“My husband’s dead,” the woman said. She started to cry.
“Oh hey,” Ben said, “oh hey, listen, I’m sorry. Listen, I didn’t mean — I’m awfully sorry. Look, is there anything I can do? Anything at all? I mean, if I can help out money wise, I’d be more than happy…Life’s been good to me in that department. It wouldn’t be any hardship.”
Mrs. Mullen was weeping uncontrollably. Ben waited for her sobbing to subside, finally overrode it. “You must think I’m some kind of nut,” he said, “but I mean it about the money. Your son was very kind to me one time when I needed help — and, well, I just had nothing but good feelings for Dick. I mean, everybody did.”
“You knew Richard?”
“Well,” Ben said, “it’s just that we were in Rapid City General together.”
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Mullen said. “He was in Intensive Care. He died just after…How could you have…”
“Well, you know the Mister Softee on Rushmore? That’s my place. I…Look, I mean it about helping out,” Ben said, but all he could hear were the woman’s sobs and finally he had to replace the phone. Someone else was waiting to use it anyway.
So he paid Jack and left the gas station and drove off to check into a Holiday Inn.
All in all he felt pretty good. Not physically of course. Physically he’d never been worse. His hair was bothering him. Indeed, he hadn’t combed it for days because it felt as if current were running through it when he held a comb to it. His other facial symptoms were bad. Bright light made his eyes tear and he could not look at the sky. His lips were heavy and felt as if tiny chips of buckshot were sliding about inside them. Also, he felt a sort of girdle effect about his forehead. The sclerosis was amok. He had the odd sensation that there were paper cuts in his lungs and kidneys, and the queerest feeling that his thighs were filled with a sort of stuffing, like sensitized furniture. Though he had been the one to offer that the day was a scorcher, he actually felt cold. (He’d heard the same weather report Jack had. That’s how he knew it was hot.) He drove with the air conditioner off and his windows shut in order to trap what heat he could, and still his steering wheel was icy to the touch. He felt weakness in all his limbs and a kind of cushion of chilled air flowing beneath his skin.
Still, things weren’t so bad. He felt pretty good. Look at the way Mrs. Mullen had cried about her husband. Four years dead and she could still be moved merely by the sound of a stranger pronouncing his name. And how kind Jack had been. Not wanting to take the fifteen cents. Two dimes and a nickel for his quarter. Giving fair measure. People were good. His friend from Minnesota. The way he’d bought that oil when he was only down just over half a quart. He probably wanted to help the kid out. People were good. Life was exciting.
Think of all that had happened to him. His disease. It was a major disease, very big league. There was even a campaign on television now. And his parents had been killed in a highway crash; that was dramatic. And he’d served in the war, though he hadn’t seen action. Not that action. But there were other things. He couldn’t list them all. He’d been to Wharton, maybe the top school in the country in the business field. All the things he’d done. He’d stood in a bucket and given a speech. He’d smoked marijuana, broken a law. He’d owned probably two dozen Cadillacs and driven two million miles. He’d had a godfather. That was something. How many had godfathers? Or stood by at deathbed scenes? Or were left the prime interest rate? The twins and triplets. The boy Finsbergs and girl. The Insight Lady and Contest Lady and the Looks Like Lady who could look at anyone and instantly come up with someone that that person looked like. The You Could Make a Million Dollars Lady. All the others.
And musical comedy in his blood. What a heritage! Songs. Standards. Hits. Top of the charts. Whistled. Hummed. Carried on the common American breath. Coming down the street on a transistor held to a kid’s head like an earmuff of sound. Carried on the electrical American breaths of stereo, quad, the million swollen amplifications, speakers suspended like mistletoe in the archways of record shops or ringle-dingled in electric campaniles everywhere the air was. Melodies familiar as appetite and as pressed upon others as their habits. What a heritage! Ben Flesh himself like a note on sheet music, the clefs of his neon logos in the American sky. All the businesses he’d had. The road companies of Colonel Sanders, Baskin-Robbins, Howard Johnson’s, Travel Inn, all his franchises. Why, he belonged everywhere, anywhere! In California like the sound of juice, Florida like the color of sunlight, Washington and Montana like the brisk smell of thin height, and Missouri like the neutral decent feel of the law of averages.
Nope, he couldn’t complain. And ah, he thought. And looked forward to checking into the motel. Where he’d wait for dusk, have dinner in his room, open the thick-lined drapes, and watch out for his signs as they came on in nighttime Birmingham, all the blink-bulb neon and electric extravaganzas that stood out sharp against the sky and proved that every night Broadway opens everywhere.
Ah, he thought euphorically, knowing that his happiness was real, chemical, of course, symptomatic, but there, there under his disease, under the chemicals.
He was broken, they would kill him. The Finsbergs were an endangered species and his Travel Inn a disaster. They would kill him. Within weeks he would be strapped to a wheelchair. And ah, he thought, euphorically, ecstatically, this privileged man who could have been a vegetable or mineral instead of an animal, and a lower animal instead of a higher, who could have been a pencil or a dot on a die, who could have been a stitch in a glove or change in someone’s pocket, or a lost dollar nobody found, who could have been stillborn or less sentient than sand, or the chemical flash of somebody else’s fear, ahh. Ahh!
A Biography of Stanley Elkin
Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.
Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.
Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.
In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.
Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review. Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated with Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.