Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“I’ve tried … you know, to get experience.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ve had — I don’t know — maybe a dozen jobs since I left home.”

“A dozen jobs in five years. That’s a lot of moving around.”

“Yes, it is. But I wanted to do as many different things as I could. I have this idea about apprenticeship. It’s how I see myself — as an apprentice.”

“It’s best to get a good background,” his father said, wantonly indifferent.

“The personalities,” Dick said, “I don’t know if I can explain this, but they’re part of our lives, not even a trivial part either because we grow up to their jokes, we tell time by their voices. And what voices! Broadcast. Broad cast. Personality like seed, a part of nature, in forests and beside streams, and high up the sides of mountains, higher than the timber line.”

“There’s good money to be made,” his father said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

“I change jobs and bone up because I want to make myself worthy of my voice.”

His father yawned, swept his fingers up under his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and gently rolled the loose skin on the bridge of his nose back and forth. It was another act. The generation gap. A pantomime of stolid misunderstanding. Though he resisted, Dick felt himself drawn deeply into the performance. By his father’s gesture — his face had now gone blank and he was vaguely chewing, sucking his cheeks and exploring the flaws in his teeth with his tongue like a nightwatchman aiming his flashlight at doors — the two of them had become partners in some nightshift enterprise, men in a boiler room, say, among complicated machinery, in a mutual vacuum of the night and labor, a half-hour till one of them has to check the dials again. He could get no further with his dad, and was embarrassed that he had exposed himself as much as he had.

In the next weeks he thought about his apprenticeship a great deal, and wondered if this might not be just the effect his father intended. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was. His dad’s routines had been meant to embarrass him because the man sensed that this sneaking shame was Dick Gibson’s weak spot— Dick Gibson, that name that had come to him out of the air, the best inspiration of his life, consolidating in its three crisp syllables his chosen style, his identity, a saga, a mythic body of American dash, and that he had used just once, keeping it secret since, unwilling even after five years to give it up, saving it, as one preserves the handsomest pieces in his wardrobe and meanwhile goes shabby and ordinary, a miserliness not of money but of strategy, a military notion of reserves or a coach’s of bench, an Aladdin idea of one wish left in the lamp — and wanted to purge him of it. He had never been completely unembarrassed while speaking on the radio; this was a fact (his mike fright was something else). He had always felt just a little silly announcing, introducing, selling, describing, interviewing, giving the time and telling the weather, doing local color, acting and reciting bed-time stories, holding up his spokesman’s end of the conversation — which in radio was the only end there was. For the truth of the matter was that radio was silence as well as sound; the unrelenting premise was that the announcer’s voice occurred in silence, in the heart of an attentive vacuum disposed to hear it. Whereas he knew this was untrue. Didn’t his own mind wander, wasn’t it inattentive? Nothing was worthy of violating such silence; nothing yet in the history of the world had been worthy of it. That’s why he was embarrassed. So what his father was doing was meant to demonstrate how easily self-consciousness could be shed. Some such lesson must have been intended. So, he thought sadly, the apprenticeship isn’t finished. This thing remained: he had to become immodest, to learn to move dispassionately into the silence. His experience thus far was nothing; it would be a long time before he would be as good as he was meant to be. That was that.

He made plans to leave Pittsburgh, to take up the burden of his apprenticeship a second time.

The day he left home and bid his family goodbye he had expected a scene. But there was none; they did not offer to come to the station with him, and his mother used her mad, broad dialect only once. “A mither’s kiss,” she said automatically when she kissed him.

Arthur shook his hand and winced in pretended pain. “Yipes, champ, you don’t have to break a guy’s fingers, do you?”

His father was even more silent than when Dick had left home the first time, but he seemed on the verge of tears. Dick stuck out his hand but his father ignored it and embraced him. His beard felt strange against Dick’s, trailing sensation like a scent, as if he’d been rubbed with something dusty and valuable, scraped by flesh in a ceremony. Dick submitted to the embrace and thought it remarkable that his father’s eyes were red.

In the next years you might have heard Dick Gibson’s voice a hundred times without knowing it, certainly — so much had it willfully become a part of the generalized sound of American life — without thinking to ask whose it was, no more than you would stop to wonder at the direction of the wind from the sound it makes in the street. He went about the country restlessly, always lonely now and ignorant of time, his beautiful but anonymous voice the juggler’s humble affair before some imposing altar, a town crier of the twentieth century.

“Leeman Brothers directs the attention of shoppers to its White Sale now in progress in the Linens section on the fourth floor. For a limited time we will be offering genuine first-quality percale sheets for single, twin and full beds at discounts of up to 40 percent. We are also featuring a wide selection of slightly damaged printed cambrics at 75 percent off. Please take the elevators at the State Street entrance.”

“Attention! Attention please! There has been a change posted in the results of the fifth race. Please hold on to your pari-mutuel tickets. Jimson Weed has been disqualified for crowding on the turn. Repeat: Jimson Weed has been disqualified for crowding. The Maryland Racing Commission has declared the official results. It’s Your America is the winner, Martin’s Muddle has placed and Crybaby has finished in the money to show.”

“Will everyone please stand clear of the firetrucks? Will you stand clear of the firetrucks, please? These men can’t work. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Welcome to the General Motors Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, ‘The World of Tomorrow.’ The General Motors Company wishes to apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced during your wait on the line. Please sit far back in your comfortable chairs so that you may the better hear through your personalized headsets. The Company wishes to remind any of you who may be wearing sunglasses to please remove them now so that you may the better see our exhibit.”

“Kibbidge batting for Medwick.”

“‘The Congressional Limited’ leaving on track fifteen for Newark, Trenton, North Philadelphia, 30th Street Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore and Washington. Passengers holding chair Pullman reservations will please go to the south end of the platform. All aboard. All aboard please.”

“Will the owner of the green, 1940 Pontiac bearing Texas license plates G479–135 please report to the attendant at gate number twelve?”

“On your left is the historic old Cotton mansion built in 1847 by Emmanuel Cotton, to plans drawn up by the distinguished American architect Lattimer Michael Hough. The expression ‘King Cotton’ is not, as many suppose, a phrase describing the pre-eminent position of cotton in the Southern economy, but a nickname directly referring to Emmanuel Cotton’s life-long obsession that he was the pretender to the Hanoverian throne. The pillars you see are the only standing examples of Virginia marble — not a marble at all, actually, but a processed quartz made to resemble the less expensive stone.”