Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

Behr-Bleibtreau held up his hand. “I expect someone.” He hesitated. “He may come and he may not.”

Dick opened his microphone and told his engineer to order for fifteen people. Then he explained the ground rules to his guests and obtained mike levels from each of them. “Bernie Perk,” he said, “you don’t speak that softly. Let’s hear your reaction to Jack Patterson here when Jack says that fluoridation not only doesn’t prevent tooth decay but causes cancer of the jaw.” Bernie Perk gave an exaggerated groan and the panel laughed, even Behr-Bleibtreau. “The most important thing,” Dick said, “is that you don’t all speak at once. I’ll recognize you either by looking at you directly or by calling your name. These mikes compensate for the different power levels of your voices, so everything comes at the listener at equal strength. If you speak when someone else is talking, it just sounds like babble. Nothing’s more frustrating for the listener.”

The panel knew all this, but he went through it for his guests’ guests, owing them insights. He was only sorry that the show was so much what it seemed. Those who came to the house of magic were entitled to secrets. Besides, he loved the people who saw him work. The capsule-like character of the studio, the heavy drapes hung down over solid, windowless walls, and the long voyage to dawn created in him a special sense of intimacy, as though what they were about to do together was just a little dangerous. Even more than the people who watched him work he loved the people he worked with. They were comrades. For him it was as if all place— all place — was ridiculous, a comedown, all studios makeshift, the material world itself existing only as obstacle, curiously unamiable, so that, remembered later, the night they worked together became some turned corner of the life. (A sense, up all night, of emergency, national crises kicked around the anchor desk.) There had been a thousand such comrades in the fourteen years since the war, the seven years he had been doing late-night talk shows. And all place was ridiculous, wayside, all towns tank, for him anyway. Though his voice had been heard everywhere by now, he had never been network (unless you counted the small, queer regional networks: the Billy Lee Network in Texas and the Southwest, Heartlands Broadcasting, the Mid-Atlantic Company, Gulfcoast Broadcasting System, the Northwest’s Big Sky Company), never coast-to-coast.

“We’ll be here five hours,” he said. “It’s a long time till five o’clock.” He turned to Behr-Bleibtreau. “The world looks strange when you’ve been in a studio all night and go outside. If we all last, I’ll take you to breakfast.” Now he turned to his guests’ guests. “As I say, it’s a long time till five o’clock. If any of you absolutely has to sack out there’s a cot in my office, and another in Jerry’s. Some nights I wish I could go lie down.” This wasn’t true; there had never been a show which he hadn’t wished would go on longer. Babble or not, for him the greatest moments had been when, losing their tempers or caught up in their ideas, they all spoke at once; in that instant he would feel himself physically touched by their speech, centripetally held by their cross-talk. Nor was he ever nervous, save in some impersonal sense, as now, anxious for the chemistry to be correct, like someone hoping that the fish are biting. If it all went well, if Behr-Bleibtreau found the panel to his taste — not provincial, sufficiently challenging to bother with— something could happen. A truth, or something better than a truth. “I’m here merely to moderate,” he said. “I myself am not controversial.” He was, to use Madam Modred’s term, “a control.”

And wasn’t that a night? WVW, Lockhaven, Pennsylvania. The night of the seance. The medium was the Reverend Abner Ruckensack. Shakespeare had come, the Bard of Avon. A lugubrious Shakespeare, plain-talking, curiously shy. He called Dick Mr. Gibson. It was down in the log. (He still couldn’t bear to think of his logs, tapes of all his programs. Fourteen years, seven of them doing these late-night talk shows, almost five thousand tapes. His spoken history of some of the world. The expense enormous, to say nothing of the time that went into indexing them. All but a hundred or so burned to a crisp in the fire. Dick Gibson’s burned logs.) He could still remember one part. It must have been about three in the morning. All of them tired, impatient, the Reverend Ruckensack producing dud after dud — farmers he’d known, children he’d baptized, a sinner, an enemy — and the panel sending them back, shade after shade, like failed auditioners, until he came, the Bard himself, the Divine Will:

DICK: You don’t sound like Shakespeare.

SHAKESPEARE: I’m him, all right, Mr. Gibson.

DICK: You are, eh?

SHAKESPEARE: You bet your boots, Mr. Gibson.

DICK: Well, if you’re Shakespeare, how come you don’t speak in blank verse? I always associated Shakespeare with blank verse.

SHAKESPEARE: We’re white men here, Mr. Gibson. That blank verse was just for the niggers. So’s they wouldn’t understand.

He still remembered it, and here and there other passages, but without the logs one day it would all be gone, as all conversation was always going, the word disintegrate, busted, and the air come in like a draft. Or all that remained would be the conclusions, with none of the wonderful linkings and marvelous asides. The wisdom forgotten and the madness gone, and only the silence for punctuation.

He could not depend upon his listeners; he had no notion of them. They were as faceless to him as he to them. (They didn’t even have a voice.) His panels, his Special Guests were more real. As for his listeners, he guessed they were insomniacs, cabbies, enlisted men signed out on leave at midnight driving home on turnpikes, countermen in restaurants by highways, people in tollbooths. Or he saw them in bed — they lived in the dark — lumps under covers, profiles on pillows, their skulls beside the clock radio (the clock radio had done more to change programming than even TV) while the dialogue floated above their heads like balloon talk aloft in comic strips. Half asleep, they would not follow it too closely.

No, he knew little about his listeners. They were not even mysterious; they were there, but distant as the Sioux. He knew more about the passionate extremists who used his microphones in the groundless hope of stirring those sleepers, and winning over the keepers of the booths — the wild visionaries, opponents of fluoride, palmists, astrologers, the far right and far left and far center, the dianeticians, scientologists, beatniks, homosexuals from the Mattachine Society, the handwriting analysts, addicts, nudists, psychic phenomenologists, all those who believed in the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman and the Communist Conspiracy; men beyond the beyond, black separatists who would take over Idaho and thrive by cornering the potato, pretenders to a half-dozen thrones, Krebiozonists, people from MENSA, health-food people, eaters of weed and soups of bark, cholesterolists, poly-unsaturationalists, treasure hunters, a woman who believed she held a valid Spanish land grant to all of downtown San Francisco, the Cassandras warning of poison in the white bread and cola and barbecued potato chip, conservationists jittery about the disappearing forests and the diminishing water table (and one man who claimed that the tides were a strain on the moon), would-be reformers of a dozen industries and institutions and a woman so fastidious about the separation of church and state that she would take the vote away from nuns and clergymen, capital punishers, atheists, people who wanted the abortion laws changed and a man who thought all surgery was a sin and ought to carry the same sentence as any other assault with a knife, housewives spooked by lax Food and Drug regulations, Maoists, Esperantoists, American Nazis, neo-Jaegerists, Reichians, juvenile delinquents, crionics buffs, anti-vivisectionists, witches, wizards, chief rabbis of no less than three of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and a fellow who claimed he died the same year Columbus discovered America.