Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“All right, try this … Your father. Your father goes to Indianapolis to call on a store. He forgets to take his shaving cream, or maybe he’s all out of it. Well, he has to make a good appearance. You don’t walk up to L. S. Ayers’s head buyer with five o’clock shadow. If you’ve got bad breath you can put something sweet in your mouth, you can hide it, but how do you hide your whiskers? What do you do, throw your hands up over your face? Well, it’s Sunday night, and he’s got an appointment first thing in the morning. The drugstores don’t open till nine or nine-thirty. In a town the size of Indianapolis there could be some place open all night, even on a Sunday, but it’s late. What’s he going to do, start looking now? The man’s tired, he’s had a hard day, it’s been a long trip. He goes to bed. The last thing on his mind before he falls asleep is the lousy shaving cream.

“In the morning he unwraps the little soap, the souvenir Ivory with the hotel on the wrapper, and he lathers with that. He rubs his palms furiously to work up the lather. He goes through the whole bar until it’s only a tiny sliver. He pats it on his face. He shaves. He cuts himself. That cut, that blood! That’s what I’m talking about — your daddy bleeding in a stuffy little room in Indianapolis. Where’s the dignity? Where’s the authority? Do you see? Do you see what I mean? Do you follow? Turn on the applause sign, somebody. Where’s Bob’s applause sign man? Joe Glober, hold up the ‘Laugh’ card. Pretend it’s applause. No?

“The private life. That everybody has. Being loose in the world. On your own. On mine, Dick Gibson’s. ‘Pepsodent’ is not actually my middle name. This is inside stuff. How much time do we have? Seventeen minutes? Twenty? … Marty Milton, ladies and gentlemen, Bob’s pre-show time man. How long have you been with Bob, Marty?

“I’ll tell you what happened to me after I lost my job. I meant to return the twelve or thirteen hundred miles to my home by bus. You’ll just have to accept this. It was exciting for me, the most exciting thing that had ever happened. I was in disgrace, you see. In a way. I’d blown it, fucked up, torn it. The shit had hit the fan. I’d lost this job in Nebraska. There’s a certain kind of disgrace in declining fortunes. And a certain kind of excitement in disgrace. This was a sort of ill health — an illness of recuperation. Oh, how weak I was, how vulnerable to everything. Dizzy as a lover. My pores were open, goners to drafts. I mean my spirit was such that I could have caught cold or picked up bad germs. Just to stand up straight made me giddy. And young as I was, I had this power of the has-been like a secret weapon. How sweet is weakness! How grand it makes us feel when we really feel it, how happy and how solemn! You’ve seen those men, five months past their heart attacks, making their leaden progress up the stairs, one foot on the next step and the other brought up to join it, a hand on the banister perhaps, and the deep, stately breathing.

“That’s how I was. And not the least of it was the bus itself. This was a few years ago, before the war. It was still the depression; only the rich traveled by plane and even at that only between coasts. Buses were respectable then. You remember Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in that movie. But this was my first time on a bus. Before when I had moved about — I was turning myself into a professional and I traveled considerably — I took trains. Well, I was always going to better jobs; people were to meet me. And even if that hadn’t been the case I would still have traveled by trains because I associated them with show business … The movies did that, the montages. Remember those triumphant tours, hands clapping over the big wheels and the successive signs saying Cleveland and Chicago and Detroit and the last one always New York.

“So there I was on this bus with this incredible ticket they give you like folded scrip — I hope you folks like small talk — and my unfamiliarity with the nooks and crannies of the thing, as if a bus were some queer sort of contraption they didn’t have in America. That’s it! I could have been a foreigner, but a foreigner come from a really major power to some hole-and-corner country where they drink wine with their meals and have no facilities for dry cleaning. My demeanor must have invited hospitality, reminded others I would be taking back my impressions of them. Or maybe it was the weakness I was telling you about. Whatever, several people smiled at me. And one older man actually got up and prepared this empty double seat for me. He raised the window shade and adjusted the footrest. Then he helped me with some of my things, kneeling on the arm of the seat to put them neatly on the rack.

“‘Thank you,’ I said, pronouncing my words distinctly. ‘You are very kind to me.’

“I sat down but the old fellow still stood in the aisle looking at me uncertainly. I smiled at him pleasantly but he seemed troubled. Then, looking away, he spoke to the woman in the seat in front of mine. ‘I think he ought to take his coat off. It gets pretty warm once the driver closes the door.’

“‘He’d probably be more comfortable,’ she said.

“The man turned back to me and I looked up at him with that curiously alert anxiety people show when others are discussing them. ‘Yes?’ I asked.

“‘We were thinking you might be too hot in that overcoat once the bus starts,’ the man said.

“‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’ I started to wriggle out of the coat and the man in the seat behind mine leaned forward to help. ‘You are very kind to me,’ I told him. The old man in the aisle folded the coat carefully and put it in the rack above his seat where it would not be crushed by my parcels. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You are all very kind to me.’ We smiled at each other and nodded, and then the man in the aisle took his seat and I settled in. In a little while the woman in front offered me her newspaper. ‘Oh, no,’ I said brightly. ‘Thank you. I am looking through the window.’ The woman nodded approvingly and looked where I was looking.

“‘Those are elm trees,’ she said.

“‘Oh, yes?’

“‘Elm,’ she said.

“‘El m ,’ I repeated.

“We came to a town and passed a schoolyard where some kids were playing basketball. ‘Those boys are playing the game of basketball,’ the old man said.

“‘The game of basketball takes much skill,’ I told him thoughtfully.

“‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘There are great universities that will pay for his education if the boy is skillful enough.’

“‘Ah.’

“‘They certainly have their energy. I suppose they’d play till the cows came home if no one stopped them.’

“‘With children it is much the same everywhere,’ I said.

“We went by an International Harvester agency where the machines were jammed up on the apron outside the store, the great yellow seats on the tractors and harrows like enormous iron catchers’ mitts. I looked out the window at everything, the best guest in history. And indeed, after my isolation and dedication of the last years, there was something profoundly interesting, astonishing even, about it all. I might have been a foreigner, a greenhorn to ordinary life.

“It was necessary for me to change buses in Des Moines, and over coffee in the Post House my new friends scrutinized my tickets and consulted with each other.

“‘His best bet,’ one said, ‘would be to lay over in Chicago for a night, look around the city tomorrow morning and catch an early afternoon bus out.’

“‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ the man said who had helped me off with my overcoat.