stood watch in silhouette up and down both sides of the street. The photographer got a shot of me in conference with the more emaciated of the retirees, who informed me that he’d once stayed up forty-six hours straight, hunting Japs on Iwo Jima, then Dr. Laurie, whose function had now abruptly switched from sleep induction to prevention, led me into the booth where Tony had already stowed my satchel stuffed with clean underwear, shaving kit, two fresh shirts, a burlap bag of gravel (to sit on when I felt drowsy: Cuttler’s idea) and eighteen thrillers plucked at random from the shelves of Wal-Mart. The format was simple: every fifteen minutes I would go live to the studio and update the time and remind everybody out there in KFUN land just how many consecutive waking hours I’d racked up. Every other hour I was allowed a five-minute break to visit the toilet facilities across the street at the Soul Shack Dance Club, which was co-sponsoring the event, butaside from that I was to remain on full public display, upright and attentive, and no matter what happened, my eyelids were never to close, even for an instant.
I T 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 hismotionless 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
I T 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 hismotionless 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
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