CHAPTER 18
Søren Blak
All the radio stars trooped through the Green Room; Francis saw them all—kindly Dad Benson and sweet Alma Melting and Miss Lily Dale in her wheelchair, the Norsk Nightingale who (surprise) didn’t talk with an accent at all and his name wasn’t Jens but Jon, a big rangy bald fellow who sang like Gene Austin when he donned a black mask and became The Masked Balladeer on The Calhoun Club, and Faith and Dale Snelling, a husband and wife who hardly acknowledged each other, and Little Becky. She was the only one who noticed Francis.
“You waiting for somebody?” she said once. Yes, he was waiting to talk to certain people. He was writing a term paper about radio’s role in the war.
“You sure you’re not just hanging around hoping to see my tits?”
No, he assured her that he was not.
She snorted and leaned over him. “But you wouldn’t mind seeing them.”
He didn’t know how to answer this. He didn’t want to insult her, but on the other hand, she looked to him like one of those persons whose tits he definitely would not care to see.
“Well, maybe someday I’ll let you have a little peek,” she said. She turned away and knocked an ashtray off the table and a hundred butts shot all over the room, ashes drifting down like snow. “Oh shit!” she said. Francis immediately started gathering butts off the rug but then suddenly sprang forward head-first into the wall when she goosed him. It was a deep goose, a serious grab with her thumb up his bunghole, and he banged his face on the wall molding and landed on his head and shoulder, scrunched up by the couch. She shrieked with joy. “What a clyde you are!” Just then a kid in short pants and a Navy jumper rushed into the room, a boy with golden ringlets bouncing—Francis recognized Little Buddy, though the boy looked glum. “Didja get him?” he cried. “You promised I could see!”
“You’re too late. I already drilled him.” She looked at Francis. “Didn’t I?”
Francis shook his head. “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” he told the boy. Little Buddy looked up at Little Becky. “You didn’t goose him, you big fat liar!” He kicked her in the ankle and ran and hid behind the couch, chuckling to himself. But Little Becky was after Francis. She approached him, eyes narrowed, and shoved him. He shoved back.
“I did so goose you and I’m gonna take your pants down and prove it to you,” she sneered. “C’mere, Buddy, and have a look at his rosy-red rectum.” She made a ferocious dive for Francis’s good corduroys and he stepped back and brought up his knee and cracked her a good one. She plopped down, hands to her face, and moaned. Her hands came away bright red with blood.
“You asswipe,” she muttered, rising slowly to her feet. Little Buddy snickered as she reached for the ashtray. Francis grabbed her wrist, and they struggled, her spitting in his face and trying to butt him, but he threw her down, just as Dad and Leo and Gene strolled in.
Little Becky burst into tears. “He punched me!” she cried, running to Leo with open arms, but Leo side-stepped her. “It’s about time,” he said. “I wish it had been me.”
Dad told her to go wash her face and she turned and glared at Francis and fled from the room. Little Buddy came out from behind the couch. “She didn’t goose him,” he said, gravely. “He hit her in the nose.”
“Look out or he’ll do it to you,” said Leo.
The child shook his little ringlets. “If he does, I’ll shoot him with a gun.”
“If you do,” said Leo, “you’ll go to the electric chair and they’ll fry you until your hair turns straight and your eyes fall out.”
“Leo—” said Dad, but all three of them were laughing. Leo turned to Francis.
“I’m sorry,” said Francis. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
Leo said it was nothing to apologize for. “You ought to get a medal,” he said. And the next day, he gave Francis a coffee cup of his own, on which he had written, “The Man Who Handled the Monster.” Leo showed him where to hang it, over the sink, in the white cabinet where all the stars kept their coffee cups, and every day when Francis came around he got down his cup. After awhile he even developed a taste for coffee.
Up on the farm in Moorhead, meanwhile, lying on his Sound Couch, Roy thought Little Buddy was a comer. He called Ray on the Radiophone and told him that the boy had a preternatural instinct for radio, to ditch Slim and to give the boy free rein. “You’re making that old mistake again,” he shouted through the static. “You’re full of beans, as usual,” said Ray, happily. Unfortunately, the Radiophone went on the fritz and Roy’s voice came out of the big desk speaker in broken shards, little blips of words, such as “savant,” “ideation,” “ritual,” “ether,” “efficacy,” and “positivism”—“Have you been talking to Patsy Konopka?” yelled Ray, but that didn’t affect the voice of Roy, which babbled on—“sequential” came through and “predate.”
Roy had been reading a Norwegian philosopher named Søren Blak and sent Ray a copy of Blak’s big book, The Experience of Innocence (Uskyldigheds Oplevelse), with a note: “I know you won’t read this but am sending it anyway so you can’t say you didn’t know about it.” Ray summoned Ethel. “Read this for me,” he said.
Søren Blak raised goats in the mountains above Glomfjord and wrote poetry and thought about civilization, which he felt had mostly come to the end of the road, except for radio. In his small stone hut, far from the corruption and urban despair of Oslo, Blak’s one connection to the world was a small Atwater-Kent radio, over which, through the propitious combination of sunspots and high clouds and the crazy bounce of the airwaves and the altitude of his hut, he occasionally received Fibber McGee and Molly. Blak had taught himself English years before by reading John Greenleaf Whittier, the only English book in the Glomfjord Library, and he kept fluent by speaking to his goats—“Ay, my tattered legions, goats of Glomfjord! / Shake off thy rooky torpor now and leave / The cloistered warmth of this thy straw-paved bower / And follow close the well-tripped path of horned flocks / Vexed by pebbly pains and by a scourge of flies / Yet daily drawn by hunger that cannot be shut / Forth to yon dewy-beaded meadow / Bent upon the cause of mastication”—and so, to him, the English of Fibber and Molly came as a distinct innovation, almost a new language, lean, angular, more allusive, more contrapuntal than the Quaker Bard’s windy speeches. In his mountain fastness, surrounded by rocky splendor, he lived for Monday nights and the half-hour with the folks from Peoria. The state radio signal from Oslo was a pipeline of triviality, rat crap, a monument to the invincible smallmindedness of the Norwegian people, but Fibber and Molly were a fresh breeze from the New World, a work of art that enlarged and extended radio just as he, Søren, had taken clunky Norwegian and made something sensuous of it in his Oplevelse, not that the Norwegian people had ever noticed; no, they had not.
The boastful Fibber was, to Blak, a paradigm of western man, and the famous loaded closet, of course, represented civilization and all its flotsam and loose baggage, while the childlike voice of Molly, bringing the man back to reality, cheering him up in his moments of inevitable defeat, seemed to Blak the voice of culture in its deepest and most profound incarnation, that of the adored Mother, the Goddess of Goodness, the great Herself. Molly’s trademark line, “Tain’t funny, McGee,” expressed Blak’s mood exactly. Radio was a Great Mother (Stor Moder) that reached out through the ether to gather its farflung herd of goats and bring them temporarily back into one dark warm barn. Only when Fibber McGee and Molly came faintly into his dark little hut did Søren Blak feel truly connected to the human race. His long letter to the world was dedicated to them and their home at 79 Wistful Vista.
Radio, Roy believed after reading Blak and going on to Carl Jung (whose work may have been based on some transcriptions of Inner Sanctum and the Cliquot Club Eskimos), was a raw primitive gorgeous device that unfortunately had been discovered too late. In the proper order of things, it should have come somewhere between the wheel and the printing press. It belonged to the age of bards and storytellers who squatted by the fire, when all news and knowledge was transmitted by telling. Coming at the wrong time, radio was inhibited by prior developments, such as literature. It was as if the ball had preceded the bat, so that when the bat finally was discovered, it was relegated to the ninth inning, when players would throw bats in the air and try to hit them with balls. In the same way, literature, which was alien to radio, prevented it from reaching full flower.
If only radio had come first, it would have kept poetry and drama and stories in the happy old oral tradition and poets would simply be genial hosts who chant odes and lays instead of a bunch of nervous jerks like T.S. Eliot. Radio could have saved literature, but instead, literature had imprisoned radio in literature’s own disease, like an editor who asks the writer to take out all the funny parts. Literature had taken radio and hung scripts around its neck, choking the free flow of expression that alone could give radio life. Scripts made radio cautious, formal, tight, devoted to lines. But radio is not lines—radio is air! said Roy. Literary principles of form mean nothing—radio has no linear context whatsoever. It is dreamlike, precognitive, primitive, intimate. It has less to do with politics or society than with sex, nature, and religion.
Ray read one of Roy’s letters out loud to Ethel: “Radio travels at the speed of light, 187,000 miles per second. Instantaneous, and the signal is reproduced by the recipient—an unlimited number of them, at no additional cost per unit. By comparison, the printed word is produced one copy at a time, at additional per unit expense. It is a possession. The printed word is much more rapidly perceived, or read, than the spoken word can be heard, due to the fact that speaking involves a much higher level of complexity than writing. Writing is spelling and grammar; it stops there. Speaking involves tone, pitch, inflection, volume, rate of speech and changes of rate of speech—factors that, each productive of slight variations of the other, increase the expressive power of speech geometrically. Unfortunately, the radio speaking voice is restricted by the speaker’s aural memory of how radio people should speak—which results in a certain similarity among speakers as to inflection and rate, which may also be due to the old limitations of microphones, primitive instruments requiring the human voice to accommodate existing technology. As the technology improves, we must teach the voice not to accommodate itself to the technology of yesterday. We must show announcers how not to speak so clearly.”
“It goes on,” said Ray.
“Do you want me to deal with it?” she asked. She had written for Ray a three-page summary of the Blak book. Ethel was ever businesslike.
“He is my brother and he cannot be dealt with. He must be endured.”
Roy’s enthusiasm for Little Buddy was based on his belief that only children could master radio, it was too simple a medium for adults. Spontaneity was what the doctor ordered for radio—and the more mistakes, the better! Goofs were better than anything you could plan. “Innocence must instruct experience!” he wrote Ray. “The child is father of the man!” Ray wrote back: “You better have your well water checked. I believe you are absorbing some sort of minerals in the brain that have short-circuited your Down button. How is the Mrs.?”
Then Little Buddy hurt his voice. Leo told Francis the doctors weren’t just sure how but that some of the WLT people thought he had been choked by his dad. “Throttled the little booger and squeezed his vocal cords and now he sounds like the wind in the outhouse.” Leo said that Slim couldn’t keep the show going for two minutes without Little Buddy. “Isn’t that the hell of it? Here’s a darn good guitar player and he needs this brat to put him across with an audience. Makes you think twice about being in this business.”
Slim played on Friendly Neighbor the next day and sat around after in the Green Room. Francis had skipped school. Slim was a sawed-off guy with a weathered face and a sad smile. He was a lot smaller than on the radio, Francis thought. Slim rolled a cigarette on his knee and lit it. He told Leo, “I think it got to be too much for the kid, all that acclaim and attention, and he fretted about losing it, and it tightened up his voice box, and when he craned his neck, it strained him. A few days rest and he’ll be good as new.”
But a few days rest did not help. Buddy lay in bed and if anybody suggested that he get up and go to WLT, he moaned and wept and hugged the pillow and said his throat was burning.
Slim did the Cottage Home Show alone the next week, and according to Leo, WLT got a thousand calls and letters asking, Where’s Buddy ? Even the Tribune printed a story about it: Child Star Home Sick, But Show Goes On.
The next day, Leo was waiting for Francis when he arrived. “Grab a glass of water and follow me,” he said. Slim was waiting in Studio B, tuning his guitar. He glanced up and smiled. “Leo says you can sing real good,” he said softly. Francis shook his head. “Let’s give it a try, pardner. What you say? You know ‘Red River Valley’?” He strummed the old guitar. “Key of C ought to work for you,” he said. “Try it. Come and sit by my side if you love me, do not hasten to bid me adieu.” Francis looked for Leo but he had disappeared up into the control room, where he and Gene were laughing about something.
“I can’t sing,” Francis whispered.
“Try,” said Slim. So Francis did. He closed his eyes and sang as much of “Red River Valley” as he knew. And Slim said, “You’re right. You can’t sing. But that’s okay. I can’t stand on my head.”
“I’m very sorry. Maybe if I took the music home and practiced—”
Slim smiled. “I don’t believe that’s gonna help, pardner.”
Francis was about to say again that he was very sorry, and then Slim shook his head. “I don’t believe that anything is going to help me now,” he said softly. And Francis could see that was true. The broken brown teeth, the scaly white hands, the lost eyes: this man was on his way to the crash, about to become Daddy.
