Changing the Past (32 page)

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.

But by now Dr. Jonathan Kellog was an established feature of New York radio, and he had long since ceased to look for a replacement. He made the move to weekdays that had been planned for Dr. Pomerantz and tried various time slots, all of them successfully, before audience surveys indicated that the hour just before noon was likely to reach most listeners, for Kellog's appeal was wide and came to include the self-employed, housewives, adolescents of either sex, the drivers of cars, retirees, persons of all races. He was exceptionally courteous to people with accents, but if they were too hard to understand, he spoke to them off the air, for the needs of the audience could not be forgotten. This was never less than a performance, though he liked to think it was sometimes a good deal more. In time, return calls from those who had taken his counsel and prospered were routine. “Doctor, you were so right! That mistake my husband made was less important than the continuation of the marriage.”…“Just as you predicted, my son soon came home, his tail between his legs. He's settled down now. Thank God for your help.”

Perhaps it did even more for his reputation as sage when someone praised him for providing correct advice which, through cowardice, vanity, or sloth, they had failed to act upon. “I'll never forgive myself. I just couldn't bring myself to apologize to her, and now she's dead.”… “I didn't have the nerve to turn him down. So I gave him the money and he poured it down another one of his rat-holes and went bankrupt anyway.”

As the prevailing culture began to undergo what was soon called the sexual revolution, the problems presented to Dr. Kellog pertained more and more to the erotic. Old men, who had not had an erection since before impotence could be confessed to over the airwaves, now phoned to ask Dr. Kellog, in the hearing of the world, whether there was still hope. Mothers inquired whether it could lead to incest when toddler twins, one male, one female, caressed each other's genitals. A teenager wanted to know if the unrequited oral gratification she gave her boyfriend would result in his despising her. A homosexual husband insisted that liberation had made things much worse for him: now his boyfriends wanted to identify themselves to the world, ruining him, whose old-fashioned principles of polite discretion were shared by his wife and straight associates.

Kellog had got cold feet when he heard the first of the sexually explicit questions and killed the earliest calls, but by now he had acquired some local rivals in broadcast psychotherapy, and the nearest to him in popularity had made sex a specialty and was thereby gaining in the ratings. When the executives at WKEG urged him to be bolder, Kellog took the plunge. Thus began the era in which the program became almost exclusively devoted to Eros.

“He puts on my bra stuffed full of socks and tucks his organ back between his legs so you can see only a triangle of pubic hair that looks like a woman's. Would you say that's homosexual?”

“No, not at all, if that's all he does. It wouldn't be even if he dressed completely in female clothes and went out in public. He would be gay only if he had sexual relations with others of his own sex.”

“He makes love to me okay. Maybe I'm worrying over nothing. Thanks, Doctor. You've set my mind at ease.”

At the outset of his new profession Kellog considered himself reasonably sophisticated in sexual matters—over the course of the adult decades he had been to bed with a variety of women—but it soon appeared that he had had little preparation for many of the questions that were put to him.

What could be said to the man who confessed to being his daughter's lover since she had reached the age of seventeen?

“I'm no child molester,” boasted the man. “I never touched her earlier though I've been a lonely widower for some years.”

“Of course you are aware that that's against the law,” was the best Kellog could produce on such short notice.

“So was sitting in the front of the bus if you were black, not long ago! So was just living if you were a Jew in Nazi Germany.”

Kellog rallied. “Be that as it may, what you're doing is not right.”

“Then why did Lot do it?”

“Who?”

“Lot, in the Bible, whose wife turned to a pillar of salt. He got both his daughters pregnant, and that was fine with God. Go read it and see.”

“Sir, if I have to explain what's wrong with incest…The morality aside, isn't it genetically dangerous if a child is produced?”

“We're not thinking of having children. We're just satisfying each other's needs.”

“It would be much better if you both got other lovers,” Kellog said wearily. The only meaningful response to certain propositions—e.g., that coldblooded murder of another human being could be justified, that torture was permissible, that having sexual relations with a blood relative could be sanctioned—was simply to call them wrong. Proof, as such, could not be furnished, and if it could be, it would only vitiate the clear and obvious truth. Unless a human being could see that, there was nothing to talk about. But this man could not simply be turned away. Whatever his defiance of the natural law, he had called for help.

Kellog spoke gently. “The situation must not be as satisfactory as you make it sound. If you're calling me, you must have some doubts.”

“I have none at all,” said the man. “I'm calling to help others who may be in similar straits. You see, both my daughter and I were badly disfigured in the fire in which my wife died. We're not attractive to anyone else.”

Even in a society that had at one seemingly arbitrary point instantaneously exchanged the Puritanism that had been basic since its importers deboarded at Plymouth Rock for the licentiousness of the Roman baths (only yesterday the movies were so bluenosed that husband and wife could not be shown as occupying the same bed; now yesterday's shameful parts were everywhere on obligatory display and polymorphous perversity was lauded, and often practiced, by clergymen), even in a place and time where in peep-show films one could watch a German shepherd copulating with a human female, a male in ardent erotic sport with an underaged girl represented as being of his own flesh and blood, there was amongst the callers to Dr. Kellog no paucity of those who disapproved of simple sex education in the schools, any manifestation of sexual inversion including that discreetly practiced in private, any heterosexual connection not sanctioned by marriage, and in fact, with some, any sex whatever including the solitary: there actually still were parents who tried to discourage their offspring from masturbating.

But some complaints eventually revealed more than first met the eye.

“Surely that's harmless,” Dr. Kellog said. “Would you rather he impregnate a young girl or get a disease from a streetwalker?”

“But isn't he doing it too much? He stays in the bathroom for hours.”

“I wouldn't worry about it. It's normal enough, including the borrowed underwear. How old is the boy?”

“Doctor,” said the woman, “I wasn't telling the exact truth. He's my husband.”

Kellog recommended professional counseling.

Another wife and mother said her thirty-year-old son had separated from his spouse and come back to live at home. “I think something's going on between him and his stepsister. She's only twelve: that's the thing.”

“Have you tried confronting him about the matter? Simply telling him of your concern. Discreetly, nonconfrontationally, of course.”

“I don't know,” said the mother. “He tends to fly off the handle at any hint of criticism. He was always like that as a young kid. And that's why his marriage broke up. He says his wife was always needling him. He just couldn't take it.”

“It doesn't sound like a healthy situation, Phyllis.”

“It's not his fault, see,” said Phyllis. “The girl is quite a tease. She'll sometimes run around in scanty attire, and she's already getting to be, uh, you know, developed. She'll sit on his lap and scrootch around, or she'll suddenly dig him in the ribs or grab something of his, like his pen while he's trying to write a check, and run to some corner of the house, and he's supposed to chase her.”

“Does he?”

‘Yeah, and they're gone a long while, sometimes.”

“You'll really have to discuss the matter with him. And speak to the girl too, separately, privately. It may all still be relatively innocent, at least in deed, but it could go too far.” He saw a commercial was due. “Try that, Phyllis, and good luck. Now—”

“Please, doctor,” said Phyllis. “I can't get on any worse terms with my stepdaughter. She hates me already for marrying her father. And the fact is, I haven't been getting along lately with my husband. If he finds out about this, I don't know what he'll do. He's never liked my son.”

Kellog put some severity into his voice. “I
am
sorry, Phyllis, but we are simply out of time—”

“She's just a little chippy, Doctor, is what she is. I made a bad mistake marrying this man. He's run up all kinds of debts and last week he just went and sold my car. I'll tell you what I think, awful as it is. I think he might even be instigating the girl to do this to my son, to get something to blackmail him with.”

“Phyllis—”

“Could I just please stay on the line until after the commercial?”

Kellog never usually permitted this sort of thing, which could too easily be abused, for every caller's predicament was desperate according to him- or herself, and it was unfair to those waiting in the telephonic queue to allow one person to monopolize the doctor's attention—but, more important, the professional broadcaster's assumption was that the audience, many of whom were, at any given hour, in cars, had necessary limits to its attention.

But he now granted Phyllis' wish, and when he returned to the air after recorded commercials had been played, he said, “Tell your husband candidly about the girl and your son, but don't mention your suspicions about
his
own motives. I leave it up to you to decide whether you want to stay married to this man.”