Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (12 page)

BONERS

F
or a while now, Cynthia has been noticing a whitish film of soap scum building up on the walls of Gordon’s shower stall. No matter how often she scrubs, it’s always there the next day, or the day after. Gordon showers before bedtime and she’s checked–no soap scum before the shower, but dribs and drabs of it afterwards. It’s driving her nuts. She can only conclude that Gordon is hostile toward sparkling tile surfaces. He must be doing it on purpose. Then one day it occurs to Cynthia:

It’s not soap scum.

She’s in Gordon’s bedroom, changing the sheets, when it finally clicks. She’s looking at the books on Gordon’s nightstand, wondering if they’re responsible for the sullen, churlish twelve-year-old he’s become. He’s always been an avid reader–he was reading before he could walk, practically–but the titles he’s been bringing home lately suggest a disturbed state of mind
. Nausea, A Clockwork Orange, Tropic of Cancer, The Stranger.
It’s Gordon who’s become the real stranger. He can’t even say hello anymore without a snarl. And what’s this, tucked away between the anthologies of Nietzsche and Artaud?
The Pocket Book of Boners.
Cynthia’s seen enough of those, thanks to Mal, to know what
that
means. Suddenly, it all becomes clear. Every night, for God only knows how long now, her wheezing, fair-haired boy has been getting hard-ons in the shower and masturbating himself like a maniac. That’s not soap scum on the walls in there–it’s jism.

Ick!

From now on, Gordon will be responsible for cleaning the shower stall himself. If he doesn’t do a good enough job, she’ll have to bring up this masturbation business and embarrass him with it. She’s not going to risk getting her son’s semen on her hands. How disgusting would that be? More disgusting, possibly, than the thoughts in his filthy little Boner book. She picks up
The Pocket Book of Boners
and scans a page at random:

“The Great Flood was sent because of the large numbers of dirty people.”

Oh. It’s not what she thought at all. She should have read the subtitle:
An Omnibus of School Boy Howlers and Unconscious Humor.
It’s illustrated by Dr. Seuss, one of Gordon’s heroes. Dr. Seuss’
McElligot’s Pool
was the first book Gordon checked out of the town library–when he was still in diapers. Cynthia had thought it was just because he liked the pictures of all the weird fish, but he actually taught himself to read with that book. “If I wait long enough, if I’m patient and cool, who knows
what
I’ll catch in McElligot’s Pool!” God, she’d had to listen to that sentence about fifty million times, until it was fried onto a chunk of her brain, never to be forgotten. And now Gordon is writing his own book. He thinks it’s a secret, but Cynthia knows all about it. She’s seen him working on it, knows he keeps it in the locked bottom drawer of his desk, to which she has a spare key. She’s even read some of it. She’s not a literary critic, but in her opinion Gordon’s current reading material is having far more of an influence, to his detriment, than good old Dr. Seuss. The title page has a crude illustration of a pathetic little bald guy howling with his eyes ripped out of their sockets.
Blind and Hairless
–that’s what he’s calling it. A novel. The first page reads:

I am a sick man. A wounded man. A man whose soul has been used as Kleenex by some snotty cosmic nose. It is very likely I am mentally deranged. However, seeing a psychiatrist is out of the question. Not that I’m superstitious or afraid of being labeled an emotional weakling. On the contrary, I was once a psychiatrist myself. Let’s just say my faith in the profession has been shaken, partly because I was allowed to be a member of it.

I have taken to wearing a trench coat and dark glasses. My face is unshaven and smells of gin and cheap suntan oil. I keep my hands busy by making origami penguins out of gum wrappers. I give them to small children I pass on the street. Some turn and run. Others stand gawking at me with that mixture of wonder and horror usually reserved for circus freaks.

“Someday your dreams will be shattered, too,” I tell them. The gawking ones cock their heads at this, seeming to digest the information. Then they invariably ask, “Where’d you get that hat, Mister?”

I am not wearing a hat. There is an explanation: I haven’t washed my hair in over three months–but I don’t tell them that....

Twelve years old and he’s already pretending to be an old bum–and crazy to boot. Maybe he should get out and exercise more.
And stop jacking off!

It’s bad enough that Mal does it all the time (she pretends not to know)–but now Gordon too? There’s too much testosterone flying around in the Swannson household. Something has to be done.

That night, as they’re getting ready for bed, Cynthia has a little talk with Mal. She tells him about Gordon’s secret shower activity and asks him what they should do about it. Mal shrugs his big shoulders and says, “So what’s the big deal? He’s twelve years old, for chrissakes. Whacking off is natural at his age. Let him live a little.”

“He’s in there ruining the shower walls, night after night,” Cynthia complains. “We’ll have to put in new tiles if he keeps it up.”

Mal puts on his bathrobe, covering a huge patch of albino skin that looks like the state of Texas, right in the center of his back. “Didn’t you ever diddle yourself at that age?” He wags his enormous, flaccid penis at her. It looks a venomous Mexican Gila Monster crouching in the tumbledown chaparral of his crotch.

Cynthia slaps him on the shoulder, harder than she’d really meant to. “No,” she says, “I didn’t diddle. I was afraid I’d burn in hell.” She doesn’t need to remind Mal that her parents were missionaries.

“Well, I did, all the time,” Mal says. He almost sounds proud.

Cynthia resists the impulse to say, “You still do.” The phrase,
Like father, like son,
races through her mind. Mal doesn’t have a closet full of
Playboys, Penthouses,
and
Hustlers
because he likes to read the articles.
What does he think, she’s dumb?
Cynthia tries to remember which came first: did he start bringing home the skin magazines after she lost interest in having sex with him, or did she lose interest in having sex with him because he brought home the skin magazines? It’s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Either way, there’s no going back.

They both hear Gordon starting his nightly shower down the hall.

“I want you to talk to him,” Cynthia says.

“There’s no way I’m telling him he’ll burn in hell for yanking his crank.”

“I’m not asking you to. I just want you to tell him to not be so blatant about it.”

“It’s not like the neighbors know. He hasn’t taken out ads in the dang newspaper.”

“You know what I mean. I don’t want to be the one who’s always cleaning up –” she wrinkles her nose and lowers her voice to a whisper “–
his sperm.
”

At that point they hear a suspicious rustling behind the closed door of their own bathroom.

Mal and Cynthia’s bathroom is connected to Gordon’s bathroom by way of the tub room, which sits in the middle. Mal has a stash of his very smuttiest magazines in there, in a small cupboard within easy reach of the toilet, for those days when his bowel movements are coming a little slow. From the sound of it, Gordon has discovered his own uses for Mal’s hidden treasure trove of porn.

“What’s he doing in our bathroom?” Cynthia whispers.

Mal knows damn well what Gordon is doing in their bathroom, but he’s hoping Cynthia will remain ignorant.

“Maybe this would be a good time to go talk to him,” she says.

Mal feigns lethargy.

“
Now
…” Cynthia prods him.

With heavy feet, Mal heads toward the bathroom. He clears his throat, hoping to make enough noise to roust Gordon out of there.

When he opens the door a crack, he sees Gordon standing stark naked near the open cupboard with his hairless little dink sticking straight out from his body like a divining rod. It’s so stiff that it seems to be vibrating. Gordon’s nose is mere inches away from a neatly trimmed twat toward the bottom of a
Hustler
centerfold. Mal notes, with some amusement, that it’s the Scratch-‘N’-Sniff issue (which to his nose smelled like perfumed bacon). Without really thinking, he startles Gordon by saying:

“Hey there! What’s wrong with your tool?”

Panicked, Gordon drops the magazine and makes a jackrabbit dash for the privacy of his own bathroom. He trips on the rug in the tub room, staggers off-kilter, and smacks his head
(hard)
on the far wall. Momentum carries him into his own bathroom, where he does a woozy about-face–flagpole still waving–and locks the door behind him.

That kid’s gonna have one helluva bruise
, Mal muses to himself. Maybe flailing the lizard is more dangerous than he’d thought.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

When Mal returns to bed, he tells Cynthia–with facial expressions both comic and woebegone–about the events that just transpired.

So Mister Teenage Cool got caught stroking his boner!
Cynthia has never laughed so hard at anything in all her life. She knows she should try to sympathize with the little jerk-off artist (hormones are no doubt coursing through his bloodstream like rocket fuel), but there’s something spiteful in Cynthia that makes her laugh even more. Gordon tries so hard to be aloof–like he’s too smart for her, too
with it
–and it just tickles her to no end to see him get caught with his pants down. Or, in this case, with his pants all the way off.

Doesn’t every mother harbor a secret hatred toward her son when he starts to drift away from her?

With Gordon, it happened early. When he was helpless, just a baby, her love for him reared up unbidden–all ferocious instinct. She gave birth to him when she was still young, only nineteen. No one had warned her that a mother’s love could reveal itself in such a howling, half-mad way. There was no tenderness in it, no real concern for Gordon as another human being. She just loved him because he was
hers
, while at the same time she resented him, because he curtailed other possibilities for her future. She could have gone to college, could have had a career (the alternative lives she imagined for herself were invariably fabulous and carefree), but raising Gordon was too distracting. He was always burping, always crying, always filling his Pampers with stewed beets. She was fiercely protective of him, but there were times when she wanted to murder him. If he had fallen off a pier into shark-infested waters, she would have jumped right in to save him, without even thinking–but as the shark fins drew near she might have found herself muttering: “I should have let you drown, you goddam little
freak
.”

Cynthia was surprised by her own ambivalent nature. By the time Gordon turned four or five, the balance of her sentiments had shifted. Resentment was winning out over her primitive maternal affection–because he truly
was
a freak, an aberration. No child should be capable of reading what he was reading at that age. And what a smartmouth! Always sassing her, always asking,
Why?
So she started slapping him. He talked like an adult–he could start acting like one.

By then, if Gordon had fallen off a pier, she would have just leaned over the railing and shouted, “Try heading for shore, Mister Big Britches! I guess you shouldn’t have gone near the water until you learned how to swim.”

Of course from that point things only went from bad to worse. Gordon withdrew from her and–
let’s face it
–started to fear her. Which made her despise him even more. What son would have the gall not to love his mother? She’d show
him
, that ungrateful little twerp. Reading was all he seemed to care about, so that’s where she went after him. Whenever she saw him with a book in his hand, she’d find some meaningless chore for him to do. Dust the television, rake the walnut leaves, de-flea the basset hound, remake the beds–it didn’t matter, so long as it kept him busy. Gordon did his best to ignore her. She called him Lazybones, said he could either do his chores or start paying for room and board. For the most part, he did as he was told. But lately, more and more, he just scowls at her and turns up the stereo –

–
which makes her so mad she could claw his face off.

In fact, she’s tried it a number of times, but he’s big enough now to stop her. So she tells Mal to beat him with the belt they keep up in the kitchen cupboard–which Mal does, reluctantly, when he gets home. Lately Mal’s been complaining that it upsets his evenings. He’s told her to just beat Gordon in the daytime, when the offense (“Whatever the stupid thing was…”) is still fresh in her mind. But Cynthia doesn’t want to be the only parent who metes out discipline. Gordon will grow up thinking she’s an angry shrew, a backbiting harpy, when really, she’s just trying to keep him under control.

Tonight she’s feeling a bit closer to Mal than usual. It’s almost as if they share a common enemy–
Gordon.
She rolls on her side under the sheets and puts a hand on Mal’s splotchy, slightly damp chest. She caresses the sparse brown hairs there, thinking about the days when she and Mal first met. He’d seemed so charismatic back then. She was the new girl in town, the daughter of missionaries (her father had just been appointed minister of the Kingsburg United Methodist Church). Mal was the local rich kid. He was in his second year at Reedley Community College, studying architecture. She was a senior in high school. She was beautiful in those days–almost movie star beautiful–a blonde with big green eyes, Marilyn Monroe lips, and full, perky breasts.