Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  “Good evening,” said the ad hoc psychologist, his voice as yet unsteady despite his remarkable feeling of basic confidence for no reason at all. He had never before addressed an anonymous public, had never even acted or debated at any level of school. He now hit the button that killed his microphone, cleared his throat quickly, and returned to the air. “I am Dr. Jonathan Kellog, and I’ll welcome your calls.”

  The lights on the telephone console were already glowing: there were those who put in calls before airtime, sometimes more than an hour early, so as to get prompt access to Pomerantz. These were the callers who now awaited Kellog. It remained to be seen whether listeners would continue to phone after the substitution had been announced. Unless calls came in there could be no show.

  “Yes. You’re on the air.”

  “My name is Bobby. Actually, it’s Robert, but I’ve always been called Bobby, maybe because I’ve always been small for my age. I look younger than I really am, and people always treat me like a kid, though I’m forty-seven years of age by now. My mother still tells me what to eat, what to wear!”

  “You still live at home, Robert?”

  “Not at my mother’s home. I’m married. My mother lives with us.”

  “She orders your wife around, too?”

  “Actually, the two of them team up against me. Now they’re getting my daughter into the act. She’s twelve.”

  Kellog’s self-confidence dissolved. He had no idea whatever of how Pomerantz might have dealt with this man, and the home in which he himself grew up, with a vain, assertive father and a quiet mother whose strength was subterranean, provided no precedent. He knew nothing of what it was to be bossed around by women.

  He sought to delay. “Well, Robert….”

  “Actually, I prefer Bobby.”

  Kellog had a flash of inspiration. This man was very likely born to be a toady to someone: better with his own females than criminal elements, ideological or religious fanatics, or, for that matter, sexual deviates. What Bobby might want from the doctor was simply reassurance.

  “Let me ask this, Bobby: are your mother and wife good women?”

  Bobby answered almost shyly. “If you mean like morally, I don’t know anything against them.”

  “And your daughter is a nice girl?”

  “A-student, very popular.”

  “You should thank your lucky stars,” said Dr. Kellog, “that you have three such good people who love you. The usual complaint about a wife and mother is that they’re jealous of each other and seldom get along, that a daughter has too little respect for her dad.”

  “I guess I should look at it that way,” Bobby said in his weak voice. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  During the ensuing break for recorded commercials, Kellog had the opportunity to take several draughts of lukewarm coffee. All the phone lights stayed on; a new caller was already on Bobby’s late line. But no sooner had his rush of relief come and gone than the bogus psychologist fell back into self-doubt. He hadn’t given any answer at all to Bobby’s problem! Perhaps Bobby would go on for a while, maintaining his obsequious status quo, then crack suddenly and murder the women in his house. … It now occurred to him, as it had not at the appropriate time, that Pomerantz would have urged Bobby to seek marriage-counseling, which indeed was the late doctor’s standard response to most callers enmired in domestic conflict.

  The caller on Line 2 was named Vivian. “Let me say first, Dr. Kellog, how much better you are than Pomerantz—I know your ethics forbid you from commenting on this, but I wanted to say it. You’ve got so much more common sense! You don’t talk that headshrinker junk—and you’re not always telling people to get professional help! If they did that, then why would they need to call a radio station?” She chuckled righteously.

  “What’s your problem, Vivian?” Kellog hated her for taking away the first advantage he had identified, he who had foreseen getting through the rest of the program by urging callers to see real specialists in their troubles. Thus he was inclined to be malicious when Vivian told him her problem. Her neighbors, otherwise the kindest, most considerate persons on earth, had a to-them-beloved cat that lurked all day in her yard and killed many of the songbirds that visited the feeders she kept filled with seed even in summer. Or was this rather a question for a veterinarian?

  “What’s more important to you, Vivian? Good friends or strange birds?” He bitterly switched her off and went to the next caller, who though having the voice of a little girl was a married woman.

  “… I think he’s doing something else with the money. The thing is, should I just come out and ask, or should I tell him he just doesn’t give me enough to run the house and see what he says?”

  “If he’s spending it on other women,” Kellog said, remembering his own experience, “he’s not going to volunteer any information. On the other hand, if you ask him outright, he might walk out the door, with real or fake indignation, it wouldn’t matter. How about serving him dinner that consists only of something like boiled cabbage and dry rice, and when he protests, say you didn’t have enough money for anything else.”

  “He might punch me in the face.”

  “Is he capable of that sort of thing?”

  “Done it more than once.”

  Kellog had now got over his lingering pique with Vivian. “Look, Dolores, this is a much more serious matter than whatever he does with his money. If he strikes you…these are serious blows?”

  “I got a black eye right now.”

  “That’s criminal behavior on his part,” said Kellog. “It should not be tolerated by you! You should go to the police.”

  “I did,” Dolores said. “They say they can’t do anything in family squabbles.”

  “Leave him.”

  “I got two young kids and no other source of income. I never finished high school. I couldn’t get much of a job, and if I did, who would watch the kids all day?”

  Once again Kellog was nonplussed: neither he nor anyone else, including the late Pomerantz, would have been able to resolve Dolores’ problem by a suggestion that would be acceptable if made public. But he had to say something now.

  “Dolores, I’m afraid there are times in life when we all have to make choices, though both alternatives are unattractive. You’ll just have to choose. If you stay with this man, you’re going to be mistreated. If you leave him, you’re not going to have any income. You have to weigh each choice carefully, you have to—”

  “You phony,” said Dolores. “I thought you were supposed to really help people.”

  Of course this did not reach the air, but it had its effect on Dr. Kellog, who shakily completed his remarks as if Dolores had not interrupted. “No one else can make certain decisions for you. That’s what being an adult means.”

  In self-loathing he went to a commercial. Dolores was absolutely right. He alternated between wishing he could somehow, off the air anyway, have told her so and detesting her for presenting him with such a dilemma so early in his radio career.

  He decided to institute a policy that would apply to any subsequent calls of Dolores’ kind, that is, those to which an ambiguous answer must be given.

  In response to persons in search of particular information, e.g., the names of psychotherapeutic practitioners—mention of which, because it constituted free advertising, was forbidden by the peculiar ethics of broadcasting—Pomerantz would ask the caller to stay on the line and speak off the air to the producer, who kept available a list of such professionals, as well as local clinics, appropriate agencies of local, state, and federal governments, and other potential sources of help. The needs of the radio show took precedence over all others, and to meet them it was necessary to have something positive to say at all times when broadcasting. Pomerantz could be extraordinarily negative in private phone calls, especially those to his wife and his secretary, but his public voice never faltered in its optimism. Kellog now began to understand that it was possible to do this consistently only by deflecting those ca
llers with unanswerable problems—and not with truisms easily recognizable as such, as he had done in the case of Dolores. Yet, to maintain the distinction between himself and the late psychologist, for which he had been publicly commended by Vivian, neither could he gracefully advise a succession of those seeking his free help to report to the kind of counseling for which a fee was charged.

  What he could do was what he did with the next caller whose predicament was certainly too complex to be dealt with on the radio. A man who gave his name as Norman told Dr. Kellog he was sure his wife would make an attempt to poison him—in fact, she had promised as much—but he had no idea of when and how. He could not go to the police, for she might be bluffing, plus he would be embarrassed, and anyway, feeling thus far physically tiptop, he could confidently assert that she had not yet carried out her threat. But how to keep her from doing so without causing a scandal and while preserving the marriage?

  “You believe the woman is trying to murder you, yet you want to stay married?”

  “I don’t think that affects my basic love for her. She really has done a good job as a wife.”

  “Norman, I think this is too delicate a matter to discuss further on the air. Stay on the line and give your number to Pat, my producer. I’ll get back just after the show.”

  Kellog kept his promise, but when he phoned the number obtained from Pat, just after the close of the program, the man who answered insisted his name was not Norman and that he had no knowledge of the matter: he was himself unmarried. Pat had either inaccurately taken down the number or Norman, if such was his real name, had been perpetrating a hoax.

  After dealing on the air with Norman in a manner that had seemed successful at the moment, he had given a similar response to two other callers—Marilyn, who had a speech defect that was surely painful to hear on the radio, and a man named Sal, who professed to suffer from priapism, i.e., had an eternal erection, which was not even reduced by ejaculation. These were the days before candor in sexual matters was routine on the airwaves, before people boasted, to the frenetic vulgarians who hosted mass-market TV shows, of merrily practicing an assortment of erotic bizarreries with their parents, children, and pets and being none the worse for it, which era was eventually succeeded by that of the next category of guests, whose lives had professedly been ruined by the deviates of the previous generation. Kellog would not let Sal’s complaint reach the air, but he did have Pat get the man’s number. He was scarcely qualified to make a professional comment, but it was of interest to him as a man.

  After the fruitless call to Norman, however, Kellog was in an irritated mood. He phoned Marilyn and tried to understand her sputter, then told her as kindly as he could that what she needed was a speech therapist. However, she had been to several and not been helped: what she required now was advice on how socially to survive her affliction, find friends, meet men.

  “Marilyn,” said he, “you’ll just have to keep your courage up and keep trying, tough as it is. Fortunately you live in one of the most highly populated areas of the country: there are millions of chances for you to find people with whom you’ll get on. It’s not as if you’re in some rural area. I’m sure there are organized groups of people who share your affliction. You should be able to get in touch with them through one of the speech therapists with whom you’ve been in contact.”

  Marilyn hung up without a word, not helping Kellog’s state of mind. He placed the call to Sal.

  “Who?” Sal asked. “Oh, yeah, Doc Kellog. Are we on the air? Okay. Like I said, I am hung real big to begin with, and most of the time I got a boner besides. But what gets me is it don’t go down even after I come. Now, I been to see a regular doctor, but he says he can’t do nothing about it. It’s just that way. I guess it don’t mean you’re sick or anything, really don’t do any harm. When I was a young kid, I was always being embarrassed to have that bulge showing in my pants, though I tell you there was a married lady who lived on the next floor up who used to lick her lips when she saw it, but that was a time when I was too young and dumb to do anything about it. Anyway, Doc, what I wanted to get from you was the names and addresses of some of the companies that make stag films. I’ve seen some with guys whose schlongs were nowhere near as long as mine. I got nine and a half inches! Why should I slave away behind the wheel of a cab when I could make good money fucking, getting blown, and all. You nut-doctors know how to get in touch with these movies, I bet.”

  “You degenerate,” said Kellog, and hung up. Immediately he regretted doing so. He should not have blamed Sal for the desolating effect Marilyn had had on him. And why should the taxi driver not make the most of his natural endowments? But a more important concern was this tendency of his own to lose control of his emotions. He was the worst replacement imaginable for Pomerantz. It was absolutely essential to hire a genuine practitioner during the ensuing week.

  He did interview several professionals, but found none of them suitable. One had an extremely unpleasant-sounding, raspy voice. Another was very arrogant and demanded more than twice what Pomerantz had received. The third assured Kellog that he would take the job only if he could broadcast from his office, at hours when he had no other appointments.

  Meanwhile a considerable amount of mail had come into the station on the subject of Pomerantz’ replacement. There were those who missed the late psychologist (some of them unaware of his death) and found Kellog a miserable substitute. But many more preferred Dr. Kellog by far—and if a reason was given it was likely to be that he was down-to-earth, not some intellectual snob but rather the kind of guy you could talk to, not afraid to admit he could not help when he couldn’t, sometimes almost inarticulate but always in a human way, always warm (the word then in vogue, later to be replaced, when participles came into fashion, by “caring”).

  What he had seen as his glaring inadequacies—inexperience, ignorance, lack of emotional stability—were taken as rather his strengths.

  So there he was behind the microphone again on the following Sunday evening. It began much better this time, with a series of callers whose problems could be answered with platitudes that, owing to Kellog’s growing fluency in this mode of expression (harking back to his salesman days), did not seem, to him or the callers, as stale as they were. But then, was anything new ever to be said in the area of human affairs?

  Only ten minutes remained of the two-hour show when Kellog punched the button that brought him the voice of a man who said, pleasantly, “Doctor, I’ve had enough of your vicious attempts to ruin me. I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you.”

  Kellog did of course have the capacity either to hang up or to go to commercial and talk to the man off the air. Pomerantz had made it a practice instantly to use the advantage of the seven-second delay and cut off any caller who expressed the slightest criticism of him. He would have disposed of this one at the word “vicious” and thus never would have heard the threat.

  But Kellog, though so frightened he could hardly speak, made a bold decision that changed his life. He permitted the caller to go on the air and, after some deep breathing, managed to speak coherently with him.

  “What attempts could I have made to ruin you?”

  “You told the FBI that I was a pervert.”

  “Are you a pervert?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Kellog. “I don’t know you at all. But I wish I did, because I’m sure I could help you. I think your trouble is that people don’t take you seriously, so you have to call up someone on the radio, who is just some voice, somebody so remote that it seems they don’t really exist, and you can make threats against them without doing anybody harm, because it’s all make-believe, isn’t it, uh, what’s your name?”

  “Warren.”

  “I’m right about you, Warren, am I not?” Warren remained silent. “I’ll tell you how right I am: I’m willing to meet you someplace, unarmed and alone. You’re not going to do me any harm, because if you do, then you have
eliminated what well may be your last chance in life to be listened to, really listened to, by someone who respects you.”

  Now Warren was sobbing. Kellog allowed his weeping acquiescence to be heard by the public, but took Warren’s address off the air, passed it to the producer, who phoned it in to the police. Warren was taken into custody. The store of deadly weapons found at his home in the far northern Bronx suggested that his threat had not been empty. Next it was determined that he had twice been institutionalized for mental problems but subsequently released as being harmless.

  The publicity department of WKEG made the event known to the other media, and next day it was mentioned on several local TV newscasts and in two papers. For the most part, Kellog was seen by the public as having performed admirably, though some professionals in the field of psychotherapy pointed out enviously that he had no credentials for the job and criticized him for what was really a breach of ethics, viz., betraying Warren. But in fact when Kellog visited Warren shortly after the latter’s arrest, Warren, a small, gaunt man with a disarming smile, insisted that Dr. Kellog had provided just the right medicine. “I was really crying out for help,” he told a TV reporter, “and only he heard me, God bless him.”

  Thereafter it became fashionable for other madmen and then even wanted criminals, more or less rational, to telephone Dr. Kellog on the air and offer to surrender to him. At the height of this rage, his ratings were not only higher than those of any other show in the long history of WKEG (which had been founded in the 1920s by a brewer), but they also set a record for New York radio. But finally the practice palled on listeners, especially when the crimes in reference were no worse than the evasion of three hundred traffic summonses and when too many of the lunatics were proved to be but mischievous high-school students.