Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (39 page)

“Whoa!” says Jimmy. “You’re still doing it? Like what–every night?”

“Practically.”

“Skip, this is not good,” Twinker says, her eyes shining with blinked-back tears. “It may feel good to you now, but in the long run it’s not gonna be healthy for you. I know! They say that one in three girls are sexually abused before they turn eighteen, and for boys it’s one in six. You’re being sexually abused, Skip, whether you realize it or not. Your mom should
not
be having sex with you.”

“Twinker,” Jimmy says, exasperated, “sometimes you can be such a damn prude.”

“No, she’s right…” Skip says, suddenly sober. “I’ve been feeling really guilty about it. I guess that’s why I told you guys. I needed to tell
some
body. And I know we shouldn’t be doing it. I just don’t know how to make it stop.”

“Stop thinking with your dick, for starters,” D.H. suggests helpfully.

“Easy for you to say,” Jimmy sneers. “Do you even have one?”

“Guys! Stop it!” Twinker shouts.

“My penis has already been through enough,” D.H. sulks. “It doesn’t need to hear your insults.”

“Skip, maybe all you need to do is fall in love–only not with your mom. With someone who’s more right for you.”

“Would you know any volunteers?” Skip asks, looking at Twinker meaningfully.

“I might. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Hey, look! Ted’s about to get lucky again,” says Jimmy. “Go, Ted!”

Ted and the brunette are back in the bedroom. Ted, already naked, sips from a glass of wine as the brunette slips out of a sexy black velvet dress. He’s about to join her on the bed when he grabs his wounded arm and keels over like a polar bear stunned by a tranquilizer dart. He lies on the bed, paralyzed, while the brunette climbs on top of him and reopens the wound so she can lap up his blood. The door creaks open and the blonde enters wearing a lacy see-through nightgown. She takes a turn licking at Ted’s bloody arm. Aroused, the brunette yanks the blonde’s hair and they kiss with flickering tongues. The blonde then takes off her clothes and the two women engage in a blood-frenzied lesbian petting session on top of poor, mostly inert Ted.

“How do you usually feel right after you’ve jumped your mom’s bones, Skip?” Gordon asks him, point-blank. “Honestly.”

“Honestly? Tired, guilty, depressed, kind of pissed off that I’ve let her screw me again… but mostly just out of it. A lot like Ted there, I guess.”

“That’s the way my mom makes me feel, too,” says Gordon, “only she does it in a different way. She’s the Queen of the Put-Downs, always telling me I’m lazy, or I smell bad, or I look like a freak. She acts like I should give her Brownie points for being candid about having a son she hates. On top of that, she’s a nit-picky perfectionist when it comes to anything I do, like I can never be good enough, but when it’s something
she
has to do, she cuts herself all kinds of slack. And if anything ever goes wrong in her life, she always finds a way to blame it on me. Basically, she loves sapping my energy. She feeds off it.”

“Like a vampire,” says Skip, starting to get it.

“Exactly! A psychic vampire! Just being around her makes me feel drained. She’s like an emotional black hole, sucking up my life force, my will to live. Maybe that’s why the world has this fascination with vampires. We’ve all met people who do it in real life, only we’re not quite aware of it because it’s happening on a subconscious level, with energy instead of blood. Your mom does it by tricking you into sex so she can drain your youth, or whatever… and my mom does it by making me feel bad so she can feel good.”

“My mom really,
really
likes cunnilingus,” Skips says. “Do you think that could be another vampire thing?”

“No, Skip,” Twinker says, laughing. “That’s just a normal girl thing. Unless you think I’m a vampire, too.”

“I guess we won’t really know until you have sex with us.”

“Dream on, James.”

“Have any of you guys read Goethe’s
Faust?”
Gordon asks.

“Sure–
twice
, right after I blazed through the complete works of Shakespeare,” says Skip. “Get real, Crash.”

“Don’t drag a bunch of books into this now,” Jimmy warns him. “You were doing pretty good with the vampire stuff.”

“Books are our friends, Jimmy…. What I was just thinking about was how out of all the things Faust sees while he’s with Mephistopheles–who’s sort of the devil–what scares Faust the most is the Mothers.”

D.H. jokes, “As in the Mothers of Invention? Frank Zappa’s old band?”

“No, the Mothers as in the archetypal bitch goddesses. The ones who create all life–and sometimes destroy it.”

“Oh.
Them
.”

“Let me give you guys just one example. This is all tied together, I swear…. In the Book of Baruch, which is one of the oldest Gnostic texts–as old as the Bible–there’s a story about the creation of the world that involves a goddess named Edem.”

“Eden?” Twinker’s not sure she heard right.

“E
dem
. It’s the Hebrew word for ‘earth.’ Eden is the word for ‘paradise.’ Close, but not quite the same. Anyway, Edem has the hots for Elohim, which is the Hebrew word for ‘god.’ So the heavenly father god and the earthly mother goddess fall in love. After a while, it’s just like they’re married. They decide to move in together and start a family, so they create paradise and make Adam, the first man. Elohim breathes spirit, or
pneuma
, into Adam. And Edem breathes soul, or
psyche
, into Adam. Then they make Eve in the same way–so all the people that come after Adam and Eve will possess both soul and spirit.”

“I always thought spirit and soul were the same deal,” says Skip.

“The Gnostics differentiate. Spirit is from above, from the heavens–or from the superconscious, transpersonal Self, if you want to put it in Jungian terms. Soul is from below, from the earth or the shamanic underground–what Carl Jung called the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.”

“Gee, I’m glad we’ve got that straight,” Jimmy says, tipping back a beer.

“Anyway…” says Gordon, ignoring him, “after creating the world and mankind, Elohim rises to the highest part of heaven to see how everything looks from up there. And what he finds when he gets there is a light that’s even brighter than the sun he’s just created. This light is the supreme force in the universe. It’s called the Good. And Elohim says to the Good, ‘Oh shit, I screwed up. I thought I was the highest god, but obviously I’m not. Now I want to stay up here in heaven, but my spirit is trapped below in all those clueless people. Let me go blow up that crappy little world, so I can get my spirit back.’ But the Good says, ‘Nothing that comes from love can be evil. You and Edem made the world out of your love and now you have to let her keep it for as long as she wants. But while you’re waiting for her to get tired of it, you can hang out with me and we’ll stay high together.’ So that’s what Elohim does. He turns his back on the world and stays with the Good in heaven.”

“I guess he didn’t love Edem that much, after all…” Twinker says.

“The feeling I got was that Elohim wanted Edem to go with him, but she decided she liked living in the suburbs better,” says Gordon.

“And what’s more important, anyway?” Jimmy asks rhetorically. “Having a wife, or hanging out with your friends?”

“Friends!” everyone shouts except Twinker.

“So then what happened?” Twinker asks Gordon, humoring him.

“Then Edem got really pissed. She felt like that flaky Elohim had ditched her. So she decided to get even. She gathered her angels around her–including the serpent,
Naas
–and she told them to go and incite adultery and divorce among the world’s people. Edem thought that if people felt unloved and abandoned, like she did, then the trapped spirit in them would pass those feelings directly on to Elohim. Edem also commanded the angels to torture people in every way they could think of, so Elohim would feel tortured, too–again, because of his trapped spirit.”

In later Gnostic literature, the vengeful angels would become Archons, the Good would become synonymous with the True God, Edem would transform into Sophia (or possibly Eve), and Elohim would turn into the nefarious Demiurge–but Gordon doesn’t want to risk confusing his audience by going into all that now. He simply concludes by saying:

“So that’s why the world is such a fucked-up place. When Elohim ascended to heaven and discovered the Good, he showed the way for everyone who wanted to follow him with their own divine spirit. But because he left Edem behind, he also kick-started the whole process of evil against his spirit in the world’s people. Which brings us right back to the subject of vampires.”

“Finally!” says Jimmy.

“Vampires prey on the spirit in others. In this world–where evil prospers and good people suffer–the more spirit you have, the more likely you are to be attacked for it. And it all started with a self-pitying mother taking out her anger on her innocent sons and daughters.”

Screams and cries for mercy resound throughout the drive-in as the lesbian vampires go on a rampage, stabbing another man in their wine cellar, then slashing the throats of the young campers in the trailer. The gory devastation is relentless. By the movie’s end, everyone has been killed except Ted–who drives off in his little blue car, already dead.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

“We have to save Skip by taking him to see Madame Sophie!”

That rallying cry comes from Jimmy.
Hollywood She-Wolves
turned out to be pure, hardcore porn–aspiring actresses sucking and fucking absolutely anyone so they could get a part in a movie. Skip moaned all the way through it, saying he didn’t think he’d have the will to resist his mother’s sexual advances once he got home. Jimmy’s plan is to subvert a greater evil with a lesser one. From police station rumors brought home by his father, Jimmy has heard that Madame Sophie’s palm reading parlor is a suspected front for a bordello. He reasons that if a fortune-telling whore can get Skip’s rocks off, then Skip won’t have to spend the rest of the night banging his insatiably horny mom.

Finding the place shouldn’t be a problem. Everyone knows where Madame Sophie lives. At night her name blazes across the top of a big circular sign with a finger-splayed palm in its center outlined in pink neon. The sign sits on top of a gas station pole beside a flat-roofed cinderblock house fronting the highway near downtown Selma:
Madame Sophie–Fortunes Told.

So now everyone is squeezed into Hideous’ truck (a thunderstorm dumped its watery load during the first anal-penetration scene, forcing them to watch the remainder of the movie from inside the cab with the windshield wipers going). The windows are fogged with the warmth of their bodies and beery breath. Hideous turns on the defroster and pulls out of the drive-in with the comfortingly melancholy sound of tires hissing on wet asphalt. He tunes the radio to KKDJ–Fresno’s only decent rock station. After a few miles, Traffic’s “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” segues into Vanilla Fudge doing a live version of the old Supremes hit, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” Jimmy cranks the volume and everyone starts to sing along to the spontaneously revised lyrics:

Set me free why don’t you, Mom.

Get outta my life why don’t you, Mom.

You really don’t love me.

You just keep me bangin’ on….

D.H. and Skip–woozy and off-key–especially like the parts where they get to howl along as backup singers.

They’re all thinking about how great it feels to be young and fucked-up, crushed together like stowaways on a pirate ship as Hideous hurtles them through the blustery autumn night. The glittering wet highway looks like an alien landing strip with its wall of wind-whipped oleander in the median. As they near Selma, ghostly signs of human habitation appear in the truck’s headlights: a window painted green from the light of a TV set, a white mailbox surrounded by foxtails, the reflective topaz eyes of a cat out on a front porch, hunting for mice. As they pass, everything slides back into oblivion.

No one cares how late it is. They just want to keep having fun. If this night ended up lasting forever, in their minds that would be all right.

“Take a left,” Jimmy says. “I think it’s up here, past the train tracks.”

A smaller version of Madame Sophie’s neon highway sign hangs from a lamppost up ahead, the bigger sign towering beyond it. Hideous pulls to the curb in front of the desolate-looking cinderblock house. Dusty venetian blinds are turned shut behind all the windows. There’s no grass in the front yard–only a bed of gypsum pebbles that in the rain looks like a sandbar made of rotten molars. The front door is painted a dark Chinese red, deepening toward black along the edges. The light bulb jutting from a porcelain socket above the front porch is red, too.

“Looks like nobody’s home,” D.H. says.

Jimmy says, “Who wants to go knock?”

“We should all go,” says Gordon. He can tell no one wants to do it alone.

“I wait in twuck in case you need a fast getaway,” Hideous says as everyone else gets out.

“I’m not sure this is such a great idea,” says Skip. “I mean, no one knows we’re here. We could get robbed, or kidnapped –”

“– or righteously laid,” Jimmy says. “Don’t get all pussyfied on us now, Skip.”

Jimmy runs ahead and knocks on the door. Everyone else huddles on the porch with him to get out of the rain. They can hear someone moving around inside. After a moment, the door cracks open and a dark face appraises them from behind the brass safety chain. “Hi! We’re here to get our palms read,” Jimmy blurts out.

“It’s very late.” An older woman’s voice. Gruff. No nonsense.

“I know… but we have money. And my friend here could really use some astral guidance.” Jimmy puts the emphasis on the
ass
in astral, causing D.H. to bite down on a short, sharp laugh. It comes out sounding like a coyote’s yelp.

Twinker puts in a good word for them. “They’re very spiritual boys,” she says.

“Okay,” the voice says. “You can come in… but leave those wet shoes outside.” Interior lights go on as the woman unhooks the door chain, revealing herself as an amazingly obese middle-aged gypsy lady with platinum blonde bobbed hair. She’s wearing a turquoise felt dress embroidered with flowers and butterflies. Her eyebrows–drawn on, inverted V’s–have been painted in the same garish turquoise hue. She looks like a slightly more feminine version of Divine–the 300-pound transvestite actor in the John Waters movie,
Pink Flamingos,
who was filmed in that movie’s finale gleefully eating dog shit as it was squeezed like Mr. Softy’s ice cream from a hunching mongrel’s butt.