The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  The lieutenant’s eyes widened. He was livid now, his face contorted with the bitter, contrary exercises of grief and grudge. Gibson knew he had to hurry. Ignoring the officer, he grasped the microphone still more tightly and drew it closer to him, as if the only way Collins could stop him would be to pull the equipment out of his hands. “We’re meat, we’re meat,” he cried passionately. (He saw his listeners come alive, one soldier beckoning the other to approach the radio, crawling out of foxholes in the jungle, gathering together around the Lister bag. He saw snipers leaning down from the trees to which they were tied. Thinking of the bombers that were even now zeroing in on Broadcasting House, fixing its roof between the crosshairs of their bombsights, he began to chatter ferociously, not calling as he might have to a panicky audience falling all over itself to escape a burning theater, “Calm down, calm down,” but a sub-articulate commiseration that cut through the traps of language, dispensed with hope and went abruptly into mourning. “Ah,” he said. “Oh my. Gee. Hmn. Yuh. Ah. Oh. Tch tch. Whew. Hmph. Boy.”

  Behind the glass in the control booth the lieutenant was leaning so far forward that his nose was blunted by the glass. “Tag,” Dick said. “We’re it. Boom boom.”

  “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to permit any of this stuff to get by,” Lieutenant Collins’s voice boomed out over the speaker. “What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are? Not a syllable of this will ever be broadcast! I’m stopping the transcription!”

  “They’re moving in,” Dick Gibson said, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I’m by myself. The bombs are falling.”

  “Hah!” the lieutenant cried. “I’ve shut you off. You’re just talking to the walls.”

  “I don’t know if you can still hear me, boys. I may just be talking to the walls, but I’m sticking to my post. Let’s have some music, what say?”

  “I won’t put it on for you!”

  “Over hill, over dale,

  Hell, they even read our mail,

  As those caissons go rolling along.

  In and out, hear them shout,

  I can’t wait till I get out,

  As those caissons go rolling along.”

  “Well, ex-sergeant, are you proud of yourself? Are you, ex-sergeant?”

  “There’ll be bullshit over

  The white cliffs of Dover,

  Tomorrow, just you wait and see.”

  “On second thought I am going to record this. It will make very interesting listening at your court martial.”

  “Anger’s a way, my boys,

  Anger’s a way,

  Why should we take their noise,

  Why don’t we run away—ay—ay—ay?”

  “That’s evidence. Right there. That’s evidence.”

  “This is the Army, Mr. Jones,

  They’ll shoot some bullets in your bones,

  You had your breakfast in bed before,

  But you dum la de dum in a war.”

  “You’ll get yours, Mister.”

  “Oh-hh say can you see

  How the powers that be

  Keep us down, in the groun’

  With the lie that we’re free?”

  He pushed his microphone away and leaned back. He was exhausted. The lights had ceased to flash. The air raid was over. Dozens had died, hundreds were wounded, but the rest of them were safe till next time.

  “You didn’t sign off,” the lieutenant’s voice croaked over the loudspeaker.

  “Right,” Dick Gibson said. He pulled the table mike toward him again and held it in his lap. “Fellow animals,” he said, “grr whinney whinney oink oink roar. See you at the crap table, catch you guys ’n’ gals in the bars, keep a candle in the whore’s window, meet you in the alley. Dick Gibson”—he hadn’t meant to use the name, but it slipped out— “signing off.”

  MP’s came. Before they arrived Dick had to be guarded by the lieutenant. They had nothing to say to each other, and he was embarrassed that the man had no gun; it would have been simpler for them both if he had. As it was it may have appeared to Collins—Dick was the larger of the two—that Dick was doing him a favor by not resisting. More probably, he may have thought that Dick was seeking favors. That was what brutes did; time and again, in difficulty, he’d seen them go boyish, go soft, presuming upon their deprivation to toady—brutes turned housepets. Dick couldn’t be sure that he had not intended this last possibility. Perhaps he meant to underscore a new strain in his character. Certainly when the MP’s came they didn’t seem to see anything strange in arresting him, or in leading him out of the building under armed guard. He was pleased in one way, not so pleased in another. He wasn’t sure he knew what to do next. In a sense he looked forward to his conviction, to some actual ruling on his status, a documentation of sorts of his character. Then he could be genuinely what they said he was. (To divide men into officers and enlisted men was a superb idea; he didn’t know how he had lived without it.) He was even impatient for the time when he would be turned queer by the absence of women (or the presence of men), impatient to learn their desultory violence and terrifying indifference. He yearned for the debasement of his taste and fastidy—it was a way of being free. Already he was astonished by his freedom, the liberties he took with his guards, for example— “Give us a smoke, chief”— affronts, gaucheries that bordered on risk, swagger the other side of his scruple, swinging from cringe to contempt as though character were nothing more than hinged mood. It was strange and exhilarating to live by the rule of whim.

  At the guard house—the British government had set aside a portion of the Inns of Court for use by the Americans as a detention center, and he had the fearful suspicion that the prisoners had been left in London to be bombed—he acted like a guilty man (that is, he behaved as if having committed one crime he could commit another), thus frightening many of the other prisoners, AWOL’s, the deserters for love, the careless missers of trains and buses, the cowards. Another prisoner remembered that he had been interviewed in Stars and Stripes and this seemed to induce awe, as if there could be no offense like the offense of the respectable. The prisoner, himself an accused murderer, pressed Dick to discover why he was there. It was when Dick admitted that he’d “told them what to do with it” that the man became deferential, words and will to him the ultimate violence. Dick decided that though the man had killed he was not one of the brutes at all.

  He stayed in the guard house for a week. After he had cleaned up his room each morning there was not much to do and he listened to the BBC. It was satisfying to him chiefly because of its clear classifying of its audience—even more meticulous and useful than the distinction between officers and enlisted men. During the week he also had three interviews with the captain who was assigned to be his defense counsel, a man who was a dentist in civilian life. Dick thought him too earnest, but in fairness he had to admit that he thought all dentists earnest. Only a very earnest man would be able to stand the sight and feel of an open mouth. (It was probably their excess earnestness that kept them out of medical school.) He was certain the dentist would not be able to get him off—certain also that only the dentist’s earnest objectivity kept him from expressing then and there his opinion of Dick’s actions.

  He learned that his trial was set for the end of the following week. When he was taken from the guard house four days before that date and conducted in a closed car—there was no one to guard him—to a castle in the English countryside, he was terrified. Angrily he asked his driver—a man of lower rank than Dick who, despite the protests of his lieutenant and engineer and director, was still a sergeant until proven guilty—why the dentist was not with him. “Is it a trick? My whole case rests on that guy’s arguments. If they’ve yanked my mouthpiece I’m sunk.”

  “Gee, Sarge, I don’t know a thing about it,” the driver said.

  Dick saw that the driver was not himself a brute (and where were they all, incidentally?) but just another poor innocent as Dick himself once had been. He
watched the man’s cautious negotiation of the left side of the highway, an effort that obviously still strained him.

  “So you don’t know a thing about it?”

  “That’s right, Sarge.”

  Dick leaned forward, almost pressing his lips against the driver’s neck. “Cut that Sarge shit, Mac,” he said levelly, “or you and me are gonna tangle assholes.” They rode on for a while in silence; then Dick became offensive again. “Fucking left side of the road,” he said brutally. “This whole fucking country is eaten up with faggotry and fuckery because the cocksuckers drive on the left side of the road. La la la. Why don’t you drive over on the right, you simple bastard? Let these assfarts know the Yanks are coming.” He leaned forward abruptly and jerked the driver’s arm so that the car swerved to the right. “Ha ha, the Yanks are coming!” Dick screamed. The driver recovered control of the car and Dick sat back, pretending to chuckle at his joke for the rest of the ride. Every once in a while he would glance at the terrorized driver. I must get used to meanness if I am to live in the world, he thought. Otherwise I won’t last, I’ll never make it.

  At the castle he was met not by MP’s but by three men in suits, big anonymous-looking men with the blunt faces of U.S. marshals or secret servicemen. Their very business suits suggested magicians’ costumes, bulging with what he took to be concealed pockets and trick linings, even their hatbands reversible perhaps, in emergency becoming signal strips seen for miles. Two of the men frisked him objectively, touching him heavily about his body, yet with a rapidity that made it all seem routine. They might have been checking him out to see if he was transporting fruit across a state line.

  Afterward they led him through the first floor of the castle, which had been renovated and was honeycombed with offices. The women who worked in these cubicles probably knew more about the war and what was going on, Dick thought, than even old Ed Murrow back in London. Two of his escorts left him at a small elevator and he rode up with the third. He was surprised to see the man push the button for the nineteenth floor; he was quite certain that there could not be nineteen floors in the castle. Probably he was in some terrific nerve center and in reconstructing the building they had put in secret floors between floors and beneath ground level, like the extra pockets in the secret servicemen’s suits. They stepped out into a richly carpeted hallway that looked more like the corridor of a first-class hotel than it did of either a castle or the offices below (above?). The man led him toward a large door at the end of the hallway, where he made Dick stop and lean against the wall to be frisked a second time. This took longer than the first frisking and was not nearly so objective.

  “Okay,” the man said finally, “you’re clean as a whistle.” Then he winked. “Incidentally, if you don’t mind my saying so, soldier, you’re mighty well hung.”

  “You must be some security risk,” Dick said.

  The man shrugged and knocked on the door. A voice that sounded vaguely familiar told them to come in. The secret serviceman opened the door and saluted. Dick gasped and saluted along with him; he was looking right into the eyes of a famous general. Like Dick’s guard, the general was dressed in civilian clothes and wore nothing to assert his identity save his famous face and a cluster of four small stars formed by diamonds and pinned to the breast pocket of his suit.

  The secret serviceman was dismissed and the famous general narrowly studied Dick’s salute. “Pretty loyal all of a sudden, hey, young fella?” he said. Dick remained braced and continued to hold his salute. “By golly, you’re a regular West Point cadet. Off the record, lad, are you sure you’re the same fella that tells my people they’re just meat?”

  Dick continued his salute, his chin so tightly drawn in toward his neck that the tendons began to quiver. “I can’t hear you, son,” the famous general said.

  “Yes, sir,” Dick said. “I’m he, sir.”

  “Ha. He admits it,” the famous general said, turning around. For the first time Dick noticed that several high-ranking officers from various services were also in the room. He was despondent with panic. What did the chiefs of staff—if that’s who they were—have to do with his case? Was he to be made an example? Suppose they charged him with treason? They could shoot him.

  The famous general chuckled. “Child, that was sure some swell dodge your signing off that way. I’ve certainly got to hand it to you … At ease there, soldier … Yes sir, pulling all that traitor crap and then saying you were Dick Gibson instead of your real name. Of course, that wouldn’t win you an acquittal, but it’s lucky for you just the same that you thought of it. Isn’t it, boys?”

  Several of the officers grunted.

  “You know, my boy, your program is my favorite. Did you know that, youngster?”

  “Is it, sir?”

  “Hell, I’ll say so. Positively. That’s a fact. My favorite. Those songs. Stirring, absolutely stirring.”

  “I’m very pleased you think so, sir.”

  “Oh, I think you do a terrific job. If I have any objection at all I guess it’s that you don’t play enough golden oldies.”

  “Golden oldies,” Dick said.

  “Well, those were some pretty good songs they had back there in the first war,” the general said. “Not to take anything away from the stuff they’re doing now, of course,” he added quickly.

  “He doesn’t play any cavalry tunes,” a colonel in the tank corps objected glumly.

  “Do any of you fellows know ‘She’s the Mistress of the Quartermaster’?” another asked.

  “How’s that one go, Bob?” a two-star general asked.

  “You’re a lucky kiddy, son,” the famous general said, breaking in.

  “I am, sir?”

  “You’re mighty well told you are. Why, it’s only because I like your program so much that your case came to my attention at all. You know, it’s funny; I don’t really care all that much for music. My lady can never get me to go to a concert with her. I’m not even all that fond of a military band. I guess that as much as anything else it was you I was listening to. There was something about your voice. It reminded me of an experience I had, oh, back a few years now. Anyway, when there was a substitution for you on Patriot’s Songbook last Sunday I had to find out why. That’s how I heard about what you’d done. Well, naturally once I found out I just had to hear that record Lieutenant Collins had made. I can tell you one thing—you made me mad as hell. Why, I was all for hauling your ass up before a firing squad or something. Then, when you signed off saying you were Dick Gibson, why it suddenly came to me why I’d always been so fascinated by you.”

  “I don’t understand, sir,” Dick Gibson said.

  “Why, I guess you don’t. Well, of course you don’t. But I’ll get to it, son, I’ll get to it.” The general put his arm about Dick’s shoulder and led him toward a chair. “Do you recall a few years back working for a station in Nebraska?”

  “KROP,” Dick Gibson said, “the Voice of Wheat.”

  “Yes, that’s it, that’s the one. Well, sir, my first wife’s people live out in Atkinson, Nebraska, and when I was running the Fifth Army headquarters in Chicago, I sometimes had occasion to take old Route 33 to go see them. Well, I use the radio a lot when I drive. I kind of depend upon it; it helps me to stay awake. You see, I don’t like to stay in motor lodges or hotels—most of them aren’t very clean, you know; ’s ’matter of fact, the only place I like to stop is some army camp where they train inductees; I know that sort of place will be clean enough for any traveler to lay down his head—so usually I drive through. That’s where you come in. I was near the Iowa–Nebraska border, I remember, and suddenly I picked up this program, with this fella talking. Well, sir, as I already told these gentlemen, there was ice on that highway, and it was getting dark and I was tired—but I mean tired—and I’d already dozed off for a fraction of a second and only the sudden swerve of the car jolted me awake again. That’s when I picked up this program. Well, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard before. Something abou
t the voice … but not just the voice, what the voice was saying … I was fascinated. It woke me up. I didn’t want to miss a word. That was you speaking, lad. I remembered the name soon as I heard it again on Lieutenant Collins’s record—Dick Gibson. I don’t even recall now what you said back then. All I know is that whatever it was, it helped. I followed your voice all the way to Atkinson.”

  “There was something wrong with the equipment,” Dick Gibson said.

  “No sir. It came in perfect. Perfect. Best reception I ever had. Funny thing about that too, because I’d borrowed the car, and up to the time I picked you up the radio had been giving me trouble. But you came in perfect, no static or anything. It was as if you were right there in that car with me.”

  Dick remembered how good he’d been, how he had thought even at the time that he was in a state of grace. His chest heaved, and he felt tears coming. Whatever the general might tell him now, he knew that it was over; his apprenticeship was truly finished, the last of all bases in the myth had been rounded, his was a special life, even a great life—a life, that is, touched and changed by cliché, by corn and archetype and the oldest principles of drama. In ignorance and absent- minded goodness of heart he had taken a burr from the general’s paw. And the general had turned out to be the general and would now repay him. This was no place for it, but he began openly to cry, simultaneously congratulating and commiserating with himself. Good work, Dick Gibson, he thought. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought. You paid your dues and put in your time and did what you had to. You struggled and fought and contended and strove, and many’s the time your back was against the wall, but you never let up, you never said die, even when the night was darkest and it seemed the dawn would hold back forever. You showed them. You, Dick Gibson, you showed the dirty motherfucking fartshits and prickasses. You showed them good. Poor Dick Gibson.