Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (3 page)

On this particular day, his mother and Mrs. Marrsden had decided to get together in the wading pool in the Marrsden backyard to drink rum-and-cokes and spread vicious rumors. Gordon’s mother wore her hair in a crisp Aqua-Net shellacked bouffant and came sheathed in a one-piece bathing suit of the latest Space Age fabric. She looked like a glamorous poodle groomer from one of the orbiting moons around Saturn. In contrast, Mrs. Marrsden arrived with her black hair in a close-cropped pixie cut, wearing a daring flower print bikini with wide yellow straps that emphasized her enormous, shelf-like bosom. Careful not to spill their drinks, the two women filled the wading pool with water from a stiff green garden hose. Then they told Gordon and Jimmy it was time for them to learn how to swim. Gordon–cutting a heroic figure in the aforementioned Big Boy underpants–thought this was a fantastic idea, and as soon as his mother lowered herself into the pool with a giddy shiver, he was clambering at her side, asking her to help him in. Jimmy, however, needed some coaxing. He was more interested in running around the yard naked, his red swim trunks having proven too constraining. Mrs. Marrsden had to chase him around the swing set a few times before she was able to catch him by the arm and drag him into the pool, where he splashed and yelled like a freshly hatched gargoyle as she got him into his trunks again.

The initial caress of that cool, limpid water against his naked chest was a thrill Gordon hoped he would always remember. He felt free, buoyant, electric, able to breathe in deep lungfuls of crystalline air. His first asthma attack had occurred just a few months earlier, after his mother had left her pet cat, TwinkleToes (six toes on each foot, mangy, invidious), in the playpen with him while she was doing some vacuuming. She found Gordon twenty minutes later with his face pressed against the pen’s netting, turning a cyanotic blue, as the cat sat behind him calmly licking its mutant calico feet. Gordon’s mother rushed him to the emergency room, where Doctor Brockett gave him a shot of epinephrine, and, after asking a few questions, deduced that Gordon had a severe allergy to cat dander. The good doctor suggested giving TwinkleToes the boot. And although Gordon’s mother eventually did send TwinkleToes away (not without misgivings), Gordon’s lungs had never been the same. They always felt restricted to some degree–until that first dunk in the wading pool.

Gordon and Jimmy both turned out to be natural swimmers. They crisscrossed the pool, shoving off from one mother to the other, paddling like happy little tadpoles. Once Gordon looked up, blinking water, expecting to see his mother, and found his hands resting on Mrs. Marrsden’s breasts, instead. He felt a little embarrassed about that, but it was also sexy. Mrs. Marrsden simply laughed and shoved him on his way.

Everything seemed to be going along fine–it was the happiest time Gordon could remember having–but then the two mothers shrieked as one and leapt out of the pool, trailing great sheets of water from their swimsuits. Gordon felt himself hoisted into the air by angry hands. He was set down on his feet, hard, and then his mother was bending down in front of him. She looked extremely upset–and it frightened him.

“Gordon,” she said, “did you go Big Job in the pool?”

He couldn’t imagine such a thing. “No!” he said emphatically, hoping it would quell his mother’s rage.

“Tell the truth. Did you go Big Job in the pool?” She shook him. Her green eyes warned of impending violence.

“No! I didn’t!” Gordon declared. And truly, he didn’t think he had.

“Then who did?”

Losing his own sense of reason and proportion, Gordon pointed a finger at Mrs. Marrsden, now standing beside the pool with a kitchen strainer. “She did,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so!” This was said in a rush as Gordon’s mother yanked down his pants. Gordon looked to his feet. He didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was clearly there. His body had betrayed him. Five little brown turdlets rested in the soggy crotch of his now permanently disgraced Big Boy underpants. He supposed he wouldn’t be wearing
those
again for a while.
Damn!

The whole situation was so overwhelming that Gordon might have burst into tears if it hadn’t been for Jimmy’s presence. Even at the age of two, Gordon wanted to play the stoic in front of his peers. He glanced over at Jimmy, to acknowledge his humiliation, but Jimmy was in an odd squat with his back to him, like a Russian weightlifter straining for his first Olympic gold medal. As Gordon watched, a greenish-brown seepage started dripping from beneath Jimmy’s red swim trunks and running in rivulets down the backs of his legs. Gordon knew what was happening even before Jimmy bellowed: “It was me! Jimmy! I went Big Job in the pool!”

Mrs. Marrsden went over and tugged on Jimmy’s elastic waistband, taking a quick peek at his rear end. “I don’t think so, kiddo,” she said. “The turds in the pool are floaters. What you did looks more like leftover guacamole. But nice try, anyway….”

Gordon and Jimmy had been the best of friends ever since.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Two months pass before Gordon’s collapsed lung re-inflates and he’s able to leave the hospital–a long stretch of time in the life of a six-year-old. Gordon spends it getting to know some of the people on the hospital’s staff. There’s Jeff, the male nurse, who brings him old issues of custom car magazines, then chides Gordon for looking at the supercharged, candy-flake-coated Mustangs and Hemi ’Cudas while ignoring the bikini-clad girls standing next to them. There’s also Gwen, the foxy, long-legged Candy Striper, who unknowingly gives Gordon a clear view of the crotch of her white cotton panties whenever she rises on tip-toe to check the fluid levels in his IV bottles (Jeff’s counsel wasn’t lost on him, after all…). He also becomes acquainted with Bethanny, the overweight night nurse (very sympathetic about nightmares), Oscar, the janitor (“You should see the crap I have to pick up. It’s disgusting!”), and Rosaria, the ancient, decrepit Mexican woman who gives him his sponge baths (always handing him a soapy rag and averting her eyes while he washes his “special part down there”).

And then there’s suave Doctor Brockett, Gordon’s hero, who looks like Spock on
Star Trek,
but without the pointy ears. Doctor Brockett always warms up his stethoscope by blowing on it before he puts it on a patient’s chest, and he once sternly told Gordon’s mother he would give
her
all the shots, instead of Gordon, if she didn’t stop smoking around her asthmatic son. For those reasons and many others, Gordon thinks Doctor Brockett is one of the most admirable, intelligent adults he’s ever met.

(Unfortunately, in the months ahead, Doctor Brockett will become addicted to something Gordon’s mother and Mrs. Marrsden refer to as “Happy Pills.” He will get arrested for driving his red Alfa Romeo on the wrong side of the road at eighty miles an hour while on his way out to Riverland to go water-skiing. In the Police Blotter write-up in the following week’s issue of
The Kingsburg Recorder
, it will be noted that two braless hippie girls and a bucket of Colonel Sander’s Kentucky Fried Chicken accompanied the doctor on his wild ride. It’s an embarrassing situation to find oneself in, but Doctor Brockett will do the responsible thing and pay his bail, then check himself in to a drug rehab clinic in Fresno. There, while detoxifying, he will be approached by a coalition of concerned citizens, including several members of the Kingsburg city council. They’ll suggest it might be time for Doctor Brockett to abandon his well-established medical practice and relocate to a place like New York or San Francisco, where moral laxity such as his will perhaps be better tolerated. Kingsburg, they’ll imply, is too small a town to handle so large a scandal. The upshot of all this is that Gordon will get stuck with a jolly, balding, bow-tie-wearing pediatrician named Doctor Smiley, whom he’ll grow to loathe, while his childhood idol, Doctor Brockett–the adult he most wants to emulate–is never to be seen nor heard from again.)

Gordon’s seventh birthday arrives while he’s still in the hospital. Only his Grandma Helen makes note of it, giving him a pair of bright blue galoshes and a matching rain hat, along with the Merck Manual he’d requested. Gordon’s mother and father are out-of-town. In Spain, actually, going to bullfights. His father won the trip by selling a record number of Westinghouse air conditioners. The Swannsons own a hardware store that has a local monopoly on air conditioners–and it gets hot in Kingsburg. So hot that Gordon’s father wins one of those trips just about every year.

Gordon wishes he were in Spain, too, instead of stuck in a boring old hospital. At least the oxygen tent has been put away, so he can watch television, but at this hour there’s nothing on but soap operas. To pass the time, Gordon recalls images from the travel brochures his parents left lying around the house. He imagines himself in Madrid. He sees himself wandering the marble halls of the Prado, passing by the Titians, Goyas, and El Grecos. Finally, he encounters Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych:
The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Seeing Bosch’s lurid panoply of saints and monsters in his mind’s-eye incites a tingling in Gordon’s bladder. He suddenly needs to pee. He reaches for the turquoise plastic pitcher on his bedside table, kept there expressly for that purpose. He’s still attached to IV bottles, which makes it almost impossible for him to get up to use the bathroom. Gordon pushes his pajama bottoms to his knees and takes aim with his little dink.

Just as the first squirt successfully thrums against the pitcher’s bottom, the door to his room swings open and Jeff, Gwen, Bethanny, Oscar and old Rosaria all parade into the room singing, “Happy Birthday.” Wide Bethanny leads the way with a cake on a hospital gurney. Gordon is mortified, but there’s no stopping what he’s started.

Rosaria is the first to notice his predicament, getting an eyeful of his
special part
for perhaps the first time ever. “The boy, he unpantsed!” she says, with a kind of ancient Aztec indignation.

“He’s pissin’ like a racehorse, is what he’s doin’,” says Jeff. “Damn, buddy, you better slow down there, or you’ll need another jug.”

“Maybe we should come back another time,” Gwen suggests. They all agree and turn around to head back the way they came.

“Don’t worry, Gordon,” Oscar says on his way out, “I seen worse.”

“Happy Birthday!” trills Bethanny, leaving the cake behind.

Gordon swears he hears giggling once the door is closed.
It isn’t right,
he thinks.
No six-year-old… no, wait… no
SEVEN-year-old should have to suffer so much pain and ignominy.
There’s only one thing to do. He props up his right arm and starts praying to whatever celestial beings are available, pleading for another swift end to his existence. He knows it’s hopeless. God is having far too much fun with him.

Just call him the Whiz Kid. Everyone else did.

MATADOR

W
hen Malcolm “Mal” Swannson gets back from Spain his first act, upon returning to his office, is to tack up a gaudy bullfighting poster on the fake wood paneled wall above his drafting table. In torrid hues of green and ochre, the poster announces the impending clash of wills between Manuel Alvarez and a particularly large and vicious bull named El Gordo Muerte–a confrontation to be held at 3:00 PM, Saturday, in La Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas del Espíritu Santo, Madrid. Mal had attended said bullfight and walked out of there stupendously impressed. He’s now thinking he might give up the hardware business–even give up his lucrative sideline as a certified Westinghouse air conditioning sales and service representative–so he can devote himself full-time to becoming a
torero
.

Those bloodthirsty Spaniards have probably never seen anything like him. Mal stands 6’-7"–or 5’-19", as he likes to joke–with only socks on his feet. He weighs a hefty 268 pounds. He has some kind of a weird skin disease, like psoriasis, that makes patches of his hide turn itchy and red and fall off in flakes, leaving behind white areas that make him look like he’s been haphazardly bleached. He’s practically albino in places. But what a matador he would make! Mal imagines his tall, skinny legs encased in tight, shiny toreador pants–
taleguilla
–the outline of his whopping manhood bulging at the crotch. Who has bigger balls: the bull or Mal Swannson? “Mal!” the audience roars in one voice, pelting him with rose petals before the contest has even begun. So what if he’s suffering from Early Male Pattern Baldness? (A combover makes it barely noticeable.) Who cares if his belly hangs way out over his belt these days? (Too much prime rib and homemade ice cream.) He’ll still be the best darn bullfighter Spain has ever seen.

But Mal worries about his glasses–thick, black-framed numbers that make him look like Clark Kent. The world gets very blurry without them. He’s near-sighted. What if the glasses happen to fall off during a tricky
verónica
, get crushed under the hoof of some picador’s mount? Then where will he be?

Mal contemplates getting contact lenses.

It’s excitement I’ve been missing
, thinks Mal. He needs the thrill of danger; the quickening that comes with risk. Getting married to Cynthia really knocked the wind out of his sails. Right up until their honeymoon, he was
A Man of Action
. He tore around the countryside in a cherry red 1958 Corvette. He had a beautiful teak and mahogany eight-cylinder speedboat for towing water-skiers on the Kings River. He raced go-karts with his buddies just for kicks. A Homelite chainsaw engine on a welded steel frame could get a guy’s butt moving at more than fifty miles an hour while he sat just inches above the ground. Man, that was fun! He won First Place in the Kings County Go-Kart Derby just a few weeks before Gordon was born.

When Gordon was born–that’s when the fun really ended. Those people who swear babies are little bundles of joy? They’re deluded. Babies cry almost non-stop and crap their pants relentlessly. Where’s the fun in that? Gordon was a complete accident, the booby prize from a broken condom. Mal had never had much luck with condoms. He was just too big for them. They exploded into latex confetti during his ferocious orgasms. He even tried wearing two at a time, but Gordon somehow sneaked in there, anyway. Once that little sucker started mitosis, there was no getting away from him.