The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  Arnold would stand behind the makeshift curtain and I would introduce him, adopting what I took to be the styles of the various MC’s he might encounter. Thus a late night television show: “This next guest is one who’ll give pause to any of us who’ve ever had to take out our Social Security card to look at before writing down the number. He’s a memory expert who calls himself an eidetic—a man with a photographic mind. Let’s bring him out and have him take some pictures. Ladies and gentlemen—Arnold Menchman.” Or: “Mr. Sy Tobin and the management of the Sands Hotel present … ‘The Great Arnold’!”

  Sometimes Arnold would just be standing there, as in a tableau, when I drew the curtain. Other times he would run out from between the curtains in that snappy locomotive jog entertainers do, their heads down, their hands balled into fists at the level of their chests, the orchestra playing “Fine and Dandy.”

  After a while we saw the limitations of our makeshift stage. Though Arnold could have gone on right then if there had been an audience. He knew every square inch of that room, at home as a blind man in his square yards of familiar darkness. We had to try him in other environments, for place—mere place—was our problem. Arnold wasn’t stupid. Unlike other “mentalists” he enjoyed what he knew; the things he saw when he closed his eyes were full of wonder for him. And he was selective: he didn’t get any pleasure out of such stunts as memorizing whole Sears and Roebuck catalogs.

  DICK: Does he listen to the radio?

  PEPPER STEEP: What? Wait. Or pages from telephone directories, or timetables. Though he knew these too. Knew the Yellow Pages, knew the City and Town Indexes on the back of the Shell Oil Company roadmaps for every state. But encyclopedias, tracts on gardening, rock formations—these were his forte. The positions—listen—he knew the positions of the stars! But it is one thing to know a principle, another to apply it. For instance, Arnold knew dexterity—whole books of the dance he knew; he could have given you by heart the choreography of a hundred ballets—but he wasn’t dexterous. So place was our problem, the threat of place.

  Then I thought of the local television station. After all, this was how Arnold first knew about me, wasn’t it? As I told you, I’d done some things for them with my girls. Whenever there was a telethon I volunteered my students to handle the phones. For favors rendered I presumed to ask the station manager to let Arnold and me—after hours, of course: everything we did that year (giggling) was after hours, everything we did required keys—use his station.

  In the empty studio I would introduce Arnold. I wanted him to learn to step over the cables, you see, to get used to moving across a cluttered floor. Slowly Arnold learned to thread his way between cameras and light stands, to step over coaxial lines thick as roots. Then I would rearrange these, Arnold not looking, so that when he came from behind the Japanese screen where I made him wait before I announced him, it was into a new arena that he stepped each time. At first it was as if he was walking in a minefield. He was that cautious, picking his way, high stepping as a man in heavy weather.

  We made it into a game. If he brushed against anything he lost a point. “No, Arnold,” I’d call. “You’re still too tense. Try to relax. If you do collide with something, personify it. Keep it from falling. Brace its shoulders, smile at it.” With practice he became more natural, but it was slow work. When he could finally get through an evening at the TV studio without a serious blunder it was time to start all over somewhere else.

  Next we used the auditorium of a high school—the father of one of my girls was the principal—and Arnold came down from the stage into the audience and moved gingerly through a row of seats to wherever I happened to be sitting. This was particularly good practice, because half these acts are audience participation. Then one night I shouted up to him to pretend that there were no steps leading down from the stage and to negotiate the four- and-a-half-foot space to the auditorium floor in some other way. It was awful—as if our weeks of practice had never happened. You’d think I had asked him to jump from an airplane. He got down on his hands and knees and backed tentatively toward the apron of the stage. He looked ridiculous. He pushed a foot out behind him and groped with it for the edge. When he found it, he stuck out the other foot and waved it about, as if seeking some purchase in the air itself. Another time he lay prostrate on the stage, belly down, arms straight out in front of him and hands joined, exactly like someone doing a belly flop. He couldn’t move. I finally had to take his legs and actually pull him down from the stage. I felt like a fireman taking a housepet out of a tree. When he was on the ground again he slumped down on the piano bench, his head in his hands.

  “I never crawled,” he said finally.

  “What’s that, Arnold?”

  “I never crawled. My mother tells me I never crawled. Proper crawling is very important.”

  “Of course you crawled. All babies crawl.”

  “No. ‘Odd as it may seem to parents for whom the clumsy crawling maneuvers of a toddler are “cute” and often comic, the act of crawling is a sine qua non of proper locomotor development. Studies have shown a close relationship between later athletic development and efficient crawling.’” Arnold quoted letter-perfect from one of his many sources.

  “Then let’s teach you to crawl,” I said.

  “I’d feel funny,” he said. “You’d laugh. No, it’s no good. I’m too clumsy. I’m just wasting your time, Miss Steep.”

  “You aren’t wasting my time.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s no use.”

  “Are you going to give up now, Arnold? After we’ve made so much progress? Am I wrong about you? Are you a coward? Is that it? Maybe you haven’t got the guts to be in show business. Maybe your guts are as undeveloped as your grace. Because believe me, Arnold, there are going to be places where the stages aren’t equipped with stairs and it’s a bigger jump than a lousy four and a half feet.”

  “I can’t.”

  “These are bad times, Arnold. Everywhere our foreign relations are deteriorating. The Middle East, the Far East, Europe. Our neighbors north and south. Wars are coming, Arnold. The USO is going to be bigger than ever. Do you think the theaters in a theater-of-operations are going to have stairways? You’re going to have to make up your mind, Mr. Menchman.”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “Did I laugh when you fell out of chairs?”

  “No.”

  “Or when you tripped over your shadow that time in the studio?”

  “No.”

  “Well then?”

  “Teach me to crawl,” he said.

  So I did.

  We crawled together across the stage all night. We played follow the leader on our hands and knees. It was exactly what was missing in Arnold’s locomotor development! Before we left that night Arnold had learned not only to crawl but to negotiate that jump. He could have leaped from any stage in the world. It was our single most productive session.

  Now Arnold could move almost as well as your average man on the street, and in the next two weeks he made even greater progress. Inside a month we were able to make a stage of everything, anything. We drove into deserted parking lots at supermarkets and Arnold burst out of the window of my automobile nimble as Houdini. He climbed the hood and jumped up onto the roof of the car like Gene Kelly. He scrambled up the pedestal of a statue in the park and, holding onto the horse’s leg, swayed far out over its base, cocky as a ballet sailor in a dance. He was beautiful, suddenly lithe as a cat burglar. I couldn’t have taught him another thing about movement … It was at about this time, incidentally, that Dick had him on the show.

  “I guess we won’t be seeing each other much from now on,” I told him one night when we got back to my studio.

  “You’re a marvelous teacher.”

  “You’re an apt pupil.”

  “I’m very confident about my appearance. I owe you a lot.”

  “You worked hard.”

  “I still really haven’t got much of an act, though.”

 
; “Oh, well,” I said, “your act. Your act is your mind.”

  “I guess so … But a person’s act has to be structured. There has to be a patter. You know. Style is important, delivery is.”

  “You’ll work it out.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know so much about these things.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Oh, you do. Miss Steep?”

  “Yes?”

  “If I gave you more money, could you … do you think—?”

  “What?”

  “Could you be my audience for a bit? Just for as long as it takes me to work out my routines?”

  “I couldn’t take money for watching you perform, Arnold.”

  “I’d be taking up your time.”

  “I’d love to watch you, but not for money. I’ve become very interested in your career,” I said.

  So that’s what I did. We still used the makeshift curtain, but the way he moved now it could have been the handsomest setting in show business. He invented his routines right before my eyes. All I did was teach him a few flourishes. Not very good ones, I’m afraid—just that kind of handling themselves that professionals do. You know what I mean—a hand clasping the forehead in concentration, or two fingers buttering the right eyebrow, chin cuppings, scowls to make what he did look difficult. Later we discarded even these. He didn’t need them; he was too good. His memory should seem to be what it was: a function as naturally available to him as touch. What was wanted was ease, the juggler’s divided attentions, his camouflaged concentration, to be centerless, detached, incorruptible. BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Just so, Pepper.

  PEPPER STEEP: I had never seen anything so fine. He must have known this, though he still needed assurances.

  “Will I be good, do you think?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I have every confidence.” We laughed together at the word.

  “Still,” he said, “I’m a naturally clumsy man, Miss Steep. My smoothness is only a veneer. Just tonight, getting off the bus to come here, I tripped and almost fell.”

  “An accident.”

  “Yes, but suppose I do something like that when I’m onstage?”

  “Onstage, Arnold, you’ll be magnificent. You move like a dancer.”

  “On our stages. Bare floors, familiar terrain, tamed place.”

  “Anywhere. Everywhere.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Arnold, I’d like to see one last performance.”

  “Oh?”

  “A final dress rehearsal.”

  “But it’s not here I’m worried about. This”—he gestured about him— “this is like singing in the bathtub.”

  “I don’t mean here.”

  “You don’t?”

  “The staircase.”

  “The winding staircase?”

  “Yes.”

  “The whole act?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tonight. Now.”

  “But I—”

  “Come.”

  We went to the high room where the staircase wound its wide barber’s spiral to within six feet of the ceiling. Standing at the bottom and shading his eyes, Arnold leaned his head back and looked up to the top step. “Go on,” I said. He glanced at me for a moment and began to move up the stairs, at first holding on to the rail, then letting it go. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced, “it’s with great pleasure and pride that we now present one of the most amazing performers in the world. The man you are about to see isn’t an actor, for an actor, properly speaking, is one whose dramas are inflexible and fixed. There is nothing inflexible and fixed about the drama you will now witness. Nor do I now introduce a man who is a mere adept in some unvarying physical routine which, though impossible for average muscles and ordinary limbs, is simply the product of repetitive exercise. Like the actor, however, and like the acrobat as well, he is about to face an extraordinary challenge—a challenge which each of us sitting here tonight faces daily. Ah, but we fail. This man won’t. It is a challenge of getting and a challenge of having, of keeping and possessing—of reach and embrace itself. For he pits himself not as the stand-in actor against the poet’s contrived pressures, nor as the proven tumbler against a previously conquered gravity, but as the one man in the world against—simply—everything! To have it all at once, easier than Atlas, bearing all the awful tonnage of impression—the juggler of the living world …”

  Yes, Dick Gibson thought, yes. Yes.

  PEPPER STEEP: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … the one and only Arnold Menchman!”

  Arnold stood on the top step, less than an inch between the ceiling and his head. He seemed colossal. He poised there for a moment. His hands—his hands were in his pockets! He looked directly at me. Then he closed his eyes, removed a hand from his jacket pocket and put it across his eyelids in a gesture I thought we had agreed to abandon.

  “There are thirty-seven steps in this staircase,” he said softly, “one hundred and eleven balusters. The stairs are covered by an Oriental-type carpeting about four feet wide. Seven basic colors predominate. In the descending order of their quantitative representation they are: red, dark blue, light blue, rose, white, grayish green and black.

  “Pick a number from one to thirty-seven, from one to one hundred and eleven.”

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know that he meant me to. In the past he had often repeated something he pretended had been called up from the audience.

  “A number from one to thirty-seven, please. From one to one hundred eleven. I’m waiting.”

  “Fourteen, Arnold.”

  “Fourteen, good. From one to one hundred and eleven. If you will, madam.”

  “Eighty-three.”

  “Eighty-three, excellent. Fourteen would be the fourteenth stair, balusters forty, forty-one and forty-two. Eighty-three would be the eighty-third baluster, or the highest baluster on the twenty- seventh stair. Choose right or choose left, madam.”

  “Left.”

  “My left or yours?”

  “Your left, Arnold.”

  “Thank you, madam. By the fortieth baluster—my left—you will find a rose-tinted curvilinear intersected at three angles by wormlike tendrils of grayish green, the tendrils given a slight suggestion of depth by being outlined on their right sides in a thin black. By the forty-first baluster—my left—you will have a small white snowflake shape sketched within a just larger but less rigid version of itself done in light blue. The forty-second baluster on my left is a simple run of red interrupted by four narrow, thrusting fingers of dark blue. You will have to check this information for yourself, madam, for you will of course have noticed that my eyes are shut!”

  “That’s marvelous, Arnold. You’ve memorized the Oriental rug!”

  “Am I correct, madam?”

  “Bravo, Arnold. Bravo. The ninetieth baluster. My right.”

  “A light blue bell.”

  “The fifty-second. Your right.”

  “A breast. White. A rose nipple.” He opened his eyes. “Oh, Pepper,” he said. He ducked his head shyly for a moment and then looked at me. Then he came down the stairs, his body sinking out of sight each time the stairway turned and reappearing as it opened out, his gaze still locked in mine. At the eighth step he spoke. “Oh Pepper,” he said again, reaching his hands out to me. “I’m so pleased.” At the bottom step he took my hands and held them.

  “You were grand, Arnold,” I said. I had to look away.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. You were superb, immense.”

  “No, please. What?”

  “Nothing, Arnold. I’m being a little selfish.”

  “You, Pepper? Oh, no.”

  I tried to smile. “Well, you don’t need me any more—you know that, don’t you? Your performance just now. Even the way you came down those stairs, you could have been Fred Astaire. You just graduated from the Charm School.”
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br />   “Pepper, don’t talk like this.”

  “No, really. Fred Astaire himself. You don’t need me any more.”

  “I wanted to be good for you.”

  “Well, you were. Very good.”

  “Pepper?”

  “What is it, Arnold?”

  “Will you be my … manager?”

  ”I don’t know anything about managing anybody, Arnold.”

  “Well, I don’t either. I need to be managed.”

  I didn’t argue. I was honored that he’d asked me, and it must be pretty clear by now that we were in love.