Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (15 page)

Soon he was imagining having sex with almost every woman he encountered. Old Mrs. Lundquist–with her big, leathery boobs and her hair like a lemonade-stained Lhasa apso–cheerfully begged him to sodomize her as she leaned over the soda fountain in her
Swedish Sweets Shoppe
. Gaunt Mrs. Appleton, the Fire Chief’s wife, gave Gordon a porpoise-like blowjob in the deep end of the high school swimming pool; he couldn’t help himself after he saw her in that black one-piece nylon bathing suit with her nipples poking out. All three of the check out clerks at
Ivan’s Swedish Market
(even that mean one with the beet-colored beehive hair and the drawn-on eyebrows) flung off their cobalt blue smocks and laid down naked in the cereal aisle so Gordon could successively hump them while being watched over by Count Chocula, Cap’n Crunch, and that fey-looking leprechaun on the Lucky Charms box. Even Gordon’s grandmother and his sexy first cousin, Hadleigh, grappled with him in an erotic shower scene. Gordon’s libidinous imagination knew no bounds.

He became a master of jacking-off. He did it everywhere: in trees, irrigation ditches, abandoned forts, Sam’s dog house, and late one night with the vacuum cleaner hose down at the Pink Elephant Car Wash (the best seventy-five cents he’d ever spent). He experimented with lubricants. In the bathroom he sampled soaps (Dial was good, Ivory even better, but Lava Hand Soap–with pumice–would never touch his foreskin again), shaving cream (Brut Cool Mint Gel was quite tingly), various shampoos and conditioners, his mother’s Oil of Olay, and in a fit of sheer madness, Vick’s VapoRub
(yowch!).
In the kitchen: butter, Cheez Whiz, sour cream (he could have made a tasty baked potato), Cool Whip, egg yolks, Aunt Jemima’s Pure Maple Syrup (
sticky…
), and anchovy paste (more for its smell than its texture). In the garage: well… after an encounter with a can of Quaker State 30-weight motor oil he became convinced he had no business seeking his pleasure there.

With all this masturbatory activity, Gordon began to consider himself something of a sexual sophisticate, especially in relation to his peers. He literally thought about sex all the time, during almost every waking moment. He could muster up a mental image of almost every position in the
Kama Sutra.
He was able to define esoteric terms like masochism, cunnilingus, fellatio, frottage, and
ménage à trois.
But he still hadn’t even come close to getting laid. Imagine his frustration. He had yet to see an actual nude woman in the flesh, aside from his own mother. And he had yet to sprout even his first pubic hair.

But all that was soon to change.

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Ever since Gordon’s mother found out she’s pregnant again, she’s been stamping around the house naked like some saggy-stomached Bantu fertility goddess. It’s kind of gross. She’s truly the only woman Gordon can’t imagine screwing. He takes one look at her cellulite-rippled thighs and the bear brown fur curling up from her vagina, and he thinks,
How did I ever fit my damned head through there?

She’s usually dressed, thank God, by the time he gets home from the lumberyard in the evenings. His father has him working with the air conditioning crew after school. He crawls through attics and under houses routing air ducts, braving black widow spiders and asbestos dust for fifty cents below the minimum wage. He keeps hoping some horny housewife will greet him at her door wearing a pair of black fishnet stockings and a sexy negligée. The ensuing seduction scene runs through his head at three times normal speed (she unfastens his manly tool belt, lowers the zipper on his pants with her teeth, etc.). So far it hasn’t happened, but he’s still optimistic.

With the money he sets aside from the job, he plans to buy a used Corvette when he turns sixteen. He knows there’s something fundamentally ludicrous about owning such a car, and it will probably be an embarrassment to him by the time he’s ready to leave home and become a beatnik (he’s been reading a lot of Kerouac and Burroughs, lately). However, his father owned a Corvette before him–so they’ll have that in common–and Gordon is hoping it will help him meet girls. If a car really
is
a psychological extension of a man’s genitals, as he’s so often read, then his will be bulging, blue, and freaky-fast–with pinstripes that look like veins.

He’s hoping that a driver’s license will open up exciting new vistas for him. Lately, his days have a sameness that he finds a little disturbing. School, work, a quick yank in the shower, then it’s time for bed. Whole weeks go by that way. It makes him want to say, “Oh, come on….
That’s it?”

Today the monotony was broken up somewhat by an incident in journalism class. The class is taught by an affable, bearded, big-gutted man named Digger Olsen–a hippie who ate too much. He looks like a friendly bull walrus. He’s known around campus as “The Big O.” Gordon thinks he’s the greatest. Jimmy Marrsden and Gordon are taking the class together, finally getting to know each other again after six years of deliberate avoidance. Gordon is the Opinions Editor of the school newspaper,
The Viking Voice
; Jimmy is one of its photographers and the main darkroom technician. Together, they’ve been raising a mild sort of hell with the school’s administration–Jimmy taking bizarre photos of those in charge and Gordon writing subversive captions to go along with them. The other day, for example, a girl named Amanda Erickson was suspended from school for wearing a T-shirt that said,
Life is a bed of roses, but watch out for the pricks.
Jimmy took a picture of Amanda (T-shirt slogan prominently displayed) as she was being strong-armed by the assistant vice-principal–a pop-eyed Young Republican/Moral Majority type named Donald Witzkowski who took his job far too seriously. In this particular photo, Mr. Witzkowski had the countenance, Gordon thought, of a maddened trout. He chose to run the photo on his Opinions page with a caption that read
Sanctimonious Fishman Gropes One of Our Fair Students
, along with a fiery editorial denouncing the school’s dress code policy. That Amanda was just one rung above trailer trash (and had nice tits) was not the issue; it was her right to free speech that concerned Gordon. If Amanda ended up wanting to date him after the article came out, well… that was just a bonus. When the article
did
come out (despite The Big O’s serious misgivings), it caused an uproar: students organized into protest groups, staged rallies, and today they came to school wearing T-shirts with the filthiest slogans they could think of. Some of these amounted to no more than rude concert T-shirts (Ted Nugent, Molly Hatchet, and Blue Oyster Cult were especially popular), but others were genuinely creative and obscene. Gordon was called into the vice-principal’s office during journalism class, where Donald Witzkowski met him along with a surprise guest: Sergeant Alphonse Garcia, of the Kingsburg Police Department.

The door closed behind them and Gordon was instructed to sit in a metal folding chair. As he sat “What’s this?” Sergeant Garcia asked abruptly, flinging the latest issue of
The Viking Voice
in Gordon’s face.

“That’s a newspaper,” Gordon said, stating the obvious. He let the loose pages fall at his feet.

“I know it’s a newspaper! I’m talking about what you wrote in it, dum-dum!”

“You mean my editorial?” asked Gordon, who was thinking that Sergeant Garcia looked like the homely younger brother of the character Eric Estrada played on that TV cop show,
CHiPs.
He also thought that
dum-dum
was not a particularly good phrase to use when you’re trying to appear more intelligent than the person you’re interrogating.

“Your
ed-i-tor-rial…
” Sergeant Garcia said in a mocking, namby-pamby voice. Gordon could tell that the sergeant desperately wanted one of those high-wattage hanging interrogation lamps to shine in his face, but he’d have to settle for the flickering, buzzing florescent lights overhead, making the room feel like the inside of a toothache, all hollowed out and grayish-green.

“It had something to do with freedom of speech,” Gordon said, trying to be helpful.

“Well, I think it stinks!” Sergeant Garcia yelled, slapping his fist into his palm right in front of Gordon’s face. It made Gordon flinch. He wondered if he was about to get beaten up, or hauled off to jail. Either way, it would make great fodder for his next Opinions piece.

“This man here,” Sergeant Garcia said, pointing to Mr. Witzkowski, “
this guy,
should sue you for slander!”

“I think
libel
is the word you want there,” said Gordon.

“Whatever! If it was up to me, I’d take you down to the river and drown you in a sack, you little smart aleck.”

“Why? Because I called him a fishman?”

“A
sanctimonious
fishman,” Mr. Witzkowski said, sanctimoniously.

“Well, I’m sorry about that,” Gordon said. “I just thought you were looking a little trout-like that day. How can I make it up to you?”

“You
can’t
make it up to me,” Mr. Witzkowski said. “You hurt my feelings.”

“Like I said,
‘I’m sorry…’”

“We’re gonna suspend the holy hell outta you,” Sergeant Garcia promised.

But in the end, they didn’t. They were afraid of turning Gordon into a
cause célèbre.
After another twenty minutes of intimidation tactics, they sent Gordon back to class, where he immediately regaled The Big O and his fellow journalists with the tale of his persecution.

“They should’ve taken me with you,” Jimmy said. “I was the one who took the picture, after all.”

“Pictures don’t lie,” Mr. Olsen said; “only Gordon does.”

“But he
did
look like a fishman. Anyone could see that.”

“I think I’ll be exercising my veto power over your captions a little more strictly from here on out,” The Big O announced.

“God!” Gordon said, pretending to be offended. “What does the ‘O’ in The Big O stand for?
Oppressor?”

“Orgasm!”
Jimmy said a little too loudly, drawing the word out.

Mr. Olsen’s lightning-fast reaction took everyone by surprise. He grabbed Jimmy by the ear and marched him into the darkroom. The word
orgasm
, in the seventh grade, still had the power to shock. Everyone could hear Mr. Olsen lecturing Jimmy behind the closed darkroom door. For some reason, this cracked Gordon up. When the door opened again, Mr. Olsen came out looking sterner than anyone had ever seen him. Jimmy trailed behind him, pale and obviously shaken, but grinning behind the big man’s back to show that he was unrepentant.

So both Gordon and Jimmy emerged unbowed from their confrontations with authority that day. Each recognized in the other a certain clownish courage that eluded almost everyone else. And that was why Gordon made the decision that he and Jimmy could become friends again.

Getting ready for bed that night, Gordon wonders if he’ll live to regret that decision.

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The next morning in the bathroom, Gordon gets a welcome surprise. He seems to have sprouted pubic hairs–
two of them! –
overnight.

Gordon’s first thought is to share this fabulous news with someone. But
who?
His father? No, bragging to Mal might lead to comparisons, which, however instructive, could prove embarrassing (“First pube, huh? I think I’ve still got mine somewhere…” Mal says, rummaging around in his crotch. Then: “Take a gander at this beauty, my boy!” he crows as he unreels a strand from his scrotum at least seven feet long). So who else? His mother? No, that would be impossible–almost unthinkable…. Anyway, Cynthia’s usually in the kitchen at this hour, naked, putting cucumber slices on her nipples (her boobs are swelling from the pregnancy and she claims that something in the cucumbers relieves the soreness). There could be severe consequences for Gordon if he interrupted his mother’s cucumber slicing with a whoop and a wag of his wank. Emasculation would be a distinct possibility.

For a moment Gordon considers plucking one of the prized hairs and sending it, along with tender love note explaining its significance, to Miss Saroyan–sort of a milder version of Van Gogh’s episode with his severed ear and an unsympathetic prostitute. But then he reconsiders. He doesn’t want Miss Saroyan thinking he’s just gotten his first one. He wants her, along with everyone else, to think he’s been growing a veritable forest down there for years.

So Gordon decides to keep the information to himself. It will be just one more secret among the many secrets about his life.

Or so he assumes–wrongly, as it turns out.

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If Gordon at twelve doesn’t seem like quite the same dorky genius that he was at six, it’s because he’s got sex on the brain. Like I said earlier, once you incarnate on Earth your spiritual awareness narrows and it gets really hard to remember that you’re immortal. But even if you can hang on to some of that spiritual knowledge–like Gordon–as soon as you’re exposed to sex, violence, and materialism, your past life memories start to fade. With every page that he looks at in one of Mal’s porno magazines, with every car crash, rape, and decapitation that he watches on television, with every dollar that he saves for that stupid Corvette, Gordon gets a little dumber. But that’s just life… there’s no avoiding it–especially around puberty. By the time I hit my teens, I plan on being as dumb as dirt, too. I’m almost looking forward to it.

To make things even worse (and this is why adolescence can be such a bummer), Gordon has been abandoned by almost every one of his guardian angels. They’re a lousy bunch of prudes, for the most part, and in the last few months practically every time they’ve checked in on Gordon they’ve caught him beating off. They really can’t stand that sort of thing. It makes them fly off in a huff. Remember, a lot of guardian angels are like your great-grandmother Shirley, who spent her whole life sewing quilts (475 of them!), and once they die and get wings they tend to forget almost as much about being human as we forget about the Other Side once we’re born. I don’t know why that is… the whole set-up is crazy, if you ask me. Like, who designed this system, anyway? Thank God Gordon has a daimon looking out for him. A daimon will hang in there and let you slap the monkey all you want.