The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  It was the memory of that sound—as much as the itching of his flesh beneath the Band-Aid on his forehead—that was driving Georgie nuts on this day in January when he stepped off his delivery truck and crossed the sandy back parking lot of the burger joint that was his most successful account. Usually he’d ring the bell for fifteen minutes, but this evening the two owners were already out back, around a corner and obscured from him, sounding like teenagers on a smoke break until Georgie went to investigate. The two owners, one fat and one slim, one clean-shaven and one with a moustache, were speaking with a man who’d come not just to deliver some milkshake machines, but also to make a sales pitch.

  “It takes a special kind of individual,” the man was saying as Georgie stepped over to them, “to recognize beauty in a hamburger.”

  Those were the first words he heard him say, but somehow they erased immediately the memory of Mary’s shouts. They were like something his father might have said if he’d been a little more ironic, a little more American. In that first instant, Georgie felt the same magnetism as when he’d seen Mary across the parking lot of the drive-in all those years before, felt the same sense of the spinning world slowing down, allowing him to see directly down a previously obscured corridor. The milkshake man kept talking, wouldn’t stop, though the owners—whom Georgie knew to be brothers—seemed ready to be done with him.

  “Couldn’t believe it when I got the order. Eight milkshake machines! Wanted to write you all a note to make you understand that each of these babies is capable of cranking out five milkshakes at once. And you want eight of ’em? That’s forty simultaneous milkshakes! I just had to come and take a look at this place. I came all the way from Chicago because I didn’t believe it. But now I do. Didn’t believe it before but now I do. I can see through the window yonder what kind of operation this is. Hard-line efficiency. You’ve got that part down. A dozen workers all pumping out the same product. Everything measured and kept to standard. Look at that fella in there! Trying to keep up with all the shakes he’s gotta make! And here it is five o’clock in the evening. Can you imagine what this place looks like at eight? ’Course you can, you’re the owners. Can you imagine what this place looks like at eight o’clock at night? All the young fellas like yourself and their girls?”

  Georgie was surprised to discover that the milkshake man was talking to him. Their eyes met for the first time. Georgie tried to speak. Failed. Cleared his throat. Glanced at his clipboard. Nodded.

  “You talk about an efficient engine. You know how much energy a car engine wastes?” The man looked back and forth from Georgie to the two brothers, as if ready to field guesses. “A whole bunch,” he said at last. “A whole darn bunch. A whole heck of a lot. But you know what I see when I look in that window right there? I see no wasted energy. I see a group of workers functioning to optimum capability. I see income being generated from a minimal amount of capital. I see a reason why somebody might need eight of my milkshake machines.”

  Georgie had listened to all of this with an acceleration in his heart, his mouth drying up, had felt the energy humming off this encounter and understood that there was a better life contained in it. He was amazed to discover that the milkshake man looked at him in a way he’d never been looked at in such company, that the man seemed to include him in the conversation in a way none of the restaurant owners ever had. He looked at Georgie, a slim boy in his early twenties, holding a clipboard and dressed in a sweat-stained uniform, a Band-Aid on his forehead and his hair still gelled in a style reminiscent of three years ago. But a face as rugged as you’d ever hope to see around here. A midwestern-looking boy. The milkshake salesman looked at the twenty-four-year-old grease truck driver and asked him, “What do you see?”

  And Georgie knew that this was his moment. He looked at the owners, the brothers who were one type of business person, then beyond the windows to the efficient small-scale success they’d created. He looked at the middle-aged midwestern milkshake machine salesman, who’d come all the way from Chicago just to see what sort of place needed to make forty milkshakes at once. Another kind of businessman altogether.

  Georgie fixed his gaze on the milkshake man and said, “I see a lot of beautiful hamburgers.”

  WE HEARD THE STORY A thousand times, each of us, even those who weren’t born yet—especially us. It was a rally cry, our creation myth; the one thing we knew for sure about our mysterious father was that he’d stood up at the correct time, had made the right first impression on the right man, had provided for the future of us all on that hot January evening in a parking lot in San Berdoo, had sealed our success and our fates with one clever line spoken through exhausted hope with a dry mouth and aching head. It put his authority beyond question, made him our hero on the strength of one arbitrary and largely accidental instant. Our early lives were touched by that moment, blessed in a way that made us feel different. Even later, when the lying mirror that reflected only happiness and perfection had long since been shattered, we retained this marbleized view. We never had friends outside the family, only each other. The disdain our father had for other kids—their behavior, their ready assumption of their parents’ lazy habits—infiltrated our own minds. The world was a place that existed outside our own experiences; we didn’t control it (who would want to?) but we weren’t tied to it either. And it was anything but an example to us. At the center of the world was our father, the provider and patriarch, never satisfied, never relaxed, pacing on a Sunday afternoon, always caught up in some mind-consuming activity—washing his car, vacuuming the house top to bottom—always up on a ladder or occupied with some noisy lawn-maintenance machine, inaccessible. We’d watch from the edge of the yard or from a second-floor window. We existed for him in the way the neighbors’ kids existed for us. We were satellites. Our mothers included. Our mothers especially. Bound by tradition. Only two things a woman could do to get rid of her husband in those days. And we witnessed them both.

  NOVEMBER 1963. ON THE DATE of the first attempt on their father’s life, the ballplayer and his bodyguard were walking along the ravine of the dried-up Arrowhead Creek, north of Highland Avenue in San Bernardino, behind the long row of houses lined up like dominoes, one of which—the pastel yellow one over there at the end, with the swimming pool and the single maple tree rising over the fence—was theirs. They’d moved five years ago and still the boys had never gotten used to it. Five years since they’d uprooted from the house on Van Sunderland, sold it off for, in the words of their father—whom they both worshipped—more money than you could shake a stick at. Had come out here to the neighborhoods north of Highland, where the long streets held row after spiraling row of houses filled with young families like themselves, housed dozens upon dozens of kids GB’s and Jamie’s age for them to play with and plenty of young adults for their parents to invite over for cookouts, though they never did. This afternoon, in fact, was the first time either of the boys had ever witnessed any kind of community activity, and it was hardly the sort of thing you could feel good about.

  GB was twelve, already built like an athlete, bearer of his mother’s extravagant eyes and heart-shaped face, her dusty blonde hair, dressed always head to toe in a pinstriped New York Yankees baseball uniform procured via mail order in response to his persistent pleas. It was the only thing he’d worn for over a year despite his father’s protests—though his mother was the one who had to wash it three times a week and she didn’t seem to mind—the uniform having become his every day attire since they’d gone to Dodger Stadium to see the team recently emigrated from Brooklyn and GB had vowed that he would one day be the greatest ballplayer ever, had stood out in the yard for the remainder of the evening, tossing a Wiffle ball in the air and cracking it toward the fence with a thin yellow bat, counting off homeruns as he hit them, approaching records like his hero Roger Maris. Jamie was seven and carried with him a toy M-16 assault rifle like the kind they’d soon be using in Vietnam, occasionally aiming it toward the woods at the sounds of invisib
le attacks. The dutiful younger brother, always willing to carry on the role of sidekick in someone else’s elaborate fantasy, he’d taken on the character of armed attendant to his brother. That day in the backyard, he’d played a frustrated outfielder to GB’s home run king, had chased the tailing balls until he’d run out of room, then watched them drift over the fence toward the ravine. He was a softened version of their father, with olive complexion and boyish frame, skinnier and more frail than his brother, forced by severe myopia to wear thick black-rimmed glasses that somewhat obscured his dark eyes and long lashes and the serious look that their mother adored, that made her reach forward and touch his face while he ducked away, that made her run her hands through his thick movie star hair.

  They’d been let out of school early, had been informed over the intercom of what had happened. The staticky voice of Principal Cruz, whom everyone called Principal Khrushchev, informing them that the president of the United States of America had been shot as he rode in a motorcade with his wife in a convertible down a crowded street. They’d been ushered in groups past weeping adults, past tall female teachers they’d thought heartless for the punishments meted out for incomplete homework, past grim men in suits and ties, faces covered with handkerchiefs, out to the busses, which they were told to board and go home early to be with their parents.

  Among the children, a festive atmosphere had ensued. GB and Jamie had watched it, sitting together in the back of the bus as always, watching the boisterous kids in the rows ahead of them. Theirs was the last stop. Far out beyond the cleared land that would soon be a freeway, the bus slowed at the entrance of their subdivision, paused at the gate that read Canyon View Estates on a sign over a yellow brick entryway, and they emerged from the bus, a string of a dozen kids aged five through twelve, and came through the entrance into the main street of their neighborhood to an amazing sight.

  Everyone was outside, standing on their lawns. Not just the parents, but all the adults, all of them having been sent home from work, too, having now come out together onto the lawns and streets to await the arrival of the children, as if to derive some sense of hope from the vision of the kids coming off the bus, or perhaps uncertain that there was anything they could take for granted—that on a day like this one, gray and overcast even in California, the president shot in plain sight, anyone could disappear.

  They’d watched him take the oath of office on a January day two years ago in Washington, DC, Robert Frost on hand and the forty-three-year-old man with the funny accent urging them to ask not what their country could do for them, GB and Jamie on the floor playing Monopoly while their mom and dad sat on the couch, whispering, teasing, their father imitating the accent, the long drawn-out vowels and the dropped R’s, their mother having nothing to do with it, unwilling to submit the inaugurated president to such ridicule, even on a private scale. “Who do you think you are?” she’d said to her husband. “Who are you to make fun of the president?” Their father looking reproached for a moment before letting his expression settle. “Why don’t you just admit it then, Mary? Admit that you’re in love with him. Tell the boys that you’re in love with the new president. That if you could you’d go to bed with him in a heartbeat and the hell with me and the boys.”

  The evening had descended into one of their unanticipated arguments, the game of Monopoly never finished, the television soon broadcasting to an empty living room, the boys in their rooms crying, their mother in the kitchen, their father out back by the pool, chain-smoking.

  For the boys it was nearly impossible to recognize these pivots in their parents’ conversations, these moments when it went from all’s well to awful in a heartbeat. It seemed to them that something fundamental had changed in the way they communicated, a change that had come when they’d uprooted from the house on Van Sunderland and moved out here to the hills north of the city as a result of their father’s hard work at the restaurant, the labor that had led him from a lowly West Coast liaison to the milkshake machine man all the way up to assistant quality supervisor for the fastest growing restaurant company in the history of the United States, a company that had begun as a single asphalt hamburger stand in San Berdoo and had been turned—through the sweat and vision and relentlessness of the milkshake man and his associates—into a multimillion-dollar business, two hundred locations in nearly half the states in the union, famous throughout the country for its already iconic symbol, its golden trademark beckoning motorists on their long trips across the country on Eisenhower’s fast-developing interstate system.

  The boys still remembered the day their father had come through the door of the old house on Van Sunderland, the day he’d lifted them into his arms in the foyer and told them that it was done, that they’d finally succeeded, after endless negotiations, in buying out the two brothers, that for only 2.7 million dollars they’d secured the revenue of what he promised them would be the greatest company in the world. They’d watched him kiss their mother on the lips—the first time either of them could remember, they’d later agree in the tiny room they shared in the house on Van Sunderland—had been lured into believing that this moment really would change things, had been awestruck at the sight of their new house, their new bedrooms at the back corners, with three windows apiece and plush carpeting and a view of the ravine and the foothills, stunned by the backyard and the swimming pool, the new neighborhood that rose and dove among the dry hills and dales. And yet still, even in this new location, even surrounded by a beauty that made their old habitat seem all the more dismal, they’d found their parents to be more distant, always thinking of something else. That day he’d taken them to Dodger Stadium, had led them up the hill from the Pasadena Freeway to the new complex among palm and olive trees, they’d sought and not received some new connection with him, had hoped that today—the three of them attending a ballgame together—they might get to feel a certain warmth from their father that had been missing. Instead he’d been disinterested, unable to answer their questions about the rules, had called out to the passing vendor and urged them to be satisfied with this gesture while he turned inward, turned to contemplate the great bowl of seating, the boys sharing their box of Cracker Jacks each with one eye on the game, one eye on their silent father.

  George Benjamin Hill didn’t know the rules of baseball. Didn’t care. It was a pointless game, one he would come to resent even more over the years as his oldest son became devoted to it. He had never so much as watched an inning on television, didn’t know a strike from a ball nor a Dodger from a Yankee, had reluctantly agreed to take the boys only when the milkshake machine man had all but forced the complimentary tickets upon him in the aftermath of one of their heated meetings at the office that afternoon, the latest Friday meeting in which they’d gotten together with the board to attempt to figure out a way to resolve what was so clearly wrong with their company. It was the milkshake machine man’s franchising model. From the beginning, he’d been a handshaker and a backslapper, always quick with a line like those he’d thrown out that day Georgie had met him. His mantra had been growth: expand as much as possible and get their restaurants in as many states as they could. They’d offered franchises at outrageously low start-up fees of less than a thousand dollars, had advertised enormously low kickback agreements—agreements that had helped them expand but had done nothing for the long-term well-being of the company. In his old-fashioned style, the milkshake machine man had insisted they treat all their franchisers with respect, had insisted that they think of them as business partners rather than customers. A nice gesture, certainly, but one that, it was becoming clearer every day, was driving the company toward insolvency. They were drowning in overhead, had brought in $75 million dollars in sales the previous year but had only turned $160,000 in corporate profits. The franchisees were getting rich while the franchisors were barely keeping their heads above water. There’d been conversations—at the water cooler in the corporate office, over drinks in dark bars with the air conditioners running—George Benja
min Hill and the other board members getting drunk and commiserating over the wealth they’d imagined and the disaster that seemed inevitable, the company headed straight for bankruptcy within a year or eighteen months. Two hundred restaurants packed with customers one day and closed down the next. Two hundred franchisers ruined, the milkshake man defaulted on dozens of loans, pursued by creditors, foiled by his own inability to work the numbers.

  It was on that summer day in 1962, seated in the baby blue pit of Dodger Stadium with his two sons, that George Benjamin Hill had seen the answer to the company’s problem. The day he sat looking out over forty thousand people—like franchisers, really, in their cramped seats on loan from the Los Angeles Dodgers—the boys pulling on his sleeve with questions whose answers he didn’t know, their father always with bigger fish to fry. By the time forty thousand stood to sing “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” he’d ironed out most of the details, was already picturing himself not here at the ballgame with his boys but in the board room on Monday, presenting his new idea to the men with whom he’d shared late-night roundtables of gloom and desperation, watching their expressions change as he pitched it to their boss, a new plan that would use real estate as a money-making device, the same way the Los Angeles Dodgers used this bright bowl of a stadium, a plan that would eliminate the risk of day-to-day business by making them first and foremost landlords to their franchisers. First—he would tell the board members—we scout out potential sites for future restaurants. We buy or rent the land with fixed interest rates, sublet the buildings at a significant markup, force the franchisers to contribute a minimum fee or percentage of sales (whichever is greater). As sales and prices rise, the company will collect more rent and revenue, while our costs remain constant …