Tell zeal it wants devotion;
Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it metes but motion;
Tell flesh it is but dust:
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.

-Sir Walter Ralegh

A true crowd had gathered in front of the Tropicana Casino, upright livestock; harelips, evil odors, voices hatchet the air.

They were all packed against a temporary barrier like those used by police to keep back rioters. Red, white and blue banners hung from the light posts. Twenty-one white stretch limousines were parked side by side in the emptied section of the parking lot, ramps marking them off at either end like book ends. A stage had been set up, a big banner stretched across it saying in gold lettering, KAPTAIN PETER PAYNE.

A voice roared out over the speakers, "Ladies and gentlemaaan! - Kaptain Petaaar Paaayne!!!"

The crowd cheered. Several whistles were audible. A tri-coloured motorcycle spangled with stars buzzed past, the rider waving. He wore a white leather outfit, gold stripes jetting across. Men held small children on their shoulders for a better view. The motorcycle turned around, buzzed back, picking up speed, the rider popping a glorious wheely that made the crowd go wild. At the end of the run the bike fishtailed, turned back, front tire jacking up, him going the whole length of the parking lot, all the while keeping only one hand on the bike while he waved with the other. He road past, one foot on the seat, one hand on the handle bars, the other limbs outstretched like an acrobat (like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider . . . Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). People were stirred, wanted this. They smiled, wagged their heads enthusiastically and cheered.

"He sure can ride," said a man, cowboy hat obscuring his shrunken head.

A little girl stared at the spectacle with wide, impressionable eyes.

Several young men covertly sipped cans of beer, talking in low voices, their shoulders hunched.

Peter Payne whined up to the ramp several times, testing the logistics. Finally he gave the thumbs up. He would jump. The crowd became silent. He rode back a couple of hundred yards. A small man in a mechanic's jump-suite ran up to him. Everyone could see that they were talking. Words exchanged. Gestures vehement. The small man jogged away as Peter Payne revved up his bike. He waved and then buzzed toward the ramp, his bike picking up speed. The bike hit the ramp and shot into the air. He let go of the handle bars, threw his arm over his head, quickly grabbed them again and he was on the other side. Cameras flashed. Sound issued from open mouths.

Peter Payne was born in San Angelo, Texas. His father worked as a ranch hand. The family moved around, from Texas to Colorado, Colorado to New Mexico, then on to Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana. His dad was a jack-of-all-trades, getting work where he could, drinking too much, getting fired, going straight, getting steady work, then hitting the bottle harder than ever. When he had money he spent it quick, buying Peter and his older brother Jack whatever they wanted, even if it meant not paying the rent and bills. Mom bore with it, resigning herself to the wild ways of her man, Preacher.

He could hear his father outside howling at the moon, deep in liquor. Years later he would remember this with a kind of sacred awe, at the time he lay in his bed wide awake, his brother's breathing sounding out a comfort (their blood being the same) that could only be effaced by death.

The light shafted across the room and he lay on the night, tv going low in the living room, Mom's pretty hair streaked with early grey. Preacher out there sitting on the tail gate, sipping Kentucky whisky, happy in the clean expanse and drink and speaking to those lavish stars.

"Get your butt in that door!" Pete hissed.

Blaine sulked his way through the broad doors. The family found seats together in the sixth pew next to a very blond husband and wife with a teenage daughter yellow as straw.

Old women sat, gripping purses and bibles tightly, faces dry, pious, globbs of hunger and senility and protuberances of pain. Some newlyweds pressed close together, the man staring with animal satisfaction at his mate's swollen belly. Humbled fathers stared at the Aryan Christ before them, their eyes pink from Saturday night's twelve pack. A dirtyfaced boy murmured obscenities under his breath, Satan pricking within him, effing obsessive effs as the sanctuary filled its gut.

"Aint they ever gonna start?" muttered Blaine. Virginia, Pete's wife, grabbed the boy's hand, squeezing it tightly so it hurt like hell.

"You kids need to learn a little religion," said Peter in a low voice. "When I was a boy I enjoyed church."

He lied.

"These days all these kids act like God forsaken atheists," commented the blond husband next to them.

Virginia nodded her head.

"My little girl here," the man continued signifying the young lady next to him, "told me the other day that she thought the bible was boring!"

"Lord, mercy!" said Virginia.

"She wants her religion to be entertaining . . . Doesn't want to work for her salvation."

"Lizards," mumbled the blond wife.

A hush ran over the congregation. The pastor shuffled out, his small eyes taking silent count of God's children. The organ broke in, hymn books shuffled, whispers were exchanged, Bringing in the sheep they sang, Bringing in the sheep . . . We shall be rejoicing . . .

Peter prayed to God.

Dear Lord, he prayed, Dear Lord protect me and my family from harm's way . . . When I'm doing those stunts protect me so I'll be able to be there for little Sarah and Blaine . . . And let Blaine see the light of Jesus...Let me be ok doing these stunts for seven more years and then I'll quit dear Lord...Praise be to Jesus Christ...Help me Christ, help me!

Did Peter Payne have a definite perception of the validity of God?
No. He had faith in an occult substance, decidedly male but undefined like a lump of clay. He saw afterlife vaguely, as a man half blind sees the blurred image of his wife being violated as he struggles to release himself from the chair he is tied to . . . Peter Payne saw god as something separate from himself, he did not consider that god (sitting cross legged atop a pile of shit) created man and the world as a spider does its web . . . The cruciform speck of gold which hung from his neck was to him not so much the logo of the Eternal as it was of White Honor . . . It showed that any homosexual tendencies he had were most likely latent, his money was not acquired through Jewing people, his sins were washed clean by virtue of their having been performed under the auspices of European ancestry . . . The Lord was an ethereal substance which he allowed to molest him, as an alter boy does a priest . . . Man without god would be like an octopus without a saddle, a bowl of jello without horseradish, a chimney without a negligee . . .

"Come on you son of a bitch!" Virginia cried out as she fed the machine another silver dollar.

All around the vibrant clink of coinage rang out . . . Money was falling in heaps. Lights went off, sirens sounded. Undoubtedly many were becoming rich at that very moment. A woman walked by, her shirt front filled with silver, her white belly dipping a little over the rim of her pants. Cigarettes burned in every mouth: Pall Mall, Marlboro, Lucky Strike, Camel: Straights, menthol, lights, 100's.

"I've got an addictive personality," Virginia would tell people. "I've gotta have my pop," she would say opening another can of Mountain Dew.

She lived to eat. Gambling was a hunger. The buffets at the casinos were phenomenal, gross. Roast beef floated in a thin gravy spotted with white clots of fat. Baked cod, chippy and chewy, a faint taste of sewage to the meat. Fried chicken, the crust aged, effete, a reservoir of oil hidden beneath the skin. Vegetables embalmed in a lukewarm broth, all vitamins judiciously leached from their fibres. Desserts bright, tall, towering, colorful, silicon sweet.

Bellies distended, rumps hanging low, aqueous, they make their way back to grey moneylust, mud, noxious, carcinogenic smoke sifting through their ears, packing against their craniums, hair follicles.

Dad is a motorcycle daredevil. Watch out. If he dies that means no him. So I don't want to pray. I don't want to pray not because I don't want Dad to be ok, but because I don't want to. I don't want to be stabbed by a spirit, but I don't want to pray, be bored and pray. Before dinner I just pretend (head bent, churlish, as a criminal might submit to the lash of a whip, inwardly defiant). Mom might whoop me, but I don't care. I'm Blaine. I don't care. Because I am not a sweet boy or a sissy and I knew but did not know, wanted but would not believe, would not admit.

It was early morning and I was walking down the hall. I needed to go so I was walking down the hall and then I heard that scream and did not consider. Did not consider who it was but I knew it was a pain yell, like a real pain and it could have been her. So I opened the door and there was a man hurting her, his back arched up and the skin like it was wet. She was screaming and he was hurting her. He was on top of her and hurting her and then yelled at me and told me to get out. His face was red, not just angry red but like he had been holding his breath, and it was not like I had ever seen it before, but it was Dad, a stranger yet him. Nobody said anything about it, just as if it had never happened. She seemed ok and I didn't say anything about it. She must not have been hurt too bad because she was in a good mood and made pancakes and bacon and joked and moved around with her big thighs filling out the kitchen. I just hoped she wasn't hurt bad somewhere I couldn't see. Because Dad could hurt you bad if he wanted to. I know he could. His arms could hurt you. I don't care though because I don't care if I get hurt. I don't care (it being that this very pain that his mother bore, whirling of blood, tempest of milk and okra, was the agony he felt, being pulled from the other side, mysterious pre-existence-natal-wrack -- attracted by the odor of blood, semen - into the fleshy folds of the womb, tortured, shot out, a victim of raw elements, irreversible laws of universal suffering).

"Look Merle, you better go home. I don't need any drunks on my team. Any boy that's with me needs to be square. You get it?"

"Sure Pete, I get it."

"You know, you come over and start helping me to set things up and your all boozed, or even just got yourself a bad hangover, and that's no good. I'm going to need you tomorrow, so I want you to be in good shape."

"Pete, you know I love you. I'll listen Pete. You know I don't mean to drink so much. I'll make it ok Pete. Don't worry, I'll make it ok."

"I hope so Merle. By God I hope so."

Pete could not help but get nervous when he caught Merle on a drunk . . . There was no question that Merle was a good mechanic; and a decent technician provided he was sober.

"That drinking problem's a terrible thing," Pete would say. "My brother had it and it is a terrible thing."

My brother had it and my father had it, he thought, but it killed my brother. Preacher was big and of another time and was a match for it or at least a contender. You watch Merle, he told himself, because contender he is not.

Phoenix, AZ

10:30 PM

The night before a jump.

Payne climbs into his air stream. He eats cold cereal while listening to a Kenny Rogers eight-track, goes to bed.

3:30 AM

Peter Payne wakes to the sound of water. He arises. Merle is standing in the kitchenette peeing on the stove. He is not sober.

"Virginia, what the hell is this? I got the statement from the bank today and according to it there's five-thousand dollars less in our savings account than there's supposed to be . . . There's practically nothing in there!"

"Well Petey . . . " Virginia started.

"Don't Petey me Virginia . . . It's that damn gambling of yours isn't it? Hell, I knew it was getting out of control. You go down to those god damned casinos and flush my money down the toilet, don't you! . . . I'm out there risking my neck - Literally risking my god damn neck! - to earn some money so me and you and Blaine and Sarah can have a decent middle class life, and what are you doing but just flushing it all down the toilet. You ought to be ashamed or yourself woman!"

"Oh Pete!" Virginia cried, breaking down.

She collapsed at his feet, burying her head in his trouser leg.

"You've done wrong Virginia, you've done wrong . . . You're just letting yourself go and I really don't know what to do about this . . . You need help . . . You know you need some goddamned help."

"I know I do. I know I do Pete."

"Why doesn't that man have a wife?" she would ask.

"Just look at him," Pete would inevitably reply. "What female is going to take a man like that?...They'd need a veterinarian to deliver the baby."

"Well men without women worry me."

No one in fact had ever seen Merle hand in hand with a woman. When the guys would start talking about the female anatomy he would keep silent, even blush slightly. Yet his squalid little apartment was littered with objectionable literature. His mind was obviously not devoid of carnal thought. No one suspected him of being a saint.

I bet he sins. I bet he sins more than me. Mom calls me a sinner. She's fat but I'm a sinner. She drinks pop. Merle doesn't have a cross around his neck like Dad does. They say he didn't do good in school so I better watch out. I better watch out that I don't turn out like him. He always smells bad, like beer and stuff. I don't want to smell like that. Dad smells good. Because he's got that cross I guess. I bet that Jews are like Merle. They say that the Jews killed Christ. I bet I'm Jew. I just bet I am. Merle says it is ok to be Jew or fag as long as you don't stick it in his face. I won't stick it in his face. I won't.

Virginia was blowing up, bloating out, tearing the seams of her clothes, making eyebrows rise. She had a nice figure when her and him first met. It was not having two kids that killed it. It was her addiction to food and soda, her mad chase after calories. The fat had no place to go. Her asthma prevented her from much in the way of exercise. Pete found himself cringing before her naked body, caressing it with little enthusiasm. For him bedroom activity became a regular chore - He put her on a diet. He was sick of seeing her tremendous rump wagging around the house.

"No more pop and junk food," he said.

"I don't eat junk food. I eat people food."

"That's right, you eat people food. Enough for about two or three people. Now it's time for person food . . . Singular . . . You get it?"

That night at supper he shook his head when she started helping herself to seconds of the pineapple whip.

"What's that got in it? Marshmallows, cottage cheese - That's no diet food!...If you're still hungry eat some more salad."

"Rabbit," Virginia mumbled under her breath as she stabbed her fork into a leaf of lettuce.

She lay beneath the covers, a John Grisham novel in one hand. His back was to her. He lay curled up on his side, eyes closed.

Why doesn't he ever make love to me, she thought. I have desires just like every other woman . . . More probably . . . He needs to know I want it . . . I'll give him a hint. I'll ask him if he feels like doing anything.

"So what do you feel like doing honey?" she said.

"Sleeping."

I need to get him excited, she thought.

She put down her book and began to caress his shoulder.

Oh god! Peter Payne thought, She's all hot again.

She began kissing his neck, reaching her hand around him and running it around his stomach.

Come on honey, she thought, come on and turn over. You know what I want. You know what I need . . . I hope he has some steam in him . . . If he makes me do it alone . . . I don't like being a sinner.

I guess I'll have to turn over and do my sacred duty, Peter Payne thought. She can squeeze the life out of a man like a python . . . Damned back-breaker on top of me.

If his brother could visit this man, he, Peter Payne . . . This man so unlike that boy who lay wide awake, Dad howling at the moon . . . This man, children branching off him like strange somewhat problematic fruit, a heavy woman brushing up against him in the night . . . A man performing cryptic adult rituals, succumbing to social shackles, living behind a brutally handsome face. He was far from what he had been, as a pile of greasy sausage is far from the pig it once was, comfortably wallowing in the mud.

Jack sat there in his trailor cleaning his guns, the swimsuit model pinned to the wall, her breasts full and uptilted, water rolling off her brown, apparently desirable body, insensitive, paper, the room without joy. There was the bottle and he would drink from the bottle, and there was the Horse and Hunt Club and the shooting and there was Pete and memories of violation, tubes of red, jungles of gleaming nerve.

I tried to keep his spirits up, thought Pete. You tried, he told himself, you tried but you did not give more of yourself than you thought was essential. You blew it man; hard. Validate all you like, but you blew it and can only pray to Jesus Christ for forgiveness and hope and pray for heaven.

And then there was the field of white fingers, parade of turf, choking agitation, underground rivers of distilled flesh, rolling to outlet.

Virginia begins to receive mail from the casinos regularly: pamphlets, propaganda. She masks her habit, fabricates stories about where the family money goes, tells bottomless lies, bribes her children in order to keep their mouths shut. She rotates between the tv and the refrigerator, grows fat, stupid, lazy, indentured to greenbacks.

"Meatloaf! Are you joshing?" Pete says at the dinner table. "This is the third night running . . . Not to mention the fact that you use so many breadcrumbs the stuff belongs in a bakery . . . Where is the prime rib? Are we paupers? Have I been chasing the American dream in order to eat mystery meat?"

Virginia laughs it off like it's no big thing. She has actually passed off a spam loaf as a meat loaf. She is clever that way. Still, the money she is managing to save by feeding her family scraps hardly makes up for that which is sucked down by the slot machines. She throws silver into them 48-14, runs down to the casinos the moment Pete is out the door. If he happens to be gone for a couple of days, look out: She gambles away whatever she can get her hands on, be it a roll of greenbacks or nickels, never stops to think how big the odds are against her.

"Twenty-five limousines side to side is what, about two-hundred foot?" said Merle. "When you did twenty-one last year you didn't have much room to spare as I recall, so I don't see . . . "

"We just need to change the dynamics of the jump," said Payne. "Make the ramps more effective . . . Hell, I can figure it out."

He prayed frequently, planned. Pictured a flour white Jesus before him, rallying him across the twenty-five limoes with the magical power of Christianity. The image would become distorted: Jesus appearing with a turned up, lop-sided nose...his hair black, curly...lips grinning sarcastically.

Pete made mental offerings to the deity in order to placate him. He had managed to arrive at a satisfactory agreement with God before a jump, laying his children, wife and faith at the altar of monotheism. His courage was largely based on a belief in the divine presence; in divine protection.

He kneeled in prayer, hands clasped, head bowed. It was a Tuesday afternoon, the church was nearly empty. A woman several pews behind him fanned herself with a pamphlet. He felt sticky, uncomfortable down to his loins. He poured forth his heart to Jesus Christ, an awful plaster statue, a ludicrous piece of trash. Vehement, like an idol worshipping savage he prayed, coppery taste in mouth, anus contracted, lips pressed tense.

He got up and remembered how it was. His station wagon was there, he thought, and I can't say I knew because I don't know what I knew. I felt something and did not even bother to knock and just opened up and went in. You felt something boy, he told himself. You felt something and had been feeling it for a long time and it was like you always knew what kind of a seed he was and you could smell it all rotten like puke.

There was that smell and the mellow buzzing of flies in the heat of the trailor and a sense of decay and sadness, even when you go through a dead-man's clothes years later, not rotten but subtle odor and were told and crashed in the belly of water.

"Pete's not here right now . . . I don't know when he'll be back . . . You're welcome to wait for him if you want though...It's just me and Sarah here. Blain is off spending the night at a friend's house," said Virginia.

"That sounds fine," said Merle sitting down.

Sarah lay on the rug watching tv.

Virginia had been inwardly lamenting the fact that she was cut off from the casino for the night. She had $300 in her pocketbook that her husband knew nothing about . . . To see this money multiply, thicken substantially . . . That's pleasure . . . For each dollar to give birth to ten . . . Sarah was the only obstacle . . . Yet Merle . . . She could leave her . . .

"Say Merle," said Virginia. "You wouldn't by any chance be willing to babysit Sarah here for an hour or so while I take a run to the store, would you? . . . There's beer in the fridge and stuff and you could drink beer and watch tv and watch her until I get back."

Sarah looked up sleepily, forehead wrinkled, dissatisfied.

"No, I don't mind," replied Merle. "I'm sitting here anyhow . . . You go ahead. She'll be here when you get back."

Hearing the door slam his heart ticked. He went to the refrigerator and opened a can of beer. Sarah was falling asleep. He sat back down and watched as her eyelids sunk.

She's asleep. I had better take her to bed, he thought.

He picked her little body up in his arms. Her mouth dropped open, the chapped mouth of a child, like a wound on her face . . . Laying her down on the mattress . . . An innocent room, wallpaper spotted with balloons of basic colors, red, yellow, blue.

He watched her breath . . . Face puffing, perspiring, his nostrils quivering . . . It was only later that he would think, I'm such a coward, such a god damned coward.

Yet whatever was dirty, volatile about his nature . . .

She lay innoxious, emblematic (to him) of his own social inadequacy, venery, that moment of crime, an explosion of filth, that irreversibly severs all chords of virtue, exposes man as a spineless amphibian living off the carcasses of ladybugs and butterflies, melting their delicate wings between tongue and teeth.

There was much panting, the more he tried to control, the more it came. Pete came home and Merle was sitting on the couch drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon and Virginia was not there, but Sarah was in her room already.

Peter Payne spent the day in his trailor in quiet contemplation. At noon he walked around the jump sight, inspected the ramp, looked out over the parking lot where they would be. When a reporter asked him if he was prepared to go through with it he replied, "Well I've got certain contracatory obligations so, like it or not, I've got to just go ahead and do it." Early in the evening he ate a light meal, alone, but the Salisbury steak was without flavor and he did not have faith in it.

When the time came he put on his leather outfit, took up his helmet and went out to his bike. Merle informed him that it was in condition.

The incalculable eyes of night laughed, rockets shot up spraying mallow, lilac, mauve...popping, crackling...an odor of sulfur tinged the air. The human animals once again gathered around to see, as wolves might gather around the glow of a dying fire.

"Hell," said Merle. "This'll be a hell of a jump." There was tension, naked, breathed, yes, them. Their white faces formed a wall of worm-like countenance, the many arms and legs postured, gestured accordingly, as some strange satanic beast, teeth shining through the slash of lips, red tongues moist, flickering.

Once again Peter Payne rides out. A wheelie. Cheers.

He gathers strength by riding back and forth before the people, one wheel jacked up in the air, his white uniform dramatically patriotic, warrior like. He accepts the gurgle of praise. He has a love of his fans, the American people, an attachment to them, he would verily throw his body at their mercy.

Eyes viewing the universe through the visor of his helmet, an armor of leather covering his skin - no inch of epidermis showed out of this shell. These acts performed on the dust of the earth assumed Gargantuan proportion, truly epic, immortal, as a star at dawn, larvae. The disembodied voice of the announcer rang out describing in clean masculine tones the madness of the event.

Once again Payne goes through the motions of testing the jump, riding up on the ramp, viewing the cars before him. He gives the thumbs-up.

"So that's it," Merle asks running up.

"It's as it's going to be," says Peter Payne.

Amidst the hush of the fans his bike screams toward the ramp, angling up it. He shoots into the air, over limousines, yet falling short of the opposite ramp, the other shore so to speak, his front tire hits the front hood of the next to last car, slipping, the man's body hurled violently against the pavement, hands still clinging to the bike as it comes after him, bouncing against his back and twisting away.

What was his view of reality?

It was not mundane in the absolute sense of the word. He superimposed the mythopoeic vision of God on the corporeal world, lending his life that essence of naivete necessary to soar above the common strains. His thought patterns stemmed from a definite ego, not altogether catholic, which subordinated certain glories as fixed property for him alone. The honor of the male homosapien naturally tinged his environment; the habits inherited from the ape naturally lent his outlook the perfume of brutality. He saw the world through the fog of the Western Anglo, subliminal frequencies transmitting silhouettes of cowboys, victorious soldiers, tattered flags, hitchhikers on lone prairies, longhorns - all overlapping, American in label.

How did he, Mr. Payne, think?

His initial reaction to situations produced images, calling on his storehouse of previous impressions, prejudices, inherent tendencies . . . These coagulated into calculations, emotions, shocks that impelled his person forward, to perform tasks, jump cars, pray to Christ, penetrate his wife...His thoughts co-ordinated themselves according to his geographic location, the United States appeared against the panorama of the universe as immense, far outsizing suns, solar systems, how much more so opposing countries . . . the Witness watched within, relatively indifferent, clean, apart from the vile places Peter's hands went, performing his mortal functions of defecation and procreation . . . The laughter, the agony of his life, were lines penned in the air, fruits bit into bursting like bubbles . . . His thoughts were countless, sordid, grand, sleazy, ambitious, pitiful. He thought often.

Did he love his family?

He loved his son and daughter by ties of kinship, as one loves one’s country. He loved his wife conjugally, originally with attachment and sexual passion, as a source of gratification, later only in the sense of the actual physical action (almost as a commandment).

Was he afraid?

No.

I heard her crying in the middle of the night, but I didn't say anything because I had heard Dad tell Merle that no one could understand women and Merle said that only pink sissies could, his voice blurpy like a toad's and his hair all strung on his scalp like a doll's. She's just a little girl, but I bet she will be a funny woman. So she didn't come because they kept saying that she was traumatized but I went into the elevator and pressed six and did not wait to hear. They told me at the desk what room he was in and then the nurse saw I didn't know and took me past the machines and in there. There was just the white cast like a mummy, like something from the movies but I saw his eyes and knew he was in there because they were looking at me. They were bright and true blue and he looked at me. He couldn't move because of all those casts. He wasn't dead because he was looking at me, because he talked to me, or made sounds that I understood when I listened close. He said he bet that I didn't want to ride a bike any more. I told him I did. They say wages are bad. I am Blaine so I don't want to work for wages. He's old and he won't do anything any more. That's probably that punishment. I should not care. I'm Blaine so I should not care. I'm a brick.