Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (4 page)

Cynthia delivered Gordon on June 1st, 1966–the same day as Marilyn Monroe’s birthday. She would have been forty.
Marilyn Monroe and her near-mystical breasts, gone forever.
The thought still makes Mal sad. How many times has he jerked off to her image? A hundred times? Maybe more….

Mal has quite the porno collection, in which Marilyn features prominently. A whole cabinet inside his clothes closet is stacked with
Playboys
and
Penthouses
. He also has a hidden cache of more explicit fare, with titles like
Teen Slut Diaries
and
The Well-Hung Intruder.
Cynthia doesn’t like it, but she isn’t up for sex much these days, and a man has to have an outlet. She punishes him by buying designer stuff at the mall. Every Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress or Yves St. Laurent pantsuit is a big
“Fuck You!”
to Mal Swannson.

It’s an old story. He’s not the first guy to have a wife who takes out her aggression on him with a charge card. And it’s not that big a deal, anyway…. He can afford it. His dad, Milt, passed away from cancer about two years ago, leaving the business to him and his brother, Gerald–along with three-quarters of a million for each of them in stocks and bonds. Now all Mal has to do is look after his mother, and when she goes, man, he’ll be set. The old broad has an estate worth another cool million, at least.

He decides to check in with his mother on his way home from work. She lives only four doors down, in a ranch home that Mal designed and sub-contracted, just like his own place. She’s still mad at him for making her sell the house he grew up in: a rambling, three-story Arts and Crafts mansion under ninety-year-old maples on the prettiest street in town. But she’s getting old–she had Mal in her late-thirties–and the place was too much for her to keep up once Dad was gone. Besides, living there would have made her dwell on the past. Now she has all the modern conveniences and it’s easy for Mal to keep tabs on her.

He lets himself in through the back door with his own set of keys. Mal likes to sneak up on his mom and find out what she’s doing when she thinks she’s alone. Today he hears the wheeze and rhythmic gurgle of the old asthma machine she keeps in the pantry room. She must be having one of her spells. The asthma machine is an outdated piece of hospital equipment that Dad bought for her on the cheap. It’s used for vaporizing asthma medicine, so patients can inhale it into their clogged-up lungs, where they need it most. The whole thing consists of a long plastic tube, a little condenser unit, and a big green tank of pure oxygen. Mal worries that one of these days his mother will blow herself up. Especially ever since she decided that none of the asthma medications work, and took to pouring straight shots of Smirnoff’s vodka into the conveniently jigger-sized vaporizing cylinder.

“Ma? You home?” Mal shouts, just so he doesn’t scare her into a heart attack by walking in on her.
Although come to think of it….

“In here!” Helen calls from the pantry, flamboyantly out of breath.

Mal finds his bony old mother hunched over the asthma machine, wearing a dark brown turtleneck and tan polyester slacks–her usual get-up. Her hair is dyed jet black, just like it was in her illustration on the Sunny Maid Raisin boxes for all those years.

There’s a funny story about the hair dye: One day his mother called him up in a tizzy, saying she’d had an accident and he better come over quick. When Mal got there, he found she’d knocked over the bottle of hair dye she’d been pouring over her head once a month in the kitchen sink for the last eight or nine years. It was some old brand they don’t even make anymore–probably banned by the FDA. It turned out the stuff was so incredibly toxic that when it spilled it dissolved all the stain off the kitchen cabinet and ate a hole straight down through the linoleum floor. She ended up having the whole kitchen redone. Chalk it up to the price of vanity.

Mal can see the bumps of his mother’s rib cage straining through the wool of her thin sweater. “You having trouble again?” he asks her. She turns to him, sucking on the asthma machine’s clear plastic tube like Groucho on his last cigar.

“I’m always having trouble," she says. "I had you, didn’t I?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the light of your life!” Mal pouts and puffs out his cheeks.

“You are, honey…. Now come here and sit down.” His mother pats the top of a cardboard box full of Del Monte canned peaches just across from her. Mal sits. “Have you been to see Gordon?” she asks him.

Uh-oh.
Now he’s in for it.
“No,” Mal admits, staring at his size nineteen white leather oxfords. He’s been looking for white wingtips, but so far no luck, outside of golf shoes.

“He’s getting out tomorrow, you know….” His mother takes another huff off the tube, then asks, exhaling, “Have you seen him even once, in the whole two months he’s been in there?”

“Oh, Ma… you know I don’t like hospitals!”

“That’s no excuse. He’s your son. He needs you. When was the last time you gave him a hug?”

Mal hunches his broad shoulders.

“You don’t know? Shame on you! I thought I raised you better.”

“Christmas,” Mal says, for lack of any concrete memory. “I think I hugged him at Christmas.”

“Are you sure? Remember, I was there at Christmas. The only thing I saw you hugging was the toilet after you drank all that eggnog and helped yourself to three bowls of my green tapioca pudding.”

He isn’t usually a big drinker, but Mal always seems to go a little haywire around the holidays.
Touché, Mom,
Mal thinks. He turns petulant. “Y’know, sometimes I wonder if he’s even mine. I mean, he’s so skinny and weak. And look at me!” Mal points to his own barrel-sized chest. "How does a guy like me end up with a wheezy little runt like Gordon?"

Helen merely stares up at him from the depths of some private
samadhi,
toking on the asthma machine’s tube like a Hindu at her hookah.

“Okay, so I guess, maybe, it’s hereditary…” Mal says. “Sheesh, Ma, aren’t you about done with that thing yet?” In irritation, Mal switches off the asthma machine’s compressor. His mother suddenly sits up straight, as if awakened from a trance.

“That did it! Oh boy, I feel better now!” She breathes out a little singsong sigh of relief and slaps Mal on the knee. “How ’bout some banana bread?”

“No thanks. I just thought I’d pop in to see how you’re doing. But I should be getting home. Cynthia’s probably already got dinner made.” Mal knows Cynthia has done no such thing. He does most of the cooking. If he didn’t, they would have starved or succumbed to food poisoning years ago.

“Oh well then…
Toodle-loo!”
Helen waves him goodbye without standing up.

Mal notices his mom is doing the happy sigh thing again. The old biddy must be looped. He probably would be, too, if he’d just inhaled half a pint of 98-proof liquor. Mal kisses her goodbye and heads for the door.

When Mal gets home, he finds the house empty. Cynthia is probably over at the hospital with Gordon. Either that or she’s running around town with her friend, Janice. Now
there’s
someone he wouldn’t mind seeing naked. Janice Marrsden is stacked like no woman he’s ever laid eyes on, outside of magazines. He’s been thinking about putting a pool in the backyard, just so he can get a chance to see her in a bikini.

The truth is, Mal’s getting a little bored with Cynthia. Her body has never been the same since she had Gordon. She used to be such a hot little number, but now her boobs are sagging, even though she agreed not to breastfeed. (Mal had read an article in
Penthouse
–or had it been
Juggs
?–that said not nursing was the way to keep tits perky and permanently one to two cup-sizes bigger.) She also has some post-pregnancy flab around her middle. She goes around looking like she’s five months pregnant. It’s embarrassing! Even worse, her belly button turned really big and ugly. Now every time she takes off her Playtex Control-Top Panties, it’s like an old man’s nose poking out at him. Mal swears that Cynthia let herself go on purpose, so he wouldn’t pester her for sex. If that was the plan, then it’s working.
Damn her eyes!
If she’s going to act like that, what’s the point of being married?

Mal inwardly laments the perfidy of women. Oh, what a heartless world he’s been born into! Betrayed by his wife, by his weakling son, by his family in general. Cast adrift in a godless universe without a meaningful connection to anyone. He feels overwhelmed with sadness and an inescapable sense of doom. He’s failing at everything, he thinks, and no matter how long he stays married, no matter how many children he ends up having, in the end, no one will truly understand him. Condemned to solitary confinement within his own sorry skin, he’ll die alone.

There’s nothing he can come up with to ease the numb horror of that final thought. Feeling a sudden queasiness, Mal staggers to the bathroom and locks himself in. Nursing his sense of cosmic alienation there among the cool blue tiles, Mal tells himself,
Get a grip! You can still enjoy life’s simple pleasures.
And then he does what he knew he was going to do all along. He sits down on the john with the May 1972 issue of
Playboy
and beats off to the Barbi Benton spread.

He thought he might get off guilt-free this time, but it only makes him feel worse.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

A few weeks after Gordon’s return home from the hospital, Mal rolls out of bed early on a sunny Sunday morning and heads straight for the bathroom to read the letters section in the latest issue of
Penthouse
. The minutes fly by in a haze of
“I’m-a-sophomore-at-a-small-Midwestern-college I-swear-nothing-like-this-has-ever-happened-to-me-before you-wouldn’t-believe-it I-met-this-gorgeous-hippie-girl-with-long-blonde-hair-perfect-breasts we-went-on-a-picnic I-guess-she-got-a-little-drunk nipples-showing-through-her-thin-cotton panties-came-off-as-she-unzipped my-nine-inch-dingus-throbbing between-her-wet-lips I-was-in-heaven then-she-said-she-had-a-friend I-looked-in-the-rearview-mirror-and-saw-Spiro-T.-Agnew blowing-another-steamy-load-into-my-madly-humping-wife oh-god-I-moaned seeing-her-creamy-tits-stuffed-pussy oh-my-frickin’-god I’m-coming! Ohgodohgodohgod-I-can’t-wait-for-it-to-happen-again.”
Mal is appalled by his own lack of self-control when he realizes he’s whacking off at a time when most normal people would be getting ready for church. To make amends to whatever god or deceased relatives he might have offended, Mal decides to tackle the dismal, thankless chore of getting to know his only son again.

He finds Gordon sitting at the kitchen table wearing Jockey shorts and a dingy white T-shirt, contentedly munching away at the heroin of children’s breakfast cereals, Kellogg’s Super Sugar Smacks(
“Dig ‘em!”
says the beatnik bear wearing a turtleneck on the front of the package). As usual, Gordon is so engrossed in a book that he’s seemingly unaware of the spoon’s repetitive journey from the cereal bowl to his mouth. Tiny puddles of milk are everywhere.

“Hey there, Gordy… what’s that you’re reading?” says Mal, playing the happy paterfamilias.

Gordon holds up the book so his father can read the cover. It’s Hermann Hesse’s
Steppenwolf.
Not a book Mal happens to have read–or even heard of.

“
Steppenwolf,
huh? What’s that about? A wolf?”

Gordon, still reading, says, “It’s about a guy named Harry Haller, who wants to commit suicide with an overdose of opium. But then he gets invited to this weird club–
for Madmen Only
–instead.”

“Really?” says Mal. Heck, it actually sounds kind of interesting. He wonders if any naked women show up at the club later. “How do you like it so far?” he asks.

Gordon puts down the book and contemplates just how much he should reveal. For perhaps the first time in his life, his father actually seems interested in what he’s going to say next. Gordon decides to confide in him: “Sometimes, I feel an awful lot like Harry.”

“Don’t do drugs, son. They’re bad news,” says Mal, missing the point entirely.

“I won’t. But if I get invited to a club for Madmen Only, I’m going. Okay?”

Mal brightens. “Well, that’d probably be the Hoo-Hoo Club,” he says, making a reference to a secret fraternity of lumber merchants that he’s scheduled to be initiated into later that week, “but you can’t go there until you’re older. In the meantime, how about you and I go do some flying?”

Gordon jumps up from the table. “That’d be great! Cool! I’ll go get dressed!”

Mal owns a red and white Cessna 172, the last significant toy leftover from his freewheeling days as a bachelor. He keeps it in a hangar at the Selma Airport. It’s a cruddy little airport, bordered by a weedy, lily-pad-choked lake, but the rent is cheap and it’s only eight miles away. Cynthia hates the airplane and wants Mal to get rid of it even more than she wanted him to get rid of the speedboat, the go-karts, and the Corvette–but Mal is sticking to his guns on this one. Taking away his ability to fly would be like taking away his freedom.

He and Gordon drive out to the airport in Mal’s Ford Pinto, the “Lean, Green Machine” Cynthia made him buy after he sold the Corvette. Her justification was that it would be great on gas mileage. She also just loved the little hatchback–an automotive innovation that, in her opinion, was “too cute for words.” Mal hates the rattletrap piece of crap. It has a four-speed transmission (every speed too slow) and the driver’s seat is stuck at the back of its tracks and tilted at a crazy 45-degree angle, broken, because the car is just too damned small for him. To show his contempt, Mal keeps the backseat full of greasy tools, torn blueprints, and old milkshake cups from the Selma Dairy Queen. He also lets bird shit build up on the paint. The Pinto is only a few years old, but it already looks ready for the junk heap. Even Gordon is embarrassed to be seen in it.

There’s no talk between father and son until they turn onto the dusty tar road that runs alongside the lake to the airport. Up ahead, a padlocked chain is strung between two red-painted concrete posts at the airport’s gate. Gordon asks in advance if he can unlock it. Mal hands him the key.
Knock yourself out, kiddo,
Mal thinks to himself. When they pull up to the posts, Gordon scrambles out of the Pinto and drags the chain to the side of the road as quickly as possible, as if he’s performing some manly, heroic task. Mal drives the Pinto into the airport proper and Gordon returns the chain to its original position with a fancy, one-handed click of the padlock, then jumps back in his seat. If Mal is supposed to be impressed, he doesn’t show it. He merely holds out his hand, palm up, for the return of the key, as if even a word of praise or thanks might cheapen this little ritual of theirs, which has been playing out on summer weekends for almost as long as Gordon has been wearing pants.