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

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.

Her eyes changed. She looked down and then away. “Oh, no,” she breathed finally. “No, I didn’t come for any of that. Don’t you realize what I’m saying?”

I didn’t. A wave of exhaustion crashed inside of me and pulled back from the naked shingle with a long slow suck and moan.

“I came for you. I’m here for you. For as long as it takes.” She lifted her eyes and gave me a searching look. “I’m your angel, ” she said, and then she backed away and vanished into the night.

—

I made it through the first week without closing my eyes once, not even in the privacy of the Soul Shack’s unisex restroom, resorting to the Freon horn and the safety pin whenever I felt myself giving way. My body temperature dropped to 94.2 degrees at one point, but Dr. Laurie wrapped me in one of those thermal survival blankets and brought it back up to normal. Like the rats, I ate. Over-ate, actually, and by the second day I couldn’t have cared if Mother Teresa and all the starving bald-headed waifs of Calcutta were camped outside the glass cube, I was eating and there were no two ways about it. Whereas before I’d made do like any other bachelor fending for himself, skipping breakfast most days and going to the deli for a meatball wedge in the afternoon and one fast-food venue or another in the evening, now I found myself gorging almost constantly. Tony and Dr. Laurie were bringing me pizza, sushi, tandoori chicken and supersizer burritos around the clock. I was thirsty too. Couldn’t get enough of the power drinks, of Red Bull, Jolt and Starbucks. The caffeine made me sizzle and it hollowed out its own place in the lining of my stomach, a low gastrointestinal burning that made me know I was alive. For the first few nights I felt a bit shaky during the down hours, from one to maybe five or so, but I never faltered, and there was always somebody there to monitor me, whether it was Dr. Laurie or one of our interns at the station. As the hours fell away, I felt stronger, more alive and awake, though the integument was back, draped over the world like a transparent screen, and everything — the way Hezza’s mouth moved when she spoke, Tony’s animated thrusts and jabs as he sat emoting beside me from six to nine each morning, even the way people and cars moved along the street — seemed to be happening at the bottom of the sea.

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, piglike 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.