Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

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.