The Dick Gibson Show (41 page)

It is for this reason that we are currently working on a tape delay that does all that present tape delays do but then accelerates the tape so that the next decent conversation may be heard immediately—creating, in effect, if not in fact, an apparently seamless conversation. We’re close to a breakthrough on this one. And when it occurs we will truly have pulled time’s teeth at last. Indeed, as the entire industry now gears itself to the telephone talk show, the fabulous “two-way radio” concept seems a fullfilment of what radio has always promised—a means of open discourse, of people-to-people priorities. Of course there is always room for improvement. One area that must be explored is the area of sound itself. If two-way radio is to take its rightful place on the American air something must be done to soften the sibilant “tunnel effect” of telephone sound and bring it closer to studio standards. We’re working on that too. In the meanwhile, so much has already been accomplished that I think we may say with as much accuracy as pride that only now is the
real
Golden Age of Radio upon us. …

2

The Golden Age is upon me. Heavy. I think it really
is
Pandora’s box. “Dick Gibson, WBOX, and all I know is what you tell me.” (I live in a box.)

I used the phones as early as ’53. Before there was even amplification equipment, let alone tape delay. Repeating laboriously, like a translator at the UN, everything the caller said, and not just words but inflections too, mimicking the voice as well as I was able, and not just the voice but the accent, and not just the words and the inflections and the voice and the accent, but also the passion, the irritation and complaint and sulking triumph, listening so closely and working so hard that my head hurt and when it was my turn to answer I couldn’t shake the caller’s style and borrowed his vocabulary and traded on his posture so that he thought I was baiting him and grew angry, and then I had to mimic
that
and that made him angrier which raised the ante of my imitation once more until at the end we were shouting at each other and one of us finally had to hang up. And still so involved after the call was finished that when I took the next call the first caller’s style sometimes continued to prevail, intruding itself into what I repeated of the new conversation, fading only as I began gradually to catch the new caller’s emphasis—a round robin of personality. Dick Gibson, KOPY. Dick Gibson, KAT.

Then, when technology at last caught up with us innovators and pioneers, going to the phones again, at last empowered to be myself. But something else changed, though at first I couldn’t identify it. When I understood, it was very odd. I had something in my hands again. In Hartford I’d been empty-handed. The phone was like the scripts I used to hold during my apprenticeship.

It seemed right to be burdened. It seemed appropriate that a man on the radio should be connected and not permitted that merely conceptual and apparent connection—his voice—like a beast in Whipsnade, seemingly loose. Fetters give me. Let there be heavy equipment; attach me by cords, electronic leashes, to my microphonic stakes.

(Alternatively, how would it be if I
could
roam free, speak in deserts as in auditoriums, ad lib while swimming, mumble on mountains, ask strangers for the time of day in the streets and have my sounds picked up in Texas or Timbuktu? Build me of crystal, Lord. I would be Jesus Crystal.
In Excels is Diode.)

He was already forty years old when he was asked to resign from the station in Hartford. A playback of the tapes satisfactorily demonstrated to the managers that he had not initiated any of the foul language; he had merely been unable to control it. Probably he would have resigned anyway, for that night had shown him how tired he was of all spurious controversy, as well as of his own unconscious baiting of his guests. Besides, he had fallen in love with Carmella, Pepper Steep’s sister.

He took her with him to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1959, two months after he had been asked to resign. It was Carmella herself who decided they could not be married. Strangely, it was on religious grounds that she turned him down. She had asked him what he was.

“Me? I don’t know. I’ll be what you are.”

“I’m nothing.”

“Then there’s no problem. Neither am I.”

“Then there’s a problem. I want my life to be regularized. I was born a Gentile. That was the name of our little sect in California when I was a girl—the Gentile Church. It was the only one in America. As the elders died off and people moved away there was no one left to carry on the traditions. The Mosque was abandoned.”

“The Mosque?”

“Jesus was a Jew. The Jews were Arabs. Arabs worship in mosques. Pepper and I went back a few years ago. I thought of staying on, but the firehouse isn’t there any more.”

“The firehouse?”

“The Mosque was in the firehouse. Anyway, I’ve been nothing since. I could be a Catholic if my husband was one, or a Jew, or anything at all. I want to be
something.”

“Look, I was born a Methodist. You could be a Methodist.”

“What do Methodists do? I couldn’t be Methodist if it went against my conscience as a Gentile.”

“Well, I don’t know what they do. I don’t remember. Maybe we could take instruction.”

“Can they smoke?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ve been trying to give up smoking.”

“Well, there’s nothing in the religion that says they have to smoke …
I
know—Baptists aren’t supposed to smoke. We could be Baptists.”

“Would you promise to be a good Baptist?”

“Certainly.”

“I don’t believe you. Besides, it all seems so artificial. I’d much prefer just to stay with you and wait until I fall in love with someone who’s already something.”

And that became their arrangement.

The normal and ordinary and the public were her passions, not instinctively so much as self-consciously. For example, she loved to prepare long lists of electric kitchen appliances, such hardware being to her what jewels and furs were to other women. Dick often found her doodles on telephone pads where she had drawn, with some skill, electric carving knives, blenders, toasters—all the latest products from GE. She would have made a superb interior decorator of a very special sort. Museums could profitably have come to her to furnish typical rooms of the mid-century middle class in the best of popular taste. She watched what everyone else was watching on television. Her opinions were almost always consistent with the samplings revealed in polls. When they weren’t she would steep herself in the arguments of the majority until there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between its position and her own.

It was very odd. He knew that one day she would cheat on him. Not because of money or love or youth or power or sensuality; one day her heart would be captured by someone so respectable, someone so responsible and normal, that he would even have to be told that Carmella had “set her cap for him.” (That the fellow would have to be told in the first place was certain, for he would be a passive man, flattered and frightened by her and not believing his luck. It was almost as certain that the news would have to be broken to him in just such phrases, the only style that would not kill him.) So someday her prince would come, and he could be almost anyone—though there were some things he could not be. He could be married but not Catholic, he could be Catholic but not married; Carmella would not begin her new life by being damned out of her old one. She was already thirty-four, which set additional imperatives, not for herself, for in a way she was selfless; for example, she had no ordinary greeds, did not require riches or excitement, and had no urge to prolong her youth as such.

But at thirty-four sociology and raw percentages took over. How many men were still bachelors at thirty-four? (The man could not be as much as five minutes younger than herself. She was unwilling to live under even the least psychological aspersion. Thus, she forbade the unsavory and pined for the prescribed. Even during the short time she stayed with Dick she insisted that the daily paper and the milk be delivered—not because she was lazy, not even because she read the paper or drank the milk, but because these things were tokens of decency.) And of those who were still single at thirty-four and born before April 11—her birthday—how many were homosexuals, mama’s boys, playboys whose heterosexual profligacies were the danger signals of a too extravagant need? How many were losers or becoming losers? (Was Dick Gibson—when he resigned from WHCN he once again withdrew the name—a loser? He was already forty and sensed that the great apprenticeship, like some recurrent disease from childhood, would soon be on him again. Was he normal? He had been told by Carmella that he had none of the normal man’s accouterments, and he could have told her that he did not even possess a character. Was he even
sexually
normal? He had not lived with a woman since Miriam in Morristown almost twenty-one years before, and although he was not virginal, sexually he had the past of a nineteen-year-old boy.) There were other requirements. Even if she were able to find someone who was sexually acceptable, he would have to be a man who was already established, his goals not already realized, perhaps, but within marching distance. It would not do for him to be a beginner, for once a beginner always a beginner. (That, he thought, was still another strike against himself.) Then, on a lower order of the imperative, Carmella would want him to have friends—old army buddies, perhaps—whom she would not entirely approve of, and one failing friend from childhood, say, regard for whom would be a measure of her husband’s loyalty and manliness. It was pretty slim pickings. But though he understood the percentages, he also knew how determined Carmella was and that people always get what they want, that
all
goals are within marching distance.

So the adultery was inevitable and placed an extraordinary burden on Dick Gibson (now, as he had been twenty-one years before with Miriam, Marshall Maine again, having, in his own mind, retired “Dick Gibson” when he lost the Hartford show), because the assumption ordinarily made about two people who live together without being married is that the relationship is invulnerable to outside pressures. For a man the least approachable woman is the woman who already has a lover. She seems inviolate as a newlywed or nun. Carmella’s open flirting confused men; they never comprehended their eligibility. (Shy men, decent men, why would they?) As often as not they thought themselves toyed with. The burden of proof was on Carmella. She had to allay their fears, and she allayed them at Marshall’s expense, cuckolding him out of wedlock. He dreaded their public appearances together. More than once, even before they left Hartford, he thought of calling the whole thing off.

Yet Carmella’s very need of the normal was the most fascinating thing about her. It was pathological. To the degree that she yearned for respectability she lacked it, so that as long as he stayed with her he enjoyed a heady sense of the forbidden. For all her absent-minded doodles of electric frying pans and steam irons, she seemed to him the most abandoned woman he had ever known, wilder than the Creole girls of Mauritius, crazier than the brutish whores he had been with in London during the war. It was her need to convert everything into the routine and domestic, her necessity to pretend even with him that they were just the nice couple next door, that fueled his lust. It was very clear; she was inviting him to play House, a game which she played so ferociously that there was something sinful in their supper- times, a wickedness in her burned meats and scorched vegetables, something so tantalizing in her bridey pout over a failed cake that he grew hard contemplating the unrisen dough. A vagrant smell of the amiss from the oven was often enough. For him Carmella was a French maid come to life out of pornography. In his imagination her bare behind bloomed just out of sight beneath her pinafores, and he often thought he could see the wide twin grins of her rump. Their arguments—it never went this far; they didn’t have arguments—would have had to have been settled by sexually seditious spankings. Sometimes she made perky mouths at him, as if she was his daughter as well as his bride, and it was both his torment and a source of his pleasure that she never stopped thinking of the day when she would have a real husband.

They had gone to Pittsburgh for his mother’s funeral, but Carmella liked the city and it was she who decided that they would not return to Hartford. Then she wept, understanding that she could make such a decision only because her life was so irregular.

Though Marshall’s father was an old man by this time—Carmella told him that they were married—he still enjoyed performing as much as ever. Only a week after he had buried his wife he was playing the role of a dirty old man, and Carmella was an ideal prop for him. Leering, he might pretend to a sudden palsy. Then, his right hand twitching uncontrollably, he would bring it up to the level of Carmella’s breasts. In this way he managed to brush them at least a half-dozen times a day, or, in passing, to strum her behind every hour or so. Lest he be misunderstood—his peculiar pride wanted it made perfectly clear that he was lascivious and not physically impaired—he occasionally arranged to get his hand tangled inside Carmella’s skirt, where it thrashed about like a fish in a sack making rash plunges and rushes. All Carmella said at these times was “Please, Dad,” or “Now Dad, you know that’s just perfectly silly.” She probably assumed that every family had its eccentric, and that it was perfectly normal for old men, even supposititious fathers-in-law, to turn lewdly on their sons’ wives.