Rant

  Tina Something: Gimps with fused vertebrae, losers known to be night-blind or farsighted, you’ll see them on the curb all night. Maybe some team will take pity and give them a nothing position. In a big car, a loser might get what people call the “mascot” position, the middle of the backseat, where you can’t do much but talk to keep up the mood. Otherwise, they’re totally Misfit Toys.

  You have a short neck or bad eyes and you’d better bring lots of gas money and pray for a nice team with a big backseat. Cultivate your jokes and people skills.

  Echo Lawrence: The “window” is the determined time a game begins, until the time it ends. You might have a Saturday four-hour window. Or you might play a Monday all-night window, from eight to eight.

  Shot Dunyun: The night we met Rant, he’d escaped some voucher hotel, waiting for assignment to transitional Nighttimer housing. In a city where most people are either working jobs or boosting peaks, for a guy without work, a guy whose port won’t boost shit, it’s no wonder he wandered at night.

  Rant climbs into the car and gives me a quarter. How lame is that? An asswipe quarter for gas money. Except it’s gold and dated 1887. I don’t know what that coin was, but Echo dropped the car into gear, and we slipped into the traffic stream. Rant climbed into our backseat like he’d been waiting on that corner, waiting his whole bullshit life for us to pull up. And Green, twisting to reach back, he says, “Might I have a closer look at that coin?”

  Echo Lawrence: A good driver shouldn’t have to look anywhere but forward. Good backseat lookouts shouldn’t look anywhere but backward and sideways. It’s not their job to see where the car’s headed. A good shotgun handles his side and half the windshield.

  You’re not just looking for cars to hit. You’re looking for cars headed to hit you. You’re looking for cars already on someone’s tail. You’re looking for police. Not just during a chase, but all the time, parked or baiting or trolling. Or stalking. “Baiting” means to steer something cherry, virgin-perfect, clean, and polished down the middle of the boulevard, the “field” or “route” or “maze.” You see a showroom two-door purr bright red down that center lane, flying a game flag: just-married cans or soccer-mom paint—to prove they’re playing, and you’d be a fool to chase after.

  Not to say a lot of rookies don’t—peel off for a piece of that fresh red paint.

  The veterans, teams that know “bait,” they’ll wait a second look. A block back always come the shadow cars, spread out in a wide dragnet, the teams in league with the bait car, ready to slam the rookies flushed out. Next time you hear a Graphic Traffic report about a plague of bad drivers, this is the shadow cars scoring on rookies.

  From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Whatever your team mascot, watch out for a flood of soccer fans this evening. It seems every proud parent is driving a crew around with their team colors flying. Go, Cougars! At the Post Circle, along the north side, watch out for a six-car pile-up. No telling who the winner is, but they all appear to be amateur sport teams. No injuries, but the traffic cams show a lot of people arguing in the breakdown lane.

  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 ju
st 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 Du
nyun ( 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.