T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

Cuttler made himself scarce the first week, chary of associating himself with failure, I suppose, but on the eighth day, when I was a mere seventy-three hours from the record, he showed up just after Tony and I had signed off and the blitzkrieg of ads leading into Annie’s slot had begun cannonading over the airwaves. I was experiencing a little difficulty in recognizing people at this juncture — my eyes couldn’t seem to focus and the pages of the thrillers were just an indecipherable blur — and I guess I didn’t place him at first. He was standing there at the open door of the booth, a vaguely familiar figure in a canary-yellow long-sleeved shirt and trailing cerulean scarf, threads of graying blond hair hanging in his eyes — his small, pig-like eyes — and two mugs of piping hot coffee in his hands. Or maybe he was wearing a pullover that day, done up in psychedelic blots of color, or nothing at all. Maybe he was standing there naked, pale as a dead fish, loose and puffy and without definition beyond the compact swell of his gut and the shriveled little British package of his male equipment. Who was I to say? I was hallucinating at this point, experiencing as reality what Dr. Laurie called “hypnogogic reveries,” the sort of images you summon up just before nodding off to Dreamland.

“Boomer, you astonish me, you really do,” Cuttler might have said, and I think, in reconstructing events, he did. His figure loomed there in the doorway, the two coffee mugs emblazoned with the KFUN logo outstretched to Tony and me. “We all took bets, and I tell you, really, I’ve been on the losing end all week. Not that I didn’t have faith, but knowing you, knowing your performance, that is, and the level of your attachment to, uh, procedure down at KFUN, I just didn’t think — well, as I say, you do astonish me. Bravo. And keep it up, old chip.”

My focus was wavering. I couldn’t really feel the cup in my hands, couldn’t tell if it was cold or hot, ceramic or Styrofoam (I was suffering from astereognosis, the inability to identify objects through the sense of touch, the very same condition that had afflicted Randy Gardner from the second day on). I felt irritated suddenly. Hot. Outraged. The feeling came up in me like a brush fire, and I couldn’t have put the two proper nouns “Cuttler” and “Ames” together if they were the key to taking home the million-dollar prize on a quiz show. “Who the fuck are you ?” I snarled, and the coffee seemed to snake out of the cup of its own accord.

Cuttler’s canary-yellow shirt was canary no longer, if, in fact, that was what he was wearing that day. He snarled something back at me, something offensive and threatening, something about my status at the station, but then Tony, glad-faced, big-headed, cliché-spouting moron that he was, stepped in on my side. “Lay off him, Cutt,” he might have said. “Can’t you see the strain he’s under here? Give us a break, will you?”

And now I felt warm to the bottom of my heart. Tony, good old reliable witty Tony, my partner and my fortress, was coming to my aid. “Tony,” I said. “Tony.” And left it at that.

Then somehow it was night and my mood shifted to the valedictory because I knew I was going to die just like the rats. My quarter-hour spots lacked vitality, or that was my sense of them (“Helloooo, you ladies and baboons out there in K-whatever land, do you know what the time is? Do you care? Because the Boomer doesn’t”). The street outside the booth wasn’t a street anymore but a portal to the underworld and the bums weren’t bums either, but dark agents of death and decay. I saw my wife and her second husband rise up out of the fog, sprout fangs and wings and flap off into the night. My dead mother appeared briefly, rattling the ice cubes in her cocktail glass till the sound exploded around me like a train derailment. I shoved a gyro into my face, fascinated by the pooling orange grease on the console that seemed to have risen up out of the floor beneath me just to receive it. When Dr. Laurie, who might have been dressed that night like a streetwalker or maybe a nun, came in to monitor me, I may have grabbed for her breasts and hung on like a pair of human calipers until she slapped me back to my senses. And Hezza. My angel in earflaps. Hezza was there, always there, as sleepless as I, sometimes crouched in the bushes, sometimes manifesting herself in the booth with me, rubbing my shoulders and the small of my back with her medium-sized mittened hands and talking nonstop of bands, swag and the undying glamour of FM radio. Christ was in the desert. I was in the booth. My fingers couldn’t feel and my eyes couldn’t see.

ON THE TENTH DAY, I achieved clarity. Suddenly the ever-thickening skin of irreality was gone. I saw the street transformed, the fog dissipating that seemed to have been there all week pushing up against the glass walls like the halitosis of defeat, each wisp and tendril burnished by the sun till it glowed. I went live to the studio for my quarter-hour update and let my voice ooze out over the airwaves with such plasticity and oleaginous joy you would have thought I was applying for the job. When I got up to visit the facilities at the Soul Shack, a whole crowd of starry-eyed fans thumped and patted me and held out their hands in supplication even as the chant Boomer, Boomer, Boomer rose up like a careening wave to engulf us all in triumph and ecstasy. One more day to set the record, and then we’d see about the day beyond that — the twelfth day, the magic one, the day no other DJ or high school science nerd or speed freak would ever see or match, not as long as the Guinness Brewing Company kept its records into the burgeoning and glorious future.

I was running both taps, trying to make out the graffiti over the toilet and staring into my cratered eyes as if I might tumble into them and never emerge again, when there came a soft insistent rapping at the door. Clear-headed though I was, I felt a surge of irritation. Who in hell could this be? Didn’t everybody in town, from the people in their aluminum rockers at the nursing home to the Soul Shack’s ham-fisted bouncers, know that I had to have my five minutes of privacy here? Five minutes. Was that too much to ask? Sixty stinking minutes a day? Did they have to see me squatting over the toilet? Unzipping my fly? What did they want, blood? “Who is it?” I boomed.

The smallest voice: “It’s me, Hezza.”

I opened the door. Hezza’s face was drawn and white, pale as a gutter leaf bleached by the winter rains. Beyond her I could see Rudy, our prissiest intern, studying the stopwatch that kept me strictly to my five minutes and not a second more. “Nazi!” I shouted at him, then pulled Hezza into the bathroom with me and shut the door.

She was shivering. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the irises faded till you couldn’t tell what color they were anymore. She’d been keeping vigil. She was as tranced as I was. “Take your clothes off,” I told her.

How much hesitation was there — half a second?

“Hurry!” I barked.

She was wearing blue jeans, a blouse under the long coat, nothing under that. The coat fell to the floor, the blouse parted, the jeans grabbed at her thighs, and her panties — yellow and gold butterflies and hovering bees, the panties of a child — slid to her knees. Hypnogogic reverie indeed. I tore the buttons off my third-favorite Hawaiian shirt, yanked at my belt, but it was too late, too far gone and lost, because Rudy was pounding on the door like the Gestapo with instructions from Cuttler to knock it off its hinges and snap an amyl nitrate cap under my nostrils if I lingered even a heartbeat too long.

I don’t know. I can’t remember. But I don’t think I even touched her.

DAY ELEVEN WAS a circus. A zoo. I was in the cage, hallucinating, suffering from dissociated thinking, ataxia, blurred vision and homicidal rage, and the KFUN fans — a hundred of them at least, maybe two hundred — blocked the street, pressed up against the glass walls, gyrated and danced and shouted. Tony was with me full-time now, counting down to the moment of Randy Gardner’s annihilation, the KFUN sound truck blasting up-to-the-minute KFUN hits to the masses, the police, the city council and the mayor getting in on the act — taking credit, even, though at a safe distance. The stores up and down the block were doing a brisk business in everything from T-shirts to birdcages to engagement rings, and the fast-food outlets were putting on extra shifts.