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

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 nitrite 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.

Hezza was in the booth with us, the booth that had grown crowded now because Dr. Laurie and Nguyen were hovering over the console like groupies, milking every moment for all it was worth, and nobody wanted Hezza there but me. I insisted. Got angry. Maybe even violent. So, though Cuttler and Rudy the intern bit their lips and looked as sour as spoiled milk, Hezza was right there in a plastic chair between me and Tony, her medium-sized mittened hand clutched in my own. And why not? I was the star here, I was the anchorite, I was the one nailed to the cross and hung out to dry for the public’s amusement and edification and maybe even redemption. I was feeling grandiose. Above everybody and everything. Transcendent, I guess you’d call it. I wanted Hezza in the booth. Hezza was in the booth.

Tony and I stumbled our way through the show, the Boomer anything but, my wit dried up, my voice a freeze-dried rasp, a whisper. We played more music than usual, cueing up one insomnia tune after another, the Talking Heads’ “Stay Up Late,” the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” a Cuttler Ames’ blast from the past “Wake Me, Shake Me.” The ads came fast and furious. Tony counted down the minutes in a voice that got increasingly hysterical. The record was in sight. I was going to make it — and what’s more I was ready to shoot for the whole banana, the twelfth day, the immortal day, and I’d already told Cuttler as much. “It’s in the bag,” I told him, waving my arms over my head like an exercise guru. “No fears.”

And then the final countdown, live on the air, 5–4–3–2–1, and a shout went up from the crowd, all those delirious bobbing heads, Hezza grinning up at me out of her parchment face and squeezing my hand as if she were milking it, Dr. Laurie beaming, Cuttler, Tony and the mayor jostling for position with Nick Nixon from the local TV station and a smattering of crews from as far away as Fresno and Bakersfield. “Speech!” somebody shouted, and they all took it up: “Speech, speech, speech!”

I rose from the chair, bits of pea stone gravel stuck to the backside of my sweaty trousers, Hezza rising with me. Tony was chanting along with the crowd now — or no, he was leading the chant, his voice booming out through the big speakers of the sound truck. It was my moment of glory. My first in a whole long dry spell that stretched all the way back to high school and a lead role in the Thespian Club’s production of The Music Man. I lifted the mike to my lips, took a deep breath. “I just want to say”—my voice was thunderous, godlike—“I just want to say, Goodbye, Randy Gardner, R.I.P.!”

—

Then I was alone again and it was dark. The morning had bled into afternoon and afternoon into evening, the world battened on the fading light, and with every sleepless minute a new record was being forged. Dr. Laurie begged me to quit at noon, three hours into the new record (actually six, if you consider that I’d been awake and alive for the show that first day before sequestering myself in the glass box). She reminded me of the rats—“They had hemorrhages in their brain tissue, Boomer; enough is enough”—but I ignored her. Cuttler wanted me to go twelve full days, and though I knew on some level he didn’t care if I lived or died, I had to show him — show everybody — what I was made of. It was only sleep. I could sleep for a week when I was done. A month. But to stay awake just one more minute was to make history, and the next minute would make history all over again, and the next after that.

Hezza had melted away with the crowd. Dr. Laurie had gone home to sleep. Tony had a date. Cuttler was cuddled up at home with his snaggle-toothed British wife, listening to Deep Purple or some such crap. Even the bums had deserted me, taking their moveable feast down the avenue to a less strenuous venue. The funny thing was, I felt fine. I didn’t think sleep, not for a minute. What I saw and what I thought I saw were one and the same and I no longer cared to differentiate. I was living inside a dream and the dream was real life, and what was wrong with that?

I watched the KFUN fans line up outside the Soul Shack, watched the line swell and shrink, and fixated on the taillights of the cars moving silently down the boulevard. I couldn’t read, couldn’t watch the portable TV Tony had set up for me, couldn’t even listen to the chatter of it. Everything seemed so inconsequential. I would say that my mind wandered, but the phrase doesn’t begin to do justice to the state I was in — I no longer inhabited my body, no longer had a mind or a being. I felt a great peace descend on me, and I just sat there in silence, studying the red LED display on the console as it chopped and diced the hours, moving only to lift a listless hand to acknowledge the thumbs-up from one or another of the baggy-pantsed teens drifting by on the sidewalk. The club emptied, the streets went silent. I didn’t even bother to take my restroom breaks.

In the morning, the light climbed down from the tops of the buildings, a light full of pigeons and hope, and Tony appeared, as usual, at quarter of six, with two cups of coffee. There was something wrong with him, I could see that right away. His face lacked dimension. It wasn’t a face at all, but a flat screen painted with Tony-features. He looked worried. “Listen, Boom,” he said, “you’ve got to give this up. No offense, but it’s like having a dead man here doing the show with me. You know what you said yesterday, on the air, when I asked you how it felt to set the record? You remember that?”