Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

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