Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (28 page)

After Stan pays for the gas, they drive out along the town’s main street. Gordon thinks about how easy it would be to disappear into a place like Parlier and begin a new life. A life free of his mother’s incessant demands and her sarcastic belittling, old habits grown worse–bolstered by self-pity–now that Mal is gone and she’ll have to take care of a new baby. (
Has my brother been born yet?
Gordon wonders.
Will his face be all furry, like in my dream?
) Parlier is close enough that he could ride his bike to it, yet far enough away that the Kingsburg police would never think of looking for him there. He could blend in, assume a new name, maybe get a job bending sheetmetal for the local heating and air conditioning company or doing paste-up work for the Parlier newspaper. Maybe a kindly Mexican family would take him in. A big, loud, loving family with lots of aunts and uncles and cousins who all get together every Saturday night in a big cherry orchard strung with yellow Christmas tree lights to sing and dance and tell jokes and drink beer while everyone eats homemade tamales and
chiles rellenos
.

For a kid who’s grown up in the Swannson family’s circumstances, that vision seems a kind of paradise. When Gordon first read John Steinbeck’s
Tortilla Flat
, he wanted to run away to Monterey and join the
paisanos
. They seemed to understand the deeper rhythms of life, with their jugs of red wine and their gladness to know each other and to be doing almost nothing. But maybe there are
paisanos
in Parlier. And maybe he could fall in love with one of their sisters, an untamable, whip-smart girl with soulful brown eyes, a fierce laugh, and beautiful black straight hair. After he married her, the
paisanos
would embrace him as their brother-in-law. The cheap red wine and refried beans would never stop flowing….

“Do you think you could ever fall in love with a Mexican girl?” Gordon asks Jimmy.

“Nah…” Jimmy scoffs. “Some of those beaner chicks have great tits and asses when they’re around fifteen, but it all turns to fat once they start fucking. Then they just wanna get knocked up so they can lie around the house all day collecting welfare. All they do is watch TV and eat government cheese, so by the time they’re twenty, they’ve turned into one of those big ol’ gross
mamacitas
. You know the ones–always cruising around the malls like a tugboat, whacking their poor kids on the side of the head just because they want some candy, or an Orange Julius. So if you’re asking me, I’d say stick with white chicks. Or Japs–they stay skinny and they’re good at math.”

All of this is offered in a tone of practical advice. Gordon had no idea Jimmy was such a racist. They’ve both grown up in a town full of Mexicans (
or Mexican-Americans, or Chicanos or whatever…)
and for Gordon there is some vague distinction in his mind between white people and brown people, but it seems no more important to him than being a Democrat or a Republican. In a way, he thinks less of the Republicans, because they were responsible for Nixon.

“I didn’t know you were so prejudiced,” Gordon says.

“I’m not prejudiced,” Jimmy retorts. “I’m just being statistically accurate. You should talk to my Uncle Lloyd. He sells life insurance. He knows the statistics on everybody.”

“So Mexican chicks are statistically more likely to turn into whales and beat their kids?”

“That’s what Lloyd told me. He really knows his shit. That’s how come he makes so much money. ‘Manual labor is for suckers,’ he says.”

“You make him sound like some kind of hero.”

“He’s pretty cool for an old fat guy. We drink beer together. Last time he took off his toupee and made the dog wear it. And he’s got this watch that’s like a cuckoo clock, only instead of a bird, a naked lady comes out and gives this guy a blowjob every hour. He cracks me up. You should meet him.”

From the way it sounds to Gordon, Uncle Lloyd is the antithesis of Johnny Hoss, a flabby bigot who’s probably a con artist. But Jimmy seems to admire him in the same way that Gordon admires Johnny.
Weird.

Both boys look up as Janice knocks on the closed window between the truck cab and the camper. She slides it open, saying, “Hey, I almost forgot, I picked up some Wacky Packages for you guys.” She opens her purse and hands them several brightly colored packages of bubblegum with demented stickers inside. They’re like baseball cards, only they spoof advertising in a Mad Magazine kind of way. Gordon and Jimmy have been collecting them for years.

“Cool!” says Jimmy, while Gordon adds: “Hey thanks, Mrs. Marrsden.”

“Make sure you divide them up even-Steven.” The window slides shut like the food slot behind the tiger’s den at Roeding Park Zoo.

Jimmy divvies up the packages, then he and Gordon start tearing at the waxy paper flaps. They ignore the brittle sticks of bubble gum (one quick burst of flavor and then they turn into hard little wads that make your jaws ache, chewing them). They get right to the stickers, instead. The first one that Gordon uncovers is a parody of Hostess Twinkies called
Hostile Thinkies.
The familiar cellophane packaging is filled with cartoon brains instead of spongy yellow cakes. Two angry exploded heads, one blue and one green, bookend the slogan,
“Blow Your Mind with Brain Filled Hostile Thinkies.”
It’s funny and gross all at once. Gordon wonders if companies like Hostess pay any attention to Wacky Packages. He wonders if Topps Chewing Gum, Inc.–the maker of Wacky Packages–has ever faced a lawsuit.

The sticker underneath (there are two in every pack) shows crispy human hands climbing out of a red and white striped bucket of
Kentucky Fried Fingers.
“
Better Than Biting Your Nails
,” the slogan goes. “
It’s Chicken lickin’ good.”

“Do you want this one?” Gordon tosses the
Kentucky Fried Fingers
sticker to Jimmy. “I have two already.”

Tearing into his third package, Jimmy says, “I’ve already got that one and all these already, too. But thanks, anyway.”

It’s amazing to think of all the stuff they’ve collected in their short lives: fossils, coins, sea shells, bottle caps, postcards from exotic lands, surf-smoothed bits of colored beach glass. So many things have seemed rare and precious, worth keeping forever. But it’s starting to dawn on Gordon that the world supplies nearly everything in abundance. And in a society dominated by late-stage corporate capitalism, everything is considered expendable, including himself.

He asks Jimmy, “How many of these stickers do you think they print each year? Five hundred thousand? A million?”

“A butt-load, that’s for sure. Maybe Lloyd could find out for us.”

“If it’s over a million, why do we bother collecting these things?”

“Hell if I know. Because it’s fun?”

“Maybe we’re just being ripped-off. The whole point of advertising is to make people buy junk they don’t really need. We like these stickers because they make fun of ads. It makes us feel cool, like we’re in on the big joke. But really, we’re still wasting our money on junk, like everybody else.” Gordon opens his last Wacky Package. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen before in that one, either.

“So who gives a crap?” Jimmy says. “I mean, it would be better if the gum didn’t suck so bad, but still, so what?” He puts a few sticks of the horrid gum in his mouth and makes a face like he’s chewing glass.

“We could be spending that money on beer.”

“Oh. Good point.”

They’ve been scheming to load up on beer and get drunk together for the past couple of weeks, but so far they haven’t been able to find anyone over 21 to buy for them. Johnny Hoss turned Gordon down in a good-natured way, telling him he should only drink while being supervised by an adult. Jimmy’s Uncle Lloyd sounds like a good bet, but there must be some reason why Jimmy hasn’t asked him yet. They’ve talked about paying a few extra dollars to Smitty the Bum–who sleeps in the oleander bushes down by the railroad tracks–but Smitty hasn’t been around for a while. Maybe he hitched a ride to the coast for the summer.

“Which do you like better,” Jimmy asks, “Budweiser or Coors?”

“I’ve only drunk Coors with Johnny, but I’m thinking maybe we should switch to something else.” Gordon explains that Colorado’s biggest polluter is the Adolph J. Coors Brewing Company, which is run by Joseph Coors–an arrogant, extremely wealthy, opportunistic asshole who thinks of the world as his personal ashtray. Three years ago, Joseph Coors provided the start-up capital for The Heritage Foundation–a right-wing think tank that wants to give tax breaks to the rich and screw over women, children, minorities, labor unions, and the environment. They plan to accomplish those goals by teaming up with the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement and getting Ronald Reagan elected President.

“Since when did you turn into such a stuck-up little hippie-girl?”

“What do you mean?” Gordon is wondering if the Hoo-Hoo Club has any dealings with The Heritage Foundation. They certainly seem to share a lot of the same political imperatives.

“First you talk about marrying some hot little beaner princess from Parlier or somewhere, and now you’re saying we should boycott Coors so this old fart actor doesn’t get elected President. That’s so pussyfied! You’re acting like César Chávez with a stick up his butt.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to
marry
her.”

“Yeah, well, whatever….”

“You want the guy from
Bedtime for Bonzo
to be your President?”

“Oh, like a peanut farmer is a lot better?”

“He’s a lot smarter, at least.”

“Like that means anything. Smart people are always the most screwed-up. Just look in the mirror. And you can’t even vote. So why are you all worried about politics all of a sudden?”

“So you don’t even care who killed JFK?” Gordon asks, baiting him. A few days earlier, the House Sub-Committee on Assassinations had announced to the press that sound evidence recorded by a Dallas motorcycle patrolman’s microphone proved there was a fourth shot in Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963–and it had come from the infamous grassy knoll.

“That’s different,” says Jimmy. “That’s a conspiracy–which is a great thing to think about. Like UFOs, Bigfoot, and whether dogs can predict earthquakes.”

“I think the Mafia did it and the CIA covered it up. Jack Ruby was the key to the whole thing, but first they drugged him to make him sound crazy and then they killed him so he wouldn’t talk.”

“Just like he killed Oswald.”

“Right. The whole thing stinks. And then we got LBJ, who knew, and Nixon, the biggest liar ever.”

“Look, man, like I said–forget politics. What about the Loch Ness Monster?”

Gordon hasn’t really given much thought to the Loch Ness Monster. “Maybe it’s
tulpa
,” he says.

“What the hell’s a
tulpa?”
Jimmy asks, his voice preemptively full of scorn.

“It’s a Tibetan word for a thought-form creation–sort of like how kids make up imaginary friends. Basically, the idea about
tulpas
is that if you put enough thought-energy into visualizing something like the Loch Ness Monster, at a certain point other people will be able to start seeing it, too.”

“You’re just making that up,” Jimmy says.

“No, really…” Gordon protests. “I read about it in this book called
Magic and Mystery in Tibet
. It was written by this explorer lady named Alexandra David-Néel, who was, like, the first white woman to ever climb the Himalayas and sneak into the forbidden city of Lhasa, back around 1924. She even met the thirteenth Dalai Lama–twice.”

“
Tulpa-loompas
…” Jimmy half-sings, “what a load of crap.”

“Okay, so maybe the Loch Ness Monster isn’t a
tulpa
,” Gordon backpedals. “Maybe it’s just the ghost of a plesiosaur haunting the lake that it swam in 65 million years ago,” he says. “Or it could just be a really big sturgeon. Y’know, the fish that makes caviar? They’re really creepy-looking, if you haven’t seen one. Like a crocodile from Mars or something. And then we eat their eggs.”

“Gross.”

“I know. It’s as bad as those Chinese guys who eat fried scorpions and raw puppy livers
.” It’s a weird world we live in
, thinks Gordon.
People will eat just about anything–including the body of Christ, if they’re Catholic. But why do we care so much about the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, Mothmen, and extraterrestrials
,
when the world is already full of incredibly bizarre
real
creatures like the coelacanth, the giraffe, and the duck-billed platypus?

An answer comes to him unbidden:
Maybe it’s because no one’s eaten an Abominable Snowman yet.

Jimmy says, “So you don’t think Nessie’s a real dinosaur?”

“Probably not. I guess I don’t really know. I’d have to do some research.”

“But you believe in ghosts.”

“Sure. They’ve been reported everywhere, all over the world, for thousands of years. So at the very least, they’re part of the collective unconscious. But I think our astral bodies survive after we die–only some of them get lost on their way through the
Bardo
. Instead of following the Light to heaven, they keep returning to places they were familiar with in the material world. Those are the ghosts.”

“Gordon, you spew more crazy fucking bullshit than anyone I know.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“So?”

“So what’s an astral body, doofus?”

“It’s sort of like your soul, only not all of it, because part of your soul always stays in heaven watching over you while you’re incarnated on Earth–like a guardian angel. When you die, you see a light that guides you back to that other part of your soul, or spirit. If you’ve learned everything you were supposed to learn from the time you spent on Earth, then those two parts of your soul are joined into one and you get to live in heaven. If you haven’t learned all your lessons and you still have some karma to work out, then your astral body has to go through the
Bardo
, which is kind of this dream world with different levels where a whole bunch of weird things happen. On the lower levels there’re these big hairy
Bardo
demons with a million fangs and belts made out of human skulls. On some other levels you get to have really great sex. Eventually your astral body finds the level it’s supposed to be on, and then it sort of evaporates and gets reincarnated again.”