Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (44 page)

“Oh, all sorts of things,” Helen tells him. “I’m usually underwater, down there with the fanged uglies from the deep. Sharks try to bite me, I hunt for sunken treasure, strange patterns are drawn in the sand on the ocean floor. It’s so lonesome and dark in that place. Nothing but trouble.”

“But you can breathe underwater?”

“Oh my, no… I’m not myself in these dreams. Sometimes I’m a ball of light, but mostly I’m just… I don’t know… I guess a skinny walrus.”

“You’re a walrus?” Derek is impressed.

“Yes,” Helen says definitively. “I’ve seen your mother swimming around down there. She’s a Great White Shark–but I am the walrus.”

“I thought John Lennon was the walrus,” says Gordon.

“Who?”

“You know, that guy from The Beatles who got shot to death two years ago in front of that famous apartment building in New York. The Dakota, it’s called. It’s the same place where they shot
Rosemary’s Baby
.”

“Someone’s baby was shot there, too? That’s terrible!”

“No,
Rosemary’s Baby
is a movie about a woman who gets drugged by Upper West Side devil-worshippers. They make her have sex with Satan while she’s wasted so the Antichrist can be born. Mia Farrow played the Antichrist’s mom. I’m sure you know who
she
is. She used to be married to Frank Sinatra.”

“I saw Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas once when he didn’t have his toupee on,” Helen says. “He was getting a bucket of ice from the machine down the hall. There he was, right in front of me, bald as a vulture–only the top of his head was covered with sticky blue bits of goo. He put his finger to his lips and whispered, ‘Shhh! Don’t tell anyone!’ He had Mafia connections, you know… that’s how he got the part in
From Here to Eternity
… so I promised him I wouldn’t say a word. Then I watched him turn into a lizard and skitter away to his room.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just dream that, Grandma?”

“Maybe that last part. I can’t say for certain.”

“I saw a lizard,” says Derek. “A bluebelly. Its tail was broke off.”

“There are lizards everywhere. Especially in government,” Derek’s grandmother informs him with a conspiratorial nod.

“Anyway, getting back to John Lennon…” says Gordon, “thirteen years before he was assassinated, he wrote a song called ‘I Am the Walrus.’ Derek even knows some of the words to it, I’ll bet.”

“I do?” Derek kicks the table’s center post with his cowboy boots to express his skepticism.

“Sure… I play it on the stereo all the time.” Gordon sings,
“‘I am he as you are he–‘“

“‘– as you are me and we are all together!’”
Derek claps his hands in recognition and skips ahead to the part about the pornographic priestess and the yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye. He knows at least half of the lyrics. It’s his favorite song after “Werewolves of London.”

“Good! That’s so good!” Helen cheers. She taps her spoon against her wineglass, making it ring. Then, getting wistful, she says, “It seems such a shame to kill a talented songwriter like that.”

“I know,” Gordon says. “But here’s the weird part. Or actually, a bunch of weird parts…. When The Beatles were recording ‘I Am the Walrus’ in the studio with George Martin, they decided to add a live radio broadcast from the BBC right off the air into the mix. It was kind of in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp and his found objects–you know, where Duchamp signed his name to a urinal or a bottle washing rack and then put it in a gallery and called it art. Or maybe they were more inspired by John Cage–who knows? Anyway, the BBC was broadcasting a live performance of Shakespeare’s
King Lear
at the time and the part they recorded four minutes into the song has a line in it that goes: ‘O, Untimely Death!’”

“And this John Lennon’s death was certainly untimely,” Helen says, getting it.

“Right. Then a year after ‘I Am the Walrus’ when The Beatles were working on
The White Album
, John Lennon wrote a song called ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun.’ He said the title came from a headline he saw on a gun magazine that came out just a few months after Robert Kennedy was assassinated–but maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe he knew somehow that he would be assassinated, too.” It was D.H. who had first voiced most of these observations during their high school lunch hours; Gordon later confirmed their veracity with his own research.

“So this John Lennon writes a song about people loving their guns and then later he gets killed by one,” Helen says, summing up.

“Right. This pudgy, stressed-out, born-again Christian loser named Mark David Chapman shot him. There’s a theory that Chapman was a brainwashed assassin and his favorite book,
The Catcher in the Rye
, was the post-hypnotic triggering mechanism that caused him to kill his CIA-selected target. Just like the Queen of Diamonds from a deck of cards was the triggering mechanism for the brainwashed assassins in that movie,
The Manchurian Candidate
. Richard Condon’s book, which inspired the movie, was based on a real CIA program for creating mind-controlled assassins called Project BLUEBIRD, which later became known as MKULTRA. And you might notice that Mark Chapman and Manchurian Candidate have the same initials.”

“I saw that movie!” Helen says. “Frank Sinatra starred in it. He was so dreamy. But he was even better in a movie called
Suddenly
. In that one he played a madman who was looking to kill the President of the United States with a sniper’s rifle, and let me tell you, he was
quite
convincing.”

“See? There are wheels within wheels... the same characters keep popping up. Robert Kennedy was supposedly going on dates with Mia Farrow around the time she was working on
Rosemary’s Baby
, while she was still married to Sinatra. Some people even say Kennedy was the reason Sinatra filed for divorce. And John Frankenheimer, the director of
The Manchurian Candidate
, was a media consultant to JFK during his election campaigns and a close friend of Robert Kennedy. In fact, it was Frankenheimer who drove Robert Kennedy to the Ambassador Hotel on the night he was assassinated. A lot of people think the shooter, Sirhan Sirhan, was in a hypnotic trance that night. Sirhan claimed he couldn’t remember anything at all about the shooting when he stood trial later. Plus, powder burns around the bullet wound behind Kennedy’s right ear showed that he’d been shot from behind from no more than two or three inches away, at an almost vertical trajectory, even though all the witnesses say Sirhan was in front of him the whole time and never closer than a few feet. The L.A. County Coroner, Thomas Noguchi, lost his job for pointing that out…. It makes you think someone closer to Kennedy–like his bodyguard–actually fired the shot that killed him. And in fact, when Kennedy went down, he yanked off the clip-on tie of the CIA-contracted security guard that was standing right where Noguchi said the shot must’ve gone off. In the crime scene photos you can see the tie on the floor next to Kennedy’s hand.
Thane Eugene Cesar
–that was the guard’s name, I’m pretty sure…. He’s still walking around, free as a bird.”

“His brother was killed that way, too. So tragic.” Helen wipes a tear from her eye as she says, “What a world, what world….”

“Yeah, and you just know Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy. That’s why Jack Ruby shot him before he could go to trial. And did the Warren Commission really expect us to buy that Magic Bullet theory? Wasn’t it Hitler who said, ‘The bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it’?”

“If it wasn’t Oz and his Ruby slippers, then who do you think did it?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know…” Gordon says, ignoring the loopy
Wizard of Oz
reference. “Maybe it doesn’t even matter. There are so many theories at this point that even if we were told the truth, we’d have a hard time believing it. The Rolling Stones have a song called ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ that has a line in it that goes: ‘I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?” when after all, it was you and me.’ If you think about it in terms of the collective unconscious, that makes about as much sense as anything.”

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,”
Derek croons through his lizardfishmonster mask.

“Do you really think both of those boys slept with Marilyn Monroe?” Helen asks Gordon, on the verge of weeping. “The press can say such hateful things. But if it’s true, then her death is what started this whole ball of beeswax, if you ask me.”

“I don’t really know…” Gordon admits. “They were horny guys, that’s for sure. Some people think the Kennedys had her killed because she knew too much–which would make their own assassinations sort of karmic retribution. Marilyn supposedly had a red diary full of all sorts of stuff JFK and his brother had told her while they were sleeping with her. And there were rumors, after they broke things off, that she was so heartbroken and pissed-off that she was threatening to hold a press conference and spill all their secrets. A CIA wiretap supposedly overheard her telling her friends about Russian missile sites in Cuba and a secret trip that JFK took to a U.S. Air Force base, where he saw wreckage from a crashed flying saucer and the bodies of dead aliens. But then there’s another theory that the mob murdered Marilyn to get back at the Kennedys for turning on them. And, of course, she also might’ve just plain old committed suicide, or died from a drug overdose. She wasn’t supposed to be very happy.”

“I’ll say. Beauty, in the long run, always leads to disappointment. I know that much from personal experience. Oh shucks, excuse me….” Helen uses a paper napkin to loudly blow her nose.

“Some people say the whole peace and love, spiritual and sexual revolution of the sixties died at Altamont when the Stones played ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ just before the Hells Angels stabbed that guy in the audience,” Gordon says, backtracking a little, “but I think that’s just media manipulation. First off, I met a bunch of the Hells Angels when I was camping at Dinkey Creek, and they didn’t seem like the kind of guys who would stab someone to death unless they had a real good reason for it. I’ll bet that guy pulled a gun or something first. Second, there’s a better argument that what really turned uptight white people against the whole hippie movement was the Manson Family and the media frenzy surrounding their trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders.”

“They were in on this mess, too?” Helen’s tastefully painted-on eyebrows arc like divining rods from behind her napkin.

“Charles Manson claimed The Beatles were sending him secret, coded messages in their songs about guns and revolution on
The White Album
. He thought there’d be a huge race war between blacks and whites called ‘Helter Skelter’–which was the title of another song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney–mostly Paul, I think…. By killing a bunch of rich white people, Manson hoped to get the race war started by laying the blame for the murders on the Black Panthers. The people he sent to do the killing even wrote HEALTER SKELTER in blood on the refrigerator door at the LaBianca house after they slaughtered everyone.”

“How horrible,” Helen says. “Imagine what it took to clean that up.”

“That’s not the worst of it. At the Tate house they killed five people, including Sharon Tate, who was married to the director, Roman Polanski. She was eight months pregnant with their first child. The killers said they were planning to cut the baby out of her and perform some kind of ritual with it, or roast it on a stick, but they ran out of time. Some people make a big deal out of the fact that Polanski, who was in London during the murders, had just had a huge hit with his latest movie,
Rosemary’s Baby
.”

“Oh my goodness, there’s that baby again!” says Helen.

“I know…. There’s a weird sort of dream-logic to all this:
Rosemary’s Baby
, Robert Kennedy, Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra, the Manson Family,
The Manchurian Candidate
, John Lennon, JFK–they’re all interconnected somehow. Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were guests at a small dinner party honoring Robert Kennedy at John Frankenheimer’s house earlier on the same night that he was assassinated. The actress who played the mind-controlling mom in
The Manchurian Candidate
, Angela Lansbury, gave a note to her screwed-up teenaged daughter, Didi, so she could hang out with the Manson Family without being picked up as a runaway. And the producer of
Rosemary’s Baby
, Robert Evans, was a close personal friend of Henry Kissinger–who was, of course, Nixon’s main man. Nixon may’ve lost the 1960 election to JFK, but he was a shoe-in for President in 1968 after Robert Kennedy was taken out of the race. This stuff just goes on and on…. It’s all so crazy and creepy that it freaks me out just thinking about it. The assassination of Martin Luther King is probably mixed-up in there, too–I just haven’t figured out how yet.”

“Two Kennedys and a King,” Helen says. “KKK. You know what that means.”

“You think the Ku Klux Klan had something to do with this?”

“I don’t know what I think. But that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? Some group in the shadows, masterminding the conspiracy….”

“Yeah, but not a bunch of dumb rednecks wearing bed sheets.”

“I just thought with the whole race thing… oh, don’t bother.” Helen’s voice goes up a few notches in tone. “You’re right,” she says, speaking much faster than usual. “They’re much too simple to pull off such a stunt. This is sorcery, a collective turning from the spirit’s light. The Dark Brotherhood.”

“The dark what?”

“Did I just say something?” Helen’s voice is back to normal. She blinks her eyes, looking around as if she’s lost.

“You were saying something about a Dark Brotherhood,” Gordon reminds her. He’s worried that she may have just had a stroke. Or maybe she was channeling wisdom from a higher source.

“Was I? Just now? I don’t have the faintest recollection….” Helen gets up to clear away the dishes.
Her motor skills seem just fine,
Gordon observes with relief.

“Well!” she says, trying to hide her nervousness, “I sure do enjoy our little dinner conversations. Derek, did you get enough to eat?”