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  After a few minutes of military presses, Prance left his homemade barbells and kicked through the sawdust floor of the tent toward an olympic-size pool of blancmange. The dozen-odd spectators on hand shadowed his every step. The two moustachioed Spaniards had already set up their camera equipment at one end of the pool and, as Prance arrived at the other end, offered him upturned thumbs and a Ready-when-you-are. Prance then speared through the surface of underlit gel and quickly pulled himself into a fetal ball which tumbled gently toward pool bottom. As he drifted downward he extended his arms and legs one at a time until he came to rest at bottoman anthropomorphic starfish sealed in amber. Many minutes laterI had stopped counting themhe

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  emerged at the camera end of the pool, glistening and belching like a newborn baby.

  The onlookers gathered around Prance, vying for handfuls of his slick biceps and asking questions.

  Prance, when is your next stunt? a fawning member of the press asked.

  Stunt? Prance responded, insulted.

  The reporter blanched and said, Er, uh . . . sorry. Well, what, in fact, do you call what you do?

  The end of it is art; the process, love.

  One of the filmmakers had stepped away from the whir of his cameras and draped a towel across the expanse of Prance's shoulders. But Prance, he said, the two are often indistinguishable, no?

  Prance's simple reply: That, my friend, is a confusion we might all live happily with.

  I saw Prance Williams in person once more after the blancmange event of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. This second and last encounter took place just after the War at a transvestite show on Bourbon Street. During the intervening years I had, of course, kept track of his exhibitions of love and art, albeit by way of piecemeal reportage. For instance, wire service snippets described with woeful inadequacy Prance's hang-glide through a hellish forest fire in southern California; the glancing morning newspaper reader could not possibly have imagined this quiet Icarus whose wings would not melt. Also, film critics laureled the documentary account of his blancmange swim, which rode the art theatre circuit for a few years before disappearing altogether.

  And there were interviews which found Prance in sublime laconic form:

  Q: Prance, the big event?

  A: An ocean.

  Q: Huh?

  A: I'd like to swim one.

  Q: Which one?

  A: The coldest one that isn't all ice.

  Plans of a transoceanic swim had yet to see fruition that night I walked down Bourbon Street; and I felt for a few horrid moments that the voice of the barker outside the cabaret I entered sang the death knell of those plans. Come on in, folks! the barker spat from around his fat cigar, Nothing but the finest in live transvestite entertainment!

  As if a TV show patron would settle for anything less, I thought as I hurried on past, only to be knocked back by a sight which bored my heart like a musket ball''Prance Williams: The Human Pedestal" dashed in livid red across the lobby kiosk. The many sordid implications of the phrase washed through my bowels like ice water, though my worst fears were assuaged once I saw what was actually occurring on stage. There was Prance, not in drag, but trussed in an

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  austere black singlet. He was a dozen years older, but one certainly couldn't tell by his stern muscle tone and suede-smooth face. Even if the bright footlights did not obscure the crowd, whose lewd caterwauling and sex stinks glutted the air, Prance nonetheless would have willed it from his vision. All he saw was water. An ocean. And two land masses on either side of it waiting to be inspanned by the wake of one human swimmer. The garish she-he's whom he balanced on his dimpled chin were just so much dead weightprops of the process of love whose end is art.

  When I left Bourbon Street that evening, I'd come to love Prance Williams like Jesus. Say what one will of the tawdry forum to which his art had been relegated, his art was still alive. That evening, I'd once again seen mankind's aureate potential realized in the form of Prance Williams, and the strained breaths he had emitted under the weight of a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound transvestite ignited within me an acute philoprogenitive longing that had lain dormant since I first saw him in Chicago.

  I was of marrying age when I left Bourbon Street, and soon afterward took a wife. In the early days of our marriage, my wife and I often made love in open fields, beneath heaven-colored bunting tacked across the sky by angels. And we had several children, all of whose faces I saw hours before their conceptions in my wife's ecstatic tears. Children . . . Children . . . Children became my locomotive love chant. Our entangled bodies would rock to and fro upon a grassy hillside and I would grunt Children . . . Children . . . Children because children are the potential of perfection and perfection is never redundant. After awhile, though, my wife became displeased with our romantic life and said making love to me had become a mystic science. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I asked her. Oh, she said, When we make love, we shouldn't think of children. We should just . . . you know. Anyway, I'm tired of having children.

  Seeing that my wife had borne seven children in as many years, I couldn't very well take the last word on the matter As the bunting of our love arena began to droop with moth holes and dry-rot, I did pray for some god-like capacity to bear children. I prayed for some fissurevestigial since the heyday of Zeusto yawn across my forehead or chest. A fissure from which golden-curled homunculi might bound forth into the world to make love and art, with my blessing of a swat to the bare behind. This hope for Olympian fertility was all I had when my wife and seven young children left for Indianapolis with a man my wife considered "sounder" than I.

  I nearly lost all hope of ever bearing children one autumn day in 1962 while I sat in a barber shop waiting to get my hair cut like President Kennedy's. I was leafing through a copy of Argosy and, amongst the judo school and pistol ads toward the back, came across a picture of a smiling, middle-aged Prance Williams. He was modeling what was advertised as Dr. Pulvermacher's Electrogalvanic Life Belt. "I can still climb the highest mountain, swim any river, do 1000

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  push-upswith Dr. Pulvermacher's E-G Life Belt," said the photograph's caption. How desperate was his smile; I didn't think he ever smiled. Could this have been rationalized as a necessary step in the process? I held the page up to the light and searched the photograph for the tell-tale white outlines of a paste-up. It was really Prance, his body the same mechanism of spring-loaded compaction it was thirty years earlierthat's what was so lacerating. Perhaps he felt he'd hung enough flesh on the barbed interface of loving and mere living, and was going to let someone else take the chances for us. Maybe he decided to seal his wounds by hiding in the backs of magazines selling mail-order health gimmicks. I did so by moving in with Mother.

  Mother will tell me that if there was ever a charleston, it was that Prance Williams. Was always pulling weird maneuvers and never had an exercise show. Now Jack Fairlane taught us survival, she says. Then I'll tell her that if one really loves life, one's life should be more than a study in survival. If one loves life, all that isn't best is lamentable. The accumulation of an individual's steps should leave him on the top of the world.

  Mother will then ask me where are my life's crowning achievements, where are the fruits of my risks, where are the risks? And I'll reply that if one can't change one's world for the best today, one should hope to do so soon afterward, even though such hope can devour a day, a month, a year, as if in a heartbeat. Well, she'll say, if I had Jack Fairlane's philosophy I wouldn't be whiling away my middle years with my old mother. I'd like to tell her that if we collared Prance and Fairlane in their heyday, stood each behind a lectern on either side of Edward R. Murrow, and ran their respective philosophies up the flagpole, we'd see which one we'd salute.

  Murrow would open the debate with the following question: Mr. Fairlane, what is love?

  Blisters of sweat erupt through the kinescope grain of Fairlane's forehead: Er, uh . . . Love? . . . . He step
s from behind the lectern and entertains the audience with a blinding succession of four-point toe-touches.

  We're impressed with your athletic prowess, Mr. Fairlane. But again, what is love?

  Try my candybar, kids. It's a high-energy, nutritious snack that will tide. . . .

  Mr. Fairlane??

  And beneath the hot studio lights, Jack's pancake makeup and hair bluing ooze like lava into the open collar of his jumpsuit.

  Would you like to take this question, Mr. Williams?

  Prance nods politely, steps forward in his black formal singlet, and hands a revolver to his lamé-wrapped lady assistant who's just stepped from the wings. She moves ten paces away, levels the gun at Prance's face and, upon his unwavering cue of "My dear," fires. As the audience recovers from collective fibrillations, Prance removes the spent bullet from the clench of his teeth, holds it to

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  the light like a diamond for all to see, and utters in a voice as sure as his backstroke, "Love."

  But that's a fantasy I've kept stoked in my heart for over twenty years. This morning, as usual, I apologize to Mother for having forced her to dance, and join her in front of Jack Fairlane's wrinkly blue image for some deep-breathing exercises. Mother folds her arms into facsimiles of chicken wings, flaps them like a chicken and says, I'm getting old.

  I start into some moderately-paced deep knee bends. Mother is now wheezing a bit and says, You're getting old. She strains a glance at me through a milky welling of tears while still keeping time with Fairlane. Your seed is getting old, she continues, and dammit, that is life.

  Mother's words lock me in the bottom of one of my knee bends; I try to rock myself upward, but end up falling back on my ass with a thud that rattles the pictures on the wall and sends the old Motorola on the fritz.

  Dammit, look at this now, Mother growls. Monkey with the rabbit ears till you get the picture back.

  I remain on my ass and rest backward on the palms of my hands. Wait a minute, Mother. I lean forward and squint into the flickering tube. Can't you see it? Can't you hear it?

  Mother aims a cock-eyed glance at me. She puzzles at the glee my voice undoubtedly registers. What? All I see is a bunch of goddamn snow!

  I walk over to the TV on my knees and, as I turn up the volume, rue the infirmities of age which prevent her from seeing and hearing what I do. The report, I say. Watch. Listen.

  The angels seem to have gotten out their tack hammers and are fine-tuning their halleluia chorus. A greased and goggled speck of man and a pace boat were spotted two hundred miles off of the British Isles. He has to be eighty years old! Mother says, and I tell her no eighty-year-old suit of skin and muscle ever hugged bones so tightly. Prance Williams evidently has proceeded quite well through the years, thank you; and I'll be among the jubilarians welcoming him as he steps upon the chalky shores of England and rattles seawater from his body with a heron's aplomb. And I will have never seen Art so wet, so lissome, so anciently young.

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  Charlotte

  by Tony Earley

  The professional wrestlers are gone. The professional wrestlers do not live here anymore. Frannie Belk sold the Southeastern Wrestling Alliance to Ted Turner for more money than you would think, and the professional wrestlers sold their big houses on Lake Norman and drove in their BMWs down I-85 to bigger houses in Atlanta.

  Gone are the Thundercats, Bill and Steve, and the Hidden Pagans with their shiny red masks and secret signs; gone is Paolo the Peruvian, who didn't speak English very well but could momentarily hold off as many as five angry men with his flying bare feet; gone are Comrade Yerkov the Russian Assassin and his bald nephew Boris, and the Sheik of the East and his Harem of Three, and Hank Wilson Senior the Country Star with his beloved guitar Leigh Ann; gone is Naoki Fujita who spit the mysterious Green Fire of the Orient into the eyes of his opponents whenever the referee turned his back; gone are the Superstud, the Mega Destroyer, the Revenger, the Preacher, Ron Rowdy, Tom Tequila, the Gentle Giant, the Littlest Cowboy, Genghis Gandhi, and Bob the Sailor. Gone is Big Bill Boscoe, the ringside announcer, whose question "Tell me, Paolo, what happened in there?" brought forth the answer that all Charlotteans still know by heart"Well Beel, Hidden Pagan step on toe and hit head with chair and I no can fight no more"; gone are Rockin' Robbie Frazier, the Dreamer, the Viking, Captain Boogie Woogie, Harry the Hairdresser, and Yee-Hah O'Reilly the Cherokee Indian Chief. And gone is Lord Poetry, and all that he stood for, his archrival Bob Noxious, and Darling Donnisthe Sweetheart of the SWA, the Prize Greater Than Any Beltthe girl who had to choose between the two of them, once and for all, during the Final Battle for Love.

  Gone.

  Now Charlotte has the NBA, and we tell ourselves we are a big deal. We dress in teal and purple and sit in traffic jams on the Billy Graham Parkway so that we can yell in the new coliseum for the Hornets, who are bad, bad, bad. They are hard to watch, and my seats are good. Whenever any of the Hornets come into the bar, and they do not come often, we stare up at them like they were exotic animals come to drink at our watering hole. They are too tall to talk to for very long, not enough like us, and they make me miss the old days. In the old days in Charlotte we did not take ourselves so seriously. Our heroes had

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  platinum blond hair and twenty-seven-inch biceps, but you knew who was good and who was evil, who was changing over to the other side, and who was changing back. You knew that sooner or later the referee would look away just long enough for Bob Noxious to hit Lord Poetry with a folding chair. You knew that Lord Poetry would stare up from the canvas in stricken wonder, as if he had never once in his life seen a folding chair. (In the bar, we screamed at the television, Turn Around, ref, turn around! Look out, Lord Poetry, look out!) In the old days in Charlotte we did not have to decide if the Hornets should trade Rex Chapman (they should not) or if J. R. Reid was big enough to play center in the NBA (he is, but only sometimes). In the old days our heroes were as superficial as we werebut we knew thatand their struggles were exaggerated versions of our own. Now we have the Hornets. They wear uniforms designed by Alexander Julian, and play hard and lose, and make us look into our souls. Now when we march disappointed out of the new coliseum to sit unmoving on the parkway, in the cars we can't afford, we have to think about the things that are true: Everyone in Charlotte is from somewhere else. Everyone in Charlotte tries to be something they are not. We spend more money than we make, but it doesn't help. We know that the Hornets will never make the playoffs, and that somehow it is our fault. Our lives are small and empty, and we thought they wouldn't be, once we moved to the city.

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  My girlfriend's name is Starla. She is beautiful and we wrestle about love. She does not like to say she loves me, even though we have been together four and a half years. She will not look at me when I say I love her, and if I wanted to, I could ball up the words and use them like a fist. Starla says she has strong lust for me, which should be enough; she says we have good chemistry, which is all anyone can hope for. Late in the night, after it is over, after we have grappled until the last drop of love is gone from our bodies, I say, "Starla, I can tell that you love me. You wouldn't be able to do it like that if you didn't love me." She sits up in bed, her head tilted forward so that her red hair almost covers her face, and picks the black hair that came from my chest off of her breasts and stomach. The skin across her chest is flushed red, patterned like a satellite photograph; it looks like a place I should know. She says, "I'm a grown woman and my body works. It has nothing to do with love." Like a lot of people in Charlotte, Starla has given up on love. In the old days Lord Poetry said to never give up, to always fight for love, but now he is gone to Atlanta with a big contract and a broken heart, and I have to do the best that I can. I hold on, even though Starla says she will not marry me. I have heard that Darling Donnis lives with Bob Noxious in a big condo in Buckhead. Starla wants to know why I can't be happy with what we have. We have good ch
emistry and apartments in Fourth Ward and German cars. She says it is enough to live with and more than anyone had where we came from. We can eat out whenever we want.