Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (20 page)

Stepping out of the wine vault, Gordon wanders the aisles toward the rear of the store, looking at all the upright liquor bottles in their myriad poisonous colors and forms. He can hear Sammy now, braying, “I don’t know what you want from me! Should I wear a sign and walk up and down the highway? Maybe I could play the kazoo or dance an Irish jig!” Mal says something back to him in a low tone, too quiet to be heard.

With no real experience of drinking alcoholic beverages, Gordon finds himself drawn to certain brands for purely aesthetic reasons. He likes the squat green roundness of the Tanqueray gin bottles and the somehow quintessentially Russian design of the Stolichnaya vodka labels. He imagines himself having his own fully stocked bar when he’s older, living in a modern bachelor pad, where he debonairly mixes drinks for nubile airline stewardesses and Communist nymphomaniacs like a young James Bond. Gordon makes a mental note to himself to learn how to drive a rocket-launching Aston-Martin. And an airplane and a speedboat while he’s at it, for quick getaways. His father could help him out there….

It occurs to Gordon that perhaps James Bond is more his father’s ideal of masculinity, rather than his own. Maybe he’s identifying with Mal a little too strongly these days because of all that Prednisone he’s been taking. The role of the suave spy who speeds around in sleek vehicles saving the world while having sex all the time fits Mal much better than it does Gordon, whose heroes have tended to be grumpy old wizards like Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung. However, there was a time when he was younger–around five or six–when Gordon’s daydreams cast him in a more heroic light.

Gordon recalls how he used to entertain fantasies of himself as an athletic teen hippie boy named Starhawk. Starhawk wore round-toed red leather boots and a pair of red underpants on the outside of his perfectly faded denim jeans. He also wore a magic denim jacket (embroidered with flowers and peace symbols) that possessed powers of invisibility, and he had a special pair of red, titanium-mesh gloves with which he could catch speeding bullets. His reflexes were so fast, in fact, that he once caught 63 bullets fired at him from the Tommy gun of the Schnozz Marauder–a villain based on Gordon’s wholly inexplicable childhood fear of the big-nosed vaudeville entertainer, Jimmy Durante. Starhawk’s confrontations with the Schnozz Marauder were often witnessed by a gorgeous, high-strung hippie girl with wavy blonde hair and a buxom body encased in sky blue tights–a girl whom Gordon, in his fantasies, referred to as Sis. To Gordon’s way of thinking at the time (the early 1970’s), calling someone Sis was the height of cool, and it didn’t necessarily mean they were related. Thus, after Starhawk defeated the Schnozz Marauder by grabbing the empty Tommy gun and bending it into a pretzel with his fists, he turned to the near-swooning hippie girl and said in his cool guy voice: “C’mon, Sis, let’s get out of here.” A snow-white unicorn with a silky mane suddenly appeared at Starhawk’s side and he gallantly helped Sis onto its bare back. Then they both galloped away toward more virtuous hippie adventures with Sis’ arms tightly encircling Starhawk’s chest and her head resting upon his shoulder, where she could nuzzle his ear and whisper, “Wow, Starhawk, that was, like, so cool! I can’t believe how strong and groovy you are! I dig you so much!”

Thinking about that particular fantasy now, Gordon would be inclined to identify Sis as his anima and the Schnozz Marauder as his yet-to-be-integrated shadow–but still, the whole thing strikes him as embarrassing in the extreme. Maybe James Bond isn’t such a bad role model, after all.

“Gordon! Let’s get going!” Mal shouts to him from across the store.

Startled, Gordon almost crashes into a rotating wire rack full of greeting cards celebrating the wisdom and hilarity of alcoholism and unchecked satyriasis. He quickly regains his equilibrium and heads toward the front of the store. Mal is already out in the parking lot. Sammy remains behind the mahogany desk, popping more seaweed capsules into his mouth and swilling from a crystal goblet brimming with wine. He gives Gordon a look of mock-exasperation and sighs, “Tell your father he needs more B-vitamins in his diet. And if anybody would listen to your old Uncle Sammy, I’d say it was time you got sent to bed with an airline stewardess. What do you say? Isn’t that right, Gordy?”

“Um, right!” says Gordon, thinking,
God, what is he, a mind reader?

“Wine, women, and song!” Sammy says, hoisting his glass. “Nothing else in life matters.”

“Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” says Gordon, raising his fist in solidarity. And then he’s outside in the parking lot with his father.

“What was all that crap about?” Mal asks him as they walk to the car.

“Just Sammy being Sammy….”

“Never put an alcoholic in charge of a liquor store,” Mal says, as if Gordon might be in danger of making just such a business error in the near future. Then he unlocks the Pinto and eases himself into the broken driver’s seat with a theatrical groan.

On the drive back to Kingsburg, Mal asks Gordon if he wants to stop by the airport for a quick flight in the Cessna. Remembering his vow to learn how to drive and fly, Gordon decides the time is right to press his father for flying instructions.

“Will you teach me how to fly today?” Gordon asks him.

“Sure, I’ll let you hold the co-pilot’s wheel, like always.”

“No, I mean really teach me. So I can start flying lessons this year.”

“Who said anything about flying lessons?”

“Grandma told me that Grandpa paid for your lessons starting when you turned thirteen.”

“She did?”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but –”

“I was hoping you’d let me do the same thing.” Gordon can sense his father’s resistance to the idea. “What? Don’t you want me to learn?”

“I’m not saying that. I just don’t think you’re ready yet.” Mal pretends to be paying more attention to the road than usual.

“Why not? You did it at my age. And I’ll bet I could pass the written part of the pilot’s exam, no problem.”

“I’m sure you could, too.” There’s no use arguing with him there. Gordon has an almost photographic memory at this point in his life. He’s proven it by having Mal and Cynthia read out loud from any random page in any book in the house while keeping it concealed from him. Usually by the second or third sentence, Gordon can tell them the book’s title and author and even the sentence’s approximate location on the page–and also what comes after it. He’s never wrong. “That’s not the issue,” says Mal.

“So what is it then?” Gordon asks. His voice rises a notch. “Why can’t I take flying lessons?”

“Look at you!” Mal says, suddenly furious. “You’re still just a shrimp! When I was your age I was almost six feet tall. And one heck of a lot more mature.”

Gordon feels as if he’s just been slapped. His father is angrier with him than he’s ever seen him before. And–aside from some possible fallout from the argument with Sammy–Gordon has no idea why.

“I just thought I’d ask…” Gordon says, backpedaling.

“Look, you may be book-smart, but that doesn’t mean you have good judgment–or even common sense.”

Mal’s fury has Gordon spooked. “Why are you getting so mad?” he asks.

The Pinto is now traveling at more than eighty miles per hour, a speed at which it begins to shudder with harmonic vibrations. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Mal reaches into the back seat and rummages around in the pile of crumpled Dairy Queen bags and soiled blueprints. He comes up with a magazine that Gordon recognizes from Mr. Olsen’s journalism class. It’s the scholastic edition of the
Columbia Journalism Review
, the most recent issue. Suddenly, Gordon knows why his father is upset. A queasy sensation slams into his body like a wave of cold, slimy water–Mal’s disappointment in him is that palpable.

Shaking the folded magazine at the side of Gordon’s head, Mal says with brutal vehemence, “What you did was so…
asinine!”

A photograph of Gordon (pre-Prednisone) is on the magazine’s back cover, along with a reprint of his two-part editorial crusade against his school’s dress code policy–starting with Amanda Erickson’s suspension from school for wearing the wrong T-shirt and ending with Gordon’s confrontation with Sergeant Garcia in Mr. Witzkowski’s office. It’s there because Gordon has been singled out as the winner of the
Columbia Journalism Review’s
Annual Scholastic Journalism Award.

“How many people have read this, do you think?”

“Not many,” Gordon says. “It just goes around to the schools.”

“
The Columbia Journalism Review?”
Mal is livid. “Important people in New York read this magazine! I’ll bet Norman Mailer reads this magazine!”

“It’s not that big a deal. Really.”

But in a way, it
is
a big deal. When Mr. Olsen congratulated Gordon six weeks ago for being the youngest student to ever win the award, he told Gordon that it all but guaranteed he would get into any college of his choice, including Harvard, provided he kept his grades up in high school.

“Norman Mailer could be reading right this minute that my jackass son thinks he was raised by wolves!”

There it is. The reason for Mal’s fury. The joke that has suddenly come back to haunt Gordon. A joke written because, for some reason, he just couldn’t take the honor seriously.

The editorials were written in Gordon’s usual, joking style (“
Sanctimonious Fishman Gropes One of Our Fair Students
” etc.) and when the
Columbia Journalism Review
asked for a short bio to go along with the award’s announcement in their pages, Gordon gave them something written in the same general tone. In other words, he pushed his small town observations toward absurdity to make his life seem more interesting. And then he told an obvious, outrageous lie with that crack about being raised by wolves like Remus and his brother. But in his defense, Gordon felt that telling the world he had been suckled by a she-wolf contained a kind of poetic truth about what it was like to be raised by Cynthia Swannson in Kingsburg, California–a truth that straightforward journalism would always miss.

Gordon wants to tell his father about all this, but he’s so overcome with panic and nausea that he can’t think of a way to begin.

“You make me so embarrassed!” Mal rants. “You’re such a pompous little know-it-all! And look at you now, with your fat chipmunk cheeks and those stupid feathered bangs with all that hairspray! It looks like you’ve got something shellacked to your frickin’ forehead!”

Gordon has recently begun parting his hair down the middle and feathering it back on the sides in a lame imitation of Andy Gibb, the singing teen heartthrob all the girls in his class are going wild about this year. He’s been fortifying the look with his mother’s spray cans of Aqua-Net–probably too much of it, Gordon realizes now, as he touches the side of his head furthest from Mal and finds he can lift all the hair there in one stiff piece like a desiccated falcon’s wing.

“I was planning on taking you to Fathers and Sons Night at the Hoo-Hoo Club next month, but now I’m afraid you’ll just make me look bad….” Mal’s narrowed eyes are sending out X-rays of hatred from behind his thick, black-framed glasses. Gordon pushes back in his seat. “I’m already Chief Scrivenoter and there’s a good chance I’ll be made Snark of the Universe next year–but not if you go screwing it up for me. I’ll never hear the end of it from those guys if they find out I’ve got an ass-cheeked ding-a-ling like you for a son!”

If the Pinto weren’t traveling at over eighty miles an hour, Gordon would have opened the door and rolled out of it by now. He doesn’t say anything to defend himself. His soul just sinks deeper and deeper into an interior monologue. He blames himself for not being the kind of son his father can take pride in. He wonders how things might have been different. A little flame of indignation flares in him when he thinks that life is hard enough–a father should defend his son against the world’s cruelty, not rain more blows down on him–but then Gordon thinks of all the idiotic things he’s said and done… and the little flame gutters.

Maybe he deserves whatever insults his father has in store for him. His heart yearns for a father would gladly stand behind him and school him in the ways of the world (
he feels so alone, so ignorant–like everyone knows more than he does
), but he can completely understand Mal’s disappointment. Gordon has never fit in very well with his father’s conception of an All-American boyhood: football games, Boy Scout camp, barbecues, and go-kart races. At the Hoo-Hoo Club’s Fathers and Sons Night next month some favorite son will be chosen to undergo the ritual of the Entered Apprentice–and thereby become an honorary member of the Hoo-Hoo Club–but that favorite son won’t ever be Gordon. Not in a million years.

“The off-ramp to the airport is coming up,” Mal says grimly. “Now do you want to go flying or not?”

“I guess not. I don’t feel like it today,” Gordon says.

“How come? You’re not scared because of that DC-10 crash last week, are you?”

It’s been all over the news. A DC-10 crashed just after take-off from Chicago, killing 272 people. It’s being called the worst aviation disaster in American history.

“I just don’t feel like it,” Gordon says. “That’s all.”

“Fine,” says Mal, “then I’ll take you to the lumberyard and put you to work. But I’m going flying, anyway.”

“Go ahead,” says Gordon.

For some reason, it seems as if Mal is putting Gordon’s status as his son up for grabs when he says: “If you don’t want to go with me, I’ll just find somebody else.”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Back at the lumberyard, Mal stalks out to the nail shed with the soles of his big shoes grinding gravel. Gordon wordlessly trails behind him–head down, humiliated–like a battered duckling. Under the shed’s galvanized tin roof, Mike Shriver sits on a nail keg smoking a cigarette while Johnny Hoss, out in the hot sun, picks up a two-ton air conditioner with the diesel-belching forklift and loads it onto a nearby flatbed truck. Mike stands up and tries to look busy when he sees Mal approaching.

“Hey, Big Daddy!” Mike waves to Mal with a crooked grin. “I thought you were taking the day off.”