"Hell," he said, "that's still better than the price you'd have to pay at the Jiffy."

THE NIGHT of the motorcycle ride Kenny invited me to a spare rib barbeque at Rick Stacy's trailer just up the dirt road from his place. Somebody had collected a big baggie full of mushrooms from the fields, and they were tucked in the glove compartment of an abandoned car to be enjoyed after the ribs. A lot of people had collected for the big feast, and Rick Stacy was slowly basting the ribs with barbeque sauce, not concentrating on anything in particular. There were 27 pounds of ribs to be gone through that night, and Mike the four foot tall Great Dane decided he would avoid the hog traps that night and hang around the rib fire where he occupied himself scratching hard, trying to fit parts of his body against a bush which shook like a storm all night.

"Hey remember that night when Mike caught himself an armadillo and was walking down the road with it in his jaws?" said a tall boy who was the son of a big dairy farmer nearby. "Let me tell you, that wasn't no chocolate bunny!" Patty, Kenny's wife, couldn't picture it. "Aww, he wudn't do that!" she said. Rick's little boy cruised around with a football helmet, riding his trike. People wafted in. One of the principals was showing around color snapshots of his marijuana farm out in the woods. The plants looked to be five or six feet high. There was what later looked like a laundry bag full of grass from the farm somewhere around. Three or four joints were always circling among fifteen people, so one passed every five seconds. There was potato salad, lasagna, big loaves of bread, a huge salad, cases of beer, coca-cola, and other things proper to a feast. More people stopped by.

"You know, rednecks, real hard core rurals, are gettin' high now. Sure. They drink all their lives. What the fuck, they musta been lookin' for a high."

"Always was. I remember when I was just big enough for a bicycle, little kids could always go bong-bongin it."

What in hell was that?

"We'd ride our bikes up to a gas pump and buy two cents worth of gas. Then we'd go out in the woods and put it right up to our noses and," here he imitates a gasoline pump, one arm as the handle and the other as the spigot, eyes blinking and rolling upward like the gallon counter and mouth making the sound of the machine as it fills the tank, "Bong bong! Bong bong! Bong bong!"

"Then we'd pass out. That's bong-bongin it."

That reminded someone else of the times when they were kids that they'd hear the mosquito control truck coming into their neighborhood. They'd race out of bed and into the garage and hop on their bikes and a whole pack of buddies would pedal like runway fools into the thick white cloud of kerosene and DDT sprayed out of a nozzle at the back. "There wasn't any chemical high to it," said the son of a dairy farmer, "but it sure was cool looking into that cloud for a while." And about the time their lungs got filled with stuff, after a couple of blocks, they lost too much energy to keep up and, like a squadron of tired mosquitos, fell back out of the cloud and rode home to bed.

Kenny and the rest decided to go to Spudnick's for more action, so they left, and I went home to sleep.

I RETURNED late the next afternoon to Kenny's trailer. I knocked on the door and waited. I was about to leave when I heard Patty tell me to come in. I sat in the living room and watched the local news as Patty said Kenny would be out in a minute. One of the items was about the trial of an Orlando man for possession of marijuana. The fellow was caught by an agent with an ounce or two of grass and maybe a tablet of something. The man was in his mid-forties, and it was his first offense. Believing the marijuana laws to be more relaxed, he pleaded guilty, expecting to get probation. The judge sentenced him to a year in prison and asked if he had anything to say. The man said why not put him in jail forever if he was going to go to jail at all. The judge immediately complied by giving him the maximum--five years.

When a newsman asked whether he would appeal, the man said no he would not. He said if the American system was so rotten as to put him in jail for that offense at his age, he didn't care, he didn't want any part of its procedures. He didn't appeal.

When Kenny came out of the bedroom the sun was shining in on my eyes so I didn't him very well when I asked how he was doing. Kenny shuffled along dragging his foot carefully on the floor, and I could see that he had a pained look on his face. He braced his hand against the chair and sat down very slowly and carefully. "Not too good," he said between several short intakes of breath. His voice was wheezy. "Didn't you hear? I had an accident last night. Coming back from Spudnick's on the motorcycle."

Now I could see. There was a big swath of raw flesh just below Kenny's ribs. His elbow was swollen really big, and so was his hand. There was a deep gouge near his wrist. He showed me a big sore on his hip, and he showed me his shirt lying in the corner. It was a strip of rags.

He said he had a lot of mushrooms, then went to Spudnick's for a couple of beers. On the way home he just nodded out at 60 or 70 mph and woke up as his bike hit the loose gravel at the side of the road. "I bailed out," said Kenny, "so the bike wouldn't fall on my leg, but held onto the handlebar so the bike wouldn't roll back on me while we were both spinning around. It's sort of good to know it happened when I was so fucked up that I didn't know what I was doing. Riding around drunk. Cause I would hate to make a mistake in riding. Never had an accident except when I was messed up. Now I'll probably learn not to do that again, and I'll be all right.

"Then I had to walk half a mile back to Spudnick's and get some help. Sheriff took me home, and Rick picked up my motorcycle. Last bike I had a wreck and somebody saw two sheriffs pack it in the trunk of their cruiser and drive away with it. I was in no position to demand it back at the time. It's kinda fucked up, but at least I got it."

RELATIVELY SPEAKING, Kenny was new to the country. His father worked as a bartender in a Northern country club and was partial to games of chance. But Kenny had broken with that past. He bartered in watermelons, sold hay, worked on his cars and bike out front and tended his horses. He planned on growing some kind of crops on his land, but back of it all he wanted something bigger. What he had didn't sound like quite enough to support a family yet.

Kenny may not have been a Southerner by blood, but he wanted the freedom to get loose and do crazy things, and his major if seemingly impossible ambition was to acquire a lot of land in the state which professors at the University of Florida said had the fastest rising population and biggest land development rush in the history of the United States. Kenny took some good natured kidding about how "speedy" he was. He would need all the courage and speed he could muster to get that plot of land before the developers did.

But I didn't think he would even have a chance of getting more than the 13 acres he had now until I heard about some of his midnight rides on the black bike to cities around the state. I never asked him about them, but during the course of my visit he would talk every now and then about night trips at 100 mph in his T-shirt in the rain to places like Jacksonville and Tampa and Cocoa. One time he said he was stopped by a state trooper on the interstate. "I didn't think he could see me in the rain," said Kenny, "but I couldn't outrun him so I pulled over. I had been runnin without lights, but he was sitting by a bridge and heard this sound go by real fast, although he couldn't see anything. He caught up with me after a couple miles and that was that. I told him, 'I just had a big argument with my wife and I had to bust out.' He believed it. Those troopers, they understand a guy with a problem like that. He probably felt the same way himself sometime. He told me to cut down the throttle and he followed me for a while, then pulled away." So I think maybe he does have a chance to get what he's dreaming of, but he'll have to survive quite a few more of those trips. Kenny's wife Patty told Rick Stacy's wife that she wouldn't be surprised if a "trooper showed up at the front door to our trailer one night and told me Kenny had been killed in an accident."