In the light of his feeling that perhaps his father somehow meant his performances to be a contribution to his apprenticeship, he introduced the subject himself.
“I haven’t spoken much of my work in radio.”
“No,” his father said.
“I’ve tried … you know, to get experience.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ve had—I don’t know—maybe a dozen jobs since I left home.”
“A dozen jobs in five years. That’s a lot of moving around.”
“Yes, it is. But I wanted to do as many different things as I could. I have this idea about apprenticeship. It’s how I see myself—as an apprentice.”
“It’s best to get a good background,” his father said, wantonly indifferent.
“The personalities,” Dick said, “I don’t know if I can explain this, but they’re part of our lives, not even a trivial part either because we grow up to their jokes, we tell time by their voices. And what voices! Broadcast. Broad cast. Personality like seed, a part of nature, in forests and beside streams, and high up the sides of mountains, higher than the timber line.”
“There’s good money to be made,” his father said. “There’s no doubt about it.”
“I change jobs and bone up because I want to make myself worthy of my voice.”
His father yawned, swept his fingers up under his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and gently rolled the loose skin on the bridge of his nose back and forth. It was another act. The generation gap. A pantomime of stolid misunderstanding. Though he resisted, Dick felt himself drawn deeply into the performance. By his father’s gesture—his face had now gone blank and he was vaguely chewing, sucking his cheeks and exploring the flaws in his teeth with his tongue like a nightwatchman aiming his flashlight at doors—the two of them had become partners in some nightshift enterprise, men in a boiler room, say, among complicated machinery, in a mutual vacuum of the night and labor, a half-hour till one of them has to check the dials again. He could get no further with his dad, and was embarrassed that he had exposed himself as much as he had.
In the next weeks he thought about his apprenticeship a great deal, and wondered if this might not be just the effect his father intended. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was. His dad’s routines had been meant to embarrass him because the man sensed that this sneaking shame was Dick Gibson’s weak spot—Dick Gibson, that name that had come to him out of the air, the best inspiration of his life, consolidating in its three crisp syllables his chosen style, his identity, a saga, a mythic body of American dash, and that he had used just once, keeping it secret since, unwilling even after five years to give it up, saving it, as one preserves the handsomest pieces in his wardrobe and meanwhile goes shabby and ordinary, a miserliness not of money but of strategy, a military notion of reserves or a coach’s of bench, an Aladdin idea of one wish left in the lamp—and wanted to purge him of it. He had never been completely unembarrassed while speaking on the radio; this was a fact (his mike fright was something else). He had always felt just a little silly announcing, introducing, selling, describing, interviewing, giving the time and telling the weather, doing local color, acting and reciting bed-time stories, holding up his spokesman’s end of the conversation—which in radio was the only end there was. For the truth of the matter was that radio was silence as well as sound; the unrelenting premise was that the announcer’s voice occurred in silence, in the heart of an attentive vacuum disposed to hear it. Whereas he knew this was untrue. Didn’t his own mind wander, wasn’t it inattentive? Nothing was worthy of violating such silence; nothing yet in the history of the world had been worthy of it. That’s why he was embarrassed. So what his father was doing was meant to demonstrate how easily self-consciousness could be shed. Some such lesson must have been intended. So, he thought sadly, the apprenticeship isn’t finished. This thing remained: he had to become immodest, to learn to move dispassionately into the silence. His experience thus far was nothing; it would be a long time before he would be as good as he was meant to be. That was that.
He made plans to leave Pittsburgh, to take up the burden of his apprenticeship a second time.
The day he left home and bid his family goodbye he had expected a scene. But there was none; they did not offer to come to the station with him, and his mother used her mad, broad dialect only once. “A mither’s kiss,” she said automatically when she kissed him.
Arthur shook his hand and winced in pretended pain. “Yipes, champ, you don’t have to break a guy’s fingers, do you?”
His father was even more silent than when Dick had left home the first time, but he seemed on the verge of tears. Dick stuck out his hand but his father ignored it and embraced him. His beard felt strange against Dick’s, trailing sensation like a scent, as if he’d been rubbed with something dusty and valuable, scraped by flesh in a ceremony. Dick submitted to the embrace and thought it remarkable that his father’s eyes were red.
In the next years you might have heard Dick Gibson’s voice a hundred times without knowing it, certainly—so much had it willfully become a part of the generalized sound of American life—without thinking to ask whose it was, no more than you would stop to wonder at the direction of the wind from the sound it makes in the street. He went about the country restlessly, always lonely now and ignorant of time, his beautiful but anonymous voice the juggler’s humble affair before some imposing altar, a town crier of the twentieth century.
“Leeman Brothers directs the attention of shoppers to its White Sale now in progress in the Linens section on the fourth floor. For a limited time we will be offering genuine first-quality percale sheets for single, twin and full beds at discounts of up to 40 percent. We are also featuring a wide selection of slightly damaged printed cambrics at 75 percent off. Please take the elevators at the State Street entrance.”
“Attention! Attention please! There has been a change posted in the results of the fifth race. Please hold on to your pari-mutuel tickets. Jimson Weed has been disqualified for crowding on the turn. Repeat: Jimson Weed has been disqualified for crowding. The Maryland Racing Commission has declared the official results. It’s Your America is the winner, Martin’s Muddle has placed and Crybaby has finished in the money to show.”
“Will everyone please stand clear of the firetrucks? Will you stand clear of the firetrucks, please? These men can’t work. Someone’s going to get hurt.”
“Welcome to the General Motors Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, ‘The World of Tomorrow.’ The General Motors Company wishes to apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced during your wait on the line. Please sit far back in your comfortable chairs so that you may the better hear through your personalized headsets. The Company wishes to remind any of you who may be wearing sunglasses to please remove them now so that you may the better see our exhibit.”
“Kibbidge batting for Medwick.”
“‘The Congressional Limited’ leaving on track fifteen for Newark, Trenton, North Philadelphia, 30th Street Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore and Washington. Passengers holding chair Pullman reservations will please go to the south end of the platform. All aboard. All aboard please.”
“Will the owner of the green, 1940 Pontiac bearing Texas license plates G479–135 please report to the attendant at gate number twelve?”
“On your left is the historic old Cotton mansion built in 1847 by Emmanuel Cotton, to plans drawn up by the distinguished American architect Lattimer Michael Hough. The expression ‘King Cotton’ is not, as many suppose, a phrase describing the pre-eminent position of cotton in the Southern economy, but a nickname directly referring to Emmanuel Cotton’s life-long obsession that he was the pretender to the Hanoverian throne. The pillars you see are the only standing examples of Virginia marble—not a marble at all, actually, but a processed quartz made to resemble the less expensive stone.”
“There will be a half-hour wait for seating, a half-hour wait for seating at all prices.”
/> “A lost child, about four or five years old, wearing a brown snowsuit, brown mittens and answering to the name of Richard, is waiting to be picked up at the ranger station just below the ski lift.”
“Front. Front, please.”
“Is there a doctor in the house?”
“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick ‘Pepsodent’ Gibson. I’m very happy to be here in Minneapolis tonight. Bob Hope will be with you in a few minutes, but first. …”
One day in Chicago’s Loop he was coming out of the Oriental Theater on Randolph Street when suddenly the heavens opened and he was caught in what could have been a cloudburst. One moment the skies were clear; the next the rain was pounding the street in the heaviest downpour he had ever seen. He was only fifty feet or so from the shelter of the marquee when it began to rain, but even if he had attempted to run back to it he would have been completely soaked. So he ducked into the stairwell entrance to an underground cafeteria called Eiler’s. He had coffee and a sandwich, but even after he had finished the rain had still not let up. If anything, it was raining even more heavily than before; the water was coming down the stairway and under the doors and had already formed a considerable pool, which the busboys were trying to clear away with pails and mops. Many people—mostly middle-aged women, afternoon shoppers—had come in from the street and were gathered at the bottom of the stairs.
The basement cafeteria in which they were all standing was low- ceilinged and crowded with rounded arches. Obviously it was meant to support the great weight of the building above them. Dick Gibson thought of the London blitz, the underground shelters there, where, according to what he’d heard, people whose homes had been blasted sometimes stayed for weeks at a time. As he often did when he was caught in something like an emergency situation, he began to look about for a girl, someone with whom he might talk, or, in some end-of-the-world abandon, kiss, hold, fuck. But there were very few likely prospects. Two pretty girls of perhaps twenty sat not far away, but these he discounted because there were two men clearly more handsome than himself with whom in all probability they would pair off when the time came. This left only a small, sweetfaced, pleasant- looking young woman. The more he looked at her the more feasible the idea of loving her became. Soon he found her plumpness sexually exciting and even the submissive gentleness of her expression, daring. He began to imagine her willing passion, and to project the wonderful things she might do for him. Before long he began to consider himself lucky to have her rather than the two girls whose beauty had probably made them selfish and cold. As he was thinking of his girl and imagining what it would be like to have such heaviness at his disposal, perhaps even gratefully blowing him, she looked up and saw him staring. Maybe she had felt his concentration; at any event she smiled widely as if she recognized him, or as if they were already lovers. Dick blushed and looked away at once, fixing his features in a stern, indifferent mask. Though he knew she was still watching him, he did not dare look up.
In a while the rain stopped and they were free to go. The girl passed in front of him and Dick could see the bewilderment on her face as he failed to acknowledge her stare. He realized that it was the same expression he himself had worn when his father had bewildered him.
My God, he thought suddenly, all it was was love. All it was was love and shyness. Oh Jesus, he thought, oh shit, I do not know what my life is.
The next day he called off the apprenticeship.
3
Which was impossible. He was already too far into it. It would have taken a major revision of his character, a rehabilitation, real eye openers. We are what we are. Dick Gibson went back into radio; the quest continued.
By now he had enough experience in radio to handle anything. He was an accomplished announcer, a newsman, an MC, an actor. He could do special events, remotes, panel discussions. He had a keen ear for which songs and which recordings of which songs would be the hits, and was even a competent sports announcer. Though he had not yet broadcast a game from a stadium, he had done several off the Western Union ticker tape, sitting in a studio hundreds of miles from the action and translating the thin code of the relay, fleshing it out from the long, ribbony scorecard. More than anything else this made him feel truly a radio man, not just the voice of radio but radio itself, the very fact of amplification, the human voice lifted miles, beamed from the high ground, a nexus of the opportune: See seven states! And everything after the fact so foreknown, the game itself sometimes already in the past while he still described it; often the afternoon papers were on the streets with the final box score while he described for his listeners the seventh-inning stretch or reported a struggle in the box seats over the recovery of a foul ball—his foreknowledge hindsight, a coy tool of suspense: “DiMaggio swings. That ball is going, going—oh, it’s foul by inches.”
He was able to perform even the simpler feats of engineering, and had a good working knowledge of sound effects. (Strangely, he would sometimes reveal these, giving up his privileged information not so much with a gossip’s delight as a betrayer’s, enjoying his sense of ruining illusion, fixing forever in the minds of those who heard him that fire was only handled cellophane, rain stirred pebbles on a piece of paper, thunder a tin sheet shaken—so that even afterward that was what they heard, cellophane, pebbles, tin sheets, the metaphors undone, turned, the things they stood for become the things that stood for them.) He was good at all of it.
He no longer experimented nor changed jobs, and though he still had not used the name Dick Gibson, it was not because he was saving it, but merely because he had eschewed the idea of his apprenticeship and with it the idea of his destiny too.
But he must have had a destiny. He had traveled much in the past and was registered with at least fifteen draft boards across the country. One month in the winter of 1943 he received notice from five of them that he had been called up.
It was like being arrested.
He did his basic training at a camp in western Massachusetts. There he experienced the total collapse of civilization. To Dick the army made sense only if one considered the ultimate objectives of the war, but he waited in vain for his superiors to remind him of the Fascists or to outline the goals which he himself had so passionately endorsed in his own pleas to his listeners to buy bonds and save paper and conserve water.
He had brought his portable radio with him and it became his habit, now that he was in it himself, to listen to all the war news, taking particular comfort from Edward R. Murrow’s bravely resonant “This is London.”
One evening he had just settled back on his bunk to listen when Private Rohnspeece picked up the radio from the window sill.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m breaking your faggot radio,” Private Rohnspeece said, and threw it out the window.
“What’s wrong with you?” He grabbed Rohnspeece’s sleeve, but his comrade-in-arms pulled a switchblade knife out of his pocket and an enormous blade clicked brightly into position. Then the man calmly cut a piece out of Dick Gibson’s hand. Dick screamed and a sergeant came running into the barracks.
“Who the hell’s making that goddamn noise?” the sergeant demanded. Dick sucked blood, swallowing it back as fast as it came out of his wound, thinking in this way to preserve his life’s precious juices. (At that instant it somehow seemed related to the war effort, like turning off lights and saving tinfoil.) Between mouthfuls he continued to scream, and again the sergeant, apparently myopic, demanded to know who was making the noise.
Rohnspeece pointed to Dick Gibson. “He is,” Rohnspeece said.
“He cut me,” Dick said.
The sergeant looked without enthusiasm at Dick’s hand. It was as if he had been auditioning bloody hands all day and this was just one more in a pretty thin lot. “You’ll bleed worse than that once Jerry sticks his bayonet in your gut,” he said, but Gibson was scarcely relieved that someone in authority had at last mentioned Hitler’s forces.
Afterward he we
nt outside to see if he could salvage his radio, but it was gone. He did not see it again for two days, when it suddenly turned up on top of Private Fedge’s locker.
“Where did you get that radio, Fedge?” Gibson asked.
“I found it.”
“It’s mine.”
“You saying I stole it, cocksucker?” Fedge reached for the M-l he had just finished cleaning.
“That’s not loaded.”
“The fuck it ain’t,” Fedge said.
“Are you going to listen to Charley McCarthy tonight?” Dick asked without hope.
“What’s Charley McCarthy?”
“Fedge, you asshole, Charley McCarthy’s the orphan. He lives with Mr. Bergen,” Private Laverne said.
The Dick Gibson Show Page 11
