Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (34 page)

She lights the joint, takes a tiny toke, and passes it to Gordon. “What is it?” he asks. Before he gets an answer, he takes an enormous crackling hit and holds it deep inside his lungs–doing his best to impress, as usual.

“Careful with that! It’s opiated Thai stick!”

“
Hmmm?
” A whiff of funky-smelling smoke uncoils from Gordon’s left nostril. Whatever he just inhaled, it’s too late.

“Oh my god, you’re gonna be so fucked-up! Let’s not waste it. Blow the smoke into my mouth.” Francesca pinches out the joint and parts her lips as if for a kiss. Gordon puts his lips close to hers and blows a thick plume of smoke straight down her throat. Then she leans in and kisses him for real–long and wet.

Holy shit!

Gordon has never been so turned on by anyone (or anything) in all his life. Even his amorous attachment to the vacuum cleaner machine at the Pink Elephant Car Wash pales in comparison. An actual live nude beautiful girl is kissing him and letting him fondle her tits. It’s unprecedented!

His hand moves to the baby-smooth curve of Francesca’s thigh as they continue kissing. While Gordon caresses her, infinitesimally tiny silken hairs seem to rise up from Francesca’s skin, expanding with radiant energy. As his hand travels along her belly, he grazes her vagina, which seems to have a life of its own. It’s wriggling about like the neck of a clam–then it latches onto Gordon’s hand like remora eel. Suddenly, the whole tent shudders as Francesca’s fingers wrap around his boner. She yanks on him a little roughly, like she’s trying to start an old lawnmower. And then Gordon’s pelvis is jerking and he’s spurting watery semen like the Tin Woodsman’s oilcan squeezed by the sweet hands of Dorothy and he finds himself being sucked into the whirling hurricane vortex of
one completely massive headrush!
In his mind, he sees the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West cackling:
“Something with a little poison in it, but sweet to the smell. Poppies! Poppies!…”
A tremor of piss-warm terror jolts through him as his stomach seems to implode.

Then everything tilts to one side and Gordon’s face falls off. Or maybe it’s only vomit–but whatever it is, it definitely look likes him. It lays collapsed on the pillow next to Francesca’s hair like an abandoned Halloween mask, staring up at him with accusing hollow eyes, the discard of some self-righteous child who wanted to be a werewolf. Francesca is looking at it with a kind of squinty, mute horror.

Gordon knows he should apologize–but maybe that won’t be enough. What he should
really
do is provide this girl that he loves with an accounting of his life, a tale of who he is and how he got that way, a confession of his sins and inadequacies. But all that seems much too difficult to explain right now. It’s so much easier just passing out.

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In a dream, Gordon finds himself revisiting the sun-blasted Texaco station on the outskirts of Parlier. He sees a chocolate brown Doberman pinscher guzzling aqueous pink gasoline from a pump nozzle held by Francesca. When the dog drinks its fill, Gordon squats beside it and lovingly attaches a leather aviator’s cap and tinted wind goggles to its angular brown head. The Doberman licks Gordon’s face, grateful for the attention–or maybe just looking for food crumbs.

Jimmy stands in the middle of a two-lane country road. He’s dressed as a cheerleader, shaking his pom-poms and fake tits while jumping up and down in slow motion. The Doberman assumes a pointer’s stance in front of him. Francesca flicks her Yosemite Sam lighter under its stumpy twitching tail. A jet of blue flame leaps out of the dog’s butt.

Disembodied now, Gordon watches from a distance, through heat waves, as the Doberman races along the blacktop with forty-foot flames rocketing from its rump. It’s like watching an old documentary of a dragster attempting a new land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Grape vineyards burst into fire in the dog’s wake. Gordon rises to consciousness thinking,
Where’s Smokey the Bear when you really need him?
Then he hears Smokey saying in his big bear’s voice: “Only
you
can prevent forest fires.”

Oh, really?

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Alone in his sleeping bag, Gordon fitfully rises from sleep to the smell of stale vomit. His own, unfortunately. Most of it seems to have collected in his hair. When he rolls over looking for water and a flashlight, he sees the other sleeping bag across the tent wriggling with some terrible purpose. The light is dim, but it’s obvious enough: Jimmy and Francesca are rolling around inside there, screwing like porn stars. A low, guttering moan escapes from behind Francesca’s clenched teeth, as if she’s having an orgasm. Gordon’s stomach flops, but there’s nothing left in there for him to throw up.

To hell with Paris
, is what he thinks.

And to hell with Jimmy, too… that lucky bastard.
But Gordon has to concede that if the circumstances had been reversed, he might have done the same thing. An actual live nude beautiful girl can cloud a guy’s judgement, make him betray a good friend, or even commit treason. Just ask Mata Hari–or any smug suburban mom. An actual live nude beautiful girl can pretty much make a guy do anything.

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There are some things you just can’t do on the Other Side. Getting stoned on opiated Thai stick and having a premature ejaculation during the ensuing headrush is one of them. Like I’ve said before, there’s nothing like an earthly orgasm over there. Which is too bad, because if there was, maybe I could stop reincarnating. Sometimes I think the material universe is like some monstrously addictive drug. You know it’s bad for you, but you keep going back for more, anyway. Maybe that’s why life on Earth has to be so harsh–so our souls don’t end up loving it too much.

“Life’ll kill ya,” as the great Warren Zevon once sang. There’s an infinite number of ways in which life can screw you over: asthma or alcoholism, bankruptcy or bulimia, cancer or car crashes, drug addiction or divorce…. Just go through the alphabet–you’ll never run out of possibilities. Even someone as blameless as a little old church lady will wind up getting the shaft in this world. It doesn’t matter if she was too timid to sin. She’ll still have to deal with psoriasis, bad dentures, failing eyesight, her daughter’s lupus, her favorite nephew’s schizophrenia, and a thousand other bullshit problems until her lungs gradually fill up with fluid and she suffocates because her heart is too tired to pump. And who wants to grow up to be a little old church lady, anyway? Where’s the fun in that?

Look, we all know that partying with the Hells Angels and jumping off a 90-foot cliff will lead to a skull-crushing hangover the next morning, if not something worse–but some of us are dumb enough (or ballsy enough) to try it, anyway. Maybe that’s an okay thing. I’m not saying you should start shooting smack and robbing banks with a posse of depraved French circus clowns (you can watch the movie to see how that one plays out). I’m just saying that a little worldly experience isn’t always such a bad thing. It can be good for the soul. For starters, it can make you more compassionate, less willing to judge.

Think about it. If someone had the authority to send your soul to hell, who would you want judging you–the blameless little old church lady, or someone like Mal’s hero, James Bond? Let’s get even more specific. Let’s say Gordon’s soul is on the line and while he was in the tent with Francesca, 007 and the church lady were watching him from on high.

Of course, the church lady is going to be seeing sin all over the place (especially clinging to Francesca’s hand). She sourly notes profanity, drug use, and premarital sex. Following the handy guide to eternal damnation in the back of her Bible, she decides she has no choice but to consign Gordon’s soul to the fiery pit. Thanks to the church lady, Gordon now gets to spend eternity bending over for Tabasco sauce enemas and being force-fed chocolate napalm pudding–all just because he fell in love with a girl and wanted to do the horizontal hula with her.

But then James Bond weighs in…. Here’s a true man of the world, a martini-swilling, Walther PPK-packing sybarite, a debonair badass who knows his way around bikini-clad women and the baccarat tables of Monaco. What he sees isn’t sin. It’s just angsty, adolescent error. “We can fix that up, old chap,” Bond says, clapping Gordon on the back. Rather than damn him to hell, Bond persuades M to supply Gordon with a box of bulletproof condoms and then sends him off to practice his mattress mambo technique with the Goldfinger Girls and Pussy Galore.

If James Bond can forgive you, then God should be able to forgive you, too. At least that’s my theory. There’s no hell after you die, anyway, so it’s not like it matters much. There’s some pretty heavy mind-fucking that goes on in that
Bardo
place Gordon’s always talking about, but no hell. Hell is right here on Earth, if it’s anywhere. I’ll bet you’re glad to hear that.

Fear and pain don’t exist on the Other Side, either, just so you know. You won’t find orgies, bullets, narcotics, flesh-eating zombies, or Carlsberg Elephant Malt Liquor on the Other Side–which probably explains why teenage boys find all those things so fascinating. One of the reasons we reincarnate is so we can experience all the stuff that doesn’t exist in heaven. The people who enjoy that junk the most are the ones who have most thoroughly forgotten that they’re spiritual beings who don’t really belong here in the first place. And teenage boys, as everyone knows, are about as oblivious as you can get. For them, the world can look a lot like Valhalla, that mythical hall the Vikings went to when they died in battle, a place of eternal drinking, fighting, and Valkyrie-fucking.

Everyone makes a plan, before they reincarnate, that lays out all the experiences they need to have in their upcoming lifetime. Not all of those experiences are necessarily fun. The more difficulties you put in front of yourself, the more chances you’ll have for spiritual growth. There are opportunities for spiritual growth on the Other Side as well, but they’re nowhere near as intense as the crap that happens on Earth. The cruel pressures you feel while you’re stuck in a human body are the spiritual equivalent of those chthonic geological forces that can turn a pile of dinosaur bones into a diamond. I’m guessing a similar result is intended for our souls. It must be God’s way of squeezing out our Divine Sparks.

A daimon, or some more run-of-the-mill spirit guide, will help you with all the details in the blueprint for your new life. Then they’ll watch out for you from the Other Side while you’re incarnated, trying to make sure that all the stuff you laid out for yourself actually happens. Before you go, you’ll make deals with other spirits–like Gordon and I did–to determine who will join you as a brother or a sister, who will be your mom and dad, and so on. You’ll even pick out some of your more important friends and enemies–usually spirits you’ve known from one or more past lives. Your worst enemy in this world could be one of your closest friends on the Other Side. Like, I know for a fact that Jesus and Judas are good buddies. You can’t blame Judas for the crucifixion. The whole thing was set up way in advance.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Gordon and Jimmy have a relationship like that.