The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  Alias Dick Gibson, alias Marshall Maine, alias Tex Ellery, alias a dozen others, knew, knew then, blessed by nostalgia as some are blessed with prescience, this steady hindsight that was contemporaneous to him and as involuntary as digestion, that all this was the truth, that those pictures had it right: Americans were in their living rooms, before their floorlamps, on their sofas, in their chairs, along their rugs, together in time, united, serené. And so he felt twinges, pins and needles of actual conscience; he needed to join his voice to that important chorus, that lovely a cappella.

  He approached Lee, the reasonable Credenza, and spoke to him about it. He said KROP should be no different than other stations.

  “I see what you mean. I’ll talk it over with the brothers and get back to you,” Lee told him.

  And then, two weeks after he had first introduced the subject, he received a delegation of Credenzas in the transmitter shack. Surprised by their presence there and to a certain extent intimidated by seeing so many of them gathered at one time—only Charley and Bill, whose legislative duties kept them in Lincoln, did not come—he was at first alarmed, suspecting actual physical attack.

  Louis III spoke. “You, Marshall Maine, Lee says you ain’t satisfied with the way we do things on our station.”

  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. Dest
royed 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.

  He was forced to make certain changes in his chatter, to bring his talk into accord with the changes in his delivery. Formerly his remarks on introducing a song matched the mood of the song, while filler material provoked an illusion, even at this distance, of KROP’s relationship to show business. ( “Now, from the sound track of Walt Disney’s feature-length animated cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the RKO Studio Orchestra plays the wistful ‘Someday My Prince Will Come.’ Maestro …” “From the hit Broadway show Showboat of a few years back, the lovely Miss Helen Morgan sings this show stopper, the haunting ‘He’s Just My Bill’ … ”) With his new constraint, however, words like “sound track,” the names of studios, even the titles of films, suddenly made him self-conscious. Catch phrases like “from the motion picture of the same name” caught in his throat. His old attempt to set a human mood—”A romantic confession now, some sweet excuses for a familiar story: ‘Those Little White Lies’”—seemed the grossest liberty of all. The idea of setting a mood for the dark-booted Credenzas was blasphemous, a sort of spoken graffiti.

  At first he tried simply to announce the title and identify the singer, but the discrepancy between the tunes and his flat statements was even more disturbing to him than his old chatter. As a consequence he began to play a different sort of music altogether, songs that were so familiar they needed no introduction, love songs nominally still, but from a different period, or rather from no period at all, songs that had always existed, in the public domain years, nothing that could ever have connected KROP with show business: “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Alice Blue Gown,” “I Wandered Today to the Hill, Maggie.” Because they were the sort of songs no crooner anyone had ever heard of was likely to have recorded, he found it difficult to speak the names of the obscure tenors and sopranos who had recorded them, the Fred L. Joneses and Olive Patzes and Herbert Randolph Fippses who had cornered the market on this kind of thing. So he said nothing and looked instead for instrumental versions of the recordings, leaving Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties on his day off and going down to Lincoln on his own authority to the big radio station there, to speak to the music librarian and offer him money for his discards. At first the man didn’t seem to understand what he wanted, until Marshall explained that he did a request show for shut-ins, and invented for him the Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties Old People’s Home, a place, he said, where the staff used the golden hits of yesteryear as therapy, offering the invalided and senile a musical opportunity to re-court their wives, re-raise their children and re-fight their wars, the idea being, Maine said, not to pull the afflicted (he called them that) from their pasts but to push them back into them.

  Together they went into the music library, and there he found a cache of exactly the sort of thing he was looking for: “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” played by the Netherlands Deutschgeschreir Orkestra, Jerome Klopf conducting; “I Wish I Was in de Land ob Cotton,” sung by the Luftwaffe Sinfonia; Sir Reginald Shoat leading the Edinburgh Festival Orchestra in a Stephen Foster medley. There were also some fine things by the Hotel Brevert- Topeka’s Palm Court Band.

  “Gee,” the librarian said, “I didn’t know we had all this stuff.” “Yes,” Marshall Maine told him. “These will do.” The man put one of the recordings on the library console. “The quality’s not good. This one sounds strained, as if it was transcribed from the short wave.”

  “Yes,” Marshall Maine said, “that’s fine. They want that quality— the suggestion of the distant past.” “But they’re all instrumentals.” “Yes, that forces them to remember the words.” “Oh, look here, Lily Pons doing ‘Funiculi Funicula.’” “No,” Maine said sharply. “But if you had choral groups, I might take some choral groups of the right sort.” “Choral groups?”

  “It gives them the sense they’re not alone.” So he took back with him a hundred and twelve instrumentals, plus an armful of recordings by a few choral groups—rejecting, for example, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians’ rendition of “In the Merry, Merry Month of May” in favor of the Utah Military Institute’s Marching and Singing Soldiers’ version of the same song, and the Brockton Riding Academy Mounted Chorus’s “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”

  Furnished with these he returned to KROP and put them on the air. He could hear through his long afternoon record show the adulterated strains of the vaguely decomposing music he played, performances that the wind might have blown through, or the sea squeezed. Usually he no longer bothered to announce the songs. Remembering the Credenzas’ warning, he made sure that no dust stuck to the needle. He oiled the turntable, lifted the tone arm smartly when a record was finished and placed it carefully in the right groove of the next selection. Every few minutes he moved his head a precise seven inches from the microphone and gave the time and temperature twice: “It’s two thirty-five. It’s two thirty-five. The temperature is fifty-three degrees. It’s fifty-three degrees.”

  He had never been to England and so had never heard the BBC, but he had an impression that this was what it must sound like. He had a sense, too, of service, a special nonprofit feel of a government- managed, tax-based, public utility, as if the story he told the music librarian at the radio station in Lincoln somehow had come true. Giving the time and temperature, he imagined his voice coming out of loudspeakers in the dining halls of prisons or the card rooms of veterans’ hospitals. He liked this. In a way—though it had come about in a manner entirely different from the one he had counted on when he had approached the brothers—he felt exactly the responsibility he had hoped to feel.

  His nervousness began to relax its hold on him, though he did not tamper with its effects. Now his constraint was designed, a technique, and he acquired still another sense of his professionalism, a wicked inside knowledge of his own manner, the same knowledgeable sensation available, he supposed, to workers on newspapers who see the headlines before they hit the streets—a split-second edge that was all one needed to maintain a notion of his uniqueness and to confirm his closeness to the source of things.

  “I had never had it before. But what did I have? What did I have exactly? A knowledge of what time it was and what time it was getting to be? Access to the weather report? The sequence in which the records would be played that afternoon? What I had was inside information about myself, what I was going to do, what particular shape my dignity would take next, how much shyness or reserve would be there in the next time signal, what unmood would be provoked by the next unmusic I played.”

  But that only got him through the afternoons. The music, however transatlantic and anonymous, was the point. He merely served it, bringing it to the turntable like a waiter, his presence hidden in his deference, his shyness only the giver’s decent effacement. If it weren’t for the music, however, and the time and temperature, he would have been lost, so though the fright did not actually return, it waited for him like that portion of a sick man’s day when the temperature climbs and the p
ain begins.

  Doing the news that followed his afternoon record show, for example, and recalling the brothers’ insistence that he make more palatable the inevitable reports of accident and sudden death with a deflective cheer—they meant, he supposed, no more than that he lift the pitch of his voice—he felt enormous pressure to oblige, pressure that existed even as he read those stories that had nothing to do with disaster: neutral items about the sale of farms in adjoining counties, or the paving of the dirt road that led to the new dam. He knew what was coming up, and like some unsure singer who knows of a difficult passage later in his song that he has negotiated hit and miss in rehearsal, he could anticipate only those bad places in the road where the car turned over and the children died, and felt his throat begin to constrict, his mouth to dry, his teeth to dry too, like hard foreign objects suddenly in his mouth. So, even as he continued to read the report of the new engine purchased for the volunteer fire department and what the governor said in his address to the Building and Loan convention, he would sound a little hysterical, and once or twice when the time came for him actually to give the damaging bulletin, he lost control entirely. Aiming for the C above high C that was the perfect pitch the Credenzas wanted, the exact and only comforting tone of catastrophe for them, his voice broke, he overshot and gave them not perfect pitch nor even imperfect pitch, but wild pitch, shattering the decorous modulations of radio with falsetto, with something close to a real shriek or scream. Someone hearing him might have thought it was his child who had burned to a crisp in the fire, his wife raped and slain, his father struck down by the lightning or fallen into the thresher.

  After these performances he waited to hear from some angry Credenza, not even returning to the transmitter shack when his relief man came for fear they would phone the moment he left the station and not wanting to add anything to their already considerable rage should they miss him. So he sat by the telephone to wait for their call.