→ 1 – An Introduction
Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies he never met in real life.
Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. After Gaetan Dugas was dead, the number of sex partners saying they’d fucked him, it went through the roof.
→ 2 – Guardian Angels
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): The hound dog is to Middleton what the cow is to the streets of Calcutta or New Delhi. In the middle of every dirt road sleeps some kind of mongrel coonhound, panting in the sun, its dripping tongue hanging out. A kind of fur-covered speed bump with no collar or tags. Powdered with a fine dust of clay blown off the plowed fields.
→ 3 – Dogs
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Wintertime, Middleton dogs run in a pack. Regular farm dogs hereabouts, they’ll tear off and disappear, except you can hear them howling and barking at night. Other dogs, people car-dump them at the side of the road. Abandoned. City folks figure any dog can fend for itself, turn wild, but most mutts will starve until they’re hungry enough to eat the shit left by some other varmint. The shit’s crawling with fly eggs. Most of those let-go dogs die of worms.
→ 4 – Fake Stars
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): Before Rant had started kindergarten, but after he’d started sleeping in a regular bed, every day his mother put him down when the little hand of the kitchen clock was on the two, until the little hand was on the three. Yawning or not, Rant had to stay on that bed, up in his attic room, with his pillow propped against the wall. In bed, he hugged a stuffed rabbit he called “Bear.”
Picture the moment when your mom or dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.
→ 5 – Invisible Art
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Weeks out ahead of Easter Sunday, you could smell the vinegar on Mrs. Casey’s hands, worse than pickling season. Mrs. Casey would keep a pot of water boiling. First to hard-cook her eggs. Then another pot of water to boil with vinegar, add chopped junk for color, and dye her eggs.
→ 6 – The Tooth Fairy
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Don’t laugh, but one landmark summer, a stick of licorice cost you five dollars in gold. A regular plastic squirt gun set you back fifty bucks.
The spring of the Tooth Fairy upset the whole, entire Middleton standard of living.
First happened is Rant come to my house a Saturday, with his Scout kerchief tied round his neck, and him telling my mom we needed the entire day to collect old paint cans for a recycling merit badge.
→ 7 – Haunted House
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): The only gold money Rant spent was, one day he pushed a wheelbarrow down the road, all the way to the Perry Meat Packing plant.
→ 8 – Pacing
Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Your truly effective car salesman, he hands you his business card, first thing. That salesman says hello, tells you his name, and gives you his card, because human behavior studies show that 99 percent of customers use the business card as their excuse to exit the dealership. Most car buyers, if they hate you, even hate your cars, they still feel bad for wasting your time. If they can ask for your card, the customer feels better about bailing out. You want to trap most shoppers, you hand them your card the minute you meet them: They can’t escape.
In the first forty-three seconds you meet a stranger, experts in human behavior say that, just by looking at them, you decide their income, their age, their brains, and if you’re going to respect them. So a smart salesman wears a decent suit. He doesn’t scratch his scalp and then smell his fingernails.
→ 9 – Fishing
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Living, alive animal fur is what my fingers would finally come across. Rant just egging me to push my arm deeper into the ground. My fingers slippery with grease. Most of me sun red, stretched out on the sand, my hand’s crawling down, colder than cool, into the dark of a varmint hole. Skunk, maybe. A coyote or gopher den.
Rant’s eyes on my eyes, he says, “Feel anything?”
→ 10 – Werewolves
Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D. ( Epidemiologist): Among the oldest superstitions practiced by ancient cultures was the warning to never drink from a pool frequented by wolves. Nor did our ancestors scavenge from any game animal—say, a deer or an elk—which had been felled by a pack of wolves. Either of these transgressions—or simply being bitten by a wolf—it is believed would transform one into a legendary half-human, half-canine monster, bloodthirsty and savage: a werewolf.
→ 11 – The Bees
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): Get this. Independence Day, one year, the whole Casey clan goes out for a picnic. A barbecue with marshmallows and seared animal flesh. All the aunts and uncles, all the cousins, an acre of Caseys sprawled on blankets or folding lawn chairs, eating corn. Everybody hugging everybody, shaking hands.
→ 12 – The Food
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): To make time stand still—what sand mandalas are to Buddhist monks and embroidery is to Irene Casey—eating pussy was to Rant. He used to wedge his face between my legs and slip his tongue into me. He’d come up on his elbows, smacking his lips, his chin dripping, and Rant would say, “You ate something with cinnamon for breakfast…” He’d lick his lips and roll his eyes, saying, “Not French toast…something else.” Rant would snort and gobble, then come up with his eyes shining, saying, “For breakfast, you drank a cup of Constant Comment tea. That’s the cinnamon.”
→ 13 – Sporting
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): Monday mornings, I’d feel wore out from staying plugged in all Sunday night, cramming for Algebra II. Mr. Wyland hands out six or eight hours of homework to boost, and I’d always leave it for the last minute. My eyes closed, I can still hear the voice of the primary witness, the gal who boosted those lessons. Since you can’t out-cord thoughts—only sensory junk like taste, smell, sounds, and sights—the primary witness talks through every step of every equation, yakking away, while you watch her hand holding chalk, scratching the numbers on a blackboard.
→ 14 – Going Away
Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): It took the both of us to haul off Rant’s clothes. A night before he left home, he only pretended to pack them in his suitcase. Got garbage bags and filled those instead, folding those shirts and pants just so. Half his mom’s life wasted in embroidery-ing. The young part of her life spent punching rivets and sewing extra trim on regular blue jeans. Rant, he’d hold each shirt tucked under his chin, petting the wrinkles smooth against his chest, then folding the sleeves. He’d button all the buttons. He piled all the folded pants and shirts into the black plastic bags.
→ 15 – Boosted Peaks
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): How’s this for bullshit? At this shop, for our top all-time rental, you’re talking about Little Becky’s Walk on a Warm Spring Day. Shit like that, comfort shit, dumb shits come in here, ask to rent it all day long. The reason I got into this business is I love transcripts, ever since I was little, but this is killing me. It’s beyond bullshit.
Eight hours every day, renting out copies of Little Becky’s Seaside Hunt for Shells. Everybody wanting the same mass-marketed crap. Saying it’s for their kid, but really it’s not. All these fat, middle-aged dumbshits just want something to kill time. Nothing dark and edgy or challenging. Nothing artsy.
→ 16 – The Team
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): Every Honeymoon Night, I’d wear the same lucky veil. Different nights, I’d wear a long or short wedding dress. A night in late August, driving in a car with no air conditioning, I don’t want to be wearing a thousand layers of tulle with heavy silk on top of that. You can’t find the stick shift in all your petticoats. But wintertime, if you drive into a snowdrift, Party Crashing on icy streets, that same tulle can save you from freezing to death.
→ 17 – Hit Men
Lynn Coffey ( Journalist): The poet Oscar Wilde wrote, “Each man kills the thing he loves…” Each man except the smart ones. The ones who don’t want to serve time in prison, the smart men used to hire Karl Waxman.
Tina Something ( Party Crasher): How’d I know what Wax was up to? I couldn’t know. The first night he Tag Teamed me, that Honeymoon Night when Echo ditched me, Wax pulled over to the curb in a Maserati Quattroporte Executive GT. Painted dark red, Bordeaux Pontevecchio. Rosewood panels in the dash. The headliner is sewed out of Alcantara suede, and the heated seats actually give your butt muscles a constant Swedish massage.
→ 18 – The City
Todd Rutz ( Coin Dealer): The kid who died. The kid comes in with a sweat sock tied in a knot, starts undoing the knot with his teeth. Nothing inside that old yellow sock should be worth my time to look. My permit says I can stay open four hours past the night curfew, long as I don’t leave the shop. Past curfew, I lock the door, and anybody comes I buzz them inside. This kid with the dirty sock, I almost didn’t buzz him. You can never tell with Nighttimers.
→ 19 – Student Driver
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): One Student Driver Night, Rant asked Green Taylor Simms to take a picture, a photo of Rant standing next to me. Rant handed Green one of those throwaway paper cameras, and, holding one hand stiff, chopping at his own knees, he goes to Green, “From here up.”
Green drove his car that night, his big Daimler, and we’d pit-stopped at a drive-in for something to eat. Rant stands next to me, reaches an arm around my shoulder. He fingers the knob of my port, where it comes out between the Atlas and the Axial at the back of my skull, and Rant goes, “What’s this like?”
→ 20 – Junkyards
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): For sheer spectacle, the peak of Party Crash culture had to be Tree Nights. The idea, as always, was to choose a flag that the unaware public could dismiss as ordinary, normal—or, at worst, an accident.
Among the accident type of flags were coffee cups and sack lunches. Crash teams utilized these flags on Ooops Nights: For example, during an Ooops “Coffee” game, participants indicated they were in the game by bolting or gluing a large travel mug to the roof of their vehicle. The actual coffee was optional. In the event of an Ooops “Brown Bag” game, teams glued a brown-bag “lunch” to their roof. To the general public, these flags occurred as silly accidents, and unaware drivers might pull alongside laughing and pointing, attempting to get the driver’s attention and help resolve the misplaced item.
→ 21 – Echo
Canada Mercer ( Software Engineer): My wife and I hired Echo Lawrence after a dinner party. A couple we knew, the Tyson-Neals, had just given birth to their first child, and the baby’s needs kept interrupting the meal. After the mother had disappeared to tend it for the umpteenth time, the father remarked, “I’m glad we experimented with three-ways before we started a family.” With a newborn, he said, they’d never have the time and privacy necessary to experiment with bondage and vibrators and police uniforms. But now all of that was behind them, so they had no regrets about this baby. They seemed very happy.
→ 22 – A History
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): For myself, personally, my reason for participating in Party Crash events is quite simple: I hold my life as precious. I adore my friends and family. I treasure my health and the myriad capabilities of my aged yet healthy body and mind.
I consider myself to be enormously gifted with good fortune, but accidents do happen. Annually in this nation, approximately sixteen thousand people are murdered. During the same period of time, approximately forty-three thousand die in motor-vehicle accidents.
→ 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?
→ 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.
→ 25 – The Patsy
Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): Depends on if you believe that deformed girl or you believe the police, but their first night together was the same night Buddy was supposed to have killed that lady. The one owned the little pet store, that Libby woman.
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): What’s to love most about Party Crashing is how close it matches real life. I mean, a drunk driver doesn’t care that you’ve been painting for years and your first gallery show opens next week. How bogus is that? The fifteen-hundred-pound elk, the one standing in the shadows at the edge of the road, ready to jump, it has no idea that your baby is due next week.
The greasy brake lining or the cell-phone talker…
The loose lug nuts or drowsy truck driver…
→ 26 – In Denial
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): How weird is this? The last night I go out with Rant Casey, we waste our whole window Mercy Crashing. The more front-end damage your car has, the better you look in Party Crashing. Teams I know, they’ll take a sledgehammer to the bumper and front fenders of any new ride, just whale away on their headlights and grille so they won’t look like newbies.
→ 27 – Tree Night
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): Following enormous deliberation, we chose to use a real tree. We decided on a noble fir. Festooned in blue lights, and crowned with a glowing blue star. Fastened lengthwise along the roof of the Cadillac Seville, the tree resembled a blue comet: the big star bobbing above the windshield, trailing hundreds of dazzling blue sparks behind it.
→ 28 – Embedded Commands
Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Remember, car buyers will fall into one of the three learning styles: visual, auditory, or kinetic.
Talk to Echo Lawrence, for example, and her eyes are rolled up, looking at the ceiling. Every other sentence out of her mouth is “The way I see it…” or “Watch out for that bitch Tina Something…” To pace Echo, you only have to look up when you think. Do it subtly, but bunch up the fingers on your left hand to mimic hers. Speed up until your breathing is forty, maybe fifty breaths per minute. Blink your eyes at least thirty blinks every minute.
→ 29 – Werewolves III
Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): Did I ever tell you about the longest day of my life? The day I almost died?
Jayne Merris ( Musician): If you ask me, at first it was hilarious. Droolers, my friends called them; anybody with end-stage rabies couldn’t give a damn about curfew. Droolers weren’t even aware they had rabies. Most infected people just felt a little more pissed off every day. Always edgy or grouchy. They’d take anger-management courses and serotonin reuptake inhibitors. They did meditation at Zen retreats, or cognitive talk therapy, to deal with their growing anger. Junk like deep breathing and creative visualization. All this junk, until, one day, they woke up not just on the wrong side of the bed but actually twitching, their throat spasming, maybe their legs partially paralyzed—a Drooler. Next thing, you’d see them staggering down the street, on the traffic cameras, violating the eight o’clock morning curfew.
→ 30 – In Mourning
Lynn Coffey ( Journalist): On the first day after Rant Casey died—an apparent suicide witnessed by thousands of people, millions if you count the television rebroadcast of his car exploding—on the very next day, a curfew officer named Daniel Hammish, age forty-seven, a nineteen-year veteran of curfew patrol, was making his evening sweep when he assaulted a passerby. Hammish bit this stranger, with his teeth, in an unprovoked attack, on the exposed skin of her neck. Responding emergency medical technicians found Hammish delirious and seemingly hallucinating, before he lost consciousness and subsequently died.
→ 31 – An Accounting
Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): Close as I can figure, the older Carlyle boy went and got himself made sheriff just so he can break bad news to folks. He come up our porch steps, middle of breakfast, the morning after Buddy’s car accident, and banged on the screen until Chet come to the door. Bacon Carlyle, he says, “I regret to inform you, but your son, Buster Landru Casey, was killed in a car accident at approximately eleven-forty-three of last night.” He read the words from a little white card, looking at the card instead of us. Sounding out each word, slow as if he was in second grade. Then, all respectful, he snatched off his trooper hat, and he turned the card over and read the back side, saying, “You have my deepest sympathies in your time of grieving.”
→ 32–In Hindsight
Ruby Elliot ( Childhood Neighbor): I can tell you, getting abandoned at the Junction Airport by her husband is not the worstest event ever to happen to Irene Casey.
Glenda Hendersen ( Childhood Neighbor): Basin and Ruby and me, we went through school with Irene, and she was always cutting class. Never did seem to matter, how she come into the world without a daddy. Irene was full of grand plans. Talking all the time about college or the army, anything she figured could deliver her out of town. Sad part is, she never did get beyond the ninth grade. The summer we was thirteen years old, her and Basin, Ruby and me, we ran wild, staying out; then Irene quit coming to the phone. Irene quit—well—everything.
→ 33 – Werewolves IV
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): Talk about bullshit. Looking back on this. It’s beyond bullshit, but sometimes I don’t think when I brush my teeth, and I’d spit the toothpaste into the toilet instead of the sink. Force of habit. I never think how spit is really saliva, and I never consider how my dog used to drink out of the toilet.
→ 34 – What If
Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): I want to ask, you ever wonder why the dominant culture says certain stuff? I mean, really hammers on you that some stuff is absolutely, deadly impossible? For instance, what science calls the “Grandfather Paradox”? How it works out that you should never, ever even consider time travel, because you might go back in time and kill your own grandfather by accident, let’s say, and then—kah-poof—you’d not exist? I mean, if you trusted in the government experts, wouldn’t you be careful and never go back in time?
→ 35 – A Flashback
Chester Casey ( Farmer): Here comes a load of bullpucky.
The night before my boy, Buster, goes and kills himself, some old coot tells him this long, impossible yarn. This rich old coot named Simms says how, when he was Buster’s age and first moved to the city, he was in a car wreck. This Green Taylor Simms is a young man just driving along, and a car coming in the opposite direction, it crossed the centerline without slowing down a hair, and slammed into the man’s car.
Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): The way Rant told me the story, Simms wakes up in a hospital bed, asking, “How long have I been here?” And the nurse tells him, “Four days…”
→ 36 – Hit Men II
Tina Something ( Party Crasher): On my last date with Wax, and I mean our final gaddamn date, the two of us were cruising a Honeymoon Night in a hot, and I mean stolen, gaddamn Maserati GranSport, and Wax sees this mess of emergency-vehicle lights down along the train yards off Wentworth Avenue, so he goes to cruise by for a peek.
All’s left is smoking metal. Even the middle part of the train looks torched, and the fire guys are wrestling to haul the Jaws of Life over to the biggest balled-up chunk of a Lincoln Town Car. All down this side of the tracks, the smoke blows wedding streamers and junk. A white lace veil soggy with blood. A red rosebud boutonniere.
→ 37 – Resolving Origin
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): In Middleton, sleeping dogs have the permanent right-of-way…both metaphorically and literally.
Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): So we went back to Middleton. To see the Middleton Christian Fellowship. The Sex Tornado. If we were lucky, the Tooth Museum and the wild dogs.
Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): Didn’t we go to Middleton to see if Irene Casey was dead? Wasn’t our real reason to see if Rant had fulfilled the mission Simms sent him to do?
→ 38 – Communitas
Dr. Christopher Bing, Ph.D. ( Anthropologist): The phenomenon commonly known as Party Crashing is simply the latest manifestation of a liminal space which provides a cathartic sublimation, generating a normative communitas, thereby deflecting any pent-up hostility toward the status quo and preserving the existent social structure.
From the essay “Liminality and Communitas” by Victor Turner ( Anthropologist): Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, “edgemen” who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the cliches associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact and imagination.
→ 39 – Werewolves V
Hudson Baker ( Student): This is hard to explain, but in every toilet stall in every bathroom at the high school we go to, somebody wrote in every stall: “Amber Nye Is Dripping with Rabies!”
Only, really, Amber wrote that herself.
It’s really hard to explain.
→ 40 – Final Connections
Wallace Boyer ( Car Salesman): Right now, if you scratched your ear, I’d scratch my ear. If you cocked your head to one side, I’d cock my head—pacing you—selling you with eye contact and proof that I care.
I’d say, “Look here”—another embedded command.
If you said, “Time travel is impossible,” I’d bridge your objection, saying, “Yes, many people claim it’s impossible, but didn’t people use to say the Wright brothers would never get off the ground?”
→ 41 – Rant Revisited
From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: You don’t have to look up at the sky to tell it’s a full moon tonight. We already have reports of a fender bender at Milepost 14 of the 217 Freeway, where two bridal parties appear to be throwing handfuls of wedding cake at each other. With the Rubberneck Report every ten minutes, this is Tina Something for Graphic Traffic…
→ 42 – Contributors
Hudson Baker ( Student) is currently working toward her undergraduate degree in criminal justice.
Brannan Benworth, D.M.D. ( Dentist) remains isolated in government infectious-disease quarantine for an indefinite period.
Dr. Christopher Bing, Ph.D. ( Anthropologist) is currently overseas studying the culture of Noh drama in Japan.
Allan Blayne ( Firefighter) remains isolated in government infectious-disease quarantine for an indefinite period.
