Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

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.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: During the Great Plague of London in 1665, the weekly death rate fluctuated between one hundred and four hundred persons until July 1. By the middle of July, the weekly death rate had risen to two thousand. By the end of July, sixty-five hundred were dying each week, and by the end of August, seven thousand. Though the common source of bubonic plague had been fleas carried by the European black rat (Rattus rattus), the explosion in new infections arose from a change in disease transmission. Instead of bites from fleas, the causative organism, Pasteurella pestis, had begun spreading from person to person via droplets of saliva and mucus ejected in coughs and sneezes.

Carlo Tiengo: It's the rabies, why we had so much business lately. These perverts come down with it, and they can't boost their secondhand smut off the Web. They're forced to come downtown and pay for a primary experience. Mind you, I should've known. Any Tuesday night, we see more than six fellows in the audience, that's a warning sign. The night we lost Bernie, there had to be fifty Droolers around the stage. Twitching. Spit looped in long strings out the corners of their lips. They squint, even in the dim light. All those tendencies, obvious rabies symptoms.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Beginning in 1490, a new epidemic spread across Europe and Asia. The first symptom was a small ulcer at the site of infection, which disappeared after three to eight weeks, leaving a faint scar. Within a few weeks, the victim appeared free of infection. The Chinese called it the "Canton disease." The Japanese, the "Chinese disease." To the French, it was the "Spanish disease." And to the English, it was the "French pox." The modern name is derived from a shepherd imagined in 1530 by Girolamo Frascatoro in his poem "Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus."

Vivica Brawley: One of my regulars, this balding Nighttimer, he didn't look so good. He's sitting with both elbows propped on the padded edge of the stage, drooling, drool running down his chin, real shiny. The rule is, no touching, but he reaches out a five-dollar bill, folded long-ways, like he's going to slip it between my toes. He's a Teamster, if I remember.

Used to be I always had a French-tipped pedicure, back when I still had ten toes. These days, if I took off my shoes in a salon, the girl who does the nails would run screaming.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: In its late latent stage, tertiary syphilis weakens the walls of blood vessels, leading to death by heart failure or stroke. The disease also enters the central nervous system, damaging the brain. Symptoms include personality changes marked by a manic optimism and increased excitability, which ends in general paralysis of the insane (GPI). This hyperactivity, in tandem with the disinhibitions caused by said brain damage, can also spur the infected individual to seek the pleasure of compulsive, casual sexual activity, further spreading the disease, and earning syphilis the common moniker of "Cupid's disease."

Carlo Tiengo: Viv's poking her toes the way she does to accept tips. The Drooler's just some perv who stops in after work on his payday. He stands up from his stool and leans over the edge of the stage. Viv's sitting, leaned back on her hands, pushing one foot into his face, the ways pervs like. Then she's screaming.

Vivica Brawley: See here, on my right foot, where the three little toes should be? That's how much he crammed in his mouth. The bald Teamster. He grabs both hands around my ankle and bites down, and I'm screaming for Bernie. Carlo's behind the bar, doing nothing. With my other heel, I'm kicking the Teamster in the forehead, in the eyes. That's when Bernie grabs him by the shoulder from behind and spins him around.

The sound of his teeth coming together, the «click» is still in my head. Since the moment I heard that click, my foot's looked how it does.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Prior to 1564, Ivan IV, the first Tsar of All the Russias, had allowed freedom of opinion and speech. Ivan accepted petitions from all classes of his subjects, and even the poorest citizen had access to him. Of his three sons, one died at six months, one was lethargic and dimwitted, and the third joined his father as the elder gradually earned the nickname Ivan the Terrible.

All three sons suffered from congenital syphilis. As their father's cerebral syphilis progressed beyond 1564, he subjected thousands to execution by burning and boiling. In the city of Novgorod, the Tsar and his son spent five weeks flogging prisoners to death, roasting them alive, or drowning them below river ice. On November 19, 1581, the Tsar stabbed his son and namesake to death with a steel-pointed spear.

Carlo Tiengo: Benjamin Searle, people called him "Bernie," he was huge. Easily three hundred pounds. Played professional ball for one season with the Raiders. Bernie spun the psycho around. Pried his jaws off Viv's foot and spun him around, and the psycho sinks his teeth into the side of Bernie's neck. The vein they got there. The juggler.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: Among those crippled and killed by syphilis was England's King Henry VIII, as well as France's Charles VIII and Francis I. Artists include Benvenuto Cellini, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the writer Guy de Maupassant.

In the Paris of 1500, a third of the citizens carried syphilis. Among the French nobility, those who were not infected, Erasmus reported, were condemned by their peers as being ignorant and crude. By 1579, the surgeon William Clowes reported that three-quarters of Londoners carried the disease.

Vivica Brawley: Weird what you remember, but I looked at my foot, and I see wire sticking out. Silver wire and pink plastic. And for one crazy second I think, I'm a robot, some kind of an android. And I'm only just finding out…But not really. I'm stoned on the boosted effect, and I'm bleeding and in shock. But I'm no android.

The wire is, the bald guy wore a partial upper, a partial upper denture, and the two teeth of it are still stuck in my foot. His real teeth are dug into Bernie's throat.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: As with bubonic plague, the transmission rate of syphilis exploded due to a change in the nature of the causative organism. Rather than being imported from the New World, it's more likely the disease was originally the African skin infection known as yaws, which was primarily spread by body contact among children playing nude. Bacteriologically, the two diseases are identical, although yaws is spread by any physical contact involving skin eruptions. Because of the clothing needed in the colder climate of Europe, yaws emerged as a disease spread through the predominant method of greeting: a mouth-to-mouth kiss. Only as syphilis became epidemic did Europeans abandon the kiss for the handshake, and the disease assumed its current venereal form.

Carlo Tiengo: It's the sight of blood or something, but every Drooler and perv in the club piles on top of Bernie. Viv and the other girls lock themselves backstage. The bartender and me, we're locked in the office, calling to get the cops. The door is solid oak, thick as a telephone book, and we can still hear Bernie bellowing for help.

Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: It would not be unrealistic to assume that—like bubonic plague and syphilis—the current rabies epidemic is due to casual contact, becoming a zymotic disease common to crowded cities. Like syphilis, the disease brings the subject to an agitated state where he is more likely to seek out and infect others. Additionally, the damage caused by the Lyssavirus to the central nervous system prevents the sufferer from «boosting» or otherwise enjoying the solitary entertainment of neural transcripts. This inability increases the likelihood the infected individual will seek amusement outside his home, indulging in risky social interaction such as "Party Crashing" and casual sex.

Vivica Brawley: Poor Bernie. After the cops shot everybody, they had to autopsy their stomachs to find all the bites people took. Bernie's ears and nose and his lips. The surgeons at the hospital showed me some toes in a pan of salt water and offered to reattach them. The toenails still had their nice white-tipped French pedicure.

But I just looked at those toes all chewed up by a Teamster and half digested, and I told the doctors, "Don't bother."