Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (64 page)

“That sounds like a Van Morrison song,” D.H. jokes.

Instantly catching on, Jimmy appropriates the melody from “Tupelo Honey” and sings in a raspy basso profundo:

His dick stings with Tuskegee Syphilis,

It’s some VD of the first degree.

D.H. produces a dimestore harmonica from his pocket and starts
doot-dooting
along, evoking the mating cries of captive penguins at the Roeding Park Zoo as Jimmy improvises:

His dick stings with Tuskegee Syphilis,

That’s why it hurts… when he pees.

“You shouldn’t make light of the situation,” Lloyd chides them. “Three-hundred-and-ninety-nine impoverished black men were left untreated for syphilis while being studied for the next twenty years by so-called ‘medical professionals’ in the U.S. Public Health Service. It was a flagrant, concerted violation of medical ethics that ended (so far as we know…) only in 1972. From there it’s not much of a leap to thinking that the medico-military-occult complex might be intentionally deploying AIDS and life-destroying addictive drugs into gay and low income, non-white communities. Dealers were actually
giving away
heroin in places like the Bronx in the mid-to late-sixties.”

“Lloyd, you da man, but
damn!
–you bringin’ us down wit’ all this White Dude conspiracy talk,” Jimmy says as D.H. switches to a honking harmonica blues riff. “You bad as them muthafuckin’ dolphin-exploders.”

“I beg to differ…” Lloyd says, playfully cuffing his jive-talking nephew. “The steady moral blunderings of those ‘dolphin-exploders’ at the Stanford Research Institute far exceed my own relatively minor lapses into disreputable behavior. SRI International, as it’s called these days, is a two-hundred-million-dollar-a-year operation. It’s now the second largest think tank in America. They’ve been working on God only knows how many above-top-secret projects funded by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Office of Naval Research. One of those projects–which I’m privy to–might be of particular interest to you, Gordon, since it involves psychics and remote viewing.”

“Is that how I learned to do all this crap?” Gordon asks.

“It’s more likely you cultivated your paranormal abilities right here…” Lloyd says, pointing to a reflective green highway sign coming up on their right:
Lemoore Naval Air Station / Next Exit.
Darting above the hazy blue horizon–miles away across a fertile, furrowed moonscape harboring toxins from the pesticides and aerospace industry by-products that are incrementally poisoning San Joaquin Valley crops–an F/A-18 Hornet strike-fighter noiselessly descends for a landing. It looks like a tiny, leg-clutching spider spinning a web of billowy silk contrails across the sky.

“Hey, I’ve been out here before!” Jimmy suddenly remembers. “My dad used to work on the Navy base, before they made him Chief-of-Police.”

“My dad works here, too,” Twinker says, sounding sulky. “We’re not going there, are we?”

“No. Don’t worry…” Lloyd assures her, “our business is elsewhere.”

“So what’s a Navy base have to do with paranormal abilities?” Gordon asks as they pass the Lemoore NAS exit. He’s merely curious. He doesn’t recall ever having been there.

“If it’s all right with you, I’d rather not get into that just yet…” Lloyd says, glancing apprehensively in his rearview mirror. “First, let me tell you a little bit about the remote viewing project at SRI and my friends there, Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann.”

“My name is Swann…”
Jimmy sings.

Do-doo-do-doot…
D.H.’s harmonica honks.

“I get it on.” Do-doo-do-doot.

“I’m a remote viewer, baby…” Doot-do-doot.

“I can see right through your panties!” Do-doooo-do-doot….

Jimmy howls like a wolf and does some Screamin’ Jay Hawkins-inspired witch doctor muttering as a black, early-sixties Lincoln Continental sedan pulls up alongside them in the passing lane. A stout, triple-chinned Asian-featured man wearing a Magritte-style bowler and a spiffy black suit is behind the wheel. From the open window on the passenger side, an emaciated, beak-nosed Egyptian-looking man with a Salvador Dali mustache stares at them with yellowish, protuberant, unblinking eyes. He’s wearing a black suit, too.

While D.H. indulges in a frenzied, farting harmonica solo, the Egyptian-looking man leans on the Continental’s suicide door and shouts above the highway’s din: “You must turn back! Stop interfering in matters that are none of your concern! The fat man tells lies!” His voice is tinny with a weird singsong lilt to it. His face turns sallow with the effort of speaking, as if it’s unnatural for him.

“Do you know those guys?” Gordon asks Lloyd.

“It’s those damnable Men in Black!” Lloyd grouses, flipping them off with a pudgy middle finger. “
Beastly
little thugs. But there’s no cause for alarm. Their vehicle is no match for my powerful Bentley.” Lloyd presses on the accelerator and the black Lincoln falls away to their left.

“Whoa, actual Men in Black?” D.H. says, spitting the harmonica from his mouth. “That’s so cool!”

“What are Men in Black?” Twinker asks.

“They’re aliens in government suits!” Jimmy says giddily, watching over his shoulder as the Lincoln races to catch up with them.

“They go around impersonating government agents, trying to suppress evidence of UFOs and alien involvement in Earth’s affairs,” Gordon explains.

“It’s more complicated than that,” Lloyd says. “They’re interdimensional entities. More like transhuman trickster figures. They can inhabit our reality, but they only have the energy to do so for a short time. Terrestrial materialization takes the piss right out of them–especially during the light of day. Watch, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Lloyd takes his foot off the accelerator and allows the black Lincoln to overtake them again. The Asian driver and the Egyptian lean toward them from the open window, yelling threats. Their voices sound like frantic buzzings from a hive of bees: “You’ve been warned! You punks are headed for big trouble!
You’re cruising for a bruising!”
Their skin has turned gluey white, with an eerie blue glow sparkling around the edges.

“Go back to where you came from, you stooges for Lam!” Lloyd shouts back at them. He floors the accelerator again and the Lincoln falls back. It starts to shimmy as its big motor roars for one final assault. Then, like a fast-fading mirage, it disappears.

“Holy shit!” says Skip. “Did you see that?”

Everyone confirms that they did. Everyone, that is, except for Gordon–who has slumped forward with his head between his knees, deep in narcoleptic sleep.

Gordon dreams he’s dashing naked along a tree-lined suburban street with a long-stemmed red rose clenched between his teeth. A white marble statue is chasing after him, effortlessly gliding above the ground as if it’s mounted on a swift and agile little hovercraft. The statue has a murderous female energy to it. It appears to be the Roman goddess, Diana, pulling her hunting bow taut to launch a poisoned arrow at him. Her eyes are full of hatred and Gordon is afraid to look in them, for fear of being hypnotized. With just the barest glance over his shoulder, he sees the marble turning to red, raw flesh. The first arrow whistles past his ear. Gordon leaps across hedges, climbs over white picket fences, hides behind old hemlock trees, dodging arrows as the statue bellows for his blood. All that running is wearing him out. His heart is racing. He’s gasping for breath. Meanwhile, the statue has transformed into a glowering James Dean wearing the red windbreaker from
Rebel Without A Cause
. Gordon senses this change has made the statue vulnerable. He grabs one of the fallen arrows and leaps out from behind a tree to jab the arrow’s tip into James Dean’s neck. The arrow’s poison turns Dean’s face back into stone. His eyes take on an insectile appearance–like a praying mantis, or those little Grey aliens at the end of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. The statue telepathically begs Gordon to dig his thumbs into two pressure points on either side of its marble nose, just below its black, emotionless eyes. Doing so will reverse the effects of the poison. In an act of compassion, Gordon does just that and the dream ends.

As Gordon rises to consciousness, breathing hard, his mind is already making associations.
Naked
(“as the day he was born”).
Seeking love
(the red rose).
Diana
(the Moon Goddess–with all that implies in the world according to Lloyd…). The statue’s eyes remind him of his mother’s fierce gaze. The arrows could have been his mother’s projected thoughts of rage and hatred. Their prick brings about paralysis, dissociation, sleep–like the poison needles in fairy tales.
And James Dean?
Probably his mother’s animus–the male side of her psyche–
where she’s vulnerable.
Sending one cruel thought back her way
(“Stay put, or I’ll rupture your internal organs…”)
was enough to prevent her from bashing in Lloyd’s Bentley.

Or is James Dean somehow related to Jimmy? And what was the point of that alien-insect stuff, anyway?
he wonders, now fully awake.

“Rise and shine…” says Lloyd as Gordon sits up and stretches his arms and legs.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” Twinker says, leaning forward to kiss Gordon’s cheek. “Did you have any good dreams?”

“It was more like a nightmare. About my mother, I think,” Gordon says, getting razzed by his friends in the backseat. He turns to Lloyd: “You said something about the Men in Black being stooges for Lam. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lloyd concentrates on his driving. “A slip of the tongue,” he says, “but I may as well explain….
Lam
is the Tibetan word for the Way or the Path–a rough equivalent of the Chinese word,
Tao
. And
Lama
, of course, means ‘He who Goeth’–the one who follows the Path. It was also a title of the ancient gods of Egypt. But Lam has a more precise meaning for the adepts of the Ordo Templi Orientis. It refers to a particular class of interdimensional entities. Aleister Crowley first summoned one of these Lam entities during a series of magickal invocations called the
Amalantrah Workings
, which took place in a Manhattan apartment building on Central Park West in the winter of 1918. I believe the building was the Dakota–where John Lennon was shot–although I could be mistaken.”

“That’s the same place where they shot
Rosemary’s Baby
,” Gordon blurts out, experiencing a spasm of
déjà vu
.

“Someone’s baby was shot there, too? What a pity!” Lloyd smirks.

“You know what I mean…” Gordon says.

“Indeed, I do.” Lloyd reaches for his wallet. “Anyway, as I was saying, Crowley was able to invoke one of these Lam ‘intelligences’ to manifest physically by creating an interdimensional energy portal–a sort of rip in the space-time continuum that allows passage into our world. And apparently this Lam entity was obliging enough to sit for a portrait. Crowley exhibited the Lam portrait at his
Dead Souls
exhibition in Greenwich Village in 1919. He swore then–and to his dying day–that the portrait was drawn from real life. I carry a tiny reproduction of it here, in my wallet. Care to see it?” He opens his fat wallet and passes it to Gordon.

“You carry a picture of Lam around in your wallet?”

“So I never had children…” Lloyd says with a shrug. “Don’t give me guff.”

Everyone in the backseat leans forward to peer over Gordon’s shoulder as he looks at Lloyd’s wallet. On the left side of the billfold’s clear plastic accordion sleeves is an elementary school photo of Jimmy, taken in the second grade–his bucktoothed grin, freckles, and devilishly glinting eyes set off against a tacky blue backdrop. On the right side is a small Xeroxed portrait of a spindly grey humanoid creature with a tiny nose and mouth, no ears, and an enormous, bulbous head.

“This Lam guy looks just like one of those drawings done by people who’ve been abducted by UFOs,” Gordon says, stating the obvious.

“Just like the Greys,” D.H. agrees, “except for the eyes.” The eyes in the drawing look almost human: beady, wise, and weirdly hypnotic.

“Well observed…” Lloyd commends them. “The Lam’s eyes are almost always covered by large, black, almond-shaped lenses–the alien equivalent of sunglasses, in case you didn’t know…. See, the Lam entities, or the Greys… call them what you will… spend most of their time in darkness. Their normal habitat is deep underground. Their eyes have adapted to that environment and are thus extremely sensitive to light. Those black lenses they wear protect them from our sun, while at the same time allowing them to see in the blackest night. In fact, modern military night vision technology was back-engineered from such lenses found on the bodies of dead aliens in the wreckage from the Roswell Crash of 1947.”

“That’s just fuckin’ freaky…” says Skip. “They really found aliens at Roswell?”

“Roswell was only the beginning… there have been several UFO crashes since. Alien bodies are literally stacked up like cordwood at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. You have Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard to thank for that.”

“Because of
The Babalon Working
,” says D.H., remembering.

“The Magick Boner of Saucy Jack!” Jimmy ejaculates in a spontaneous fit of idol worship.

“Right again,” says Lloyd. “Crowley was a responsible magus–despite what the public thinks of him–and after creating the interdimensional portal with a wave of his Magick Rood during the
Amalantrah Workings,
he also took care to close it when he was finished. Not so with Hubbard and Parsons…. They weren’t quite up to Crowley’s level. When they aped the
Amalantrah Workings
with their
Babalon Working
in Pasadena during 1946 and ‘47
,
they ripped such a large hole in the space-time fabric that it was beyond their ability to repair it. Their portal has remained open, allowing the Greys and other transhuman, interdimensional entities unhindered access to our realm ever since.”