Read Online The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin - Free Book Online Page B

we had all stopped listening weeks before when I came back from Lincoln with the new records. Because they never heard those other programs. Because without consulting anyone each of them had become bored, without even recognizing the moment when they no longer cared to listen to their own radio station, and without even deciding not to, without—my God, they must have been bored—its even being a conscious act on their part, and so there was just this piecemeal tuning me out, just this gradual lapse as one loses by degrees his interest in a particular magazine he subscribes to, just this sluggish wane, just this disaffection, not from my programs alone but from Shippleton’s too. They were all so bored that it was simply something personal, taking boredom for granted, almost as if it were something in the eye of the beholder with no outside cause at all, just a shift in taste, as one day one discovers that he can no longer eat scrambled eggs. So bored that it was just too trivial to mention to one’s brothers, because each made the unconscious assumption that the others still had their appetites intact.”
    Well, thought Marshall Maine, I’ll be. I ran KROP right into the ground. All by myself. I did it. Not even my engineer listened to me. Not even my transmitter man with nothing to distract him except the sound of the relief man’s snoring. I’ll be. It doesn’t have a single listener. Not one.
    “This is Marshall Maine,” he said aloud in the empty shack, “KROP’s Voice of the Voice of Wheat. Be still. We interrupt this radio station for a special announcement. Be still.”

2
     
    It is not enough to say that he lost his job. Rather, it disappeared—his as well as the jobs of the transmitter men and engineers and the other announcer. Even the radio station disappeared—KROP plowed back under.
    As it happened, Dick Gibson was able to take advantage of the Credenza boredom for a few more days. Though now that some of his colleagues had realized what had happened—or soon would—he knew he did not have much time. Once the requisitions were put in to replace the equipment he had damaged, the Credenzas would easily be able to fill in the rest of the story. Meanwhile he worked.
    Perhaps it was the knowledge that no one heard him, or perhaps it was to make a sort of amends for his former fear, or simply the hope that if they should tune him in now, at the top of his form, they would forget who it was that had driven them away from their sets in the first place and would place a new and stronger confidence in him. At any rate, using the name Dick Gibson, he spoke during this respite with a silver tongue, lips that were sweeter than wine, a golden throat. He was in a state of grace, of classic second chances. The more it galled him that no one heard him, the better he was. The weather had turned bad and there was a thin film of unseasonable ice along Route 33; yet he hoped that someone passing through might be listening. It could make the difference between one concept of the place and another. Such a stranger might think, for as long as the signal lasted, that he had entered a Shangri-la, crossed a border more telling than the Iowa-Nebraska one, and come into—despite the flatness stretching behind and before him—a sort of valley, still unspoiled, unmarked perhaps on maps. To stay within range of the signal—never strong and now damaged further by the involuntary surges and slackenings of an inconstant electricity—the stranger might slow down (it would have nothing to do with the ice) and Dick would guide him, preserving him on the treacherous road as art preserves, as God does working in mysterious ways. The stranger might even pull over to the side. Dick pictured the fellow, his salesman’s wares piled high in the space from which he had removed the back seat, sitting there, his appointments forgotten, time itself forgotten, preoccupied, listening with a recovered wonder unfamiliar since childhood, in a