“I think,” he told his H & R Block man, “that I shall have to shut down this office.”
“It’s the off-season, Mr. Flesh, that’s why it seems so slack. From January to May you can’t hear yourself think. The phones never stop ringing. Most of our off-season work is audits, people called in to bring their records down to IRS, go over their returns. The spot check, you know? I’ve got twenty appointments of that nature this month alone.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said.
“Mr. Flesh, there’s a saying, ‘The only thing you can be sure of is death and taxes.’ This is a sound business, Mr. Flesh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If you’ll just look at the commissions, even in these off-months—”
“Where’s the return in returns?” he asked. “Look,” he said, “I know you do a good job. But that was yesteryear. You own your own home? Rent?”
“We rent, but—”
“You don’t get around like I do. I’m Wharton, I know things. My ear’s to the ground like the white line on the highway. They’re closing the loopholes, they’re graduating the taxes, gaudeamus igitur. Texas Instruments has us by the short hairs. With the pocket computers any kid can figure his old man’s taxes. They teach this shit in school now. Like good citizenship. Like Driver Training. Anyway, what’s the matter, you never heard of the Taxpayers’ Revolution? Shh, listen, they’re dumping tea in the harbor.”
“But without a warning, with no notice—”
“Finish your case load. Take twice your commission. Triple. We’re closing shop, we’re going out of business, everything must go.”
“But—”
“I told Evelyn Wood the same. What, you think you’re a special case? I told Evelyn Wood, I told her, ‘Eve, there’s trouble in Canada, in the forests. The weather’s bad, the stands of trees are lying down. There’s no wood in the woods, Wood. The pulp business is mushy. Where’s the paper to come from for the speed readers to read? They’re reading so fast now they’re reading us out of business. Publishing’s in hot water. Magazines are folding, newspapers. (What, you never heard of folded newspapers?) If we want to keep up with the times we have to slow down, go back to the old ways. We have to teach them to move their lips.’ ”
“Mr. Flesh—”
“A month, I give you a month’s notice.”
Which was good business. And now he was conscious always of Finsbergs on the other end of his line. He performed for them. His best foot forward. Living as if within the crosshairs of their sharp-shooter observation and understanding. Every move a picture. His deals dealt for them more than for himself. Like a kid behaving for Santa Claus.
At night he dreamed of them, changed now, grown apart, the shifting sand-dune arrangement of their bone structure — all gone now their ’50’s and ’60’s tract-house mode — their features left out overnight in a human weather, hair colors changing, styles, growing piecemeal paunches, gestures, asses, the girls moving toward some vague Estelledom while the men grew more like Julius and less like each other. An expanding-universe theory of Finsbergs. The Big Finsberg Bang. In his dream he was like some archaeologist at the Finsberg digs, reconstructing their old mass individualism, only with difficulty putting them together, a painstaking labor. Not something for someone with his hands. All the king’s horsing them. And getting somehow the idea that if he could only shape his franchises in some more coherent way — this occurred to him: that if he could pace the routes from New York to Chicago, from St. Louis to Denver, Omaha to Los Angeles, Fort Worth to Dallas, Boston to Washington, planting the land mines of his franchising in such a way as to coincide with a traveler’s circadian rhythms, his scientifically averaged-out need to pee, eat, rest, distract himself with souvenirs from Stuckey’s and Nickerson Farms or get off the main route for a bit and go to town — all would be well, he would clean up, regain the respect of the boys, the love of the girls, and that respect and love for him would somehow force them back into their old odd single magical manifestations. But it was too hard, a job for a younger man, a healthier. All wouldn’t be well, the Finsberg features would never again collect at the true north of their old selves. There was no way.
All he could do was tack, trim. Sacrifice Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics and H & R Block for Dunkin’ Donuts. Trading them off like baseball cards. If a depression came, Dunkin’ Donuts would prosper. He felt that. He knew that. That was good business. With what he got for the franchises he dumped, he reinvested heavily in doughnuts and coffee.
Then the price of cream shot sky-high and sugar went through the fucking roof.
3
It was early 1975. The banks had begun to chip away at the prime rate, every two or three weeks bringing down the boiling point of money, its high tropical fevers, a quarter percentage point here, a half percentage point there. The temp tumbling like a crisis in old-time films. The price-of-money fix was in. The gnomes of Zurich and the Fed had put the brakes on. Gold, legal to own, went begging. Stocks recovered ground in their long Viet/guerrilla/Hundred Years War.