Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“There will be a half-hour wait for seating, a half-hour wait for seating at all prices.”

“A lost child, about four or five years old, wearing a brown snowsuit, brown mittens and answering to the name of Richard, is waiting to be picked up at the ranger station just below the ski lift.”

“Front. Front, please.”

“Is there a doctor in the house?”

“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick ‘Pepsodent’ Gibson. I’m very happy to be here in Minneapolis tonight. Bob Hope will be with you in a few minutes, but first. …”

One day in Chicago’s Loop he was coming out of the Oriental Theater on Randolph Street when suddenly the heavens opened and he was caught in what could have been a cloudburst. One moment the skies were clear; the next the rain was pounding the street in the heaviest downpour he had ever seen. He was only fifty feet or so from the shelter of the marquee when it began to rain, but even if he had attempted to run back to it he would have been completely soaked. So he ducked into the stairwell entrance to an underground cafeteria called Eiler’s. He had coffee and a sandwich, but even after he had finished the rain had still not let up. If anything, it was raining even more heavily than before; the water was coming down the stairway and under the doors and had already formed a considerable pool, which the busboys were trying to clear away with pails and mops. Many people — mostly middle-aged women, afternoon shoppers — had come in from the street and were gathered at the bottom of the stairs.

The basement cafeteria in which they were all standing was low- ceilinged and crowded with rounded arches. Obviously it was meant to support the great weight of the building above them. Dick Gibson thought of the London blitz, the underground shelters there, where, according to what he’d heard, people whose homes had been blasted sometimes stayed for weeks at a time. As he often did when he was caught in something like an emergency situation, he began to look about for a girl, someone with whom he might talk, or, in some end-of-the-world abandon, kiss, hold, fuck. But there were very few likely prospects. Two pretty girls of perhaps twenty sat not far away, but these he discounted because there were two men clearly more handsome than himself with whom in all probability they would pair off when the time came. This left only a small, sweetfaced, pleasant- looking young woman. The more he looked at her the more feasible the idea of loving her became. Soon he found her plumpness sexually exciting and even the submissive gentleness of her expression, daring. He began to imagine her willing passion, and to project the wonderful things she might do for him. Before long he began to consider himself lucky to have her rather than the two girls whose beauty had probably made them selfish and cold. As he was thinking of his girl and imagining what it would be like to have such heaviness at his disposal, perhaps even gratefully blowing him, she looked up and saw him staring. Maybe she had felt his concentration; at any event she smiled widely as if she recognized him, or as if they were already lovers. Dick blushed and looked away at once, fixing his features in a stern, indifferent mask. Though he knew she was still watching him, he did not dare look up.

In a while the rain stopped and they were free to go. The girl passed in front of him and Dick could see the bewilderment on her face as he failed to acknowledge her stare. He realized that it was the same expression he himself had worn when his father had bewildered him.

My God, he thought suddenly, all it was was love. All it was was love and shyness. Oh Jesus, he thought, oh shit, I do not know what my life is.

The next day he called off the apprenticeship.

Which was impossible. He was already too far into it. It would have taken a major revision of his character, a rehabilitation, real eye openers. We are what we are. Dick Gibson went back into radio; the quest continued.

By now he had enough experience in radio to handle anything. He was an accomplished announcer, a newsman, an MC, an actor. He could do special events, remotes, panel discussions. He had a keen ear for which songs and which recordings of which songs would be the hits, and was even a competent sports announcer. Though he had not yet broadcast a game from a stadium, he had done several off the Western Union ticker tape, sitting in a studio hundreds of miles from the action and translating the thin code of the relay, fleshing it out from the long, ribbony scorecard. More than anything else this made him feel truly a radio man, not just the voice of radio but radio itself, the very fact of amplification, the human voice lifted miles, beamed from the high ground, a nexus of the opportune: See seven states! And everything after the fact so foreknown, the game itself sometimes already in the past while he still described it; often the afternoon papers were on the streets with the final box score while he described for his listeners the seventh-inning stretch or reported a struggle in the box seats over the recovery of a foul ball — his foreknowledge hindsight, a coy tool of suspense: “DiMaggio swings. That ball is going, going — oh, it’s foul by inches.”

He was able to perform even the simpler feats of engineering, and had a good working knowledge of sound effects. (Strangely, he would sometimes reveal these, giving up his privileged information not so much with a gossip’s delight as a betrayer’s, enjoying his sense of ruining illusion, fixing forever in the minds of those who heard him that fire was only handled cellophane, rain stirred pebbles on a piece of paper, thunder a tin sheet shaken — so that even afterward that was what they heard, cellophane, pebbles, tin sheets, the metaphors undone, turned, the things they stood for become the things that stood for them.) He was good at all of it.

He no longer experimented nor changed jobs, and though he still had not used the name Dick Gibson, it was not because he was saving it, but merely because he had eschewed the idea of his apprenticeship and with it the idea of his destiny too.

But he must have had a destiny. He had traveled much in the past and was registered with at least fifteen draft boards across the country. One month in the winter of 1943 he received notice from five of them that he had been called up.

It was like being arrested.

He did his basic training at a camp in western Massachusetts. There he experienced the total collapse of civilization. To Dick the army made sense only if one considered the ultimate objectives of the war, but he waited in vain for his superiors to remind him of the Fascists or to outline the goals which he himself had so passionately endorsed in his own pleas to his listeners to buy bonds and save paper and conserve water.

He had brought his portable radio with him and it became his habit, now that he was in it himself, to listen to all the war news, taking particular comfort from Edward R. Murrow’s bravely resonant “This is London.”

One evening he had just settled back on his bunk to listen when Private Rohnspeece picked up the radio from the window sill.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m breaking your faggot radio,” Private Rohnspeece said, and threw it out the window.

“What’s wrong with you?” He grabbed Rohnspeece’s sleeve, but his comrade-in-arms pulled a switchblade knife out of his pocket and an enormous blade clicked brightly into position. Then the man calmly cut a piece out of Dick Gibson’s hand. Dick screamed and a sergeant came running into the barracks.

“Who the hell’s making that goddamn noise?” the sergeant demanded. Dick sucked blood, swallowing it back as fast as it came out of his wound, thinking in this way to preserve his life’s precious juices. (At that instant it somehow seemed related to the war effort, like turning off lights and saving tinfoil.) Between mouthfuls he continued to scream, and again the sergeant, apparently myopic, demanded to know who was making the noise.