Until then, she didn't even know that particular boyfriend spoke German.

Canada Mercer: The subject of venereal disease came up, and she insisted it wasn't a problem. The Lawrence girl, she explained that sex workers regularly perform oral sex as part of foreplay. She told us the true purpose of the act is to routinely test a client for illness. Syphilis, she said, tastes like curried chicken. Hepatitis tastes like veal with capers. Gonorrhea, like sour-cream-and-onion potato chips. HIV, like buttered popcorn. She looked at my wife and said, "Let me lick your pussy and I can tell if you've been exposed to venereal warts, and if you're at risk for developing cervical cancer." Most forms of cancer, she said, taste similar to tartar sauce.

Echo Lawrence: As an adult, I found riding the bus made my hands sweat. Riding in a taxi, I could hardly take a deep breath. Driving, my heart would pound in my ears, and my vision would lose any awareness of colors. I'd get that close to fainting. I was so sure I'd be rammed by another car. On an unconscious level, my memory of the head-on collision was controlling me. It got so bad I couldn't cross the street for fear that a driver might run a red light.

My world kept collapsing down, getting smaller and smaller.

Sarah Mercer: Canada will tell you. We had this dear, sweet crippled girl here, and she'd brought along a black leather shoulder bag that she set on the dining-room table. At some point in the evening, she set down her glass of Merlot and went to the bag, unzipping it and unpacking these…things. Long thick pink rubber things that were so worn in places that you'd be terrified of them breaking in half inside of you. Pink rubber that looked stained and smudged. Brown stains that might've been old blood. Black deposits, where the batteries had leaked. Things, I couldn't say what they were. Handcuffs and blindfolds. An enema bag with a nozzle that didn't look any too clean. Latex gloves. Some horrible spring-loaded things that looked like jumper cables—she called them "tit clamps." Everything just reeked of chlorine bleach.

All these horrors, this girl was putting on my polished Drexel Heritage dining-room table, right where we set the turkey at Thanksgiving. And a speculum, oh Lord, so old it had a crack in the clear plastic. I remember her saying, "You can do any of these things to me…"

Echo Lawrence: My routine—where I talk about tasting people for hepatitis or gonad warts—I was saying that long before I met Rant Casey. The fact he could actually do that trick, it was un-fucking-believable. He licked me one time and told me to lay off eating whole eggs. From the taste of my pussy, he said my cholesterol was too high. Later, the blood work came back that he was dead-on.

Canada Mercer: This girl, Echo, she took out a thick white candle and lit it, telling us to let the wax melt so we could pour it onto her bare breasts. She shook out the match and told us, "I don't want you to torture me just because you feel sorry for me. I want you to really enjoy hurting me." She said, "I want tonight to be about you."

The young lady said she despised what she called "Pity S&M."

Echo Lawrence: Get this. The ideal therapy came to me: If I could just stage an accident and survive it, then I might start to get past my fear. If I could just bump my car into another car and cause a fender bender, then I'd see that fatality accidents are so rare they're not worth the worry. So I started stalking other drivers, looking for the perfect car to bump. The perfect accident. Just one perfect, controlled accident.

A certain car might look perfect, but when I drove close enough to smack my fender, I'd see a baby seat in the back. Or the driver would be so young you knew an accident would destroy their insurance rates. Or I'd trail someone until I could tell they had a terrible minimum-wage job and the last thing they needed was a sprained neck.

Nevertheless, the role reversal helped my nerves. Instead of waiting to be killed by another reckless driver, I'd become the predator. The hunter. All night, I'd be looking. You can't count the number of people I shadowed, trying to decide if I should plow into their car.

Canada Mercer: No, we never did have three-way sex. The girl never took off her coat. A week later, I came home to find Sarah sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with the girl. We paid her two hundred dollars, cash, to drink tea for an hour. Sarah kept telling her how pretty she looked. The week after, I came home and Sarah was washing the girl's hair in the kitchen sink. Sarah gave her a permanent wave with blond highlights, and paid two hundred dollars for each of the three hours it took.

If Sarah could boost her self-esteem, we hoped the girl might find a new career. Talking to her, praising her, we lost track of our plan to have a child of our own. The girl cost so much and took up so much of our free time, I couldn't afford to buy a dog. To this day, we still see her every week. And I do think we're making some headway.

Echo Lawrence: My perfect accident turned out to be some guy with a dead deer tied across the roof of his car. Some fucking Bambi-killer, a guy wearing a camouflage jacket and a hat with ear flaps. He's driving a fuggly four-door sedan with the dead deer roped lengthwise, its head laying at the top of the windshield.

In the city, a dead deer's not something you can lose sight of very easily, so I keep my distance and track him through neighborhoods, biding my time, looking for the perfect spot to nail his killer ass. Somewhere an accident won't block traffic or endanger bystanders.

Get this. I'm hunting him the same way he stalked that poor four-legged creature. Waiting to get my best shot.

I mean, I'm really getting off on this. I'm so fucking excited. I scoot through yellow traffic lights, staying a field of cars behind him. I slow and drop back when he turns, then make the same turn. I let cars slip between us so he won't notice how long I've been in his rearview mirror.

At one point, I lose the fucker. A light goes red, but he runs it and cuts a right turn around the next corner. All my months of tracking, and my perfect accident's escaped. The light goes green, and I sprint to find him, turn the same corner, but he's gone. Down another block, I'm scanning my way through intersections, hoping for a glimpse of that deer corpse, that poor, sad murdered deer, but there's nothing, fucking nada. Nobody. My watch was ticking toward morning curfew, and the last thing I needed was a fucking five-hundred-buck ticket for getting caught outside in the daylight.

Sarah Mercer: We called the Tyson-Neals, and they admitted to never having sex with the girl, either. The reason they'd finally decided to have a child was because it penciled out as cheaper than seeing Echo every week.

Echo Lawrence: Listen up. I'm driving home, at least happy that I won't get a past-curfew ticket or be facing some redneck hunter over his crushed quarter-panel—when I see the dead deer. The car's pulled off the street, idling in the drive-through lane of a fast-food place. The driver's window is rolled down, and a bearded face is barking at the menu speaker. In the fluorescent drive-through lights, the car looks spotted with rust. The paint, scratched. Most of the car is piss yellow, but the driver's door is sky blue. The trunk lid is beige. I pull over and wait.

A hand passes a white bag out the drive-through window, the driver gives the hand some paper money. Another beat, and the piss-yellow car eases across the curb, moving into traffic. Before he can disappear again, I'm on his tail. I pull my seat belt tight across my hips. A heartbeat before my front bumper should smack his backside, I take a deep breath. I shut my eyes and stomp the gas pedal.