Page 31 of Shadow Ticket
“How the heck do we create a market for dairy products in Japan short of invading and occupying the country outright? Taking away their tea or sake or whatever it is they drink and forcing them to drink milk like normal human beings?”
From which Hicks after a while politely detaches, to have a look at a number of framed four-color posters advertising the once infamous food product known as Radio-Cheez, the basis of Bruno Airmont’s fortune, briefly competitive with the Kraft classic Velveeta, as well as Pabst-ett, the Pabst brewery’s attempt to make up for loss of beer revenue. Radio-Cheez was designed to stay fresh forever, in or out of the icebox, thanks to a secret, indeed obsessionally proprietary,radioactiveingredient.
Hicks has paused in front of one of these chromos showing a wholesome American married couple, posed in a subpornographic embrace in a kitchen where the only food seems to be Radio-Cheez both packaged and in use, with speech balloons reading “Oh honey, it’s all been so REVITALIZED around here thanks to Radio-Cheez!” with the husband replying urbanely, “Not too bad yourself!” The wife, though maybe not typical of Milwaukee housewives, is in fact pretty cute, done up here in some sort of screen-siren rig, under a platinum hairdo.
In this fictional household, radioactive cheese seems key to romance, it being radium’s grand hour of popularity, when it’s still medical wisdom to seek as many ways as possible to introduce radiation into the human body—radioactive mineral water, patent radium elixirs and aphrodisiacs, radium suppositories—despite the appearance five or six years earlier of poisoning symptoms down in nearby Ottawa, Illinois, where hundreds of “Radium Girls” were employed in painting numbers on glow-in-the-dark clock dials, licking their brushes every so often to keep them finely pointed.
For Radio-Cheez, all too soon, the honeymoon was over, federal Food and Drug killjoys declaring it “harmful to human health” somehow.
“New one on me, folks,” Bruno gesturing affably as he worked the crowds outside the federal courthouse at his first, though not to be his last, indictment, flash powder going off, local press screaming questions nobody can hear, protesters trying to hit him on the head with picket signs readingCheez It, the Cops!andIrradiate Bruno.
Reports furthermore beginning to come in from grocery stores all across the U.S.A. of Radio-Cheezshelfincidents, getting warmer and warmer till eventually exploding, sending once loyal customers running in blind panic down to nearby rivers to throw in all their as yet unexploded jars of the product, which were then carried away buoyant and glowing downstream, sometimes hundreds, even thousands of miles to coastal harbors and ports before detonating against the hulls of ships at anchor, any found still upstream being promptly labeledenemymines, with duly sworn sharpshooters ordered to fire at them from a safe distance. Fish in the rivers and harbors were briefly puzzled by the bright new scatter of food potential,until deciding, all together the way fish do, that they didn’t care much for Radio-Cheez either.
None of which disarranged by so much as an eyelash the public gaze of Bruno Airmont, already becoming known in the industry as the Al Capone of Cheese, who without mentioning it to anybody, including his family, has been carefully planning an unannounced exit to legal safety elsewhere, which at last, one night in the deep hours reserved for petty theft and romantic misjudgment, became the next morning’s headline—growing less newsworthy as the weeks rolled by and the radio jokes moved on, and Radio-Cheez dwindled to a strange afterlife among those who still claimed health benefits from the mysterious rays it continued to emit.
When Bruno skedaddled off the civilized map for parts unknown, Daphne Airmont was just at that point of later girlhood when an understanding Pop might’ve come in handy, instead of leaving her stuck with a stag line of know-nothings and pikers out the door and down the block…
From motives which did not include sentiment, she took a long, unauthorized look over and through the paperwork Bruno had left behind, which was plenty, a mountain of dummy corporation records, lawsuit summaries, dishonored checks, rap sheets and police reports, not the sort of homework any dog in their right mind would be tempted to eat.
Here began a sort of higher education. Since the end of the War the center of gravity of the Cheese Universe has apparently been shifting, to some observers at alarming speed, in the direction of Chicago, where Kraft, having by now captured 40 percent of the U.S. market, looms unavoidably as the chief factor to be dealt with. Beginning with its acquisition in 1927 of Velveeta, whose introduction (apart from its role as a Radio-Cheez competitor) has proved not unpivotal, a regional-scale roll-up has been in progress, more modest cheese operations all over Wisconsin and beyond quietly being absorbed one by one. There have of course always been price-fixing scandals since at least back in the last century, from involvement in which even the Wisconsin Cheese Exchange, located deep in Sheboygan County, hasn’t been entirely free. But nothing like this.
The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business. TheBritish company Lever Brothers merged with the Dutch cartel known as the Margarine Union to form Unilever. After the merger of National Dairy Products with Kraft everything avalanched, faster than anybody was ready for, climaxing in the Cheese Corridor Incursion, a wildcat operation denounced at the time variously as Bolshevik, cartel, or Capone-related though in fact nobody knew where it came from, a major sector of Wisconsin de-cheesed in the blink of an eye, entire cheese inventories hijacked right out the gates of more than one cheeseworks, from Sheboygan on west, one after the other, a coordinated rolling knock-over, truckloads of case-hardened palookas, many said to be from Illinois, trooping in and out of plants big and small, tossing provolones back and forth like footballs, rolling along the ground giant waxed wheels of domestic Parmesan, no cash taken, no payrolls, only physical cheese, Colby longhorns, bricks of Brick wrapped in tinfoil and carried away by the hodful, storming on down the Cheese Corridor in a bold sweep already “legend-dairy,” as newspaper extras were proclaiming before it was even over with. What didn’t get gobbled down on the spot or stashed for further aging in caves at secret locations was quickly distributed among lunch wagons, soup kitchens, one-arm joints throughout the upper Midwest, effectively down the hatches of the hungry inside of forty-eight hours.
Some believe it was masterminded by Bruno Airmont, even though he was the loudest complaining—that it could’ve been intended as an early warning to dairy folk who were thinking about joining in any mass effort to redefine the price structure. In any event, Bruno, bewildered as anybody, emerged as the last man, if not standing, at least able to stumblebum around, somehow finding himself in supreme command of a darker project he may never have learned the true depth of.
The world of cheez and its ways, already perplexing, had turned suddenly opaque as well for Daphne, who found sometimes she had trouble keeping a handle on it all. If Bruno really was, or maybe still is, the Al Capone of Cheese, didn’t that suggest there also had to be somewhere a Cheese Outfit that could be running at any scale from statewide on up, blessed with supernaturally accurate bookkeeping, short on mercy, located either nowhere or anyplace it liked—and why stop there?
Whatever levels Bruno might be reporting to, Daphne gathered from notes scribbled to himself, he was already too high up for personal comfort. Found himself thinking of all the public toilet walls across the Midwest and the names he was being called, the fates that ungifted restroom cartoonists were imagining for him. Starting to worry about marksmen out there waiting for him to wander into their sights.
—
Sooner or laterthe kingpins had to meet—as things fell out, at Al Capone’s own Midnight Frolics cabaret, on East 22nd in Chicago. Bruno at this point in the evening was entering a haze of indifference as to the exact ingredients of what he might be drinking, as long as it did the job.
“Yeah! Yeah I’m the Al Capone of Cheese, see? Il Al Capone di Formaggio.”
“Pleasure to meet you—in fact I happen tobeAl Capone.”
“Hep to that, my paisan! And what is ityou’rethe Al Capone of again?”
Al Capone after a pause only shrugged, laughing nervously, not always regarded as a good sign by those familiar with him and his impulses.
Despite this uneasy beginning, the two seemed to hit it off. Bruno began to feel a perverse kind of protective aura. Soon he was making with the cheese quips. “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Ricotta?” and “You don’t like it, eh va’ fondue,” and so forth.
“Bruno, you card.” The Big Fella meant the Joker, but Bruno may’ve been thinking of an older deck, an older card, numbered XIII, the one nobody likes to see turn up, especially considering how mysteriously rival figures in the Velveeta/Radio-Cheez/Pabst-ett theater of combat were beginning to disappear from the cheezscape.
“How many’d you lose?” Al Capone, as the story goes, once asked Bruno, who in his innocence thought Big Al was talking about dollars.
“Oh,” Bruno pondered, “um…”
“Now you’re the boss,” advised the celebrated bootlegger, “don’t think you can relax. ’Cause now there’s even more people out to get you, see, Valentine’s Day comes more than once a year, any minute can be your last, you need to be more alert than ever, capeesh? Sleep especially. How you been sleeping lately, goombah—things OK with that?”
—
G. Rodney Flaunch,a onetime male flapper somehow delivered into premature middle age, seems unable to maintain a direct gaze with anybody, preferring to glower off into space, throwing the word “fiancé” around a lot, embarrassingly open about the scale on which he hopes to profit. “A million and a half, that’s my magic number, I’m not greedy, only asking a fair return for the work I’ve put in…”
According to Rodney, everyone up here on Prospect despises him while secretly admiring his courage in daring to actively court the daughter of the Al Capone of Cheese, honorific or whatever.
“Step easy, G. Rod,” fellow loophounds caution, “you know what they can do to you.”
