Lisa Traxler:

My apartment was on Queensberry Street when I was doing production for the Mattress along with my weekend and fill-in airshifts. By night I was a club jock, spinning records at a nearby rock club called Jumping Jack Flash, and it often kept me out very late. Getting up for Charles' show was tough, but he'd be super pissed if I wasn't there by 5:30am. I began to get really paranoid that I'd oversleep and catch hell, but somehow I always made it in before his show started.

One dark winter morning the alarm jolted me from sleep, and I got up and dressed and stumbled out the door and through the streets of the sleepy Fenway. I dodged a few extra winos and catcalls from lo-o-o-osers on my way to the station that day, but didn't think too much about it. When I rang the bell downstairs and announced myself (too sleepy to remember my card key), Albert O's voice came through the intercom and asked, "What are you doing here so early?"

Turns out I was so scared of the wrath of Charles that I dreamed the alarm had gone off and I walked through the Fenway - alone, unarmed, and yet unharmed - at 3:30 in the morning.

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Another Mattress story:

I was producing a comedy bit for Charles' show early one morning when Billy West burst into the production room, declared he had a great idea for a bit we had to produce RIGHT NOW and locked the door behind him. He dropped into the seat facing the typewriter and, to my great amazement, pounded those keys like they'd never been pounded before - he must have typed, like, 250 words a minute. He cranked out a page of dialog in nothing flat, grabbed the top of the page and yanked it out of the machine, then whipped around and got right into my face and snarled, "You will NEVER tell anyone what you just saw. Remember this: if anyone knows you can type, you'll type your whole fuckin' life."

I kept the secret until now. Sorry Billy.