The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  “Eat my dick, Laverne.”

  “Whip it out and I will,” Laverne said.

  Fedge whipped it out and Laverne ate Fedge’s dick. While Fedge’s eyes were still closed Dick Gibson seized the opportunity to lift his radio off the top of Fedge’s locker and take it back to his bunk. Something had happened to it when Rohnspeece had thrown it out the window, and to hear it at all, Dick had to stick his right foot in his locker and let the radio rest on his neck, steadying it with his hand. He felt this made him look rather like the woman of Samaria toting her water jug back from the well, but he hoped no one would notice. There was a good chance no one would since a crowd had gathered to watch Private Laverne eat Private Fedge’s privates.

  But Corporal Tuleremia came up to him.

  “Who are you supposed to be?”

  “Shh,” Dick Gibson said. “They just introduced W. C. Fields. He’s the guest star.”

  Tuleremia smashed Dick Gibson in the stomach. “I’ll show you stars, you pansy.”

  Dick decided he would have to listen in the dayroom from then on. There, with the radio page from the Sunday paper spread out before him, he carefully logged an entire week’s programs, checking them off with a pencil and starring those he was particularly interested in. On Monday he was listening to Lux Presents Hollywood, with Ginger Rogers as Kitty Foyle, when Blitz came into the dayroom. Blitz turned off the lights, walked over to the big console radio, fiddled with the dial and tuned in a yodeler. Then they listened to polkas for an hour in the dark.

  Dick turned amiably to Blitz. “Why don’t we share?” he suggested.

  “We can share your balls,” Blitz said neutrally.

  We’re going to win this war, Dick Gibson thought. We’re going to whip the Axis powers, the cunning Japs and vicious Nazis, and then we’re going to conquer the world.

  He had never known such men existed. For all the imagination that had enabled him to flesh out full-fledged accounts of ballgames from the flimsy data that came in over the wire, he could not have imagined men like Laspooney and Null. These two would wait until the men were seated on the boothless toilets and then come into the john, running amok, goosing and grab-assing.

  “Hey, Null,” Laspooney would shout.

  “What is it, Laspooney?” Null called back.

  “Don’t you just love these horseshoe toilet seats? A man can just shove his hand down the opening and grab,” he’d say, shoving his hand down the opening and grabbing.

  “Yeah, Laspooney,” Null answered, “there’s no place to hide.”

  Dick thought it odd that the army would take homosexuals, but as it turned out they weren’t homosexuals; indeed, off post, they beat up homosexuals. They just thought that grabbing people’s cocks was a good joke, almost as good as farting. Laspooney could fart a strong unbroken string for twelve minutes. They were real stinkers too. The men just fanned the air in front of their noses and laughed. Only Private Rohnspeece did not fan the air. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you guys,” he’d say, “I like the way it smells.”

  Late one night when Dick went into the crapper to polish his brass, Null was seated on the toilet. Though he was in the act of squeezing out a turd, Null grinned and waved. “Hey,” he called out. “Listen to this. Look. Look here.” He pointed toward the opening in the toilet seat, grunted and there was a splash. “Well, don’t you get it?” Null asked.

  Gibson shook his head.

  Null grinned and squeezed out a big one. “Now do you get it?”

  “Get what?” Dick asked.

  Null did it again. “There. That. Don’t you get it?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Null voids, you jerk,” Null said, exploding in laughter.

  Dick Gibson looked at him.

  Still smiling, Null got up off the pot. It was outside the range of possibility that he might flush the toilet, but he didn’t even wipe himself. He came over and wrapped his arm about Dick’s shoulder. “You know what’s wrong with you, soldier?” Null said. “You don’t get no fun out of life. Tomorrow me, you and Laspooney’ll go out for a night on the town. We’ll do things up brown.”

  Dick gagged. “Will we have to beat up queers and roll drunks?” he asked weakly.

  “Nah. Live and let live.”

  Dick was terrified, but he went with them. Null kept his promise and they didn’t beat up any queers or roll any drunks. They found a willing high school girl named Sheila and took her to a motor lodge and gang-banged her, Dick holding back when it was his turn and he was alone with the girl. “It’s nothing against you personally, Sheila, but I’m married and anyway I have too much respect for you.” He did not tell her that it was the smell of Null’s underwear, which seemed to be everywhere in the room, that inhibited him. “Could you kind of moan a little for their benefit, Sheila? They think I’m a grind and don’t get much fun out of life.”

  “Then you moan,” Sheila said.

  When Laspooney and Null returned, it was late and time to get back to the base. Sheila could sleep there and pay for the room, they said. Sheila said she didn’t have quite enough money to cover it and asked if they could let her have four dollars.

  “What are you, Sheila, some goddamned hoo-er?” Laspooney said.

  “Yeah, Sheila, is this one of your fucking slut hoo-er shakedowns?” Null wanted to know.

  “Come on, you guys,” Laspooney said, and began to slap her around. Null joined in and together they beat her up pretty bad.

  When they had finished Dick Gibson looked down at her helplessly. Sickened, his features had somehow formed a sort of grin.

  “What the fuck are you grinning about, Soldier?” Null said.

  Dick Gibson looked at him. “Don’t you get it?” he said.

  “Get what?”

  Dick pointed to the girl lying unconscious at their feet. “Don’t you get it? She’s bleeding.”

  “Oh yeah,” Null said, laughing, and slapped Dick Gibson on the back.

  Radio had badly prepared him for his new life. He had never suspected the enormous chasm between the world of radio with the sane, middle-class ways of its supposed audience and the genuine article. Only the officers—to the shame of his democratic instincts—were at all recognizable to him. Whom had he been speaking to over the air? he wondered. Was anybody listening? Was he the last innocent man? He was sure that he was not innocent, just less brutal, perhaps, less reckless, more hygienic than the next man. Who broadcasts to the brutes? he wondered ardently. Who has the ear of the swine?

  He asked permission to speak with his commanding officer.

  Captain Rogers, a railroad man in civilian life, pressed his tented fingertips in the classic position of executive consultation when Dick said he wanted to explain the reason behind his request for transfer out of the artillery and into special services. He might better serve the army in a slot for which he was better qualified, he said.

  The captain noted that Gibson had done well in artillery work and shouldn’t sell himself short.

  Dick allowed that that was true, and went on to use other phrases and arguments which he would no longer have dared to use with someone other than an officer. He reminded the captain that Joe Louis was in special services. Had the army made a mistake? Someone like Joe, with his superb physique and physical endurance, would make a splendid infantryman, but wasn’t the army and the country better served by using him to raise the men’s morale with his boxing exhibitions?

  “You’ve got a point there,” the captain said, “but what of the terrific boost to morale if Louis were an infantryman? Wouldn’t that be just the thing to show the men what democracy is all about? Wouldn’t it? I mean, when you take a world champ and treat him just like everybody else, well, something like that might be just the ticket for demonstrating the sort of country we are.”

  Dick Gibson considered. “Yes, Captain, that’s true in Louis’s case. But I’m already just like everybody else.”

  They were in the office of the man who ha
d been the golf pro for the Berkshire resort which the army had taken over for a training camp. The room still had the wide glass display cases that had once housed its former inhabitant’s trophies, and this, together with the rug—Dick, used to the heavy, absorptive carpeting of radio studios, always felt more sure-footed on rugs than on bare floors, or even on the ground itself—lent a pleasant donnish quality to the room. It was conducive to horseshit, Dick sensed.

  Well, that was all very well, the captain said at last, but how could he recommend Dick for special services when he knew nothing about Dick’s talent?

  Thereupon followed Dick’s strangest audition. Without a microphone or script and with only the captain for an audience he did what amounted to an evening’s mixed programming. He introduced records, paused five seconds, and pleasantly recapitulated the name of the song and the singer. He made up news. He did an inning and a half of a ballgame and then, guessing from the captain’s expression that he was no sports fan, rained it out and went back to the studio for a talk on first aid. He re-created this and he re-created that, all the time watching the captain’s face for cues to his tastes. For a few minutes he did a creditable job of reproducing an emergency at the transmitter, requesting the audience to please stand by, and had the pleasure of seeing the captain smile, a reaction he was at a loss to account for until he remembered that the man had been a railroader and must have experienced similar breakdowns in his line of work. Thereafter he hit the railroad angle pretty hard, doing all he could remember of the opening of Grand Central Station, a half-hour drama, and Tommy Bartlett’s Welcome Travelers, an interview show with people who had just gotten off the Twentieth Century Limited.

  Even in auditions he had been by himself, separated from the sponsor or the station manager by at least the plate glass of the control booth, and there was something so strange to him in this confrontation that soon he forgot why he had come. Each show he re-created now became an end in itself, something to be gotten through, and he had a heavy, hopeless sense of a truck mired in mud, of branches and rocks shoved beneath tires for a traction that would never be attained. He had forgotten that his aim was to capture the consciousness of the brutes, and here he was being polite, elegant and glib. At ten o’clock, an hour and a half after walking into the captain’s office, exhausted, he signed off, appalled to realize that what he had been doing was a frightening reenactment of his career.

  Shaken, Captain Rogers looked at him for two minutes before finally speaking. “You’re a regular show,” he said at last. “Request for transfer approved!” He slammed the blotter on his desk three times, left, center and right, with the fatty side of his fist in a mime of someone stamping documents submitted in triplicate.

  But it was no different on Armed Forces Radio. Dick’s show was broadcast on Sunday afternoons—that traditionally gray and sober time on American radio, after church and before the family-comedy programs of the early and mid-evening—and was called The Patriot’s Songbook. Though it went out on shortwave wherever American forces were stationed and to virtually every theater of combat, Dick was not pleased with it; he found the rigidity of the format and the endorsed quality of the sentiment burdensome. (Ironically, his audience had never been larger. The program was taken not just by the military but by dozens of independent stations across the country.) He had no illusions that he was reaching the brutes, for the program, thirty minutes of service and popular war songs, was something of a joke even at the London studio from which it emanated. The staff, most of them professionals like himself in civilian life, referred to it as “The Flag Wavers’ Songbook,” “Uncle Sam’s Lullaby Hour,” or even worse. The single thing he had to show for it, and this at the beginning, was his promotion to sergeant, an honor that simply reflected Armed Forces Radio’s fashion of having several of its programs hosted by noncommissioned officers.

  To Dick it seemed absurd to play recordings of rah-rah songs to men who had actually been in combat. He had heard too many vicious parodies of these songs; they were sung in comradely funk in every London pub, so he could imagine the words the men on the actual firing line might put to them. He made efforts to broadcast some of the milder of these parodies—though there were no recordings of them that he knew of—but every request was refused. Indeed, how could it be otherwise when even the innocuous remarks with which he introduced each record ( “This next song, ‘Semper Paratus,’ is the beloved anthem of the generally unsung seadogs in the mighty United States Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is one of our nation’s most trusted services. In peacetime it has the responsibility of enforcing maritime laws, saving lives and property at sea, operating as an aid to navigation generally, and preventing smuggling. In war it is a valued adjunct of the navy itself. A ‘Patriot’s Songbook’ salute to the Coast Guard!”) had first to be checked and approved by his superiors?

  Despite, then, his knowledge that Rohnspeece and Fedge and Laspooney and Null and Blitz and the others—if, in fact, they were still alive—had probably heard him, AFR being the only English-speaking radio they could pick up in most of the places where they could be, Dick had no hope that he had changed their opinion of him. He had the brute’s ear, but the brute was probably laughing. The brute may even have been pissing into the speaker cone or firing bullets at it or whipping someone’s ass with the aerial. He was a celebrity for the first time in his life—Stars and Stripes had interviewed him—but it had never seemed less important. In his interview with Stars and Stripes the one remark he had really wanted them to print— “Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose are much more effective. As a radio man I envy them both”—had been omitted, and he had sounded as bland as ever he had on the radio.

  The show was recorded on Tuesday nights in Broadcasting House, the BBC facility in London. Busy during the day, a few of its studios had been set aside for the use of the Americans late at night. One Tuesday, shortly after the appearance of his interview in Stars and Stripes, Dick was making an electrical transcription of Songbook when he saw the flashing red light that indicated an air-raid warning. He had been through other air raids in London, though one had never occurred when he was broadcasting. Seeing the light, he gathered together the pages of his script, switched off his microphone and rose to go the shelter. He was almost out of the studio when his engineer and director, a first lieutenant named Collins, called to him over the loudspeaker from the control room.

  “Sit still, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said. “There’s no telling when they’ll sound the all clear. I’m tired. The damn BBC won’t give us the goddamn building at a decent hour. We’re soundproofed, so I don’t think we’ll pick up the noise of the bombers in here. Hell, we can’t even hear the blasted sirens. Why don’t we just go ahead and finish the broadcast?”

  Sergeant Gibson looked nervously toward the signal light, which had now gone into a new pattern—a series of four short flashes followed by three long, indicating that the bombers were over the city. Except for the lights they would have had no hint that the bombers were overhead; in their windowless studio they might not have heard even a direct hit, and would have known that they were dying only when the flames had begun to lick at them.

  “Damn it, Sarge, sit back down,” the lieutenant ordered. “We’ll be okay. Watch the On the Air sign. When the sign comes on you cue in again after ‘Wing and a Prayer.’”

  Dick returned sullenly to the microphone and the lieutenant put the song on the turntable. The signal lights and the insane bravery of the music made Dick more nervous than ever. He wondered if men had ever gone into battle burdened by such themes. It was impossible, and he had a certain knowledge of the impossibility and inanity of comfort, suddenly realizing what must be the enormous irritation to the dying of all brave counsel and all fair words. Such must forever have tampered patience and ruined death.

  When the record finished the On the Air sign beamed on. In the brief moment before he began talking Dick strained to hear the bombers. He thought he could detect a buzz or hum, but it might have been
only the electric engines in the studio. The lieutenant rapped on the glass with his graduation ring and pointed furiously to the sign. Shaken, Dick lost his place, then found it again. “Fellas, that was ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’ as sung by the Mello-Tones.” He heard the alarm in his voice and longed to be in the bomb shelter, where he could hear the bombs when they exploded and feel the slight fleshly shift in the sand bags. He looked toward the booth but the lieutenant had leaned down to pick up the next recording and he could not see him. For all he knew he may have been the only person left in the building. His hand rattled the pages of his script and he lost his place again. “‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’” he repeated, stalling. Again he found his place and introduced the next song. It was “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World,” and as he listened to the lyrics ( “Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again”) he became furious. If he’d had a pistol he might have taken aim and shot the lieutenant right then. Why, he thought, surprised and not displeased, that’s how the brutes think, the ones who treasure their grudge and then, on patrol, calmly shoot their lieutenant in the back. Was he a brute? Good! So be it!

  He felt himself swell with power, a savage surge. “Bullshit!” he roared into his open microphone over the lyrics of the song. “Bullshit!”

  The lieutenant’s face appeared white and enormous behind the control room window. He seemed not angry, nor even astonished; he looked as bland and mild as a ship’s captain just relieved of command by his men. Dick saw his mouth move and his lips form words, but no sound came out; he had forgotten to depress the speaker button in the control room. Dick felt a triumphant flush of heroism, Horatio at the bridge, the Dutchman at the dike, the man in the radio room sending out his S.O.S.’s as the others lowered the lifeboats and leaped into them, all men covering all other men’s retreats—the guerrilla achievement. “Ah boys,” he cried, exultant, ”we’re the ones who pay. It’s us who bleed, buddies.”