Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

Arthur was touching his shoulder.

The radio man wheeled. “I want you to have Carmella,” he said. “I want you to teach her the laws of calm and Methodism and to get all that dreck out of her pussy and line it with mortal children before it’s too late. I want her to be charming to your clients and rearrange the furniture and mix it up in the Mix-master. I would marry her myself but I am not religious, though I am a god.”

“Don’t,” his brother said. “I’m sorry, I’m—”

“Can you stand in the sky?”

“Please,” Arthur said, “I feel lousy about this.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ve been very decent. You’ve — what’s that? Who’s there?” A pale shape was moving in the darkness. “Carmella?” The lightning flashed again and he saw that she was naked, as was Arthur. So she hadn’t waited. It was exactly as if she had broken an appointment with him.

Now his heart was broken. It was a Dick Gibson first. He went downstairs and packed. There wasn’t much. He played the radio as he put his few belongings together.

He had been off the radio for three months when he left Pittsburgh. For the next few months, into the winter of 1960, he traveled about the country. He had some money — he had saved perhaps $30,000 over the course of his career — and he used planes and rented cars as he had once used trains and buses. Since the apprenticeship was on him again, he went to the places where he had first broken into radio: to Kansas and Maine and eastern Washington, to Roper, Nebraska, where he had worked for the Credenza brothers on KROP, to Arkansas and Montana, to all those unbeaten paths and peripheral places on the American pie where he had been young. There were motels everywhere; it was all beaten paths. He stayed in the motels and listened to the radio, monitoring the stations he had once worked, referring to his log, the by-now thick notebook in which he kept records not only of the programs he had done but the times at which they had been broadcast. He listened out of some deep anniversarial sense, not celebrational but memorial. These time slots were his birthdays and sacred holidays, the ear’s landmarks, and what he heard came across to him not as news or music or sports but as the sound of time itself.

A few of the stations for which he had worked had become network affiliates, and in such cases he stayed only long enough to absorb some of their local programming before moving on to the next town. Once or twice he found that a station had long since closed down and he had a nervous, complicated sense of stricken time, the place’s mornings and evenings and afternoons without demarcation for him, as if invisible bombs had fallen on abstractions. These occasional disappointments apart, he discovered that most of his old stations were not only still in operation but were almost the same as during his apprenticeship. Even some of the voices he heard were familiar to him, for the voice ages less than anything; it is more constant than a nose or the shape of the mouth that houses it. There were familiar commercials, intact after all these years, slogans he hadn’t thought about for a quarter of a century but which lined his memory like nursery rhymes and released in him surges of affection for jewelry stores, all-night restaurants, lumberyards, nurseries and farm-equipment agencies. Yet even when he recognized a familiar voice he never called the station to remind an old colleague of their mutual past. He was content merely to listen, reassured by the familiar, his nostalgia a sort of credentials.

Despite change, much had remained the same — or else progressed sequentially that having known the beginning he might have anticipated what came afterward. Again he was struck by his old sense of the several Americas; he knew that lurking behind the uniformities of federal highway system and the green redundancy of enormous exit signs that made Sedalia seem as important as Chicago, and the blazing fifty-foot logotypes of the motels, and colonial A&P’s and Howard Johnsons’ like outposts of Eastern empire in west Texas’s scrub country, and teller’s cage Dairy Queens wantonly labeled as old steamer trunks, and enamelly service stations, and in back of all the franchised restaurants and department stores — there was a Macy’s in Kansas City — dance studios, taco stands, drugstores, motion picture theaters and even nightclubs, and to the side of the double arches of the hamburger drive-ins and the huge spinning chicken buckets canted from the perpendicular like an axis through true north, America atmospherically existed. It wasn’t the land; he had no mystic’s or patriot’s or even householder’s sense of the land at all. Region somehow persisted inside monolith. The Midwest threw a shadow as exotic as Spain’s. He believed in all of it. New Englanders were salty, Southerners proud. Westerners independent, Easterners sophisticated, Appalachians wise and taciturn and knew the old, authentic songs. And beneath all that, beneath all the clichés of region, he believed in further, ultimate disparities between rich and poor and lovely and ugly and quick and dull and strong and weak. And structuring even these, adumbrating difference like geologic layer, character, quirk, personality like a coat of arms, and below personality the unspoken, and below the unspoken the unspeakable, so that as he walked down Main Street he might just as well have been in Asia. It didn’t matter that the columnists were syndicated or that the rate of exchange was one hundred cents on the dollar; he felt a vague, xenophobic unease. He stared at people as at landmarks or battlegrounds or historic sites; he moved up and down the aisles of Rexall’s Drugstore as through someone else’s church, and picked at the Colonel’s fried chicken like some fastidious visitor to Easter Island pantomiming his way through a feast of guts.

He came away renewed, refreshed, his youth somehow confirmed in the spectacle of his abiding uneasiness. The apprenticeship could continue; he was anxious to go back on the radio.

It was at about this time he began to send out his demonstration records.

But he was restless. He preferred thirteen- or twenty-six-week contracts to anything longer, and developed a reputation in the industry as a drifter. Strangely, this didn’t hurt him. Somehow his itinerancy was attractive to station managers; it even lent him a certain glamour. What he was looking for was the ideal format. It formed in his mind slowly. What this was all about, what his apprenticeship meant, was that he wanted to do the perfect radio program. He didn’t know what that was, but he began to suspect it would have something to do with the telephone.

In Ames, Iowa, at KIA — he was Bill Barter — he did one of the first telephone swap programs in the United States. Called Merchandise Mart, it was really a sort of classified ads column. People called up, described an article on the air they wanted either to trade or sell and left their telephone number. When the caller hung up Bill would describe the article again briefly and give out the telephone number a second time. The program was popular, and Bill, who had never owned much himself, had a genuine curiosity about his callers. He was surprised and even confused by how casually they offered to exchange one plum of possession for another. Their notions of trade indicated whim, sudden decision, mysteriously changed minds, ways of life and thinking that hinted at Hegelian alternatives. Thus upright pianos went for motorboats, motorboats for lawn furniture, lawn furniture for air conditioners. In their descriptions the items were almost always new or used only once or twice or for part of a season, and Bill Barter imagined unspoken tragedy, disqualifying accident, sons fallen overboard and drowned and the outboard cast out. The objects seemed to come with a curse, a heavy resonance of ruin and loss. It never occurred to him that they might not work and needed repairs; his callers did not seem horsetraders seeking an advantage. Indeed, the only times he was suspicious were when something was offered for outright sale.