The Dick Gibson Show (54 page)

“Oh,” Dick said wearily.

“See, I live here. You understand me? In the emergency waiting room. This is where I live. I’m an emergency, do you follow?”

“They let you stay there?”

“Well, I’m an emergency, ain’t I? Sure, the docs and nurses let me sleep here on the leather sofa. You should see the shape some of these clowns are in—their heads all unbuttoned and their blood upside down. Boy oh boy. They give you bad dreams on the leather sofa, some of them. I got my eye on one guy sitting outside this booth in a wheelchair right now. He ain’t cut or burnt or nothing, but he looks pretty sick. Wife’s more upset than he is. She’s got this steel nigger comb, just keeps running it over and over through his hair and looking down at him from behind the wheelchair. Yeah, you really see it in a place like this—second-degree burns, third-degree, the works. And accident cases. You know what’s the worst accident case there is? Motorcycles. These kids come in, and I mean they’re
totaled.
Like they fell off the world. One time I seen a guy hold his eye in his hand like a marble. And raving maniacs—
they’re
cute. You wouldn’t believe the language comes out of their mouths—especially the women’s. My God, what’s on some people’s minds!

“Tonight a little kid come in who’d worked one of these washers onto his finger and it wouldn’t come off. They got a tool that cuts off rings and they used that. Imagine having a tool for something like that. That’s what gets me. They got a tool for everything. For pulling beans out of people’s noses and getting crud from their eye. There ain’t an emergency they haven’t worked out in advance.

“Most people couldn’t take living in a place like this. I know what to avoid. If it’s real bad, the ambulance driver comes running in first to tell the girl at the desk. Then I know it ain’t something I want to see and I get out of the way.”

“Why do you stay?”

“Why do I
stay?
In case something happens to me. I’m an epileptic, I got Grand Mal. That means the Big Bad. The Big Bad I got. But I’m right here, you follow? I’m Johnny on the spot. I’m never more than a minute from help.”

Dick didn’t know how he was going to get through the rest of the program. The man was waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything.

“I got a right,” the man said abruptly. “Hell, I’m an emergency. I got Grand Mal.”

“Where do you dress?” Dick finally managed. “What about your clothes?”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, that’s interesting about that. I got this buddy in the hospital laundry. He throws my stuff into the hopper with the sheets and the gowns. Everything on me is fresh every day. And there’s this vegetable on the seventh floor—they let me use his electric razor.”

“You’ve got it made,” Dick said.

“How do I eat? You know how I eat?”

“How do you eat?”

“I take my meals off hospital trays! I eat what the sick leave!”

“Terrific.”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“I believe you.”

“Then what’s wrong? You think I’m talking about garbage? Full- course meals! Full-course breakfast! Full-course lunch! Everything full course. I eat better than you do. It’s balanced meals. A dietitian makes them up. I’m on a salt-free diet. My cholesterol’s lower than yours is. I could overeat if I wanted—sick people don’t have much appetite—but I watch myself, I don’t gorge.”

“Just push yourself away from the hospital cart, is that it? That’s the best exercise.”

“Yeah. Ha ha. Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I do have this little staph infection. What’s so terrible? It won’t kill me, I can live with it. The residents have their eye on it. It’s low grade, practically nothing.”

Dick groaned.

“Well, where
should
I go, hot shot, where? I’m an emergency. My life’s an emergency. Where’s an emergency gonna go?”

“I’m not criticizing.”

“Listen,” the caller said, “I ain’t stinted. I get everything I want. The chow’s good. I get dessert, even. I already told you. Ha ha.
I take the cake.”

He couldn’t have taken any more calls. It was a good thing the show was almost over. He was tired. He did the commercials mechanically, announced the temperature and told his listeners the time, and then he reached forward, took the table microphone and brought it close to his mouth. He paused, not quite certain what he was going to say.

“I’m worried about Henry Harper,” he said at last. “I’m thinking about Ingrid in the Buick. I don’t even mention air pollution, foreign policy, or the terrible things that have been turning up in the artificial sweeteners. There’s crime in the streets, and to tell you the truth, we’ve mucked up our fields and streams too. I hope the Sierra Club wins its battle against the Disney interests in California. I’m troubled about the whales, and I mourn for the death of Lake Erie. The pill has harmful side effects and not enough people wear their safety belts. We ought to have better gun laws. Everywhere the environment is as run down as a slum. Strontium 90 takes a generation to break down, but even that’s faster than the non-bio-degradable soaps. The young have chromosome damage from LSD and the old live without point. Our diet isn’t any good. Where will the money come from for low-cost housing? Charcoal steaks cause irreversible lung damage; cancer is broiling in the barbecue. The pace is too fast and the noise level’s too high, color TV makes you sterile and too much sunshine queers your skin. Speed kills and hot water from the factories raises the temperature of the river and murders the fish. Food preservatives poison our breakfast cereal. There’s monosodium glutamate in the baby food and baldness in the hair spray. There’s BHA in the white bread. Oh God, there’s far too much nitrate in the soil, and unless the furriers become more responsible in five years the only leopards left alive will be in the zoos.

“I’m concerned about barium and arsenic in the drinking water of playground fountains, and about the carcinogenic wax on fruit like the bad queen’s toxin on Snow White’s apple. Jesus, friends, our bath water mustn’t be too hot and the rubber from our tires dissolves into the air so that we’re choking on our own tread.
Keep all medicines out of the reach of children,
I tell you.
If you drive, don’t drink!
Coffee is bad for us and we don’t know what aspirin does to our cells. We haven’t figured out our priorities. Smoking stunts your growth, and I don’t like the way they shunt the phosgene gas back and forth across the country on railroad cars. They’re playing Russian roulette with our lives. The long straightaways on our freeways can hypnotize you and there’s enough mercury in the eggs we consume to drive a thermometer. Don’t look directly into the eclipse. Only you can prevent forest fires. We’re drowning in litter, shipmates. Jet lag upsets the circadian rhythms and plays holy hell with the stewardess’s monthlies, and sonic boom is killing the gazelles. The air isn’t clean. Mark my words, the population explodes even as we drop dead. A thermal inversion melts the icebergs and our coastlines are drowning. An underground nuclear explosion can set off an earthquake, and I’m not so well myself.

“There’s too much obsession. I’m worried about Henry Harper. I wonder what happened to that man in Knoxville. To the lady with the pierced ears. I wish Angela and Robert would get out of the house. There’s nothing they can do about the baby. What will be will be. They mustn’t feel guilty. If they want, I’ll go up to Tallahassee myself and sit with the kid so they can go to the movies. It would do them good to get out once in a while. What does that old man mean, everything’s connected? That guy who called tonight should move out of the emergency room and rent an apartment. There’s too much obsession. I’m guilty as the next guy. I can’t stop thinking about Behr-Bleibtreau. He’s a man I knew in Hartford one time, and I think he holds a grudge against me. He might be trying to force some crazy showdown between us, and I can’t say I mind because I think it may be in the cards. Only … only …

“All those calls tonight. What’s happening to my program? What’s the matter with everybody? Why are we all so obsessed? I tell you, I’m sick of obsession. I’ve eaten my ton of it and I can’t swallow another bite. Where are my Mail Baggers, the ones who used to call with their good news and their recipes for Brunswick stew and their tips about speed traps between here and Chicago? How do your gardens grow, for Christ’s sake? What’s with the crabgrass? What’ll it be this summer, the sea or the mountains? Have the kids heard from the colleges of their choice?
What’s happening?”

6

It was time for the Dick Gibson Picnic.

To promote the event the station had been playing a series of spot announcements, one or two a night at the beginning of the campaign but gradually reaching saturation a week before-the picnic. As in the previous year, it was decided that it would be held in Gainesville, Florida, a city about three hundred miles northwest of Miami. The management felt that though this worked a hardship on the heavy listenership concentrated in the Miami area, Gainesville was more accessible to the villagers and farm families of central and southern Georgia, southeastern Alabama and the great midlands of Florida itself than Miami proper, which would have been expensive and crowded even in the off-season. Although Miami contributed far and away the largest audience to the program, its participation in Listening Posts was disproportionately small. The backbone of the show was still the rural areas. Nevertheless, there were indications that an adjustment was taking place, the country people frightened perhaps by the increasing bluntness of the calls. All shows seek the level of the demands made upon them, but there was something alarming, as much to the management as to Dick Gibson, about the stridency of these demands, the way solipsism was gradually drowning out the inquiry, deference and courtesy that had set the show’s original tone. As long, however, as the sponsors showed no alarm, no one made any serious effort to force the show back to its original instincts. Perhaps they had not
been
instincts.

WMIA picked up the tab for feeding the thousand or so Dick Gibson Picnickers expected to turn out, but all the work of preparing the fried chicken, potato salad, roast corn, iced tea and Jellomold fell to the picnic’s official hosts, the Listening Post from Cordelle County, Georgia, who arranged, too, for the entertainment. Last year’s Entertainment Committee had been too ambitious, and while they had put together a first-rate show of singers, bands, groups and chorus lines from the local dancing schools, everyone agreed afterward that they had come to meet and mix with each other, not to sit for three hours in a hot tent. Hence, this year the Committee had decided to emphasize various games and comical races in which all the Mail Baggers might participate. In fact, the Entertainment Committee suggested that this year there be
no
structured activity. It was Dick Gibson who reminded them that people would be coming from all over the Southeast and that since most of them would be strangers to each other there ought to be at least some minimal group activity. He had also insisted that an effort be made to keep people belonging to the same Listening Post from sitting together at the picnic tables.

On the day before the picnic Dick drove to Gainesville in his convertible with the top down, taking along his director and his engineer, the only people from WMIA to attend. The station manager and several other of the station’s executives had planned to come, but Dick had discouraged this, pointing out that it would be better for the program if the Mail Baggers did not see him as just another employee of the station, and that the presence of a hierarchy would detract from their sense that the program belonged to them. The management conceded the point and so he went up to Gainesville accompanied only by his crew, Bob Orchard and Lawrence Leprese, who were already familiar to his audience. Particularly in the early days of the program, his listeners had become used to Dick’s good-natured kidding of the two men. “Bob,” he might suddenly complain to his engineer, “where are my Kentucky calls? You’re not giving me a strong enough Kentucky signal. Turn this station around and get me blue grass.” Invariably his little hint would inspire some Kentuckian to phone in, and then he would compliment the engineer on his improvement, building the conceit that the station was a sort of airplane which could be pointed in any direction they chose. He also commented on Lawrence Leprese’s wild sports shirts, painting a lurid picture for his audience of the director’s terrible taste. Actually, the man usually wore an ordinary dark business suit with a white shirt and plain tie, and so before going to Gainesville Dick had had to buy him the loudest shirt and Bermuda shorts he could find in the Deauville specialty shop.

There was a large sign taped to the long side of the convertible with Dick Gibson’s name painted on it in bold red letters, so that as he drove along he looked like the grand marshal of his own parade. In DeLand, Florida, where they stopped for gas, he forgot it was there and tore the sign in half when he opened the door on the driver’s side. They repaired it with scotch tape and drove the rest of the way up to Gainesville.

The station had booked three rooms for them at the Hotel Pick- Gainesville and they checked in at about six thirty on Friday evening. Tired from the long drive, Dick decided to have dinner sent to his room and then go to bed until it was time to do the show that night.

They had rented the facilities of WGSV, using the phone company’s carrier line to take the signal back to Miami. This affected the sound quality, but worse was that the station didn’t have the sophisticated phone setup WMIA did, so the program’s mechanics that night were very clumsy. All the incoming calls had to be handled through the receptionist’s switchboard and shunted by extension phone to the studio. Since the station ran an all-night record request show, naturally the girl at the switchboard fell behind and when Dick finished a conversation there was not always another caller on the line. Nor did he have any notion where a call was coming from and found it difficult to recognize his listeners’ voices. The occasion of the picnic and its publicity had reassured many of the old Mail Baggers that the program was being returned to them, inspiring them to call the show again, but it must have been clear to even the least astute that they’d been forgotten. Much air time was wasted in sly maneuvering between Dick and his callers, the caller wanting Dick to say his name and Dick trying to get the caller to do it for him. Though it was a dull program, it was a very hard night’s work for him. It was dull, hard work, but there was something pleasant about it too. It was like the old days, the
very
old days, before they knew each other too well, and had had to take everything slowly and carefully, offering each other gentle, civilized banalities.