The Dick Gibson Show (16 page)

Dick Gibson considered. “Yes, Captain, that’s true in Louis’s case. But I’m
already
just like everybody else.”

They were in the office of the man who had been the golf pro for the Berkshire resort which the army had taken over for a training camp. The room still had the wide glass display cases that had once housed its former inhabitant’s trophies, and this, together with the rug—Dick, used to the heavy, absorptive carpeting of radio studios, always felt more sure-footed on rugs than on bare floors, or even on the ground itself—lent a pleasant donnish quality to the room. It was conducive to horseshit, Dick sensed.

Well, that was all very well, the captain said at last, but how could he recommend Dick for special services when he knew nothing about Dick’s talent?

Thereupon followed Dick’s strangest audition. Without a microphone or script and with only the captain for an audience he did what amounted to an evening’s mixed programming. He introduced records, paused five seconds, and pleasantly recapitulated the name of the song and the singer. He made up news. He did an inning and a half of a ballgame and then, guessing from the captain’s expression that he was no sports fan, rained it out and went back to the studio for a talk on first aid. He re-created this and he re-created that, all the time watching the captain’s face for cues to his tastes. For a few minutes he did a creditable job of reproducing an emergency at the transmitter, requesting the audience to please stand by, and had the pleasure of seeing the captain smile, a reaction he was at a loss to account for until he remembered that the man had been a railroader and must have experienced similar breakdowns in his line of work. Thereafter he hit the railroad angle pretty hard, doing all he could remember of the opening of
Grand Central Station,
a half-hour drama, and Tommy Bartlett’s
Welcome Travelers,
an interview show with people who had just gotten off the Twentieth Century Limited.

Even in auditions he had been by himself, separated from the sponsor or the station manager by at least the plate glass of the control booth, and there was something so strange to him in this confrontation that soon he forgot why he had come. Each show he re-created now became an end in itself, something to be gotten through, and he had a heavy, hopeless sense of a truck mired in mud, of branches and rocks shoved beneath tires for a traction that would never be attained. He had forgotten that his aim was to capture the consciousness of the brutes, and here he was being polite, elegant and glib. At ten o’clock, an hour and a half after walking into the captain’s office, exhausted, he signed off, appalled to realize that what he had been doing was a frightening reenactment of his career.

Shaken, Captain Rogers looked at him for two minutes before finally speaking. “You’re a regular show,” he said at last. “Request for transfer approved!” He slammed the blotter on his desk three times, left, center and right, with the fatty side of his fist in a mime of someone stamping documents submitted in triplicate.

But it was no different on Armed Forces Radio. Dick’s show was broadcast on Sunday afternoons—that traditionally gray and sober time on American radio, after church and before the family-comedy programs of the early and mid-evening—and was called
The Patriot’s Songbook.
Though it went out on shortwave wherever American forces were stationed and to virtually every theater of combat, Dick was not pleased with it; he found the rigidity of the format and the endorsed quality of the sentiment burdensome. (Ironically, his audience had never been larger. The program was taken not just by the military but by dozens of independent stations across the country.) He had no illusions that he was reaching the brutes, for the program, thirty minutes of service and popular war songs, was something of a joke even at the London studio from which it emanated. The staff, most of them professionals like himself in civilian life, referred to it as “The Flag Wavers’ Songbook,” “Uncle Sam’s Lullaby Hour,” or even worse. The single thing he had to show for it, and this at the beginning, was his promotion to sergeant, an honor that simply reflected Armed Forces Radio’s fashion of having several of its programs hosted by noncommissioned officers.

To Dick it seemed absurd to play recordings of rah-rah songs to men who had actually been in combat. He had heard too many vicious parodies of these songs; they were sung in comradely funk in every London pub, so he could imagine the words the men on the actual firing line might put to them. He made efforts to broadcast some of the milder of these parodies—though there were no recordings of them that he knew of—but every request was refused. Indeed, how could it be otherwise when even the innocuous remarks with which he introduced each record ( “This next song, ‘Semper Paratus,’ is the beloved anthem of the generally unsung seadogs in the mighty United States Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is one of our nation’s most trusted services. In peacetime it has the responsibility of enforcing maritime laws, saving lives and property at sea, operating as an aid to navigation generally, and preventing smuggling. In war it is a valued adjunct of the navy itself. A ‘Patriot’s Songbook’ salute to the
Coast Guard!”)
had first to be checked and approved by his superiors?

Despite, then, his knowledge that Rohnspeece and Fedge and Laspooney and Null and Blitz and the others—if, in fact, they were still alive—had probably heard him, AFR being the only English-speaking radio they could pick up in most of the places where they could be, Dick had no hope that he had changed their opinion of him. He had the brute’s ear, but the brute was probably laughing. The brute may even have been pissing into the speaker cone or firing bullets at it or whipping someone’s ass with the aerial. He was a celebrity for the first time in his life—
Stars and Stripes
had interviewed him—but it had never seemed less important. In his interview with
Stars and Stripes
the one remark he had really wanted them to print— “Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose are much more effective. As a radio man I envy them both”—had been omitted, and he had sounded as bland as ever he had on the radio.

The show was recorded on Tuesday nights in Broadcasting House, the BBC facility in London. Busy during the day, a few of its studios had been set aside for the use of the Americans late at night. One Tuesday, shortly after the appearance of his interview in
Stars and Stripes,
Dick was making an electrical transcription of
Songbook
when he saw the flashing red light that indicated an air-raid warning. He had been through other air raids in London, though one had never occurred when he was broadcasting. Seeing the light, he gathered together the pages of his script, switched off his microphone and rose to go the shelter. He was almost out of the studio when his engineer and director, a first lieutenant named Collins, called to him over the loudspeaker from the control room.

“Sit still, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said. “There’s no telling when they’ll sound the all clear. I’m tired. The damn BBC won’t give us the goddamn building at a decent hour. We’re soundproofed, so I don’t think we’ll pick up the noise of the bombers in here. Hell, we can’t even hear the blasted sirens. Why don’t we just go ahead and finish the broadcast?”

Sergeant Gibson looked nervously toward the signal light, which had now gone into a new pattern—a series of four short flashes followed by three long, indicating that the bombers were over the city. Except for the lights they would have had no hint that the bombers were overhead; in their windowless studio they might not have heard even a direct hit, and would have known that they were dying only when the flames had begun to lick at them.

“Damn it, Sarge, sit back down,” the lieutenant ordered. “We’ll be okay. Watch the On the Air sign. When the sign comes on you cue in again after ‘Wing and a Prayer.’”

Dick returned sullenly to the microphone and the lieutenant put the song on the turntable. The signal lights and the insane bravery of the music made Dick more nervous than ever. He wondered if men had ever gone into battle burdened by such themes. It was impossible, and he had a certain knowledge of the impossibility and inanity of comfort, suddenly realizing what must be the enormous irritation to the dying of all brave counsel and all fair words. Such must forever have tampered patience and ruined death.

When the record finished the On the Air sign beamed on. In the brief moment before he began talking Dick strained to hear the bombers. He thought he could detect a buzz or hum, but it might have been only the electric engines in the studio. The lieutenant rapped on the glass with his graduation ring and pointed furiously to the sign. Shaken, Dick lost his place, then found it again. “Fellas, that was ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’ as sung by the Mello-Tones.” He heard the alarm in his voice and longed to be in the bomb shelter, where he could hear the bombs when they exploded and feel the slight fleshly shift in the sand bags. He looked toward the booth but the lieutenant had leaned down to pick up the next recording and he could not see him. For all he knew he may have been the only person left in the building. His hand rattled the pages of his script and he lost his place again. “‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’” he repeated, stalling. Again he found his place and introduced the next song. It was “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World,” and as he listened to the lyrics ( “Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again”) he became furious. If he’d had a pistol he might have taken aim and shot the lieutenant right then. Why, he thought, surprised and not displeased, that’s how the brutes think, the ones who treasure their grudge and then, on patrol, calmly shoot their lieutenant in the back. Was
he
a brute? Good! So be it!

He felt himself swell with power, a savage surge.
“Bullshit!”
he roared into his open microphone over the lyrics of the song.
“Bullshit!”

The lieutenant’s face appeared white and enormous behind the control room window. He seemed not angry, nor even astonished; he looked as bland and mild as a ship’s captain just relieved of command by his men. Dick saw his mouth move and his lips form words, but no sound came out; he had forgotten to depress the speaker button in the control room. Dick felt a triumphant flush of heroism, Horatio at the bridge, the Dutchman at the dike, the man in the radio room sending out his S.O.S.’s as the others lowered the lifeboats and leaped into them, all men covering all other men’s retreats—the guerrilla achievement. “Ah boys,” he cried, exultant, ”we’re the ones who pay. It’s us who bleed, buddies.”

The lieutenant’s eyes widened. He was livid now, his face contorted with the bitter, contrary exercises of grief and grudge. Gibson knew he had to hurry. Ignoring the officer, he grasped the microphone still more tightly and drew it closer to him, as if the only way Collins could stop him would be to pull the equipment out of his hands. “We’re meat, we’re meat,” he cried passionately. (He saw his listeners come alive, one soldier beckoning the other to approach the radio, crawling out of foxholes in the jungle, gathering together around the Lister bag. He saw snipers leaning down from the trees to which they were tied. Thinking of the bombers that were even now zeroing in on Broadcasting House, fixing its roof between the crosshairs of their bombsights, he began to chatter ferociously, not calling as he might have to a panicky audience falling all over itself to escape a burning theater, “Calm down, calm down,” but a sub-articulate commiseration that cut through the traps of language, dispensed with hope and went abruptly into mourning. “Ah,” he said. “Oh my. Gee. Hmn. Yuh. Ah. Oh. Tch tch. Whew. Hmph. Boy.”

Behind the glass in the control booth the lieutenant was leaning so far forward that his nose was blunted by the glass. “Tag,” Dick said. “We’re it. Boom boom.”

“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to permit any of this stuff to get by,” Lieutenant Collins’s voice boomed out over the speaker. “What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are? Not a syllable of this will ever be broadcast! I’m stopping the transcription!”

“They’re moving in,” Dick Gibson said, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I’m by myself. The bombs are falling.”

“Hah!” the lieutenant cried. “I’ve shut you off. You’re just talking to the walls.”

“I don’t know if you can still hear me, boys. I may just be talking to the walls, but I’m sticking to my post. Let’s have some music, what say?”

“I won’t put it on for you!”

“Over hill, over dale,
Hell, they even read our mail,
As those caissons go rolling along.
In and out, hear them shout,
I can’t wait till I get out,
As those caissons go rolling along.”

“Well, ex-sergeant, are you proud of yourself?
Are
you, ex-sergeant?”

“There’ll be bullshit over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.”

“On second thought I
am
going to record this. It will make very interesting listening at your court martial.”

“Anger’s a way, my boys,
Anger’s a way,
Why should we take their noise,
Why don’t we run away—ay—ay—ay?”

“That’s evidence. Right there.
That’s
evidence.”

“This is the Army, Mr. Jones,
They’ll shoot some bullets in your bones,
You had your breakfast in bed before,
But you dum la de dum in a war.”

“You’ll get yours, Mister.”

“Oh-hh say can you see
How the powers that be
Keep us down, in the groun’
With the lie that we’re free?”

He pushed his microphone away and leaned back. He was exhausted. The lights had ceased to flash. The air raid was over. Dozens had died, hundreds were wounded, but the rest of them were safe till next time.