The Franchiser (42 page)
Oh, he thought, farseeing Flesh, prophetic Ben, oh, oh, the Ezekielized connections, the, to him, visible network of causality. Dial the phone in Texas, it rings in Paris. (And yet, and yet, if it turned out I was mistaken, why, I was honestly mistaken, nobly mistaken, for this is the way things are done in the world. He thought of polls, straw votes, telephone samplings, trial balloons, sneak previews with their audience-reaction cards, consumer research, feasibility studies, all enterprise’s three-spoon tests. Of handicapping the world, of infinite possibility like hats in the ring, of flags run up flagpoles to see who salutes, of all ever-diminishing options which reduced themselves at last to a sort of Hobson’s choice, the inevitable if-this-then-that sequences of science and syllogism. Nobly mistaken. For if I paid off room clerks in Orlando, if I had Impalas tailed and station wagons, and studied the progress of the Interstates, or, more, connived—and I did—to discover where they would be, where the exits would be placed, learning the distances between gas stations, between rest areas, toilet facilities, the Gas/Food/Lodging synapses of American physiology, reconnoitering the as yet no-man’s-land and enemy lines and possible beachheads of the tourist buck—the images military because the discipline was—if, that is, the bulk of my accomplishment was mere dog-soldier spadework, why then at least the cause for it was anchored in inspiration. Disney World, I thought, when I first heard it proposed, when the name was itself a trial balloon, my God, it will draw Americans like flies to sweets, entire families—for surely, I recognized, no one, no
one
would go to such a place alone; this was something collective; there was something exponentially tandem in the very prospect of such a journey, and one could almost forget about single rooms or even tables for two; this would be big,
big
—and I shall have to get roll-away beds, Porta-cribs, playground equipment, candy machines, comic-book stands, refrigeration units for bottles, formulas. Noble. In a way, heroic, even epic.
Of course noble. Of course heroic. Of course epic. For I was in the big time now. Up there, at least in spirit, with Aeneas, Brigham Young, Penn and Pike and Penrose, with Roger Williams, Theseus, Dido, Brutus, and Peter the Great and Alexander, Czar of all the Alexandrias. With Moses and Paul and Del Webb and Bugsy Siegel. With Disney himself, the Disney of Anaheim no less than the Disney of Florida. Up there, at least in spirit, at least on their wavelengths, with all those Founders, legendary and historic, with a sense of timing and prophecy on them, perfect pitch for the potential incipient in what lesser men might have looked on as hills, desert, swampland, stony ground. There in spirit and brotherhood with whoever it was who first said, “Let there be Chicago, let it be here.” That long line of visionaries who defoliated jungle simply by giving it their attention, who, looking at mountains, saw fortresses; at valleys, the laws of gravity pulling sweet water. Who second and third guessed the shabby givens of place and impediment, Johnny Appleseeds of commerce and government and a dozen God’s countries, swell places to raise kids or nice to visit.
Having, that is, what
they
had—criteria, standards, the surveyor imagination, the blueprint heart.)
Ringgold, Georgia, with its labor force of busboys, waiters, maids, auditors, desk clerks, and the rest, its honest day’s drive from major cities of the north and midwest, its blunt smack dab existence almost exactly between the points of origin and destination, was, would have been, and would be again, if there was lasting peace in the Middle East, if OPEC came round and detente worked, the perfect place for Flesh to pitch his now million-dollar tent. And how far off was he, anyway? Less than two hundred miles. (Atlanta would be the logical stopping point on the second night of the now three-day drive to Disney World.) What’s two hundred miles? In a universe that was probably infinite, what
was
two hundred miles? Not a stone’s throw, not a good spit, less than a lousy molecule of space. What’s two hundred miles? Bank-fuckruptcy, that’s all.
And even that anticipated by bright Ben, by farseeing Flesh. After, admittedly, he had already committed, after the land had been purchased, bulldozed, and the foundations were laid and the buildings almost up. So it wasn’t really too late. Things could be done. He could, for example, together with the Motel Owners’ Association of Greater Chattanooga and the Ringgold Chamber of Commerce, arrange to bribe all the state troopers of Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana not to stop speeders, or the high-ups in the highway departments of those states not to post speed limits. Sure, sure he could. Or, shifting emphasis, capture the Lookout Mountain trade, the Rock City clientele, the Incline Railroad and Confederama crowd. The See Seven States set. Oh yes. But he meant it. For once he had gotten the gist, picked up the seismological vibes of his earthquake times, even, that is, before the Finsbergs had begun to die—his invitations to them to join him there as his guests had been, well, love, of course, but in part, at least, his way of papering the house—and while he marked time waiting for the electricians to return, he had begun to write copy for his brochures, brochures which appealed directly to those visitors to Chattanooga’s tourist attractions: “Now that you’ve seen seven states, why not sleep in one of them tonight? Spend your evening in America’s newest Travel Inn—Travel Inn, Ringgold, Ga.” “Enjoy Lookout Mountain? Now Lookout for Travel Inn, Ringgold, Georgia—the world’s newest!” To passengers on the Incline Railroad: “Inclined to recline in luxurious accommodations? Call Ringgold, Ga.’s Travel Inn’s Famous Courtesy Car toll free. Spend the night in America’s Newest Travel Inn.” “You’ve seen Confederama. Enjoy an evening in the Gateway to the Old South—Ringgold, Georgia’s Travel Inn. Old-fashioned Southern Hospitality in Old Dixie’s newest Travel Inn.”
And took the copy, together with photographs and an architect’s sketches, to printers in Chattanooga. And his best slogans to a firm in Atlanta which printed bumper stickers. (These he would give to employees in the souvenir shops of Rock City and Confederama and Lookout Mountain and all those other places, paying them to slap them on out-of-state cars in the parking lot while their owners were out seeing the sights.)
Except that he was oddly—inasmuch as he did not yet understand why he should feel this way—disturbed that he should do this (not because of the licking he expected he might have to take, not because of the reverses—he’d had reverses—not even because he could not stand up to adversity), feeling what he took to be sort of commercial queasiness at such methods. Then he understood, the meaning as clear
as prima facie
dream. That—that he had come out of the closet, stepped out from under, and taken leave of, his anonymity. No longer Mister Softee, no longer Fred Astaire, no longer Colonel Sanders’s lieutenant or just another subject of the Dairy Queen, but Ben his-own-self Flesh, out in the open, standing up to be counted. Travel Inn or no Travel Inn, dis-, as it were, enfranchised. Cut off and grown apart as the suddenly changed features of the twins and triplets. Which, too, he had now begun to understand. As he was beginning to understand their oddball deaths. (Maxene died. She, whose hair had begun to thin while she was still a girl, and who had had to wear wigs woven from her brothers’ and sisters’ barbered locks, had become completely bald. She lost her cilia, her eyebrows and lashes, lost her pubic hair, the tiny hairs in her behind, all the downy hair along her legs and arms that defended the pores, the protective bristles in her nostrils that could no longer screen and trap the tiny particles and bacterial motes that, now she was only skin, invaded her system and killed her. The news came to him on a postcard from Patty: “Dear Ben, Maxene bought it. She lost all her hair and died, one could say, of terminal baldness. Maybe the wigs we gave her to wear from our clippings were some sort of hairy homeopathy. You think? With so many of us gone, there just wasn’t enough hair to make her wigs anymore and she died. The boys have the votes now. Love. P.”)
As he was beginning to understand everything. Everything. Seeing, in the shadow of Lookout Mountain, all connections and relations, all causes linked to their effects like some governing syntax of necessity and fate.
It was clear, for example, that with two-day trips become three-day trips and three-day trips four and five, and so on, the country had been stretched, an increment of distance thrust between any two points. He foresaw a lowering of public standards, taste’s tightened belt, the construction of cheap cut-rate motels like the tourist cabins of the thirties, meager, frill-less. (The frill is gone.) What was happening was almost glandular. The scale of things was changing, space compounding itself like the introduction of a new dimension. He should have had a Wayco parking garage, he’d be sitting pretty. Without any additional outlay of cash he could, in two or three years, when most of Detroit’s cars would be smaller, actually have increased the capacity of his garage by at least a third. It was the expanding universe here, America’s molecules drifting away from each other like a blown balloon, like heat rising, the mysterious physical laws gone public. That was how to think now. (Though perhaps Wharton had known, suspected something when they had tried to drum into his head terms like “volume” and “mass.”)
Take food, for example. Because of the increasing cost of energy, the day was coming when there would be sliced loaves of prepackaged toast. Industrial toast. People would be eating meat the day they bought it. Which would mean more shopping. Which would mean more walking. Which would mean more shoes. Which would mean more resoling, more replacement of heels. Or
sturdier
shoes, women walking around like practical nurses. Which would mean other ways to flaunt their femininity, which would mean tighter blouses, tighter skirts, more cosmetics, brighter colors, newer dyes.
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.