Rant: The Oral History of Buster 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 Dunyun (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.

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.