Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“Well good luck,” Dick Gibson said.

“This year I had a heart attack — not a bad one, very mild really. ‘You can live a long time yet,’ the doctor told me. ‘Just get plenty of rest and try not to worry.’

“Say I do get plenty of rest, say I don’t worry. It isn’t feasible.”

Toward the end of that evening’s program, the anthropology professor called for the first time in months. Dick had never learned his name but always looked forward to one of his calls. The anthropologist was full of fascinating information; he was one of the few callers who apparently had no interest in talking about himself but simply enjoyed sharing some of the conclusions of his research with Dick and his audience. They chatted pleasantly for a time, the anthropologist feeding Dick a lot of interesting facts about the Seminole Indians who lived along the Tamiami Trail just west of Miami. Dick had seen their wretched cardtables along the roadside, makeshift lean-to “stores” hardly more sophisticated than a child’s lemonade stand, and had glimpsed their terrible hovels through the broken fences meant to screen them from the sight of tourists.

“They’re so poor,” Dick said.

“Oh Dick, the Navajos could give them a run for their poverty. Many tribes could. That’s not the point. The Seminoles are the only tribe that makes its camp outside a great metropolitan area. They’ve always done this. They did it when the land still belonged to the Indians. They lived on the doorstep of the Creek and Chickasaw and Choctaw. Seminole— Sim-a-nóle, or Iste Siminóla —means ‘separatist’ or ‘runaway’ in the Muskogean language.”

“I didn’t know that,” Dick Gibson said.

“They were the first suburbanites, you see. They conceive of their destiny as a Mighty-Have-Fallen warning to other peoples. In times of slavery they set up their villages outside the slavequarters. They were offering the example of their condition as a gift to the slaves.”

“Gee.”

“There’s a deep instinct at work here. Follow closely. The significance of the suburbs — I’m doing work on this — is that all peoples are in exile. Your two-week summer vacation is an example. (Traffic patterns and roads, by the way, follow morale patterns closely.) It’s all related to the Vacant-Throne theory of history. The czar had his summer palace, the President his summer White House. These are Diaspora symbols.”

Unfortunately it was time for Dick to sign off. He had to break in on the professor.

“Put me on hold,” the anthropologist whispered, “I have something to tell you.” Dick regularly received such requests, and sometimes the phones were lit up for as much as an hour after he went off the air. It may have been that people felt that reaching him privately lent a distinction even more profound than speaking to him on the air. Recently he had frequently obliged them, sometimes hearing terrible things in this way — awful things. People who were well spoken on the air often made no sense at all when they spoke to him privately afterwards — or they might suddenly lapse into some of the vilest language he had ever heard.

After signing off he came back to the professor. “What did you want to say?” he asked.

“Tell me,” the anthropologist said urgently, “whether a man sits or stands up to wipe himself, and I’ll tell you everything else about him. This cuts through cultures, Dick. It obliterates history and geography. Dick, it’s the single distinction between men. It annihilates everything else. Religion, laws, custom — these things are nothing. He stands because his mommy wiped him. Do you see this, Dick? He stands now because he still expects some great, warm soft hand to rub his shit away. All else is nothing. Freud never really understood the true significance of the anal-retentive concept. It’s his own term, but he missed the boat. Incidentally, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Freud himself was a stander.”

“I thought this had something to do with the Seminoles.”

“Forget the Seminoles. They’re nothing but a bunch of poor-mouth bastards. Poor mouth, poor mouth, that’s all they know. All that Mighty-Have-Fallen crap. Forget the Seminoles. The Seminoles aren’t my real work anyway. Dick, I have so many ideas, I’m exploding with insights. Truth is everywhere, Dick; significance is as available as gravity. Do you know the best place to learn about a people’s legal and penal system? Its zoos! Go to its zoos, Dick, and you’ll find out more about its laws and prisons in a half-hour than you would in its courts and jails in a year.”

“I don’t—”

“Did you know there are three fundamental pieces of furniture— the table, the bed, and the chair — and that a people behaves according to the article of furniture dominant in its culture? Did you know that the living-room sofa, or couch, is only a sort of hybrid bed, and that it was introduced by the degenerate Assyrians as a means of formalizing adultery?”

“You’re going too fast, I can’t take all this—”

“There’s more. There’s always more. If you miss one truth there’ll be another along. It’s like streetcars. Wait, wait. The Axis Powers were the only nations involved in World War II which didn’t conclude their news broadcasts with weather reports. No question of secrecy was involved; it was simply a matter of the lack of regard for one’s fellows. Since the people within the range of a given broadcast knew whether it was raining or the sun was shining, they didn’t care what was happening in the rest of the country.”

“I don’t see—”

“Flags! Red, green, blue, white, black and gold are the predominant colors used throughout the world for its flags because those are the colors — with the exception of red, which is always blood — that symbolize not only the basic forces of nature but the particular natural forces most valued by a culture. Your flag is a dead giveaway.”

“What has this—”

“Sandwiches! What’s the thickness ratio of the contents of a sandwich relative to its bread? Is lettuce used to add height? This gives us the hypocrisy quotient. Or those little soaps with a hotel’s trademark on the wrapper—”

“What? What about those soaps?”

“Or matchbooks! Matchbooks particularly. Why does a man become attached to the iconography of a particular trademark?”

“Why does he? Is that significant?”

“What’s to be made of the fact that soaps wane with use, that fire consumes the matchstick, that the height of a pile of letterhead stationery goes down in a drawer, that a swizzle stick is made to be snapped in two?”

“What? What is to be made of it?”

“Oh Dick, Dick. My real work isn’t the Seminoles, it isn’t zoos, it isn’t furniture or artifacts. It’s your program. My real work is your program, Dick. Look out, Dick. Be careful. Please be more careful. Watch your step. A scientist is warning you. Don’t take calls after the show. Don’t put people on hold. Get your rest, try not to worry. Be like the man in Cincinnati.”

“Who is this? What’s this all about? What are you saying to me?”

The anthropologist giggled and broke off; Dick heard the buzz of the broken connection. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he was almost certain that the man had been disguising his voice. The giggle had been a sort of sudden relaxation. Something about it had seemed familiar.

And then he remembered. A name flashed into his mind. No, he couldn’t be mistaken. Behr-Bleibtreau! It had to be. The idea was disquieting at first, but later, going back to the Deauville in the car, he was filled with a marvelous sense of relief. An enemy! He had an enemy. An enemy had appeared!