T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

—

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.”