Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

by Chuck Palahniuk

  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.

  Lynn Coffey: With Hit Men, perhaps with all Party Crashers, we’re describing a self-directed road rage.

  Certain men may claim to adore women; they’ll marry a dozen times, then drive each wife to suicide with abuse. Karl Waxman felt that same way about those stolen luxury automobiles. He loved to speed along at seventy, all those jealous eyes turning to follow him, but he resented the fact he needed a Jaguar or a BMW to gain such recognition. That the automobile didn’t even belong to him was the ultimate insult. The supreme manifestation of all his self-perceived shortcomings.

  Shot Dunyun: No bullshit, but I never leave the house without a mix for anything: Falling in love. Witnessing a death. Disappointment. Impatience. Traffic. I carry a mix for any human condition. Anything really good or bad happens to me, and my way to not overreact—like, to distance my emotions—is to locate the exact perfect sound track for that moment. Even the night Rant died, my automatic first thought was: Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto II, or Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major…?

  Jarrell Moore: The way I figure it, the head individual in Party Crashing would have to tally fouls. Plus, keep track of teams by their license plate. Plus, name the flag and window for each game. Yeah, and notify all the players about upcoming events. If that’s only one guy, it’s a safe bet he’s pretty damn busy, and not just some thug. He’d need to be pretty damn bright.

  Tina Something: Didn’t matter was it a Lexus or a Rolls-Royce, at the finish of every Party Crash date, Wax and me ended up at the top of the Madison Street boat ramp, the place where the ramp’s angled, steep, into deep water. Trailed behind us, cotter pins and U-joint needle bearings, crankcase oil, brake fluid, and maybe slivers of carbon fiber. And smoke, gaddamn fog banks of black or blue smoke. Our drivetrain barely still functional.

  I’d climb out and watch while Wax shifted down to first gear. With the engine still running, some nights, if nobody was around, he’d press the panic button on the alarm. What a gaddamn noise. The sirens and whatever lights we hadn’t already busted, they’d be flashing on and off. With the Mercedes or Lamborghini still flashing and screaming, Wax would step out and slam the door shut. The car already rolling down the boat ramp, nose-first, into the black water. Like watching an ocean liner sink. The Titanic. White and amber lights, horn blaring, even as the car settled deeper, under water, that trashed relic of somebody’s dream would keep wailing, flaring, fainter and fading, until it settled onto some secret mountain of wrecked dreams—Jaguars and Saleens and Corvettes—that people had hired Wax to murder.

  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.

  But even I can tell, this kid’s a convert. His suntan he hasn’t even lost yet. So I took a chance I’d make some money. Look at New Orleans, 1982, some bulldozer doing construction work downtown at lunchtime, businesspeople walking around dressed in three-piece suits. The dozer scrapes the dirt and busts open three wood cases of buried 1840-O Liberty Seated quarters. Not gold, mind you, but coins worth in the range of two to four grand apiece. Those bankers and lawyers wearing suits and dresses, they jumped into the mud and wrestled each other. Biting and kicking each other for a handful of those Gobrecht quarter-dollars.

  My point being, you just never know where a hoard of treasure will surface.

  Edith Steele ( Human Resources Director): We interviewed Mr. Casey for a position as a nighttime landscape-maintenance specialist. He was referred to our firm through the I-SEE-U labor help line. On the occasion of his third failure to arrive for work, claiming his fifth injury due to a non-work-related traffic accident, Mr. Casey was removed from our payroll.

  Todd Rutz: The Baltimore Find of 1934, two little boys were goofing around in the basement of a rented house and they discover a hole in the wall. On August 31, 1934, they pulled 3,558 gold coins out of that hole, all of them pre-1857. At 132 South Eden Street in Baltimore, Maryland. A fair number of those coins, we’re talking “gem condition.” At the very least, perfect uncirculated or choice uncirculated.

  Lew Terry ( Property Manager): If it was up to me, I’d never even rent to Nighttrippers—those Daytimer kids who switch over. It’s just to irk their parents, they convert. Those delinquents feel compelled to live into every negative stereotype they have about Nighttime cultur
e—loud music and boosting drug highs—but the housing statute says a minimum of 10 percent of your units you have to make available to converts. Casey moved in with nothing, maybe one suitcase, into Unit 3-E. You could go look, only the door’s still sealed with police tape.

  Todd Rutz: The kid with the sock, he’s chewing at the knot with his teeth, and inside the toe you can hear coins clinking together. My point being, that sound makes me glad I buzzed the kid inside. I can tell the sound of silver from copper and nickel. Running my shop so long, I can hear coins rattle and tell you if they’re twenty-two-or twenty-four-karat gold. Just from the sound I hear, I’d chew on that stinking, dirty sock with my own teeth.

  Jeff Pleat ( Human Resources Director): According to our records, we engaged Buster Casey for two weeks in the capacity of dishwasher. By apparent coincidence, during the brief span of his employment with us, some sixteen dinner guests encountered foreign objects in their food. These ranged from steel paper clips to a buffalo nickel dated 1923.

  Todd Rutz: The kid slides an arm inside the sock, all the way up to his skinny elbow, and he drags out a fistful of…we’re talking impossible coins. It wouldn’t matter how bad they smell. A 1933 gold twenty-dollar in gem condition. A 1933 gold ten-dollar, uncirculated. An 1879 four-dollar piece, the Liberty with the coiled hair, near-gem condition.

  Jarrell Moore ( Private Investigator): My statement for the record is, Buster Landru Casey, aka “Rant” Casey, did contact me via the telephone and did arrange an appointment to discuss my services toward locating a missing biological father. At that time, I informed the potential client that my base fee was one thousand dollars per week, plus expenses. Said potential client assured me the expense would not be an issue.

  Brenda Jordan ( Childhood Friend): If you promise not to tell, another thing Rant Casey told me was that the old man who showed him about the coins, the stranger who drove up the road from nowheres, said he was Rant’s long-lost, for-real pa from the city.

  Todd Rutz: Dealing with a kid like that, believe me, I looked for obvious counterfeits: any 1928-D Liberty Walking silver dollars. Any 1905-S gold Quarter Eagles. Blatant fakes. An 1804 silver dollar or Lafayette dollar. I put a Confederate 1861-O half-dollar under a lens and look for coralline structures and saltwater etching, “shipwreck effects” that might tell me more than the kid’s letting on. I check for microscopic granularity that might come from sea-bottom sand.

  We’re talking coins that haven’t been whizzed and slabbed. Raw coins. Some with nothing except bag marks.

  Allfred Lynch ( Exterminator): Vermin control is not your chosen field for most, but Rant Casey took to it like a roach to cat food. The kid would crawl under houses, into attics, didn’t matter if the job was vampire bats. Snakes, bats, rats, cockroaches, poison spiders—none of it made Rant Casey break a sweat.

  Funny thing, but his physical exam came back positive for rabies. No drugs or nothing, but he had rabies. The clinic took care of it and updated his tetanus booster.

  Todd Rutz: Believe me, I was only pretending to check the blue-book values. I tell him, the Barber Liberty Head half-dollar he’s got, the 1892-O, when Charles E. Barber first minted it, newspaper editors wrote that the eagle looked starved to death. The head of Liberty looked like “the ignoble Emperor Vitellius with a goiter.” While I’m feeding the kid my line, really I’m going over the stolen-property bulletins for the past year.

  The kid’s looking out my front window. He’s shaking the sock to jiggle the coins still inside. He says his grandmother died and left these to him. Offers that as the only pedigree for his collection.

  Allfred Lynch: Only single problem I ever had with Rant Casey was, every month or so we do random lunchbox checks. As the guys are headed home, we ask to look inside their lunchboxes. Our guys are alone in people’s homes, sometimes with jewelry and valuables sitting around. A random check keeps everybody in line.

  Never found Rant stealing diamonds, but once we popped open his lunchbox and the insides was crawling with spiders. Black widow spiders he’s supposed to been killing that day. Rant says it’s by accident, and I trust him.

  I mean, who’d smuggle home a nest of poison spiders?

  Todd Rutz: The deal ended up, I paid the kid fifteen thousand out of petty cash. Gave him every bill I kept in the safe. Fifteen grand for the 1933 gold twenty, the 1933 gold ten, and the 1879 four-dollar piece.

  When I ask his name, the kid has to think, look around at the floor and ceiling, before he tells me, “I ain’t decided yet.”

  Believe me, it didn’t matter if he lied. Didn’t matter that he refused anything except cash payment. Or that the kid’s teeth he used to untie the sock, his teeth are stained black. Jet-black teeth.

  My point being, just that 1933 gold Saint Gaudens Double Eagle, that’s an eight-million-dollar coin.

  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?”

  He tells me how, because of rabies, his port won’t boost. His fingers still pushing, rubbing the skin around mine. His fingers warm, as if he’s been holding a cup of coffee. Fever-warm. Hot.

  A port is like having an extra nose, I tell him, only on the back of your neck. Only not just a nose, but eyes and a tongue and ears, five extra ways to see. Sometimes, I say, it’s bullshit. You’re supposed to control a port, but sometimes you get a whole-body hunger for a Coke or potato chips, stuff you’d never eat, so you know the corporate world must broadcast peaks or effects that enter the port even when it’s unplugged.

  Green’s standing, leaning against the driver’s door of his car, holding the camera to his face, going, “Tell me when.” Cars drive past, behind him, some cars with “Student Driver” signs. Some Party Crash teams, slowing to see if we’re flying a flag.

  Rant cups the back of my neck in his hand, going, “Now.”

  For example, tonight, I wasn’t hungry until we drove past this fast-food place. My drool, it’s real. But the bacon-cheeseburger taste in my mouth is a boosted effect.

  Green Taylor Simms goes, “Say ‘cheeseburger.’”

  And, Rant’s hand gripping my neck, he twists my face toward him and plants his mouth over mine. When the camera flashes, Rant’s other hand is dug between my legs, spread and thumbing between the buttons of my fly.

  The crazy asshole. His tongue hot in my mouth, his saliva on my lips, fast as spit can transfer rabies. The camera flash comes twice before I push Rant Casey away, and he goes, “Thanks, man.” He takes the paper camera from Green and says, “My dad won’t believe I bagged me such a good-looking boyfriend.”

  How bullshit is that?

  And me, I’m just spitting and spitting. The hot taste of cheese and bacon and rabies. Spitting and spitting.

  From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic Reports: Bad news for those of you westbound on the 213 Freeway: A four-door hardtop has sideswiped the inside divider and flipped, trapping the driver and one passenger inside. The ambulance boys say the driver is a thirty-five-year-old male, losing blood from a compound fracture of his femur; his pulse is weak, and his blood pressure is falling rapidly. His current prognosis is cardiac arrest due to exsanguination, with another update on the quarter-hour. This is the DRVR Graphic Traffic Report: We Know Why You Rubberneck…

  Shot Dunyun: On Student Driver Nights, the flag is one of those signs that warn: “Caution—Student Driver at the Wheel.” You have to make two good-size signs and wire one between your taillights, across the back of your trunk and rear
bumper. You wire the second sign across the front of your hood, but so it won’t block ram air into your radiator. Beginners, teams that expect too much from their viscous fan clutch and coolant pump, they’ll make a sign that blocks the whole grille, and you’ll see them overheated at the side of the road.

  Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): Party Crash rules require all the teams use some form of “Ajax Professional Driving School” sign since a few seasons ago a real student driver wandered into the course, during the window. That guy’s a legend. The poor student, the story goes, six different teams serial-tagged his car, chased him for blocks, gang-banging his rear bumper until his muffler dropped. People say the student and the instructor just bailed, drove up onto a curb and left the front doors hanging open and the motor running.

  From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic Reports: Here’s another update regarding that rollover accident on the 213. Driver extrication continues, but we’re already looking at signs of a cerebral subarachnoid hemorrhage and pneumocephalus caused by the driver’s forehead contacting the windshield-mounted rearview mirror. That’s all there is to see on the westbound side. We’ll have another update on the quarter-hour. This is the DRVR Graphic Traffic Report: We Know Why You Rubberneck…

  Shot Dunyun: Party Crashing might sound exciting, but most of it consisted of sitting, talking, and driving in circles. Cruising around, watching for another car flying the correct flag for that time window. The flag announced on the phone call or e-mail or instant message that went around. Some windows, you’d see a team without a clue, dressed for a Honeymoon Night with wedding shit on their car. Or you’d see a team wearing the wigs and driving a car painted with “Go Team” shit, perfect for a Soccer Mom Night. If your flag is wrong, you look like assholes. Or worse.