Just awakened from twenty years of intrusive analysis, deep druggings, locked wards, and forced shock treatments (not necessarily in that order), Kansan David Daniels begins his journey. Outside Kingdom City, Missouri, when his car suddenly stops, it's nearly rammed by a Mercedes bus before David is ushered into a miasmic construction trailer by Ména Menachem. After the strange old Jew in biblical robing tells his delinquent granddaughter that David is the one they've been waiting for, David is prodded into divulging the story of his now-renewed life - with which Ména seems already familiar, somehow. Following dinner and lessons on spiritual immortality, Ména warns David to watch out for their common foe, a red-haired ogre called Hista who's tainted the human experience for millennia.

Picking up his parents' Cadillac in St. Louis, David drives for Florida and once more encounters the mysterious bus called EMPIRE EXPRESS. At a giant Georgian fireworks outlet, an unkempt Arab tempts David with drugs, party girls, and weapons of mass destruction - just before the joint is blown to smithereens. Shaken but unscathed, David is offered theories of the mind by a curmudgeonly nightmaid at the WHITE HOUSE motel.

Finally in the Land of Sunshine, David visits a friend of Menachem's, Margot Morningstar, a voluptuous carwash girl more interested in castrating dictators than polishing hubcaps. She too seems to know David and invites him to her special place. The following Tuesday, en route to the tryst, David stops at the Beverly Hills Deli and meets Sarah Wiesenthal, an overworked waitress and survivor of hitler's deathcamps who tells middle-aged Daniels that she's waited so very long, that God's on David's side.

Perplexed but determined, David continues to the tundra where Morning canters about on her bareback stallion, Hope. Clad in loin cloth and roses, Morning reveals a bit of their common past-and present mission. When she hints at their roots in the heavens, on a not-so-distant planet Freedom in the Paradise starsystem, David wonders if she's trying to push him off the deep end. Indeed, before consummation, their interlude is disrupted by neo-nazis. While David pursues the grizzly thugs, Morningstar vanishes. And, after a week of hunting for the lady, just before departing dear dixie, David finds the stallion butchered beside Margot's torched abode.

Late the next night, on the lonely highway home, David is lured into an Illinois truck stop and served cocainized coffee by a gaudy dude. Easily besting the pusher Little Baghdad, David presses northwest despite great pain, but finds no trace left of the Menachem trailer in Kingdom City - only a discarded construction sign that says, "Welcome to Your New West Jerusalem."

Back in Kansas, David's body continues to deteriorate while Poor Richard's Apartment House affords little sanctuary from bill collectors. A pine cane Moses and a message from Menachem that mankind's good dreams will soon be realized seem to be our Renaissance man's only salvation as he dwells in a cubby hole behind an empty bookcase and periodically spys on a cross-eyed nazi dominatrix/bill collector. The surgically correct fraulein and her two brothers, Brownie and Heinie, the ones who intruded on Morning's tundra, now mean to attach David's livelihood - his video equipment. Desperate to personally triumph by living a few normal years before his muscular affliction overwhelms him, David sneaks out to visit a Kansas Attorney and sue the doctors who subdued him. Lawyer Logan, more than sympathetic, refers Video Daniels to a Missouri barrister, Rabbi Green. While awaiting his winter appointment with justice, David finds solace in memories of an unrequited love from Lincoln High and, later, his post-Marine Corps visit to Puberty Park, Nevada, where Mr. Sam the Crippled Man's acrobatic nieces performed under the Big Top - a magical night to remember, a night when Mr. Sam spoke of celestial things and a Marine buddy lost at Iwo Jima, LCPL Mathew Waters.

Returning to the Rising Star of Kansas, when a onetime nurse and friend from the State Hospital, Big Brandy, is kidnapped by the neo-nazis, David knows the so-called SwizzleSticks mean business. They've already turned his favorite pool parlor into a drug house and when it's time to visit Rabbi Green, he's diverted to the M. Pyre Trust Building, greeted by Hista (Martin Pyre) disquised as Father Peter Martin.

The devil only harasses David - for the time being. Good times do come when Morningstar, having escaped her captors, reappears as a Lenexa Policewoman and welcomes David into her arms. They spend Thanksgiving at the Pipe Club and aboard the Hound Dog, a casino-on-wheels where Doc Riddle finally diagnoses David's Multiple Sclerosis. Granny Smith, proprietrix of the portable gambling parlor, says the only reason the SwizzleNuts didn't bother David for two decades was because he posed no threat with a drugged mind.

Christmas eve, Morningstar suddenly tells David he's LCPL Waters reborn, and she runs away to Hope, Arizona. David is left to ride Blind Herbie's moped to St. Louis for the holidays; the Pyre Patrol has impounded his Chevy. Following his nephew's graduation from Lincoln High where David discovers Granny was really his English Teacher and Menachem his wrestling coach, David befriends one Coleen Baxter whose been processing his dad's memoirs. Amidst a game of eight-ball betwixt David and his father, Raymond O. Daniels, P.U., Granny arrives from Kansas with April Butler and bad news. Big Brandy bought the farm big time.

Granny leaves her Super Stock Dodge, Proud Mary, for David's return to Kansas and April stays in St. Louis to ride back with him. The next day, when David escorts his sister Victoria and niece Kimble to the Fox Theatre, April and Coleen come along. At intermission, they encounter Granny's biker friends from the coast, movie stars Sly, Paco, and Kitty Sunshine Frank. Taking the helm of Sunshine's Harley, David leads the rat pack to O'Grady's Grill. Much later that night, Miss Frank and David (who's now barely able to walk, much less copulate), spend a dreamy, healing night in the Connell Cabin on Mt. Olive - where David was born two days after the end of WW II. In the morning, they rendezvous with the others at David's parents' house. Right after Sunshine reveals she's the reincarnation of Anne Frank and that Morningstar's her older sister, Margot Frank, the house explodes. Miraculously, a roll call shows no casualties.

Scrambling from the rubble to battle beelzebub on his own turf, David crawls into Proud Mary and speeds west - with the SwizzleTurds in tight tow. Beside a Columbia, Missouri, abortion clinic, David engages the Schicklgruber Triplets in a fierce firefight. With Granny's Uzzi, he slays Brownie and Heinie. But Hista arrives in a chopper with David's parents and talks David into surrendering his weapon to Lenore. Then the Empire Express bus shows up with M. Pyre's geriatric followers ready to lynch David from atop their coach. Before the devilish deed is accomplished, though, David commands Herr Hista to kill himself - and to everyone's surprise, he raises Luger to head, and does it! The mob wants to let David go, but Lenore is obsessed; she says she wants to see if he's really the one the Jews have awaited so long. As the sky thunders and snaps with lightning, she crunches the bus into gear.

Dropping to the end of the rope, David suddenly spots a piercing light and follows it with Judah Maccabee on an allegorical journey through time and space. They raise the dead of disasters past and witness the souls of six million Jews lead the way to Heaven, ultimately lifting with every other oppressed people from the lifeless stacks of all the world's dead reiche. During the biblical voyage, adolph hitler is judged at last, sent to hell with six meat hooks in the back of his neck forever. Their cleansing of the world done in a matter of days, David and Judah rest beside their caisson in an open field.

When Daniels awakes, however, he's back in Kansas with Morningstar, Sunshine, Menachem, and Mr. Sam. David's been unconscious since lightning struck his hanging tree to save his life. The Cold War is history; Granny says peace, freedom, and prosperity are growing everywhere. Thus, David Daniels comes to savor his days in the sun, at this place, in our time; so the tale is told.

end synopsis