Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

So, thought Maine. So. Electrocution. It’s to be electrocution. Then he understood why Credenza troubled with vagrants, why he kept them around — so they could electrocute the announcers when they got out of line. Maine shook his head and, walking calmly toward the doorway, planted his feet firmly on the rubber welcome mat, grounding himself.

“Come on,” the transmitter man said. “Quit fucking off. I’m testing for a short circuit.”

“I’m a staff announcer,” Maine said simply. “I have nothing to do with the equipment.”

“Shit,” Murtaugh said. Then, to Maine’s surprise, he went through the motions without him, fiddling with knobs and dials, throwing switches and, at one point, actually taking apart a rather complicated piece of machinery with a screwdriver, the best acting Maine had seen him do that evening. When Murtaugh finished he looked up at Maine. “It’s at the studio,” he said.

“Is it?”

“I’ve checked everything out. It’s at the studio. The only thing it can be is the coil.”

Marshall Maine planted himself even more firmly, making himself a dead weight on the doormat. “The coil, is it?” he said.

“The meter’s disabled,” Murtaugh said. “I’ll call the station.” He picked up the direct-line telephone and said something to someone at the other end. He waited for a few moments, appearing to listen as the engineer got back to the phone and made his report. The transmitter man nodded. “I didn’t either,” he said. “No, what’s-his-name, the staff announcer told me about it.” He put back the phone. “It’s the meter, all right,” he told Maine. “The needle must have jammed and shorted the coil.”

Marshall Maine looked at him.

“That’s why it sounds like that,” Murtaugh said. He pointed to the loudspeaker. “He’s been riding a false gain. There’s no equilibrium in the output. He couldn’t tell. The needle was just floating free.”

“ONE MOMENT PLEASE!” they heard the engineer shout. Then the loudspeaker went dead.

“And he hadn’t noticed,” Marshall Maine said.

“What’s that?”

“He hadn’t noticed. That’s what he told you before you said, ‘I didn’t either.’ That he hadn’t noticed. You hadn’t either.”

“That’s right. Hey, how’d you know that?”

“He hadn’t been listening. Only watching the needle.”

“That’s right. Say, mate, could you hear all that?”

“When I shrieked,” Marshall Maine said.

“What’s that, fella?”

“Nothing,” Marshall Maine said. He stepped off the mat and came back into the shack. He leaned against the equipment. He played his fingers over the dials and stroked the switches. He thrust his hand into the space from which the transmitter man had removed the electric panel which he had taken apart. He picked up one of the loose wires.

“Hey, watch it!” the transmitter man yelled. “You want to get burned?” Murtaugh knocked the wire out of his hand.

“Right,” Maine said calmly, grabbing the wire again and picking his teeth with it.

Murtaugh shook his head and started outside with his flashlight. “Call me when it comes back on,” he said.

The first time I laughed, Maine thought. When I shrieked that time. That’s what jammed it. That’s when I tore it. And they hadn’t noticed. Not the engineer or the relief engineer, not the transmitter man or the relief transmitter man, not Shippleton, not the Indians — not even Credenza himself. Hell, not even me.

“Because we had all stopped listening.

“And that’s why I never heard. Because one by one we had all stopped listening weeks before when I came back from Lincoln with the new records. Because they never heard those other programs. Because without consulting anyone each of them had become bored, without even recognizing the moment when they no longer cared to listen to their own radio station, and without even deciding not to, without — my God, they must have been bored — its even being a conscious act on their part, and so there was just this piecemeal tuning me out, just this gradual lapse as one loses by degrees his interest in a particular magazine he subscribes to, just this sluggish wane, just this disaffection, not from my programs alone but from Shippleton’s too. They were all so bored that it was simply something personal, taking boredom for granted, almost as if it were something in the eye of the beholder with no outside cause at all, just a shift in taste, as one day one discovers that he can no longer eat scrambled eggs. So bored that it was just too trivial to mention to one’s brothers, because each made the unconscious assumption that the others still had their appetites intact.”

Well, thought Marshall Maine, I’ll be. I ran KROP right into the ground. All by myself. I did it. Not even my engineer listened to me. Not even my transmitter man with nothing to distract him except the sound of the relief man’s snoring. I’ll be. It doesn’t have a single listener. Not one.

“This is Marshall Maine,” he said aloud in the empty shack, “KROP’s Voice of the Voice of Wheat. Be still. We interrupt this radio station for a special announcement. Be still.”

It is not enough to say that he lost his job. Rather, it disappeared — his as well as the jobs of the transmitter men and engineers and the other announcer. Even the radio station disappeared — KROP plowed back under.

As it happened, Dick Gibson was able to take advantage of the Credenza boredom for a few more days. Though now that some of his colleagues had realized what had happened — or soon would — he knew he did not have much time. Once the requisitions were put in to replace the equipment he had damaged, the Credenzas would easily be able to fill in the rest of the story. Meanwhile he worked.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that no one heard him, or perhaps it was to make a sort of amends for his former fear, or simply the hope that if they should tune him in now, at the top of his form, they would forget who it was that had driven them away from their sets in the first place and would place a new and stronger confidence in him. At any rate, using the name Dick Gibson, he spoke during this respite with a silver tongue, lips that were sweeter than wine, a golden throat. He was in a state of grace, of classic second chances. The more it galled him that no one heard him, the better he was. The weather had turned bad and there was a thin film of unseasonable ice along Route 33; yet he hoped that someone passing through might be listening. It could make the difference between one concept of the place and another. Such a stranger might think, for as long as the signal lasted, that he had entered a Shangri-la, crossed a border more telling than the Iowa-Nebraska one, and come into — despite the flatness stretching behind and before him — a sort of valley, still unspoiled, unmarked perhaps on maps. To stay within range of the signal — never strong and now damaged further by the involuntary surges and slackenings of an inconstant electricity — the stranger might slow down (it would have nothing to do with the ice) and Dick would guide him, preserving him on the treacherous road as art preserves, as God does working in mysterious ways. The stranger might even pull over to the side. Dick pictured the fellow, his salesman’s wares piled high in the space from which he had removed the back seat, sitting there, his appointments forgotten, time itself forgotten, preoccupied, listening with a recovered wonder unfamiliar since childhood, in a state of grace himself.

No matter. Within four days of discovering the truth he received word from Shippleton that none of their services were required any longer, that the Credenzas had decided to close down the station. That they fixed no blame and were willing to write letters of recommendation for all the staff was evidence that they had not yet figured out what had happened. But Dick knew, if the others didn’t, and felt a fondness for his crew, determinedly sentimental on the last morning they were together. (Actually it was the first morning: all six of them were in the shack for the first time, plus Lee Credenza, who had driven over to bring them their last paychecks.) As they packed and made hurried preparations for their exodus, he saw that in emergency each had auxiliary lives which they would now take up. They might have been men who had served with him in a war, or political prisoners given some eleventh-hour reprieve and told to leave the country. He saw that he had one of Murtaugh’s handkerchiefs and that Shippleton had a pair of his shoes. They re-exchanged combs, ties, books and magazines they had lent each other over the months. Why we’ve been friends, he thought, amazed, brothers (the six of them only two less than the sum of the Credenzas themselves, and actually equal if you didn’t count the Credenzas in Lincoln).