Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (16 page)

Some entities say the only reason anyone incarnates on Earth in the first place is to experience negativity. Masturbation and all that other junk (like naked beauty queens, hand grenades, and gold-plated Ferraris) would qualify as negativity, I guess. That’s why the world is such an ass-backward, paradoxical place. The things you want the most usually end up being bad for you. The sun gives you skin cancer, the tastiest foods make you fat, and love will break your heart. The Buddhists have it right:
life is suffering–
and all suffering is caused by desire. So at first glance, it would seem like the trick is to just stop desiring stuff. But then you’d be dead, wouldn’t you? Because eventually, you’d get thirsty.

So why are we born just to suffer and die (and then do it all over again)? Beats the hell out of me… I wish I had the answer for that. Karma? Negativity? Who really knows? Maybe Gordon’s daimon has the scoop. All I can say is that there must be some serious lessons for our souls to learn here on Earth. Otherwise, why bother? I mean, let’s face it–most human lives kind of suck.

DOCTOR SMILEY

G
ordon is a sick boy. A wounded boy. A boy whose soul has been used as Kleenex by some snotty cosmic nose. He’s sitting alone in the oppressive, antiseptic cheeriness of Doctor Smiley’s examining room, stuck there with nothing to do but stare at the doctor’s namesake smiley face wallpaper. Yellow smiley face magnets also cling to the metal cabinets and smiley face stickers are stuck on every available drawer and chair. Even the wooden tongue depressors are laminated with little smiley faces saying, “Have a nice day.”
Simpering yellow bastards,
Gordon is thinking. He’s feeling about as anxious and depressed as the deranged psychiatrist in his novel-in-progress,
Blind and Hairless.
For months now, he’s been tormented by severe bouts of asthma, hives, and a relentless, bone-aching fatigue. He’s been so sick for so long that his thoughts have been driven toward the mystic. Lately he’s been wondering about the strange connections between life and literature. The other night a lordly, authoritative voice spoke to him out of the darkness of his dreams:
Think it, write it, and you shall live it.
Not comforting news, from Gordon’s perspective. The other major character he’s writing about in his book is a bald-headed juvenile delinquent named Eddie, who has telekinetic powers because he wasn’t breastfed as a child (strontium-90 in the baby formula, and so on). The catch is that Eddie’s telekinetic powers only work when he’s grasping his testicles.

After the voice spoke to him, Gordon decided he should check to see how far things had gone. Early the next morning, still wearing his pajamas, he tiptoed out into the backyard, grabbed his nuts, and tried to levitate the basset hound.

No luck. Apparently those voices in his dreams aren’t right about everything.

The notion to levitate Sam probably came from Gordon’s memory of the floating Doberman that he thought he saw being killed in the Smiley’s backyard when he was seven. He never found out anything more about that. He asked around, made sort of an informal investigation, but no one seemed to know anything about a Doberman murder. The Rowley’s dog, Raymundo–who it resembled–had disappeared right around that same time, but Rina Rowley informed Gordon that Raymundo had been hit by a truck. Raymundo had a reputation as a bad dog, always jumping over his backyard fence to go tipping over trashcans and taking dumps on other people’s lawns. Sometimes he barked all night long, seemingly just for the hell of it. All of the adults in the neighborhood had hated Raymundo, although he was good with kids–kind of dumb but never vicious, not even when someone yanked on his pointy ears. Gordon wondered if the collective hate of a neighborhood was enough to kill a dog, or cause it to commit suicide. Maybe Raymundo had thrown himself under the wheels of a truck because of low dog-esteem.

Or maybe Rina Rowley had been covering up for someone. Rina was a weird girl with frizzy white hair who put Day-Glo green rubber bands on her braces and always went around with a bumpy training bra showing beneath her clothes, even though she was years from puberty. Gordon didn’t think he could trust a girl like that–no more than he could trust Doctor Smiley.

Already suspect from the Doberman incident, Doctor Smiley betrayed Gordon’s trust early, and unforgettably, when he became Gordon’s designated pediatrician. They had their first doctor/patient encounter right after Gordon plummeted from Jimmy’s tree house. Doctor Smiley just happened to be on duty at the Kingsburg Memorial Hospital when the ambulance crew wheeled Gordon into the emergency room. Because he was in shock, Gordon wasn’t feeling much pain, but he was bloody and several parts of his body were invisibly swollen with numbness: his forearm, his leg, the back of his head. Doctor Smiley leaned over him–cigarette-and-bourbon breath, a smile as wide as his red bow tie–and he boomed out: “Hey, it’s my little neighbor from down the street! What happened to you, kiddo?”

“I fell,” Gordon said, in no mood to elaborate.

“Well, I guess you did!” Doctor Smiley said in that jocular tone that Gordon would come to despise. “Got yourself banged up pretty good there, I see! Where’s it hurt?”

“All over.”

“You’ll have to do better than that if you want me to be your doctor today.”

“Doctor Brockett’s my doctor,” said Gordon, thinking,
Get this jerk out of here.

“Not anymore, he’s not.”

“Why? What happened to him?” Gordon struggled–and failed–to sit up.

Doctor Smiley smiled a froggy smile that made him look as if he’d just eaten a fly. (Gordon wouldn’t find out about Doctor Brockett’s illicit adventures with “Happy Pills” and braless hippie girls until weeks later.) “That’s not for you to worry about, little man,” the doctor said with a shake of his fat, balding head.

Up yours, Doctor Smiley,
Gordon wanted to say, but he didn’t. Someone rubbed a cold wet towel on the back of his scalp. He smelled something like alcohol, only sweeter. The next thing he knew, he was being wheeled toward the X-ray room.

The emergency room orderlies stretched Gordon out on a stainless steel table under a bulbous, beige-and-black X-ray machine. They draped a heavy lead apron across his chest, then went away. He was left there on his own for quite some time. The X-ray room’s well-organized gloom seemed hyperreal and yet somehow distant, as if Gordon was floating above and beyond his broken body. His scalp itched (he didn’t know it yet, but he had sixty-two stitches there). Noises were weirdly amplified. A scowling nurse showed up to do the X-rays, her white rubber-soled shoes squeaking across the linoleum like anguished chipmunks. Then there was a little buzz of radiation, accompanied far off down the corridor by the mad scientist lab sounds of a heart monitor
(robotic beeping),
a dialysis machine
(a wet clack, whirr, and shudder),
and an old woman’s raspy keening. Gordon closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Doctor Smiley was standing over him, telling him he had something called a greenstick break.

“A what?” asked Gordon, feeling groggy.

“A greenstick break of the fibula. It looks like a green tree branch that’s only broken halfway through. We can’t set it that way… it’ll never mend.” Doctor Smiley’s voice was full of false fatherly concern. “We’ll have to re-break your leg.”

“Where’s Doctor Brockett?” Gordon asked, suddenly wide-awake.

He looked up to find three men in pea green operating room scrubs standing over him, their strong hands gripping his arms and the top of his broken leg. “Don’t struggle, Gordon,” Doctor Smiley told him; “you’ll only make things worse.” The sweet alcohol smell was coming from somewhere again–leaking up from inside Gordon’s throat, actually–making him feel sick. He knew what was coming next when he saw Doctor Smiley take his ankle in a two-handed grip, threatening: “If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, you’ll hurt yourself. Now don’t move!”

But Gordon was terrified. He tried to get away. The hands gripped him tighter. Then there was a horrible twisting deep inside his leg. “I said, ‘
Don’t move, damn it!
’” There was no clean snap, but instead a tortuous wrenching that created a pain to match Gordon’s high-pitched scream. After several excruciating moments the resistance gave way inside him and a splintered bone erupted through his shin.

“Damn it!” Doctor Smiley shouted in cold fury, his eyes gone wide with rage. “
Damn it!
I told you not to move! Didn’t I tell you that?” He jerked Gordon’s foot and the bloody bone retracted like a turtle’s head back into the bleeding skin. Then, not living up to his name for once, Doctor Smiley turned and stalked away.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

After that episode, there was no way Gordon wanted to have anything to do with Doctor Smiley as his pediatrician. But for some reason (having roots in sadism, Gordon suspected) his mother had become convinced that Doctor Smiley was a great healer. He had some quack theories about allergies that sounded promising to Cynthia’s way of thinking, and even though she had no medical background whatsoever, she went around telling everyone that Doctor Smiley was a genius who would revolutionize the treatment of asthmatic children. She proudly volunteered Gordon as a guinea pig for the doctor’s radical new experiments.

Gordon had no choice in the matter. That was the trouble with being a child–you were always a peasant in the medieval court of the grown-ups, unable to deflect any suffering they might want to inflict on you. It was, of course, wildly unfair… but what could he do? Even at the wizened age of almost thirteen, Gordon still didn’t have enough sovereignty to pick his own doctor.

So Gordon had spent the last six years being poked and prodded by Doctor Smiley and his minions. He had endured years of allergy shots, which only seemed to make his asthma grow worse. He had participated in studies for new medicines, enduring side effects that included shingles, hives, projectile vomiting, jaundice, bubbling green diarrhea, and a kind of hallucinatory lassitude that resembled rapture of the deep. Almost everything Doctor Smiley did only served to make Gordon sicker (it seemed as though the only time Gordon experienced the glow of health was when Doctor Smiley was on vacation), but in spite of the doctor’s obvious incompetence, Gordon’s mother never lost faith in him.

Over the last three months, Doctor Smiley has been subjecting Gordon to a battery of tests designed to identify and categorize his immune system response to every single potential allergen known to mankind. Twice a week, Gordon has had to experience the humiliation of walking through the garishly-painted door to Doctor Smiley’s office (displaying a likeness of Winnie-the-Pooh chasing a lemon yellow balloon with, of course, one of those ubiquitous smiley faces stenciled on it). Then, after an interminable wait, he’s ushered into a small examining room, stripped to his undershorts, and subjected to a nurse who covers his back with thirty-two numbered dots. Beneath each dot, solutions containing minute particles of specific allergens are injected via syringe. The solutions are of Doctor Smiley’s own devising, intended to induce tiny allergic reactions in the form of welts, which can then be graded on a scale of zero (no reaction) to four (extremely reactive). In this fashion, Gordon has been tested for allergic reactions to over five hundred supposed allergens, from the usual suspects like cat dander, dust mites, and ragweed pollen, to more fanciful culprits like fried pork rinds, Shasta Root Beer, and his grandmother’s green tapioca pudding.

The result: Gordon has exhibited 4+ reactions to everything except iced tea and boiled potatoes–a new record.

Doctor Smiley now considers Gordon his star patient, a freak of medicine. In the meantime, Gordon has become so weakened by his body’s violent reaction to the testing that he’s feeling close to death. He has a resting heart rate of 160. He tends to pass out if he stands up too fast. His asthma is now a constant presence, slowly suffocating him and making him feel useless. At night, he suffers from insomnia, which is only occasionally broken up by brief, gasping dreams. In the morning, he wakes with angry red welts slashed across his back and chest, as if he’s been clawed by a jilted succubus. He throws up when the telephone rings, experiences teeth-chattering chills in the midday sun, and his bones ache like a rotten tooth that runs the whole length and breadth of his skeleton. It’s a life hardly worth living, but unlike his previous bouts of childhood illness, he hasn’t been consoling himself with thoughts of an early demise.

He wants to get laid first.

There’s a fat, sexually voracious high school girl named Sissy “Marshmallow” Marshall on the other side of town who will reputedly screw anyone in exchange for two six-packs of Diet Coke and a bag of beef jerky. Gordon has been thinking of taking her up on that offer. The scenario has tumbled over and over in his mind. He’s even written a passage about it in his novel, projecting his complex feelings onto the bald juvenile offender, Eddie, who becomes so drunk on Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer at his senior prom that he’s caught leering at Sissy’s massive rear end in her pink polyester stretch pants (“every bulge and ripple of flab arrogantly displayed…”). Later that same night, Sissy rapes Eddie on the reed-choked banks of the Kings River. Eddie becomes severely depressed about the incident, alternating between bouts of misbegotten love for the desperate girl and periods of self-loathing. Eventually, he works out his emotional conflict in a lyric poem, appropriately titled,
A Love Song for Sissy the River-Cow:

Off we went then, you and I,

With your pink polyester lighting up the sky

As if your lumpy butt was made of neon Jell-O;

Off we went, trudging through weeds and muck,

To fulfill a promised suck.

Although I might’ve guessed you weren’t a lady.

It turned out you were a bovine nightmare, Baby.

Not satisfied with merely chewing the cud,

You violated my pud,

And I was plunged into hot throbbing horror….

Recalling that night we saw the ignis fatuus