T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

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, made 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 .