Bluffness and sensuousness were not all his range, nor even a significant part of it. If he had to single out a tone which best characterized him in those early years it would have been rather a flat one. And why not? He was chiefly a man speaking to farmers, reading them the weather, telling them the hog and sheep and cattle prices, a harbinger of grain and vegetable conditions— “soybeans” and “rye” and “oats” words in every other sentence out of his mouth. He had learned almost from the outset to avoid folksiness, vaudevillizing their ways. The single time he had tried to appropriate what he took to be their vocabulary, he himself had had to answer the telephone to listen to their offended complaints: “You tell that damn Jew you got down there he’d best not make sport of us. That town bastard don’t know piss from cowplop.” From then on he spoke to them in flat accents as unnatural to him as dialect, his neutral reading of the daily markets as much a performance as any he had ever attempted.
But it was precisely on stations such as these that he got his best experience and was permitted to exercise his widest range. As soon as it became light — it was as if he could hear the farmers leaving their houses — he was left with their wives. These took, if their husbands didn’t, a certain amount of kidding. Not that he tried any more than with the men to pass himself off as a country boy. Instead he went the other way entirely. He felt himself some traveling salesman among them, come to life from a joke. Emphasizing his alienness, his dazed slicker-in-the-sticks incarnation, as if he had just been set down there from Paris or New York, he made all he could of their funny ways. He flattered them with their homespun notion of themselves, never letting them forget their ailing-neighbor-fetched soups and astonishing pies of vegetable and wild fruit, finding his theme in the idea of appetite, exaggerating their capacities, bunyanizing the hunger of their men and selves: “Ladies, I’ve got a recipe here for a Kansas farm omelet. First, take eight dozen eggs. All right, we’ll need some butter in this. Four pounds should do it.” Or zeroing in on the quilts he pretended they were always making: “An Easterner came by yesterday, saw one and went blind. What I want to know is how you get any sleep under one of those things. One lady I heard of hung hers to dry out in the henhouse. Those hens laid eggs all night. The rooster came in about midnight, saw it and started to crow. He thought the darn sun had come up.”
But he tickled them hardest with his allusions to the wily sex in them, inventing this appetite as he had built on the other, taking his biggest risks here, openly blue, barnyardy, pretending a kind of slicker exhaustion at the thought of their lusty bouts, frankly animalizing them, claiming awe and a ferocious physical respect in the face of their enormous sexual reserves, careful only to specify the essential domesticity of their ardor, its vaguely biblical franchise. (But even this sop shrewdly dispensed with when it came to their daughters, those — as he had it — one-hundred-sixty-two-pound, big-boned killers of traveling men, singing their raucous muliebrity and celebrating their quicksand bodies in which whole male populations had gone down, entire sales forces.) The opportunities were limitless — their alleged flour- sack underthings another source of his feigned astonishment, imagining for them beneath the hypothetical homespun and supposed calico, hypothetical bodies, heavy toonervaudevillian tons of robust flesh, imperial gallons of breast, the thick, fictive restraining chest bands helpless against such soft erosion. And this was as aboveboard as their concupiscence, for it was all in reference to an exercise-and-reducing show he had talked the station manager into letting him do.
“What? A skinny kid like you? Don’t make me laugh.”
“What difference does it make how I look? I’ve got a voice like Tarzan. Let me try.”
And the man did — on the condition that he stay off the streets and that his audience never be permitted to see him.
He became “Doctor Torso.” The voice he created for his new role was extraordinary. Deliberately aged, carefully made to seem just senior to the oldest lady doing the exercises, he sounded like some professional, not a gym teacher but a coach, with all the coach’s indifference to the bodily distinctions between male and female — the body, ulteriorly, one big muscle he crooned over in his faintly theatrical telephone operator’s diction. Himself sitting perfectly still at the table with the microphone, and, for the sake of the slight strain it gave to his voice, leaning on his elbows, his forehead forward and clamped into the heels of his hands. “With a one and a two and three and a fower. A fiuv and a six and a seven and an eight.” Then, blowing out his breath to clear the poisons, “All right, ladies. This next exercise is for your sitters. Get right down on the floor, now. Palms spread and about four inches to the side of those thighs we just firmed up so nicely for your hubbies. All right, now those precious legs straight and shut tight. Just like the vaults in the Bank of England.” Interrupting himself. “Mrs. Frangnadler”—his imaginary scapegoat, his one-hundred- sixty-two-pound common denominator— “I said tight. No cheating on me. Tight together. You don’t still have that rash. Tight now, tight. Squeeze. Pretend they’re the two halves of your purse, and you’re in town on a Saturday night, and you’ve got your egg money in there. Come on, Mrs. Frangnadler, I said tight.” Slyly. “Why, if I was a thief I could reach right down in that purse of yours and steal something really valuable. Then what would your husband say? There, that’s better. Why, I could hardly get the edge of my knife down there now. Could I, ladies?” Then, pretending that he had turned back to the rest of them, “All right, then, when I start counting I want you to bring up the left thigh high as you can. I want to be able to slip my hand under there. Then down on the even number and bring up the right on the odd. We’ll do this ten or twelve times together and then you practice it by yourselves at home. You’ll soon feel the difference it makes. And if I know those husbands of yours, they’ll feel the difference too. Incidentally, you mothers, start getting your young daughter to do this exercise with you. I pity the traveling man that tries to pinch her! All right, that’s enough rest period. Ready, begin!”
But the rest periods, of course, were the point of the program; it was what they listened for. All of them relaxing together and him giving them all any of them would ever know of the locker room. They must have thought longingly of the easy sensuality of the city.
Just before he left that station and went on to the next, he announced the official tally — he had had them send in cards — of the weight they had collectively lost. It came to exactly one hundred sixty-two pounds. He always felt as if he had taken one of their women from them.
In lieu of a raise. For though he was a member of AFRA, the small stations he worked for in those days were not required to pay union scale. There were too many graduates of radio schools waiting for jobs. And though the big-city stations wouldn’t touch them — back-of-the- matchbook dreamers, bad-complected, imperfectly pitched tenors and forced basses you had to hear just once to know all you ever needed to, not just of the condition of their lungs but of their glamour-caught souls too, their striven-for resonances accusing as fingerprints — small stations depended upon them. With his experience he might already have moved up to any number of stations cuts above the ones he worked. The NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, was looking for someone exactly like himself, and would have paid him twenty-five dollars a week to start and jumped him to thirty dollars at the end of three months. Had he taken such a job, however, he would never have been allowed the liberties he took on the small stations. He was grateful for the temptation, but threw it into the pot with all the rest of the sacrifices he had made — more bread cast upon the waters, further frog years.