Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (17 page)

Only serves to make me gaseous,

Like the women who wheeze and stomp

Bitching about Marcel Duchamp.

How could I have known the evil of your ways

When your naked enormity set my brain ablaze?

With no conception of your predilection,

I was led by my erection,

Into the multitudinous folds of your flesh.

I’ve never been one to make long range plans,

I measure out my life in twelve-ounce cans,

But pay for you by the ounce?

“Never,” says the jester,

“The check would bounce.”

Now the women are raising hell

Wanting to crucify Luis Buñuel.

I’ve often thought to sue you for rape,

My back is still bent out of shape.

But I seem to be without recourse to the law.

After all, I had a certain spasm,

In loftier circles called Orgasm,

And this, it would seem, was a fatal faux pas.

Silver spots boiled in front of my eyes,

Thrusting between your hippopotamus thighs,

And this has caused me a shitload of grief.

Testicular relief

Was never worth all that.

I should have been a pair of lobster claws

Tap dancing in a bowl of split pea soup.

The poem’s structure was lifted from T.S. Eliot’s
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
, of course. Gordon has been finding poetry more illuminating than prose lately. Keats, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Auden, Rilke, and Stevens have all been checked out on his library card in the last few months. The world would be a barren place for him without library books. He should have brought one along to pass the time while he waits for today’s allergy shot. There’s nothing to read in Doctor Smiley’s examining room aside from a chipper Disney-illustrated version of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, and two curled up, goober-stained editions of
Highlights
, an inane children’s magazine.

Gordon has already flipped through both of the magazines with a creeping sense of disgust–page after page of cartoon skunks smelling daffodils, moronic word games, simplistic math puzzles, and not-so-subtle exhortations to obey Mommy and Daddy. The only thing he found even mildly entertaining was a cartoon strip about two brothers: one a disdainful rebel like himself, named Goofus; the other, a goody-goody ass kisser named Gallant. Goofus and Gallant were depicted having parallel adventures in which Gallant, for example, espoused vegetarianism while Goofus wanted to taste barbecued squirrel guts. Gallant was always praised in the end, but Gordon was secretly rooting for Goofus all along. And what did his insanely moralizing parents expect out of him, anyway, giving him a name like Goofus? The poor kid was screwed right from the start. If Goofus ended up doing drugs and listening to Jimi Hendrix with his stereo cranked up too loud, well, who could blame him?

Even the back of a cereal box would be welcome reading material now. Out of desperation, Gordon picks up
Snow White
. He’s just starting to thumb through the pages (daydreaming about sadomasochistic sex games with the Wicked Queen) when the door opens with a
whoosh
and Doctor Smiley steps inside looking lively, trailing a noxious mist of drugstore cologne.

“Well, hello there, Gordon! How’ve we been feeling today?”

Gordon takes his cue from the book in his lap, answering, “We’ve been feeling grumpy, sneezy, sleepy, and dopey.”

“Ho-ho!” Doctor Smiley booms in his big,
I’m-such-a-happy-go-lucky-guy
voice. “Looks like we’ve got four out of seven dwarfs there! Which ones are we missing?”

“Bashful, Happy, and Doc. Between the two of us, we’ve got all but one.”

Doctor Smiley fakes a fat grin. “That’s clever, Gordon. Now take off your pants.”

“Can’t you just give me the shot in my arm today?”

“I’m afraid I have to take a look at your penis.”

“It’s fine. I’ve already checked.”

“Look at that!” Doctor Smiley crows, rubbing his hands together with manic glee. “You’re bashful! We’re seven for seven now!”

“Big whoop…” says Gordon, unbuckling his belt.

Gordon’s visits to Doctor Smiley have always felt degrading, but with this new imperative (“
Wag your penis at the smiling clown with the red bow tie
…”) Gordon can feel himself sinking toward whole new depths of abjection. What’s worse, he still has half a hard-on from his S&M fantasies about the Wicked Queen and he’s worried now that dumb, potentially homosexual Doctor Smiley might think it’s for him. Then again, maybe having half a hard-on is a good thing: at least he’ll look bigger… although he’s still not sure he has a full-fledged, adult-sized penis–at least not yet.

“Hmmm…. There seems to be a stiff breeze blowing through here,” Doctor Smiley says, squinting at Gordon’s partial erection. He puts on a pair of reading glasses and leans in for a closer look.

“Just hurry up…” says Gordon, looking at the ceiling.

“Holy Cow! You’ve got a few hairs there!”

“So?”

“So?” Doctor Smiley says in that bombastic voice of his, like King Lear doing voice-over on a commercial for used cars and trucks. “
So?
You’re a man now!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You can have sex. You can get a girl pregnant! Have you ever thought about
that?”

“Not really…” Gordon demurs, knowing he has been thinking of little else.

“You can’t fool me, Gordon…. Pull up your pants. I’ve got something I want to show you.”

Doctor Smiley sits down on a black padded stool and starts rummaging around in the bottom drawer of a metal file cabinet. He emerges with a shiny, laminated, four-color brochure–something like the menu from a sushi restaurant. He waves it under Gordon’s nose. “See this?” he says. “Look. This is what can happen to you if you’re not careful.”

The brochure shows photographs of a wide variety of genitalia in the final stages of venereal disease–exotic yellow and purplish warts, gaping sores, dripping wounds. Most of them look more like sea anemones than human sex organs.

“That’s pretty disgusting, Doctor Smiley,” Gordon says, trying to downplay his repulsion.

“Look at that one there! That’s what syphilis does.”

“I just thought it made you go blind.” Gordon’s hand involuntarily gropes at his crotch.

“Nope. Some little sweetheart comes along and sticks her tongue in your ear, says she’ll show you a good time–and the next thing you know, your dingus is about ready to drop off.” Looking stern, Doctor Smiley says, “I want you to watch yourself, Gordon. And promise me: no sex before marriage–at least not without a condom.”

Gordon promises Doctor Smiley he’ll watch himself very carefully

“And if the condom ever breaks for some reason, try scrubbing with a Brillo pad afterward,” Doctor Smiley suggests. “It’s always worked for me.”

Gordon’s expression is slack-jawed, entirely credulous.

“I’m just kidding, Gordon. A
joke
….” Doctor Smiley looks him up and down with what might almost pass for sympathy. He scoots his stool over to a small desk and takes out a prescription pad. Starting to write, he says, “You’re looking a little pale and wheezy. I think I’ll put you on a course of steroids–something called Prednisone. It’s powerful stuff. Should perk you right up.”

“Does it have any side-effects?” Gordon asks, recalling his previous bouts with Doctor Smiley’s powerful medicines.

“Compromised adrenal function, liver and kidney damage, lots of stuff…. But we won’t keep you on it long enough to do any lasting harm. In the short run, I think it’s your best shot.”

“Okay then…” says Gordon. Who is he to argue? He’s still considering the gruesome effects of gonorrhea and its ilk, thinking,
Thank God for antibiotics.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

What I love about Doctor Smiley is that the fat flake actually thinks he knows what he’s doing, when in reality he’s just being used by a higher force. In other words, he’s a quack, but a quack with a purpose. Gordon could have told him as much, if he’d looked for clues in the poetry he’s been reading lately. W. H. Auden said it best:

“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here’s the deal: Gordon’s daimon needed a way to stay in touch with him on a regular basis–an open channel between this world and the Other Side. It didn’t look like Gordon would be going the monk route and learning to meditate anytime soon (masturbation doesn’t qualify, unfortunately–it’s actually the flip side of meditation), so it was decided that making Gordon chronically ill would be the next best choice. But there was a problem: any halfway decent pediatrician would have had Gordon up and running around like a healthy little maniac in no time. There were drugs, even then, that would’ve gotten Gordon’s asthma and allergies under control. So, working with the materials at hand, Gordon’s daimon threw Doctor Smiley into the mix. And that dorkwad of a doctor did exactly what he was supposed to do: he screwed up Gordon’s health to the point where he’d be sick for most of his young life.

I know that sounds harsh…. From any way of looking at it but a daimon’s, it basically sucks. While Gordon’s little buddies were tearing around on football fields and jumping their bikes over ditch banks, Gordon sat around on his butt all day wheezing and reading books. But look at it this way: those little jocks and future farmers of America never had a shot at transcending their origins. They grew up thinking they’d have lives pretty much like the lives of their parents–a regular job, a regular wife, and regular kids. If it all went A-okay, a new Cadillac might be in their future. For Gordon, however, the future was wide open, because he was becoming much more imaginative.

In fact, Gordon has been tapped for far greater (and stranger) things. That’s why he has a daimon in the first place. In this life, like the last, he’s destined to become an artist. Only this time, words will be as important to him as images. A good chunk of his life will be spent trying to grab the dragon tail of consciousness and shake off its scales into neat little rows of black on white. Letters onto paper. Spirit into matter. He’s going to become a writer. Or a Scribe, as they call the position on the Other Side.

Becoming a Scribe is no easy thing. Not everyone’s cut out for it. Being sick a lot of the time is only half of it–and in that respect, Gordon is actually getting off kind of easy. There are worse diseases that have kept daimons in close contact with their charges throughout history. I mean, think about it. It could have been syphilis (a route Doctor Smiley warned Gordon off). Syphilis works great, as a matter of fact. Some pretty famous writers did their best work while suffering from it. Isak Dinesen got a royal case of it coming out of Africa. Its evil flowers bloomed in Baudelaire. (How are you liking these cornball allusions to the authors’ work so far?) Syphilis was at the birth of Nietzsche’s tragedy, it caused Rimbaud to pass a season in hell, and it provided an unsentimental education for Flaubert.

Tuberculosis has also done wonders for an amazing number of writers. Just for starters, there’s Kafka, Chekov, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, Emerson, Jane Austen, Eugene O’Neill, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and all five of the Bronte sisters. And that’s not all…. Byron had tuberculosis and Shelly would have died of it if he hadn’t drowned first. It gave Albert Camus that existential feeling and Edgar Allen Poe his morbid twist. As a way of weakening the human vessel so the Other Side comes through loud and clear, tuberculosis used to be the disease of choice.

But then modern medicine took it out, along with syphilis. So Gordon’s daimon decided to go with the next best thing: asthma. Which is kind of a wimpy disease, a disease for people who blow-dry their hair, maybe. But hey, it definitely gets the job done. If it was good enough for John Updike, Che Guevara, Marcel Proust, and Philip K. Dick, it’s good enough for anyone.

There’s something else Auden said: “Art is born of humiliation”–and that’s the other half of the equation. Writers need to have something to write about, and for some reason humiliation spurs them on better than anything else. Gordon has already had plenty of humiliation, and there’s more coming, of course. It’s just the price you pay for walking around as a human. When spirit is made flesh, and you can remember what it was like when you were only spirit, flesh can seem kind of gross.

To tell the truth, sometimes flesh can get so downright disgusting it can make you ashamed to be alive. Human bodies always seem to come to a bad end. But maybe that’s just nature’s way of making you look past biology toward the soul.

Or God’s way of saying, “Stay humble.”

STILL MORE BONERS

C
inco de Mayo, 1979, falls on a Saturday. To show his solidarity with his mostly Mexican crew, Mal has closed the lumberyard for the day. He feels like it’s time to go a little crazy. Time to let it all hang out. Mal Swannson is up for a walk on the wild side and he doesn’t give a hoot who knows.

By mid-afternoon Mal can be found out on the backyard patio, wearing a leopard skin Speedo and a jazzy black sombrero. He’s tending the barbecue, watching the flesh char on a slab of marinated flank steak. As Mal flips the meat he does a little shuffling dance to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. “A Taste of Honey” is blaring through the open windows from the living room’s stereo system. That jungle cat bikini is riding low on his flat hips, revealing more of his hairy butt crack with each syncopated knee slap, but Mal doesn’t give a damn. He’s fogged on mezcal, Campari, and Del Monte canned peach juice–his own cockeyed version of a Tequila Sunrise–something he’s dubbed
Señorita’s Menses.
He’s throwing a party to celebrate the recent completion of his built-in swimming pool, and that red-hot mama with the big
bazoombas
, Janice Marrsden, is the special guest of honor.

Does that make him feel like a love-drunk Speedy Gonzales? You
bet
it does!