by T. C. Boyle
There was a coffeepot and a tray of two-days’-stale doughnuts set up on a table against the wall just behind Cuttler, the remnants of a promotion for the local Krazy Kreme franchise. I went for them like a zombie, pausing only to reference his question. “Like shit,” I said.
“Oh, smashing. Super. Our champion, our hero. I suppose you’ll be drooling on the table ten minutes into the marathon.”
I wanted a cigarette, though it was an urge I had to fight. Since Cuttler’s accession we’d become a strictly tobacco-free workplace and I had to hide my Larks out of sight and blow smoke into a screw-top bottle when Tony and I were on the air. I could feel the caffeine working its way up the steep grades and inclines of my circulatory system like a train of linked locomotives, chugging away. In a burst of exhilaration I actually drew the pack from my pocket and shook out a cigarette, just to watch Cuttler’s face go into isolation. I made as if to stick the cigarette between my lips, but then thought better of it and tucked it behind my ear. “No way,” I said. “You want me to go twelve days, I’ll go twelve days. Fourteen, fifteen, whatever you want. Jesus, I don’t sleep anyway.” And then I was in the booth with Tony, ad-libbing, doing routines, cueing up records and going to commercials I’d heard so many times I could have reprised them in my sleep—if I ever slept, that is.
IN THE MID-SIXTIES, Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen of the University of Chicago devised an experiment in sleep deprivation, using rats as his subject animals. He wired their rodent brains to an EEG machine and every time their brain waves showed them drifting off he ducked them in cold water. The rats didn’t like this. They were in a lab, with plenty to eat and drink, a nice equitable temperature, no predators, no danger, nothing amiss but for the small inconvenience of the wires glued to the patches shaved into their skulls, but whenever they started dreaming they got wet. Normally, a rat will sleep thirteen hours a day on average, midway on the mammalian scale between the dolphin (at seven) and the bat (at twenty). These rats didn’t sleep at all. A week went by. Though they ate twice as much as normal, they began to lose weight. Their fur thinned, their energy diminished. The first died after thirteen days. Within three weeks all of them were gone.
I mention it here because I want to emphasize that I went into all this with my eyes wide open. I was informed. I knew that the Chinese Communists had used sleep deprivation as a torture device and that the physiological and psychological effects of continual wakefulness can be debilitating, if not fatal. Like the rats, sleep-deprived people tend to eat more, and like the rats, to lose weight nonetheless. Their immune systems become compromised. Body temperatures drop. Disorientation occurs. Hallucinations are common. Beyond that, it was anybody’s guess what would happen, though the fate of the rats was a pretty fair indication as far as I was concerned. And yet still, when Cuttler and Nguyen Tranh, the station’s owner and manager, came up with the idea of a marathon—a “Wake-A-Thon,” Tony was calling it—to boost ratings and coincidentally raise money for the National Narcolepsy Association, I was the first to volunteer. Why not?, was what I was thinking. At least it would be something different.
Thus, Dr. Laurie. If I was going to challenge the world record for continuous hours without sleep, I would need to be coached and monitored, and before I stepped into that glass booth at the intersection of Chapala and Oak in downtown San Roque at the conclusion of today’s edition of “The Gooner & Boomer Morning-Drive Show” I would have built up my sleep account, replete with overdraft protection, to ease me on my way. Call it nerves, butterflies, anticipatory anxiety—whatever it was, I’d never slept worse in my life than during the past week, and my sleep account was bankrupt. Even before the last puerile sexual-innuendo-laden half-witted joke of the show was out of my mouth, I could picture myself out cold in the glass booth five minutes into the marathon, derisive faces pressed up against the transparent walls, all the bright liquid hopes and aspirations of what was once a career unstoppered and leaching off into the pipes. I cued up the new Weezer single and backed out of the booth.
There was a photographer from the local paper leaning up against the shoulder-greased wall in the corridor, the telltale traces of doughnut confection caught in the corners of his mouth. He glanced up at me with dead eyes, tugged at the camera strap as if it had grown into his flesh. “You ready for this, man?” Tony crowed, slipping out of the booth like a knife pulled from a corpse, and he threw an arm round my shoulder, grinning for the photographer. Tony’s job was to represent the control group. Every morning, after our show, which we’d be broadcasting live from the glassed-in booth, he would go home to bed, then pop in at odd hours to sign autographs, hand out swag and keep me going with ever newer jokes and routines, which we would then work into the next morning’s show. He’d spent the past week trying to twist Polish jokes to fit the insomnia envelope, as in how many insomniacs does it take to screw in a lightbulb and what did the insomniac say to the bartender? Tony squeezed my shoulder. “How you feeling?”
I just nodded in response. I felt all right, actually. Not rested, not calm, not confident, but all right. The sun slanted in through one of the grimy skylights and hit me in the face and it was like throwing cold water on a drunk. Plus I’d had two more cups of coffee and a Diet Coke while we were on the air, and the assault of the caffeine made me feel almost human. When Dr. Laurie, Nguyen and Cuttler stepped out of the shadows and locked arms with me and Tony to pose for the photographer, I braved the flash and showed every tooth I had.
THE FIRST MASOCHIST to subject himself to sleep withdrawal for the sake of ratings was a DJ named Peter Tripp, who had a daily show on WMGM in New York back in 1959. His glassed-in booth was in Times Square, and he made it through the two hundred hours of sleeplessness his program director had projected for him, though not without experiencing his share of delusions and waking nightmares. Toward the end of his trial, he somehow mistook the physician monitoring him for an undertaker come to pump him full of formaldehyde and they had to read him the riot act to get him back into the glass booth and finish out his sentence. Two hundred hours is just over eight days, but what Cuttler was shooting for here was twelve days, two hundred eighty-eight hours—a full twenty-four hours longer than the mark set by the Guinness Book of World Records champ, a high school senior from San Diego named Randy Gardner who’d employed himself as the test subject in a science project to monitor the effects of sleep deprivation. He was seventeen at the time, gifted with all the recuperative powers of the young, and he came out of it without any lasting adverse effects.
As I stood in the back hallway at KFUN, simulating insouciance for the photographer, I was thirty-three years old, sapped of enthusiasm after twelve years on the air, sleep-deprived and vulnerable, with the recuperative powers of a corpse. I was loveless, broke, bored to the point of rage, so fed up with KFUN, microphones, recording engineers and my drive-time partner I sometimes thought I’d choke him to death on the air the next time he opened his asinine mouth to spout one more asinine crack, to which I, an ass myself, would be obligated to respond. My career was a joke. The downmarket slide had begun. I didn’t have a chance.
Outside, in the parking lot, there was a random aggregation of sixth-grade girls in KFUN T-shirts, flanked by their slack-jawed, work-worn mothers. When Tony, Dr. Laurie and I stepped out the door and made for the classic KFUN-yellow Eldorado convertible that would take us downtown to the glass booth, they let out a series of halfhearted shrieks and waved their complimentary KFUN bumper stickers like confetti. I slipped into the embrace of my wraparound shades and treated them to a grand wave in return, and then we were out in traffic, and people who may or may not have been KFUN listeners looked at us as if we were prisoners on the way to the gallows.
It was early yet, just before nine, but there were four or five bums already camped against the walls of the glass cubicle—it was Plexiglas, actually—and a pair of retirees in golf hats gaping at the thing as if it had been manufactured by aliens. The sun, softened by a trace of lingering fog, m
ade a featherbed of the sidewalk, the parked cars shone dully and the palms stood watch in silhouette up and down both sides of the street. The photographer got a shot of me in conference with the more emaciated of the retirees, who informed me that he’d once stayed up forty-six hours straight, hunting Japs on Iwo Jima, then Dr. Laurie, whose function had now abruptly switched from sleep induction to prevention, led me into the booth where Tony had already stowed my satchel stuffed with clean underwear, shaving kit, two fresh shirts, a burlap bag of gravel (to sit on when I felt drowsy: Cuttler’s idea) and eighteen thrillers plucked at random from the shelves of Wal-Mart. The format was simple: every fifteen minutes I would go live to the studio and update the time and remind everybody out there in KFUN land just how many consecutive waking hours I’d racked up. Every other hour I was allowed a five-minute break to visit the toilet facilities across the street at the Soul Shack Dance Club, which was co-sponsoring the event, but aside from that I was to remain on full public display, upright and attentive, and no matter what happened, my eyelids were never to close, even for an instant.
IT MAY SEEM HARD to believe—especially now, looking at it in retrospect—but those first few hours were the worst. Once the excitement of setting up in the booth (and cutting into Armageddon Annie’s mid-morning show for a sixty-second exchange of canned jocularities—“How’re you hanging, Boomer? Still awake after fifteen minutes?”), the effect of the last few sleepless nights hit me like an avalanche. I was sitting there at the console they’d set up for me, staring off down the avenue and thinking of Dr. Laurie’s legs and what she could do for me in a strictly therapeutic way when all this was over and I really did have to get back to sleep, and I think I may have drifted for a minute. I wasn’t asleep. I know that. But it was close, my eyelids listing, the image of Dr. Laurie slipping off her undies replaced by a cold sweeping wall of gray as if someone had suddenly flipped channels on me, and then I was no longer staring down the avenue but into the eyes, the deep sea–green startled eyes, of a girl of twenty or so in what looked to be a homemade knit cap with long trailing ear flaps. At first I thought I’d gone over the edge, already dreaming and not thirty minutes into the deal, because why would anyone be wearing a knit cap with earflaps in downtown San Roque where the sun was shining and the temperature stuck at seventy-two, day and night, as if there were a thermostat in the sky? But then she waved, touched two fingers to her lips and pressed them to the glass, and I knew I was awake.
I gave her my best radio-personality smile, ran a hand through my hair (now combed and gelled, just as my cheeks were smooth-shaven and my Hawaiian shirt wrinkle-free, because this was a performance above all else and I was representing KFUN to the public here, as Cuttler had reminded me sixteen times already that morning, lest I forget). She smiled back, and I noticed then that a crowd had begun to gather, maybe twenty people or so—shoppers, delivery truck drivers, mothers and babes, granddads, slope-shouldered truants from San Roque High, and even a solitary cop perched over his motionless bicycle—all drawn to the image of this woman pressed against the glass in a place on the sidewalk where no glass had been just a day ago. They saw her there, people who might have just strolled on obliviously by, and then they saw me, in my glass cage. I watched their faces, the private looks of absorption metamorphosing to surprise and then amusement, and something else too—recognition, and maybe even admiration. Oh, yeah, they were thinking, I heard about this—that’s Boomer in there, from KFUN, and he’s setting the world record for staying awake. It’s been almost an hour now. Cool.
At least that’s what I imagined, and I wasn’t delusional yet, not by a long shot. That girl standing there had turned things around for me, and for the first time I felt a surge of pride, a sense of accomplishment and worth—enthusiasm, real enthusiasm—but of course, I was tired to the marrow already and experiencing a kind of hypnotic giddiness that could have been the precursor to any level of mental instability. In my exuberance I waved to the assembled crowd, mothers, bums and truants alike, and that seemed to break the spell—their eyes shifted away from me, they began to move off, and the new people who might have been their reinforcements just kept on walking past the glass booth as if it didn’t exist. The girl tore a sheet from a loose-leaf notebook then and bent over it in concentration. I watched her write out a message in block letters as the pigeons dodged and ducked round her feet and the seagulls cut white flaps out of the sky overhead, and then she looked up, held my eyes, and pressed the paper to the glass. The message was simple, terse, to the point: YOU ARE MY GOD.
I FOUGHT SLEEP through the morning and into the early afternoon, so wired on caffeine my knees were sore from knocking together under the table. There are two low points in our circadian cycle, one to four in the morning, which seems self-evident, and, more surprisingly, the same hours in the afternoon. Or maybe it’s not so surprising when you take into account the number of cultures that indulge the post-prandial nap or afternoon siesta. At any rate, on a normal day at this hour I’d be doing voice-overs on ads or dozing off in one of the endless meetings Cuttler and Nguyen seemed to call every other day to remind us of the cost of postage, long-distance phone calls and the paper towels in the restroom. The afternoon lull hit me. My head lolled on my shoulders like a bowling ball. I thought if I ate something it would help, so when Tony stopped in to glad-hand the bums and the half-dozen lingerers and gawkers gathered round the booth, I asked him to get me some Chinese takeout. I did the one forty-five spot (“Hey, out there in KFUN land, this is the Boomer, and yes, I’m still awake after three hours and forty-five minutes, and when you hear the tone it will be exactly—”), then bent to the still-warm cartons of kung pao chicken, scallops in black bean sauce and mu shu pork.
I couldn’t eat. I lifted the first dripping forkful to my mouth and a dozen pairs of eyes locked on mine. The bums had been stretched out in comfort all morning, passing a short dog of Gallo white port, cadging change and hawking gobs of mucus onto the pavement, making merry at my expense, and now they just turned their heads to stare as if they somehow expected me to provide for them too. A trio of middle-aged women with Macy’s bags looped over their wrists took one look at me and pulled up short as if they’d forgotten something (lunch, most likely). And one of the old men from the morning reappeared suddenly, licking his lips. I tried to smile and chew at the same time, but it wasn’t working. I toyed with the food awhile, even picked up one of the thrillers and tried to block them out, but finally I set down the fork and pushed the cartons away. That was when the girl in the earflaps popped up out of nowhere—she must have been lurking in the bushes along the median or watching from the window of the Soul Shack—to painstakingly indite a second message. She pressed it to the glass. EAT, it read, YOU’RE GOING TO NEED YOUR STRENGTH.
THE GIRL’S NAME WAS Hezza Moore. She was of medium height, medium weight, medium coloring and medium attractiveness. We met formally just after the sun went down the evening of that first day. I’d got my second wind around seven or so (the second period of alertness in our circadian cycle, by the way, corresponding to the one we experience in the morning), and by the time the sun went down I felt as energized as Nosferatu climbing out of his coffin. I paced round the glass box, spanked off my quarter-hour spots with the rumbling monitory gusto that had won me my on-air moniker ten years back when I was an apprentice jock at KSOT in San Luis Obispo, did a few sets of jumping jacks, flossed my teeth and unlatched the glass door at the rear of the booth to embrace the night air.
I was thinking this is a lark, this is nothing, thinking I could go a month, a year, and who needed sleep anyway, when she materialized at the open door. She was still in the knit cap, but she seemed to be wearing mittens now too, and an old Salvation Army overcoat that dropped to the toes of her Doc Martens. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“You remember that Dishwalla promo you guys did six years ago?”
I gave her a blank look. The temperature reading on the display over the Bank
of America down the street was 71°.
She’d edged partway into the booth, one foot on the plywood floor, her shoulders bridging the Plexiglas doorframe. “You know, the new CD and dinner for two at the Star of India? I was the fourteenth caller.”
“Really?”
She beamed at me now, two dimples sucked down into her smile. The knit hat cut a slash just above her eyes, and her eyes jumped and settled, then jumped again. “Yeah,” she went on, “but I was only fifteen and I didn’t have anybody to go with. I wound up going with my mom, and that was a drag. You should have been the prize, though. I mean, it was you telling us all that the fourteenth caller would win the free chapatis and the lime pickle and all the rest of it, and if it’d been you going to dinner with the fourteenth caller I would’ve died. Really, I would have. You know, I’ve never missed your show, not even once, ever since you went on the air? I even used to listen in school, in homeroom and first period, with headphones.”
I held out my hand. “It’s a real pleasure,” I said, just to say it, and that was when she gave me her name. “You want an autograph? Or some of this swag?” I gestured to the heap of KFUN T-shirts, beanies, CDs and concert tickets we were giving away as part of the Wake-A-Thon, teen treasure mounded in the corner of the glass booth just above the spot on the pavement outside where one of the bums—the one with the empty pantleg where his left foot should have been—was stretched out in bum nirvana, snoring lustily.