Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“Sit still, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said. “There’s no telling when they’ll sound the all clear. I’m tired. The damn BBC won’t give us the goddamn building at a decent hour. We’re soundproofed, so I don’t think we’ll pick up the noise of the bombers in here. Hell, we can’t even hear the blasted sirens. Why don’t we just go ahead and finish the broadcast?”

Sergeant Gibson looked nervously toward the signal light, which had now gone into a new pattern — a series of four short flashes followed by three long, indicating that the bombers were over the city. Except for the lights they would have had no hint that the bombers were overhead; in their windowless studio they might not have heard even a direct hit, and would have known that they were dying only when the flames had begun to lick at them.

“Damn it, Sarge, sit back down,” the lieutenant ordered. “We’ll be okay. Watch the On the Air sign. When the sign comes on you cue in again after ‘Wing and a Prayer.’”

Dick returned sullenly to the microphone and the lieutenant put the song on the turntable. The signal lights and the insane bravery of the music made Dick more nervous than ever. He wondered if men had ever gone into battle burdened by such themes. It was impossible, and he had a certain knowledge of the impossibility and inanity of comfort, suddenly realizing what must be the enormous irritation to the dying of all brave counsel and all fair words. Such must forever have tampered patience and ruined death.

When the record finished the On the Air sign beamed on. In the brief moment before he began talking Dick strained to hear the bombers. He thought he could detect a buzz or hum, but it might have been only the electric engines in the studio. The lieutenant rapped on the glass with his graduation ring and pointed furiously to the sign. Shaken, Dick lost his place, then found it again. “Fellas, that was ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’ as sung by the Mello-Tones.” He heard the alarm in his voice and longed to be in the bomb shelter, where he could hear the bombs when they exploded and feel the slight fleshly shift in the sand bags. He looked toward the booth but the lieutenant had leaned down to pick up the next recording and he could not see him. For all he knew he may have been the only person left in the building. His hand rattled the pages of his script and he lost his place again. “‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’” he repeated, stalling. Again he found his place and introduced the next song. It was “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World,” and as he listened to the lyrics (“Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again”) he became furious. If he’d had a pistol he might have taken aim and shot the lieutenant right then. Why, he thought, surprised and not displeased, that’s how the brutes think, the ones who treasure their grudge and then, on patrol, calmly shoot their lieutenant in the back. Was he a brute? Good! So be it!

He felt himself swell with power, a savage surge. “Bullshit!” he roared into his open microphone over the lyrics of the song. “Bullshit!”

The lieutenant’s face appeared white and enormous behind the control room window. He seemed not angry, nor even astonished; he looked as bland and mild as a ship’s captain just relieved of command by his men. Dick saw his mouth move and his lips form words, but no sound came out; he had forgotten to depress the speaker button in the control room. Dick felt a triumphant flush of heroism, Horatio at the bridge, the Dutchman at the dike, the man in the radio room sending out his S.O.S.’s as the others lowered the lifeboats and leaped into them, all men covering all other men’s retreats — the guerrilla achievement. “Ah boys,” he cried, exultant, ”we’re the ones who pay. It’s us who bleed, buddies.”

The lieutenant’s eyes widened. He was livid now, his face contorted with the bitter, contrary exercises of grief and grudge. Gibson knew he had to hurry. Ignoring the officer, he grasped the microphone still more tightly and drew it closer to him, as if the only way Collins could stop him would be to pull the equipment out of his hands. “We’re meat, we’re meat,” he cried passionately. (He saw his listeners come alive, one soldier beckoning the other to approach the radio, crawling out of foxholes in the jungle, gathering together around the Lister bag. He saw snipers leaning down from the trees to which they were tied. Thinking of the bombers that were even now zeroing in on Broadcasting House, fixing its roof between the crosshairs of their bombsights, he began to chatter ferociously, not calling as he might have to a panicky audience falling all over itself to escape a burning theater, “Calm down, calm down,” but a sub-articulate commiseration that cut through the traps of language, dispensed with hope and went abruptly into mourning. “Ah,” he said. “Oh my. Gee. Hmn. Yuh. Ah. Oh. Tch tch. Whew. Hmph. Boy.”

Behind the glass in the control booth the lieutenant was leaning so far forward that his nose was blunted by the glass. “Tag,” Dick said. “We’re it. Boom boom.”

“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to permit any of this stuff to get by,” Lieutenant Collins’s voice boomed out over the speaker. “What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are? Not a syllable of this will ever be broadcast! I’m stopping the transcription!”

“They’re moving in,” Dick Gibson said, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I’m by myself. The bombs are falling.”

“Hah!” the lieutenant cried. “I’ve shut you off. You’re just talking to the walls.”

“I don’t know if you can still hear me, boys. I may just be talking to the walls, but I’m sticking to my post. Let’s have some music, what say?”

“I won’t put it on for you!”

“Over hill, over dale,

Hell, they even read our mail,

As those caissons go rolling along.

In and out, hear them shout,

I can’t wait till I get out,

As those caissons go rolling along.”

“Well, ex-sergeant, are you proud of yourself? Are you, ex-sergeant?”

“There’ll be bullshit over

The white cliffs of Dover,

Tomorrow, just you wait and see.”

“On second thought I am going to record this. It will make very interesting listening at your court martial.”

“Anger’s a way, my boys,

Anger’s a way,

Why should we take their noise,

Why don’t we run away — ay — ay — ay?”

“That’s evidence. Right there. That’s evidence.”

“This is the Army, Mr. Jones,

They’ll shoot some bullets in your bones,

You had your breakfast in bed before,

But you dum la de dum in a war.”

“You’ll get yours, Mister.”

“Oh-hh say can you see

How the powers that be

Keep us down, in the groun’

With the lie that we’re free?”

He pushed his microphone away and leaned back. He was exhausted. The lights had ceased to flash. The air raid was over. Dozens had died, hundreds were wounded, but the rest of them were safe till next time.

“You didn’t sign off,” the lieutenant’s voice croaked over the loudspeaker.

“Right,” Dick Gibson said. He pulled the table mike toward him again and held it in his lap. “Fellow animals,” he said, “grr whinney whinney oink oink roar. See you at the crap table, catch you guys ’n’ gals in the bars, keep a candle in the whore’s window, meet you in the alley. Dick Gibson”—he hadn’t meant to use the name, but it slipped out— “signing off.”

MP’s came. Before they arrived Dick had to be guarded by the lieutenant. They had nothing to say to each other, and he was embarrassed that the man had no gun; it would have been simpler for them both if he had. As it was it may have appeared to Collins — Dick was the larger of the two — that Dick was doing him a favor by not resisting. More probably, he may have thought that Dick was seeking favors. That was what brutes did; time and again, in difficulty, he’d seen them go boyish, go soft, presuming upon their deprivation to toady — brutes turned housepets. Dick couldn’t be sure that he had not intended this last possibility. Perhaps he meant to underscore a new strain in his character. Certainly when the MP’s came they didn’t seem to see anything strange in arresting him, or in leading him out of the building under armed guard. He was pleased in one way, not so pleased in another. He wasn’t sure he knew what to do next. In a sense he looked forward to his conviction, to some actual ruling on his status, a documentation of sorts of his character. Then he could be genuinely what they said he was. (To divide men into officers and enlisted men was a superb idea; he didn’t know how he had lived without it.) He was even impatient for the time when he would be turned queer by the absence of women (or the presence of men), impatient to learn their desultory violence and terrifying indifference. He yearned for the debasement of his taste and fastidy — it was a way of being free. Already he was astonished by his freedom, the liberties he took with his guards, for example— “Give us a smoke, chief”— affronts, gaucheries that bordered on risk, swagger the other side of his scruple, swinging from cringe to contempt as though character were nothing more than hinged mood. It was strange and exhilarating to live by the rule of whim.