“‘Ah, Mr. Desebour, pull up a couple of chairs, why don’t you?’
“‘He’s in for rupture,’ one man liked to explain to his visitors, ‘from carrying great weights.’
“‘Is it a fact, Mr. Desebour, that you had a limb amputated in order to accommodate your incredible cock, and that you now wear a pant leg over that cock and fill up your shoe with its foreskin?’
“‘No, that is not a fact,’ I said, and they laughed the harder. Everyone laughed. The man who got hard-ons when Miriam fed him laughed; the Sherpa who had injured his spine in an Everest expedition, and whose employer — a rich Southerner who had taught the Sherpa English — brought the fellow to Morristown to spend the rest of his life in the Home, he laughed.
“‘Down home,’ the Sherpa said, ‘there was this good old boy. Now he had a piece on him and that piece, well sir, it was big but it was cuter’n a speckled pup under a red wagon. Folks down home said he could climb it. Whoeee, have mercy, have mercy. My daddy told me that old boy went up it like a nigger chased up a tree by a li’l ole ghost. I ain’t sayin’ a thing ’gainst Marshall’s here, I’m just tellin’ you all what my daddy reported.’
“‘Down home, down home,’ I hissed at him irritably. ‘You’re from Tibet. Why don’t you say up home?’
“I tell you, it’s quite extraordinary to be laughed at — Bob Hope couldn’t have touched me in those days — quite extraordinary to know that wherever you go you are something less than the least person there. Not to inspire disfiguring envy or fury or hatred but only merriment is a doom. I had the power to change a mood simply by entering a room. At the sight of me, whatever had been the frictions and cross-currents before, there was now a unity. And it didn’t matter what people said to me. I mean this two ways. Many of the patients confided private things about themselves to me, what they regarded as my inhumanity lending me the immunity of clowns — as one fucks one’s wife in front of the dog. You don’t understand this, do you? There have been cuckolds before. Why, right in your own neighborhood, you think, down your street and up your block, and who laughs, who doesn’t go out of his way to be kind to the guy’s children, circumspect with him? I don’t know, perhaps they smelled something on me that was inhuman really or they wouldn’t have acted like that.
“They laughed at me openly but never brought Miriam’s or the enema man’s name into it. As a matter of fact, he was the only one who didn’t find me amusing. He even tried to befriend me. The enema man had had two or three divorces himself and knew the rough weathers of love. He told me that this was why he was in the home, and why he took enemas; his frustration in his marriages had somehow affected his intestines and kept him almost constantly blocked. But he was nice and tried to comfort me. He put his arm about me consolingly. ‘Don’t depend on women, kid. Forget the broads. They’re poison. Put money in your poitch.’
“‘That’s easy for you to say.’
“‘Not so easy, not so easy. They took their toll. Agh, none of ’em are any good. They’re woitch than a coitch.’
“‘All of them?’
“‘Every last one. They’d be better off dead in a hoitch.’ I nodded. ‘Kid, good talking to you. I better beat it back to my room, it’s time for my enema. Hey, did you see the noitch?’”
“I told him where he would find Miriam. I marveled at my helplessness, astonished to recognize that the conventional parameters of character applied, amazed that a person who had been on the radio; who had traveled and lived alone could not handle himself in a pinch. Why, I should have let them have it for laughing; I should have set Dr. Pasco straight or wrung Miriam’s neck. Now I don’t know. Now I am surprised I was surprised, for there I was, sidetracked in Morristown and living incognito with a nurse in a rest home, things too strange for your apprentice personality and one-track soul. How could I have known better who had gotten every idea I ever had from what they permitted to be spoken on the air? Why, my greenness was written in the stars. It’s a wonder I didn’t cry, break out in sweats and pimples, a wonder I didn’t sulk in corners or imagine them all at my funeral. I was little more than a teen-ager. How did I not go mad at that first feel on the bus; what kept me from proposing marriage then and there, the first time I felt her hand on my cock?”
But not all of this was for the warmup. Actually, Dick Gibson got no further than the part where he began to describe the sort of place Morristown was. At that point he became conscious of a stirring in the audience, not a restlessness so much as a new interest. He looked behind him — his instinct unerring here, danger always approaching from the rear — where he saw Frances Langford and Colonna and Bob Hope himself. After a while Langford and Colonna went off to their places behind the curtain, but Mr. Hope remained, politely listening at first but increasingly puzzled to know where this was leading, and then at last visibly concerned that all this talk of invalids and cripples could hurt the show. In a moment he signaled for the curtain to be raised, and there was the band in its places and Colonna and Vera Vague and Miss Langford and the rest of the cast in theirs, and Bob Hope came over to Gibson, whispered something in his ear, relieved him of the warmup microphone and did a fast half-dozen snappy minutes of emergency material.
The reaction of the audience was interesting. It sent up a courteous massed awww of disappointment when it saw that Dick was not to be allowed to finish his story, but then responded immediately and uproariously to the first of Hope’s jokes. But it was Dick Gibson himself who laughed loudest and cheered hardest. As a professional he understood Hope’s problem, of course, but there was something else — not sycophancy, not fear that he would lose his job, but his sense that Hope was racing the clock, up against time, the big one. In all the years he had been in radio he had never quite had this sense of time, had never seen it as a dimension in itself, more, a battleground, the battleground, and not only the battleground but the enemy as well. It was radio that took time on at its own game, scheduling it, slicing it into fifteen- and thirty- and sixty-minute slices, its single master. Forget railroads and buses and planes, forget appointments at the highest levels and the synchronized intricacies of combat and athletics, all you-cut-here, he-fades-there arrangements. Only radio and time were inexorable, and here was a hero who stood up in it, as one stands up in the sea, and splashed about in it, used it, perhaps one day would die in it. Hence he cheered and laughed, little less than literally wild when the director in the control room threw his finger and the red On the Air sign burned bright and Mr. Hope, script in hand, ready behind the stand-up microphone, took his cue.
Afterward Dick Gibson told the rest of his story to Joe Glober and Mel Bell and Jacomo Miller and a few of the people in Skinnay Ennis’s band when they all went out to a roadhouse just outside St. Paul. He was a little in his cups — Hope had spoken to him personally, assuring him that his approach was fresh, and that he had never heard anything like it: “Imagine,” Hope had said, turning to the man who worked the applause sign, “not to glut an audience with jokes, but merely to depress them so that when the laughs come the people are actually grateful and laugh harder”—and so perhaps his voice was just a bit louder than usual. But louder or not, he was at first addressing just the seven or eight at his table. Only later did he shift over and gradually raise his voice so that he could be heard finally throughout the entire roadhouse, doing his own version of a broadcast from the Copa Lounge, Barry Gray sans microphone and guests — closed-circuit radio, the radio of confrontation, the shout network — and in his cups or not, never forgetting time as he now understood it.