Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg

WHIZ KID

P
icture six-year-old Gordon Swannson skulking along a shag carpeted hallway in the predawn stillness of a suburban ranch house. Gordon has dark, raccoonish eyes and a wheeze that would frighten almost any mother–except his own. He takes furtive gulps of air like an oxygen-coveting little thief. He’s asthmatic. He’s a boy genius. He taught himself to read before the age of three and now he’s already devouring college textbooks, but only in the fields that interest him: Dinosaurs, Geology, Abnormal Psych…. He could spot a Parasaurolophus from a mile away. He knows why tectonic plates shift and how igneous rock formations are made. He’s the youngest boy ever to diagnose himself with Asperger’s syndrome, just by reading about it.

But maybe boy genius isn’t quite the right term for him. Maybe he’s more of an idiot savant. Consider the evidence. The seat of his fuzzy blue inflammable pajama suit is sporting charred brown tiger stripes–the unfortunate aftermath of a bedwetting incident that he tried to conceal by draping his sodden PJs on top of the electric wall heater in the bathroom. He watched in fascination as the heater’s coils turned an urgent orange.
These’ll be dry in no time,
he thought. Then the stench of roasting urine gave him away.

There’s also this intellectually damning fact: he still believes in the Easter Bunny. That’s why he’s sneaking around in his charbroiled pajama pants. It’s Easter Sunday, 1973, and Gordon wants compensation. He knows he’s a wheezy little bastard, every parent’s nightmare. He’s already been in the hospital for asthma at least a dozen times–and he’s about to go in again. His life so far has been miserable, but he’s sworn to God that he’ll try to make the best of it. He thinks the least God can do in return is to let him get a look at the Easter Bunny.

That’s why he’s up so early. Gordon is convinced the Easter Bunny delivers his gifts under the cloak of darkness–like Santa Claus… or Dracula. At least that’s his best guess.

Gordon tiptoes out of the hallway into the den, where moonlight ghosts through floor-to-ceiling curtains hiding sliding glass doors that open onto the backyard patio. He can just barely make out a Kelly green dime-store Easter basket sitting on the fireplace bench next to the andirons. It’s an electric fireplace with ceramic logs and the andirons are there just for show. Gordon turns on the fireplace so he can see better, experiencing a little
déjà vu
in the light of the fake orange flames. He rummages through the basket’s squiggly cellophane grass, emerging with a large chocolate Easter Bunny, several hard-boiled eggs that he dyed with his grandmother the previous evening, and a miraculous, miniature stuffed Smokey the Bear.

Although Gordon’s world is full of advertisements featuring anthropomorphic animals–think Charlie the Tuna, Tony the Tiger, and Mickey Mouse, for starters–Smokey the Bear is far and away his favorite. Why? Because Smokey is the only one who gives him a deep and somehow profoundly satisfying sense of existential responsibility. "Only
you
can prevent forest fires." Not a single forest fire has ravaged the town of Kingsburg, California, from the day he was born there, and Gordon is not averse to taking full credit for that fact.