I used the phones as early as ’53. Before there was even amplification equipment, let alone tape delay. Repeating laboriously, like a translator at the UN, everything the caller said, and not just words but inflections too, mimicking the voice as well as I was able, and not just the voice but the accent, and not just the words and the inflections and the voice and the accent, but also the passion, the irritation and complaint and sulking triumph, listening so closely and working so hard that my head hurt and when it was my turn to answer I couldn’t shake the caller’s style and borrowed his vocabulary and traded on his posture so that he thought I was baiting him and grew angry, and then I had to mimic that and that made him angrier which raised the ante of my imitation once more until at the end we were shouting at each other and one of us finally had to hang up. And still so involved after the call was finished that when I took the next call the first caller’s style sometimes continued to prevail, intruding itself into what I repeated of the new conversation, fading only as I began gradually to catch the new caller’s emphasis — a round robin of personality. Dick Gibson, KOPY. Dick Gibson, KAT.
Then, when technology at last caught up with us innovators and pioneers, going to the phones again, at last empowered to be myself. But something else changed, though at first I couldn’t identify it. When I understood, it was very odd. I had something in my hands again. In Hartford I’d been empty-handed. The phone was like the scripts I used to hold during my apprenticeship.
It seemed right to be burdened. It seemed appropriate that a man on the radio should be connected and not permitted that merely conceptual and apparent connection — his voice — like a beast in Whipsnade, seemingly loose. Fetters give me. Let there be heavy equipment; attach me by cords, electronic leashes, to my microphonic stakes.
(Alternatively, how would it be if I could roam free, speak in deserts as in auditoriums, ad lib while swimming, mumble on mountains, ask strangers for the time of day in the streets and have my sounds picked up in Texas or Timbuktu? Build me of crystal, Lord. I would be Jesus Crystal. In Excels is Diode.)
He was already forty years old when he was asked to resign from the station in Hartford. A playback of the tapes satisfactorily demonstrated to the managers that he had not initiated any of the foul language; he had merely been unable to control it. Probably he would have resigned anyway, for that night had shown him how tired he was of all spurious controversy, as well as of his own unconscious baiting of his guests. Besides, he had fallen in love with Carmella, Pepper Steep’s sister.
He took her with him to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1959, two months after he had been asked to resign. It was Carmella herself who decided they could not be married. Strangely, it was on religious grounds that she turned him down. She had asked him what he was.
“Me? I don’t know. I’ll be what you are.”
“I’m nothing.”
“Then there’s no problem. Neither am I.”
“Then there’s a problem. I want my life to be regularized. I was born a Gentile. That was the name of our little sect in California when I was a girl — the Gentile Church. It was the only one in America. As the elders died off and people moved away there was no one left to carry on the traditions. The Mosque was abandoned.”
“The Mosque?”
“Jesus was a Jew. The Jews were Arabs. Arabs worship in mosques. Pepper and I went back a few years ago. I thought of staying on, but the firehouse isn’t there any more.”
“The firehouse?”
“The Mosque was in the firehouse. Anyway, I’ve been nothing since. I could be a Catholic if my husband was one, or a Jew, or anything at all. I want to be something.”
“Look, I was born a Methodist. You could be a Methodist.”
“What do Methodists do? I couldn’t be Methodist if it went against my conscience as a Gentile.”
“Well, I don’t know what they do. I don’t remember. Maybe we could take instruction.”
“Can they smoke?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ve been trying to give up smoking.”
“Well, there’s nothing in the religion that says they have to smoke … I know — Baptists aren’t supposed to smoke. We could be Baptists.”
“Would you promise to be a good Baptist?”
“Certainly.”
“I don’t believe you. Besides, it all seems so artificial. I’d much prefer just to stay with you and wait until I fall in love with someone who’s already something.”
And that became their arrangement.
The normal and ordinary and the public were her passions, not instinctively so much as self-consciously. For example, she loved to prepare long lists of electric kitchen appliances, such hardware being to her what jewels and furs were to other women. Dick often found her doodles on telephone pads where she had drawn, with some skill, electric carving knives, blenders, toasters — all the latest products from GE. She would have made a superb interior decorator of a very special sort. Museums could profitably have come to her to furnish typical rooms of the mid-century middle class in the best of popular taste. She watched what everyone else was watching on television. Her opinions were almost always consistent with the samplings revealed in polls. When they weren’t she would steep herself in the arguments of the majority until there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between its position and her own.
It was very odd. He knew that one day she would cheat on him. Not because of money or love or youth or power or sensuality; one day her heart would be captured by someone so respectable, someone so responsible and normal, that he would even have to be told that Carmella had “set her cap for him.” (That the fellow would have to be told in the first place was certain, for he would be a passive man, flattered and frightened by her and not believing his luck. It was almost as certain that the news would have to be broken to him in just such phrases, the only style that would not kill him.) So someday her prince would come, and he could be almost anyone — though there were some things he could not be. He could be married but not Catholic, he could be Catholic but not married; Carmella would not begin her new life by being damned out of her old one. She was already thirty-four, which set additional imperatives, not for herself, for in a way she was selfless; for example, she had no ordinary greeds, did not require riches or excitement, and had no urge to prolong her youth as such.
But at thirty-four sociology and raw percentages took over. How many men were still bachelors at thirty-four? (The man could not be as much as five minutes younger than herself. She was unwilling to live under even the least psychological aspersion. Thus, she forbade the unsavory and pined for the prescribed. Even during the short time she stayed with Dick she insisted that the daily paper and the milk be delivered — not because she was lazy, not even because she read the paper or drank the milk, but because these things were tokens of decency.) And of those who were still single at thirty-four and born before April 11—her birthday — how many were homosexuals, mama’s boys, playboys whose heterosexual profligacies were the danger signals of a too extravagant need? How many were losers or becoming losers? (Was Dick Gibson — when he resigned from WHCN he once again withdrew the name — a loser? He was already forty and sensed that the great apprenticeship, like some recurrent disease from childhood, would soon be on him again. Was he normal? He had been told by Carmella that he had none of the normal man’s accouterments, and he could have told her that he did not even possess a character. Was he even sexually normal? He had not lived with a woman since Miriam in Morristown almost twenty-one years before, and although he was not virginal, sexually he had the past of a nineteen-year-old boy.) There were other requirements. Even if she were able to find someone who was sexually acceptable, he would have to be a man who was already established, his goals not already realized, perhaps, but within marching distance. It would not do for him to be a beginner, for once a beginner always a beginner. (That, he thought, was still another strike against himself.) Then, on a lower order of the imperative, Carmella would want him to have friends — old army buddies, perhaps — whom she would not entirely approve of, and one failing friend from childhood, say, regard for whom would be a measure of her husband’s loyalty and manliness. It was pretty slim pickings. But though he understood the percentages, he also knew how determined Carmella was and that people always get what they want, that all goals are within marching distance.