The Dick Gibson Show (28 page)

“A-Do. Dr-Hes. Hest-Q. R-Shipman. Shir-V. W-X-Y-Z. Two drawers have no cards. Do I have it right, madam?”

Well, I won’t go on about it. There are hundreds of things in even the emptiest of rooms. Looking only once, only casually, Arnold saw and registered them all. Every detail made its impression on him. At first only mildly interested but gradually fascinated, I led him about the Charm School—it was after hours by now—took him into rooms, turned on the lights and let him look briefly. Then he gave me back all of it.
All of it.
The thousand things, the million details. And it was just as if I were blind and he was giving me sight. Naming everything, hearing my inventory called off—the precise placement of the furniture, bare spots in the rugs, the patterns in the drapes, the number of holes in the speakers of the toy telephones—I had it all for the first time. I hadn’t known how much there
was
before.

By the time we’d finished our tour I had decided to help him. I could see he’d been telling the truth, both as to his gifts and his drawbacks. He was immensely clumsy—a stumbler, a toe stubber, a lumbering blunderer—and immensely excited. His excitement fed his clumsiness. Those pathetic flourishes, his corny “Am I correct, madam?” learned from some old fraud in a tent show. But his
mind!
His mind was a gallery of the world, of everything he had ever seen. Stuffed to bursting it was with all the odd-lots of memory, a warehouse of surfaces. No wonder he couldn’t move! So I agreed to work with him, though for the sake of the girls it had to be after hours.

We used my studio, and after great effort I got him first to the point where he could stand in place without falling, then to where he didn’t knock telephones from desk tops when he sat down, and at last to move across a room without tripping. I didn’t dare try him on the stairway, of course, but after two or three weeks, he became relatively adroit in the simple conquest of ordinary human space. We still had no idea how he would behave on a stage—the equipment in my studio was limited—so neither of us really knew whether he was making any practical progress. We devised a curtain, however—that is,
I
did; Arnold was a long way off from doing any work with his hands—the area in front of it became Arnold’s “stage.”

Arnold would stand behind the makeshift curtain and I would introduce him, adopting what I took to be the styles of the various MC’s he might encounter. Thus a late night television show: “This next guest is one who’ll give pause to any of us who’ve ever had to take out our Social Security card to look at before writing down the number. He’s a memory expert who calls himself an eidetic—a man with a photographic mind. Let’s bring him out and have him take some pictures. Ladies and gentlemen—Arnold Menchman.” Or: “Mr. Sy Tobin and the management of the Sands Hotel present … ‘
The Great Arnold’!”

Sometimes Arnold would just be standing there, as in a tableau, when I drew the curtain. Other times he would run out from between the curtains in that snappy locomotive jog entertainers do, their heads down, their hands balled into fists at the level of their chests, the orchestra playing “Fine and Dandy.”

After a while we saw the limitations of our makeshift stage. Though Arnold could have gone on right then if there had been an audience. He knew every square inch of that room, at home as a blind man in his square yards of familiar darkness. We had to try him in other environments, for place—mere place—was our problem. Arnold wasn’t stupid. Unlike other “mentalists” he enjoyed what he knew; the things he saw when he closed his eyes were full of wonder for him. And he was selective: he didn’t get any pleasure out of such stunts as memorizing whole Sears and Roebuck catalogs.

D
ICK
: Does he listen to the radio?

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: What? Wait. Or pages from telephone directories, or timetables. Though he knew these too. Knew the Yellow Pages, knew the City and Town Indexes on the back of the Shell Oil Company roadmaps for every state. But encyclopedias, tracts on gardening, rock formations—these were his forte. The positions—listen—he knew the positions of the stars! But it is one thing to know a principle, another to apply it. For instance, Arnold
knew
dexterity—whole books of the dance he knew; he could have given you by heart the choreography of a hundred ballets—but he wasn’t dexterous. So place was our problem, the threat of place.

Then I thought of the local television station. After all, this was how Arnold first knew about me, wasn’t it? As I told you, I’d done some things for them with my girls. Whenever there was a telethon I volunteered my students to handle the phones. For favors rendered I presumed to ask the station manager to let Arnold and me—after hours, of course: everything we did that year
(giggling)
was after hours, everything we did required keys—use his station.

In the empty studio I would introduce Arnold. I wanted him to learn to step over the cables, you see, to get used to moving across a cluttered floor. Slowly Arnold learned to thread his way between cameras and light stands, to step over coaxial lines thick as roots. Then I would rearrange these, Arnold not looking, so that when he came from behind the Japanese screen where I made him wait before I announced him, it was into a new arena that he stepped each time. At first it was as if he was walking in a minefield. He was that cautious, picking his way, high stepping as a man in heavy weather.

We made it into a game. If he brushed against anything he lost a point. “No, Arnold,” I’d call. “You’re still too tense. Try to relax. If you do collide with something, personify it. Keep it from falling. Brace its shoulders, smile at it.” With practice he became more natural, but it was slow work. When he could finally get through an evening at the TV studio without a serious blunder it was time to start all over somewhere else.

Next we used the auditorium of a high school—the father of one of my girls was the principal—and Arnold came down from the stage into the audience and moved gingerly through a row of seats to wherever I happened to be sitting. This was particularly good practice, because half these acts are audience participation. Then one night I shouted up to him to pretend that there were no steps leading down from the stage and to negotiate the four- and-a-half-foot space to the auditorium floor in some other way. It was awful—as if our weeks of practice had never happened. You’d think I had asked him to jump from an airplane. He got down on his hands and knees and backed tentatively toward the apron of the stage. He looked ridiculous. He pushed a foot out behind him and groped with it for the edge. When he found it, he stuck out the other foot and waved
it
about, as if seeking some purchase in the air itself. Another time he lay prostrate on the stage, belly down, arms straight out in front of him and hands joined, exactly like someone doing a belly flop. He couldn’t move. I finally had to take his legs and actually pull him down from the stage. I felt like a fireman taking a housepet out of a tree. When he was on the ground again he slumped down on the piano bench, his head in his hands.

“I never crawled,” he said finally.

“What’s that, Arnold?”

“I never crawled. My mother tells me I never crawled. Proper crawling is very important.”

“Of course you crawled. All babies crawl.”

“No. ‘Odd as it may seem to parents for whom the clumsy crawling maneuvers of a toddler are “cute” and often comic, the act of crawling is a
sine qua non
of proper locomotor development. Studies have shown a close relationship between later athletic development and efficient crawling.’” Arnold quoted letter-perfect from one of his many sources.

“Then let’s
teach
you to crawl,” I said.

“I’d feel funny,” he said. “You’d laugh. No, it’s no good. I’m too clumsy. I’m just wasting your time, Miss Steep.”

“You
aren’t
wasting my time.”

“No,” he said, “it’s no use.”

“Are you going to give up now, Arnold? After we’ve made so much progress? Am I
wrong
about you? Are you a coward? Is that it? Maybe you haven’t got the guts to be in show business. Maybe your guts are as undeveloped as your grace. Because believe me, Arnold, there are going to be places where the stages aren’t equipped with stairs and it’s a bigger jump than a lousy four and a half feet.”

“I can’t.”

“These are bad times, Arnold. Everywhere our foreign relations are deteriorating. The Middle East, the Far East, Europe. Our neighbors north and south. Wars are coming, Arnold. The USO is going to be bigger than ever. Do you think the theaters in a theater-of-operations are going to have stairways? You’re going to have to make up your mind, Mr. Menchman.”

“You’ll laugh.”

“Did I laugh when you fell out of chairs?”

“No.”

“Or when you tripped over your shadow that time in the studio?”

“No.”

“Well then?”

“Teach me to
crawl,”
he said.

So I did.

We crawled together across the stage all night. We played follow the leader on our hands and knees.
It was exactly what was missing in Arnold’s locomotor development!
Before we left that night Arnold had learned not only to crawl but to negotiate that jump. He could have leaped from any stage in the world. It was our single most productive session.

Now Arnold could move almost as well as your average man on the street, and in the next two weeks he made even greater progress. Inside a month we were able to make a stage of everything, anything. We drove into deserted parking lots at supermarkets and Arnold burst out of the window of my automobile nimble as Houdini. He climbed the hood and jumped up onto the roof of the car like Gene Kelly. He scrambled up the pedestal of a statue in the park and, holding onto the horse’s leg, swayed far out over its base, cocky as a ballet sailor in a dance. He was beautiful, suddenly lithe as a cat burglar. I couldn’t have taught him another thing about movement … It was at about this time, incidentally, that Dick had him on the show.

“I guess we won’t be seeing each other much from now on,” I told him one night when we got back to my studio.

“You’re a marvelous teacher.”

“You’re an apt pupil.”

“I’m very confident about my appearance. I owe you a lot.”

“You worked hard.”

“I still really haven’t got much of an act, though.”

“Oh, well,” I said, “your act. Your act is your mind.”

“I guess so … But a person’s act has to be structured. There has to be a patter. You know. Style is important, delivery is.”

“You’ll work it out.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know so much about these things.”

“I don’t either.”

“Oh, you do. Miss Steep?”

“Yes?”

“If I gave you more money, could you … do you think—?”

“What?”

“Could you be my audience for a bit? Just for as long as it takes me to work out my routines?”

“I couldn’t take money for watching you perform, Arnold.”

“I’d be taking up your time.”

“I’d love to watch you, but not for money. I’ve become very interested in your career,” I said.

So that’s what I did. We still used the makeshift curtain, but the way he moved now it could have been the handsomest setting in show business. He invented his routines right before my eyes. All I did was teach him a few flourishes. Not very good ones, I’m afraid—just that kind of handling themselves that professionals do. You know what I mean—a hand clasping the forehead in concentration, or two fingers buttering the right eyebrow, chin cuppings, scowls to make what he did look difficult. Later we discarded even these. He didn’t need them; he was too good. His memory should seem to be what it was: a function as naturally available to him as touch. What was wanted was ease, the juggler’s divided attentions, his camouflaged concentration, to be centerless, detached, incorruptible. B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Just so, Pepper.

P
EPPER
S
TEEP
: I had never seen anything so fine. He must have known this, though he still needed assurances.