Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“Yes. Turn your radio down. We’re on a six-second tape delay.”

“What? Oh. Yeah. Just a minute. I’ll turn my radio down.”

“Please. … It’s two-fifty on the Sun Coast, a balmy seventy- one degrees outside our WMIA studios on Collins Boulevard.”

“Dick Gibson?”

“Yessir.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you two months.”

“I’m pleased you finally got through. Go ahead, sir.”

“Dick Gibson?”

“Yes. Go ahead, please.”

“Your feet stink.”

“Oh?”

“I smell them over my radio.”

“But you turned your radio down.”

“I smell them over my telephone.”

The crank hung up. Dick took another call.

He’d had the program for a little more than two years and had been Dick Gibson uninterruptedly all that time. He would never not be Dick Gibson again; he had even had his name changed legally. Laying to rest the apprenticeship forever, he had at last found his format.

The program was a simple one, a variation of something he and radio had done for years. It was a telephone talk show, but slightly different from the hundreds of other telephone talk shows. Dick Gibson’s Night Letters was a sort of club really, a kind of verbal pen pals. WMIA, a powerful clear channel, 50,000-watt station, sent out its signal in a northerly and westerly pattern, regularly reaching states throughout the South and Middle Atlantic regions. His listener/callers, chiefly from Florida and Georgia, though almost as often from Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas and Virginia to the north and Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas to the west, were loosely organized into clubs called Listening Posts or Mail Bags. There were perhaps 15,000 members who for a fee — which barely covered the cost of printing and handling — received a directory of the membership. (Countless others who were not members listened regularly and called the program.) Meetings were rarely held, but from time to time Dick traveled to one Listening Post or another and met fans. Though he preferred talking to them on the phones, it was something the members wanted.

Anyone could telephone the program, but many of his callers were regulars, people who through some trick or other of dialing or patience were able to get through repeatedly. He recognized many of their voices, but he could even identify those who called in less frequently. Crank calls like the one he had just taken were rare. He barely ever had to cut anyone off the air; the six-second tape delay was a nuisance, and he wouldn’t have bothered with it except that the FCC required it. As it was, he used it sparingly; his Southerners were gentle in their speech, however violent they may have been in their private lives.

The show went on from one A.M. until four, and during the course of a program Dick might take anywhere from fifteen to forty telephone calls. He was in no hurry to move things along or to get in as many calls as possible. He had become very patient, learning in the course of the show’s run that you got the most out of people when you let them go at their own pace. He would not, for example, have cut off the man who told him his feet stank.

A light was blinking on the Arkansas line.

“Night Letters,” Dick Gibson said.

“Gibson bwana?”

It was an old friend, the caveman from Africa, the last member of the mysterious Kunchachagwa tribe. He had been discovered by anthropologists near the Fwap-dali digs on the great Ennedi Plateau in eastern Chad. The last of his race, Norman — no one could pronounce his real name, an indecipherable gaggle of clucks and chirps — had been found by the scientists as he wandered helpless and distraught outside the opening of his cave. The night before, the very night his people had discovered fire — the story had come out slowly, painfully — they had panicked and been asphyxiated in the ill-ventilated cave when a group of young, zealous hunters, made too daring by the novelty of the flames, began to throw everything they could find onto the pyre. The anthropologists comforted him and taught him English.

“Oh awful,” Norman had told Dick on the air one night, “eberyting hot, eberyting in flames. Burn up our mores, artifacts an’ collective unconscious. Eberyting go up hot hot. Young bucks burn totems, taboos, cult objects and value system, entire shmeer go up dat ebening. Whole teleology shot to shit.”

Norman had spent a happy summer with the anthropologists who debriefed and photographed him. He slept in a tent under mosquito netting. “I don’t care what you say,” Norman confessed one night, “white fellers got to be gods. Dey introducing Norman to mosquito netting. In cabe we don’t hab dis convenience.” Now, he slept under the stuff on his farm in Arkansas even in winter, using the same netting the anthropologists had given him, though it was much worn and there were holes in it. Dick tried to convince him that it should be repaired, but Norman thought it was white man’s magic that made it work.

In the fall, after that first pleasant summer, while Norman’s trauma slowly healed, the anthropologists could not decide what to do with Norman when they returned to their various universities.

“It’s not fair to the poor fellow to take him back with us to civilization. His ways are not our ways. He’d only be lost in New Haven.”

“A chap can be acculturated,” Norman had pleaded.

“I don’t see what else can be done with him,” another of the scientists said. “He’s little better than an orphan now. Intelligent though he is, he wouldn’t be able to survive alone. He’d be just as miserable by himself here in Chad as he would in the States.”

“No, Doctor. We live in two different worlds. It couldn’t work.”

“Den dis las’ one take Norman by de han’ an’ lead him into de forest. Get funny look in he eyes an’ whistle ‘Born Free.’ But Norman find way back to digs.”

The discussion went on until it was time for the anthropologists to leave. “Can we sell him to the circus, perhaps?” one of the scientists finally asked. They consulted Norman and he consented to be sold to the circus.

“Poor Norman, him culturally disoriented,” Norman told Dick on one of the first evenings he called. (Norman owned no radio; as far as Dick could tell, he had no notion that he was even on the air. Dick supposed that when the phone was installed in his shack in Arkansas some practical joker had given him Dick’s number. Possibly Norman thought it was the only number he could get.) “Him all alienated thoo and thoo. How you like dat Norman for de culture lag?”

“Were you really a caveman?” Dick asked him on another occasion.

“Oh, sah,” Norman said passionately, “my people hab nuttin’. We so backward. We neber heard ob cars or planes or tools. We so backward we neber heard ob de wheel or trees. Shee-it, we neber eben heard ob air.”

Norman had not been a success with the circus. His masters were kind — it was from them that he picked up much of the rest of what he knew of English — but the public dismissed him as a fraud. No amount of newspaper clippings or reprints from scientific journals could convince them of his authenticity. They didn’t have the patience to read them, and his gentle demeanor and essential passivity destroyed whatever confidence they might have placed in a wilder, club-swinging Neanderthal. “Norman too hip, too cool for dem public cats. Him speak to owners. Dey say hokey Wild Man of Borneo ruin it for legitimate cabeman like Norman, and advise him to go into different business. ‘What public really go fo’,’ dey say, ‘is if Norman sit up on platform above tank and let rubes th’ow baseballs at him.’ But Norman don’ like dat. Whut de hell? I son of Aluminum Siding Salesman when I back wit’ my people in de cabe.”