The Dick Gibson Show (49 page)

“Why wasn’t it feasible?”

“What’s that, friend?”

“Why wasn’t it feasible for the laundry to rent shirts?”

“Oh. They have those now too. There’s a firm that does that now. Not the one that said it wasn’t feasible. … It’s timing. It’s timing and force. A schemer has to have those too. He has to know when to plunge.”

“I see.”

“Desalinization—that’s where the money is. Or steam cars, electric, you’d think you’d clean up. But it isn’t
feasible,
Detroit says. I dream of getting in on the ground floor of these things. And the Americanization of Europe, of Africa, the far East. Jungle drive-ins and ice cream on the Amazon and suits off the rack on Savile Row. The bottom of the sea—there’s a ground floor for you. The whole world is ground floor if you know where to stand.

“I’m a schemer. I’m a schemer and dreamer. In the army—Korea was on back then—I figured if you were in the Canine Corps they’d have to keep you stateside that much longer. It stands to reason—you train at the brute’s rate. A dog’s brain isn’t as quick as a man’s. Then I wondered if there might not be a difference between leashed dogs and unleashed. That figures too. Well, reason it out. A dog on a leash can be forced to do what you want. It’s harder when he’s not connected to you. So I put in for unleashed and saw to it that I was assigned the dumbest dog there. I stalled them for months. Then I applied for kennel master. My CO. told me it wasn’t feasible to make me kennel master. You had to be a vet.

“I’m scheming still. Sometimes the ideas come so thick and fast I can’t keep up with them—laundromats in motels, movies in airports, house sitters for people away on vacation. You know something? There’s never been a Western on the stage. I’m no writer, but something like that would go over big. If you could figure out what to do about the horses and cattle drives it might be feasible. I have these ideas. I swear to you, I no sooner begin the research on one plan when another pops into my mind. I count opportunities like sheep. How many of your listeners are like me? I’d be interested to know.”

“We’ll try to find out for you.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks for your call.”

“I was doing some reading about wines. There’s this one wine— Lafitte Rothschild—which sells for eighty to ninety dollars a bottle once it’s mature. It takes years to mature properly,
years.
In France, down in cellars, it’s carefully turned—they call that ‘laying wine.’ A man could spend his whole life on the job turning it, and then it might be his son or even his grandson who’s finally the one to bring it up. That’s why it’s so expensive. But once in a while they put it out on the market for the wine buffs before it’s ready. That’s called ‘first growth,’ and it can sell for as low as $2.00 a bottle. Well, I had an opportunity to buy out a shipment of this ‘first growth’ wine. I thought about it carefully. I considered it from every angle. I tried to look at it from the point of view of the big distributors. I weighed the pros and I weighed the cons, and finally I decided to do it. I invested all my savings and bought up about three thousand bottles at $2.38 a bottle. I built this special cellar and spent a lot of money to get it at the right temperature, and now I go down and I turn the bottles—a quarter turn clockwise in winter, a quarter turn counter clockwise in fall. And once a year I bring the bottles up to stand in the shade for a day in the spring when the barometer’s low. It’s a long shot, don’t think I don’t know it, a long-term proposition—thirty years, maybe more—but I’m a schemer, no pipe dreamer, I mind the feasibility and to hell with your get-rich-quick.”

“Well good luck,” Dick Gibson said.

“This year I had a heart attack—not a bad one, very mild really. ‘You can live a long time yet,’ the doctor told me. ‘Just get plenty of rest and try not to worry.’

“Say I
do
get plenty of rest, say I
don’t
worry. It isn’t feasible.”

Toward the end of that evening’s program, the anthropology professor called for the first time in months. Dick had never learned his name but always looked forward to one of his calls. The anthropologist was full of fascinating information; he was one of the few callers who apparently had no interest in talking about himself but simply enjoyed sharing some of the conclusions of his research with Dick and his audience. They chatted pleasantly for a time, the anthropologist feeding Dick a lot of interesting facts about the Seminole Indians who lived along the Tamiami Trail just west of Miami. Dick had seen their wretched cardtables along the roadside, makeshift lean-to “stores” hardly more sophisticated than a child’s lemonade stand, and had glimpsed their terrible hovels through the broken fences meant to screen them from the sight of tourists.

“They’re so poor,” Dick said.

“Oh Dick, the Navajos could give them a run for their poverty. Many tribes could. That’s not the point. The Seminoles are the only tribe that makes its camp outside a great metropolitan area. They’ve always done this. They did it when the land still belonged to the Indians. They lived on the doorstep of the Creek and Chickasaw and Choctaw. Seminole—
Sim-a-nóle,
or
Iste Siminóla
—means ‘separatist’ or ‘runaway’ in the Muskogean language.”

“I didn’t know that,” Dick Gibson said.

“They were the first suburbanites, you see. They conceive of their destiny as a Mighty-Have-Fallen warning to other peoples. In times of slavery they set up their villages outside the slavequarters. They were offering the example of their condition as a gift to the slaves.”

“Gee.”

“There’s a deep instinct at work here. Follow closely. The significance of the suburbs—I’m doing work on this—is that all peoples are in exile. Your two-week summer vacation is an example. (Traffic patterns and roads, by the way, follow morale patterns closely.) It’s all related to the Vacant-Throne theory of history. The czar had his summer palace, the President his summer White House. These are Diaspora symbols.”

Unfortunately it was time for Dick to sign off. He had to break in on the professor.

“Put me on hold,” the anthropologist whispered, “I have something to tell you.” Dick regularly received such requests, and sometimes the phones were lit up for as much as an hour after he went off the air. It may have been that people felt that reaching him privately lent a distinction even more profound than speaking to him on the air. Recently he had frequently obliged them, sometimes hearing terrible things in this way—awful things. People who were well spoken on the air often made no sense at all when they spoke to him privately afterwards—or they might suddenly lapse into some of the vilest language he had ever heard.

After signing off he came back to the professor. “What did you want to say?” he asked.

“Tell me,” the anthropologist said urgently, “whether a man sits or stands up to wipe himself, and I’ll tell you everything else about him. This cuts through cultures, Dick. It obliterates history and geography. Dick, it’s the single distinction between men. It annihilates everything else. Religion, laws, custom—these things are nothing. He stands because his mommy wiped him. Do you see this, Dick? He stands now because he
still
expects some great, warm soft hand to rub his shit away. All else is nothing. Freud never really understood the true significance of the anal-retentive concept. It’s his own term, but he missed the boat. Incidentally, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Freud himself was a stander.”

“I thought this had something to do with the Seminoles.”

“Forget the Seminoles. They’re nothing but a bunch of poor-mouth bastards. Poor mouth, poor mouth, that’s all they know. All that Mighty-Have-Fallen crap. Forget the Seminoles. The Seminoles aren’t my real work anyway. Dick, I have so many ideas, I’m exploding with insights. Truth is everywhere, Dick; significance is as available as gravity. Do you know the best place to learn about a people’s legal and penal system? Its zoos! Go to its zoos, Dick, and you’ll find out more about its laws and prisons in a half-hour than you would in its courts and jails in a year.”

“I don’t—”

“Did you know there are three fundamental pieces of furniture— the table, the bed, and the chair—and that a people behaves according to the article of furniture dominant in its culture? Did you know that the living-room sofa, or couch, is only a sort of hybrid bed, and that it was introduced by the degenerate Assyrians as a means of formalizing adultery?”

“You’re going too fast, I can’t take all this—”

“There’s more. There’s always more. If you miss one truth there’ll be another along. It’s like streetcars. Wait, wait. The Axis Powers were the only nations involved in World War II which didn’t conclude their news broadcasts with weather reports. No question of secrecy was involved; it was simply a matter of the lack of regard for one’s fellows. Since the people within the range of a given broadcast knew whether it was raining or the sun was shining, they didn’t care what was happening in the rest of the country.”

“I don’t see—”

“Flags! Red, green, blue, white, black and gold are the predominant colors used throughout the world for its flags because those are the colors—with the exception of red, which is always blood—that symbolize not only the basic forces of nature but the particular natural forces most valued by a culture. Your flag is a dead giveaway.”

“What has this—”

“Sandwiches! What’s the thickness ratio of the contents of a sandwich relative to its bread? Is lettuce used to add height? This gives us the hypocrisy quotient. Or those little soaps with a hotel’s trademark on the wrapper—”

“What? What about those soaps?”

“Or
matchbooks!
Matchbooks
particularly.
Why does a man become attached to the iconography of a particular trademark?”

“Why does he? Is that significant?”

“What’s to be made of the fact that
soaps
wane with use, that fire consumes the matchstick, that the height of a pile of
letterhead stationery
goes down in a drawer, that a
swizzle stick
is made to be snapped in two?”

“What? What
is
to be made of it?”

“Oh Dick, Dick. My real work isn’t the Seminoles, it isn’t zoos, it isn’t furniture or artifacts. It’s your program. My real work is your program, Dick. Look out, Dick. Be careful. Please be more careful. Watch your step. A scientist is warning you. Don’t take calls after the show. Don’t put people on hold. Get your rest, try not to worry. Be like the man in Cincinnati.”

“Who is this? What’s this all about? What are you saying to me?”

The anthropologist giggled and broke off; Dick heard the buzz of the broken connection. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he was almost certain that the man had been disguising his voice. The giggle had been a sort of sudden relaxation. Something about it had seemed familiar.

And then he remembered. A name flashed into his mind. No, he
couldn’t
be mistaken.
Behr-Bleibtreau!
It had to be. The idea was disquieting at first, but later, going back to the Deauville in the car, he was filled with a marvelous sense of relief. An enemy! He had an enemy. An
enemy
had appeared!

5

Angela called. Dick asked after Robert and the baby. They were both asleep, Angela said, but Robert would be getting up soon. If he wanted she could wake him now. Dick told her to let him sleep.

He asked if she’d be working in the fall—she taught third grade in an all-black Tallahassee public school—but Angela was vague about it. It was very difficult, she said, to get someone really reliable to come in, and the baby was on a schedule which it might not be a good idea to upset just now.

Dick asked if Robert, who was on the Attorney General’s staff, was involved in that Ft. Myers business. (Recently there had been a ghetto revolt in the Gulf Coast town, and the local authorities had been pressing for the death sentence under Florida’s Anti-Sedition Act.) Angela told him they were both so busy now they didn’t discuss each other’s work much. In fact, she said, she didn’t really know what had happened in Ft. Myers because she hadn’t been reading the papers. Dick started to explain, but Angela broke in to say that she thought she heard a sound from the baby’s room. He held on while she went in to check.

The Sohnshilds were New Yorkers who had come to Florida in a spirit of missionary zeal, Robert believing it was more to the point to guarantee due process in the South than in New York. From the occasional references to him in the newspapers Dick knew that Robert was highly respected and very effective.

Oddly enough Dick Gibson had heard of the couple even before they became Mail Baggers; he had read an article about the Sohnshilds in
Esquire
in the early sixties. Angela, the article said, had graduated from Smith with a Magna in Philosophy and had met Robert when both were graduate students at Harvard. By the time the article appeared each of them had already been through a number of successful careers. Angela had given piano recitals at Carnegie Hall and had appeared as a soloist with the London Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall. Her essays on the New Left, written in the fifties while she was still a graduate student, were said to be the best philosophic justification that radical politics had ever had. She had even been—though this had not been publicized because of her associations with the left—a speech writer for the Kennedys. Robert Sohnshild, as illustrious as his wife, had given up a successful private practice and an inherited seat on the New York Stock Exchange to become the first major news analyst on National Educational Televison, and, as an adviser to SCLC, had helped develop the principle of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. Somewhere he had also found time to establish the first successful, nationally distributed underground newspaper.