T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

By the time I got both legs into a pair of jeans and both arms through the armholes of my favorite Hawaiian shirt, I was running late for work. I didn’t bother with gelling my hair or even looking at it, just grabbed a stocking cap and pulled it down to my eyebrows. Some sort of integument seemed to have been interposed between me and the outside world, some thick dullish skin that made every movement an ordeal, as if I were swimming in a medium ten times denser than water — and how the scalding twelve-ounce container of Starbuck’s triple latte wound up clenched between my legs as I gripped the steering wheel of the car that didn’t even feel like my own car — that felt borrowed or stolen — I’ll never know.

All this by way of saying I was late getting to the studio. Fifteen minutes late, to be exact. The first face I saw, right there, stationed at the battered back door with the call letters KFUN pasted at eye level in strips of peeling black electrical tape, seemed to belong to Cuttler Ames, the program director. Seemed to, that is, because the studio was filled to the ceiling with this new element I had to fight my way through, at least until the caffeine began to take hold and the integument fell away like so much sloughed skin. Cuttler made his lemon-sucking face. “Don’t tell me you overslept,” he said. “Not today of all days. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me your car threw a rod, tell me you got a speeding ticket, tell me your house burned down.”

Cuttler was a Brit. He wore his hair long and his face baggy. His voice was like Karo syrup poured through an echo box. He’d limped through the noon-hour “Blast from the Past” show for six months before he was elevated to program director over the backs of a whole troop of more deserving men (and women). I didn’t like him. Nobody liked him. “My house burned down,” I said.

“Why don’t you pull your head up out of your ass, will you? For once? Would that be too much to ask?” He turned to wheel away, resplendent in his black leather bell bottoms with the silver medallions sewed into the seams, then stopped to add, “Anthony’s already in there, going it alone, which makes me wonder what we’re paying you for, but let’s not develop a sense of urgency here or anything — let’s just linger in the corridor and make small talk, shall we?” A pause. The man was in a time warp. The leather pants, the wide-collared shirt, the pointy-toed boots: it was 1978 and Pink Floyd was ascendant. His eyes flamed briefly. “How did you sleep?”

Anthony was Tony, my morning-show partner. Sometimes, depending on his mood, Cuttler called him “Tony” like everybody else, except that he pronounced it “Tunny.” The question of how I’d slept was of vital import on this particular morning, because I’d been in training for the past week under the direction of Dr. Laurie Pepper of the Sleep Institute, who was getting some high-profile publicity for her efforts, not to mention a reduced rate on her thirty-second spots. “You need to build up your sleep account,” she told me, perched on the edge of the couch in my living room, and she prescribed long hot baths and sipping tepid milk before bed. “White noise helps,” she said. “One of my clients, a guitarist in an A-list band whose name I can’t reveal because of confidentiality issues, and I hope you’ll understand, used to make a tape loop of the toilet flushing and play it back all night.” She was in her mid-thirties and she had a pair of dramatic legs she showed off beneath short skirts and Morning Mist stockings, and in case anybody failed to take note she wore a gold anklet that spelled out Somnus in linked letters. “Roman god of sleep,” she said when she saw where my eyes had wandered. She had a notepad in her lap. She consulted it and uncrossed her legs. “Sex helps,” she said, coming back to the point she was pursuing. I told her I wasn’t seeing anybody just then. She shrugged, an elegant little shift of the shoulders. “Masturbation, then.”

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.