Then, a few months later, we were on television — together!
It was a cowboy show, where three or four children sat around on a corral fence, while, for five minutes at the beginning and five minutes at the end of the program, the chapped and Stetsoned star talked about the ancient Republic Pictures serial that filled the bulk of the airtime. Robert’s mother had arranged it and was to take the two of us to the studio. Robert wore jeans and sneakers, as we always did at school. But in light of my public appearance, Mom had sent me in that day in a suit and tie. As we didn’t have a TV yet, she didn’t know what the other kids on the show usually wore — and certainly wasn’t about to let me tell her: “But Mom, it’s a cowboy show — ”
“Just because it’s a cowboy show doesn’t mean you can’t look nice. You put on your tie, now!”
At the studio, the director’s assistant, a young woman in a purple blouse, slacks (not that common on women in the ’50s), and glasses, frowned at me, then told me to take off my suit jacket, in order to “dress me down.” Then someone said I’d have to put it back on, since my white shirt, even with the jacket covering most of it, would glare. (More than anything else, TV was responsible, during the ’50s, for the ascendancy of the Oxford blue shirt.) They asked me to take my tie off. I did; and decided they were really nice people. Then they opened my shirt collar as wide as they could under my tightly buttoned-up suit coat — and gave me a ten-gallon hat to make me look “more informal.”
Several times my mother had taken me to see radio programs. Although I’d been disappointed that the shows were not really acted, but simply read out from sheaves of flimsy paper by ordinary men and women standing around on an empty stage, one had been in a full-sized theater with balconies and the other in a hangar-like space that had seated at least three hundred. But this was a one-camera show, done live, in a studio only a hair’s breadth bigger than our bathroom at home. In his soiled white shirt, the cameraman chain smoked (like my father), and when I asked, “Won’t his cigarette smoke get in front of the lens and make it cloudy?” the assistant laughed and said, “If his cigarette bothers you, I’ll ask him to put it out. He’s not supposed to be smoking in here, anyway.”
“No!” I said, abashed at not being taken seriously. “It doesn’t bother me! I was just wondering about the camera, that’s all!”
But my greatest, silent astonishment there was that the desert background which, on Robert’s television only the night before, had stretched infinitely far behind the length of corral fence, with a couple of cactuses standing among distant dunes and sagebrush, was only painted cloth, a foot higher than the star’s head, and with a sag along the top! The whole desert (not to mention the prop fence before it) was not as wide as Robert and I laid together, toe to head!
But the very bright lights were already on.
Already we were more or less positioned.
My next surprise was one that has surprised me all over, every time I’ve been on a talk show or guest interview since: the unruptured continuity from non-air time to air time.
We four kids had been on monitor for fifteen minutes now and had gotten used to it. (Or would never get used to it: the other boy, who’d come with his father, kept staring back and forth from the TV screen in the studio corner to the camera in the middle of the room, unable to understand why, when he turned to look at himself, his image on the screen looked away, so that he could never get his screen self to look directly at his own face.) Standing beside the camera, wearing earphones and a green, open-necked shirt, dark as the sea, the director gave all his attention to his clipboard.
Only the red light coming on above the camera lens told us that the studio had changed from a cramped cell with flaking gray paint on the walls and a very shiny clock with a red second-hand jerking about it above the door, to a dream presentation vaster than Arizona and replicated unto gray thousands. It was a transition wholly without emotional weight, thoroughly technological, hidden within some nacelle of wires and timed to a clock in another room we couldn’t see.
In the same voice with which he’d been asking us if we were comfortable, was I secure on the rail there, if the party dress of the girl who sat beside me was caught under her leg (“No sir! It’s fine!”), the star in his chaps and cowboy hat said, as though he were continuing to talk to us or to people like us who, for some reason, weren’t quite there: “Well, boys and girls, it’s good to see you all back again. This evening, as our guests, we have Billy and Suzy and Bobby and Sammy…”
I’d never heard anyone call Robert “Bobby” before. And I loathed the name “Sammy.” Yet, before the metallic lights like white-hot holes in the walls, in almost no time he was saying (in the same voice in which he’d been addressing uncountable ghost children), “All right, that’s all there is to it. For now, anyway. Or at least for the next fifteen minutes.”
The red light was off.
The dream was on hold — or had switched beyond us to another of its infinitely malleable, endlessly linkable segments.
“You can get down. Just don’t go too far, so we can all get back together for the closing part of the show.”
Suzy (if she was any more “Suzy” than I was “Sammy” or Robert was “Bobby”) climbed down from the fence. I got down too. Billy was still staring from camera to monitor. Robert just jumped. “Can we go watch the movie now?”
“Aw…!” The star leaned back and folded his large, clean hands before his silver buckle, as though this were the single sadness in his generally joyful job. “I’m sorry! But that’s done from an entirely different building, way over on the other side of town. And we aren’t hooked up to that cable. But we’ll be back on the air in just a while…”
I took off my ten gallon hat and looked for the director’s assistant to give it to. She was at my elbow a moment later. “Don’t you want to keep that,” she said as I turned to her, “till the show’s over?”
Though my family did not yet have a TV, the Hunts, who lived in a cramped apartment on the second floor in the building next door to our private house, did. (Their daughter, Laura, a girl six months older than I, was supposed to be “engaged” to me, so ran the joke among the other black children along the Harlem block.) Dad and Mom and my sister were all going over there to watch.
Robert’s mother stopped in with us at a coffee shop after the show and we got hamburgers. So we didn’t get back to my house till about seven.
“What in the world happened to your tie?” Mom demanded when I walked in.
“I’ve got it on…?” I looked down at myself in conscientious bewilderment. (How carefully I’d knotted it again before the mirror above the sink in the studio’s blue phonebooth of a bathroom.)
“But you didn’t have it on the show!”
And I was surprised all over: I actually had been on television! Thousands of people really had seen me!
“They made me take it off,” I said, wondering now if it wasn’t really me who’d made the suggestion. What was it they’d said about the glare from my shirt? Maybe I’d just looked silly in a suit and an open collar… But Mom seemed to think it was more funny than not. And when Dad came upstairs from the ground-floor funeral parlor, he didn’t say anything — maybe he hadn’t actually gone over to the Hunts’ and seen me…?
A year or so later Robert provided me with the most sexually exciting few hours of my childhood.
I had met Robert’s father a few times. A physically vast, gray-haired man, the elderly and successful Scotsman was notably senior to his German-American wife. Then, one year, just before school started, my mother put down the phone to tell me: “Aunt Kay just told me that Robert’s father died this summer! That’s so sad for his mother. And the boy, too. He’s had such a rough time.” She meant Robert’s motor problems that had, by now, all but vanished and whose faintest lingerings I never noticed anymore.