“Is this true?” he would ask the waitress. He had a few drinks in him.
“Is what true?”
“What it says here. Is it true?” He would point to the legend on the back of the menu.
“Oh yes.”
“Terrific,” he would say, and bring his finger down smartly in the middle of the paragraph. “That’s what I want. That’s just what I want for my dining pleasure. Wheel it over.”
“What?”
“The Kansas City streetcar. And don’t tell me you’re all out. I can see it from here. Boys,” he would say, “I’m very hungry.”
And would study the menu like a map, asking, genuinely unsure, “Should we stay here? Look, look what’s upstairs. It shows you. We could eat in the jailhouse, we could eat in the courtroom or the barber shop. We could eat in the haberdashery or the penny arcade. We could eat in the orchard. We could eat, we could eat in the library or the parlor or the governor’s mansion or on the porch or gazebo and wet our whistles in the Brass Bed Cocktail Lounge.”
“Benny’s a little loaded.”
“Benny’s whistle is lubricated.”
“Come on, Benny, calm down, son. Let’s just stay right here in Grandma’s Garden.”
“Macintyre,” he would say, “you silly bastard. Grandma’s Garden. You hear that, Lloyd? You hear that, Frommer? Grandma’s Garden. The stupid son of a bitch calls it Grandma’s Garden.”
“Hey, come on, now,” Macintyre would say, “watch your language. I know you’ve got a few drinks under your belt, but there’s a lady present. Now, come on, Ben, just try to behave yourself.”
“Watch my language? Watch my language? I am watching my language. Take a look at your own, you fuckhead. You wanted to eat in Kenny’s Newsroom, you wanted to go to Harlow. What were some of those other places? Lloyd? Frommer? Wait, wait, don’t tell me: Yeah. The Snooty Fox. He wanted to eat in a railroad car, he was willing to try a warehouse. Jesus!”
“The Warehouse is supposed to have the best K.C. strip steaks in K.C.”
“Yeah,” he would say, “and you know why? ’Cause they’re so aged, you asshole.”
“I told you before. I warned you.”
“Forget it, P.M., he’s had too much to drink.”
“Sure, Paul, take it easy, he’s three sheets to the wind.”
“Oh, my God, ‘P.M.,’ you lousy afternoon, you dumbass evening, ‘three sheets to the wind.’ “ He would be laughing. There would be tears in his eyes. “And, yeah, wait, wait, somebody said something about The Monastery. And which one of you fatheads wanted to try Ebenezer’s? Which one Yesterday’s Girl? You want yesterday, you schmucky hickshit? Yesterday? They’ll give you — they’ll give you…Listen, you really want picturesque? Let’s get out of here. I know this charming Holiday Inn.” And would stand up, shouting, his voice carrying through the entire restaurant: “Who here remembers Thursday? Huh? Anybody recall Saturday? How about it? Thursday? Friday? Saturday? Those were the days, those were the good gold goddamn candyass days. Huh? Huh?”
And would be pulled down, Frommer and Lloyd peacekeepers still, but pulling him by his bad arm, holding on to his paresthetic right hand, Lloyd’s metal graduation ring against Flesh’s skin like an electric prod, the hands restraining him — how could they feel what he felt? — as alien nervewise and texturewise as moonrock.
“Oh,” would scream, “Aiee,” would call, “God!” would cry.)
He presents his confirmation at the desk, registers, asks if his room is near where the other Radio Shack franchise people will be.
He strolls through the exhibits in the Century Ballroom.
“Hey,” says Ned Tubman from Erlanger, Kentucky. “How you doin’?”
“Fine.”
“I seen your name tag. Bowling Green, hey?”
“Right.”
“Western Kentucky State University?”
“Yes.”
“What’s shakin’?”
“Oh, you know.”
“Foxy. Close to the chest. Well, I’ll tell you. — When’d you say you opened up?”
“About three years ago.”
“Three years. Well. How long Fort Worth sit on your application?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember.”
“What was it? You slip ’em somethin’?”
“Who?”
“You know — Fort Worth.”
“I bought it outright.”
“Oh. Outright. Say listen, I didn’t mean — But if you bought it outright — Me, I had my application in fourteen months. By the time they okay’d me, Lexington was gone, Richmond was took, Berea, Bowling Green—” He pointed to Flesh’s badge. “Every last college town in the state. They come up with Fulton.”
“Fulton’s a pretty good size.”
“Yeah, I was gonna take it but then they told me about Erlanger. Said it had an institution of higher learning. I switched.”
“And it doesn’t?”
“Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it does. It does surely. It got the Seminary of Pius X.”
“Oh.”
“You ever try selling stereo to them fellows? Police band? Headsets? Tape decks? Shit. Well — Good luck to you.”
“Same to you.”
“I’ll lay in Gregorian chants, ‘Perry Como Sings the Lord’s Prayer.’”
“Sounds good.”
“Yeah, sure. Meanwhile, you get the real college kids. Marijuana, the Pill — Those are the turn-ons, man. Biggest thing ever to hit the music industry. Know what I heard?”
“What?”
“That R.C.A., Zenith, Sony, and Panasonic gave E. Y. Lilly and Pfizer and the rest them drug companies money to develop the Pill.”
“No kidding?”
“The truth. Heard they sponsor the Mafia and the drug traffic.”
“I don’t see—”
“Why you think a lid of grass so cheap? It goes against every law of supply and demand. That’s the record companies, mister. The record companies do that. They give the pot farmers price supports.”
“Oh.”
“Subsidize poppy fields.”
“Really?”
“Pot and poppy parities, yes sir.”
“I see.”
“Sure.”
“I never thought about it.”
“I will. Open your eyes.”
“God bless.”
The displays are compelling. Each screened booth with its shelves of sound equipment glows, buzzes like cockpit, like miniature war room, like listening posts in science fiction. Meters of fine tuning like green pies closing. Needles that travel against arbitrary scales, past the reds and oranges of distortion toward baby blues of pitch-perfect harmony and balance. Round clocklike dials across dashboards of sound. Stereo cartridges like decks of cards, that look, sunk in their slots, like open tills, like queer, spit product. Cleverly notched steel spindles, turntables like reels of computer tape. And the gorgeous cargo of speakers like splendid crates, blank black domino shapes tight in their mahogany frames. The grooved and handsome ferruled knobs — AM, FM, AFC, vol. and bass, treble and balance, filter and phono, auxiliary tape. Contour control, “joy sticks.” Jacks and fuse lights. Sliding levers, smoked-plastic dust covers. Headsets like the ears’ furniture, their thick foam stuffing, their leathery vinyl skins. The broad wide-eyed faces of cassettes, the immense and careless weave of the 8-tracks. Digital AM-FM clock radios, their neon numerals the color of struck matches, the broken verticals and horizontals of the numbers like fractured bones, unkindled ghost digits just visible behind them like the floating, germ-like transparencies that drift across the surface of an eyeball. Other styles — card numbers that flip over like scores on TV game shows, or that rise into the radios like figures on odometers. There are pocket-size tape recorders, microphones built into them like snipers’ scopes. And portable televisions like pieces of luggage. There are antennas like fishing rods, like whips, like window screens, like swatches of fence, like pen-and-pencil sets, like huge metal combs, like immense paper clips. There is specialized stuff — marine radiotelephones; citizen’s band transceivers; base stations, mobile; 8-channel FM scanning receivers with their movie marquee light sequences. Tuned to crime, tuned to fire, tuned to weather, tuned to all the ships at sea — earth, fire, air, and water tuned. The notches of wavelength-like lines on rulers or the scale on maps, all the calibrated atmosphere of frequency.