by John Elliott
‘Be imaginary histories with our connivance.’
‘Get insane with Madcap!’
Carefree days, he thought, but the amiable anarchy of Madcap had seeded the birth and growth of Chance Company, and he and his future both belonged under its control.
A semi-darkened area beyond another Joe May, this time as hippie entrepreneur, enshrouded the following section. Aleatory music, triggered by the tread of feet on a thin metal strip on the floor, played in the background, dissonance seeking and finding resolution, then dissonance again. An intermittently darkened and lit screen showed the first austere declarations of Chance Company’s existence: ‘Don’t leave it to chance. Contact the Company.’ A separate monitor relayed a loop of Joe May’s charismatic keynote speech, ‘Uncertainty is our greatest asset’, delivered on the company’s second anniversary at Scranton, New Jersey, November ’65.
With a barely suppressed sigh, Harvard sprawled into a convenient club chair. A feeling of incipient lassitude started to distend his limbs and loosen his focus. He shut his eyes for a moment. His task could wait. As a sop for something to do, he picked up a pair of adjacent headphones, put them on and half listened, half catnapped, as an actor, whose name he could not remember, read Item 16 from the company’s Stories We Tell Ourselves.
‘Sheer Cliff Company faced many difficulties in the wake of its founder’s suicide. A hostile take-over bid from Whisper Long Corporation put its continued existence in jeopardy. Hard timber extraction, one of its key raw materials, was threatened by draconian quotas imposed by the new coalition government. Added to these, along with several other multi-national conglomerates, it had recently bled financial resources in a sequence of ill-judged arbitrage manoeuvres, while internally the task of appointing a successor to the chairmanship had sharpened the power struggle between the “New Day Hour One” faction and the previously dominant “Scatter the Stones More Widely” policy adherents.
‘Conscious of these ice floes in the river, the defunct leader had wisely stipulated in his final testament that a series of colloquies must be held, representing all divergent opinions, on the future course of the organisation, and that they be transmitted live to every factory, office and workplace.
‘The first meeting took place at Osaka shortly after daybreak in late autumn. Present were Yuta O, Finance Division, Taku M, Production Engineer, Moe S, Export Director, Ayno F, Pension Fund Representative, Harold L, Australian Sales.
‘Taku M opened proceedings. He said, “A twenty-six stone player can meet a one stone player. Together, out of civility and love of Go, they decide to spend time at the board. Both of them are willing to learn. In the future, twenty-six will boast I had the honour to play against so and so. He showed me non-attack, non-defence. The one stone player will relax at chess.”
‘Ayno F chose to project a film about R Temple. It consisted of a variety of establishing, long, medium and close-ups, pans, fades, stills and crane shots. When its credits rolled, she said, “New wood, new architect, new site. Forever the same, unchanging idea temple.”
‘Harold L followed her. He stressed, “Stories about the loyal ronin are still popular. Tradition holds. When each factory thinks it alone knows the best way to make our products, it is time to stop making those products.”
‘This point of view drew an angry rebuttal from Moe S. She shouted, “No slogans! No targets! Work with workers’ knowledge!”
‘Throughout the proceedings, Yuta O had sat quietly, saying nothing. From time to time, he had removed the top of his felt pen and had replaced it with a faint click. Now, he laid the pen without its top on the table, got up, left the room and did not return. After a pause, Ayno F said, “He showed us in this state the pen will not write for so long.”’
Harvard opened his eyes, stretched his arms and took off the headphones. He rose and ambled onwards round a tight chicane, whose walls were covered with the printed testimonies of grateful celebrity clients, to the library section. Above its entrance, a less well-known Karlowski portrait of Joe May stared down. She had taken him as he sat alone at the head of a long boardroom table. His torso was draped in a loose-fitting red and black dashiki. In front of him were arrayed a ring of keys, a bunch of yellow and white roses wrapped in cellophane and an expensive gold wristwatch. His poised right hand was frozen in the act of writing in his appointments diary. The partially formed word ‘vanit’ was clearly visible on the open page. The portrait’s date and the fact that it was here on loan were stated below, but not that it was the property of the Amadeo Cresci Foundation.
And there is more inside, Harvard thought, appreciating the irony of the situation. After all, what better than to see Cresci heresies being legitimised amongst Chance Company folklore? He pictured his co-conspirator, Evangeline Simpson, standing beside him in obeisance before the image of her god. How triumphant she would be rootling among her donated artefacts, unearthing gleefully the video of Chance Company: Control Through Anarchy, a TV exposé in the Open Windows series, Bishop Albiol’s Easter address condemning the dangers of addiction to fantasy lives, Oscar Tuve’s apologia for the failed Cresci lawsuit conjoined with Umberto Vitale’s article, ‘Chance Company has been and continues to be infiltrated by The Company’. K Wiener’s book, Chance Company Does Not Exist: A Syncretic Fable, and Abdul Abdullah’s notorious pamphlet, Master Chuck’s New Toy.
Once, he thought ruefully, she would have dropped them all readily and let him embrace her, but in those days he had not known how to give her his love, and she, in spite of welcoming his caress, his kiss, and for that matter any other’s caress or kiss, only really loved and was in thrall to the man she suspected of being her father.
With the seductive image of Evangeline still in mind, his hand alighted on a copy of Alvin Medcorev’s 1981 authorised History of Chance Company which he saw was included, at a specially reduced price, amid the items for sale spread out on a trestle table. Recognising that it would be of use in his immediate task and that it was a long time since he had last flicked through it to read about the early days of Evangeline’s mother, Joe May and the rest of the crew, he picked it up and took it over to the study bench on the opposite side of the room.
He had logged on and was about to activate the file he had brought with him when his attention strayed to the map, which extended along the wall above the row of computers. It delineated throughout the world the spread and penetration of Chance Company in a range of blues: sky to midnight indigo, according to the density of operations. An infrequent scattering of white patches indicated countries and territories that still refused entry. Miranda, directly above his head, which until recently would have been white, was now a Wedgwood blue in recognition of the lifting of its long imposed embargo. Now is truly the time, Harvard reflected. We are zoning in on the synchronicity to finally track down and nail our Mirandan apostate, settle his hash for good and all, and simultaneously introduce his fellow countrymen and women to the joy of realising that life can indeed be a dream if they are willing to pay for it. Added to that, he has chosen to return here and give me the sweetest opportunity of my career. ‘So, thank you, Greenlea,’ he said aloud, and inwardly, and thank you Evangeline and Cresci. Together they could pull it off. He would make damn sure of that, even though their aims were radically opposed. Separate paths led to their quarry, one of which, appearing on the screen in front of him, was coming to fruition.
Client Name—Agnes Darshel
File Name—Emily Brown
Supervisor—Roberto Ayza
He entered the agreed cost-centre number. Under its cover, the Cresci Foundation would pick up five sixths of the tab. The remainder was down to the client. Hopefully, she would find her long-lost father in a matter of days, before Sonny Ayza returned to work. Another fortunate piece of synchronicity that Harvard had enjoyed when he authorised a week’s leave in the perfect date slots. He began to sing as he worked. If Agnes did not trace him then one of the others would, just so long as it was not Evangeline on he
r own. ‘Is coming to town. You’ll never guess who. Lovable, huggable Emily Brown. Miss Brown to you.’ She needed a guide for the labyrinth, a helpmeet, a fidus Achates. Following company practice, he ordered up all the EB entries from the city telephone directory and opened the copy of Medcorev at random. His finger rested on page 41.
The details began to sort themselves out. Forty-first on the list was Emmet Briggs. A match between him and the client seemed promising. He was a long-time resident of the city. He had been married for years and still lived with his wife, Hallie. The fact that they had no children and that he had no previous Company experience was not relevant. He had been out of work for the last three months, a plus as far as Harvard was concerned. Then, as the years scrolled back on the monitor, Briggs’s sustained history of crime and violence, coupled with four terms of incarceration, emerged relentlessly. Harvard paused and stared at the map. Briggs still might be okay but was he controllable? He returned to the keyboard and typed in ‘known associates’. The answers were more reassuring. Briggs’s whole catalogue of brutality, apart from juvenile delinquency elsewhere, had taken place in the context of local organised gangsterism. He had hurt and maimed only when ordered to do so by protection racketeers or as a means of pre-empting rival antagonists. Let’s go with the system, Harvard decided. Briggs’s record was clear for the last five years. It was worth taking a chance. Accordingly, with his eye already scanning the text on page 41 of Medcorev’s book, he keyed in ‘contact’ and ‘offer’.
The first sentences he glanced at did not interest him, so he turned back a few pages and then back again until he came across a passage dealing with the ur-history, as Medcorev termed it, which he knew would lead him sooner or later to the appearance of Evangeline’s mother.
The room was quiet. The lighting subdued. Nobody knew he was there apart from the concierge downstairs and the electricians. Home could wait. Its incumbent pain could be postponed for at least a little longer. He slipped off his watch and began to read attentively.
Chance Company started up, not surprisingly, in a tenuous and disjointed way. It had several progenitors, which flickered, sputtered and faded in the years contiguous to the emergence of Madcap Enterprise—the organisation which above all nurtured and inspired its eventual founders, Joe May and Evangeline Simpson.
Two of these progenitors merit further comment at this stage—namely the Tokyo-based home restaurant phenomenon and the European Dog Activists.
The former involved like-minded individuals who provided specialist meals at highly variable prices in their own homes. The food ranged from one ingredient themes, e.g. beef, chicken, garlic, chillies, chocolate etc. to versions of European cuisine such as English institutional, Scots high tea, Dublin pub snacks, Mediterranean fish stew, mâchon Lyonnais, le 4 o’clock, Austrian dumpling fest and German breads with Dutch cheeses and Mirandan hams.
Other participants relegated food to second place. They concentrated on imposing a specified ethos accompanied by its corresponding etiquette. Diners, therefore, were able to eat meals according to the customs and manners borrowed from and approximating to Louisiana plantation owners (pre-Purchase), contemporary London Pall Mall (gentlemen only), Korean and Manchurian Spring Festivals (liable to disruption by hired left-wing student brigades) et al. In one celebrated instance a vertical approach was decreed so that, as each successive course was introduced, the appropriate ‘mores’ regressed a century at a time.
The majority of houses, apartments and shacks used for home restaurants were presided over by single women. Colloquially, they became known as Widow So and So’s—the second name denoting location and ambience. Some of these women had travelled in their lives, and they sought to recreate what they had experienced. Most, however, relied heavily on magazines, movies and television for their inspiration with the result that their ‘Po Valleys’, their ‘Minnesotas’ and their ‘Lancashires’ were particularly poetic.
Apart from a handful of habitués and their initiates, putative patrons and their guests found their way to these establishments with great difficulty. They were all in the suburbs, and, as they did not want to attract the attention of the fiscal authorities, they did not advertise openly. Some risked a brief display for an hour in the early evening by hanging a banner in the doorway if they were traditional or by putting plastic replicas of dishes in a window if they were modern, but this practice was unusual and probably indicated a judiciously placed protective friend. The rest were effectively underground and unknown. A situation which, especially during the infancy of the phenomenon, gave rise to many non-participating households being interrupted, chivvied and placated or otherwise by roaming groups of pleasure seekers. The most resourceful of these households responded by improvising what they understood their unforeseen visitors wanted in a symbiotic forerunner of Chance Company process.
This period of charming anarchy, however, was not conducive to effective business and was soon supplanted by an oral network of guides and helpers. In each locality, for a small sum, street sweepers, railway ticket clerks, insurance salesmen and flea market vendors could usually be relied on for accurate information. The final codification arrived with the publication of The Widow’s Room by Liam Fitzhugh in Southern California.
Fitzhugh had gone to Japan ostensibly to research a monograph entitled, Trailing Gary Snyder. On his way back from Yoshino Mountain, he spent the night at a traditional inn. Immersing himself in the communal tub, after washing, he listened to his fellow guests discuss the merits and demerits of a succession of widows. Intrigued, he, as politely as he knew how, enquired into the provenance of their remarks. Because of his fluent command of their language, his obvious bear-like clumsiness and his praiseworthy determination to eschew all things western, they laughingly put him straight, thus planting a seed which came to fruition on his return to Tokyo when, one fateful afternoon, he quit on Gary Snyder and set off on his quest to find the widows.
During the ensuing nine months, he assiduously combed the suburbs, storing up his database and paying for his meals, travel, rent and hire of office equipment by a mixture of busking, shoe shining and teaching business American. On one of his busking forays, he was mistaken for the celebrated street musician and composer, Moondog, which gave rise to an apocryphal story of an unreleased Tokyo recording session.
The publication of The Widow’s Room, the finished product of Fitzhugh’s labours, immediately slotted into the zeitgeist of America’s West Coast. Subsequent editions penetrated the remainder of the States. Owing to its success, Fitzhugh was able to recruit and maintain a corps of Japanese researchers who kept abreast of developments, ready to update each planned yearly guide.
Fitzhugh had a personal horror of value judgements, so his work stayed refreshingly free from rating systems of stars and rosettes. His guide’s users, therefore, were able to discover for themselves wonderful, enriching experiences or conversely indulge in relating the number of occasions they had wasted on dire, tedious and uninspired venues. On one thing though they were unanimous: his chapter on settling the bill was indispensable. Within its bullet points, he led them through a maze of foreign customs, philosophical disjunctions and plain physical discomforts to a step by step mastery of insouciance, timing and, if need be, hard-nosed bloody-mindedness. His readers recognised that without his help they would have been completely adrift. They could never have paid up so confidently and have felt so good about it. A proprietary pat on the cover of his book struck them as a fitting tribute.
In the days of his air force tour of duty, Curtis Simpson regularly dipped into the pages of the guide. One evening, as his wife, Yvonne, was unexpectedly indisposed, he accompanied his daughter, Evangeline, to Widow Saka—Otoshi Alley—Godaigo Primitive. Evangeline, who was in her final year at Columbia, experienced a new rapprochement with her father from whom she had been alienated throughout her teenage years. She later described the journey and her emotions in some detail in an interview she gave to Alternative Business Review
.
‘The encompassing darkness in the back of the staff limousine. The smoothness of its onward glide. The subtle way my father’s posture began to loosen and change. His almost boyish glance as he half turned his face close to mine. I felt as though the years were slipping away from him one by one and that he had retrieved the form and substance of the young man who must have so fascinated my mother in the days when, I guessed, their love was new. I sensed he was on the dangerous verge of mistaking me for her or, if not her, then for someone else. I almost expected him to lean across and put his hand on my knee, but, of course, he did no such thing, although the imaginary grip of his fingers on my stocking was faintly palpable. His smell was alluring and exciting. A knot twisted in my abdomen. Then he spoke, and the knot within me slowly dissipated, and we began to talk as we had never really talked before, not as father and daughter, but rather as if we had only met each other for the first time and had found, to our surprise, that we shared a love for pistachio ice cream, the Brooklyn Bridge, the New York cityscapes of Frank Stella and the bleakness of the New Jersey flatlands across the river.
‘By now, our driver was completely lost. We shuttled up one dingy street after another, only to find ourselves back where we started. Seemingly interminable factory walls petered out into vacant lots which led to more factory walls. Then at last, coming towards us across uneven hillocks, squeezed between a cluster of dilapidated shacks and an elevated railway bridge, we saw two men flashing torches in our direction. They motioned us down an unsurfaced track to a raised one-storey building bordering a brickyard.
‘Once inside, the widow greeted us personally. She was a short, dumpy woman somewhere in her late fifties. She wore a forties-style American frock. It had, I remember, large white gardenias on a purple background. As she took us to the mats we had reserved, she shuffled and swayed in front of us, pausing every now and then to turn and look coquettishly over her shoulder in the manner of the onnagata I had seen in the kabuki. Monotonous drumming heralded the commencement of a halting, almost static dance performed by our two former guides. Their movements and the meaning of their dance were incomprehensible, not just to me, but to the whole of the audience, which consisted of non-Japanese rubber-neckers. Father surmised that it was about a lion and a ghost. I told him that was simply his fallback position. He was as much in the dark as the rest of us. We laughed and the widow laughed too as she beat on a wooden block. Then she rose from her crouch and, with a small hammer, broke a hand mirror into two pieces. One half she discarded on the floor, holding the other aloft. Gently, with her fingers, as if she were releasing a small bird, she propelled it upwards and walked away somewhere behind the scenes. At that very moment, I realised that people are at their best, at their happiest, when they’re not themselves.