The Dick Gibson Show (31 page)

Pepper Steep had joined Jack Patterson in exhausted detachment; though he said nothing, Mel Son looked animatedly from one to the other. Behr-Bleibtreau also seemed exhausted.

Of the members of his panel, only Bernie Perk seemed keyed up. He jabbered away a mile a minute, so that Dick couldn’t really follow all that he was saying. The druggist wanted to know what had happened to everyone. “What’s got into Pepper?” he asked. “What’s got into Jack?”

Dick couldn’t tell him. He had no notion of what had gotten into his comrades. All he knew was that he was impatient for the commercial to be finished and for the show to go back on the air. He couldn’t wait to hear what would happen next, though having some dim sense of the masquelike qualities of the evening, and realizing that thus far his guests had “performed” in the order that they had been introduced, he had a hunch that it would involve Bernie.

It did.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: May I say something?

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Sure thing.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Okay, then. What’s going on here? What’s got into everyone? What’s got into Pepper? What’s got into Jack? I came here tonight to talk about psychology with an expert in the field. But all anyone’s done so far is grab the limelight for himself. Everyone is too excited. Once a person gets started talking about himself all sorts of things come out that aren’t anybody’s business. I understand enough about human nature to know that much. Everybody has his secret. Who hasn’t? We’re all human beings. Who isn’t a human being? Listen, I’m a mild person. I’m not very interesting, maybe, and I don’t blow my own horn, but even someone like myself, good old Bernie Perk, corner druggist, “Doc” to one and “Pop” to another, could put on a regular horror show if he wanted to.
But it isn’t people’s business.

Look, my son and his charming wife are guests in the studio tonight. Pepper Steep’s sister is here. How do you think it must be for them when an intimate relative sticks his foot in his mouth? If you love people you’ve got to have consideration.

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Bernie, don’t be so upset. Take it easy.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Dick, I
am
upset about this. No, I mean it. What’s it supposed to be, “Can You Top This?”

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Come on, Bernie—

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Because the temptation is always the one they yielded to. To give up one’s secrets. La. La la. The soul’s espionage, its secret papers.
Know
me. No, thank you. I’m pretty worked up. Call on Mel.

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Take it easy.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Call on Mel.

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Mel?
(no answer)

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Mel passes.
(He giggles.)
Well, that’s too bad, for thereby hangs a tale, I bet. The truth is everybody likes to see his friends with their hair down. Well, okay, I’ll tell the audience something maybe they don’t know. We don’t see each other off the air. The illusion is we’re mates. You want us to be, but we’re not.

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: Here goes Bernie.

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: (
fiercely)
You
had
your turn. You were
first.
Don’t hog everything. You had your turn. Just because you couldn’t do any better than that canned ardor, don’t try to ruin it for everyone else.

The truth of the matter is, I had to laugh. The man’s a schoolteacher. Big deal. He sees up coeds’ skirts. Big deal. He has them in for conferences, he goes over their papers with them, he bends over the composition and her hair touches his cheek. Enormous! Call the police, passion’s circuits are blown. I know all that, I
know
all that. But if you want to see life in the raw, be a pharmacist, buy a drugstore. You wouldn’t
believe
what goes on. It’s a meat market. No wonder they register us. Hickory Dickory “Doc.” Let me fill you in on the prescription. Yow. Wow.

You know what a drugstore is? A temple to the senses. Come down those crowded aisles. Cosmetics first stop. Powders, puffs, a verb-wheel of polished nails on a cardboard, lipstick ballistics, creams and tighteners, suntan lotions, eyeshadow, dyes for hair—love potions, paints, the ladies’ paintbox!

Come, come with Pop. The Valentine candy, the greeting cards, the paperbook racks and magazine stands. The confessions and movie magazines dated two months beyond the real month because time, like love, is yet to be. Sit at the fountain. See the confections—banana splits and ice cream sundaes like statues of the sweet, as if sweetness itself, the sugary molecules of love resided in them. The names—like words for lyrics. Delicious the syrups, the salty storm of nuts and tidal waves of spermy cream. Sing yum! Sing yum yum!

All the shampoos, all the lotions and hair conditioners proteined as egg and meat. Files and emery boards, the heartsick gypsy’s tools. Sun lamps, sleep masks, rollers, bath oils and depilatories, massaging lotions. Things for acne, panty hose—the model on the package like a yogi whore. Brushes, rinses, bath oils and shower caps like the fruits that grow on beaches.

To say nothing of the Venus Folding Feminine Syringe, of Kotex in boxes you could set a table for four on. Liquid douches—you can hear the sea. Rubber goods, the queer mysterious elastics, supporters, rupture’s ribbons and organ’s bows. Now we’re into it, hard by diarrhea’s plugs and constipation’s triggers. There’s the druggist, behind the high counter, his bust visible like someone on a postage stamp, immaculate in his priest’s white collar. See the symbols—the mortar and pestle and flasks of colored liquid. Once I sipped from the red. the woman’s potion. I had expected tasteless vegetable dye, but it was sweet, viscous, thick as oil. There are aphrodisiacs in those flasks to float your heart.

And there
I
am, by the refrigerated drugs, the druggist’s small safe, the pharmacopoeia, the ledger with names and dates and numbers. A man of the corner and crossroads, scientist manqué, reader of Greek and Latin, trained to count, to pull a jot from a tittle, lift a tittle from a whit, a man of equilibriums, of grains and half-grains, secret energies locked in the apothecary’s ounce.

Fresh from college I took a job—this was the depression—in another man’s store. MacDonald’s. Old MacDonald had a pharmacy, eeyi eeyi o! An old joke but the first I ever made. “I’ll fill the prescriptions,” MacDonald told me. “You’re a whipper-snapper. You’ll wait on trade and make the ice cream sodas. If that isn’t satisfactory, go elsewhere. If I’m to be sued for malpractice I’ll be the malpracticer, thank you very much.” It was not satisfactory, but what could I do? It was the depression. How many young men trained for a profession had to settle in those days for something else? And do you know what I found out? (What’s got into Bernie?) I found out
everything!

The first week I stood behind the counter, smiling in my white lab jacket, and a lady came in. A plain woman, middle-aged, her hair gone gray and her figure failing. “Doctor, I need something for my hemorrhoids,” she said. “They are like to kill me when I sit. It burns so when I make number two that I’ve been eating clay to constipate myself.”

I gave her Preparation H. Two days later she came back to the store and bought a birthday card for her son. Somehow the knowledge that I alone of all the people in the store knew something about that woman’s behind was stirring to me. I was married, the woman was plain; she didn’t attract me. I was drawn by her hemorrhoids, in on the secret of her sore behind. Each day in that novice year there were similar experiences. I had never been so happy in my life. Old MacDonald puttering away in the back of the store, I up front—what a team we made.

A young woman came in. Sacrificing her turn she gestured to me to wait on the other customers first. When the store was empty she came up to me.

“I have enuresis,” she said.

I gave her some pills.

“Listen,” she said, “may I use your toilet?”

I let her come behind the counter. She minced along slowly, her legs in a desperate clamp. I opened the door of the small toilet.

“There’s no toilet paper,” I said. “I’ll have to bring you some.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I stood outside the door for a moment. I heard the splash. A powerful, incredible discharge. You’d think she’d had an enema. But it was all urine; the woman’s bladder was converting every spare bit of moisture into uremic acid. She could have pissed mud puddles, oceans, the drops in clouds, the condensation on the outside of beer bottles. It was beyond chemistry, it was alchemy. Golden. Lovely.

I got the paper for her.

”I have the toilet tissue, miss.” Though she opened the door just enough for me to hand the roll in to her, I saw bare knees, a tangle of panties.

Her name was Miss Wallace, and when she came into the store for her pills—need is beyond embarrassment: only
I
was embarrassed—I grew hard with lust. I made no overtures, you understand; I was always clinical, always professional, always offhand.

“Listen,” I told her one day, “I suppose you have rubber sheets.”

“No good,” she said.

“You’ll ruin your mattress.”

“It’s already ruined. When I tried a rubber sheet, the water collected in the depression under my behind. I lay in it all night and caught cold.”

The thought of that pee-induced cold maddened me. Ah God, the bizarre body awry, messes caught in underwear—love tokens, unhealth a function of love.

There were so many I can’t remember them all.

I knew I had to leave Old MacDonald. I was held down, you see. Who knew what secrets might not be unlocked if I could get my hands on the
prescriptions
those ladies brought in! When my father died and left me four thousand dollars, I used it to open the store I have now. I signed notes right and left to get my stock and fixtures together. My wife thought it was madness to gamble this way in the depth of the depression, but I was pining with love.

There were so many …

Let’s see.
These have been a few of the women in my life:

Rose Barbara Hacklander, Miss Hartford of 1947, 38—24—36, a matter of public record. What is
not
a matter of public record is that she had gingivitis, a terrible case, almost debilitating, and came near to losing the title because of her reluctance to smile. She wanted to shield her puffy gums, you understand. Only I, Bernie Perk, her druggist, knew. On the night before the finals she came to me in tears. She showed me—in the back of the store— lifting a lip, reluctant as a country girl in the Broadway producer’s office raising the hem of her skirt, shy, and yet bold too, wanting to please even with the shame of her beauty. I looked inside her mouth. The gums were filled, tumid with blood and pus, enormous, preternatural, the gums of the fat lady in the circus, obscuring her teeth, in their sheathing effect seeming actually to sharpen them, two rings of blade in her mouth. And there, in the back of her mouth at the back of the store, pulling a cheek, squeezing it as one gathers in a trigger—cankers, cysts like snow- flakes.

“Oh, Doc,” she cried, “what will I do? It’s worse tonight. The salve don’t help. It’s nerves—I know it’s nerves.”

“Wait, I can’t see in this light. Put your head here. Say ‘Ah.’”

“Ah,” she said.

“Ah,” I said. “Ah!”

“What’s to be done? Is there anything you can give me?”

“Advice.”

“Advice?”

“Give them the Giaconda smile. Mona Lisa let them have.”

And she did. I saw the photograph in the newspaper the morning after the finals. Rose Barbara crowned (I the Queenmaker), holding her flowers, the girls in her court a nimbus behind her, openly smiling, their trim gums flashing. Only Miss Hartford of 1947’s lips were locked, her secret in the dimpled parentheticals of her sealed smile. I still have the photograph in my wallet.