the photographer. Tony’s job was to represent the control group. Every morning, after our show, which we’d be broadcasting live from the glassed-in booth, he would go home to bed, then pop in at odd hours to sign autographs, hand out swag and keep me going with ever newer jokes and routines, which we would then work into the next morning’s show. He’d spent the past week trying to twist Polish jokes to fit the insomnia envelope, as in how many insomniacs does it take to screw in alightbulb and what did the insomniac say to the bartender? Tony squeezed my shoulder. “How you feeling?”
I just nodded in response. I felt all right, actually. Not rested, not calm, not confident, but all right. The sun slanted in through one of the grimy skylights and hit me in the face and it was like throwing cold water on a drunk. Plus I’d had two more cups of coffee and a Diet Coke while we were on the air, and the assault of the caffeine made me feel almost human. When Dr. Laurie, Nguyen and Cuttler stepped out of the shadows and locked arms with me and Tony to pose for the photographer, I braved the flash and showed every tooth I had.
T HE FIRST MASOCHIST to subject himself to sleep withdrawal for the sake of ratings was a DJ named Peter Tripp, who had a daily show on WMGM in New York back in 1959. His glassed-in booth was in Times Square, and he made it through the two hundred hours of sleeplessness his program director had projected for him, though not without experiencing his share of delusions and waking nightmares. Toward the end of his trial, he somehow mistook the physician monitoring him for an undertaker come to pump him full of formaldehyde and they had to read him the riot act to get him back into the glass booth and finish out his sentence. Two hundred hours is just over eight days, but what Cuttler was shooting for here was twelve days, two hundred eighty-eight hours—a full twenty-four hours longer than the mark set by the
Guinness Book of World Records
champ, a high school senior from San Diego named Randy Gardner who’d employed himself as the test subject in a science project to monitor the effects of sleep deprivation. He was seventeen at the time, gifted with all the recuperative powers of the young, and he came out of it without any lasting adverse effects.
As I stood in the back hallway at KFUN, simulating insouciance for the photographer, I was thirty-three years old, sapped of enthusiasm after twelve years on the air, sleep-deprived and vulnerable, with the recuperative powers of a corpse. I was loveless, broke, bored to the point of rage, so fed up with KFUN, microphones, recording engineersand my drive-time partner I sometimes thought I’d choke him to death on the air the next time he opened his asinine mouth to spout one more asinine crack, to which I, an ass myself, would be obligated to respond. My career was a joke. The downmarket slide had begun. I didn’t have a chance.
Outside, in the parking lot, there was a random aggregation of sixth-grade girls in KFUN T-shirts, flanked by their slack-jawed, work-worn mothers. When Tony, Dr. Laurie and I stepped out the door and made for the classic KFUN-yellow Eldorado convertible that would take us downtown to the glass booth, they let out a series of halfhearted shrieks and waved their complimentary KFUN bumper stickers like confetti. I slipped into the embrace of my wraparound shades and treated them to a grand wave in return, and then we were out in traffic, and people who may or may not have been KFUN listeners looked at us as if we were prisoners on the way to the gallows.
It was early yet, just before nine, but there were four or five bums already camped against the walls of the glass cubicle—it was Plexiglas, actually—and a pair of retirees in golf hats gaping at the thing as if it had been manufactured by aliens. The sun, softened by a trace of lingering fog, made a featherbed of the sidewalk, the parked cars shone dully and the palms
I just nodded in response. I felt all right, actually. Not rested, not calm, not confident, but all right. The sun slanted in through one of the grimy skylights and hit me in the face and it was like throwing cold water on a drunk. Plus I’d had two more cups of coffee and a Diet Coke while we were on the air, and the assault of the caffeine made me feel almost human. When Dr. Laurie, Nguyen and Cuttler stepped out of the shadows and locked arms with me and Tony to pose for the photographer, I braved the flash and showed every tooth I had.
T HE FIRST MASOCHIST to subject himself to sleep withdrawal for the sake of ratings was a DJ named Peter Tripp, who had a daily show on WMGM in New York back in 1959. His glassed-in booth was in Times Square, and he made it through the two hundred hours of sleeplessness his program director had projected for him, though not without experiencing his share of delusions and waking nightmares. Toward the end of his trial, he somehow mistook the physician monitoring him for an undertaker come to pump him full of formaldehyde and they had to read him the riot act to get him back into the glass booth and finish out his sentence. Two hundred hours is just over eight days, but what Cuttler was shooting for here was twelve days, two hundred eighty-eight hours—a full twenty-four hours longer than the mark set by the
Guinness Book of World Records
champ, a high school senior from San Diego named Randy Gardner who’d employed himself as the test subject in a science project to monitor the effects of sleep deprivation. He was seventeen at the time, gifted with all the recuperative powers of the young, and he came out of it without any lasting adverse effects.
As I stood in the back hallway at KFUN, simulating insouciance for the photographer, I was thirty-three years old, sapped of enthusiasm after twelve years on the air, sleep-deprived and vulnerable, with the recuperative powers of a corpse. I was loveless, broke, bored to the point of rage, so fed up with KFUN, microphones, recording engineersand my drive-time partner I sometimes thought I’d choke him to death on the air the next time he opened his asinine mouth to spout one more asinine crack, to which I, an ass myself, would be obligated to respond. My career was a joke. The downmarket slide had begun. I didn’t have a chance.
Outside, in the parking lot, there was a random aggregation of sixth-grade girls in KFUN T-shirts, flanked by their slack-jawed, work-worn mothers. When Tony, Dr. Laurie and I stepped out the door and made for the classic KFUN-yellow Eldorado convertible that would take us downtown to the glass booth, they let out a series of halfhearted shrieks and waved their complimentary KFUN bumper stickers like confetti. I slipped into the embrace of my wraparound shades and treated them to a grand wave in return, and then we were out in traffic, and people who may or may not have been KFUN listeners looked at us as if we were prisoners on the way to the gallows.
It was early yet, just before nine, but there were four or five bums already camped against the walls of the glass cubicle—it was Plexiglas, actually—and a pair of retirees in golf hats gaping at the thing as if it had been manufactured by aliens. The sun, softened by a trace of lingering fog, made a featherbed of the sidewalk, the parked cars shone dully and the palms
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