, God. Oh, Ben,” Kitty screamed. “When does it stop?”
“We’ve still got to go through Rinse,” Ben yelled.
“
What?
”
“
Rinse. It’s part of the cycle!
’
And that’s—Kitty practically in his lap now, her arms thrown about his neck like a drowner, her legs capturing his as though she meant to shinny up him to safety—when he felt the warm trickle of her pee as it rolled down his thigh and knee and splashed against his shoes and puddled the thick carpet of his Cadillac.
So he knew why he’d approached her. For his priviness to those wild dreams that no man but himself shared, not of the dead, not even of sex, but simply of excitement, Kitty’s kiddy spook-house conjurings, her fervid invocation of plight, trap, and wicked pitfall that froze her reason and loosened her urine, to induce in her that high-strung roller coaster, snap-the-whip, loop-the-loop, vertiginous vision he’d somehow recognized in her from the beginning—known would be there—but till now had never seen. He shoved the lever into neutral, shut off the engine.
“It’s like this at night, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Ben.”
“At night. In the dark. This is how it is then, isn’t it?”
“Please.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. She was whimpering.
“It’s all right,” he told her, “the brushes, they’re just cloth, the bristles are smooth as chamois.”
“Oh, Ben.”
“It’s all right,” he said, “everything is fine. Look, Kitty dear, they’ve already gone back into the walls.”
“Oh, Ben,” she said. “Oh, Ben, oh, you son of a bitch.”
She raised no objection when he told her brothers and sisters about his Robo-Wash proposition. But it was a long time before she would speak to him again.
He drove the remaining 120 miles to Kansas City without the tape deck or radio. Oh my oh my but he had the memories.
Ghiardelli Square in San Francisco. Atlanta’s Underground. Yes, and Hartford’s Constitution Plaza. Louisville’s Belvedere. Minneapolis’s Mall and L.A.’s Century City. Denver’s Larimer Square and Chicago with its Old Towns and New Towns. The Paramus Mall in New Jersey. Lincoln Road in Miami Beach—a bad example. Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle—a good one. St. Louis with its Laclede’s Landing. The new Cincinnati. The new Detroit, Milwaukee. Albany’s billion-dollar civic center.
What was not highway was Downtown, the New Jerusalem. America’s Malls and Squares and Triangles like figures in geometry. Just the white man fighting back. Regrouping. Floating promises with bond issues. What had been white and then black was now white again. Phoenixy. The old one-two. Real estate’s chemotherapy, its surgical demolitions and plastic surgery. Like a cycle in nature or a rotation of crops. Allowing the blighted inner cities to lie fallow, the cores to oxidize—all those Catfish Rows of the doomed. Then Reclamation, Rehabilitation, Conversion, Salvation. Resurrection. The Tokyoization of the United States, the Boweries beaten into Berlin showcases. As if America had lost a war, a lulu, a Churchillian son of a bitch. We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the streets, we shall fight them on the slums and on the ghettos. We will never surrender. We will smear them. But as if we hadn’t, didn’t, and the worst had happened, the bottom dropping out of victory. And were now being reparated, mollified, kissed where it hurt and made better. Given this—what?—Democracy and these—what?—monuments of the mercantile, these new Sphinxes and new Pyramids, these new wonders of the world. And everything’s up to date in Kansas City.
The prime interest rate is 11 percent and he stands in the five-story lobby of the Crown Center Hotel, the first jewel in Hallmark’s Triple Crown.
He has seen, from the highway, the twin saddles of the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex, two sloping stadia like counters in shoes, home of the Chiefs, home of the Royals—what, he thinks, what a franchise!—glimpsed the three-million-dollar scoreboard, tall as a high-rise, the glassed-in private boxes and suites along the rim of the stadia like handsome molding. (He has read that some of these rent for $18,000 a year. Eighteen Thousand Dollars.) And has proceeded through Kansas City’s squeezed downtown with its decaying warehouses and skyscrapers, some abandoned, nostalgia in the making like a bacteria culture, and out Truman Road and onto Grand Avenue to the Crown Center, passing the hotel with its high cantilevered tower like a machine-gun-emplacement on a prison wall, the windows like stereo speakers or light meters on cameras. Passing the Crown Center Shops on his right, the squares and plazas and fountains and open ice rink on his left, Hall’s huge office complex, vaguely—he has seen line drawings, even knows where the apartments will stand—like a locomotive, and turns right into the parking garage, and parks—no room on the Jack of Hearts, no room on the Jack of Diamonds, no room on the Queen of Spades—on the Queen of Clubs level. Of course! Hallmark cards. And has pulled his grip out of the trunk, his garment bag. An attendant comes up to him. “Better lock your car, sir.” And it is as friendly as—he’s Queen of Clubs—an admonishment not to show his hand. He wonders as he walks toward the double set of doors what is above him, a king? Of what suit? Does the parking lot hold a pair of kings? What is above the pair? And is now close enough to read the sign above the double doors:
TO WEST VILLAGE AND CROWN CENTER SHOPS
. Ah. Aces high for hotel parking. He has been dealt a losing hand, trumped, out cut. He stands pat however and continues on through the doors.
And is in West Village, Chelsea Court, the shops like five-sided open-ended cubes hanging suspended in multileveled space and attached to each other by catwalk, the black-painted iron stairs of fire escape and spiral staircase. And is unsteady on his feet, overcome by a sense of standing among the fallen blocks of giant children. It is a
theater
of merchandise, he is overwhelmed by an impression of having stepped backstage. He looks about him, is momentarily confused, cannot tell audience from actors. Each store is a perfect set. And trade is dialogue. It’s like market day in some European town, it’s like a fair. He could be in a shop window, he could be in the street, in a crazy, zigzag perpendicular of streets; he could be standing ankle deep in some archaeology of the retail, the palimpsest digs of commerce. Nutty, displaced bourses, bazaars, booths and kiosks, the chic salesmen and saleswomen become mongers, costers, colporteurs, discreet tradesmen, hawkers, cheapjacks, chapmen. Some actually wear aprons over their mod clothing; others, their sleeves rolled above their forearms, posture like artisans, as if they have just this minute put the finishing touches on wares they have made themselves. He listens for and momentarily expects to hear work songs, street cries, folk solos, rags, arias: “Straaaw
berreez!
Nay-ills and
hat
chets! Tenniss rackettsz, skeee wear
here!
” He sees a credit card change hands and is mildly surprised. Even cash would have surprised him here. He expects barter, solid elemental stuff—silver, gold, pinches of gold dust laid out on scales. There is something claustrophobic in this three-dimensional marketplace. The clever names of the shops oppress him. He reads them but has as much trouble taking them in as he has had when he has tried to read the news moving by in a huge electric typeface along the side of a building. Athlete’s Foot (sport shoes); The Candle Power & Light Co. (sculpted wax candles); Sunbrella (sporty sun goggles); The Signal House (model railroading). Some shops are of a sort he has never seen before in his life. There is a place called Wine-Art where one buys the equipment and essences for making wine. There is a place called Bits and Pieces which sells nothing but miniature handcrafted furniture for dollhouses. He looks closely at a grandfather clock no more than two inches high. Its pendulum swings, its minute and hour hands register almost the same time as his wristwatch. (There is a two-minute discrepancy; he is certain it’s his watch which is slow.) Another shop, The Stamp Pad, sells customized rubber hand stamps. He casts about somewhat wildly for an exit, finally spots one, makes his way by means of necessary detours—once he had driven this way, doubled back and forth, taken sudden instinctive, erratic swings south and north, looking for a hole in a heatwave—doglegs, travels a maze, climbs up one level in order to get to another beneath it.