The Dick Gibson Show (14 page)

What could have been in the man’s mind? Was he insane? On the way to a nervous breakdown? Dick Gibson might have thought so had his father not taken pains to be only
selectively
mad—mad, that is, merely in his older son’s presence. Dick was reminded of the premise behind entertainments like the
Topper
stories, where the ghosts appeared only to Topper himself. In this way he was pulled into the plot, felt himself, despite his laconic stance, essential to it, a bit player magnetically drawn toward center stage. It was not unflattering that here, perhaps, was a clue to his father’s intent.

So he came to associate his father’s actions with his recent experience with Miriam, his vain attempt to unlock the secret of her voice. (He’d lied when he’d told her he’d found the secret, though the fact was he’d come to believe it.) That is, he saw them as in some way related to his testing, more grist for his ongoing apprenticeship.

How weary he was of that apprenticeship! How ready to round it off where it stood, declare it finished! He read the trade magazines—
Broadcasting, Variety, Tide
—and saw with an ever more painful anxiety that men as young as himself, a few of them young men he’d worked with, were getting on in their careers. A two-line notice in the “Tradewinds” column of
Broadcasting
about someone he’d worked with in Kansas— “Harlan Baker, formerly with WMNY, Mineola, New York, has accepted a job as junior staff announcer with WEAF, New York City”—was enough to plunge him into the profoundest depression. Baker was a hack with no style and only the most ordinary experience, and here he, who had worked in almost every facet of radio, was jobless and with no leads. Recently he had even begun to bone up on the technical aspect of radio, reading with difficulty the most scientific disquisitions on the subject, studying the diagrams (and in Morristown getting one of the X-ray technicians to explain what he couldn’t understand). There were forty million sets in the country, five thousand announcers on more than four hundred and fifty stations, and the FCC was granting more licenses daily. Soon there wouldn’t be a town of more than two thousand people that didn’t have its own radio station. Though he wanted radio to flourish, he grew jealous as a lover of its success, and uncomfortable the way a lover sometimes inexplicably is in the presence of his beloved.

In the light of his feeling that perhaps his father somehow meant his performances to be a contribution to his apprenticeship, he introduced the subject himself.

“I haven’t spoken much of my work in radio.”

“No,” his father said.

“I’ve tried … you know, to get experience.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ve had—I don’t know—maybe a dozen jobs since I left home.”

“A dozen jobs in five years. That’s a lot of moving around.”

“Yes, it is. But I wanted to do as many different things as I could. I have this idea about apprenticeship. It’s how I see myself—as an apprentice.”

“It’s best to get a good background,” his father said, wantonly indifferent.

“The personalities,” Dick said, “I don’t know if I can explain this, but they’re part of our lives, not even a trivial part either because we grow up to their jokes, we tell time by their voices. And what voices! Broadcast. Broad
cast.
Personality like seed, a part of nature, in forests and beside streams, and high up the sides of mountains, higher than the timber line.”

“There’s good money to be made,” his father said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

“I change jobs and bone up because I want to make myself worthy of my voice.”

His father yawned, swept his fingers up under his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and gently rolled the loose skin on the bridge of his nose back and forth. It was another act. The generation gap. A pantomime of stolid misunderstanding. Though he resisted, Dick felt himself drawn deeply into the performance. By his father’s gesture—his face had now gone blank and he was vaguely chewing, sucking his cheeks and exploring the flaws in his teeth with his tongue like a nightwatchman aiming his flashlight at doors—the two of them had become partners in some nightshift enterprise, men in a boiler room, say, among complicated machinery, in a mutual vacuum of the night and labor, a half-hour till one of them has to check the dials again. He could get no further with his dad, and was embarrassed that he had exposed himself as much as he had.

In the next weeks he thought about his apprenticeship a great deal, and wondered if this might not be just the effect his father intended. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was. His dad’s routines had been meant to embarrass him because the man sensed that this sneaking shame was Dick Gibson’s weak spot—
Dick Gibson,
that name that had come to him out of the air, the best inspiration of his life, consolidating in its three crisp syllables his chosen style, his identity, a saga, a mythic body of American dash, and that he had used just once, keeping it secret since, unwilling even after five years to give it up, saving it, as one preserves the handsomest pieces in his wardrobe and meanwhile goes shabby and ordinary, a miserliness not of money but of strategy, a military notion of reserves or a coach’s of bench, an Aladdin idea of one wish left in the lamp—and wanted to purge him of it. He had never been completely unembarrassed while speaking on the radio; this was a fact (his mike fright was something else). He had always felt just a little silly announcing, introducing, selling, describing, interviewing, giving the time and telling the weather, doing local color, acting and reciting bed-time stories, holding up his spokesman’s end of the conversation—which in radio was the only end there was. For the truth of the matter was that radio was silence as well as sound; the unrelenting premise was that the announcer’s voice occurred in silence, in the heart of an attentive vacuum disposed to hear it. Whereas he knew this was untrue. Didn’t his own mind wander, wasn’t it inattentive?
Nothing
was worthy of violating such silence; nothing yet in the history of the world had been worthy of it. That’s why he was embarrassed. So what his father was doing was meant to demonstrate how easily self-consciousness could be shed. Some such lesson must have been intended. So, he thought sadly, the apprenticeship isn’t finished. This thing remained: he had to become immodest, to learn to move dispassionately into the silence. His experience thus far was nothing; it would be a long time before he would be as good as he was meant to be. That was that.

He made plans to leave Pittsburgh, to take up the burden of his apprenticeship a second time.

The day he left home and bid his family goodbye he had expected a scene. But there was none; they did not offer to come to the station with him, and his mother used her mad, broad dialect only once. “A mither’s kiss,” she said automatically when she kissed him.

Arthur shook his hand and winced in pretended pain. “Yipes, champ, you don’t have to break a guy’s fingers, do you?”

His father was even more silent than when Dick had left home the first time, but he seemed on the verge of tears. Dick stuck out his hand but his father ignored it and embraced him. His beard felt strange against Dick’s, trailing sensation like a scent, as if he’d been rubbed with something dusty and valuable, scraped by flesh in a ceremony. Dick submitted to the embrace and thought it remarkable that his father’s eyes were red.

In the next years you might have heard Dick Gibson’s voice a hundred times without knowing it, certainly—so much had it willfully become a part of the generalized sound of American life—without thinking to ask whose it was, no more than you would stop to wonder at the direction of the wind from the sound it makes in the street. He went about the country restlessly, always lonely now and ignorant of time, his beautiful but anonymous voice the juggler’s humble affair before some imposing altar, a town crier of the twentieth century.

“Leeman Brothers directs the attention of shoppers to its White Sale now in progress in the Linens section on the fourth floor. For a limited time we will be offering genuine first-quality percale sheets for single, twin and full beds at discounts of up to 40 percent. We are also featuring a wide selection of slightly damaged printed cambrics at 75 percent off. Please take the elevators at the State Street entrance.”

“Attention! Attention please! There has been a change posted in the results of the fifth race. Please hold on to your pari-mutuel tickets.
Jimson Weed
has been disqualified for crowding on the turn. Repeat:
Jimson Weed
has been disqualified for crowding. The Maryland Racing Commission has declared the official results.
It’s Your America
is the winner,
Martin’s Muddle
has placed and
Crybaby
has finished in the money to show.”

“Will everyone please stand clear of the firetrucks? Will you stand clear of the firetrucks, please? These men can’t work. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Welcome to the General Motors Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, ‘The World of Tomorrow.’ The General Motors Company wishes to apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced during your wait on the line. Please sit far back in your comfortable chairs so that you may the better hear through your personalized headsets. The Company wishes to remind any of you who may be wearing sunglasses to please remove them now so that you may the better see our exhibit.”

“Kibbidge batting for Medwick.”

“‘The Congressional Limited’ leaving on track fifteen for Newark, Trenton, North Philadelphia, 30th Street Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore and Washington. Passengers holding chair Pullman reservations will please go to the south end of the platform. All aboard. All aboard please.”

“Will the owner of the green, 1940 Pontiac bearing Texas license plates G479–135 please report to the attendant at gate number twelve?”

“On your left is the historic old Cotton mansion built in 1847 by Emmanuel Cotton, to plans drawn up by the distinguished American architect Lattimer Michael Hough. The expression ‘King Cotton’ is not, as many suppose, a phrase describing the pre-eminent position of cotton in the Southern economy, but a nickname directly referring to Emmanuel Cotton’s life-long obsession that he was the pretender to the Hanoverian throne. The pillars you see are the only standing examples of Virginia marble—not a marble at all, actually, but a processed quartz made to resemble the less expensive stone.”

“There will be a half-hour wait for seating, a half-hour wait for seating at all prices.”

“A lost child, about four or five years old, wearing a brown snowsuit, brown mittens and answering to the name of Richard, is waiting to be picked up at the ranger station just below the ski lift.”

“Front. Front, please.”

“Is there a doctor in the house?”

“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick ‘Pepsodent’ Gibson. I’m very happy to be here in Minneapolis tonight. Bob Hope will be with you in a few minutes, but first. …”

One day in Chicago’s Loop he was coming out of the Oriental Theater on Randolph Street when suddenly the heavens opened and he was caught in what could have been a cloudburst. One moment the skies were clear; the next the rain was pounding the street in the heaviest downpour he had ever seen. He was only fifty feet or so from the shelter of the marquee when it began to rain, but even if he had attempted to run back to it he would have been completely soaked. So he ducked into the stairwell entrance to an underground cafeteria called Eiler’s. He had coffee and a sandwich, but even after he had finished the rain had still not let up. If anything, it was raining even more heavily than before; the water was coming down the stairway and under the doors and had already formed a considerable pool, which the busboys were trying to clear away with pails and mops. Many people—mostly middle-aged women, afternoon shoppers—had come in from the street and were gathered at the bottom of the stairs.

The basement cafeteria in which they were all standing was low- ceilinged and crowded with rounded arches. Obviously it was meant to support the great weight of the building above them. Dick Gibson thought of the London blitz, the underground shelters there, where, according to what he’d heard, people whose homes had been blasted sometimes stayed for weeks at a time. As he often did when he was caught in something like an emergency situation, he began to look about for a girl, someone with whom he might talk, or, in some end-of-the-world abandon, kiss, hold, fuck. But there were very few likely prospects. Two pretty girls of perhaps twenty sat not far away, but these he discounted because there were two men clearly more handsome than himself with whom in all probability they would pair off when the time came. This left only a small, sweetfaced, pleasant- looking young woman. The more he looked at her the more feasible the idea of loving her became. Soon he found her plumpness sexually exciting and even the submissive gentleness of her expression, daring. He began to imagine her willing passion, and to project the wonderful things she might do for him. Before long he began to consider himself lucky to have her rather than the two girls whose beauty had probably made them selfish and cold. As he was thinking of his girl and imagining what it would be like to have such heaviness at his disposal, perhaps even gratefully blowing him, she looked up and saw him staring. Maybe she had felt his concentration; at any event she smiled widely as if she recognized him, or as if they were already lovers. Dick blushed and looked away at once, fixing his features in a stern, indifferent mask. Though he knew she was still watching him, he did not dare look up.

In a while the rain stopped and they were free to go. The girl passed in front of him and Dick could see the bewilderment on her face as he failed to acknowledge her stare. He realized that it was the same expression he himself had worn when his father had bewildered him.