In his dealings with the post office he learned that while the government would not rent a box to anyone unwilling to furnish proper identification, neither would it reveal the identity of a boxholder to anyone other than the representative of an authorized law-enforcement agency. He had no real fear for himself. He was confident that when the time came he would get away with the murder, but these conditions made it difficult to find out the name of the man in Latrobe. He was not discouraged. He remembered the caller from Georgia, the old man who found connections in everything. Surely if there were ways to delve behind the anonymity of a Pepsi-Cola bottle, there were ways to discover who was responsible for placing the ad. (It was a long shot, of course, but he couldn’t help hoping it would turn out to be Behr-Bleibtreau.) Actually, he didn’t have to start with the post office box at all. He could get the man’s name from the agency that had accepted the advertisement. With his connections in radio and his knowledge of the media, that wouldn’t be difficult; a couple of phone calls would do it. There were many ways. If all else failed he could go to Latrobe—he had a vacation coming—rent a box there himself and simply wait for whoever came to pick up the mail for “Top Secret!” Nothing was more simple.
Meanwhile, he waited for the pamphlets, checking the box every other day for three weeks. Then he began to wonder which would be worse, if the man who placed the ad sent the material or if he were running a swindle. Once or twice he was tempted to write a letter complaining about the delay, but each time he decided against it. To prevent the postal authorities from becoming suspicious, every so often he addressed an envelope to himself, always writing these notes on Deauville stationery but mailing them in plain envelopes.
A month passed, and still he had had no response from Latrobe. He decided to write the followup letter after all, but the very day after he mailed it the pamphlets arrived. Ain’t that always the way, he thought as he opened the box and removed the manilla envelope.
He returned to the Deauville and pored over what he’d been sent. It was all there, everything that had been promised: the formulas for poisons, the instructions for assembling guns and bombs—everything. There was one item that hadn’t been mentioned in the ad, a single sheet of greasy paper like the stock used in fortune cookies, the inked letters on the cheap paper like frazzled cultures under magnification. The sheet contained tips for growing and recognizing marijuana. The pamphlets had been run off on a mimeograph machine from abused stencils, and the illustrations were crude and vaguely pornographic like the backgrounds in ancient eight-pagers. The staples that held them together were at odd angles to the page; several were rusty. He shook his head sadly at the poverty of being that was revealed by the author/illustrator of the pamphlets. It was too shabby—basement evil, the awry free enterprise of a madman. Would the devices even work? How could he kill him? Nothing would change.
He scrawled a note to Robert Sohnshild at the Attorney General’s Office in Tallahassee. “Dear Bob,” he wrote, “the enclosed material has recently come to my attention. Is there anything your office can do?” He added a brief postscript. “You know what my hopes are for you and for Angela and for the baby. We are powerless in these things. What more can I say?” He placed the note on top of the pamphlets, shoved everything back into the manilla envelope, resealed and readdressed it. Maybe I would have killed him, he thought, if the mails had been faster. Maybe if I ever find out the man’s name and happen to run into him I’ll still kill him. But probably not.
He left the envelope with the woman at the information desk of the Deauville to mail for him. Surrendering it, he thought, ah, the cliché, the relinquisher, the man who walks away from triumph, who renounces revenge.
He asked the doorman to bring his car. Perhaps it was Behr-Bleibtreau who had permitted him his destiny after all, Behr-Bleibtreau who would have been his enemy, who would have focused the great unfocused struggle of his life but who had failed to show up, who had left him standing high up on the pitcher’s mound in the Gainesville park, unheeded and alone and with an unobstructed view of the corny convertible with its top down and the mended Dick Gibson sign taped to its sides. On the mound there, silhouetted, a target of sorts but abandoned, with his arms at his sides, his shoulders slumped and only his eyes still moving, darting this way and that, searching desperately for the man who would bring the mortal combat with him that would save his life. And then even his eyes stilled, mute as his character, everything stilled at last except for the potato and wheelbarrow racers, the oddly coupled men and women tied together at the ankles or locked back to back or joined in gunnysacks or squeezed in barrels or pressed facing each other and scrabbling sideways in the crab’s oblique drift.
He drove down Collins Boulevard to the radio station and gave his car to the man in the Fontainebleau parking lot. He crossed the street at the light and rode up in the elevator to his studio. He waved wearily to the men in the control booth and took his place at his desk. The engineer asked for a voice level and Dick, confused for a moment, turned to see where the sound had come from.
“Give us a level, Dick,” Orchard repeated.
He looked at the microphone. “Please stand by,” he said softly. “One moment please.”
“Too low, Dick,” Lawrence Leprese said. “Can you move a little closer to the mike? We’ve got about a minute.”
“Oh,” he said.
“That’s better,” Leprese said.
“What I wanted,” he said slowly, “was to be a leading man, my life to define life, my name a condition—like Louis Quatorze.”
“A household word, is that it, Dick?” Leprese said over the loudspeaker. “The level’s good.”
“Not glory, not even fame.” The buttons on the phone were already lit. “Not a hero, not even very dependable—”
“Thirty seconds, Dick.”
“—but to be excited. To live at the kindling point, oh God, at the sound barrier.”
The On the Air sign came on. It flared behind its red glass, bright as blood on a smear on a slide. He leaned forward and spoke to the microphone. “This is Dick Gibson,” he said, “WMIA. The scrambled I Am’s of Miami Beach.”
He picked up the phone and jabbed one of the lighted buttons. “Good evening, Night Letters.”
“I’m this man’s mistress,” a woman said. “His wife is dying and he has to take her to a different climate. He’s asked me to—”
“Wrong number,” he said, and punched another button. “Night Letters.”
“My doggy was run over.”
“Line’s busy.” He took another call. “Night Letters.”
“I’m a peeping Tom. I think I’m going blind.”
“It’s a bad connection.” All the buttons on the phone panel were lit. He pressed one again. “Good evening. Night Letters.”
“If only, if only, if only—”
“Wrong number, bad connection, line’s busy, he ain’t in. This number isn’t in service!” He wiped his face and poked another button. “Hello, Night Letters. Who’s there?”
“The President of the United States. Dick, Bebe Rebozo and I are terribly concerned about what’s been going on in Vietnam …”
The End
A Biography of Stanley Elkin
Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.
Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.
Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered
around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.
In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.
Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review. Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated with Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Even though he was confined to a wheelchair toward the end of his life, Elkin continued teaching classes at Washington University until his passing in 1995 from congestive heart failure.
A one-year-old Elkin in 1931. His father was born in Russia and his mother was a native New Yorker, though the couple raised Stanley largely in Chicago.
Elkin in Oakland, New Jersey, around 1940. His parents, Philip and Zelda, originally met in this camp in Oakland, which lies at the foot of the Catskills.
Elkin as a teenager in Oakland, New Jersey. Throughout his childhood, Elkin and his family retreated to Oakland for the hot summer months, spending July and August with a group of family friends. His time there would later inform much of his writing, including the novella “The Condominium” from Searches & Seizures.
Elkin at a typewriter during college. Throughout his time as an undergraduate, Elkin was routinely praised by his English professors for the intelligence and wit of his work.
Stanley and Joan on their wedding day in 1953. The county clerk who signed their marriage license was Richard J. Daley, who would go on to become the mayor of Chicago as well as one of the most notorious figures in American politics during the 1960s.
Elkin with his son Philip in Urbana, Illinois, in August of 1959. Philip, who was named after Elkin’s father, was adopted in 1958.
The first page of Elkin’s debut novel, Boswell, marked with editorial notes. The book was published in 1964 while Elkin was an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Elkin in 1964, the year he published his first novel, Boswell. He went on to write nine more novels, as well as two novella collections and two short-story collections, during his tenure at Washington University.
Stanley and Joan Elkin pose with their children in front of an oil painting of Elkin at the Olin Library at Washington University in 1992. The painting was completed and installed in 1991.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of this book originally appeared in Esquire, Works in Progress, Dutton Review, and the Iowa Review.
copyright © 1970, 1971 by Stanley Elkin
cover design by Milan Bozic
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0434-4
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
The Dick Gibson Show Page 41
