Daredevil Jesse Jaime

[Short Story] A local stuntman prepares for his last performance.

This is the first part of the trilogy “The Life and the Death of Small Town Celebrities.” See part II: Bipo Bala’s Doom: or, Calamity Kid’s Last Adventure; and part III: Unconventional Weapons of War.

Local daredevil Jesse Jaime planned his death with as much professionalism as he did with any of his stunts. Everything would be the same as ever. He would accelerate his motorcycle to the ramp; he would fly over three buses that burned with gasoline; and then he would wave midair to the hundreds of people watching him. The next steps, however, would be to look ahead, to put a tight pressure on his breaks, and then to position his handlebar all the way leftwards. The landing on the second ramp—where he would guarantee an exact right angle between the floor and his front tire—would be enough to catapult his motorcycle forwards and then break his neck.

I don’t know why Jesse Jaime wanted to die. I once talked with Janaina about it. She was his assistant, his manager and also his wife. I wrote to her. She invited me for dinner. I went to her house and we ate and we drank and we both cried together. I tried to do the manly thing and comfort the widow, but I cried way more than she did. To be more honest with you, I wailed as she placed my head on her huge bosom. When she said “there you go, there you go” while caressing my hair, I could not stop myself. Maybe Janaina cried a lot on her own. Maybe it felt good for her to be the one doing the comforting.

“Why the hell did he wear a helmet anyway?” I asked Janaina in her arms.

“I think he wanted to have an open casket at his funeral,” Janaina said. We laughed so hard after this that we cried a different cry this time.

By god, why do men die? What is a man, anyway? Janaina offered me an answer to that, though I don’t think anyone can understand a single thing about anything serious. The story that I am about to tell you, for example, has nothing to be understood, nothing at all, because you can’t know a man, you just can’t. Janaina said that Jesse Jaime talked with a kid before he went. You see, a daredevil usually cleans and checks his motorcycle before a performance. He does so while stepping on mud and on dropped buckets of popcorn. It was in a moment like this that a little kid approached Jesse Jaime. The kid asked if the daredevil was ever afraid.

“Are you ever afraid?”