Nite Caps
by Tom Bradley
[ fiction - july 05 ]
The Lord called to Samuel, who answered, "Here I am." He ran to Eli and said, "Here I am. You called me." "I did not call you," Eli said. "Go back to sleep." - 1 Samuel 3: 4-5
During the greater part of my fourteenth year, I was obliged to pay regular visits to a certain loved one in the loony bin. I was the only person in the family who could spend any time at all in the locked ward without acting too cheerful and making everyone feel like monkeys in the zoo. In fact, I blended right in, and made several friends.
At that time a woman named Mrs Sproul was undergoing incarceration. She spent a lot of time in hydrotherapy, listening, by means of a tiny earplug, to a smuggled-in radio. She explained everything to me in no uncertain terms.
Mrs Sproul was getting extra hydrotherapy because she couldn't sleep. Almost nothing in the medicine cabinet could knock her all the way out for any curative length of time. "Maybe more baths will help," she suggested to me. "Maybe this troublesome crone will eventually resolve into a mauve sauce, and cease being able to distinguish between waking and sleeping anymore. Just sloshing."
The reason Mrs Sproul remained so wakeful was that she'd received a vague presentiment concerning the lateral motion of her son, who was a well established classical clarinetist and literary lion in London. She emphasized to me, repeatedly, that her son was no gutter minstrel. By no means did Samuel chant his tortured ditties in the tube while gnawing on an aluminum Jew's harp for shillings.
The vague presentiment - that she and Samuel would soon be sharing a continent, if they weren't doing so already - came to her late one night in conjunction with her contraband transistor radio, and ever since then she'd been listening when she got the chance, hoping to hear again whatever it was that would bring filial matters into sharper focus.
Mrs Sproul had to sneak around because this was the loony bin (to be specific, the upstairs psychiatric ward of Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, located just kitty-corner from the Capital Casino in the incorporated municipality of Panguitch, Nevada), and you were never supposed to be exposed to the chaos outside: no phone calls or letters, not even from your family. "They could go on long voyages across the Atlantic and you'd never know," she explained. Not even the ladies' home section of the newspaper was allowed past the sentry, except in pre-shredded condition for papier mache projects in the occupational therapy room.
When a woman's sympathetic nervous system is out of alignment, when nothing can keep her blood from hovering and percolating around every nerve and muscle in her whole body, she must stay wide awake and fidget twenty-four hours a day. And the psychoactive stuff she's been prescribed tends to keep her brain sufficiently out of focus to prevent her from doing anything constructive to pass the time. So, what does this woman do - I mean, if she happens to be Mrs Sproul? She listens to AM radio.
And when she does that, it's not long before something becomes apparent: everything on the AM band, including the slips of the announcer's tongue, and even the bursts of static ostensibly caused by random flocks of sparrows caroming off antennas and so forth, is planned out in advance to achieve certain effects on the public mind.
Mrs Sproul figured out this halfway startling revelation with the collaboration of several paranoid-schizophrenic heroin addicts who lived down the hall. She got along well with this sort of youngster, having been a mother in the sixties.
They came up with the political overtones. Mrs Sproul herself didn't hear anything too specifically political, beyond America's default reactionary cretinism; but the various layers of programming did seem to dovetail more often than not, in a surreptitious kind of way. She suspected that a level of saturation such as those teenaged inmates received through their perpetually grunting rock stations might, in the end, alter one's behavior to fit certain unwholesome patterns.
Mrs Sproul was not just thinking of voting or buying patterns. Everybody knows that's the way ads work. She meant patterns of thinking, feeling, and even dreaming. The most blatant example was the outfit known as "500,000 Kilowatt Clear Channel KAMA, 960 on Your Radio Dial, Your People Station!"
In the deepest hours of the night, they aired 'Nite Caps', a horrifying phone-in program for old ladies. Since it occupied one of the few clear channels in the whole ionosphere, KAMA could be heard across a quarter of the earth's surface. The wretches were presumably calling from bedsitter flats, farm houses and rest homes scattered over every point in the United States, Canada and the Kamchatka peninsula, for all I knew.
Mrs Sproul confessed that she hadn't yet figured out whether KAMA actually answered the phone and screened each caller for appropriate mood, subject matter and vocal quality, or whether they had a back room at the station, a sweatshop full of washed-up actresses stationed at big tables with scripts piled in front of them. The latter seemed more likely, to both of us, because every moment of 'Nite Caps' flowed straight from the previous and into the next with a terrible logic. There was even a "rudimentary, if twisted, beauty to it," as she said, and as I found out for myself, at Mrs Sproul's insistence.
She recruited me to help monitor the situation. Like any regular junior high boy, I was eating grotesque amounts of blotter acid in those days, and sleeping about the same number of hours per night as my locked-up friend, so I was ideal for the job.
Mrs Sproul could sometimes arrange to be in hydrotherapy for the earlier stages of the program. It was easier to sneak a listen in the private bathroom than in the corridors. Before tuning in she must sit down in the long stainless steel sarcophagus and make sure that any sores or hangnails on her hands and feet were peeled open and bleeding. She'd always been this way, even before losing her mind officially. So her extremities were in pretty bad shape on a permanent basis. "A mass of carnage," she confessed. "But the rest of my body, well, that's a different matter."
Someone had given her a new two-piece especially for this visit to the loony bin. I never saw the garment, but I can tell you that it was light blue and very youthful. "Perhaps too youthful," she allowed, "though I haven't heard anybody complain yet."
Certain of the mood-altering substances she took were supposed to exacerbate water retention, but somehow Mrs Sproul had managed to escape scot free on that account. Her thighs were still firm and lumpless, even on top and in between, or so she claimed. It was evident, through the muu-muu that she sported in the community room, that Mrs Sproul's breasts had also stood up tolerably well. Noting my scrutiny, she pointed out that she'd never encouraged the flow of heavy cream by nursing Samuel, the expatriate clarinetist/lyric poet. (I got the strange impression that she hadn't held out on him by choice.)
This was a sort of cut-rate education for an unpopular teen like me, an extra-credit Health and Personal Hygiene class, so I stuck with her. She was willing to slip such an appreciative audience some of the brain pills that were supposed to be swallowed after supper. They were pharmaceutical, of course, and cooked down nicely, and knocked me flat on my back, even as they bounced off the brick wall of my patroness' awareness like so many ping pong balls. She was downright chipper in the wee hours.
In the most anxiety-ridden moments of our linked lives, between one and three a.m., the 'Nite Caps' discussion theme is disease and disintegration. In that time slot, the callers from Miami to Juneau to Baja, California, all seem to want to talk about their dying husbands, just by coincidence, to vent intimations of mortality into the sleepy ears of literally millions of old ladies spread over a fourth of the planet. With each call the conversation gets more specific, until finally they're describing the threads of pajama flannel that dangle from the yellow crust oozing between the sutures over Grampy's last unsuccessful gall bladder operation. I don't know about my co-listener, but my brain chemistry at such moments enabled, or rather obliged, me to apprehend each of those flannel threads with all five senses, plus the esoteric sixth and seventh that obtain on the far side of the Himalayas, where folks used to guzzle the fabled Soma moon-juice, chemical ambition of every red blooded American teen-boy.
The callers at these times all have soft, vague voices designed to lull you into a hypnagogic state where your back-brain will be suffused with the odor of overripe flesh, and you'll be deathly-relaxed, misty, suggestible and defenseless against the three-a.m. top-of-the-hour climax.
For a good long while Mrs Sproul has been staring up at the little terrycloth drapes over the chicken wired window. Somebody has taken the time and trouble to brush the outer threads of the tiny orange tassels, to make them look fine and silken instead of coarsely wound. Between its pastel-enameled bars, this window affords a view - if you stand on tip-toe, pull the drapes aside, and peer through a certain un frosted streak in the glass - of the Capital Casino. I believe Mrs Sproul, but only in the anagogical sense, when she claims that jingling dump was a favorite hangout in her pre-loony bin days. "AM radio in three dimensions," she used to call it. "KAMA for the nose, eyes and tongue."
There seemed to be a house rule in the Capital Casino's coffee shop that one had to make one's mouth look like pudenda when ordering "griddle cakes, tall stack." And one had to exchange rudimentary badinage and behave in seductive lesbian ways with the bleached waitress in her French parlor maid's outfit, her face powdered with all the arid lassitude of the Salt Flats, which began their crystalline creep just outside the kitchen door.
On the far side of the cinderblock walls of this den of iniquity are the defunct state penitentiary grounds. Zoned in rows along the former prison yard are motels-cum-legal brothels, green stucco. And bordering their crowded parking lots are the tumbleweeded airstrips where open-air hydrogen bomb delivery test flights took off in the fifties - one of which had her son's name on it.
"God didn't pull the boo-boo, Dear," she would sputter in Samuel's unhappy face during the difficult afternoons when she'd forgotten to renew her Aventyl prescription. She'd try to explain, in terms graspable to him, the hypothetical relationship between birth defects and nuclear radiation, because he'd come home crying about his specialty being ridiculed at kindergarten or junior high, or college, or whatever it was.
"The boo-boo was pulled by President Eisen - I mean, the Department of Defen - I mean, the foul fiend Flibbertigi - I mean, your mother - I mean, um, yes, Mother Nature. Mother Nature pulled the boo boo, Sammy. Not Heavenly Father."
The only reason she used to subject herself to the Capital Casino and griddle cakes, tall stack, was so she could be near those disused airstrips and remember, never forget the first moment she'd laid eyes on him languishing in the incubator, an unknown priest performing emergency baptism with distilled water through a glove box. The nose was split and flapping, the upper lip non-existent, the whole cherubic countenance hanging open like a red change purse, the eyes pressed up from the bloodless gash below: two blind mongoloid slits, like a Japanese baby's. A Nagasaki changeling had taken up residence in the maternity ward just downstairs from Mrs Sproul's present place of confinement.
Death is the word that had filled her skull, as the original sin of this small thing was rinsed down Our Lady of Sorrows' drain. From the outer tegument of her cerebral cortex to the reptilian crannies of her lower brain stem: death.
When you've been thoroughly reminded of your own frailty, 'Nite Caps' brings on the vampires who sound as though they've given up the fight against senility, and left off trying to maintain even a modicum of personal dignity. The insinuation is that such behavior represents the only alternative to morbid pining for the superannuated female.
These 'seniors' cackle at non-existent jokes, they babble happily, they play their worm-eaten Color Glo organs into the telephone and sing 'Whoa Promise Me'. As soon as they're sure you've been jolted wide awake by their racket, these goofy crones suddenly get serious. They lose their speech impediments as if by magic and become coherent as the shrewdest demagogue. They start making loud jingoist comments about this international sisterhood, this 'Nite Caps' Radio Network, this invaluable service performed for the elderly, the infirm, the insomniac, the acid-adled.
And here 'Nite Caps' abandons all pretense of unrehearsedness. Someone in the studio switches on a tape player, and the whole northwestern quadrisphere of Gaia Terra segues into a stirring rendition of the famous 'Nite Caps' Anthem.
Meanwhile, inside the Capital Casino, Panguitch, Nevada, someone on a wobbling stepladder vacuums among unstitched pleats in meat-colored velvet that drapes the unlit stage and the holy-of holies beyond. Nearby, the blackjack dealer in a tiny halter-top stands like an unsuccessfully galvanized corpse, so long-dead that its age must match its weight. Bits of green baize adhere to its forearms like crypt-mold. The change maker, her nickel-plated coin dispenser wedged horizontally between rolls of sebaceous cellulite, stalks the gamblers like a bloated returnee from a salt water drowning. The Keno balls rattle like bones in their cages. An aging prostitute behind the bar breathes hoarsely into her microphone and, drones a lipsticky invocation:
"Mo Katz. Phone call. Mo Katz."
Mrs Sproul's ex-doctor might barge in at any moment, let there be no doubt. That's the only reason she even bothers to wear her light-blue two piece in the private bathroom - though he isn't supposed to come anywhere near the locked ward because he's nobody's doctor anymore (a small matter of malpractice and license suspension).
Her ex-doctor breaches the gate periodically because his sole purpose in life these days is to weasel a certain piece of information out of Mrs Sproul. She doesn't have this information, but pretends she does and is willfully withholding it from him, because she likes to see how many different ways he can figure to finagle his way into the ward. She is amused by the sullen yet amazed way I stare at the stumpy little shrink, and it's fun for both of us to hear the burly orderlies eject him.
Sometimes, before coming right out and demanding to be enlightened, her ex-doctor will try to soften her up with a brief discussion of something he presumes to be high-level, such as psychoanalytic theory (still an issue out here among the social climbing upper-middle classes on the far left fringe of the heartland). Not many literate people are locked up this time around, and he assumes that she must be starving for some elevated discourse. She's not; she has 'Nite Caps'.
Whenever her ex-doctor brings up his only field of expertise, she interrupts him and speaks dismissively of You-Know-Who. She says, through a yawn, "A bit parochial, don't you think? Like his emphasis on this Oedipal thing. Certainly not applicable to every single one of the families I've seen in my day. It's not a system of thought I'd want to devote my entire life to."
Of course, this is calculated to infuriate a self respecting biological Freudian, who nevertheless cannot prevent himself from being traumatized by even the offhanded opinions of a woman shapely as Mrs Sproul. He blurts out something like, "We'll see what Samuel has to say about that."
Rather than hear this profane grotesquery take her son's name in vain, Mrs Sproul makes bold to disconnect her earplug and turn up the volume, to drown out the nasal whine. As if on cue, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir comes on howling a monstrous jingle.
We're the Nite Caps, nighty-Nite Caps, And our hearts are full of cheer! We love our Nite Caps radio show, But most of all we love to hear The voice of our own Herb Jebco!
This is followed by a come-on for the next Nite Caps Convention, with cut-rate accommodations offered at Howard Johnson's, just down the block. "Under the sign of the H & J!"
Herb Jebco is the originator and organizer and host of all this, a faceless man with flawless enunciation, who must've done something terrible to his mother, since he felt the need to devise such an elaborate act of penance. "Maybe Herb put her in the loony bin, too," suggests Mrs Sproul's ex-doctor in a reptilian hiss. The hollow fangs find their mark, as I can tell when all the blood drains from her face via the jugular, and leaves this woman looking her age (for the moment).
She knows very well, without a stumpy half-man insinuating it into her ear, that she is a spiteful woman. So full of floating spite, which finally found an object when she came to these parts long ago and encountered the pithecoid locals and their amusements.
But Samuel was able to gestate, more or less, and ripen among them, as one of them, in one of their radioactive strongholds, and was happy, and only left the state, the continent, to avoid seeing his mother disintegrate in the attic of Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital - from whose porch you can see, through sturdy chain-links, the giant H & J glowing orange and turquoise over the downtown sidewalk.
Thousands of washed-up widows, including some of Mrs Sproul's fellow inmates, believe it to signify Herb Jebco. There are times when even I forget who is which, and reach for my radio dial upon feeling a sudden conditioned hankering to take advantage of the fried clam-strip luncheon special- not so much to eat it as to examine it closely in horror, and see if it makes a noise anywhere near as hideous as a defrocked brain-priest breaking down and raving his real reason for being where he's not supposed to be:
"What's your god-damned son saying about me in his insane songs?"
Awash in his own counter-transference, facing permanent revocation of his license, and still making threats when Samuel's clear across the ocean in the UK.
Wait a minute. In the UK?
As Mrs Sproul mechanically shreds hands and feet in the endless water, she returns to her vague presentiment.
No, not a presentiment. She didn't used to have such bad reality testing before this clear-channel business. She remembers now that it was something tangible, an out-and-out palpable piece of writing, that told her in so many words: Samuel's coming home soon.
Yes, a young dope addict got it for her. A pitiful, pimply boy infatuated with 'Mrs S' stole it off the supervisor's desk. It was a Trafalgar Square postcard with pigeons and things.
You do eventually get to see your picture postcards here at Our Lady of Sorrows, but only after the supervisor obliterates the back with blue ink. The sweet little junkie, as part of his youthful protest against being confined in the sensory deprivation chamber last week, stole this postcard before obliteration, and smuggled it in to her along with the transistor radio, his tribute to 'Mrs S' upon whom he has a crush.
And that's the explanation for this presentiment mix-up. She must've been under the influence of the devil's own thorazine at the moment these gifts were delivered. She must've been mixing her senses, and hearing her perfect genius ideal boy's written words, as from the mouth of a radio deejay: "I am coming home soon," looped goofily among the regular back-of-the-postcard unctuousness, and Paul Harvey's page two.
All those hours of amplitude modulation. Analyzing it to clarify a non-existent presentiment. For nothing!
Then it hits her again: Samuel's coming home soon, raised to a much higher level of certainty than mere presentiment now. She has an exhilarating access of fondness for her perfect genius ideal boy. Samuel's coming home soon, and her sudden mania of biochemical affection spills out upon the whole of society, like the sun rising over North America. It makes the gray snowfields on the distant mountainsides glint like aluminum siding. Alarm clocks go off in bedroom communities scattered along the rectilinear borderlands, and Mrs Sproul's mood switches again, as one or another of the several chemicals inside of her - the lithium, the Librium, the Aventyl - sloshes to another cranny of cranial molecules. KAMA obliges her by nailing the lid on the weird sisters for the next twelve hours, and supplanting them (at least until the sun sinks again) with the clicking, blipping weather and stock market reports, ads for transmission fluid, Roto Rooter; parched horizontal static, busy snips of people chanting or mumbling into the electronic desert; UPI World Desk International, Ray Conniff Singers - red roses for a blue, blue lady.
Mrs Sproul's affection floats inward. She feels genuine, sweet, inner piety. She doesn't loathe Herb Jebco at all any more. She will go mad with remorse here in the long steel coffin. Remorse for having been so spiteful. Such a floatingly spiteful woman.
When she was just a girl her family disintegrated with the world economy, and she was sent out here to the convent school, against her will. It was her first experience with a part of the country where people generically called themselves Christians - no denomination, just Christians. They'd congregate in the wilderness for weekend retreats and baptize each other in milky-green drainage ditches. She would sit alone in the convent and consider those hicks with glee, and pray to Mary for one of those screaming salt rainstorms: “Mother of Christ, bring it rolling in across the desert!” She'd imagine sometimes that she was up in the clouds, pissing down on everybody in a yellow torrent.
She wanted more than anything to be in a tornado - even one of these half-hatched tramontane ones would do. She'd sit by the big wireless in the refectory with a county map in her lap, plotting along with the announcer the course of any funnel clouds that touched down. She could feel everyone's eardrums pressing out from within, and all their clothes pulled off, everybody naked, screaming and flying from the terror and the suck, the nearly flawless "O" of wind forming an almost perfect seal with Earth's yielding surface, and bringing up cows, calves, whole stands of utility poles that bristled like Saint Sebastian with embedded alfalfa stalks.
Samuel's coming home soon. Yes, she has this vague feeling in her bones, like a presentiment. She somehow knows: soon she and Samuel will be sharing a continent.
