Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“I took up music, one day simply appearing among my schoolmates with a violin (just as one day my surfboard disappeared: it was simply gone — my fierce mother, I suppose). And do you know that though I had no talent I played even from the beginning with a certain brooding seemliness? And the earrings like actual yokes, gyroscopic; I might have been fetching water from the well, balancing buckets up hills. Yes! Something even more Oriental than Mediterranean in the way I shuffled through childhood.

“Even in real summer I no longer wore shorts or jeans or went down to the sea in bathing suits. When skirts were short mine were long, when long, short — again that gyroscopic balance I spoke of — and don’t forget the earrings themselves, those gold and silver alternatives. (Why I could have been an alternative myself, a community reference point like a hyphen on a kitchen wall, Ft. Lauderdale’s little historical girl.)

“The boys were afraid of me, and gave off some dark respect, taking my gypsy bearings and seeing me even at thirteen and fourteen as whatever the adolescent equivalent of a divorcee might be. Thinking me hot where I was cool, cool where I burned. And although they sometimes asked me out — this was when I was sixteen or seventeen — it was as if there were chaperones behind a curtain, duennas, or invisible brothers, say, a troupe of jealous acrobats, dark ethnic stabbers with Mary’s medals on their necks.

“I am never without the earrings now — the collection has become enormous — and only take them off to boil them in water or sink them like teeth in a glass by my bed. I continue to soap my ears with vaginal jellies. And sometimes there are kittens too, still, which I train in the old way to pull at my cream-sweet lobes while I dream in my bed. I am thought reclusive, silent, but my silence is only the open secret of my ears. My hearing has been affected. Ears, I have ears. The better to hear you with, my dear.”

Ears, Dick Gibson thought, ears, yes. A chill went through him. The woman continued to talk, but he could barely follow her now; he was thinking of ears. Then she broke through his reverie. “—your fragile orphan, your soprano, or someone recovered from polio but not quite, who walks with a limp, the body’s broken English, something nasty there, the kind who groans in orgasm, who shouts dirty words during sex. Oh, my adoptive styles! I crochet but don’t drive, I stay in the house during menses, I burn easily, I go to museums, and am never seen without my sheet music.”

“Listen,” a caller said from Cincinnati, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m a schemer. That’s how I happened to catch your show. Certainly. A schemer lies awake nights, what do you think? I’m calling from the kitchen. The wife’s in bed. Sometimes when the schemes aren’t there, I come down and make myself a sandwich and drink some milk. I try to relax. Listen — it’s the first time I’ve called — I’ve been meaning to ask. How many of your callers are schemers, do you think? How many are up nights, looking for angles, thinking up ways, dreaming of means?

“You know what they say? ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ But let’s don’t kid ourselves, how many of us are inventors, how many of us are equipped? On the other hand, I’m not just talking about pipe dreams. A schemer has to look out for those. Because things look possible at night. Hope’s there, wishing is. But I’m looking for something sensible that would go, something meaningful that could really take off. As good as metals in the ground, opportunity like a national resource.

“After my wife had the baby I’d see her sterilizing bottles, preparing formulas, and I thought, what if there was a company that delivered that stuff already made up? What a boon that would be. I went to the milk people with my idea and they showed me why it wouldn’t work. (Though some outfit out west does it now and are making a killing.) Then I had this idea about renting shirts. You’d get them from the laundry and never have to buy any. They’d have your size on record and bring you fresh ones every week, different styles and colors, ties to match. So I went to this laundry company and they proved to me how it wasn’t feasible. That’s the secret, of course: it has to be feasible. Feasibility’s what separates the men from the boys schemer-wise. We’re always running up against the brick walls of the real; we live in a medium of reasons as other people live in a medium of air — on the one hand and on the other hand like left and right.”

“Why wasn’t it feasible?”

“What’s that, friend?”

“Why wasn’t it feasible for the laundry to rent shirts?”

“Oh. They have those now too. There’s a firm that does that now. Not the one that said it wasn’t feasible. … It’s timing. It’s timing and force. A schemer has to have those too. He has to know when to plunge.”

“I see.”

“Desalinization — that’s where the money is. Or steam cars, electric, you’d think you’d clean up. But it isn’t feasible, Detroit says. I dream of getting in on the ground floor of these things. And the Americanization of Europe, of Africa, the far East. Jungle drive-ins and ice cream on the Amazon and suits off the rack on Savile Row. The bottom of the sea — there’s a ground floor for you. The whole world is ground floor if you know where to stand.

“I’m a schemer. I’m a schemer and dreamer. In the army — Korea was on back then — I figured if you were in the Canine Corps they’d have to keep you stateside that much longer. It stands to reason — you train at the brute’s rate. A dog’s brain isn’t as quick as a man’s. Then I wondered if there might not be a difference between leashed dogs and unleashed. That figures too. Well, reason it out. A dog on a leash can be forced to do what you want. It’s harder when he’s not connected to you. So I put in for unleashed and saw to it that I was assigned the dumbest dog there. I stalled them for months. Then I applied for kennel master. My CO. told me it wasn’t feasible to make me kennel master. You had to be a vet.

“I’m scheming still. Sometimes the ideas come so thick and fast I can’t keep up with them — laundromats in motels, movies in airports, house sitters for people away on vacation. You know something? There’s never been a Western on the stage. I’m no writer, but something like that would go over big. If you could figure out what to do about the horses and cattle drives it might be feasible. I have these ideas. I swear to you, I no sooner begin the research on one plan when another pops into my mind. I count opportunities like sheep. How many of your listeners are like me? I’d be interested to know.”

“We’ll try to find out for you.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks for your call.”

“I was doing some reading about wines. There’s this one wine— Lafitte Rothschild — which sells for eighty to ninety dollars a bottle once it’s mature. It takes years to mature properly, years. In France, down in cellars, it’s carefully turned — they call that ‘laying wine.’ A man could spend his whole life on the job turning it, and then it might be his son or even his grandson who’s finally the one to bring it up. That’s why it’s so expensive. But once in a while they put it out on the market for the wine buffs before it’s ready. That’s called ‘first growth,’ and it can sell for as low as $2.00 a bottle. Well, I had an opportunity to buy out a shipment of this ‘first growth’ wine. I thought about it carefully. I considered it from every angle. I tried to look at it from the point of view of the big distributors. I weighed the pros and I weighed the cons, and finally I decided to do it. I invested all my savings and bought up about three thousand bottles at $2.38 a bottle. I built this special cellar and spent a lot of money to get it at the right temperature, and now I go down and I turn the bottles — a quarter turn clockwise in winter, a quarter turn counter clockwise in fall. And once a year I bring the bottles up to stand in the shade for a day in the spring when the barometer’s low. It’s a long shot, don’t think I don’t know it, a long-term proposition — thirty years, maybe more — but I’m a schemer, no pipe dreamer, I mind the feasibility and to hell with your get-rich-quick.”