Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

13–Sporting

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): Monday mornings, I'd feel wore out from staying plugged in all Sunday night, cramming for Algebra II. Mr. Wyland hands out six or eight hours of homework to boost, and I'd always leave it for the last minute. My eyes closed, I can still hear the voice of the primary witness, the gal who boosted those lessons. Since you can't out-cord thoughts—only sensory junk like taste, smell, sounds, and sights—the primary witness talks through every step of every equation, yakking away, while you watch her hand holding chalk, scratching the numbers on a blackboard.

Her voice saying, "When X equals the cosine of Y, and Y is of greater value than Z, the determining factor of X must include…" And by then, I'm asleep. Still boosting, but sawing logs. Monday mornings, all I learned was the smell of chalk dust. The tap-tapping of each time her chalk hit the board to make a new line. Not a Smart Board, not even a whiteboard, that's how cheap: a chalkboard. Decades later, I could tell you that primary witness was right-handed and wore a long-sleeve red sweater rolled back a ways at the wrist. Always, the taste of black coffee in her mouth. A Night-timer's hand, somebody told me. No tan on the back. The back and knuckles and palm, all the same color.

Only thing that kept me from failing was, Rant Casey knowed even less than shit, and Mr. Wyland graded on a curve. Most Mondays, before daylight, Rant would come knock on my bedroom window. Beyond a couple horizons we'd walk, until Rant found his hole. With one sleeve rolled up and everything to the shoulder of him stuffed underground, Rant would ask me to teach him. Algebra. History. Social studies. He blamed it on the spider bites, the poison, or having rabies, but he complained his port didn't work. He'd plug in but couldn't boost nothing.

Danny Perry (Childhood Friend): Rant Casey would go down on his belly in the sand, plant his elbows on either side of a burrow, and poke his nose inside. Just from the stink, sniffing some dirty hole, Rant could tell rabbit or coyote or skunk or deadly spider. Could even tell you what kind of spider.

To be Rant Casey's friend was always some test. For guys, you had to shove your hand in his choice of dark hole, far up as your elbow, not figuring what you'd find.

Bodie Carlyle: Us in the desert, watching the light wash up from the horizon, fire colors, I told Rant about the federal I-SEE-U Act and how pale and spooky the algebra hand looked. A hand never out in the sun. The taste of a stranger's coffee still in my mouth.

And Rant says, "Shit." He stuffs his free hand down the front of his pants and grits his teeth.

"Spider-bite boner," he says. "Always happens." And he twists around inside his crotch to hide it.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): Chronic priapism is one lesser symptom of a-latrotoxin poisoning. By exploiting his poison-induced erections, Rant was liquidating any collateral he had left in the community. He could never go back home, but he would never have to. Something the wealthy know that most people don't is that you never burn a bridge. Such a waste. Instead, you sell it.

Cammy Elliot (Childhood Friend): Our geometry teacher, Mr. Wyland, the same teacher who dogs us through Algebra I and Algebra II, and drags you to stand at the board and demonstrate your limitation to the class, he folds his arms, sucking his tongue to inside one cheek of his mouth, lowers his eyes at Rant, and says, "What seems to be the problem, Mr. Casey?"

And Rant ducks his head, his chin nodding down, he tilts his hips up, points with the gun fingers of both hands at his crotch, where the zipper is tented, pointed, poked out so stiff you can see the silver teeth of the steel metal inside. "Mr. Wyland, sir," Rant says, "I've had a serious erection here for going on two hours…"

No lie. A gasp comes, but not from the A-plus rows up front. It's more the B students who believed what they heard. Back in the room a couple rows, some C-minus kid snorted a laugh, lips shut, inside a closed mouth.

"As a fellow matured male, Mr. Wyland," Rant says, "you can appreciate the painful and potentially injurious nature of this situation."

Mr. Wyland, all the air come out of him in one push. One exhale. His folded arms sunk into the collapsed chest of him. His lips peel open, sagging so you can see his bottom teeth, the color of bone shadowed with the brown of tobacco.

"You think maybe somebody should take a look at it?" Rant says on, pulling his eyebrows together, folding worry lines between his eyes.

The geometry equation chalked on the board disappeared, gone from the room. Nothing but chalk-dust chicken scratchings in the same room with the low-down, dirty miracle of a teenage hard-on. Inside his head, Mr. Wyland's supercomputing the correct answer. Him stood up to look dumb in front of folks.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Wyland's beyond trapped. If this teacher slams Rant, merely laughes and tells this punk kid to sit down and concentrate on numbers, the school's looking at a lawsuit. If the kid's got a serious medical emergency, and his dingus turns purple and drops off, the school district will be settling that claim for the next ten million dollars of budget talks. Sure, Rant has a history of disruption. Sure, Rant could've presented the situation in a less invasive manner. But none of that will count for much in a courtroom, while Wyland stands in the witness box and tells a jury why he ridiculed and humiliated a student who was possibly dying of gangrene.

Cammy Elliot: Little flicks of Mr. W's eyes, a twitch of his ear, and a gulp of his Adam's apple, only those signify his brain's at work. His face floods from pale to pink to dark red. His whole face almost tongue red. Like time's stopped.

"Mr. Wyland," a boy's voice says.

Danny Perry sticks one hand up in the air and says, "Hey, Mr. W!" He waves the hand, his fingers flickering fast, and Danny says, "I need the Health Room, too. For the same situation."

Brenda Jordan (Childhood Friend): From what I recall, Rant only had maybe two shirts. One pair of jeans. Leastways, that's all we saw. The same green-plaid shirt with long sleeves to hide the mess of teeth marks on his arms. And a long-sleeve blue chambray shirt with pearl snaps instead of buttons. You could hear when Casey got nervous, because he'd snap and unsnap the cuffs, popping little snap sounds in the back of the class.

Cammy Elliot: The outline of Rant's boner slung sideways in his jeans, almost pulsing with his heartbeat, he went to the office. His shirt cuffs snapping loud and fast as popcorn.

Silas Henderson (Childhood Friend): The oldest female excuse out of any class is claiming you have "cramps." Nothing but code for a chance to take a couple aspirin and skip the trigonometry midterm. Compared to that, a fellow's got nothing.

Lowell Richards (Teacher): A clear corollary formed between sunny weather and the number of boys suffering from painful penile erections. At issue wasn't the penises, but the failure to occlude them while in their turgid state. Furthermore, the district's legal counsel advised that a dress code requiring constraining, modest, fully binding undergarments would be impossible to enforce and serve the negative purpose of drawing increased attention to the issue.

Our chief effort intended to deal with the issue of engorged phalluses obliquely and indirectly. Legal counsel advised no direct condemnation of erections on school property. No district representative was to acknowledge or attempt to mask or resolve any obvious erections.

Cammy Elliot: The biggest secret in Rant's life was his clothes. At home, he had a closet full of shirts and pants and jeans and vests. The hangers packed together so close the closet rod sagged in the middle from the weight. The trouble was, Irene Casey couldn't not be creative. She wouldn't not express herself. She was always trying some new skill, embroidering sunflowers and ivy leaves. Smiling half-moons and stars. Trying iron-on patches or colors of glitter paint. Chrome rivets. Batik and tie-dye. Mrs. Casey would sit up half a night, hunched over and stitching herself blind in bad light, trying to make regular clothes into something special.

Wouldn't hurt Rant's pride to wear rainbow glitter and embroidery to high school, but he couldn't tolerate what kids said about his ma's work. Kids saying she was a terrible artist. Saying she had no kind of talent. He wasn't wearing his heart on his sleeve. It's more like she'd sewed her own heart on Rant's sleeve.

Logan Elliot (Childhood Friend): Casey had the crowd of us whipped into a frantic. Shouting equal rights for hard-ons, saying how we're oppressed, and burning jock straps in the school parking lot.

Leif Jordan (Childhood Friend): Rant advocating for us, our demands included a therapeutic, all-hours lunchroom, since it's a known impossibility to eat food and maintain a woody. We asked for nothing short of equal recognition of our biological…But the next word stumped us. Should we say «obstacles»? "Handicaps"? «Disabilities»? This last word, we tortured over.

We finally settled on the word "burden," asking for "full and equal recognition of the burden inherent in the male anatomy." Hearing how «burden» sounded fine and noble.

Bodie Carlyle: Not much in all his dry years of algebra had trained Mr. W to deal with a potentially life-threatening emergency boner situation. Being displayed as a geometry idiot, or sporting wood in class—either way, you were trading away your dignity. At least this way it was Rant posing the tough problem and Wyland forced to sweat out the figuring with all those eyes waiting on him.

Leif Jordan: We'd maybe talk some doctor into calling it "chronic boner syndrome."

Mary Cane Harvey (Teacher): Rant Casey told me himself: "This here's my inoculation against ever being embarrassed and humiliated in geometry, ever again."

Cammy Elliot: Had kids, politelike, raising their hand to say, "Beg pardon, Miss Harvey…" Saying, "I'd enjoy nothing more than diagramming that lovely sentence, but I'm suffering a chunk of pig iron so beet red it's starting to pain me…"

Cross my heart. Kids said, "Could be, if I got myself a breath of fresh air…" Until half the class was outside.

Lowell Richards: Instructors hesitated in prompting full participation from male students out of the anxiety that students required to stand might exhibit inappropriate arousal, generating classroom disruption and undermining the instructor's authority.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle (Childhood Enemy): If we were talking about naturally sprung boners, that would be another kettle of fish. But these here were store-bought, chemically engineered woodies sprouted on purpose to disrupt the peaceful classroom environment.

Lowell Richards: Though it was widely rumored that certain students abused medications designed to treat erectile dysfunction, legal counsel advised that no just cause existed for requiring that students submit urine for drug testing. Legal counsel cautioned that, though some tumescence may result from illegally obtained prescription drugs, the majority of genital arousal was naturally occurring and thus protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. On advice from the school district's legal counsel, the administration organized a presentation exclusively for male students in the affected peer groups.

Dr. David Schmidt (Middleton Physician): My slide show consisted of color photographs documenting penises suffering extended priapism and the resulting gangrenous injury. For the purpose of this lecture, I selected the most extreme examples, members on which the foreskin, glans penis, and engorged corpus carvenosa had discolored to a purple-black or iridescent dark green, typical of advanced necrosis in oxygen-deprived tissues.

Silas Hendersen: Some kids would take a shoelace and tie it off. Other kids brung a cucumber. Tying off something full of blood could hurt, but keeping track of a cucumber took all your concentration. God forbid, but you'd see guys limping halfway to the bathroom for readjustment, and a cucumber or zucchini squash slips out the cuff of their jeans.

Kids called it "Sportin', Spottin', or Stuffin'."

Spotting was, you'd take a fingertip of cooking oil or shampoo, something too greasy to dry out, and you put a dark spot on your front. Fake peter tracks.

Lowell Richards: The district's strategy remained only marginally successful.

Cammy Elliot: Rant Casey wore those same two shirts to school because he couldn't bear to have kids make fun of his mom. Even he figured the embroidered rainbows and the ivy she'd stitched up the legs of his blue jeans, they looked pretty sad. So he brung home two secondhand shirts and a pair of plain jeans, and kept them hid in the barn, where he could change clothes on his way to or from school.

He was double-trapped. If he wore the clothes his mom monkeyed with, he'd hear jokes about her until they broke his heart. But if Rant told her to lay off decorating his stuff, then he'd be breaking her heart.

Danny Perry: History is, a week into spring term, and Rant sat down to negotiate our demands with the school board. Behind closed doors, in the teachers' lounge, they talked while the rest of us waited in the hallway.

Bodie Carlyle: The teachers' lounge being off-limits to us, nobody knowed it had an outside door. After our long butt-sit in the hallway, the school administrators come out. But no Rant Casey.

Danny Perry: History is, Rant skedaddled out that secret door leads to the outside, sidestepped us, took with him a check for ten thousand dollars and a certificate saying he's graduated early.

Logan Elliot: No lie. Rant left us standing there with our boners, taking a political stand with our dicks on the line, and he goes kiting off, paycheck in hand from the school district. Folks is still branded him the Boner Benedict Arnold.

Silas Hendersen: Without him, the Erection Revolution kind of lost steam. Gone limp. Left us just dumb kids with vegetables stuffed down our shorts and rubber bands wrapped around our wieners.

Trusting Rant Casey was our mistake.

Rubber bands was a bigger mistake. Nothing hurts more than snipping a rubber band, snarled and tangled, all mangled up in your short hairs.

Lowell Richards: The trade-off gave Rant a new school record, awarding him a 4.0 grade-point average and top honors, plus a letter in every sport. Rant Casey, who never kicked a ball or ran a step in his life.

But if he ever showed up at a class reunion, there's men in Middleton who'd wait in line to kill him.

Bodie Carlyle: A paycheck at school graduation—instead of just a diploma. Both them, just paper folks agreed mean more. Being in agreement the big step from a lie to reality.

Rant sawed how reality was something you could build. Same as the Tooth Fairy money. If enough folks believe a lie, how it ain't a lie no more.

Mary Cane Harvey: Even all these years later, I'll discover "Rant Casey Got Out of Here" carved in a desk in my classroom.

Leif Jordan: Sure, some folks never forgave Rant for his betraying us. But most guys, we just shrugged. We shook the carrots out of our pants and got on with life.

Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): We could only afford the plainest things, but I dressed them up with embroidery or rivets. Boys love lots of shiny chrome. Sometimes, I'd sew on special trims or rickrack. I know Buddy loved those clothes. He wore them to school and kept them so nice.

The night he left home, Buddy packed up the lot of them to wear in the city. He was so proud.