“‘Down home, down home,’ I hissed at him irritably. ‘You’re from Tibet. Why don’t you say up home?’
“I tell you, it’s quite extraordinary to be laughed at—Bob Hope couldn’t have touched me in those days—quite extraordinary to know that wherever you go you are something less than the least person there. Not to inspire disfiguring envy or fury or hatred but only merriment is a doom. I had the power to change a mood simply by entering a room. At the sight of me, whatever had been the frictions and cross-currents before, there was now a unity. And it didn’t matter what people said to me. I mean this two ways. Many of the patients confided private things about themselves to me, what they regarded as my inhumanity lending me the immunity of clowns—as one fucks one’s wife in front of the dog. You don’t understand this, do you? There have been cuckolds before. Why, right in your own neighborhood, you think, down your street and up your block, and who laughs, who doesn’t go out of his way to be kind to the guy’s children, circumspect with him? I don’t know, perhaps they smelled something on me that was inhuman really or they wouldn’t have acted like that.
“They laughed at me openly but never brought Miriam’s or the enema man’s name into it. As a matter of fact, he was the only one who didn’t find me amusing. He even tried to befriend me. The enema man had had two or three divorces himself and knew the rough weathers of love. He told me that this was why he was in the home, and why he took enemas; his frustration in his marriages had somehow affected his intestines and kept him almost constantly blocked. But he was nice and tried to comfort me. He put his arm about me consolingly. ‘Don’t depend on women, kid. Forget the broads. They’re poison. Put money in your poitch.’
“‘That’s easy for you to say.’
“‘Not so easy, not so easy. They took their toll. Agh, none of ’em are any good. They’re woitch than a coitch.’
“‘All of them?’
“‘Every last one. They’d be better off dead in a hoitch.’ I nodded. ‘Kid, good talking to you. I better beat it back to my room, it’s time for my enema. Hey, did you see the noitch?’”
“I told him where he would find Miriam. I marveled at my helplessness, astonished to recognize that the conventional parameters of character applied, amazed that a person who had been on the radio; who had traveled and lived alone could not handle himself in a pinch. Why, I should have let them have it for laughing; I should have set Dr. Pasco straight or wrung Miriam’s neck. Now I don’t know. Now I am surprised I was surprised, for there I was, sidetracked in Morristown and living incognito with a nurse in a rest home, things too strange for your apprentice personality and one-track soul. How could I have known better who had gotten every idea I ever had from what they permitted to be spoken on the air? Why, my greenness was written in the stars. It’s a wonder I didn’t cry, break out in sweats and pimples, a wonder I didn’t sulk in corners or imagine them all at my funeral. I was little more than a teen-ager. How did I not go mad at that first feel on the bus; what kept me from proposing marriage then and there, the first time I felt her hand on my cock?”
But not all of this was for the warmup. Actually, Dick Gibson got no further than the part where he began to describe the sort of place Morristown was. At that point he became conscious of a stirring in the audience, not a restlessness so much as a new interest. He looked behind him—his instinct unerring here, danger always approaching from the rear—where he saw Frances Langford and Colonna and Bob Hope himself. After a while Langford and Colonna went off to their places behind the curtain, but Mr. Hope remained, politely listening at first but increasingly puzzled to know where this was leading, and then at last visibly concerned that all this talk of invalids and cripples could hurt the show. In a moment he signaled for the curtain to be raised, and there was the band in its places and Colonna and Vera Vague and Miss Langford and the rest of the cast in theirs, and Bob Hope came over to Gibson, whispered something in his ear, relieved him of the warmup microphone and did a fast half-dozen snappy minutes of emergency material.
The reaction of the audience was interesting. It sent up a courteous massed awww of disappointment when it saw that Dick was not to be allowed to finish his story, but then responded immediately and uproariously to the first of Hope’s jokes. But it was Dick Gibson himself who laughed loudest and cheered hardest. As a professional he understood Hope’s problem, of course, but there was something else—not sycophancy, not fear that he would lose his job, but his sense that Hope was racing the clock, up against time, the big one. In all the years he had been in radio he had never quite had this sense of time, had never seen it as a dimension in itself, more, a battleground, the battleground, and not only the battleground but the enemy as well. It was radio that took time on at its own game, scheduling it, slicing it into fifteen- and thirty- and sixty-minute slices, its single master. Forget railroads and buses and planes, forget appointments at the highest levels and the synchronized intricacies of combat and athletics, all you-cut-here, he-fades-there arrangements. Only radio and time were inexorable, and here was a hero who stood up in it, as one stands up in the sea, and splashed about in it, used it, perhaps one day would die in it. Hence he cheered and laughed, little less than literally wild when the director in the control room threw his finger and the red On the Air sign burned bright and Mr. Hope, script in hand, ready behind the stand-up microphone, took his cue.
Afterward Dick Gibson told the rest of his story to Joe Glober and Mel Bell and Jacomo Miller and a few of the people in Skinnay Ennis’s band when they all went out to a roadhouse just outside St. Paul. He was a little in his cups—Hope had spoken to him personally, assuring him that his approach was fresh, and that he had never heard anything like it: “Imagine,” Hope had said, turning to the man who worked the applause sign, “not to glut an audience with jokes, but merely to depress them so that when the laughs come the people are actually grateful and laugh harder”—and so perhaps his voice was just a bit louder than usual. But louder or not, he was at first addressing just the seven or eight at his table. Only later did he shift over and gradually raise his voice so that he could be heard finally throughout the entire roadhouse, doing his own version of a broadcast from the Copa Lounge, Barry Gray sans microphone and guests—closed-circuit radio, the radio of confrontation, the shout network—and in his cups or not, never forgetting time as he now understood it.
“Listen … the old clock on the wall … All right, quickly, then.
“There was a picnic. Patients and their guests, staff and their supposititious husbands.
“By now the whole town was talking. The grapevine of cripples had put out the word on me and Miriam and the enema man. In the drugstore the pharmacist jokingly offered to sell me enema poison.
“‘I have no enemamies,’ I told him, and it was as if I had broken the bank at Monte Carlo, goodsportwise.
“So the day of the picnic finally arrived and all Morristown turned out. The crème de la crème. The blindees, the deafoes and dummies—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The amputees, the orphans, the folks of ruined blood, as well as your general all-purpose invalids. All of them loved to crash the other guy’s picnic. So that Morristown had a season: summer. The deaf would eat the blind man’s chicken, and see the colors of the blind man’s fruit, and the blind heard the fsst of the deaf man’s beer. The amputees licked the orphans’ candy canes. But our picnic was even more heavily attended than one could have expected, and it may have been our scandal that made the difference.
“I had been blithe for the man at the drugstore, and now I was blithe for Morristown.
“‘Mr. Desebour, I’ve heard so much about you,’ giggled Mr. Latrobe, the blind kennel master of the guide dogs at the institute.
“‘Nice to see you here, sir,’ I told him.
“‘Misrer huff De-se-booorgh, huff huff,’ growled the deaf Mrs. Garish in that machine-like, exhalated voice of the trained mute, ‘I’ve beeenn huff look-ingg forwardt huff to meering you.’
“‘Good talking to you, ma’m. I’ve heard so much about you.’
“‘Hi, Mr. Desebour,’ said Paul the orphan.
“‘Hello, son.’
”I entered all the contests and potato-raced my heart out, finishing in the money. No mean feat, for a lot of these fellows had been born with only one leg and until you’ve potato-raced against a congenital one-legged man in a sack you haven’t potato-raced. I won at chug-a- lug and lagging pennies and swamped them at horseshoes and wheelchair racing, and in the invalid decathlon I was best. Cheating, entered as a patient but using my health, earnest, shooting to kill like a father burning them in to the other guy’s kid in the PTA softball. Flinging off my passivity for once, I pushed past the others in the human wheelbarrow, my hands and arms furious as pistons, nearly pulling the poor guy over who held my legs. Concentrating, concentrating, steady as a surgeon I balanced the peas on my knife as the peas of the spastics went flying off in all directions. There, I thought, dusting my hands, nonpareil at the picnic, take that and that and that.
“Only Miriam knew my real situation—unless, of course, in the throes of passion with the enema man she had disclosed our secret— but the invalids themselves, thinking I was one of them, would have made me their champion then and there. I could have been their Thorpe, I tell you.
“And a strange thing happened. I sensed that they had begun to turn against the enema man, against Miriam. I saw the enema man—I had beaten that constipate in hard-boiled-egg eating—sitting off by himself on a blanket beside the horseshoe pits, a book in his lap, and looking full, stuffed, his face flushed, his skin itself gorged, oppressed by the ruthless satiety of his life. I went over, blithe but burning.
“‘Reading?’
“‘Yeah. Pass the time.’
“‘What have you got there?’ I bent down and read the book’s title. ‘Ah, poetry. A few voitches, is it?’
“I drifted off toward the lake and began to walk round it. Miriam caught up with me. ‘Where are you going?’
“‘All that exercise. It’s hot.’
“‘Yes. You were very determined.’
“‘Give ’em something to talk about.’
“‘When will you leave?’ she asked after a while. This is getting crazy.’
“‘When I unlock the secret of your voice. First I have to unlock the secret of your voice.’
“‘You keep saying that. What does it mean?’
“‘How you talk. How peaceful it makes me.’
“We had stopped following the lake and had turned on to a footpath that led into the woods. It was very cool among the trees but in a few hundred yards we came to a clearing in the center of which was an enormous stone mansion. It was strange to come upon it like that.
“‘What the hell is that? Who lives there? My God, you don’t suppose we’ve found the leper colony, do you?’
“‘Mrs. Garish,’ Miriam said.
“‘What?’
“‘Mrs. Garish lives there. It’s the Institute for the Deaf.’
“It was very hot in the sun. ‘It looks cool.’
“‘It’s open to the public. Do you want to go inside?’
“I shrugged but followed Miriam into the large central hall of the building.
“Miriam told the woman who came out to greet us that we were from the home. ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s important to understand the other fellow’s problem. Look around. Be sure to see the dead room. You’ll want to see the dead room.’
“‘The dead room?’
“‘We call it that. We do experiments there. It’s 99.98 per cent free of reflected sound. The telephone company built it for us. It’s supposed to be the quietest place in the world.’
“Miriam and I walked through the various classrooms and poked desultorily at some of the special equipment. Then, at the end of a long, carpeted hallway, we came to the ‘dead room.’
“We pulled open the heavy door and went inside. It was the strangest room I have ever been in. It may have been about twenty-five by thirty-five feet—about the size of a large drawing room—though it was difficult to tell, for no two walls were exactly parallel. The walls and ceiling were broken up in a zigzag pattern and honeycombed with cells of differing shapes and depths like thousands of opened mouths. We walked on a spongy, corklike substance thicker than any carpet.
“The silence was astonishing, a hushed chorus from the mouths of the walls. It was like a darkness. Have you ever been in a room that is totally dark? Late at night, say, and awakened in a strange place, and for a moment you don’t know where you are or how they got you there, and you’re groping for the door? Well, the things you brush past there in the dark—a chair or a wardrobe—these are like blind spots. But you can hear them, hear the blind spots, as if all objects give off this signal, the sonar of material reality felt, sensed in the extinct ear, held in the vestigial eye, prickling across the bone of your forehead like the electric touch of a girl you wish loved you. Well, it was something like that, the silence. Wait, double it!
“For the first few moments neither of us spoke or even looked at each other, as people do who spot a marvel. It was all either of us could do to take it all in, all we could do perhaps to get over the inevitable touch of the sad in the presence of all that black mufflement.
“I spoke first. I don’t remember what I said, but my voice was small, squeezed, not unloud so much as descreet, anechoic, so that sound as such—walking, the noise of our clothes, our breathing—was meaningless, probably unidentifiable, swallowed in the room’s million mouths. Only words, however clipped, maintained their existence in this room of aural blind spots and thick silence, only the ideas behind words. In that sense the room was intellectual, a place for concepts. Here no teacups could ever tinkle, no spoon rattle in a glass; there could be no chatter, no din, and the report of a gun would be as insignificant as the clink of two glasses touching politely in a toast. There was no hacking or rustle or hiss or whoosh or crackle or crepitation or affricative churn, no tocsin, no knock, no thump at the door or rain on the roof. All that was not language died at its source or was reduced to harmless velvet plips. God might have made the place.
“‘Talk.’
“‘What should I say?’
“‘Speak.’
“‘I don’t know what to say.’
“‘Let’s hear it,’ I commanded.
“‘I don’t know what you want me to say. I … Be nice to me. I’m the one they laugh at—I am. They know what I do. I’m the one they’re laughing at. They think you’re a cripple like themselves.’
“‘In the beginning was the Word. Say.’
” I don’t know what you want!’
“‘To unlock the secret of your voice. Just that.’
“‘It will end by my being fired. I’ll lose my job. All I want is to help people. Why won’t you go?’ She was crying, though I didn’t hear this so much as see it.
“I recalled her stories after we made love. ‘Stop. That’s enough. Eureka, I’ve found it. Thank you.’
“‘I wish I never sat next to you on that bus.’
“‘Now I know the secret. I’m leaving.’
“‘The secret,’ she said contemptuously.
“‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I knew you had one. Now I know what it is.’
“‘What is it?’ she asked dully.
“‘You were naked. I’m a sucker for the first person singular.’”
Dick Gibson paused. He leaned back, appearing to rest. “Quick,” he said, suddenly leaning forward again. “Let me see your watch.” He took up someone’s wrist and brought it to his face. “You’re left- handed,” he said disgustedly, flinging the wrist away. “The numbers are upside down.” He grabbed someone else’s wrist, bent down over it so that his nose almost touched the man’s watch, and studying the dial, he figured to himself furiously. “Ah,” he said breathlessly, “one hour and seventeen minutes. I just made it.”
He was in Newark that evening
, out on a sleeper that night, did not speak to strangers and arrived in Pittsburgh the next morning.
It was strange to be in a big city again—even stranger than to be home—and he realized that except for layovers he had not been in a really large city since he’d left home. It was fitting. Small towns were the historic province of apprenticeship—villages, townships, county seats, flocculent, unincorporated tufts of population—these backwaters were your unheeding witnesses to your new processes and evolving styles. Just the same he felt expansive, auspicion’s loved object, young Lochinvar come riding out of the west on a round trip.
As he left Union Station and looked up Mellon Boulevard at downtown Pittsburgh, he was tremendously excited. He perceived with a sovereign clarity, shipping impression like a lovely cargo, and what he saw was to stay with him all his life as the very essence of the city. He admired the black, thick buildings, the dark windows like glass postage or framed deep water. There were high projecting cornices at the top stories like the peaks of caps, and he tried to look in under them to the careful scrollwork, distinctive as the flow of a hairline. Shifting his gaze he watched the smooth, shiny trolley rails that, blocks off, flowed into each other like twin rivers of perspective. At a nearby corner a snagged lace of electric lines floated above the traffic. He sighted along a row of canopies that unfurled above the big display windows of a department store in a parade of identical angles, trawling on the bright and windless morning a still fringe of scallops. He looked up the tall, fluted shaft of an iron light standard. It seemed monumental to him, something to light up outer space. He waited for a traffic light to change and crossed the street, moving with a certain awe toward a bank like a pagan temple, its brass and marble ornament engraved like money.
It pleased him to be in this city of just under a half-million, a large American city of the first class with a major league ball club (in a state with three major league teams; no state had more; only New York had as many), three great daily newspapers, and eleven radio stations (all the networks plus KDKA, perhaps the greatest independent in the country). He congratulated himself. Depression or no, soot or no—an industrial pall hung on the buildings like a painted shadow, but it was not unpleasant; it seemed an earnest of the city’s value—it was a magnificent place, as finished and fixed for him as a city in Europe. Yet he felt a twinge too, realizing it was merely his home, that he belonged there only in that sense, that despite his years away from it, he was simply its citizen. No great company had called him there, nor had he, prospector-like, shouldered his way through Indian hazard to seek its veins and work its lodes. In this sense he felt it less his than the last traveling salesman’s off the train with him that morning. By the time he was settled in a cab he was already down a peg or two, and he no longer knew the city well enough to be satisfied that the driver did not cheat him as he turned up alleys and cut through parks.
The Dick Gibson Show Page 9
