Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“Well, if you enjoy these stories—”

“Certainly I enjoy them. I laugh as hard as the next guy, but what is it? We’re adjustors. We see awful stuff. I mean, our nose is in it every day of the week. Probably the only time you ever saw an adjustor was when some guy sideswiped your car while it was parked outside your house. He looked at it and told you to go ahead and get it fixed. But that isn’t the half of it — it isn’t a tenth of it. Every day I see someone with his neck creamed or his leg torn off at the pocket, or his house up in flames and his kid third-degreed in her bedroom. You see pictures of accidents in the papers, but you don’t see these. They don’t show you the totals.

“And the underwriters know what’s going on too. They know everything there is to know about casualty and percentages, and the docs the same. Either you’re realistic in the insurance business or you go under. Do you know that 39 percent of the people who apply for life insurance are uninsurable unless they pay some fantastic premium, and 7 percent are uninsurable no matter what the premium is? There isn’t a premium large enough they could pay to insure themselves. And they’d pay it too.”

“Well, there’s your answer, then. You people see so much horror that you’ve got to have some sort of safety valve or you couldn’t take it. That’s why you tell each other funny stories.”

“No! It’s the same in any business. It’s the same in your business. Don’t the announcers all kid around when you go to lunch?”

“Yes, but—”

“Certainly. In every business. I used to be in the toy business before I went into insurance. It was the same there.”

“Well, then, the pressures,” Dick Gibson said, genuinely interested now in the problem. “Or perhaps it’s the fact that it’s mid-day. The temperature is highest then. You’ve moved your bowels, you’re not tired out yet, you’ve got all your energy. You’ve—”

“No. What is that? The temperature, your bowels? What is that, astrology? No. Why humor? I’m talking about good will — people wrestling to pick up checks or at least to leave the tip and the sky’s the limit, the world’s their oyster and good mood on them like the birthmark. No. No,” the caller said excitedly. “And all the fear that engines us gone, the personality seamless as brushstrokes on a painted wall. And to get as good as you give — the ears open and the heart as well. Lunch’s good democracy. The menu a ballot, you’re voting your appetite.”

“Certainly,” Dick Gibson said, “that would put you in a good mood.”

“What? Yes … But maybe a joke is a shyness, an anecdote no assertion and good will a finesse. I think maybe it’s strategy, a camouflage, some Asian nuance of delay. Sure. To miss profundity is to lose face.”

“I’m glad I could help you.”

“Well, you have. I think I’ll be able to sleep.”

“I’m sorry to lose a listener.”

“What? Oh. Yes. Ha ha. Why lunch? Why gags, humor, good will? Why can’t it always be lunchtime?”

The voice cracked, trailed off, and the connection was broken. Dick took three more calls and signed off for the night.

He left the studio and walked to the Fontainebleau where he garaged his car. Mopiani, one of the Negro night men, complimented him. “That was a good program, Dick. I listened on a ’68 Cadillac. Used both speakers. Drained the battery.”

He got into his car and started up Collins Boulevard to the Deauville. He loved Miami Beach, as he admired and loved all excess. He was at home in inflation, and saw the bizarre luxury hotels along the strip as a unique and lovely manifestation. Air conditioning and paper bathing suits, celebrities, amphibious automobiles, the open bus-trains that pulled tourists up and down the shopping mall on Lincoln Road, marinas, eleven different varieties of bagel, the infinite quinellas of pancake combination in the delicatessens (“Woolfie’s” and “Google’s” were his home cooking), glass-bottom boats, weather, Italian knit, sun-tan lotions and the parking problem. (Mopiani was only one of several personal attendants; indeed, he had never owned a car in his life and had purchased this one merely to have it parked.) He was visible in Miami Beach, a celebrity; he’d never been one before, not in this way. He was an intimate of bartenders, cigarette girls and wandering girl photographers (they still had them here; for all its modern patina, one of the Beach’s excesses was the past: thus, the entertainers were often older stars, the Tony Martins and Jimmy Durantes and Joe E. Lewises who were famous from a vintage of fame he had known as a boy). He enjoyed the vaguely North African sense of the place, its spanking whitewash and tiny Oriental-like shops. Though the vegetation was at first unreal to him — as though it too, like the bagel styles and lush, semi-kosher mood of the hotel kitchens, might have been imported — he had come to look upon palm trees as the very essence of tree, and to dismiss the familiar oaks and elms and maples of his past as spurious and faintly contrived. He knew beach boys, towel boys, the captains of fishing boats and their one-man crews, girl lifeguards, maître d’s, chambermaids, Cuban bookies, cops. And they knew him. To be a celebrity, he decided, was to be part of an intricately hierarchical staff, to know semi-secret passageways, backstairs, greenrooms, to have an inexhaustible supply of first names and exist placidly at last with one’s world, to belong to it as to a country club.

He lived in the Deauville Hotel facing the Atlantic in a small celebrity suite which he got at a discount, and his pockets were always filled with Deauville matchbooks — changed regularly as the sheets each morning — a Vandyked cavalier, the hotel’s symbol, on the front cover. Though he was trying to give up smoking, for some reason he could not give up the matches, and when he offered a light it was always with a strange flourish that he tossed the matchbook on the table. There were Deauville matchbooks on top of the dash of his car, in his jackets, in his rooms, in the studio, everywhere, his small, semi-official litter. Similarly, he stuffed his pockets with the tiny, wrapped hotel soaps, using them as sachets, so that he always smelled faintly of Dial and Deauville. There were other things, cavalier-topped swizzle sticks— though he was not much of a drinker — and Deauville stationery on which he jotted down memos to himself and which he actually preferred for his business correspondence to the official WMIA letterhead. For some reason these souvenirs had become important to him; he did not know why.

It was a beautiful night. The hotels seemed capable of storing energy, and now mysteriously reflected their whiteness. He drove a new convertible, the top down, like a well-paid private detective in movies, and as he drove, privileged at red lights which he stopped for or ignored according to some delicate discretionary sense of his own, he had a notion of coast, a feel of margin. Behind him lay the long drought of his inland life, his singleness (here raised to bachelordom; there were many bachelors in this place) and apprenticeship, which of late he had begun to grudge, resentful of it as of a detour. He played the radio low as he drove slowly along the attenuated strip of twenty- and twenty-five-story hotels like eccentric figures in geometry with their ramps looping like doorman’s braid and their cantilevered balconies that shoved out from the shoulders of the buildings like the epaulets of drum majors — and the buildings themselves, amok parabolas of frosting or the ribbed pockets of gadgets for slicing hard-boiled eggs. Sandcastles! And beyond the great wall of hotels that traced the soft veer of the strand, the sea itself, the fishy Atlantic, a new element. It was this — all that water — that now joined the air, fire and clay of his life, and seemed to make it whole. Here he lived, here, behind the deep water, exactly at sea level, where his voice with nothing to stop it might climb miles, a straight, clear trajectory of sound, spraying old Heaviside’s umbrella of ionosphere, deep as stars, sharp as night. He loved his luck, but it made him nervous. It might turn out to be merely temporary, like a spell of good weather. (Was that why he loved Florida, because the weather was more constant here and he took it as a sign of other, deeper constants?)