Sprawling out on the floor of the bar, Elvis's eyes fell on the underside of a nearby table, and he realized that he could probably rip one of its legs off and use it as a cudgel. Which is what he did; but the much larger Odessa Jones beat the shit out of him anyway, or at least continued to until both of them were thrown out of the bar, and he ran afoul of Purvis McLane and his motorcycle chain. Years after this event, when Nimrod was pursuing his philosophy degree, he spent a lot of time contemplating the following question: if Odessa Jones was fighting for a principle, and Elvis McLane was fighting out of a defensive reflex, then what was Purvis McLane up to?

Purvis McLane was engaged in long-range strategic thinking. He acted calmly and dispassionately. Uncle Purvis, Navy veteran and cofounder of the Hell's Angels, simply did what was needed to look out for the overall welfare of his family unit. Nimrod McLane had come to believe that all persons could be divided into Odessas, Elvises, and Purvises, and he considered himself a Purvis all the way.

Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane values. He went to church, he studied the Bible, he read Aquinas. All his life he had despised materialistic people who could only think about money. He had made himself famous and got on the cover of Time by becoming The Conservative Who Hated Yuppies. Which was why he wanted to become president: so he could clean up America.

Tip McLane watched his chief rival for the nomination, Norman Fowler, Jr., sign his own political death warrant, with a flourish, at precisely twelve o'clock noon on the day after Memorial Day. Norman Fowler, like Dan Quayle and a few others, belonged to a fourth category of humanity: he was a Marvis.

McLane was late for a luncheon in Bel Air and had stopped by his hotel suite in downtown L.A. for a quick change of clothing when he happened to notice the digital clock turning over 12:00. Reflexively he turned on his television, which was already set to one of the local network affiliates, and was treated to the never-to-be forgotten sight of Norman Fowler, Jr., at Disneyland, shaking hands with Goofy.

"My god," said his media consultant Ezekiel ("Zeke") Zorn.

"Is this something from Saturday Night Live?" asked his campaign manager Marcus Drasher.

"He's a dead man," was the only comment Tip McLane would make.

"Jesus, the man is worth billions," Drasher said. "He can afford to hire the best. And what do they do? They sent him to Disneyland. And they let Goofy shake his hand!"

"This has got to be Cy Ogle's work. Ogle has a Goofy fetish. It's a known fact," Zorn said suspiciously.

"Are you crazy?" Tip McLane said.

Zeke Zorn was a high-intensity sort of guy. He was an Elvis - he reacted but he didn't think much. For all this, he has a basically sunny, open, California personality, and it was unusual to hear this kind of paranoia coming from him. This was the third time he had brought up the subject of Cy Ogle, apropos of nothing, in the last week.

"I would bet you money," Zorn said glaring suspiciously at the screen, "that the man in that Goofy suit is none other than Cy Ogle himself. It's just what he would do."

"You're off your rocker," McLane said.

"Well, let me just say that if this campaign ever went to Disneyland - which it never would - I would have half a dozen snipers following you around with orders to blow Goofy's head off if he came within half a mile. Because this is just the kind of thing that Ogle would cook up."

Drasher watched this startling performance and then burst out laughing. Drasher was a Purvis. Like McLane, he had grown up poor and become a highly educated conservative. He was black and had grown up in Mississippi; but he and McLane had much more in common with each other than they did with Zeke Zorn, a man who dressed so finely that they did not even know the names of many of the articles of clothing that Zorn wore every single day.

"You're serious," Drasher said in wonderment. "You think that Cy Ogle sent Goofy in to do a political hit on Fowler."

"It's just too perfect," Zorn said. "When these perfect things happen, you have to look for a guiding hand somewhere. It's like Dukakis and the tank helmet in '88. I suppose you think that just happened." Zorn said these words almost contemptuously. "Someone noticed that Dukakis looked like Snoopy. Someone put the Snoopy helmet in his hands. Mark my words - somewhere out there is a cartoon character with your name on it, Nimrod McLane."

"Yosemite Sam," Drasher suggested.

"Sounds paranoid to me," McLane said.

"Hey," Zorn said, throwing up his hands, "once Norman Fowler has shaken hands with Goofy, no force in the universe can stop us. But" - he shook his finger accusingly at the television, "once the presidential campaign gets underway, this is the kind of thing that we have to look out for."

"Let's not get cocky," Drasher said. "There is still one force in the universe that can keep us from the nomination."

"What's that?" McLane said.

Drasher suddenly raised his voice into a polished baritone with a white southern accent, rendering a flawless imitation of the Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel. "The power of JEEEEE - zuss!" he said.

"Good point," Zorn said. "Let's get our butts over to that damn picnic."

33

"I was spreading some of this fancy gourmet mustard on my frankfurter just now," the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel said, holding a jar of the savory condiment up so that all the people at the luncheon could see it, "when I noticed that there were some small flecks of material mixed in with the mustard. Now, in the part of the country where I come from, mustard is bright yellow and perfectly smooth and homogeneous in its composition. But since I have come to California ..." Having telegraphed the joke, he paused briefly to allow laughter to build, and then subside. Then, as only a politician could, he went ahead and delivered it anyway. "Let's just say that I have spread some things on my frankfurters here in Southern California that were labeled as mustard, but in my part of the country probably would have been confiscated and analyzed in a police laboratory." The crowd laughed dutifully, for the second time, but Rev. Sweigel would not let go of the theme. "I engaged one of my staff in a lighthearted conversation about this mustard, or MOO-tard as it says on the jar, and he informed me that these flecks of material that I had alluded to were, in fact, actual seeds of the mustard plant. Mustard seeds."

The crowd went dead silent, like Sunday school children who know that they are about to be told that they stand a high chance of burning in Hell. All of the people here at the Southern California Rightist Coalition who had been brought up Christian (which was most of them) knew what was coming. The non-Christians were already so alienated by the heavily pork-oriented meal that they weren't talking much anyway.

Sweigel continued. "Now our lord JEEE-zuss once spoke of mustard seeds. He said that all one needed in order to perform miracles was to have faith the size of a mustard seed.

"This is a piece of Scripture that I have known since I was just a little boy. But I never really understood what it meant until today. You see, in all of my life, this is the first time that I have ever actually seen a mustard seed. My mustard has always been the bright yellow substance to which I earlier alluded. So I did not know, frankly, whether a mustard seed was a very small thing, like a poppy seed, or a very large thing, like a coconut. So when I read these words of our lord JEEE-zuss, I did not know whether he was saying that we needed just a tiny little bit of faith, or a whole lot of faith. "But today the LORD has seen fit to educate me in these matters and I have had my first taste of expensive Southern California MOO-tard, and I have seen actual mustard seeds. And I can report to you that they are neither extremely small, as seeds go, nor are they extremely large."