The Dick Gibson Show (23 page)

And wasn’t
that
a night? WVW, Lockhaven, Pennsylvania. The night of the seance. The medium was the Reverend Abner Ruckensack. Shakespeare had come, the Bard of Avon. A lugubrious Shakespeare, plain-talking, curiously shy. He called Dick Mr. Gibson. It was down in the log. (He still couldn’t bear to think of his logs, tapes of all his programs. Fourteen years, seven of them doing these late-night talk shows, almost five thousand tapes. His spoken history of some of the world. The expense enormous, to say nothing of the time that went into indexing them. All but a hundred or so burned to a crisp in the fire. Dick Gibson’s burned logs.) He could still remember one part. It must have been about three in the morning. All of them tired, impatient, the Reverend Ruckensack producing dud after dud—farmers he’d known, children he’d baptized, a sinner, an enemy—and the panel sending them back, shade after shade, like failed auditioners, until
he
came, the Bard himself, the Divine Will:

D
ICK
: You don’t sound like Shakespeare.

S
HAKESPEARE
: I’m him, all right, Mr. Gibson.

D
ICK
: You are, eh?

S
HAKESPEARE
: You bet your boots, Mr. Gibson.

D
ICK
: Well, if you’re Shakespeare, how come you don’t speak in blank verse? I always associated Shakespeare with blank verse.

S
HAKESPEARE
: We’re
white
men here, Mr. Gibson. That blank verse was just for the niggers. So’s they wouldn’t understand.

He still remembered it, and here and there other passages, but without the logs one day it would all be gone, as all conversation was always going, the word disintegrate, busted, and the air come in like a draft. Or all that remained would be the conclusions, with none of the wonderful linkings and marvelous asides. The wisdom forgotten and the madness gone, and only the silence for punctuation.

He could not depend upon his listeners; he had no notion of them. They were as faceless to him as he to them. (They didn’t even have a voice.) His panels, his Special Guests were more real. As for his listeners, he guessed they were insomniacs, cabbies, enlisted men signed out on leave at midnight driving home on turnpikes, countermen in restaurants by highways, people in tollbooths. Or he saw them in bed—they lived in the dark—lumps under covers, profiles on pillows, their skulls beside the clock radio (the clock radio had done more to change programming than even TV) while the dialogue floated above their heads like balloon talk aloft in comic strips. Half asleep, they would not follow it too closely.

No, he knew little about his listeners. They were not even mysterious; they were there, but distant as the Sioux. He knew more about the passionate extremists who used his microphones in the groundless hope of stirring those sleepers, and winning over the keepers of the booths—the wild visionaries, opponents of fluoride, palmists, astrologers, the far right and far left and far center, the dianeticians, scientologists, beatniks, homosexuals from the Mattachine Society, the handwriting analysts, addicts, nudists, psychic phenomenologists, all those who believed in the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman and the Communist Conspiracy; men beyond the beyond, black separatists who would take over Idaho and thrive by cornering the potato, pretenders to a half-dozen thrones, Krebiozonists, people from MENSA, health-food people, eaters of weed and soups of bark, cholesterolists, poly-unsaturationalists, treasure hunters, a woman who believed she held a valid Spanish land grant to all of downtown San Francisco, the Cassandras warning of poison in the white bread and cola and barbecued potato chip, conservationists jittery about the disappearing forests and the diminishing water table (and one man who claimed that the tides were a strain on the moon), would-be reformers of a dozen industries and institutions and a woman so fastidious about the separation of church and state that she would take the vote away from nuns and clergymen, capital punishers, atheists, people who wanted the abortion laws changed and a man who thought
all
surgery was a sin and ought to carry the same sentence as any other assault with a knife, housewives spooked by lax Food and Drug regulations, Maoists, Esperantoists, American Nazis, neo-Jaegerists, Reichians, juvenile delinquents, crionics buffs, anti-vivisectionists, witches, wizards, chief rabbis of no less than three of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and a fellow who claimed he died the same year Columbus discovered America.

D
ICK
: Do you mean to sit there and tell me you’ve actually been to Saturn on a flying saucer? Come
on
now, Mr. Beckendienst.

H
ERMAN
B
ECKENDIENST
: I have too. I have. The Martians chose me. They come down to my field while I was plowin’ and taken me aboard. Then, whoosh, up we went to Saturn. I’d say it taken ’bout half an hour. We didn’t
land.
I ain’t claimin’ we ever
landed.
Not on Saturn proper we didn’t. But we set down on one of the rings. The blue one. Yes sir.

D
ICK
: Well why? Why did they choose
you,
Mr. Beckendienst?

H
ERMAN
B
ECKENDIENST
: Well, I don’t
know
why.

D
ICK
: Didn’t you ask them?

H
ERMAN
B
ECKENDIENST
: No sir. They don’t have our language.

D
ICK
: Then how do you know they were from Mars?

H
ERMAN
B
ECKENDIENST
: Well, I seen their license plates.

And when Dick leaned over and hugged the farmer, the man had been more startled by Dick’s embrace than by the approach of the Martian saucer itself. He could have hugged all of them—all the zealots and crusaders and saints to obsession, as well as the reasonable ones, the juristic Bernie Perks. Ah, God, would there were an auditorium to hold them all, to always be there with them, to keep them forever talking.

He received the signal from his engineer. “A minute to air time, people,” he said. They all stopped chatting and looked at him. A couple of the panelists coughed. Behr-Bleibtreau smiled. Dick rubbed the skin along his throat, and watched for Jerry—there was something vaguely athletic about the gesture, his engineer’s arm up like an official’s with a gun above runners—to throw his finger at him. “Thirty seconds,” he said on his own. “All right, be ready.”

In his head he knew the exact instant that Jerry would signal, and was already talking before the finger came down the full arc of his engineer’s arm.

D
ICK
: Good midnight. I’m Dick Gibson. Till dawn us do part. Forgive the glibness, please. I’ve been in radio practically since it was invented, but I’ve never been comfortable about introductions. There’s just no appropriate style. UNH UNH UNH, DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! You see? I don’t know you, you don’t know me. We’re strangers. One of us has to make a beginning. Why don’t I just give you the lineup? My colleagues and comrades tonight are Professor Jack Patterson, Pepper Steep of the Pepper Steep Charm School, Bernard Perk of the corner drugstore, and Mel Son of Amherst.

J
ACK
: Mel, son of Amherst.
(laughter)

M
EL
: Jack patter, son.
(laughter)

D
ICK
: Come on, you guys. I haven’t introduced our Special Guest. Who is—

B
ERNIE
: Boy, with jokes like that I’d give up.

D
ICK
: … the noted psychologist, Edmond Behr-Bleibtreau. Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau is an author who has written extensively on the problem of Will—not as a philosopher but as someone pragmatically concerned with the problems of people.

J
ACK
: That’d be like Will’s will.

D
ICK
: If my panel
will
restrain itself long enough for me to get through this introduction, we can find out about it from the guest himself. Oh. Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau, one of the things we do on this show is to invite the audience to send in telegrams to the station. We accept about half a dozen collect wires a night, so I have to ask those people who won’t be paying for them to keep their messages within a ten-word limit. Later on we’ll discuss their comments on the air.

Dick gave his listeners his cable code; then, displeased with his voice—he thought it too high-pitched tonight—and to calm down his panel, he talked some more about the program’s format. He watched Behr-Bleibtreau for signs of irritation, but the man merely smiled and seemed to follow everything that was said with great attention. Sometimes a guest tried to make an alliance with Dick against the panel, but Behr-Bleibtreau seemed perfectly at ease, more so even than the people in the theater seats.

Still distrustful of the panel’s mood, Dick made some further summary statements about Behr-Bleibtreau’s work, for though it was true that he had not read Behr-Bleibtreau’s books he had the public person’s superficial grounding in all things; he could have gone on for fifteen minutes or so giving his creditable layman’s presentation of the psychologist’s position. He knew, however, that he was boring his listeners. (The thing about me, he thought even while still speaking, is that I have no humor. And that’s because I like being where I am and doing what I do. Why, then, am I so unhappy?) He knew he had to bring his speech to an end, but he saw Jack Patterson’s lips pursing for a joke. (They were skitterish tonight; he didn’t know why.) Anything was better than this, however, and he addressed himself directly to Behr-Bleibtreau, making it seem at the last moment as if his remarks had all been part of a dialogue.

D
ICK
: … by which I take it you mean the mind. Every day in every way I get better and better. That sort of thing.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Yes. But not so piecemeal. I would take the element of time out of it. We are too patient.

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: I’m surprised to hear you say that, Dr. Behr- Bleibtreau. As patient as you were during Dick’s program notes. As positively benign as the guest of honor at a banquet.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: I’m not in favor of rudeness, Mr. Patterson.

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: I think I must call you on that, Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau. I don’t wish to be stuffy, but I’m as much Ph.D. as you are, and if I’m going to address
you
as Doctor, I think I deserve the same courtesy.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: And shall our druggist friend here insist on being called Doc?

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Hey, wait a minute, I’m out of this.

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: That was meant for me, Bernie.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: Oh good. Two Doctors and a Doc.

M
EL
S
ON
: And a Dick.

Dick broke in to introduce a commercial. As Jerry put on the loop in the control booth Dick asked, “What’s wrong with you people? Come on, Jack, stop being so damned snotty. You’ve been horsing around since the program went on the air. Be professional, for God’s sake.” He looked apologetically at Behr-Bleibtreau. (Guests had walked out. It was not unheard of.) “We’re going on again now, and I’m going to try to draw you out, Edmond, about some of your ideas. All right everybody. Here we go.”

D
ICK
: I’d like to get down to something a bit more specific, sir.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Yes.

D
ICK
: What troubles me is the role of determinism in all this. You don’t seem to leave any room for it.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: I prefer to use the word “determination.” It’s—

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: Oh,
please.

D
ICK
: Jack, let the man finish his sentence, will you? I don’t know how this hostility built up, but I want to tell you I think you’re sabotaging the program.

J
ACK
P
ATTERSON
: Do you want me to leave?

D
ICK
: No, of course not. I just want you to calm down a little—that goes for all of you—and give Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau a chance to explain himself.