The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  “Don’t,” his brother said. “I’m sorry, I’m—”

  “Can you stand in the sky?”

  “Please,” Arthur said, “I feel lousy about this.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’ve been very decent. You’ve—what’s that? Who’s there?” A pale shape was moving in the darkness. “Carmella?” The lightning flashed again and he saw that she was naked, as was Arthur. So she hadn’t waited. It was exactly as if she had broken an appointment with him.

  Now his heart was broken. It was a Dick Gibson first. He went downstairs and packed. There wasn’t much. He played the radio as he put his few belongings together.

  He had been off the radio for three months when he left Pittsburgh. For the next few months, into the winter of 1960, he traveled about the country. He had some money—he had saved perhaps $30,000 over the course of his career—and he used planes and rented cars as he had once used trains and buses. Since the apprenticeship was on him again, he went to the places where he had first broken into radio: to Kansas and Maine and eastern Washington, to Roper, Nebraska, where he had worked for the Credenza brothers on KROP, to Arkansas and Montana, to all those unbeaten paths and peripheral places on the American pie where he had been young. There were motels everywhere; it was all beaten paths. He stayed in the motels and listened to the radio, monitoring the stations he had once worked, referring to his log, the by-now thick notebook in which he kept records not only of the programs he had done but the times at which they had been broadcast. He listened out of some deep anniversarial sense, not celebrational but memorial. These time slots were his birthdays and sacred holidays, the ear’s landmarks, and what he heard came across to him not as news or music or sports but as the sound of time itself.

  A few of the stations for which he had worked had become network affiliates, and in such cases he stayed only long enough to absorb some of their local programming before moving on to the next town. Once or twice he found that a station had long since closed down and he had a nervous, complicated sense of stricken time, the place’s mornings and evenings and afternoons without demarcation for him, as if invisible bombs had fallen on abstractions. These occasional disappointments apart, he discovered that most of his old stations were not only still in operation but were almost the same as during his apprenticeship. Even some of the voices he heard were familiar to him, for the voice ages less than anything; it is more constant than a nose or the shape of the mouth that houses it. There were familiar commercials, intact after all these years, slogans he hadn’t thought about for a quarter of a century but which lined his memory like nursery rhymes and released in him surges of affection for jewelry stores, all-night restaurants, lumberyards, nurseries and farm-equipment agencies. Yet even when he recognized a familiar voice he never called the station to remind an old colleague of their mutual past. He was content merely to listen, reassured by the familiar, his nostalgia a sort of credentials.

  Despite change, much had remained the same—or else progressed sequentially that having known the beginning he might have anticipated what came afterward. Again he was struck by his old sense of the several Americas; he knew that lurking behind the uniformities of federal highway system and the green redundancy of enormous exit signs that made Sedalia seem as important as Chicago, and the blazing fifty-foot logotypes of the motels, and colonial A&P’s and Howard Johnsons’ like outposts of Eastern empire in west Texas’s scrub country, and teller’s cage Dairy Queens wantonly labeled as old steamer trunks, and enamelly service stations, and in back of all the franchised restaurants and department stores—there was a Macy’s in Kansas City—dance studios, taco stands, drugstores, motion picture theaters and even nightclubs, and to the side of the double arches of the hamburger drive-ins and the huge spinning chicken buckets canted from the perpendicular like an axis through true north, America atmospherically existed. It wasn’t the land; he had no mystic’s or patriot’s or even householder’s sense of the land at all. Region somehow persisted inside monolith. The Midwest threw a shadow as exotic as Spain’s. He believed in all of it. New Englanders were salty, Southerners proud. Westerners independent, Easterners sophisticated, Appalachians wise and taciturn and knew the old, authentic songs. And beneath all that, beneath all the clichés of region, he believed in further, ultimate disparities between rich and poor and lovely and ugly and quick and dull and strong and weak. And structuring even these, adumbrating difference like geologic layer, character, quirk, personality like a coat of arms, and below personality the unspoken, and below the unspoken the unspeakable, so that as he walked down Main Street he might just as well have been in Asia. It didn’t matter that the columnists were syndicated or that the rate of exchange was one hundred cents on the dollar; he felt a vague, xenophobic unease. He stared at people as at landmarks or battlegrounds or historic sites; he moved up and down the aisles of Rexall’s Drugstore as through someone else’s church, and picked at the Colonel’s fried chicken like some fastidious visitor to Easter Island pantomiming his way through a feast of guts.

  He came away renewed, refreshed, his youth somehow confirmed in the spectacle of his abiding uneasiness. The apprenticeship could continue; he was anxious to go back on the radio.

  It was at about this time he began to send out his demonstration records.

  But he was restless. He preferred thirteen- or twenty-six-week contracts to anything longer, and developed a reputation in the industry as a drifter. Strangely, this didn’t hurt him. Somehow his itinerancy was attractive to station managers; it even lent him a certain glamour. What he was looking for was the ideal format. It formed in his mind slowly. What this was all about, what his apprenticeship meant, was that he wanted to do the perfect radio program. He didn’t know what that was, but he began to suspect it would have something to do with the telephone.

  In Ames, Iowa, at KIA—he was Bill Barter—he did one of the first telephone swap programs in the United States. Called Merchandise Mart, it was really a sort of classified ads column. People called up, described an article on the air they wanted either to trade or sell and left their telephone number. When the caller hung up Bill would describe the article again briefly and give out the telephone number a second time. The program was popular, and Bill, who had never owned much himself, had a genuine curiosity about his callers. He was surprised and even confused by how casually they offered to exchange one plum of possession for another. Their notions of trade indicated whim, sudden decision, mysteriously changed minds, ways of life and thinking that hinted at Hegelian alternatives. Thus upright pianos went for motorboats, motorboats for lawn furniture, lawn furniture for air conditioners. In their descriptions the items were almost always new or used only once or twice or for part of a season, and Bill Barter imagined unspoken tragedy, disqualifying accident, sons fallen overboard and drowned and the outboard cast out. The objects seemed to come with a curse, a heavy resonance of ruin and loss. It never occurred to him that they might not work and needed repairs; his callers did not seem horsetraders seeking an advantage. Indeed, the only times he was suspicious were when something was offered for outright sale.

  Other calls—hi-fi for a power mower—suggested windfall, upward mobility, some sudden unmiring intimate as disaster. So that he seemed continually caught in waves of disparate fortune, high and low tides of luck. He had a feeling of horserace, a seesaw sense of change. As the middleman he was untouched, a node through which the currents raced, and this, despite the innocuousness of the program, made him uneasy about it.

  Sometimes he could not resist thrusting himself into the deals of his callers. It was frustrating; the middleman was always dropping out of the middle, and he never knew if the traders found each other. It probably seemed playful to the audience, but he was in dead earnest.

  A woman called.

  “Good morning. Merchandise Mart.”

  “I want to speak to Bill.”

  “Bill speaking. Go ahead, please.”

  “Bill, I’ve got a nice double plot in
Ames Gardens Cemetery. I’ll trade it for a washer and dryer or sell it outright at a 20-percent discount. My number is Field 3-8927.”

  “Aren’t you going to die?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Aren’t you going to die? Did what you have go away? Are you cured?”

  “Listen, I want to speak to Bill.”

  “I’m Bill. You are speaking to him. Are you and your husband splitting up? Are you a spinster? Have you been living with your sister and now she’s getting married? I’m Bill.”

  “Quit horsing around, then, and take my number.”

  “Field 3-8927. I’m Bill. Are you marrying someone from an old Ames family with its own section in Ames Gardens? I’m not horsing around. Why a washer and dryer? Your voice is young. Maybe you have a lot of children and too many dirty clothes. Are you looking for a larger plot? Have you decided that your babies will be buried with you? I’m not horsing around. Do you have different ideas about death? Don’t hang up. I’m not horsing around. I’m Bill. Have you made up your mind to be cremated? Don’t ha—”

  An old man with a cultured voice called.

  “Bill Barter’s Merchandise Mart. Go ahead please, you’re on the air.”

  “Sir, I have an eighteenth-century Chinese Chippendale stand made of aromatic tea wood and in mint condition. The piece has been in my family for two hundred and thirty-seven years.”

  “Gee, what would you take for something like that?”

  “Well, I thought if I could get a real nice Barca-lounger or Simmons Hide-a-Bed—”

  People’s conceptions and arrangements bewildered and terrified him. A young man wanted to exchange a motorcycle helmet for a crucifix. Gardening tools went for animal traps, sheet music for rifles.

  A teen-age boy called up. “I’ve got nineteen pair of women’s high- heel shoes in sizes 7A through 9 double B. Assorted colors. I’ve got eleven pair of brown pumps. I’ll take yellow belts and percale pillowcases.”

  Once or twice he offered to buy things from his callers. He simply wanted to get to the bottom of at least one mystery.

  A woman called the program. “I’ve got a sixty-pound bow, Bill, and a complete set of newly re-feathered arrows plus quiver and arm guard.”

  “That’s just what I’m looking for.”

  “You?”

  “How much? What do you want?”

  “Have you got puppets? I need puppets.”

  “I’ll give you cash. Buy the puppets.”

  “I need used puppets.”

  “Why? Why, for God’s sake? I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

  “It isn’t the money,” the woman whispered. “Only used puppets will do.”

  The program made him nervous and he left it when his contract ran out.

  A few months later he did a straight telephone request show in Fort Collins, Colorado.

  “‘The Theme from The Apartment’ for Roger.” It was a man’s voice.

  “‘Days of Wine and Roses,’” a little girl sobbed. “It goes out for Phil and Doris.”

  “Is that your mommy and daddy? Do they drink? Is someone with you?”

  There were experiments. At KBS in Needles, California, he arranged to call old colleagues who had telephone shows of their own. They kidded each other about former employers and sent out regards over the air from mutual friends. He was trying to create an aura of the thick past, an untrue sense of ebullient history. They should seem to have been boys together—close, loyal, raucous as student princes from operetta.

  “Go on, Jeff, give my KBS listeners one of your famous commercials.” And as Jeff, across the country, complied, Dick—he was Marty Moon in Needles—drowned out his friend’s voice in campfire guffaw.

  One night in Ohio he called backstage to the Shubert Theater in New York and talked a stagehand into leaving the phone off the hook. By manipulating sound levels his listeners were able to hear a hollow performance of the second act of Hello Dolly, together with comments by the principals as they stood in the wings waiting for their cues.

  He tried to impart a sense of the spontaneous and wacky by giving his audience the impression that it had just occurred to him to telephone some world leader. Then he attempted to call De Gaulle or Nehru or Khrushchev. Most of the program was taken up with just the mechanics of placing such a call, with kibitzing the operators here and overseas. He never got through, of course, but once he reached a minor official in the Soviet Union who spoke a little English. Neither knew what to say to the other.

  He placed calls to whorehouses. He called a Mafia drop he had heard about, the town drunk, the village idiot. By now he was as obsessed with the telephone as he had once been with radio.

  One Monday night (he was off on Mondays) he was drinking in his hotel room in Richmond, Virginia. He’d had a letter that day from Arthur. Carmella was pregnant but was having difficulty. She was older than either of them had thought, probably too old to have an easy pregnancy. She was very sick, and it was a question of whether they would be able to save the baby. The doctor was afraid her water bag would break. She would have to be in bed for five months. Dick started to think about his old mistress and about his brother and about his life. He had drunk enough to be very sad. The radio was on, as it nearly always was whenever he was home—for years he had been unable to live without the sound; it often played all night; it influenced his dreams and was the first thing he heard when he woke up in the morning—tuned to a controversy show, one very much like the one he’d had five years before in Hartford. The guest, a Klansman, had even been on his old show once. He was very outspoken and people called up either to support him or to ask him annihilating questions. Since he had been in the game a long time, he was just as equable with his enemies as with his fans.

  Dick hadn’t actually been listening to the program, but now he picked up the phone by his bed and absent-mindedly began to dial the station. When he was connected he was put on hold. As he waited his mind was empty, not confused so much as fiercely blank. He had no idea what he was going to say, and when his turn came he began to talk about his life. He told about his childhood and his family, about his apprenticeship and about Miriam, about the war and about Carmella, who he said he loved, and all about Carmella’s trouble. The show’s host must have recognized his voice and didn’t try to interrupt him, letting him go on as long as he wanted. Then he talked about the last five years without Carmella, and he began to cry.

  This got to the host; the man tried to reassure him gently that everything was all right.

  “No, it isn’t. But if you want to know who I am,” he said, “I’m Dick Gibson.”

  3

  “Dick Gibson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dick Gibson?”

  “Yes. Turn your radio down. We’re on a six-second tape delay.”

  “What? Oh. Yeah. Just a minute. I’ll turn my radio down.”

  “Please. … It’s two-fifty on the Sun Coast, a balmy seventy- one degrees outside our WMIA studios on Collins Boulevard.”

  “Dick Gibson?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you two months.”

  “I’m pleased you finally got through. Go ahead, sir.”

  “Dick Gibson?”

  “Yes. Go ahead, please.”

  “Your feet stink.”

  “Oh?”

  “I smell them over my radio.”

  “But you turned your radio down.”

  “I smell them over my telephone.”

  The crank hung up. Dick took another call.

  He’d had the program for a little more than two years and had been Dick Gibson uninterruptedly all that time. He would never not be Dick Gibson again; he had even had his name changed legally. Laying to rest the apprenticeship forever, he had at last found his format.

  The program was a simple one, a variation of something he and radio had done for years. It was a telephone talk show, but slightly different from the hundreds of other telephone talk shows
. Dick Gibson’s Night Letters was a sort of club really, a kind of verbal pen pals. WMIA, a powerful clear channel, 50,000-watt station, sent out its signal in a northerly and westerly pattern, regularly reaching states throughout the South and Middle Atlantic regions. His listener/callers, chiefly from Florida and Georgia, though almost as often from Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas and Virginia to the north and Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas to the west, were loosely organized into clubs called Listening Posts or Mail Bags. There were perhaps 15,000 members who for a fee—which barely covered the cost of printing and handling—received a directory of the membership. (Countless others who were not members listened regularly and called the program.) Meetings were rarely held, but from time to time Dick traveled to one Listening Post or another and met fans. Though he preferred talking to them on the phones, it was something the members wanted.

  Anyone could telephone the program, but many of his callers were regulars, people who through some trick or other of dialing or patience were able to get through repeatedly. He recognized many of their voices, but he could even identify those who called in less frequently. Crank calls like the one he had just taken were rare. He barely ever had to cut anyone off the air; the six-second tape delay was a nuisance, and he wouldn’t have bothered with it except that the FCC required it. As it was, he used it sparingly; his Southerners were gentle in their speech, however violent they may have been in their private lives.

  The show went on from one A.M. until four, and during the course of a program Dick might take anywhere from fifteen to forty telephone calls. He was in no hurry to move things along or to get in as many calls as possible. He had become very patient, learning in the course of the show’s run that you got the most out of people when you let them go at their own pace. He would not, for example, have cut off the man who told him his feet stank.