Continuation of the Excerpt
He was wearing an old pair of boxing trunks with a loose waistband. His feet were bare so he’d make no sound when he walked the floor, and he’d rested his portable typewriter on a pillow. He had big feet, big hands and arms, a burly chest, a skewed nose, and scarred brow ridges that bulged out above his eyes, marks earned discovering it was not a world in which good prevailed over evil, nor even one of meaningless random chance. It was a malignant plan. The Just would grow fewer with every generation; the ranks of the Wicked increase until the gravitational pull of the dense black hole sucked down the last of the good. He just wanted to finish his account of it before the only remaining trace of his father was the envious memory in the minds of the gods themselves of the few they'd failed to bend. He leaned forward and was hitting the typewriter keys with his thick index fingers when the nursery door flew open and Diana came barging in.
“Will you stop that god-awful pounding!” She snatched his portable off the pillow and held it back as if to throw it, glaring, challenging him to react.
He turned in his chair. Always stay calm. Never show anger. Never acknowledge pain. His life had been filled with people more excitable than he.
“It's not even seven o'clock! I work! I have a job!" She drew it back again.
It wasn’t the noise. He hadn’t made any noise. Staying calm, watching her eyes, he stood up. That was all it took. Her face twisted, she swung her arms and heaved his portable out the open window.
He lunged for the sill, and while he was looking down, she darted round behind, snatched a thick handful of pages about his father and flung them past his ear. Half of them dropped in a batch, but many separated from the pack and blew up and down the street.
He grabbed her by one armpit and a knee and yanked her off her feet. She screamed and clutched at his face. She dug her fingernails into his bare chest. He let her clutch, let her kick, holding her at the open window long enough to scare her, and then he carried her into the bedroom and dumped her onto her bed. She sneered up at him. Getting dumped onto her bed wasn’t punishment. Her sneer turned sexual, but he wanted none of that this morning.
SUCCESSION will be published on May 9th
Another excerpt From Succession
Marty Berk swerved his tomato-red Cadillac convertible into the breakdown lane, flashed his brights, passed a mile-long line of trucks and cars backed up at the tolls, cut in front of a sixteen-wheeler carrying chickens. The trucker stomped his brake and jerked his horn cord. Berk pressed a button, rolled down his window, took a ticket, raised his middle finger to the chicken truck and sped away with an indignant look at Garrison.
"What? I saved forty-five minutes. What'd it cost that guy?"
Garrison glanced back. No one else got in the breakdown lane. Would Kant have conceded Berk's point?
Berk chummed him with bogus information and slipped probing questions in.
"You know Hank Hammerschmidt?"
"Sure," Garrison said.
Berk caught the car in front and drove bumper to bumper. He reckoned speed in cars passed rather than miles per hour. "How about Herm Wolf?"
“I know Herm Wolf, too.
Berk acted impressed. "What's it cost you guys make that Collegiate? It's confidential don't tell me, but I could save you some serious money."
Garrison sniffed. "Making it in Japan?"
"Korea,” Berk said. “Twice the quality, half the price."
According to Nieuwegein Korea could cut Shaughnessy’s cost sixty percent. He gave Berk a skeptical smile.
The Tornado Discount Store stood in an enormous parking lot in the swamplands west of the Hudson. Berk waved at the empty parking spaces. "Wait'll six o'clock. Wait'll Saturday." This was the fifth in a chain, he said, all in North Jersey, all four stories high, 40,000 square feet per floor, all carrying the same stock, same location, same price.
"Tornado's how fast they move the merchandise. Five times the sales per square foot as Macy's, twenty percenta the labor cost. I’m going to spiff those clowns bigger than Royal?" He shook his head. “Macy's still sells. Today, you gotta make people buy. You run a three-quarter-page ad fulla brand names at discounts and throw um a hundred bucks in coupons. Electric knives and blenders twenty-off suggested retail. Come early, grab quick, you make some beautiful buys. Hey, I spend three days a month just watching people buy things," he said, as if that were the secret of where his great strength lay.
Portable typewriters were in what Berk called “traffic appliances” at the far end of the fourth floor. They had to walk the full length of the first floor to get the escalator to the second, back to the opposite end to get the escalator to the third. Tornado stores were designed to offer the maximum number of buying opportunities in the minimum amount of time.
"Macy’s got thirteen toasters on display. Tornado got three. They leave um in boxes and stack the boxes. You want to see toasters, go to Macy's. You want to buy toasters, come to Tornado. Bring cash! Like the looters in Harlem! Reach in, grab the merchandise, haul it away on your hip! That's the feeling you try ta convey."
They reached the typewriter stacks. Berk shook his head at the plain brown paperboard Kensington boxes."Look at my box. Four colors! A carrying handle! It says 'Pick me up! Take me home! Turn your moron son into the smartest kid in his class!' Your box says, 'Don't buy me, I'm too ugly. Go buy a hairdryer.'”
When they left at six the parking lot was beginning to fill with the cars--twentieth-century pilgrims progressing through ambulatories of bargains, each seeking the epiphany of the Beautiful Buy, all certain to return the following week because no matter what they bought, their lives stayed the same. Indeed, better shoddy goods that wore out fast lest they mock them three-score-and-ten rather than ninety warranteed days.
"The American Dream!” Berk said. “I grew up my family had six kids, one bathroom. Me? I got one kid, six bathrooms. Close your plants,” he counseled on the way back. "Sell my machines. Under the Kensington name. Your customers'll get happy, you'll make money again."
"We need better merchandising,” Garrison conceded. "Better boxes. To get people's attention."
Berk whizzed past everything on the turnpike. "You want to learn how to get attention, get born a fat little schmuck whose father works for his uncle. You'll figure out the rest for yourself. You don't need attention. You need my electric."
"We've got an electric."
Berk ducked off at Fort Lee, cut back up the No Re-entry ramp to avoid the long bridge toll lines and gave him a shrewd look. "Where'd you get an electric?"
"That's confidential."
"You were asking Zulli about an IBM portable?" From the way Berk said that, he knew about the IBM consent decree.
“How do you service Golden Wands?”
“We got Sears,” Berk said. “And our dealer network.”
Too fast, Garrison thought. Too glib. Weak point.
Berk dropped him off on the Manhattan side of the bridge and gave him his card. "Want to really have an electric? Instead o’ pretending you got one? Give me a call."
He watched the tomato-red Cadillac get back on the Cross Bronx toward Long Island. If Berk got the Selectric he'd make it in Golden Wand's plant at a third IBM's cost and sell it in discount stores. Mother Kensington was too slow for Macy's, and Macy’s was too slow for Berk. On the other hand, Berk had no service organization and no sales force to sell Golden Wand machines to businesses. Carnusty wanted the real estate, Berk the sales and service. Garrison walked up to the hospital, feeling the kind of excitement he’d never felt sitting at his typewriter.
SUCCESSION will be published on May 9th
One More Excerpt
Suddenly, Emerson thrust his hands back into his pockets, pulled them out and smacked his forehead. “I forgot the money for the fish!” His face fell.
Just as suddenly, his eyes brightened. “But that’s all right! I have my checkbook!”
They resumed walking, but when they reached Joralemon, he smacked his forehead again. “I forgot! Frank doesn’t accept checks. Forgive me, Jacob. But can you do me the kindness of cashing a ten-dollar check?"
“I can lend you ten.”
“No, no, no!” Emerson wrote the check and accepted a ten-dollar bill.
They crossed Atlantic and entered Frank’s fish store.
Frank's son, Joseph, who lived with his father in the rooms behind the store, came out when the bell hit the doorjamb. He was around forty, with the same shy manner as Emerson. He had a strong face, prominent bones free of superfluous flesh, and short black hair flecked with gray. The fish were displayed in built-in white tile basins filled with chipped ice. Visible through a door at the rear, a giant pot boiled on a stove.
"Took a subway ride this morning," Emerson said. "All the way to Rockaway."
“Did you?” Joseph moved his head in wonder. "I was there once myself."
"Were you?" Emerson moved his head just as Joseph had.
"They're probably still looking for me out there." Joseph lowered his voice and confided that he’d gone to a Rockaway ice cream parlor with a group of friends. They’d eaten ice cream, talked for a time, then got up and left. "I got home, took off my jacket and found the bill in my pocket. With all the talking and saying goodbye, I forgot to pay." It sounded as though the incident had occurred many years before.
Joseph’s father, Frank, was an immaculate old man--leathern skin, prominent facial bones, no excess flesh, white hair clipped close to squared skull, tan sweater, white apron, clear blue eyes, no teeth—a Phoenician type Garrison had seen on quays Barcelona to the Bosphorus, silent, wife dead, hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.
Joseph went back to tend the giant pot, and Emerson selected the largest bass, the largest lemon, a bunch of Italian parsley. Frank weighed the bass and rang up $1.80 on the old iron cash register. He put Emerson's ten-dollar bill into the cash drawer, took out a five and laid it on the white tile sill. He wetted his fingers and began counting out one-dollar bills with care. Once, he had almost cheated himself by letting two singles get stuck together. Joseph had witnessed the incident, corrected the error and spoken of relieving Frank of that part of his responsibility.
Frank completed the careful counting of the one-dollar bills, saw the five lying on the white tile sill of the cash drawer, supposed it was the bill Emerson had handed him to pay for the fish, picked it up, put it carefully into the cash drawer and handed Emerson the meticulously counted ones.
Emerson closed his eyes and groped for words. The old man looked down into the cash drawer and groped with stiff fingers for two dimes.
"Mr. Frank," Emerson said. "Mr. Frank. Sir. I think I gave you a ten-dollar bill."
The old man stopped trying to pick dimes out of the cash drawer and gazed into Emerson's face. He had no memory of Emerson giving him a ten-dollar bill. Above all, he did not wish Joseph to get involved.
Emerson and Genevieve placed great importance upon the personal relationships they had built with the shopkeepers from whom they bought their daily food. It was the closest one could come in these advanced times to growing one's own vegetables, baking one's own bread, catching one's own fish.
Joseph came out to see what the difficulty was. Emerson tried to explain in a way that did not cast blame upon Frank because of his age. Frank shook his head, not to say no but to say that he did not remember. Emerson told Joseph he could not have given Frank a five-dollar bill because the only money he had was the ten-dollar bill Jacob had given him on Joralemon Street. In fact, Emerson suddenly realized, that was his proof.
"Jacob, show Joseph the check!"
Garrison showed Joseph Emerson's freshly written check.
"Ten dollars," Emerson said. Joseph looked at the amount.
"Look at the date!" Emerson said.
Joseph looked at the date. The date was that day's date.
Joseph was polite, but did not reach into the cash drawer. Garrison understood his hesitation. He and Emerson could have pre-arranged the entire affair before they entered the store--including the writing and the dating of the check. And had not Joseph just related the ice cream incident of Rockaway? If Joseph could cheat the ice cream parlor, why should Emerson not attempt to water his horse at that same trough? Or perhaps Joseph felt that non-Italians venturing south of Atlantic, particularly those seeking to take advantage of the three o'clock price reduction, were fair game. Did not the inhabitants of Brooklyn Heights make large amounts performing incomprehensible tasks in giant companies closed to people of Joseph's neighborhood? Which the Anglo-Saxons had recently renamed "Cobble Hill" in order to induce others of their kind to come from Manhattan and squander all they earned paying rents to which no Italian would consent?
Garrison described how Frank had put Emerson's ten-dollar bill into the cash drawer, taken out the five and laid it on the sill of the cash register.
Frank moved his squared head vaguely to say that was possible.
Joseph nodded and, after several compliments about the gentility of Emerson, and compliments by Emerson about the honesty of shopkeepers south of Atlantic, Joseph picked the crispest of the five-dollar bills in the cash drawer, pressed it into Emerson's hand, and they left Frank’s fish store with the bass, the lemon and the parsley. Garrison did not mention the two dimes Frank had failed to pick out of the cash drawer.