DICK GIBSON: Look, come on. Who’s supposed to have this gun? If someone really has a gun—
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Tell him. (silence) Go ahead, tell him. I release your tongue. You may speak, (silence)
DICK GIBSON: There. You see? I don’t deny, of course, that Mr. Behr-Bleibtreau could come up with an appropriate voice, but I wonder how convincing his bang bang would be.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Tell him!
DICK GIBSON: Tell me.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ncy chymyc Tell him.
MEL SON: What do I have to lose? It’s almost all up with me anyway. Gibson’s tie is brown and yellow stripes. The walls are green.
DICK GIBSON: Mel? Is that you, Mel? Is he doing your voice?
DICK GIBSON: (whispering) (I didn’t ask that.)
MEL SON: It’s me.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Show him the gun, why don’t you?
[Mel Son takes a revolver out of his pocket.]
DICK GIBSON: What is this? Mel, what’s happening?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Does he have a gun?
DICK GIBSON: Yes.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Did you say yes or was that me imitating your voice?
DICK GIBSON: I said yes.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Speak up. Will Dick Gibson deny that Mel Son has a weapon in his hand? Supposing for a moment that the audience has been hearing two Dick Gibsons, a real one and an imposter—which is not the case—that would still leave the real Dick Gibson to deny the existence of the gun. Does he deny it?
DICK GIBSON: I already said he has a gun. I already said so.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: There are no disclaimers? It’s not too late.
DICK GIBSON: The gun’s real. The real Dick Gibson says the real gun is real.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Very well, then.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: You really are a superb mimic, Mr. Gibson.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Stop that.
DICK GIBSON: Is that loaded?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Show him.
[Mel Son holds the gun out and Dick Gibson peers into the chambers of the revolver. The leaden tips of the bullets resemble dull stones in a bracelet.]
DICK GIBSON: (softly) You want to put that back, Mel. What would you need a thing like that for?
MEL SON: I’m hunting. I’m a hunter.
DICK GIBSON: (to Behr-Bleibtreau) Why don’t you talk to him? Can you talk to him?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Me? Shall I hypnotize him?
DICK GIBSON: Why would a man bring a gun into a radio station? He’s supposed to be a professional. That’s got to be against FCC regulations. I just hope this program isn’t being monitored. There’d be one hell of an investigation.
[There is a click.]
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: He’s cocked it.
DICK GIBSON: Listen, I don’t like what’s happening here. I think we need the police, (to the listening audience) Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick Gibson, WHCN, Hartford, Connecticut. There’s a man in my studio waving a revolver around. If the police are listening, would you get over here, please? Maybe one of you listeners ought to phone them and tell them what’s happening.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Do you think that was wise? He could kill half a dozen people before the police even got close to him. He means to die. anyway.
DICK GIBSON: We don’t know that.
MEL SON: We know it.
DICK GIBSON: (to the listening audience) Forget what I said. Don’t phone the police. (to Behr-Bleibtreau) If the police heard me they’ll be coming. They’d have to; it’s their duty. There’s no way to stop them.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: They didn’t hear you.
DICK GIBSON: They didn’t? (suspiciously) They didn’t, eh? (whispering now) (Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick Gibson, WHCN, Hartford, Connecticut, the Qui Transtulit Sustinet State. A fantastic thing is going on at this station. I’m sitting in Studio 2A, where several people have gathered for an informal midnight-to- dawn talk program called The Dick Gibson Show. The guests, Jack Patterson, Bernard Perk. Pepper Steep and our Special Guest, Psychologist Edmond Behr-Bleibtreau, together with Jerry the engineer and yours truly, Dick Gibson, the show’s host who is wearing a solid blue tie, are being held virtually at bay in the white-walled studio along with several of their guests by Mel Son, an Amherst, Massachusetts, disc jockey and former unsuccessful candidate for the Massachusetts State Assembly. I don’t know how long I’ll be permitted to speak into these microphones, ladies and gentlemen, but as long as I’m able I’ll try to give you a picture of what’s happening here. There are, of course, several eyewitnesses to these events, and I’d put them on the air to let them describe in their own words all that’s occurred, but unfortunately, all their voices seem to have been stolen, with the exception of my own, Mel Son’s, and Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau’s. The pussycat’s got their tongues. Dr. Jack Patterson of Hartford Community College made a brief remark a little over an hour ago to Bernie Perk, the registered pharmacist, but since then has lapsed back into silence. Listeners to the program heard Patterson’s voice again a few moments ago when he reputedly handed Behr- Bleibtreau a napkin to wipe some ketchup off his glasses, but both the remark and the ketchup incident itself have been challenged by your reporter who believes the learned psychologist to be some kind of hypnotist/ventriloquist. At any rate, the three principals seem to be Behr-Bleibtreau, Mel Son and Dick Gibson. Wait, Behr-Bleibtreau is about to speak. Let’s listen … )
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ncy chymyc.
DICK GIBSON: (Did you get that, folks?)
MEL SON: I … My …
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ync hcmyc.
DICK GIBSON: It’s really kind of wonderful the way you guys worked all this out between you to take over my program. It’s really very funny.
MEL SON: [He brings the barrel of the gun down heavily across the bridge of Dick’s nose, drawing blood.]
My name is Mel Son. I’ve been in a trance, but I’ve just been released—I get the feeling temporarily—in order to tell my story. I’ve never been in a trance before. It’s queer. It gives you a funny feeling. Everything in the trance but Dick’s tie was sort of blue—oo—oo and soft. Your eyes are blue, Dick.
DICK GIBSON: My eyes are blue.
MEL SON: Your blood—where I cut you—your blood is blue … gee, I just can’t get over this trance business. Once I was hypnotized in a nightclub. There were fifteen of us and we all went under, but this was nothing like that. This was like being sick or something. I don’t really mean sick—nothing hurts or anything like that—but it’s … well, dreamy, as if you were heavily medicated or just beginning to come down with something. It’s like the way you’re sensitized sometimes in a barber’s chair getting a haircut in winter. The back of your head gets all prickly. It’s terrific. I mean, I was really getting excited. And I’ll tell you something else. I never felt—this is important—I never felt humble. I mean, you’d think if a guy’s in a trance his will would be rendered helpless, that he’d be going around. Yes, Mastering everything in sight. But it isn’t like that at all. As a matter of fact, you feel very proud in a trance, almost stuck-up. You have a lot of confidence. It’s all very dignified. That’s the truth about trances. If you want my honest opinion, I think you’re making a mistake to waste your pity on enchanted princes locked up in trees. I can’t get over it. It’s really fantastic. I tell you, there’s more than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
DICK GIBSON: Less.
MEL SON: No, Dick, more—much more.
DICK GIBSON: Why don’t you put the gun down, Mel?
MEL SON: Not just yet, Dick. I’ve got to shoot myself with it. I’m going to put the barrel in my mouth and blow my head off. Brr. What a way to go! That’s a phrase that’s always gotten to me— you know what I mean? Another one is—you get this on the news wire every once in a while— “So-and-so killed his wife and three children and then turned the rifle on himself.” That sounds horrible, but I don’t get the logistics of it. A man would have to have incredibly long arms to turn a rifle on himself. “He put a bullet through his
brain”: that’s another one. How discrete that sounds. So definitive. That’s the sort of thing I’m after. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I chose to do it on the radio. It’d be a different thing altogether if I snuck off in a corner by myself. I’d have done it on my own show but I don’t reach the market you do.
To tell the truth, I haven’t settled how I’ll do it yet. I thought I might sit on the pistol. Or stick it in my ear. Or against the part in my hair. Or through my eye. Or inside my shirt, or under my arm. Or against my heart. Or across my Adam’s apple. Do you get what I’m aiming at? Ha ha. Ignition, explosion, obliteration, smear. Something really dirty: he died as he lived. Before and After—that’s it. Here today, gone tomorrow. And a stain that won’t wash out. Something in me green or blue in the woodwork like grain. My nostrils divorced and my eyes disappeared, hair in the wound and skin on the floor. Bone around like shattered glass. Pieces of tooth, and my ingrown toenails out. My sideburns on fire and a hole in my birthmark. My death archeological, my corpse my body’s palimpsest. Mel melded. Jigsaw Mel the Sonsaw puzzle. Mosaic me. Blood and blood. Mel Sundry. Mel the Sonset, Mel the Melted. Molten Mel the Sonburned. The Sonspot.
DICK GIBSON: [Upset. His wound, where Mel struck him with the revolver, is throbbing. Fantastically, it occurs to him that if Mel kills himself or if Behr-Bleibtreau takes his voice, he will never have done a quiz show.]
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to … Night School! This is your host on the college of knowledge, quizzer whizzer Dick Gibson. Tonight’s contestant is Mel Son the Suicide, Amherst d.j. and d.o.a. Let’s try to get some answers—Mel?
MEL SON: Quizzer whizzer?
DICK GIBSON: Yez zir, yez zir. Are you ready for the first question?
MEL SON: I am. For the time being I am. But hurry, hurry. I’ll plug my pulse and blast my blood. I’ll shoot my shirt and kill my collar. I’ll—
DICK GIBSON: All righty. (to his mute guests) No coaching from the audience. The question is … Why? Do you have that? Would you like me to repeat the question?
MEL SON: Would you repeat the question?
DICK GIBSON: Surely. Why?
MEL SON: Sin.
DICK GIBSON: Sin?
MEL SON: Sin, sir.
DICK GIBSON: Sincerely?
MEL SON: Sine qua nonly.
DICK GIBSON: Could you develop that a little? This is an essay question.
MEL SON: Well … because. Let’s just say that I’m petitioning for an undress of griefiness.
Mel Son’s Story:
Mel Son was a normal child, no more curious than any other child his age—and no less. His hands had spent time in his mother’s brassieres; he’d fingered Dad’s jock and spied on Sis. But necessity wasn’t involved. It was just that same neutral obligation that makes an older boy smoke his first cigarette or one ten years younger sit behind the steering wheel of the family car while his mother shops.
Puberty hit him as hard as it does others, but if he was uncomfortable he was no more so than anyone else. It was as normal as the day is long. There were wet dreams—I don’t remember them, only the sensations—and some masturbation—I found it difficult; I could never really decide what to think about—and once in a while dates. It was a routine adolescence, steady as she goes.
Then, one night when I was fifteen years old, an old man sat next to me in a movie theater. He put his hand on me and stroked me till I came. It felt good and I let him. Maybe it was because there was a girl with me and my senses were already aroused, or that I knew that there was no chance, absolutely no chance in the world, that this girl would do to me what the old man was doing. Or it may have been something else, something about the old man’s surreptitious skill. Sly and smooth he was as a pickpocket … Whatever, I let him.
Do you see what I’m driving at? Do you know what I’m saying? That I’m queer? No! It was normal. That the pressures I felt, the feelings I had—they were mine, my own. What did they have to do with girls or women? What did they have to do even with that old man in the theater? Do you see? It was my thigh, my neck, my cock, my balls. Not pussy, not tits. It was my young man’s own ass I sat on, my skin I lived in, my reflexive flesh. I never made the leap of sex.
And how is it made? What round peg/round hole argument in sex waiting on puberty like the plain geometry? How does it happen? What Noah instinct is it—in me omitted—that drives us two by two to beds like polite company approaching table? By what inevitable degrees does bent become inclination, inclination tendency, tendency penchant, penchant disposition, disposition fate? Is there glue in those brassieres? What lodestar astrology shoves our lives? Where’s it written, eh? As if love could only be the prescribed friction! Hah! I’ll write you a new prescription! Why, love machines! Marry the bus that takes you to town, that throbbing thing! Embrace wind, kiss the earthquake, hold the sea! Make up to gravity! To all the physics of adversity!
Feelings’ other was never for me. Erection was extension, not tropism. I was born sexually intransitive, a sort of mule, but complete too. Or now complete—since that old man complete. Anyone would have done: the girl I was with that night, men, whores, boys, wives—anyone. Or anything: my prick lapped by dogs, flies walking the white underside of my arm, tight squeezes, the warm pressure of the bathwater, Foot-Eeze machines, spot- reducing machines, whirlpool baths, a fast trot on a warm day on a good horse over rough ground!
And I was no more grateful to the man than I would be to the fly or the horse! And I wasn’t reciprocal; I have never wished to hold or mount or touch or taste another human being. Oh my body’s buttons, oh its levers, oh its zones! I want hands on me, in me, breath in my ears, fingernails on my back, a tongue at my toes, cunning massage. And I’ll tell you something else: it’s too damn much work to jerk off. Though after the old man I at last knew what to think of: why me, why myself! After the old man I couldn’t look at my naked reflection in the full-length mirror in the bathroom without getting excited!
So that’s about it, quizzer whizzer. I’ve lived with bad men, men so bad they’ve never wanted anything from me in return.
[He winks at State Assemblyman Victor Ash.]
DICK GIBSON: You’re killing yourself for your sins?
MEL SON: Foo on my sins. Nah, what do they amount to? Lust and sloth. Nah. I’m killing myself because my gloss is going, because I’m heavier, because my hair’s falling out, because my teeth are rotten and my breath is bad. Even dirty old men draw the line somewhere. I will not live without pleasure. Where’s the solace, eh? I’ll put a ball in my balls. That’s it! Up my testicles to death. Whoops, confession’s over. I’m back in the trance.
DICK GIBSON: This is terrible. Will he do it?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Of course he’ll do it.
DICK GIBSON: [There is still the possibility that it is all a joke, but he is caught up in the strange program, the strangest he’s ever been on. Not really understanding how they’ve worked it, but suspecting—where were the telegrams?—that the show might not be going out over the air at all. (The engineer, given great powers, emergency powers, one of those like tugboat captains or bombardiers, say, who rise to command for brief interims, or secret servicemen who under certain conditions tell Presidents what to do, bishops crowning kings while the kingdom floats leaderless and unmoored—ultimate privilege hiding in them, all the more awesome for its ordinary invisibility and its provisional quality— could have cut all of them off the air whenever he chose.) But even if it wasn’t actually going over the air—and he still had the feeling that it was—it might be on tape, and even if it wasn’t on tape there was still the studio audience to think about, and even if they were all deaf as well as dumb, then there was still Behr- Bleibtreau and Mel and himself. The show must go on. And this, he thought, is all I have for principles.]
When? (softly) Shouldn’t we try to take the gun away from him?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: If you struggle with him you could be killed yourself.
DICK GIBSON: Mel? (no answer
) Mel? (nobody home) Mel. (out to lunch) Mel, it’s Dick, (closed for the duration) Mel Son. (Nobody here by that name; try down the street.) Professor Behr-Bleibtreau. (This sotto voce: in the style of the outnumbered, the beleaguered, two pals in ambush) (This is serious, Professor. That gun could go off any minute. Maybe if we could get him to keep talking … Why don’t you release his tongue again?)
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (It’s too late, but that gives me an idea. There may still be a way.)
DICK GIBSON: (Is it a long shot?)
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (Yes.)
DICK GIBSON: (Is it risky?)
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (Yes.)
DICK GIBSON: (Is it one chance in a million?)
The Dick Gibson Show Page 27
