Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Echo Lawrence: Yes, fuck, yes. The name on my dad's tombstone is Lawrence Lawrence. That's not funny. But Waxman did kill Rant. Sure, he's got great teeth, but the man's evil.

  Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Beyond evil.

  23–Love

  Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): The minute Rant comes to me asking what model car has the biggest backseat, I could tell where he was headed. My advice was, I told him to get a car with dark upholstery.

  Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): Forget it. Our first time alone, I asked Rant what he really wanted from me. Did he plan to go around with me, then take me home as a fugly club to beat on his parents? Was dating a deformed cripple his last act of teenage rebellion? A surefire way to freak out the folks down on the farm?

  Or was I some erotic fantasy? Was sex too boring with normal girls, people with two arms and legs that matched, mouths that could kiss back? Was fucking me some one-time goal in the great scavenger hunt of his sex life?

  Or was I just the only girl he knew in the big, bad city? His mentor. A guide into the Nighttimer life. Was sex his way of clinging to me because he was too afraid to be alone in this scary new world?

  Sitting in the backseat of that Eldorado, I really let Rant have it with both barrels. We'd parked next to some bushes, away from streetlights, but it's never totally dark in town. I can remember Rant wore his blue bug suit, and smelled toxic. None of this sounds very romantic.

  Shot Dunyun: Part of my job, renting bullshit peaks to idiots, is to boost a few myself and stay familiar with the various current titles. For that couple weeks, all we got from the distributors were defective transcripts. I'd be boosting a dessert peak, and the taste track would cut out. A thick slice of chocolate cake would become a mouthful of sticky, greasy pulp. It smelled like chocolate, but in your mouth the cake was nothing but gummy texture. Trapped at home during curfew, one day I boosted my favorite porno peak, and none of the vaginas smelled like anything. The transcripts weren't the problem. My brain was the problem.

  Echo Lawrence: Sitting in that Eldorado, Rant looks at me until I stop talking. He waits about two traffic lights' worth of silence, then he says, "What did you eat for breakfast yesterday?"

  No cars go past. The street's empty. Rant's eyes float in the shadows. His black teeth, invisible.

  Yesterday? In my kitchen, I have frozen waffles, but when I go out to Tommy's Diner I order the hash. I tell Rant, "Cereal." I say, "No, wait. French toast. No…cinnamon toast…"

  Rant's hand slides across the seat until his fingers touch mine. He lifts my hand to his face, his lips touching my knuckles, he sniffs, eyes closed, and says, "Wrong." He says, "Yesterday, you had rolled-oat granola with maple sugar and pumpkin seeds, vanilla yogurt, and dried cranberries…" And of course he's dead-on.

  Shot Dunyun: Most boosted peaks are bullshit compared to even the slowest night spent Party Crashing, spending time in a car with people and music and snack food, always in a little danger. On a secret mission to meet more strangers. Real people. A road trip to nowhere.

  Nonetheless, I'd been boosting peaks since I was in diapers. My parents used to port me to infant-enrichment peaks. Half my childhood I spent plugged into babysitting peaks. As a transcript artist, not being able to plug in would make me the equivalent of a blind painter or a deaf musician. Beyond my worst nightmare.

  Echo Lawrence: Rant lifted my hand toward me, saying, "Smell." And I leaned forward to smell, nothing but my skin, my soap, the plastic smell of my old nail polish. His smell of insecticide.

  With my head bent down to meet my hand, Rant leans close to put his nose in my hair, his lips at the side of my neck, under my ear; he sniffs and says, "What was for supper two nights ago?"

  My fingers still tangled with his fingers. His breath against my neck. With his lips and the warm tip of his tongue pressed wet on my pulse, the heartbeat in my neck, I say, "Turkey?" I say, "Lasagna?"

  And Rant's warm breath, his whisper against my ear, he says, "Taco salad. White onions, not yellow or red." He says, "Shredded iceberg lettuce. Ground chicken."

  My nipples already getting hard, I ask, "Light or dark meat?"

  Shot Dunyun: A head cold can distort how a peak will boost, the same way food never tastes the same when you're sick. It must be I was catching a cold. But a week later, with no runny nose or sore throat, I still couldn't plug in and boost a good peak. By then, I was picturing a brain tumor.

  Echo Lawrence: Kissing my eyelids, Rant whispered, "You should throw out those roses…"

  He had never been to my apartment. Back then, Rant didn't even know where I lived. I asked him, "What roses?"

  "Were they from a boyfriend?" he says.

  I asked him to tell me the color of the roses.

  "Were they from a girlfriend?" he says.

  I asked if he'd been stalking me.

  And Rant says, "Pink." Still kissing my forehead, smelling and tasting my skin, my closed eyes, my nose and cheeks, he says, "Two dozen. Nancy Reagan roses mixed with baby's breath and white little-bitty carnations."

  They were a gift, I tell him, from a nice middle-aged couple I sometimes work for.

  Shot Dunyun: The doctor at the clinic calls me a week later—really just a lady from the clinic calls—and says I need to come back at my earliest convenience. She won't go into any details about my blood work. They get that bullshit smile in their voice, and you know it's not good news. The billing department just really needs full payment before you croak. So I go, and the doc says—it's rabies. No shit, rabies. He gives me the first of the five injections. He won't promise that I'll ever be able to boost another peak.

  Right from the clinic, from the pay phone in the waiting room, I phoned Echo and told her to never, never, ever let Rant Casey put his mouth on hers.

  Echo Lawrence: Kissing my mouth, Rant tells me my showerhead is brass instead of chrome. From the smell and taste of me, he says I sleep on goose-down pillows. I have a coconut-scented candle I've never lighted.

  Lew Terry (Property Manager): The only occasion I entered Mr. Casey's apartment was with our standard twenty-four-hour notice to enter premises. Rumor was, he kept pets. My first look around, I didn't see nothing. A mattress on the floor. A telephone message machine. A suitcase. In the closet, hanging, are those blue coveralls that were the only clothes you ever saw him wear. Clean or dirty, Casey smelled like poison.

  If somebody says I took anything, there was nothing to take.

  Echo Lawrence: I didn't let Rant kiss me because he smelled my food. I kissed him after seeing how gentle he treated this huge fugly spider. As we sat there in the backseat of the Eldorado, he unzipped the pocket of his coat and reached one hand inside. He opened his fingers to show me the biggest monster spider. Slowly turning his hand over, he watched the spider crawl from the palm to the back, perched on the big veins.

  Both of us looking at this monster spider, I say, "Is it poisonous?"

  Shiny, not hairy. Legs thin as eight jet-black hypodermic needles, the spider bends all eight knees, lowering itself to touch Rant's skin.

  This spider looks as ugly as I feel.

  And Rant says, "I call her Doris."

  Lew Terry: It's there, in the back of Casey's closet, lined up on the floor, I find the jars. Different sizes of mayonnaise and pickle and spaghetti-sauce jars, clear glass and washed out. At first they look empty, but I unscrew one lid. There's nothing inside, but when I go to put the lid back, on the underneath side of each lid sits a huge black spider. Huge, grizzly bastards.

  No matter what anybody says, I didn't take anything. Not money or anything.

  Echo Lawrence: Our breath fogged the car windows, but, watching that spider, neither of us could breathe out. The moment Rant breathed, the spider had bit him. He inhaled, and I inhaled, and Rant said, "Roll down your window."

  I opened the window.

  Leaning across me, Rant stuck his hand into the night air. Shaking the spider into the bushes next to the car, he said, "Good night, Dorry."
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br />   Leaned across my lap, his hips pressed into mine, I could already feel the effects of the black widow spider venom.

  Todd Rutz (Coin Dealer): About the same time the Casey kid was selling me coins, I met Lew Terry. Terry used to bring me a few good specimens. If I recall, a 1910 Indian Head quarter in extremely fine condition. A 1907 Liberty Head quarter in AU-50 condition. Nothing spectacular, but I bought them. It wasn't until the police interviewed me that I found out Terry and Casey lived in the same apartment house.

  Echo Lawrence: As Rant's lips move down my throat, I challenge him to smell what type of birth control I'm on.

  As his lips move down my chest, Rant says, "None. You had your period thirty-four—no—thirty-six hours ago."

  When I said "down my throat," I meant on the outside.

  Todd Rutz: This Lew Terry character, it's obvious he's a born Nighttimer. Pale. His face and hands clear as the skin he was born into. Always he wore the same oily-brown trench coat and a knitted kind of brown stocking hat pulled down too far.

  Echo Lawrence: "Besides," Rant says, "why would a virgin use birth control?"

  Todd Rutz: One night in my shop, this Terry character offers me the Liberty Head and the Indian Head and tells me he needs to see fifteen hundred dollars out of the deal.

  Echo Lawrence: Of course I was a virgin. With this twisted little branch for an arm. Half the time I couldn't tell, but I'd be drooling out one corner of my mouth. The palsy side. With my job, I'd made a cottage fucking industry out of being as unappealing as possible. Do you think I could just vamp it up? Snap my fingers, and go from sideshow freak to sex kitten?

  Todd Rutz: Time passed, and the Casey kid would turn up with lesser and lesser coins. Buffalo nickels. Wheat pennies. Nothing worth remembering. His stash had to be running low.

  Echo Lawrence: The next night, Rant sent me two dozen red fucking roses. And the keys to a Galaxie 500.

  Shot Dunyun: Those bullshit rabies shots took forever. It didn't help that I kept reinfecting myself with my own toothbrush. By the end, my port went as dead as the knob on the back of Rant Casey's neck. Beyond dead.

  Lew Terry: The only other detail I remember from Casey's apartment, stuck on the wall next to his bed, I found all these little lumps. Round and dark, like bugs. Soft, like little balls of hashish. Except they didn't taste like hash.

  Echo Lawrence: Our first night alone in the Eldorado, all I could think was: Thank God the leather seats are dark burgundy.

  24–Werewolves II

  Vivica Brawley (Dancer): See how, my one foot, the skin looks smooth and white as a bar of soap? Before the attack, I used to have beautiful feet. Tons of men said so. Didn't matter was I naked, all I needed to do was slip off my shoes and some customers would fork over their tip money.

  Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D. (Epidemiologist): At the height of the Peloponnesian War, in 431 B.C., Thucydides wrote of a plague that spread north from Ethiopia, through Egypt and Libya. In Athens, the citizens suffered fevers, sneezing, and a violent cough. Their bodies glowed red with lividity, until thousands threw off their clothing, and an unquenchable thirst drove them to drown in the deep, cool water of public wells and cisterns. The city-state was demoralized, its navy crippled. This is how measles destroyed the civilization of the ancient Greeks.

  In the first century B.C., a virulent strain of smallpox drove the Huns west from their homelands in Mongolia, toward Rome. For Napoleon's Grand Army, the ultimate foe would be the bacteria Rickettsia prowazekii, otherwise known as typhus.

  Our greatest civilizations have always been destroyed by epidemic disease.

  Carlo Tiengo (Nightclub Manager): Viv? Mind you, back then all the dancers boosted some effect to stay high, at least while they were performing. Most our dancers indulged in an opiate effect the club knew to provide.

  Not exactly legal, mind you, but easy to make. Somebody gets high—an actual, primary high, shooting or snorting—then they boost some packaged episode, let's say a Little Becky transcript. They out-cord their experience, then we run a subtraction equation on that script to strip out the original Little Becky. What's left over is pure opiate effect. A wireless high. Just a rush we can narrow-cast on the stage, looping it so the effect never lets up. A dancer steps into that feel-good spotlight and she won't have a care in the world.

  Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: In 1347, England was a nation of grain farmers, cultivating and exporting corn. That year, Italian traders arrived in Genoa with the Black Plague, and by 1377, one and one-half million English were dead, as much as a third of the population. Because agrarian labor was in such short supply, the entire economy switched from producing corn to raising sheep, and the English feudal system had been destroyed.

  Vivica Brawley: Bernie was working the door. It's horrible what happened. Them tearing him apart the way they did, before the cops came around.

  Carlo Tiengo: The customers, mind you, they're a different matter. Our business is, we sell a one-time, primary experience. We catch anybody transcribing or out-cording their experience in the club, and they're eighty-sixed.

  To protect our product, we made it policy to broadcast a scramble effect. Renders any active port inoperative. Jammed. If we didn't, you'd have script artists sitting ringside, out-cording every dancer, and dumping her on the Web. One out-corded lap dance can wreck the career of some poor girl. The first shitheel pays to be with her, but everyone after him gets her for free.

  Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: During the Great Plague of London in 1665, the weekly death rate fluctuated between one hundred and four hundred persons until July 1. By the middle of July, the weekly death rate had risen to two thousand. By the end of July, sixty-five hundred were dying each week, and by the end of August, seven thousand. Though the common source of bubonic plague had been fleas carried by the European black rat (Rattus rattus), the explosion in new infections arose from a change in disease transmission. Instead of bites from fleas, the causative organism, Pasteurella pestis, had begun spreading from person to person via droplets of saliva and mucus ejected in coughs and sneezes.

  Carlo Tiengo: It's the rabies, why we had so much business lately. These perverts come down with it, and they can't boost their secondhand smut off the Web. They're forced to come downtown and pay for a primary experience. Mind you, I should've known. Any Tuesday night, we see more than six fellows in the audience, that's a warning sign. The night we lost Bernie, there had to be fifty Droolers around the stage. Twitching. Spit looped in long strings out the corners of their lips. They squint, even in the dim light. All those tendencies, obvious rabies symptoms.

  Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Beginning in 1490, a new epidemic spread across Europe and Asia. The first symptom was a small ulcer at the site of infection, which disappeared after three to eight weeks, leaving a faint scar. Within a few weeks, the victim appeared free of infection. The Chinese called it the "Canton disease." The Japanese, the "Chinese disease." To the French, it was the "Spanish disease." And to the English, it was the "French pox." The modern name is derived from a shepherd imagined in 1530 by Girolamo Frascatoro in his poem "Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus."

  Vivica Brawley: One of my regulars, this balding Nighttimer, he didn't look so good. He's sitting with both elbows propped on the padded edge of the stage, drooling, drool running down his chin, real shiny. The rule is, no touching, but he reaches out a five-dollar bill, folded long-ways, like he's going to slip it between my toes. He's a Teamster, if I remember.

  Used to be I always had a French-tipped pedicure, back when I still had ten toes. These days, if I took off my shoes in a salon, the girl who does the nails would run screaming.

  Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: In its late latent stage, tertiary syphilis weakens the walls of blood vessels, leading to death by heart failure or stroke. The disease also enters the central nervous system, damaging the brain. Symptoms include personality changes marked by a manic optimism and increased excitability, which ends in general paralysis of the insane (GPI). This hyperactivity, in tandem
with the disinhibitions caused by said brain damage, can also spur the infected individual to seek the pleasure of compulsive, casual sexual activity, further spreading the disease, and earning syphilis the common moniker of "Cupid's disease."

  Carlo Tiengo: Viv's poking her toes the way she does to accept tips. The Drooler's just some perv who stops in after work on his payday. He stands up from his stool and leans over the edge of the stage. Viv's sitting, leaned back on her hands, pushing one foot into his face, the ways pervs like. Then she's screaming.

  Vivica Brawley: See here, on my right foot, where the three little toes should be? That's how much he crammed in his mouth. The bald Teamster. He grabs both hands around my ankle and bites down, and I'm screaming for Bernie. Carlo's behind the bar, doing nothing. With my other heel, I'm kicking the Teamster in the forehead, in the eyes. That's when Bernie grabs him by the shoulder from behind and spins him around.

  The sound of his teeth coming together, the «click» is still in my head. Since the moment I heard that click, my foot's looked how it does.

  Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Prior to 1564, Ivan IV, the first Tsar of All the Russias, had allowed freedom of opinion and speech. Ivan accepted petitions from all classes of his subjects, and even the poorest citizen had access to him. Of his three sons, one died at six months, one was lethargic and dimwitted, and the third joined his father as the elder gradually earned the nickname Ivan the Terrible.