Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

To feed him his own poisons, to blind him with his acids, pickle him in his vicious, zany juices, catch him in his traps and explode him with his bombs.

He made up his mind to kill the man responsible for the ad.

The earnest woman was as good as her word. In two days the comic book was in his hands. As she had said, there was no way to identify who had placed the ad; all he had to go on was the name of the company—“Top Secret!”—and the address, a post-office box number in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He clipped the coupon, signed it with a false name and sent it in with his two dollars. For a return address he gave a post office box of his own which he rented for the purpose.

In his dealings with the post office he learned that while the government would not rent a box to anyone unwilling to furnish proper identification, neither would it reveal the identity of a boxholder to anyone other than the representative of an authorized law-enforcement agency. He had no real fear for himself. He was confident that when the time came he would get away with the murder, but these conditions made it difficult to find out the name of the man in Latrobe. He was not discouraged. He remembered the caller from Georgia, the old man who found connections in everything. Surely if there were ways to delve behind the anonymity of a Pepsi-Cola bottle, there were ways to discover who was responsible for placing the ad. (It was a long shot, of course, but he couldn’t help hoping it would turn out to be Behr-Bleibtreau.) Actually, he didn’t have to start with the post office box at all. He could get the man’s name from the agency that had accepted the advertisement. With his connections in radio and his knowledge of the media, that wouldn’t be difficult; a couple of phone calls would do it. There were many ways. If all else failed he could go to Latrobe — he had a vacation coming — rent a box there himself and simply wait for whoever came to pick up the mail for “Top Secret!” Nothing was more simple.

Meanwhile, he waited for the pamphlets, checking the box every other day for three weeks. Then he began to wonder which would be worse, if the man who placed the ad sent the material or if he were running a swindle. Once or twice he was tempted to write a letter complaining about the delay, but each time he decided against it. To prevent the postal authorities from becoming suspicious, every so often he addressed an envelope to himself, always writing these notes on Deauville stationery but mailing them in plain envelopes.

A month passed, and still he had had no response from Latrobe. He decided to write the followup letter after all, but the very day after he mailed it the pamphlets arrived. Ain’t that always the way, he thought as he opened the box and removed the manilla envelope.

He returned to the Deauville and pored over what he’d been sent. It was all there, everything that had been promised: the formulas for poisons, the instructions for assembling guns and bombs — everything. There was one item that hadn’t been mentioned in the ad, a single sheet of greasy paper like the stock used in fortune cookies, the inked letters on the cheap paper like frazzled cultures under magnification. The sheet contained tips for growing and recognizing marijuana. The pamphlets had been run off on a mimeograph machine from abused stencils, and the illustrations were crude and vaguely pornographic like the backgrounds in ancient eight-pagers. The staples that held them together were at odd angles to the page; several were rusty. He shook his head sadly at the poverty of being that was revealed by the author/illustrator of the pamphlets. It was too shabby — basement evil, the awry free enterprise of a madman. Would the devices even work? How could he kill him? Nothing would change.

He scrawled a note to Robert Sohnshild at the Attorney General’s Office in Tallahassee. “Dear Bob,” he wrote, “the enclosed material has recently come to my attention. Is there anything your office can do?” He added a brief postscript. “You know what my hopes are for you and for Angela and for the baby. We are powerless in these things. What more can I say?” He placed the note on top of the pamphlets, shoved everything back into the manilla envelope, resealed and readdressed it. Maybe I would have killed him, he thought, if the mails had been faster. Maybe if I ever find out the man’s name and happen to run into him I’ll still kill him. But probably not.

He left the envelope with the woman at the information desk of the Deauville to mail for him. Surrendering it, he thought, ah, the cliché, the relinquisher, the man who walks away from triumph, who renounces revenge.

He asked the doorman to bring his car. Perhaps it was Behr-Bleibtreau who had permitted him his destiny after all, Behr-Bleibtreau who would have been his enemy, who would have focused the great unfocused struggle of his life but who had failed to show up, who had left him standing high up on the pitcher’s mound in the Gainesville park, unheeded and alone and with an unobstructed view of the corny convertible with its top down and the mended Dick Gibson sign taped to its sides. On the mound there, silhouetted, a target of sorts but abandoned, with his arms at his sides, his shoulders slumped and only his eyes still moving, darting this way and that, searching desperately for the man who would bring the mortal combat with him that would save his life. And then even his eyes stilled, mute as his character, everything stilled at last except for the potato and wheelbarrow racers, the oddly coupled men and women tied together at the ankles or locked back to back or joined in gunnysacks or squeezed in barrels or pressed facing each other and scrabbling sideways in the crab’s oblique drift.

He drove down Collins Boulevard to the radio station and gave his car to the man in the Fontainebleau parking lot. He crossed the street at the light and rode up in the elevator to his studio. He waved wearily to the men in the control booth and took his place at his desk. The engineer asked for a voice level and Dick, confused for a moment, turned to see where the sound had come from.

“Give us a level, Dick,” Orchard repeated.

He looked at the microphone. “Please stand by,” he said softly. “One moment please.”

“Too low, Dick,” Lawrence Leprese said. “Can you move a little closer to the mike? We’ve got about a minute.”

“Oh,” he said.

“That’s better,” Leprese said.

“What I wanted,” he said slowly, “was to be a leading man, my life to define life, my name a condition — like Louis Quatorze.”

“A household word, is that it, Dick?” Leprese said over the loudspeaker. “The level’s good.”

“Not glory, not even fame.” The buttons on the phone were already lit. “Not a hero, not even very dependable—”

“Thirty seconds, Dick.”

“—but to be excited. To live at the kindling point, oh God, at the sound barrier.”

The On the Air sign came on. It flared behind its red glass, bright as blood on a smear on a slide. He leaned forward and spoke to the microphone. “This is Dick Gibson,” he said, “WMIA. The scrambled I Am’s of Miami Beach.”

He picked up the phone and jabbed one of the lighted buttons. “Good evening, Night Letters.”

“I’m this man’s mistress,” a woman said. “His wife is dying and he has to take her to a different climate. He’s asked me to—”

“Wrong number,” he said, and punched another button. “Night Letters.”

“My doggy was run over.”

“Line’s busy.” He took another call. “Night Letters.”

“I’m a peeping Tom. I think I’m going blind.”

“It’s a bad connection.” All the buttons on the phone panel were lit. He pressed one again. “Good evening. Night Letters.”