“This is a terrible story,” Dick said.
“Wait. The point isn’t pain. Wait. It isn’t the mess they made. There’s mess at birth. Wait.”
“Well, go on.”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Wait. … I slept with the fishing line in my ears and the wounds suppurated and they took me to the doctor. The doctor was furious, of course. He removed the fishing line at once, and treated me with salves and antibiotics. ‘We’ll be lucky,’ he said, ‘if the ears don’t turn gangrenous. You came to me just in time.’
“But evidently we didn’t, or the infection hadn’t run its course, because the pain was worse than before and every morning there was blood on the pillow. Father wanted to take me back to the doctor, but something had happened to Mother. She’d become fierce. As I say, like a gypsy. ‘The doctor’s a fool,’ she said, and brought a newborn kitten and set it beside me on the bed and poured milk on my ears, and the kitten licked the milk, licked the ears, nursing my lobes. It felt strange and fine, and when the kitten wearied of licking at the dry lobes I would daub more milk on them and set the kitten back at my ears.
“In a few days the kitten came by herself and would lick at the lobes even without the milk. Maybe she thought the blood and the pus were part of the milk. Mother was a modern woman. I don’t know where she learned about this; maybe she read it, or maybe she just knew. So there we were, this ten-year-old Madonna and kitten, and even after my ears had healed I went around with it on my shoulder, transferring it from one shoulder to the other, its tongue at my ear, as though it were itself an earring.
“Then one day the kitten was gone. It disgusted Father, Mother said. Anyway, it had already done its job, she said. I cried, but Mother said Father had forbidden me the kitten and that was that.
“But it wasn’t Father—it wasn’t Father at all. It was Mother. Wait. You’ll see.
“Two days after the kitten disappeared my mother came and examined my ears. She took each lobe and rolled it between her fingers like dough. ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘They’re lovely and strong. I have a surprise.’
“They weren’t beautiful. They were hideous and mysterious to me. The holes had collapsed and were clean as scars. Like navels they were, with just that texture of lifeless second growth. Or properly speaking, not holes at all. One was a crease, an adjustment that flesh makes, like the change in a face when a tooth has been pulled. And one was a hole—a terrible absence where a feature should be. Or like a child’s sex organ, perhaps, unhaired and awful. Awful—they were awful.
“Mother’s surprise was earrings, of course. I was ten when this happened. Do you follow me? My character had already been formed. It had been formed on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale with the characters of my friends, and at motion-picture theaters and at pajama parties on weekends and by the long, extended summer of my Florida life.
“Then Mother showed me the earrings. Two pairs. One the post kind—button earrings, they’re called. Tiny coins like gold beauty spots. She put them in my ears and showed me my reflection in a glass. ‘Take them out. Mother. Please.’
“‘Are they heavy?’ she said. ‘Are you sensitive there? Don’t worry. We’ll butter the posts, or dip them in fat from a chicken I have. They’ll be all right.’
“‘Please, Mother. Oh, please take them out.’
“It was what I saw in the mirror. I was someone foreign, someone old. Like the gypsy again, or an aunt in a tintype. Like a man who tells fortunes, or someone who died. Like a child on a stage who plays the violin.
“Mother took the earring out and put in the other pair of earrings. These hung from a wire, a treacherous loop, and when they went in they opened fresh wounds. ‘How do you like them?’ my mother asked. This pair was silver, a long, thin, antique lattice and a queer wafer which swung from it. ‘Do you like them?’ she asked. She was so fierce. I knew they cost a lot. I knew more: I knew she had bought them even before she had pierced my ears! ‘They’re very nice,’ I said, and when she left I took them out, unwinding the loop from my ear as you might detach a key from a keyring. I slipped into the bathroom and got some of Mother’s vaginal jelly and greased the lobes. In the morning I left the house before she could see I wasn’t wearing the earrings.
“But now, now I was so conscious of my ears. I thought, I thought boys stared at them—you know? Nasty naked things. I went back and put the earrings on just to … well, cover myself. Again I was transformed into someone foreign, some little strange girl.
“That’s when everything began to change.
“All my girlhood, all my life, I had lived in the sun, but now my darkness wasn’t tan but something Mediterranean, a darkness in the genes, something gone black in the blood. There was pumice in it, a trace of volcanoes that slope to the sea, carbon on kettles from fires outdoors.
“I couldn’t ride a bicycle any more, or rollerskate. And the imagination of narrow disaster whetted: What if I should stumble? What if I should fall? The posts like actual stakes to me, the loopy wire hardware medieval. And dirty, dirty germs beyond the reach of sterilization— though I dropped the earrings every night in boiling water—as if the germs might be part of the metal itself, collected in its molecules, a poison of the intimate, the same reciprocal bacterial play as between a head and a hat or hair and a sweatband, toes and socks, a foot, a shoe. Foh! I was fearful not just because of the simple ripthreat to my ears, but because once the sores were reopened, once the crease had become a slash, the floodgates of disease would open too, death by one’s germs, one’s own now un-American alien chemistry.
“I took up music, one day simply appearing among my schoolmates with a violin (just as one day my surfboard disappeared: it was simply gone—my fierce mother, I suppose). And do you know that though I had no talent I played even from the beginning with a certain brooding seemliness? And the earrings like actual yokes, gyroscopic; I might have been fetching water from the well, balancing buckets up hills. Yes! Something even more Oriental than Mediterranean in the way I shuffled through childhood.
“Even in real summer I no longer wore shorts or jeans or went down to the sea in bathing suits. When skirts were short mine were long, when long, short—again that gyroscopic balance I spoke of—and don’t forget the earrings themselves, those gold and silver alternatives. (Why I could have been an alternative myself, a community reference point like a hyphen on a kitchen wall, Ft. Lauderdale’s little historical girl.)
“The boys were afraid of me, and gave off some dark respect, taking my gypsy bearings and seeing me even at thirteen and fourteen as whatever the adolescent equivalent of a divorcee might be. Thinking me hot where I was cool, cool where I burned. And although they sometimes asked me out—this was when I was sixteen or seventeen—it was as if there were chaperones behind a curtain, duennas, or invisible brothers, say, a troupe of jealous acrobats, dark ethnic stabbers with Mary’s medals on their necks.
“I am never without the earrings now—the collection has become enormous—and only take them off to boil them in water or sink them like teeth in a glass by my bed. I continue to soap my ears with vaginal jellies. And sometimes there are kittens too, still, which I train in the old way to pull at my cream-sweet lobes while I dream in my bed. I am thought reclusive, silent, but my silence is only the open secret of my ears. My hearing has been affected. Ears, I have ears. The better to hear you with, my dear.”
Ears, Dick Gibson thought, ears, yes. A chill went through him. The woman continued to talk, but he could barely follow her now; he was thinking of ears. Then she broke through his reverie. “—your fragile orphan, your soprano, or someone recovered from polio but not quite, who walks with a limp, the body’s broken English, something nasty there, the kind who groans in orgasm, who shouts dirty words during sex. Oh, my adoptive styles! I crochet but don’t drive, I stay in the house during menses, I burn easily, I go to museums, and am never seen without my sheet music.”
“Listen,” a caller said from Cincinnati, “I’ll
tell you the truth. I’m a schemer. That’s how I happened to catch your show. Certainly. A schemer lies awake nights, what do you think? I’m calling from the kitchen. The wife’s in bed. Sometimes when the schemes aren’t there, I come down and make myself a sandwich and drink some milk. I try to relax. Listen—it’s the first time I’ve called—I’ve been meaning to ask. How many of your callers are schemers, do you think? How many are up nights, looking for angles, thinking up ways, dreaming of means?
“You know what they say? ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ But let’s don’t kid ourselves, how many of us are inventors, how many of us are equipped? On the other hand, I’m not just talking about pipe dreams. A schemer has to look out for those. Because things look possible at night. Hope’s there, wishing is. But I’m looking for something sensible that would go, something meaningful that could really take off. As good as metals in the ground, opportunity like a national resource.
“After my wife had the baby I’d see her sterilizing bottles, preparing formulas, and I thought, what if there was a company that delivered that stuff already made up? What a boon that would be. I went to the milk people with my idea and they showed me why it wouldn’t work. (Though some outfit out west does it now and are making a killing.) Then I had this idea about renting shirts. You’d get them from the laundry and never have to buy any. They’d have your size on record and bring you fresh ones every week, different styles and colors, ties to match. So I went to this laundry company and they proved to me how it wasn’t feasible. That’s the secret, of course: it has to be feasible. Feasibility’s what separates the men from the boys schemer-wise. We’re always running up against the brick walls of the real; we live in a medium of reasons as other people live in a medium of air—on the one hand and on the other hand like left and right.”
“Why wasn’t it feasible?”
“What’s that, friend?”
“Why wasn’t it feasible for the laundry to rent shirts?”
“Oh. They have those now too. There’s a firm that does that now. Not the one that said it wasn’t feasible. … It’s timing. It’s timing and force. A schemer has to have those too. He has to know when to plunge.”
“I see.”
“Desalinization—that’s where the money is. Or steam cars, electric, you’d think you’d clean up. But it isn’t feasible, Detroit says. I dream of getting in on the ground floor of these things. And the Americanization of Europe, of Africa, the far East. Jungle drive-ins and ice cream on the Amazon and suits off the rack on Savile Row. The bottom of the sea—there’s a ground floor for you. The whole world is ground floor if you know where to stand.
“I’m a schemer. I’m a schemer and dreamer. In the army—Korea was on back then—I figured if you were in the Canine Corps they’d have to keep you stateside that much longer. It stands to reason—you train at the brute’s rate. A dog’s brain isn’t as quick as a man’s. Then I wondered if there might not be a difference between leashed dogs and unleashed. That figures too. Well, reason it out. A dog on a leash can be forced to do what you want. It’s harder when he’s not connected to you. So I put in for unleashed and saw to it that I was assigned the dumbest dog there. I stalled them for months. Then I applied for kennel master. My CO. told me it wasn’t feasible to make me kennel master. You had to be a vet.
“I’m scheming still. Sometimes the ideas come so thick and fast I can’t keep up with them—laundromats in motels, movies in airports, house sitters for people away on vacation. You know something? There’s never been a Western on the stage. I’m no writer, but something like that would go over big. If you could figure out what to do about the horses and cattle drives it might be feasible. I have these ideas. I swear to you, I no sooner begin the research on one plan when another pops into my mind. I count opportunities like sheep. How many of your listeners are like me? I’d be interested to know.”
“We’ll try to find out for you.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks for your call.”
“I was doing some reading about wines. There’s this one wine— Lafitte Rothschild—which sells for eighty to ninety dollars a bottle once it’s mature. It takes years to mature properly, years. In France, down in cellars, it’s carefully turned—they call that ‘laying wine.’ A man could spend his whole life on the job turning it, and then it might be his son or even his grandson who’s finally the one to bring it up. That’s why it’s so expensive. But once in a while they put it out on the market for the wine buffs before it’s ready. That’s called ‘first growth,’ and it can sell for as low as $2.00 a bottle. Well, I had an opportunity to buy out a shipment of this ‘first growth’ wine. I thought about it carefully. I considered it from every angle. I tried to look at it from the point of view of the big distributors. I weighed the pros and I weighed the cons, and finally I decided to do it. I invested all my savings and bought up about three thousand bottles at $2.38 a bottle. I built this special cellar and spent a lot of money to get it at the right temperature, and now I go down and I turn the bottles—a quarter turn clockwise in winter, a quarter turn counter clockwise in fall. And once a year I bring the bottles up to stand in the shade for a day in the spring when the barometer’s low. It’s a long shot, don’t think I don’t know it, a long-term proposition—thirty years, maybe more—but I’m a schemer, no pipe dreamer, I mind the feasibility and to hell with your get-rich-quick.”
“Well good luck,” Dick Gibson said.
“This year I had a heart attack—not a bad one, very mild really. ‘You can live a long time yet,’ the doctor told me. ‘Just get plenty of rest and try not to worry.’
“Say I do get plenty of rest, say I don’t worry. It isn’t feasible.”
Toward the end of that evening’s program, the anthropology professor called for the first time in months. Dick had never learned his name but always looked forward to one of his calls. The anthropologist was full of fascinating information; he was one of the few callers who apparently had no interest in talking about himself but simply enjoyed sharing some of the conclusions of his research with Dick and his audience. They chatted pleasantly for a time, the anthropologist feeding Dick a lot of interesting facts about the Seminole Indians who lived along the Tamiami Trail just west of Miami. Dick had seen their wretched cardtables along the roadside, makeshift lean-to “stores” hardly more sophisticated than a child’s lemonade stand, and had glimpsed their terrible hovels through the broken fences meant to screen them from the sight of tourists.
“They’re so poor,” Dick said.
“Oh Dick, the Navajos could give them a run for their poverty. Many tribes could. That’s not the point. The Seminoles are the only tribe that makes its camp outside a great metropolitan area. They’ve always done this. They did it when the land still belonged to the Indians. They lived on the doorstep of the Creek and Chickasaw and Choctaw. Seminole—Sim-a-nóle, or Iste Siminóla—means ‘separatist’ or ‘runaway’ in the Muskogean language.”
“I didn’t know that,” Dick Gibson said.
“They were the first suburbanites, you see. They conceive of their destiny as a Mighty-Have-Fallen warning to other peoples. In times of slavery they set up their villages outside the slavequarters. They were offering the example of their condition as a gift to the slaves.”
“Gee.”
“There’s a deep instinct at work here. Follow closely. The significance of the suburbs—I’m doing work on this—is that all peoples are in exile. Your two-week summer vacation is an example. (Traffic patterns and roads, by the way, follow morale patterns closely.) It’s all related to the Vacant-Throne theory of history. The czar had his summer palace, the President his summer White House. These are Diaspora symbols.”
Unfortunately it was time for Dick to sign off. He had to break in on the professor.
“Put me on hold,” the anthropologist whispered, “I have something to tell you.” Dick regularly received such requests, and sometimes the phones we
re lit up for as much as an hour after he went off the air. It may have been that people felt that reaching him privately lent a distinction even more profound than speaking to him on the air. Recently he had frequently obliged them, sometimes hearing terrible things in this way—awful things. People who were well spoken on the air often made no sense at all when they spoke to him privately afterwards—or they might suddenly lapse into some of the vilest language he had ever heard.
After signing off he came back to the professor. “What did you want to say?” he asked.
“Tell me,” the anthropologist said urgently, “whether a man sits or stands up to wipe himself, and I’ll tell you everything else about him. This cuts through cultures, Dick. It obliterates history and geography. Dick, it’s the single distinction between men. It annihilates everything else. Religion, laws, custom—these things are nothing. He stands because his mommy wiped him. Do you see this, Dick? He stands now because he still expects some great, warm soft hand to rub his shit away. All else is nothing. Freud never really understood the true significance of the anal-retentive concept. It’s his own term, but he missed the boat. Incidentally, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Freud himself was a stander.”
“I thought this had something to do with the Seminoles.”
“Forget the Seminoles. They’re nothing but a bunch of poor-mouth bastards. Poor mouth, poor mouth, that’s all they know. All that Mighty-Have-Fallen crap. Forget the Seminoles. The Seminoles aren’t my real work anyway. Dick, I have so many ideas, I’m exploding with insights. Truth is everywhere, Dick; significance is as available as gravity. Do you know the best place to learn about a people’s legal and penal system? Its zoos! Go to its zoos, Dick, and you’ll find out more about its laws and prisons in a half-hour than you would in its courts and jails in a year.”
“I don’t—”
The Dick Gibson Show Page 35