Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (36 page)

“– that live at the upper end of the electromagnetic scale.”

“So they’re invisible,” Skip says, taking over. “But they look like giant amoebas when you take pictures of ‘em with infrared film. They live up in the sky like fishes in the ocean, but sometimes they get sick and heat up–and then guess what happens?”

“What?” Hideous asks. Gordon doesn’t know the answer to that one, either.

“They look just like UFOs!”
Skip and D.H. both say at once.

“You’re right, Hideous,” Gordon says. “This is total bullshit.” But he can’t keep himself from smiling. He’s glad to have such oddball friends. They make him feel less odd in comparison.

“Dude, don’t you see how it’s all connected?” D.H. says, grabbing Gordon’s wrist. “Some guy is out walking around and suddenly he bumps into an orgone monster. The electromagnetic waves are so intense that he hallucinates he’s being abducted by aliens. But the orgone monster gets kind of freaked out by the experience, too–and it goes a little nuts. That explains all the crop circles and cattle mutilations.”

“Also,” adds Skip, “sometimes a guy will accidentally breathe in a baby orgone monster–and that’s what causes spontaneous human combustion.”

“How high were you guys when you watched this PBS show?” Gordon asks them.

“Very high.”

“Extremely.”

“I not soopwized,” says Hideous, flicking his nose ring at them.

“God dang it, Hideous, that doesn’t matter!” D.H. says. “You have to bore a hole in your skull so you can see the orgone monsters and tell us what they’re up to!”

Everyone looks down toward the cheerleaders when they hear a happy voice shouting up at them: “Hey, guys!
¿Como esta?”
A tiny, misshapen Mexican girl waves to them from the foot of the bleachers. She’s Isabelle “Twinker” Ramirez, the only regularly included female member of their group. Twinker is wearing a shiny margarita green spandex dress with raspberry pleats that looks like a candy wrapper covering a melted piece of milk chocolate. She’s suffered from scoliosis since early childhood. Her spine is curved like a pretzel, making her left leg eight inches shorter than the right one. Even though she has to walk with a cane and her doctors have told her she can expect to die early, she’s almost always incredibly upbeat.

“Twinker!” the guys shout.

With her rubbery-lipped grin and her big, brown sloe eyes, Twinker is a strange kind of beautiful. She tries to act just like one of the guys when she hangs out with them–drinking too much, telling dirty jokes, occasionally vomiting over the tailgate of Hideous’ pick-up–but all the guys secretly have crushes on her. Skip gallantly climbs down from the bleachers to fetch her. He cradles Twinker against his muscular chest and carries her up the steps as she kicks and squeals with laughter. When they arrive at the top, one of Twinker’s white canvas tennis shoes (the heavier one with the eight-inch platform heel) accidentally kicks D.H.’s left ear.

“Ow!” whines D.H., faking a concussion. He’s the one responsible for Isabelle’s nickname. For a while in her early teens, she was addicted to snorting speed and eating Twinkies. D.H., in a pioneering attempt at flirtation, compared her at that time to a Mexican Twinker Bird (his stoned amalgamation of “Twinkies,” the Looney Tunes character “Tweety Bird,” and his favorite slang word for a speed addict: “Tweaker”). “Twinker” has stuck with her ever since.

“Omigod! I’m so sorry, D.H.!” Twinker says as Skip sets her down. “Although you probably deserved it.”

“Me? I’m completely innocent. If I deserve to have my skull kicked in, then it sure as heck won’t hurt Hideous to have a hole bored through his.”

“Man, just give it up…” Gordon says.

“He’s already got the nose ring. He’s halfway there,” D.H. persists.

“Fock you! Maybe I put ho in
you
skull!” Hideous says with just a touch too much vehemence.

“Hideous! Down, boy…” commands Skip.

Hideous, in his studded dog collar, bares his teeth and growls.

Twinker looks concerned. “What are you guys trying to do, make Hideous have a lobotomy?”

“Nothing so gruesome. We just want him to watch the orgone monsters for us.”

“Are you high?”

“I wish,” D.H. answers, rubbing his ear.

The cheerleaders get everyone to stop talking by starting off the pep rally with a foot-stomping routine. They sing to the crowd and clap their gloved hands; in response, 400 pairs of feet stomp back at them, raising a huge din in the cavernous gymnasium. It sounds like a battalion of Hitler Youth marching at Nuremberg:

We are Vikings!
(stomp, stomp, stomp…)

Mighty Vikings!
(stomp, stomp, stomp…)

No one beats us!
(stomp, stomp, stomp…)

Or defeats us!
(stomp, stomp, stomp…)

And so on.... Gordon thinks there should be something in there about Valhalla and the promise of eternal carousing with perky-breasted Valkyries if the team should lose to Selma that night, but of course there isn’t anything like that. When the routine ends, the cheerleaders flip up their skirts and do the splits. As the students in the bleachers clap and cheer, Mr. Witzkowski bounds out into the center of the gym as if the applause is for him.

He’s dressed like a football coach–
the big dork
–wearing a pair of too-tight running shorts and a Vikings locker room T-shirt. There’s even a shiny nickel-plated whistle on a braided lanyard around his neck. Mr. Witzkowski grabs the microphone off its stand and unhooks it so he can rove the planks of the gym’s polished hardwood floor as he gives his pep talk. His green-and-gold tube socks are pulled up almost to his thighs.

“He’s so gay,” Skip says. “I mean, look at him. C’mon!”

Twinker leans over and whispers in Gordon’s ear, “I hate him so much!”

Because Twinker is unable to attend PE classes, she has to spend that time instead doing clerical work in the school’s administration office. Over the past few months she’s found out some things about Mr. Witzkowski that even Gordon didn’t know, until she told him recently. At Gordon’s suggestion, Twinker taped some of Mr. Witzkowski’s phone conversations, and now they’re using an excerpt from those tapes in the prank they’re about to put into motion. Gordon hopes Jimmy is ready.

“The Kingsburg Vikings were the undefeated state champions in their division last year,” Mr. Witzkowski shouts into the microphone, to thunderous cheers. “And they’re still undefeated this year!” More cheers. Someone even lets loose a burst off an airhorn. “We’ve got the Number One greatest football team the San Joaquin Valley has ever seen! And I don’t think it’s just because of all the free raisins our team gets to eat, although I’ll bet that helps some.”

Sunny Maid Raisins is one of the proud sponsors of team sports at Kingsburg High. Thanks to a deal that Witzkowski worked out with them, the school mascot is now a plump dancing raisin wearing a blonde wig and a horned Viking helmet. Immediately after this mascot’s debut, a new slur for the Vikings was invented at rival schools. They’re now known as “The Fighting Devil Turds.”

Get to the point, Witz,
you corporate pimp,
thinks Gordon.

“But if you ask me, what we really have going for us,” Mr. Witzkowski is saying, bouncing around in his ridiculous high-top tennis shoes, “what makes us special, is team spirit. That’s right!
Team spirit!
It doesn’t matter how many laps Coach Eskesen makes his ballplayers run, or how many push-ups they do. Well, I take that back…. It matters. I mean, they’ve put in the hard work. They’ve made some tough sacrifices. But no matter how good they are–and these boys are the best, believe you me–they wouldn’t be winning games like they do if every student at Kingsburg High wasn’t standing behind them one hundred percent.
I mean it!
You’re the reason for our victories, each and every one of you. You might think you’re above it all. You might be saying to yourself, ‘I’m too cool for this, man…’.” Witzkowski grimaces and pretends for a moment to be a dissatisfied beatnik. “‘
This just ain’t my scene, man…
’.” It’s like watching Jerry Lewis play the role of a noble Jewish doctor enduring torture in a Nazi death camp–such a hubristic performance against type that it’s flat-out creepy.

“Well, listen up, people!
No one
is too cool for team spirit.” Mr. Witzkowski is gearing up for his big finish. “In fact, if you
don’t
have team spirit, I’d say that borders on treason. It’s anti-Kingsburg! It’s even un-American! What I’m saying, basically, is:
‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us!’
And what I need to hear from you right now is:
Are you with us?”

There’s a fair amount of cheering and some shouts of
“Yes!”
Mr. Witzkowski cups a hand to his ear and shouts:
“I can’t hear you!”

More cheers and shouts. The airhorn blows again. Several sophomores raise a butcher paper banner that reads:
Vikings are BODACIOUS!
Mr. Witzkowski takes his cue from the banner and taunts his audience by shouting: “That’s not nearly
bodacious
enough for me, boys and girls!”

The cheers from the bleachers recede like a wave smothering itself into foam on a sandy beach. A few catcalls creep in. The guy is just so uncool–it’s obvious even to the sophomores….

At that moment, the loping guitar and drums from the opening of Pink Floyd’s “Run Like Hell” resounds through the gym. Everyone looks up. A big battery-powered Peavey guitar amp, cranked all the way up, is mounted in the high window above the basketball scoreboard. The guts from Jimmy’s old Heath Kit Quadraphonic Stereo is running a three-minute answering machine tape on an endless loop through the speakers. And here comes Mr. Witzkowski’s voice now, dubbed on top of the Pink Floyd track (which fades into the background). It’s from a phone call to an old college friend that he made from his office a few weeks ago:

“God, I’m so sick of these deluded little creeps! All they’ve got is a halfway decent ball team, but they act like they’re all growing up to be astronauts and movie stars–when the truth is, they’re all just a bunch of dumb clodhoppers. Their education stinks and they’ll be lucky if they can make it through community college. Most of them’ll wind up driving tractors or boxing raisins for a living. But they’re too dense to see that. Jesus, they give me so much grief! Like I’m the big loser somehow…. I swear, Henry, I’ve just about had it with this hick town. I’m ready to move someplace more sophisticated, like Bakersfield.”

There’s a kind of stunned silence in the gymnasium as everyone listens to Mr. Witzkowski’s rant. At the end of it, the Pink Floyd track comes back up full blast and the whole thing starts over again. Witzkowski just stands there staring up at the amp like a mouth-breathing zombie until he remembers there’s a microphone in his hand. Trying to drown out his recorded words, he shouts: “Don’t listen to that! It was taken out of context!
Janitor!
Where’s the janitor? We need a ladder in here…
right now!”
Students are starting to laugh.

Jimmy has been outside the gym the whole time, hiding in the bushes below the high window. He’s the one who started the tape with a crude remote control transmitter. Hearing Witzkowski’s scream is his cue to deliver the
coup de grace
. He tugs on a long cord disappearing over the windowsill and hightails it out of there. Inside the gym, an enormous hand-painted banner made of sewn-together bed sheets unfurls down the front of the scoreboard. It reads:

The gymnasium explodes with shouts and laughter. Mr. Witzkowski has no way of stopping it. It’s out of control. Red-faced, clenching his fists, he threatens to suspend everyone in the gym, but that just makes them all laugh harder. Witzkowski’s contempt for his students is out in the open now, his hypocrisy exposed for all time. Gordon, Skip, D.H. and Hideous are slapping each other’s backs, rejoicing in their victory over tyranny. Twinker gives Gordon a kiss on the cheek that makes him tingle all over, as if he’s been sprinkled with fairy dust.

Sometimes it feels really good to confront your enemies.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

To celebrate their victory over the evil Mr. Witzkowski, Gordon and his friends elect to skip the football game that they told their parents they would be attending that night. Instead, they all pile under a tarp in back of Hideous’ truck (along with a case of beer and a quarter ounce of Mexican red-dirt marijuana) so Hideous can sneak them into Mooney’s Drive-In for the price of a single admission.

Mooney’s is on the outskirts of Fresno alongside Old Highway 99. As Hideous pulls up to the ticket booth, he sees the decrepit, bug-spattered marquee advertising a triple feature with a Halloween theme:
Blood for Dracula, Daughters of Dracula
, and
Hollywood She-Wolves.
An Andy Warhol gross-out, a lesbian vampire movie, and something that sounds like werewolf porn… what could be more perfect?

Once he’s inside, Hideous drives fast over the humps in the lot, dodging through speaker poles and jostling his cargo in back to show off his sense of fun. The dips are littered with broken beer bottles, used condoms, and flattened pizza boxes. Mooney’s is considered a free-zone for small-time debauchery–especially among the underaged–although police cars occasionally cruise through there. A door-mounted spotlight suddenly flares, interrupting a blowjob in the backseat of the family station wagon just as a climax is being achieved in sync with one of Dario Argento’s decapitation scenes. For some, the prospect of getting caught only adds to the thrill.