Page 17 of Shadow Ticket
Hicks has always preferred not to work for anybody too upper-class if he can trade tickets with one of the other ops, who’re usually only too happy to.
Despite which he now finds himself up here on Prospect Avenue with the aristocracy, looking around for moats and drawbridges and so forth, though the Airmont mansion turns out to be a notch more modest, turn-of-the-century millwork, unblocked view of the Lake, Menomonee Valley brick kept clear of downtown industrial gray, fresh as a dairymaid’s morning delivery.
Hicks gets off the streetcar a couple of stops early and walks in by way of the Airmont driveway, appearing on city maps under a street name of its own, where he finds a new Cadillac Sport Phaeton with the hood still warm, plus a Bentley bobtail cold to the touch as daytime Milwaukee, throwing him an idea of what he’s likely to find inside.
Once past a couple-three Waupun alumni posing as residential security, he’s stashed in something they call the library, though there aren’t that many books or even magazines around. Tries to keep his hands in his pockets and remember where his elbows are.
Social chitchat around here, as he learns from falling into conversation with a number of eccentric Airmont cousins wandering around without much to do, seems very focused on cheese, in particular the recent Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, “Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”
“Cheese, oh to be sure, cheese is alive. Self-aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation. We’re at a pivot point here in the history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein or something—”
“Cheese—wait, cheese…has feelings, you say? You mean like…emotions?”
“Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…”
“Secretly?”
“Only waiting for our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we…wouldn’t want to go through all that Christians-and-Romans business again, would we?”
“Wisconsin is possessed by some vast earth-scented spirit of Bovinity, docile herds of cows by the untold thousands all across the state every day at the same hour lining up shed-side in patient queues waiting to be milked, while microbial cultures, silent yet conscious, working below the level of human attention, go on bringing a strange shadowy inertia into human character…”
“And no wonder the Japanese hate us, no dairy element to speak of in their diet, they see us as a bovine race, lacking all martial spirit.”
“What you could call a negative attitude toward cheese in particular.”
“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, radioactive ingredient.
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 reading Cheez It, the Cops! and Irradiate Bruno.
Reports furthermore beginning to come in from grocery stores all across the U.S.A.
of Radio-Cheez shelf incidents, 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 labeled enemy mines, 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.
The British 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.