The Dick Gibson Show (5 page)

There is another photograph above this one. A newscaster sits in his studio behind a big web microphone. In his dark, wide-lapelled suit he looks like a banker, the longitudes of his decency in the dimly perceived pinstripes. He holds his script. You glimpse a thin bracelet of shirtcuff. The “On the Air” sign is still inert, but there is a large-faced wall clock behind him, a thick second hand sweeping toward the landmark at the top of the clock where time begins. He looks toward the control booth at his director. He sits militantly, responsibly urgent—and this is no posture either but the careful, serious alertness of a man pacing himself, as attuned and concentrated as a child waiting to move in under the arc of a jump rope.

Alias Dick Gibson, alias Marshall Maine, alias Tex Ellery, alias a dozen others, knew, knew
then,
blessed by nostalgia as some are blessed with prescience, this steady hindsight that was contemporaneous to him and as involuntary as digestion, that all this was the truth, that those pictures had it right: Americans
were
in their living rooms, before their floorlamps, on their sofas, in their chairs, along their rugs, together in time, united, serené. And so he felt twinges, pins and needles of actual conscience; he needed to join his voice to that important chorus, that lovely a cappella.

He approached Lee, the reasonable Credenza, and spoke to him about it. He said KROP should be no different than other stations.

“I see what you mean. I’ll talk it over with the brothers and get back to you,” Lee told him.

And then, two weeks after he had first introduced the subject, he received a delegation of Credenzas in the transmitter shack. Surprised by their presence there and to a certain extent intimidated by seeing so many of them gathered at one time—only Charley and Bill, whose legislative duties kept them in Lincoln, did not come—he was at first alarmed, suspecting actual physical attack.

Louis III spoke. “You, Marshall Maine, Lee says you ain’t satisfied with the way we do things on our station.”

He was prepared to yield at once, to concede to the pressures of what seemed to him their vigilante loomings, when the off-duty transmitter man—one of those tattooed vagrants common in those days, an old navy man, retired possibly, but more probably court-martialed and perhaps even a deserter, one of those thick-veined, long-armed quiet men, someone keeping to himself, soured by a grudge or ruined by a secret—woke up and, seeing the brothers, having less contact with them than Maine—even more of a drifter than Marshall, there less time than him—not knowing who they were, or perhaps suspecting that they had come for him, threw a punch, drew a knife.

“Hold it!” the transmitter man yelled, missing Felix. “No tricks!” he screamed, and turned briefly to Marshall Maine, forming their plan even as he lunged toward the Credenzas. “The Saigon caper, mate,” he said, “I take these four, you get them two.” At these words—they had barely spoken in the three weeks the man had been at the station—Marshall felt an unaccountable flush of pride. Then Poke poked the transmitter man and the old fellow fell down—collapsed, for all Maine knew, died. Poke’s punch had loosened the man’s grip on his knife and it flew neatly, almost politely, handle first into Jim Credenza’s hand.

Marshall Maine found himself mourning, grieving for a pal. “The Credenza County caper, mate,” he said softly. Then, anger at the Credenzas’ building on his grief for his new friend, he addressed himself to George and Louis III, the two Credenzas he had been left to handle in the transmitter man’s plan. “He thought you—” he protested. “He was only … What did you have to hit him for?” The Credenzas looked at him blandly, the transmitter man’s four as well as his own two, incapable of understanding friendship’s way despite their expertise in family’s. Seeing their indifference he reversed himself again, having in the same two minutes found a buddy and lost him, mourned and forgotten him.

Forlorn, he gave in to the Credenzas, putting for good and all their value on things and feeling abashed, exposed, like one caught out in an act of bad taste. Thenceforward, for as long as he remained at the station, Marshall Maine was never again to feel comfortable with any of the other employees, seeing them as the Credenzas saw them—not family, outsiders like himself. And not only not comfortable with them, but actively resenting them, squeamish for the first time in the bunk they shared, fastidious over the common washstand, handling the common soap as if it were tainted, hovering and actually constipate on the seat of the flush toilet the Credenzas had added on in a corner of the transmitter shack. He found himself longing to stretch out luxuriously in Credenza tubs and to sit wholeheartedly, four- squarely, on Credenza-warmed toilets, those fine fleshpots and seats of kinship and power. If he could divorce himself from his colleagues, he felt, he would be that much closer to the Credenzas.

“And that’s why I’m such a good radio man. Because there
are
standards, grounds of taste. Because I would rid myself of all dialect and speak only Midwest American Standard, and have a sense of bond, and eschew the private and wild and unacceptable. Because I would throw myself into the melting pot while it’s at the very boil and would, if I had the power, pass a law to protect the typical. Because I honor the mass. Because I revere the regular. Because I consent to consensus. Because I would be decent, and decently blind to the differences between appearances and realities, and daily pray to keep down those qualities in myself that are suspect or insufficiently public- spirited or divergent from the ideal. Because I would have life like it is on the radio—all comfy and clean and everyone heavily brothered and rich as a Credenza. This is KROP, the Voice of Wheat. Your announcer is Marshall Maine, the Voice of Wheat’s Voice, staff announcer for the staff of life. Give us this day our daily bread. Amen.”

He tried to explain to the brothers what he had in mind, first apologizing for his apology for the transmitter man, washing his hands of that dirty old seadog and showing them clean to the Credenzas ( “ … who didn’t care, who hadn’t noticed past the time it took Poke to dodge the punch and counter it anything other than the man’s otherness, who held in a contempt that could pass for forgiveness
all
otherness, who expected that sort of thing from unbrothers, and not only didn’t bother to despise it but did not even bother to distinguish between one sort of otherness—the hostile deserter’s—and another— my, Maine’s, benign own”).

“Never mind that,” George Credenza said, “you sometimes get too close to the mike. We hear you breathe.”

“You’re not always careful with the records. There’s some that are scratched,” Lee said. “Lift the arm clear when it gets to the end. Use your chamois to wipe them clean.”

“Sometimes it’s the needle,” Louis told him. “Dust it, pull off the crud. That’s a thirty-five-buck needle, but it’s got to be clean.”

“The turntable squeaks. Oil it,” Poke ordered.

“When there are storms,” Felix said, “make sure the studio clocks are reset correct.”

“On ‘News, Weather and Sports,’ when you give the reports, a death on the highway or damage to crops, get a little chuckle in your voice.”

“We don’t mean to laugh.”

“It ain’t no laughing matter.”

“But a chuckle, a smile, something to signal it isn’t so bad.”

“Say the time and temperature twice. I don’t always catch it the first time around.”

“Now what was it you wanted?” George asked.

“I didn’t know you were so disappointed in me,” Maine told them dejectedly. “I didn’t know you weren’t satisfied.”

“Who ain’t satisfied, Marshall? We’re satisfied. We’re satisfied fine.”

“When we ain’t satisfied you’ll hear we ain’t satisfied.”

“We’ll haul your ass out of there.”

“We’ll fire your ass.”

“We’ll see you never work your ass in this state again.”

“That your voice, you take your ass to Iowa or Dakota nearby, croaks at the state line.”

“We’re satisfied.”

Just keep those cards and letters coming in, Marshall Maine thought.

They had intimidated him. Making one kind of metaphor of his ass as he made another. He saw them now as something closer knit even than family, close knit as interest itself, and himself forever absolved of the hope of kinship with them, reduced by his very value to them to something not just expendable should that value wane, but destroyable as a gangster’s evidence. The ass they spoke of so dispassionately he came to see as more vital somehow than the heart, not their metaphor for his soul at all, but just their prearranged, priority target, the doomed bridge- and railheads of his being. He would be undone in the behind when the time came, there kicked (they would actually do it), scorned. Destroyed in the ass. They were dark, gigantic generals, booted for business and answerable only to themselves. So he was intimidated, and he knew it. And this is what happened.

For the first time in his life he developed mike fright. Not just that stage-wary fillip of excitement, nor even that panicked realization that one’s words are gone, nor yet that temporary, pre-curtain woe in the wings that is often an actor’s capital, a signal, like the rich man’s haunted look, of money in the bank, of reserves of adrenaline to turn terror—no ordinary, innocent commotion, the heart all thumbs, or momentary inability to function that is only function in the act of sparking. Not mike
fright
at all, really, but some pinched, asbestos quality in himself of unkindling, some odd, aged and deadened dignity. That is, he could speak, could read his scripts and do his commercials, but he had a sense that he was working on slack, a loose-tooth sense of margin. All urgency had gone out of his voice. There was a certain loss of treble, a corresponding increment of heavy bass. It was the voice of a drowned man, slow and waterlogged.

He was forced to make certain changes in his chatter, to bring his talk into accord with the changes in his delivery. Formerly his remarks on introducing a song matched the mood of the song, while filler material provoked an illusion, even at this distance, of KROP’s relationship to show business. ( “Now, from the sound track of Walt Disney’s feature-length animated cartoon,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
the RKO Studio Orchestra plays the wistful ‘Someday My Prince Will Come.’ Maestro …” “From the hit Broadway show
Showboat
of a few years back, the lovely Miss Helen Morgan sings this show stopper, the haunting ‘He’s Just My Bill’ … ”) With his new constraint, however, words like “sound track,” the names of studios, even the titles of films, suddenly made him self-conscious. Catch phrases like “from the motion picture of the same name” caught in his throat. His old attempt to set a human mood—”A romantic confession now, some sweet excuses for a familiar story: ‘Those Little White Lies’”—seemed the grossest liberty of all. The idea of setting a mood for the dark-booted Credenzas was blasphemous, a sort of spoken graffiti.

At first he tried simply to announce the title and identify the singer, but the discrepancy between the tunes and his flat statements was even more disturbing to him than his old chatter. As a consequence he began to play a different sort of music altogether, songs that were so familiar they needed no introduction, love songs nominally still, but from a different period, or rather from no period at all, songs that had always existed, in the public domain years, nothing that could ever have connected KROP with show business: “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Alice Blue Gown,” “I Wandered Today to the Hill, Maggie.” Because they were the sort of songs no crooner anyone had ever heard of was likely to have recorded, he found it difficult to speak the names of the obscure tenors and sopranos who
had
recorded them, the Fred L. Joneses and Olive Patzes and Herbert Randolph Fippses who had cornered the market on this kind of thing. So he said nothing and looked instead for instrumental versions of the recordings, leaving Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties on his day off and going down to Lincoln on his own authority to the big radio station there, to speak to the music librarian and offer him money for his discards. At first the man didn’t seem to understand what he wanted, until Marshall explained that he did a request show for shut-ins, and invented for him the Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties Old People’s Home, a place, he said, where the staff used the golden hits of yesteryear as therapy, offering the invalided and senile a musical opportunity to re-court their wives, re-raise their children and re-fight their wars, the idea being, Maine said, not to pull the afflicted (he called them that) from their pasts but to push them back into them.

Together they went into the music library, and there he found a cache of exactly the sort of thing he was looking for: “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” played by the Netherlands Deutschgeschreir Orkestra, Jerome Klopf conducting; “I Wish I Was in de Land ob Cotton,” sung by the Luftwaffe Sinfonia; Sir Reginald Shoat leading the Edinburgh Festival Orchestra in a Stephen Foster medley. There were also some fine things by the Hotel Brevert- Topeka’s Palm Court Band.

“Gee,” the librarian said, “I didn’t know we had all this stuff.” “Yes,” Marshall Maine told him. “These will do.” The man put one of the recordings on the library console. “The quality’s not good. This one sounds strained, as if it was transcribed from the short wave.”

“Yes,” Marshall Maine said, “that’s fine. They want that quality— the suggestion of the distant past.” “But they’re all instrumentals.” “Yes, that forces them to remember the words.” “Oh, look here, Lily Pons doing ‘Funiculi Funicula.’” “No,” Maine said sharply. “But if you had choral groups, I might take some choral groups of the right sort.” “Choral groups?”