Rant

German.
    Canada Mercer: The subject of venereal disease came up, and she insisted it wasn’t a problem. The Lawrence girl, she explained that sex workers regularly perform oral sex as part of foreplay. She told us the true purpose of the act is to routinely test a client for illness. Syphilis, she said, tastes like curried chicken. Hepatitis tastes like veal with capers. Gonorrhea, like sour-cream-and-onion potato chips. HIV, like buttered popcorn. She looked at my wife and said, “Let me lick your pussy and I can tell if you’ve been exposed to venereal warts, and if you’re at risk for developing cervical cancer.” Most forms of cancer, she said, taste similar to tartar sauce.
    Echo Lawrence: As an adult, I found riding the bus made my hands sweat. Riding in a taxi, I could hardly take a deep breath. Driving, my heart would pound in my ears, and my vision would lose any awareness of colors. I’d get that close to fainting. I was so sure I’d be rammed by another car. On an unconscious level, my memory of the head-on collision was controlling me. It got so bad I couldn’t cross the street for fear that a driver might run a red light.
    My world kept collapsing down, getting smaller and smaller.
    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 youfeel 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