“Then you moan,” Sheila said.
When Laspooney and Null returned, it was late and time to get back to the base. Sheila could sleep there and pay for the room, they said. Sheila said she didn’t have quite enough money to cover it and asked if they could let her have four dollars.
“What are you, Sheila, some goddamned hoo-er?” Laspooney said.
“Yeah, Sheila, is this one of your fucking slut hoo-er shakedowns?” Null wanted to know.
“Come on, you guys,” Laspooney said, and began to slap her around. Null joined in and together they beat her up pretty bad.
When they had finished Dick Gibson looked down at her helplessly. Sickened, his features had somehow formed a sort of grin.
“What the fuck are you grinning about, Soldier?” Null said.
Dick Gibson looked at him. “Don’t you get it?” he said.
“Get what?”
Dick pointed to the girl lying unconscious at their feet. “Don’t you get it? She’s bleeding.”
“Oh yeah,” Null said, laughing, and slapped Dick Gibson on the back.
Radio had badly prepared him for his new life. He had never suspected the enormous chasm between the world of radio with the sane, middle-class ways of its supposed audience and the genuine article. Only the officers — to the shame of his democratic instincts — were at all recognizable to him. Whom had he been speaking to over the air? he wondered. Was anybody listening? Was he the last innocent man? He was sure that he was not innocent, just less brutal, perhaps, less reckless, more hygienic than the next man. Who broadcasts to the brutes? he wondered ardently. Who has the ear of the swine?
He asked permission to speak with his commanding officer.
Captain Rogers, a railroad man in civilian life, pressed his tented fingertips in the classic position of executive consultation when Dick said he wanted to explain the reason behind his request for transfer out of the artillery and into special services. He might better serve the army in a slot for which he was better qualified, he said.
The captain noted that Gibson had done well in artillery work and shouldn’t sell himself short.
Dick allowed that that was true, and went on to use other phrases and arguments which he would no longer have dared to use with someone other than an officer. He reminded the captain that Joe Louis was in special services. Had the army made a mistake? Someone like Joe, with his superb physique and physical endurance, would make a splendid infantryman, but wasn’t the army and the country better served by using him to raise the men’s morale with his boxing exhibitions?
“You’ve got a point there,” the captain said, “but what of the terrific boost to morale if Louis were an infantryman? Wouldn’t that be just the thing to show the men what democracy is all about? Wouldn’t it? I mean, when you take a world champ and treat him just like everybody else, well, something like that might be just the ticket for demonstrating the sort of country we are.”
Dick Gibson considered. “Yes, Captain, that’s true in Louis’s case. But I’m already just like everybody else.”
They were in the office of the man who had been the golf pro for the Berkshire resort which the army had taken over for a training camp. The room still had the wide glass display cases that had once housed its former inhabitant’s trophies, and this, together with the rug — Dick, used to the heavy, absorptive carpeting of radio studios, always felt more sure-footed on rugs than on bare floors, or even on the ground itself — lent a pleasant donnish quality to the room. It was conducive to horseshit, Dick sensed.
Well, that was all very well, the captain said at last, but how could he recommend Dick for special services when he knew nothing about Dick’s talent?
Thereupon followed Dick’s strangest audition. Without a microphone or script and with only the captain for an audience he did what amounted to an evening’s mixed programming. He introduced records, paused five seconds, and pleasantly recapitulated the name of the song and the singer. He made up news. He did an inning and a half of a ballgame and then, guessing from the captain’s expression that he was no sports fan, rained it out and went back to the studio for a talk on first aid. He re-created this and he re-created that, all the time watching the captain’s face for cues to his tastes. For a few minutes he did a creditable job of reproducing an emergency at the transmitter, requesting the audience to please stand by, and had the pleasure of seeing the captain smile, a reaction he was at a loss to account for until he remembered that the man had been a railroader and must have experienced similar breakdowns in his line of work. Thereafter he hit the railroad angle pretty hard, doing all he could remember of the opening of Grand Central Station, a half-hour drama, and Tommy Bartlett’s Welcome Travelers, an interview show with people who had just gotten off the Twentieth Century Limited.
Even in auditions he had been by himself, separated from the sponsor or the station manager by at least the plate glass of the control booth, and there was something so strange to him in this confrontation that soon he forgot why he had come. Each show he re-created now became an end in itself, something to be gotten through, and he had a heavy, hopeless sense of a truck mired in mud, of branches and rocks shoved beneath tires for a traction that would never be attained. He had forgotten that his aim was to capture the consciousness of the brutes, and here he was being polite, elegant and glib. At ten o’clock, an hour and a half after walking into the captain’s office, exhausted, he signed off, appalled to realize that what he had been doing was a frightening reenactment of his career.
Shaken, Captain Rogers looked at him for two minutes before finally speaking. “You’re a regular show,” he said at last. “Request for transfer approved!” He slammed the blotter on his desk three times, left, center and right, with the fatty side of his fist in a mime of someone stamping documents submitted in triplicate.
But it was no different on Armed Forces Radio. Dick’s show was broadcast on Sunday afternoons — that traditionally gray and sober time on American radio, after church and before the family-comedy programs of the early and mid-evening — and was called The Patriot’s Songbook. Though it went out on shortwave wherever American forces were stationed and to virtually every theater of combat, Dick was not pleased with it; he found the rigidity of the format and the endorsed quality of the sentiment burdensome. (Ironically, his audience had never been larger. The program was taken not just by the military but by dozens of independent stations across the country.) He had no illusions that he was reaching the brutes, for the program, thirty minutes of service and popular war songs, was something of a joke even at the London studio from which it emanated. The staff, most of them professionals like himself in civilian life, referred to it as “The Flag Wavers’ Songbook,” “Uncle Sam’s Lullaby Hour,” or even worse. The single thing he had to show for it, and this at the beginning, was his promotion to sergeant, an honor that simply reflected Armed Forces Radio’s fashion of having several of its programs hosted by noncommissioned officers.
To Dick it seemed absurd to play recordings of rah-rah songs to men who had actually been in combat. He had heard too many vicious parodies of these songs; they were sung in comradely funk in every London pub, so he could imagine the words the men on the actual firing line might put to them. He made efforts to broadcast some of the milder of these parodies — though there were no recordings of them that he knew of — but every request was refused. Indeed, how could it be otherwise when even the innocuous remarks with which he introduced each record (“This next song, ‘Semper Paratus,’ is the beloved anthem of the generally unsung seadogs in the mighty United States Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is one of our nation’s most trusted services. In peacetime it has the responsibility of enforcing maritime laws, saving lives and property at sea, operating as an aid to navigation generally, and preventing smuggling. In war it is a valued adjunct of the navy itself. A ‘Patriot’s Songbook’ salute to the Coast Guard!”) had first to be checked and approved by his superiors?