Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

He was prepared to yield at once, to concede to the pressures of what seemed to him their vigilante loomings, when the off-duty transmitter man — one of those tattooed vagrants common in those days, an old navy man, retired possibly, but more probably court-martialed and perhaps even a deserter, one of those thick-veined, long-armed quiet men, someone keeping to himself, soured by a grudge or ruined by a secret — woke up and, seeing the brothers, having less contact with them than Maine — even more of a drifter than Marshall, there less time than him — not knowing who they were, or perhaps suspecting that they had come for him, threw a punch, drew a knife.

“Hold it!” the transmitter man yelled, missing Felix. “No tricks!” he screamed, and turned briefly to Marshall Maine, forming their plan even as he lunged toward the Credenzas. “The Saigon caper, mate,” he said, “I take these four, you get them two.” At these words — they had barely spoken in the three weeks the man had been at the station — Marshall felt an unaccountable flush of pride. Then Poke poked the transmitter man and the old fellow fell down — collapsed, for all Maine knew, died. Poke’s punch had loosened the man’s grip on his knife and it flew neatly, almost politely, handle first into Jim Credenza’s hand.

Marshall Maine found himself mourning, grieving for a pal. “The Credenza County caper, mate,” he said softly. Then, anger at the Credenzas’ building on his grief for his new friend, he addressed himself to George and Louis III, the two Credenzas he had been left to handle in the transmitter man’s plan. “He thought you—” he protested. “He was only … What did you have to hit him for?” The Credenzas looked at him blandly, the transmitter man’s four as well as his own two, incapable of understanding friendship’s way despite their expertise in family’s. Seeing their indifference he reversed himself again, having in the same two minutes found a buddy and lost him, mourned and forgotten him.

Forlorn, he gave in to the Credenzas, putting for good and all their value on things and feeling abashed, exposed, like one caught out in an act of bad taste. Thenceforward, for as long as he remained at the station, Marshall Maine was never again to feel comfortable with any of the other employees, seeing them as the Credenzas saw them — not family, outsiders like himself. And not only not comfortable with them, but actively resenting them, squeamish for the first time in the bunk they shared, fastidious over the common washstand, handling the common soap as if it were tainted, hovering and actually constipate on the seat of the flush toilet the Credenzas had added on in a corner of the transmitter shack. He found himself longing to stretch out luxuriously in Credenza tubs and to sit wholeheartedly, four- squarely, on Credenza-warmed toilets, those fine fleshpots and seats of kinship and power. If he could divorce himself from his colleagues, he felt, he would be that much closer to the Credenzas.

“And that’s why I’m such a good radio man. Because there are standards, grounds of taste. Because I would rid myself of all dialect and speak only Midwest American Standard, and have a sense of bond, and eschew the private and wild and unacceptable. Because I would throw myself into the melting pot while it’s at the very boil and would, if I had the power, pass a law to protect the typical. Because I honor the mass. Because I revere the regular. Because I consent to consensus. Because I would be decent, and decently blind to the differences between appearances and realities, and daily pray to keep down those qualities in myself that are suspect or insufficiently public- spirited or divergent from the ideal. Because I would have life like it is on the radio — all comfy and clean and everyone heavily brothered and rich as a Credenza. This is KROP, the Voice of Wheat. Your announcer is Marshall Maine, the Voice of Wheat’s Voice, staff announcer for the staff of life. Give us this day our daily bread. Amen.”

He tried to explain to the brothers what he had in mind, first apologizing for his apology for the transmitter man, washing his hands of that dirty old seadog and showing them clean to the Credenzas (“ … who didn’t care, who hadn’t noticed past the time it took Poke to dodge the punch and counter it anything other than the man’s otherness, who held in a contempt that could pass for forgiveness all otherness, who expected that sort of thing from unbrothers, and not only didn’t bother to despise it but did not even bother to distinguish between one sort of otherness — the hostile deserter’s — and another— my, Maine’s, benign own”).

“Never mind that,” George Credenza said, “you sometimes get too close to the mike. We hear you breathe.”

“You’re not always careful with the records. There’s some that are scratched,” Lee said. “Lift the arm clear when it gets to the end. Use your chamois to wipe them clean.”

“Sometimes it’s the needle,” Louis told him. “Dust it, pull off the crud. That’s a thirty-five-buck needle, but it’s got to be clean.”

“The turntable squeaks. Oil it,” Poke ordered.

“When there are storms,” Felix said, “make sure the studio clocks are reset correct.”

“On ‘News, Weather and Sports,’ when you give the reports, a death on the highway or damage to crops, get a little chuckle in your voice.”

“We don’t mean to laugh.”

“It ain’t no laughing matter.”

“But a chuckle, a smile, something to signal it isn’t so bad.”

“Say the time and temperature twice. I don’t always catch it the first time around.”

“Now what was it you wanted?” George asked.

“I didn’t know you were so disappointed in me,” Maine told them dejectedly. “I didn’t know you weren’t satisfied.”

“Who ain’t satisfied, Marshall? We’re satisfied. We’re satisfied fine.”

“When we ain’t satisfied you’ll hear we ain’t satisfied.”

“We’ll haul your ass out of there.”

“We’ll fire your ass.”

“We’ll see you never work your ass in this state again.”

“That your voice, you take your ass to Iowa or Dakota nearby, croaks at the state line.”

“We’re satisfied.”

Just keep those cards and letters coming in, Marshall Maine thought.

They had intimidated him. Making one kind of metaphor of his ass as he made another. He saw them now as something closer knit even than family, close knit as interest itself, and himself forever absolved of the hope of kinship with them, reduced by his very value to them to something not just expendable should that value wane, but destroyable as a gangster’s evidence. The ass they spoke of so dispassionately he came to see as more vital somehow than the heart, not their metaphor for his soul at all, but just their prearranged, priority target, the doomed bridge- and railheads of his being. He would be undone in the behind when the time came, there kicked (they would actually do it), scorned. Destroyed in the ass. They were dark, gigantic generals, booted for business and answerable only to themselves. So he was intimidated, and he knew it. And this is what happened.

For the first time in his life he developed mike fright. Not just that stage-wary fillip of excitement, nor even that panicked realization that one’s words are gone, nor yet that temporary, pre-curtain woe in the wings that is often an actor’s capital, a signal, like the rich man’s haunted look, of money in the bank, of reserves of adrenaline to turn terror — no ordinary, innocent commotion, the heart all thumbs, or momentary inability to function that is only function in the act of sparking. Not mike fright at all, really, but some pinched, asbestos quality in himself of unkindling, some odd, aged and deadened dignity. That is, he could speak, could read his scripts and do his commercials, but he had a sense that he was working on slack, a loose-tooth sense of margin. All urgency had gone out of his voice. There was a certain loss of treble, a corresponding increment of heavy bass. It was the voice of a drowned man, slow and waterlogged.