T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  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.”

  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.

  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 alo
ng 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?