Echo Lawrence: Next time you come across a bad pile-up, you look forward enough, fast enough, and you might see the bait car, that still-pretty redster, disappear around a side corner way, way up ahead.
Tina Something: Your really light kind of tagging, we call that "flirting." You just nudge somebody's rear with your front wheel well. And if the target looks and likes you, if he likes what he sees, you drive away and he comes after you. Your average person will Party Crash so she can be around other people. It's very social, a way to meet people, and you sit around telling stories for a few hours. You could sit at home, but even boosting a party is still being alone. You come to the end of a party boost and you've still spent all night by yourself.
Even Party Crashing can get boring if you can't find another team flying the designated flag, but at least it's a communal boredom. Like a family.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): Party Crashing appeals primarily to people too poor or too rich to be engaged in the middle-class pursuit of monetary success. Mr. Dunyun and Miss Lawrence didn't consider they had anything to lose.
Shot Dunyun: We're not two bullshit blocks before our car jerks forward, the tires bark, pushed across pavement. A Shark's bitten paint-deep into our seven o'clock, ready to repeat-tag our left rear quarter-panel.
Still holding his bouquet of silk flowers, Rant whips around, saying, "Fella hit us!" Shouting, "He hit us!"
Into her rearview mirror, Echo says, "Why'd you let him?" She says, "Mind your field fucking quadrant…"
Green holds the gold quarter between two fingers, just touching the edges, saying, "Where did you acquire this extraordinary coin?"
And Echo hits the gas, throws us around the next right, the Shark still chewing our paint.
Tina Something: Everybody knows a full moon means a Newlywed event. A Honeymoon free-for-all. Doing this every month for a couple years, you pile up racks of wedding gowns. Racks. Ruffled shirts and penguin tuxedos. My favorites are pretty sherbet-pink bridesmaid dresses. But it's wedding gowns most Party Crashers wear: the big full skirt, the poofy veil. Half the time, one team plows into the back end of another team, and between the two cars eight brides pile out to scream at each other in the emergency lane. Some brides with hairy arms and Adam's apples jumping under their square, stubbly chins. The knuckles of one hairy hand holding the train of a dress, to show greasy work boots underneath. All the teams in gowns and veils, black people, white people, women or men, all brides look alike.
Echo Lawrence: The full moon is the best night for starters. The flag is so easy to spot. You write "Just Married" in shaving cream down the car doors and across the trunk and hood. You tie some white streamers to the top of the radio antenna and put on your best Sunday clothes. A starter team is out ten dollars, tops, to get into the game.
Veteran newlyweds, they have to count back on their fingers. Toyota, Buick, Mazda, Dodge, Pontiac. Red, blue, silver, black. This month, this honeymoon might make a vet's fifth car, ready to get pounded with dents.
Shot Dunyun: Any Honeymoon Night, you'll see another "Just Married" car in every block. Brides stand on street corners, looking for loose grooms. Grooms wait on curbs, wearing top hats, hoping to wave down a bride with her own wheels.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: A crucial aspect of dressing for any Honeymoon Night is to fasten your boutonniere with a portion of double-stick adhesive tape. In the event of a car accident, you do not want a long straight pin stuck anywhere adjacent to your heart.
Echo Lawrence: Another piece of advice: Scotchgard your seats. Before Tina Something, we had a newby lookout in the backseat during the pulse. A Shark plows into us, tags our right rear corner so hard we're spun sideways, traffic and headlights coming at us from every direction, horns blaring, and this newby lookout, she takes a leak. Damage from the tag was nothing Bondo won't fill. But we were sponging that girl's piss out of the backseat for weeks.
Shot Dunyun: The Shark still tagging our ass, he's some asswipe in a Maserati Quattroporte Executive GT painted Bordeaux Pontevecchio. Craning around, I watch out the back window, and he's not a lone Shark. Riding shotgun is a cloud of pink. A bridesmaid. Our Tina Something we ditched. Her teeth make a round oval, her mouth's that wide open. Tina's laughing that hard as the Shark's bumper clubs our ass.
Still holding Tina's bouquet of fake flowers, Rant's twisting inside his seat belt, trying to see, and says, "Why's he after us…?"
Echo Lawrence: After you're tagged out, the brides and grooms, the best men and bridesmaids, they all fake their anger. Fake-screaming and pop-eyed. Fake-fighting for the people slowed down to watch. The rubberneck effect. Passing traffic slows to a crawl to watch the spectacle. The police never stop, not for a fender bender.
The wedding parties, they're just trying to milk out the moment their life gets slow. The pulse when two cars come together.
These are regular people watching their lives squeezed down into dollars, all the hours and days of their life compressed the way the crumple zones of a car get sacrificed. The total hours of their waiting tables or sorting mail or selling shoes, it gets screwed down until they have enough money to pool and buy some wheels. A wedding dress. String some tin cans and buy some shaving cream.
The next new-moon night, these people are cruising or getting cruised. They're driving and waving to the rest of us not in the action. They're watching in every direction for a Shark, listening for the clatter of enemy tin cans, until another team of "Just Married's" see them and give chase. A swerve and black tire marks, one car darts after another so fast the tin cans stop touching the road. One red light and—that's the moment time explodes. What automotive crash-test engineers call "the pulse."
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.
The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.
Echo Lawrence: When a back car hits a front, brides get thrown against their seat belts, their veils whipped forward so fast your face gets a rash that players call "lace burn." That moment, time slows down. All the hundred years of every boring day—they explode to fill that half-moment. That pulse.
Here's time squeezed down until it explodes into a slow-motion moment that will last for years.
Your car you saved to buy, it's punched down, smaller, but your life's pumped back up. Bigger. Back to life-size or beyond. The brides on the side of the road, throwing white rice to hurt, they're just trying to make that moment stretch. Milking the pulse.
Shot Dunyun: Tina and the Shark get bigger in our back window, laughing and leaned forward so hard their breath fogs the windshield. Their bumper pushes our five o'clock, squeaking our springs and shocks. Their front tires spin so close that Echo's parking alarm starts to beep. Beeping faster. Beyond close, the Shark's wheels bite off one of our dragging tin cans, pinching each can flat and snapping the string. So close that Echo's parking alarm goes to sounding one long beep.
Rant leans forward to pat Green's padded tux shoulder and says, "By the way, congratulations."
And, still looking at that gold quarter, Green says, "For what?"
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Perpetuating Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny breaks ground for further socialization—including conformance to traffic laws which allow the maximum number of drivers to commingle on our roadways. In addition, insisting that the journey is always a means to some greater end, and the excitement and danger of the journey should be minimized. Perpetuating the fallacy that a journey itself is of little value.
Shot Dunyun: Tina and the Shark bite off another can, bump us again, drop back. Laughing.
Rant says, "You…," and he hitches a finger between Green and Echo, saying, "You got married…"
Green says, "New team at two o'clock."
And Echo says, "Find me a hole!"
Echo Lawrence: With both my feet I'm standing on the gas pedal, already planning to blind that Tina Something with a handful of raw rice. I can see my wheels in some junkyard still smeared with "Just Married" toothpaste.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: The activity casually referred to as Party Crashing rejects the idea that driving time is something to be suffered in order to achieve a more useful and fulfilling activity.
Tina Something: At the next gaddamn police impound auction, I'll be bidding against Echo. In less than one odometer click, we'll both need new wheels.
Shot Dunyun: And the bullshit Shark drops back.
Echo Lawrence: Tina's slammed against her headrest. Her tits and pearls thrown up, high, around her neck. Veil burn. Steam rises behind them, and their six o'clock's been tagged. Taken out.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Our Shark has been preyed upon by someone else. The Maserati has been slaughtered amid a litter of cowbells, shattered glass, and tin cans.
Shot Dunyun: Echo pitches us around a corner, into a dark alley. She shuts off the headlights and taillights, letting the motor idle. She parts her veil to take a better look at Rant, and Echo says, "Get your Day Boy ass out of my car!"
Offering the gold coin to her, Green says, "Do you know what this is worth?"
And Rant Casey, he touches the backseat and sniffs his fingers, saying, "That girl who peed, three, maybe four weeks back" — Rant looks at us—"she ate bell peppers that day."
Rant grins his tar-black teeth at us and says, "Any of you folks know a fellow by the name of Chester Casey?"
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.
Wax buzzed down the electric window on my side. I'm still standing on the curb in my pink bridesmaid gown, and Wax waves something floppy and white at me. That's how Wax introduced himself.
"Before you touch anything, baby," he tells me, "you put on these."
It's latex gloves.
Lynn Coffey: It's tragic. Young people seldom purchase these exotic sports cars, certainly not professional basketball or football players. They could never fit in the bucket seats. No, almost all such cars go to older-middle-aged or elderly men who seldom drive them. These Maseratis and Ferraris and Lamborghinis sit garaged for years, like lonely mistresses, hidden from direct sunlight.
Jarrell Moore (Private Investigator): As per my investigation, nobody's 100-percent sure who runs Party Crashing, but it can't be any single individual. That guy would have to keep track of fouls for every player. Anybody calls three fouls on you inside of two months, and you stop getting notified about the next game. Fouls include tagging too hard—figure the impact by the speed of each vehicle. Anything totaling more than twenty miles per hour is a foul. If I'm driving ten, and you're driving eleven, and you swerve to hit me head-on, that's an impact over twenty. I can call the foul on you.
Excess impact is only one foul to call.
Tina Something: Wax could tell you details the gaddamn owners never could. All types of convertibles: the Fiat Spyder, the Maserati Spyder, and the Ferrari Spyder, they're all named after some kind of seventeenth-century horse-drawn coach. With no top and high wheels, this black olden-days carriage looked like a spider.
Wax could work the steering-wheel paddles to shift a Formula I or Cambiocorsa trannie. He saw how Jaguar Racing Green shows up a half-shade lighter than British Racing Green. When you open the door of a Maserati, and only a Maserati, you hear a faint, high-pitched whine…Wax could tell you that was the hydraulic trannie pressurizing.
"Nice," Wax would say, gunning the V8 of a Jaguar XJR, painted Winter Gold. Flexing his fingers, he'd say, "They sprung for the heated steering wheel…" Then he'd drop the J-gate trannie into second gear and butt-ram some rusty Subaru wagon.
Lynn Coffey: In Party Crash culture, Karl Waxman was known as a "Hit Man." A species of paid assassin.
Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Me, my focus is providing the music for a perfect night of Party Crashing. But, no bullshit, I'd love to be a Hit Man. A night a while back, I watched some Hit Man scrape every inch of paint off the body of a half-million-dollar Saleen S7. A car with three and one-half inches of ground clearance, and the driver raced it off-road. That's beyond sadistic.
Lynn Coffey: That people hired a Hit Man demonstrated their love for a particular vehicle. An owner might want a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud or Silver Shadow destroyed, but said owner could never, by his own hand, defile such a beautiful automobile.
Tina Something: One point, a Jaguar X-Type, Wax says, "Can you believe this?" He slams the heel of one hand, bam, on the leather steering wheel, saying, "Can you fucking believe this tightwad! Cheaped out and settled for the Tobago wheels, not the Proteus, not even the Cayman wheels." Nailing the gas, Wax popped the right front wheel up on the sidewalk, just long enough to flatten one of those steel-plate mailboxes, exploding sparks and paint chips and white envelopes, before the wheel thuds into the gutter, the speedo never needling below forty.
Lynn Coffey: Among other things, Waxman would accept payment for disposing of luxury cars. Typically, cars about to be lost in a messy divorce decree. Or vehicles the owner could no longer afford to make payments on. Or simply insurance fraud. Or spite.
A certain go-between would pass Waxman the keys and an envelope of cash, typically two or three hundred dollars, then tell Waxman where to find the vehicle. The owner would leave town, establishing an alibi for the two or three days during which Waxman might joyride. By the time the owner returned to report the vehicle stolen, Waxman would've ditched it somewhere it wouldn't be found.
Shot Dunyun: No bullshit, but I've watched people stop in the middle of a funeral, the dead body smiling there in the casket, the old ladies sobbing, and people stop to change the music. Mozart instead of Schumann. Music is crucial.
Beyond no way can I overstress this fact.
Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising along in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you—do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, close-out, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?
Tina Something: Another point, could be our third date, a Dodge Viper, Wax got going about how his clients always wash and wax the car, detailing every inch, before they turn over the cash and keys. "It's like watching those actresses," he tells me, "those women who get their hair done, colored and curled, and their fingernails manicured and their legs shaved smooth and tanned, all that fuss just to appear in a gang-bang porn video."
Wax steered that Viper down a flight of those concrete stairs in the park, leaving a long trail of our exhaust system and suspension, saying, "Baby, I could just cry over those perfect manicured fingernails if they weren't so fucking stupid."
Shot Dunyun: No bullshit. If your car skids into oncoming traffic, and you die listening to The Archies sing "Sugar Sugar," it's your own damn
laziness.
Lynn Coffey: Certain Party Crashers you could tell were Hit Men or Hit Women. If their vehicle was always pristine—even a Chevette or a Pinto, always showroom perfect and polished. If their decoration was minimal, nothing except the basic flag. And if they readily drove over curbs, sideswiped concrete traffic barriers. From that you could deduce their wheels had been someone's dream gone awry. A lovely mistress or trophy the owner didn't want another person to ever own.
Jarrell Moore: Other fouls you can call include tagging off-limits areas of the target. No T-boning—that's a head-on impact against the side of your target. No angling to ram anywhere on the sidewalls between the front and rear axles.
Tina Something: For Rant and Wax, it irked them both that ancient mountains and forests were being sliced up to provide affordable granite countertops in tract houses, or Peruvian-rosewood dash panels in luxury cars no one would drive.
At some point, Wax mentioned how appalling it seemed that those brilliant minds who could invent miracle medicines and nuclear fission and dazzling computer special effects, they had such a complete lack of imagination when it came to spending their money: granite countertops and luxury cars. Talking about that stuff, Wax driving, the madder he got, you could watch the speedo creep up past eighty, ninety, a hundred.
Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey Page 11