the stay-awake men
What is radio, exactly?
I’ve worked in radio for most of my adult life, and I can spit out a bunch of words like electromagnetic energy and transmitter and antennae. I can talk of frequencies and wavelengths and circuits… but ultimately I don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about. Even when I look at diagrams that claim to present a visual representation, my mind just sort of blanks out, hits a wall, like when I try to imagine an infinite space.
Ultimately—and it pains me to admit this, because I am a realist, and a reasonably smart man who puts no stock in the notion of ghosts or gods—I don’t believe in the so-called science.
Because radio is nothing less than magic. Black magic, because it seems somehow wrong, something that should be forbidden, and because it is a perverse thrill to sit here in this studio the size of a broom closet, where the HVAC is third-rate and the chairs are uncomfortable and the carpet is peeling up from the floor, and my voice can reach you in your car, your living room, in your secret space. To you, the listener, I could be in a palace, in a mansion, astride a satellite orbiting the earth…anywhere.
And I could say anything. Anything at all.
When people ask me how radio works, I say that we are tinkering with the empty spaces in the world. That it’s just another kind of pollution, the ramifications of which we don’t yet know. It’s as good an explanation as any.
What do I like about radio? What grips me, keeps me tuning in, captivates me more than books and television and movies?
The voice.
The voice is all-important.
Compression, effects, amplification.
Keep your mouth three-to-five inches from the mic. Never trail off at the end of a sentence. Enunciate. Eliminate “umms” and “uhs” from your speech.
Compression, effects, amplification.
The voice you hear is not the voice of the man who is speaking, of the announcer, whoever he is. The voice itself is artifice, and I believe that casts the content into doubt. They enter through your ears and rummage around in your brain, like some kind of terrible insect, devouring, devastating…transforming.
You turn the knob, hear the click, and the voice fills up the room, almost as liquid fills the vessel into which it’s poured.
You, the listener, have allowed the announcer in, invited the vampire over the threshold and into your secret space. The announcer, whoever he is, vampire, leech, holds sway now.
The announcer is more powerful than words on a page, than a face speaking from a screen. Because you can close your eyes. Close your eyes. Close your eyes.
The station wagon leaned like a derelict under an insect-dimmed streetlight on the road's shoulder, the passenger side tires off the edge of the pavement and in the gravel. Inside, Don Wright shined a flashlight onto an unfolded map. On the passenger seat next to him, atop a pile of crumpled fast food bags and unopened mail, lay a torn sheet of paper with driving directions he'd scrawled in pencil hours earlier, now slightly smeared and mostly illegible.
Don knew the center of the city well, having been raised among its skyscrapers and smokestacks, its storefronts and bus stops, its parks and plazas. But the outskirts—with their endless shrub lined streets, dingy shops, and sagging houses—were like those of some distant, neglected city. Whenever he drove through unfamiliar neighborhoods such as these, he was struck by the sheer number of people in the city…in the country. In the world. Apartment house after apartment house after apartment house, and more around every corner, snaking off down hills, around curves, out of view, but there, endlessly there, crowding him, squeezing him in until his shoulders were up at his ears.
Until he’d passed beyond the familiar grid and into the outskirts, the ride had been easy. He’d sailed through all the red lights—a dozen or more—unassailed, the cars behind him following his lead. There hadn’t been as much as the admonishing honk of a car horn. But now he’d had to double back twice, having found himself at the end of unmarked dead-end streets and different roads with the same exact names, and he feared he might be late. The thought soured his stomach. He’d been brought up to arrive ten minutes early at the very latest, one of the rare parental tenets against which he’d never felt inclined to rebel. Show up early or don’t show up at all.
It seemed unlikely to Don that any movie studio, even the shadiest, even XT100, would hold a screening in the ugly cluster of warehouses out here beyond the ragged underbelly of the Interstate. He’d have figured the Civic Center, or maybe the sprawling Cineplex on the side of the city closest to Charlton, a sprawling, affluent suburb. But the email—from [email protected]—had provided only the obscure address and a semi-literate “official” invitation. A few days later Don discovered in his mailbox among the credit card come-ons and the catalogs and the FINAL NOTICES an unmarked, unstamped packet of promotional materials. This consisted mainly of lobby cards, poster postcards, and clippings of advance reviews that revealed frustratingly little about the content of the movie. Also included was a one-page biographical sketch about the movie’s subject, and a two-page folded booklet that dealt with the attendant rumors and legends.
Don, having been involved in broadcasting for most of his adult life, had known a little bit of the story, passed around from jockey to anchorman, producer to sound engineer. But sitting in his kitchen a week or so back, a cigarette shrinking slowly in an amber glass ashtray before him, he found himself hungry to know more, to know everything, about the man who had wandered off and became a legend, a myth, a spook story.
The biographical details were sketchy at best. Alan Rampart. Thirty-one years old. Shy and kind and quick to smile, but not given much to laughter. Family man with a son and a daughter. Dragged the family from city to city spinning top forty shlock, earning a pittance. Comes alive at the mic, becomes a different man altogether. Spewing that DJ blather without pause, talking right up to the start of the vocal—hitting the post was the term. Appearances at state fairs, announcing the opening acts and the headliners at big rock shows (always, always, you get booed at the big rock shows), at car dealerships, and at purportedly booze-free high school dances. Rumors of cocaine abuse, probably true, probably exaggerated.
And then the stunt. A throwaway gag, probably thought up over glasses of whiskey on the patio of The Interloper, the bar on Quarterworth Street frequented by journalists and radio announcers and television news anchors. They probably never investigated the legality, considered the health risks. Surely they never thought anything would go wrong.
After it was over, after two hundred and thirty hours without sleep, he left the studio, which was 11 miles from his house, got into a cab, and, as far as anyone could tell, rode off into nonexistence. The driver didn’t remember the fare, a detail that was odd in and of itself. Maybe the man jumped into the river from the French King Bridge, or got himself lost in the woods and mauled by a bear. Maybe a dalliance with some underage thing, they took off together in a pinkish haze of new lust, but maybe it stuck. One thing Don was sure of: the guy wasn’t a ghost. He was somewhere.
Mostly, though, Don was curious, perhaps more accurately rabid, to hear (or at least hear something credible about) the notorious three minute and thirty-seven second stretch that began at 4:35 a.m. on the Monday after the broadcast began. The film’s promotional materials indicated only the existence of rumors and unsubstantiated hearsay, like urban legends, a friend of a friend of a friend happened to be tuned in, he didn’t remember now exactly what was said, but it was spooky as all-get-out. Some said the segment gave clues about Rampart’s then-impending disappearance, that it was a monologue of puzzles and dark hints.
The promotional materials didn’t say that the tape would be part of the film, but they didn’t say it wouldn’t. They did mention rumors of a certain cassette circulated (and, presumably, copied) among high school students in Orford Parish, Connecticut for a time, a tape whose whereabouts were now unknown. Like the disappeared man, that tape and i
ts copies were surely somewhere—under some kid’s car seat, maybe, or in a pile of similarly unmarked cassettes under a mountain of laundry in the closet of some metalhead’s denim-strewn sty of a bedroom. Maybe at some small town flea market or out of the way record store, in a rack with tapes of prank calls and bootleg concert recordings and demos from amateur garage bands. The thought that maybe the filmmakers had actually managed to get hold of the tape thrilled Don to his marrow.
Now, in the rearview, he could see the white and red lights of the Civic Center tower rising from the fog tinted yellow of the street lights; above, atop vertiginous stone pillars, the highway moaned its eternally weary moan. Great cracks lined the lower sections of the pillars, and there were spots where the concrete appeared to have been scooped out. In the gravel to the right of his car sat chunks of concrete in patterned piles, presumably gathered and arranged by some of the city's many vagrants.
He shoved the map to the side, gunned the car off the shoulder, kicking up gravel, and continued down the weed-choked street lined with abandoned shacks and lonely shops and service stations bedecked with faded signs; at its terminus he swung the car to the left onto the cracked and crumbled concrete road that led into the warehouses. As a reporter, he knew this alley-veined cluster of deteriorating buildings by reputation only: it served as a meeting place for the shadowy organizations that hustled their wares on the city streets, a venue for gang skirmishes, and a cover for dank brothels of whose workers one was immediately wary, for they looked sickly and thin and bruised, and frequently found themselves in lockup with no pimp nor madam to bail them out. As he drove along the sepia-stained street, he saw at the entrance to a dark alley a sign on which had been scrawled in Sharpie and then written over several times:
The Stay-Awake Man
He turned his car down the alley. At several points, his side mirrors scraped the brick buildings that bordered the unlit lane, causing swirling clouds of red dust to form and dissipate back into the blackness.
The alley opened up into a modest courtyard in which 30 or so cars sat almost touching one another, door-handle to door-handle. He could see no space for his car. He was reluctant to park his car out on the street—the only other car he’d seen had been burnt out and used as a canvas for a variety of graffiti artists. Sighing, he threw the car into reverse and turned his head to make certain the alley was clear. It was not. A man in a black hooded sweatshirt with a yellow vest over it shone his flashlight into Don's eyes. Blinking away the red splotches, he watched as the light bobbed around the back of the car and to his door. The hooded man ducked down. Don could not make out a face beyond the shadow of the hood.
“I've got it,” the man said, his voice muffled. Reluctantly, Don opened his door and exited, causing the man to skitter backwards, still keeping the light trained on Don's face.
“You want to point that thing away from me,” he warned, squinting, holding up his hand, and the man ignored him and pointed to a grey metal door with no handle in evidence. Don looked at the door, and looked back to the man, but he had already climbed into the station wagon, his yellow vest glowing ghostly in the light from the dashboard. He shot it back up the alley in reverse, faster than Don liked, backed into the road, and disappeared into the darkness. Splotched colors loomed in his vision, psychedelic spatter on the blue-black sky.
Hoping against hope the theater had another sequestered car lot off-site, he trudged over to the door, feeling in his overcoat pocket for his notepad and camera, the latter of which was contraband, as the invitation had indicated that any audience member attempting to record any aspect of the performance would be promptly escorted from the premises. As he approached, the door opened. Don entered past a sentry dressed all in black with a gun on his hip, large mirrored sunglasses covering the top half of his face, the bottom half concealed by profuse and thick black stubble. He drew himself in, expecting to be frisked, but the sentry was still as a mannequin. The gun, the sunglasses…this is theater, thought Don, as he looked into the guard’s face and saw himself reflected in duplicate, slack-mouthed and drawn.
Just to Don’s left sat a bowed card table bearing two coffee carafes, teetering stacks of paper cups, and office-style cylindrical containers of sugar and powdered creamer. Two men in pressed grey suits were helping themselves. They were twins, grey haired, bespectacled, and bearing expressions that indicated they did not wish to be social. A fear struck him that the entire audience might be composed of men who looked just like them, with him the odd man out. Black-haired and thin, with a slight paunch, pools of darkness around his eyes, and a shadow of a mustache—an interloper. He abstained from coffee and decided instead to walk around and get a sense of the venue.
The narrow hall opened into a cavernous room crowded with mismatched folding chairs, some wood, some metal, a few plastic, all facing a large screen on a deceptively flimsy looking metal stand. More chairs lined the walls, separated by squat, featureless particle board tables bearing a fanned spread of magazines, as though during daylight hours the hall doubled as a waiting room. Speakers dangled unanchored by their wires from slits where the walls met the ceiling. A hole in the wall in the back where the brick had been torn away revealed the chrome and black plastic muzzle of a projector. Waitresses in cocktail dresses and towering heels, shapely and red-lipped, teetered this way and that, holding aloft trays of shot glasses brimming with a steaming liquid the deep green of nighttime cough medicine.
Somewhere a bell began to peal insistently, and people streamed in from the lobby and found seats. This was an upscale crowd, Don noted—the men in suits, no shorts, no denim, the women in dresses and modest heels. Feeling somewhat shabby by contrast, Don took a center seat in an otherwise unoccupied row four rows from the front. As the lights dimmed, he put his notebook on his lap and clicked the pen. A small light on the cap made a white circle on the page to write by. Around him he heard murmurs of disapproval.
The projector started up with a whir and a shimmying white rectangle floated this way and that in the darkness until it lit finally on the screen. After a few shapes and zig-zag patterns in various colors zipped about, the screen filled with images of woods in November, the sun shining white through them, blotting the screen, turning the branches to black bones, thin and brittle. The sound of a needle dropping onto a record, loud. Everyone jumped, and a few people tittered. The narration began, a low voice, sounding almost threatening:
Narrator (Voice-over)
Massachusetts Disc Jockey Alan Rampart was a spinner of vinyl records, a radio man, a broadcaster.
Alan Rampart
This is WIDI FM, WLLU AM, the Valley’s Voice and the Valley’s Choice.
Narrator (VO)
Until everything went all wrong.
Alan Rampart
You can’t have animals in the studio, Danny. Danny, what IS that? DANNY. GET IT OFF OF ME. GET IT OFF. (shrieks)
Narrator (VO)
Alan Rampart has been missing for three years now, but the rumor goes that if you drive through his hometown at night…
Jim Ritchie
…in Leeds, Massachusetts, but, see, you have to make sure you haven’t slept in at least 48 hours, otherwise you’ll get nothing…
Massachusetts State Patrolman Michael Burnston
…but only having stayed awake for 48 hours at the minimum, which is inadvisable, at best…
Jim Ritchie
…and the authorities strongly advise against this, you can hear him, mostly through an ocean of static, but sometimes as clear as a voice in the car with you, somewhere down the end of the dial, spinning records and talking about the madness that pulled him from our world…
Narrator (VO)
…and into the spirit world.
-INTRO MUSIC-
-TITLES:
“The Stay-Awake Man”
Written by Douglas Hathaway
Music by Rip Rippington
Filmed in and around Leeds, Massachusetts
Featuring inter
views with:
Jim Ritchie
Mack Burgle
Dan “The Man” Stanton
Finn Morganstern
and more
recorded broadcasts courtesy of WIDI
#
TITLE CARD: “THE STAY-AWAKE MAN”
TITLE CARD: “RECORDING, MARCH 2013:”
Jim Ritchie
…and that’s the plan, ladies and gentlemen, live in our studio, from March 15…
Alan Rampart:
…the ides of March…
Jim Ritchie
That’s right, the ides of March, whatever ides are, I think they’re like drinks, lemonide, lime-ide...from March 15 until he just! Can’t! Stand it anymore! our own Alan Rampart will be live, awake, on the air, broadcasting from our studio in Deamon Court, without sleep, without rest, playing tunes and talking about, well, just whatever comes into his tired old head.
Alan Rampart:
Now, how is this going to work, Jimmy?
Jim Ritchie:
I’m glad you asked, buddy. Our other disc jockeys will be shadowing you in shifts, keeping you hydrated, making sure you’re not alone, or not alone for too long. Station staff will monitor you on the air, always ready with the seven-second delay in case you say one of those seven dirty words, you know the ones, although I think there are more now. What I’m saying is, keep it clean, pal. You’ll have an escort to the restrooms, good healthy food, and good friends ready to jab you in the side with a sharp stick should you start to drift.
The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities Page 7