Sarah Mercer: Canada will tell you. We had this dear, sweet crippled girl here, and she'd brought along a black leather shoulder bag that she set on the dining-room table. At some point in the evening, she set down her glass of Merlot and went to the bag, unzipping it and unpacking these…things. Long thick pink rubber things that were so worn in places that you'd be terrified of them breaking in half inside of you. Pink rubber that looked stained and smudged. Brown stains that might've been old blood. Black deposits, where the batteries had leaked. Things, I couldn't say what they were. Handcuffs and blindfolds. An enema bag with a nozzle that didn't look any too clean. Latex gloves. Some horrible spring-loaded things that looked like jumper cables—she called them "tit clamps." Everything just reeked of chlorine bleach.
All these horrors, this girl was putting on my polished Drexel Heritage dining-room table, right where we set the turkey at Thanksgiving. And a speculum, oh Lord, so old it had a crack in the clear plastic. I remember her saying, "You can do any of these things to me…"
Echo Lawrence: My routine—where I talk about tasting people for hepatitis or gonad warts—I was saying that long before I met Rant Casey. The fact he could actually do that trick, it was un-fucking-believable. He licked me one time and told me to lay off eating whole eggs. From the taste of my pussy, he said my cholesterol was too high. Later, the blood work came back that he was dead-on.
Canada Mercer: This girl, Echo, she took out a thick white candle and lit it, telling us to let the wax melt so we could pour it onto her bare breasts. She shook out the match and told us, "I don't want you to torture me just because you feel sorry for me. I want you to really enjoy hurting me." She said, "I want tonight to be about you."
The young lady said she despised what she called "Pity S&M."
Echo Lawrence: Get this. The ideal therapy came to me: If I could just stage an accident and survive it, then I might start to get past my fear. If I could just bump my car into another car and cause a fender bender, then I'd see that fatality accidents are so rare they're not worth the worry. So I started stalking other drivers, looking for the perfect car to bump. The perfect accident. Just one perfect, controlled accident.
A certain car might look perfect, but when I drove close enough to smack my fender, I'd see a baby seat in the back. Or the driver would be so young you knew an accident would destroy their insurance rates. Or I'd trail someone until I could tell they had a terrible minimum-wage job and the last thing they needed was a sprained neck.
Nevertheless, the role reversal helped my nerves. Instead of waiting to be killed by another reckless driver, I'd become the predator. The hunter. All night, I'd be looking. You can't count the number of people I shadowed, trying to decide if I should plow into their car.
Canada Mercer: No, we never did have three-way sex. The girl never took off her coat. A week later, I came home to find Sarah sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with the girl. We paid her two hundred dollars, cash, to drink tea for an hour. Sarah kept telling her how pretty she looked. The week after, I came home and Sarah was washing the girl's hair in the kitchen sink. Sarah gave her a permanent wave with blond highlights, and paid two hundred dollars for each of the three hours it took.
If Sarah could boost her self-esteem, we hoped the girl might find a new career. Talking to her, praising her, we lost track of our plan to have a child of our own. The girl cost so much and took up so much of our free time, I couldn't afford to buy a dog. To this day, we still see her every week. And I do think we're making some headway.
Echo Lawrence: My perfect accident turned out to be some guy with a dead deer tied across the roof of his car. Some fucking Bambi-killer, a guy wearing a camouflage jacket and a hat with ear flaps. He's driving a fuggly four-door sedan with the dead deer roped lengthwise, its head laying at the top of the windshield.
In the city, a dead deer's not something you can lose sight of very easily, so I keep my distance and track him through neighborhoods, biding my time, looking for the perfect spot to nail his killer ass. Somewhere an accident won't block traffic or endanger bystanders.
Get this. I'm hunting him the same way he stalked that poor four-legged creature. Waiting to get my best shot.
I mean, I'm really getting off on this. I'm so fucking excited. I scoot through yellow traffic lights, staying a field of cars behind him. I slow and drop back when he turns, then make the same turn. I let cars slip between us so he won't notice how long I've been in his rearview mirror.
At one point, I lose the fucker. A light goes red, but he runs it and cuts a right turn around the next corner. All my months of tracking, and my perfect accident's escaped. The light goes green, and I sprint to find him, turn the same corner, but he's gone. Down another block, I'm scanning my way through intersections, hoping for a glimpse of that deer corpse, that poor, sad murdered deer, but there's nothing, fucking nada. Nobody. My watch was ticking toward morning curfew, and the last thing I needed was a fucking five-hundred-buck ticket for getting caught outside in the daylight.
Sarah Mercer: We called the Tyson-Neals, and they admitted to never having sex with the girl, either. The reason they'd finally decided to have a child was because it penciled out as cheaper than seeing Echo every week.
Echo Lawrence: Listen up. I'm driving home, at least happy that I won't get a past-curfew ticket or be facing some redneck hunter over his crushed quarter-panel—when I see the dead deer. The car's pulled off the street, idling in the drive-through lane of a fast-food place. The driver's window is rolled down, and a bearded face is barking at the menu speaker. In the fluorescent drive-through lights, the car looks spotted with rust. The paint, scratched. Most of the car is piss yellow, but the driver's door is sky blue. The trunk lid is beige. I pull over and wait.
A hand passes a white bag out the drive-through window, the driver gives the hand some paper money. Another beat, and the piss-yellow car eases across the curb, moving into traffic. Before he can disappear again, I'm on his tail. I pull my seat belt tight across my hips. A heartbeat before my front bumper should smack his backside, I take a deep breath. I shut my eyes and stomp the gas pedal.
And again, fucking nada. The car's jetted ahead, darting between other cars so fast the deer's dead ass waves its tail back and forth in my face.
Chasing him, I forget I have a bum arm and leg. I forget that half my face can't smile. Chasing him, I'm not an orphan or a girl. I'm not a Nighttimer with a crummy apartment. The deer's ass dodges through traffic, and that's all I see.
Up ahead, a light turns red. The piss-yellow car, its brake lights flare red as it slows to turn right. For a blink, the deer's gone, until I follow it around the curve. And there, on a quiet side street, without bystanders or police, I shut my eyes and…kah-blam.
The sound, that sound's still recorded in my head. It's time frozen solid. My only wish is that I'd out-corded the chase and attack, but I'll still never forget it.
My front end is buried so deep in his trunk that the dead deer's swung loose. The ropes broke, and the deer's busted open. At about the belly, the carcass has torn into two pieces. And inside, instead of blood and guts, the deer is—white. Solid white.
The driver throws his door open and climbs out, bearded. His camouflage jacket quilted and huge. The ear flaps of his hat flapping with every step toward me.
I say, "Your fucking deer…" I say, "It's fake."
And the guy says, "Of course it's fake."
I say, "It's…Styrofoam?"
The deer, turns out it's a life-size deer target for bow hunters to shoot at.
And the hunter, he goes, "Where's your damned flag?" Walking around to the back of my car, looking at my license plate, he says, "You better believe I'm calling fouls on you—no flag, way too much impact—multiple fouls."
Canada Mercer: We never did get around to experimenting with bondage and police uniforms. For Christmas, we asked Echo what she wanted Santa Claus to bring her, and she told us a "fisting dildo." Instead, we chipped in with the Tyso
n-Neals and a few other couples and bought her a car. It would seem she's a terrible driver.
Echo Lawrence: Those fucking blond highlights, I couldn't wait for those to grow out.
Sarah Mercer: To this day, I still have no appetite whatsoever for tartar sauce.
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.
Every time I operate a motor vehicle, all of what I treasure can be taken. Stolen in an instant without due process. When you're aboard a motor vehicle, death passes within a finger's length every few moments. Anytime a vehicle passes mine in the oncoming lanes, I could be subjected to torture more violent and painful than anything the world's dictators would ever stoop to inflict. Perhaps another driver has eaten nothing except hamburgers for his entire life, and as his car approaches mine on the freeway, his clogged heart fails. Blind with pain, he clutches his seizing chest. His automobile veers to one side, colliding with mine, and forcing me into another car, a gasoline tanker truck, a guardrail, over a cliff.
Despite my lifetime of declining rich desserts, my evenings spent jogging, regardless of all my careful moderation and self-discipline—I'm trapped, wadded inside a shell of steel and aluminum. My body, violated in countless places by fragments of broken glass. My low-cholesterol blood rushes to abandon me in hot, leaping spurts.
Despite all my care, the heart-attack victim and I will both be just as dead.
Accidents do happen.
Echo Lawrence came to Party Crashing to help resolve her personal history. Mr. Dunyun, to experience an actual event after his life spent boosting other people's recorded adventures. And I'd speculate that Rant Casey simply enjoys being among other human beings. I came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact.
Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): I recollect, come about this time we got a letter from Buddy. Tucked in the same envelope was a snapshot of him kissing some strange boy. I didn't know what to think of that. In one photo, Buddy looked dressed up in a shirt and tie for a friend's wedding, so Chester said there was still hope. Buddy wrote us that he was working for a bug exterminator, and he had his own apartment. He wrote about going to a dentist. A girl he met was teaching him yoga. A girl, thank God.
We wrote back to say Cammy Elliot had asked after him at church. She'd just got her last round of rabies shots. In case he got hungry with his new friends, I sent him a batch of fudge. The kind he likes best. With plenty of chopped walnuts and thumbtacks.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Prior to the inception of the Infrastructure Effective and Efficient Use Act—the I-SEE-U Act, as people refer to it—when transportation engineers endeavored to make the system carry more vehicles, their first tactic was to study the ways traffic flow fails. What was the chain reaction that starts with a sideswipe and backs up vehicles to the horizon in every direction? Much of this you'll have to swallow on faith. No Freedom of Information paperwork is going to confirm something this confidential. There exists no official mention of the mercenary Contractor Cars. On paper, the government refers to the project as "Incidence Event Prompting."
Irene Casey: Some of the other snapshots Buddy sent, they showed his new best friends. Another snapshot showed a girl who didn't look healthy. Her one arm was, oh my, like a skinny praying-mantis arm. Just a itty-bitty arm, with the hand pulled up to her chest. The little fingers held one end of this pink baseball bat, so long that the top of the bat rested on her shoulder. She was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, and her other, regular hand looked to be rubbing the baseball bat with a square of sandpaper. In other photos, the girl is rubbing smudges of shoe polish on her pink baseball bat. That girl wouldn't be doing messy work like that, not on my carpet.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Incidence Event Prompting boiled down to trans-staff engineers requisitioning old, unmarked pool cars and intentionally colliding with each other on busy arterials during peak traffic times in order to study the effect. The project killed two birds with one stone: First, obsolete four-door sedans went to the scrap heap to better serve humanity. That, and the traffic engineers accumulated video documenting how drivers react to an accident in their immediate presence.
None of the engineers impacted with enough velocity to hurt their comrades, and none of the events was worse than paint scratches and sheetmetal body damage. Still, on video you see traffic immediately slow to a voyeuristic crawl. The infamous and bothersome rubberneck effect.
Brannan Benworth, D.M.D. (Dentist): According to our files, Buster Casey made a single visit to our office. I have one hygienist who still talks about his teeth. The worst stains she's ever seen. Mr. Casey was referred by a longtime patient, a favorite among the office staff, a young man named Karl Waxman.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Community busybodies, thin-skinned control freaks, they complain about the traffic reports on DRVR Radio. The Graphic Traffic Updates. That voice announcing the tag line: "We Know Why You Rubberneck…" Naturally, the Transportation Department is behind that radio show. The transportation engineers simply wanted to see if drivers would continue to gawk if they knew exactly what they'd see. If a radio personality was telling them the grimmest details, would traffic still snarl?
The transportation agency monitors paramedic frequencies and passes the DRVR announcer the gory facts. A majority of the general public adores that show. People swoon over traffic accidents. A quick peek or a good long gape.
Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): Yeah, I wanted Rant to do yoga before Party Crashing. Everybody should, just to stay limber and avoid getting hurt. Yoga and stretching. I showed him the Down Dog pose and the Rabbit. We were practicing the Archer when he asked me about the hit man Tina Something goes around with, her boyfriend, Karl Waxman. Rant really admired the asshole's teeth.
Tina Something (Party Crasher): I don't give a gaddamn what the police say. Wax did not kill that hillbilly.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Long before modern Party Crashing, the traffic engineers were running each other down. The videos show them, four geeks in each gray car: one engineer steering, one in charge of documenting with the camera, two engineers on lookout for other gray pool cars covered with dents and scratches. Each car the same government issue: four-cylinder, automatic-transmission, three-point seat belts, and a big "No Smoking" sign riveted to the dashboard.
The pool-car boys loved to hunt each other. Those gray pool sedans were so easy to find, especially after bankers' hours ended. With full-coverage health insurance, driving a car not their own, with complete permission and encouragement to crash—and getting paid overtime wages, to boot—the infrastructure teams treasured their work.
Jarrell Moore (Private Investigator): Our firm was able to locate one likely candidate who fit the client's vague description for a biological father. An individual by the name of Charles Casey. That's the good news. That Charles Casey, aka "Charlie," attained Nighttimer status and housing under the I-SEE-U recruitment program. He did work a variety of city-government jobs while enrolled in college.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Event Prompting was so exciting that when the study window ran out and manpower was reassigned to flow studies and traffic-light timing, these traffic geeks couldn't give it up. Even without a paycheck attached, and forced to wreck their own cars, those original engineers kept up their games. Naturally, outsiders caught on. No matter how diligently you keep something a s
ecret—accidents do happen.
Jarrell Moore: The bad news is, the Charles Casey we found has been missing and presumed dead for almost sixteen years. He'd been a traffic-flow engineer for the city and died in a work-related car accident. It seems he'd requisitioned a car from the department motor pool, then ran it head-on into another car, driven by a female co-worker. The woman and her husband were both killed. Their daughter, who'd been asleep in the backseat of their vehicle, was left handicapped by the accident.
Charles Casey's body was not recovered at the scene. The couple he killed, their names were Larry and Suprema Lawrence.
Irene Casey: By the last snapshot that Buddy sent home, you can tell that crippled girl, she's not sanding and refinishing a baseball bat. That thick pink club she's rubbing on with sandpaper and steel wool, and staining with shoe polish and old tea bags, it looks exactly like some giant's sex thingy. A girl like that, with a gimp arm, making herself a dirty, bigman thingy…It's a stretch to see that girl as the mama of my future grandbabies.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Strange as it sounds, emergency service personnel continue to channel Tina Something the gory details of each drive-time accident. Everyone with a government letterhead will deny this, but it's true.
It's all connected. The I-SEE-U Act. Team slamming. Night versus day. Graphic Traffic. Our tax money was the springboard for what eventually became the Party Crashing culture. The pool-car boys, those unsung engineers, their study recommendation split this country into day and night. And they brought us the number-one-rated daytime radio program in this market.
Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey Page 14