Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn't meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That's how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can't walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies he never met in real life.

Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. After Gaetan Dugas was dead, the number of sex partners saying they'd fucked him, it went through the roof.

The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you're alive--or praising you after you ain't.

For me, I was sitting on an airplane, and some hillbilly sits down next to me. His skin, it's the same as any car wreck you can't not stare at--dented with tooth marks, pitted and puckered, the skin on the back of his hands looks one godawful mess.

The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what's it he wants to drink. The stewardess asks him to, please, reach my drink to me: scotch with rocks. But when I see those monster fingers wrapped around the plastic cup, his chewed--up knuckles, I could never touch my lips to the rim.

With the epidemic, a person can't be too careful. At the airport, right beyond the metal detector we had to walk through, a fever monitor like they first used to control the spread of SARS. Most people, the government says, have no idea they're infected. Somebody can feel fine, but if that monitor beeps that your temperature's too high, you'll disappear into quarantine. Maybe for the rest of your life. No trial, nothing.

To be safe, I only fold down my tray table and take the cup. I watch the scotch turn pale and watery. The ice melt and disappear.

Anybody makes a livelihood selling cars will tell you: Repetition is the mother of all skills. You build the gross at your dealership by building rapport.

Anywhere you find yourself, you can build your skills. A good trick to remember a name is you look the person in the eyes long enough to register their color: green or brown or blue. You call that a Pattern Interrupt: It stops you forgetting the way you always would.

This cowboy stranger, his eyes look bright green. Antifreeze green.

That whole connecting flight between Peco Junction and the city, we shared an armrest, me at the window, him on the aisle. Don't shoot the messenger, but dried shit keeps flaking off his cowboy boots. Those long sideburns maybe scored him pussy in high school, but they're gray from his temple to his jawbone now. Not to mention those hands.

To practice building rapport, I ask him what he paid for his ticket. If you can't determine the customer needs, identify the hot buttons, of some stranger rubbing arms with you on an airplane, you'll never talk anybody into taking "mental ownership" of a Nissan, much less a Cadillac.

For landing somebody in a car, another trick is: Every car on your lot, you program the number--one radio--station button to gospel music. The number--two button, set to rock and roll. The number--three, to jazz. If your prospect looks like a demander--commander type, the minute you unlock the car you set the radio to come on with the news or a politics talk station. A sandal wearer, you hit the National Public Radio button. When they turn the key, the radio tells them what they want to hear. Every car on the lot, I have the number--five button set to that techno--raver garbage in case some kid who does Party Crashing comes around.

The green color of the hillbilly's eyes, the shit on his boots, salesmen call those "mental pegs." Questions that have one answer, those are "closed questions."...

 

"One of the most feverish imaginations in American letters. . . . More than your weekly prescribed dose of humor and humanity, cleverness and outrage."

 

"Brilliant. . . extremely fun. . . . With his love of contemporary fairytales that are gritty and dirty rather than pretty, Palahniuk is the likeliest inheritor of Vonnegut's place in American writing."

 

"Mr. Palahniuk doesn't write for tourists. He writes for hard-core devotees drawn to the wild, angry imagination on display and the taboo-busting humor."

 

"Unpredictably hilarious. . . . The writing is vivid, raw, and mordantly knowing."

 

"Truly unique. He writes at the edge of crazy, and you can feel his desperate urge to get at the truth of things."

 

"Twisted? Come on, it's Palahniuk. Impossible to put down? Same answer."

 

"It's a rare novel that's as funny and as brain-bending as this one. Buckle up."

 

"A white-knuckled what-if, Rant is the author's most idiosyncratic work to date."

 

"A strong dose of gore and sinewy prose."

 

"So funny that your facial muscles soon tire."

 

CHUCK PALAHNIUK is the bestselling author of seven novels: Fight Club--which was made into a film by director David Fincher--Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Lullaby, Diary, and Haunted. He is also the author of the nonfiction profile of Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. More than 3 million copies of his book have been sold. He lives in the Pacific...

 

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
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