Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ncy chymyc.

DICK GIBSON: (Did you get that, folks?)

MEL SON: I … My …

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ync hcmyc.

DICK GIBSON: It’s really kind of wonderful the way you guys worked all this out between you to take over my program. It’s really very funny.

MEL SON: [He brings the barrel of the gun down heavily across the bridge of Dick’s nose, drawing blood.]

My name is Mel Son. I’ve been in a trance, but I’ve just been released — I get the feeling temporarily — in order to tell my story. I’ve never been in a trance before. It’s queer. It gives you a funny feeling. Everything in the trance but Dick’s tie was sort of blue — oo — oo and soft. Your eyes are blue, Dick.

DICK GIBSON: My eyes are blue.

MEL SON: Your blood — where I cut you — your blood is blue … gee, I just can’t get over this trance business. Once I was hypnotized in a nightclub. There were fifteen of us and we all went under, but this was nothing like that. This was like being sick or something. I don’t really mean sick — nothing hurts or anything like that — but it’s … well, dreamy, as if you were heavily medicated or just beginning to come down with something. It’s like the way you’re sensitized sometimes in a barber’s chair getting a haircut in winter. The back of your head gets all prickly. It’s terrific. I mean, I was really getting excited. And I’ll tell you something else. I never felt — this is important — I never felt humble. I mean, you’d think if a guy’s in a trance his will would be rendered helpless, that he’d be going around. Yes, Mastering everything in sight. But it isn’t like that at all. As a matter of fact, you feel very proud in a trance, almost stuck-up. You have a lot of confidence. It’s all very dignified. That’s the truth about trances. If you want my honest opinion, I think you’re making a mistake to waste your pity on enchanted princes locked up in trees. I can’t get over it. It’s really fantastic. I tell you, there’s more than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

DICK GIBSON: Less.

MEL SON: No, Dick, more — much more.

DICK GIBSON: Why don’t you put the gun down, Mel?

MEL SON: Not just yet, Dick. I’ve got to shoot myself with it. I’m going to put the barrel in my mouth and blow my head off. Brr. What a way to go! That’s a phrase that’s always gotten to me— you know what I mean? Another one is — you get this on the news wire every once in a while— “So-and-so killed his wife and three children and then turned the rifle on himself.” That sounds horrible, but I don’t get the logistics of it. A man would have to have incredibly long arms to turn a rifle on himself. “He put a bullet through his brain”: that’s another one. How discrete that sounds. So definitive. That’s the sort of thing I’m after. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I chose to do it on the radio. It’d be a different thing altogether if I snuck off in a corner by myself. I’d have done it on my own show but I don’t reach the market you do.

To tell the truth, I haven’t settled how I’ll do it yet. I thought I might sit on the pistol. Or stick it in my ear. Or against the part in my hair. Or through my eye. Or inside my shirt, or under my arm. Or against my heart. Or across my Adam’s apple. Do you get what I’m aiming at? Ha ha. Ignition, explosion, obliteration, smear. Something really dirty: he died as he lived. Before and After — that’s it. Here today, gone tomorrow. And a stain that won’t wash out. Something in me green or blue in the woodwork like grain. My nostrils divorced and my eyes disappeared, hair in the wound and skin on the floor. Bone around like shattered glass. Pieces of tooth, and my ingrown toenails out. My sideburns on fire and a hole in my birthmark. My death archeological, my corpse my body’s palimpsest. Mel melded. Jigsaw Mel the Sonsaw puzzle. Mosaic me. Blood and blood. Mel Sundry. Mel the Sonset, Mel the Melted. Molten Mel the Sonburned. The Sonspot.

DICK GIBSON: [Upset. His wound, where Mel struck him with the revolver, is throbbing. Fantastically, it occurs to him that if Mel kills himself or if Behr-Bleibtreau takes his voice, he will never have done a quiz show.]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to … Night School! This is your host on the college of knowledge, quizzer whizzer Dick Gibson. Tonight’s contestant is Mel Son the Suicide, Amherst d.j. and d.o.a. Let’s try to get some answers — Mel?

MEL SON: Quizzer whizzer?

DICK GIBSON: Yez zir, yez zir. Are you ready for the first question?

MEL SON: I am. For the time being I am. But hurry, hurry. I’ll plug my pulse and blast my blood. I’ll shoot my shirt and kill my collar. I’ll—

DICK GIBSON: All righty. (to his mute guests) No coaching from the audience. The question is … Why? Do you have that? Would you like me to repeat the question?

MEL SON: Would you repeat the question?

DICK GIBSON: Surely. Why?

MEL SON: Sin.

DICK GIBSON: Sin?

MEL SON: Sin, sir.

DICK GIBSON: Sincerely?

MEL SON: Sine qua nonly.

DICK GIBSON: Could you develop that a little? This is an essay question.

MEL SON: Well … because. Let’s just say that I’m petitioning for an undress of griefiness.

Mel Son’s Story:

Mel Son was a normal child, no more curious than any other child his age — and no less. His hands had spent time in his mother’s brassieres; he’d fingered Dad’s jock and spied on Sis. But necessity wasn’t involved. It was just that same neutral obligation that makes an older boy smoke his first cigarette or one ten years younger sit behind the steering wheel of the family car while his mother shops.

Puberty hit him as hard as it does others, but if he was uncomfortable he was no more so than anyone else. It was as normal as the day is long. There were wet dreams — I don’t remember them, only the sensations — and some masturbation — I found it difficult; I could never really decide what to think about — and once in a while dates. It was a routine adolescence, steady as she goes.

Then, one night when I was fifteen years old, an old man sat next to me in a movie theater. He put his hand on me and stroked me till I came. It felt good and I let him. Maybe it was because there was a girl with me and my senses were already aroused, or that I knew that there was no chance, absolutely no chance in the world, that this girl would do to me what the old man was doing. Or it may have been something else, something about the old man’s surreptitious skill. Sly and smooth he was as a pickpocket … Whatever, I let him.

Do you see what I’m driving at? Do you know what I’m saying? That I’m queer? No! It was normal. That the pressures I felt, the feelings I had — they were mine, my own. What did they have to do with girls or women? What did they have to do even with that old man in the theater? Do you see? It was my thigh, my neck, my cock, my balls. Not pussy, not tits. It was my young man’s own ass I sat on, my skin I lived in, my reflexive flesh. I never made the leap of sex.

And how is it made? What round peg/round hole argument in sex waiting on puberty like the plain geometry? How does it happen? What Noah instinct is it — in me omitted — that drives us two by two to beds like polite company approaching table? By what inevitable degrees does bent become inclination, inclination tendency, tendency penchant, penchant disposition, disposition fate? Is there glue in those brassieres? What lodestar astrology shoves our lives? Where’s it written, eh? As if love could only be the prescribed friction! Hah! I’ll write you a new prescription! Why, love machines! Marry the bus that takes you to town, that throbbing thing! Embrace wind, kiss the earthquake, hold the sea! Make up to gravity! To all the physics of adversity!