Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (47 page)

You want examples? Sometimes something as simple as a name can give the game away. Consider the names of some of those who’ve drawn on the collective goodwill of Christians and Americans, and then used that collective energy toward regressive ends: Jerry Falwell
(Fall Well),
Jimmy Swaggart
(Swagger + Braggart),
Cardinal Ratzinger
(Rat Zinger),
Newt Gingrich (I mean, come on… who names their kid
Newt
?!). Need more examples? For beating around the bush, you can’t beat the ambushings of the Bush family.

Oh, and don’t forget Arnold Schwarzenegger….

CASUALTY BENEFITS

H
ideous stops by Gordon’s house around nine o’clock to pick him up for the party at Jimmy’s uncle’s house. Skip, D.H., and Twinker are already out in the truck. Gordon has honored Derek’s Halloween wish by transforming himself into a red-furred werewolf wearing striped pants, a skinny tie, and a mod black velvet jacket from London that he picked up for ten dollars at a Fresno flea market. His hair is perfect.

Skip steps out of the truck wearing freakishly tall Flagg Brother platform boots. He greets Gordon as a drunken Frankenstein–misshapen green brow, bolts through his neck, and a bottle of Jägermeister clenched in his veiny fist. He pours a shot directly into Gordon’s upturned mouth with an encouraging grunt, then climbs back into the cab next to Twinker, who has made herself up as Frankenstein’s bride. She’s wrapped in yards of white taffeta and her hair is teased into a huge beehive with white poster paint lightning bolts running up the sides. Gordon finds it a tight squeeze getting in because D.H. is swathed in an enormous raccoon fur coat that’s taking up all the free space.

“Slap me five, you jiveass pussy hound…” D.H. says in pimp-speak from under the wide brim of a purple fake-fur fedora sporting a long peacock feather. “We be gettin’ muthafuckin’
down
tonight, bro. My hot-ass bitches be garglin’ your werewolf jism.”

“Sounds great,” says Gordon. “The dog in me wouldn’t mind a little Deep Throat action tonight.”

“The concept of chivalry is lost on you two…” chides Twinker, pretending to be offended. “No wonder you don’t have girlfriends.”

“Hey, I was just alluding to Woodward and Bernstein’s confidential Watergate source,” Gordon protests. “Tonight at dinner I was talking to my grandmother about conspiracy theories and thinking how great it’d be to get the real scoop from a highly-placed insider.”

“Right!” says D.H., feigning outrage. “And I was just reciting the lyrics from a well-known Barry White song about, um…
werewolf jism
.”

“You’re both so fuckin’ classy,” Skip grumbles, putting his arm around Twinker.

“Ooh! Sorry if we’ve offended your delicate sensibilities there, Skipperella.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re above such crude talk now that you’re making sweet love to our lady friend, Twinker,” D.H. puts in. “You weren’t so damn snooty when you were hosing your mom.”

“Hey, I resent that!” Skip says. But even Twinker is laughing.

“Lotta women cum this time, yeah?” Hideous asks of no one in particular as he starts up the truck. Hideous is apparently going to the party as himself, only more so. His hair is spiked even higher than usual and he’s sporting three new silver rings pierced through his right brow–one of them oozing blood.

“Jim said to expect a full house. He’s got a keg of Bass Ale and about five gallons of Jamaican rum out there waiting for us,” says Skip. “Oh shit! That reminds me… we have to stop and get pineapples.”

After making a quick detour at the grocery store, they drive out to the Kings River Golf Course, where Uncle Lloyd’s estate sits at the end of the 9th hole. The golf course is where all the fabulously rich people in Kingsburg tend to build their houses, and Lloyd’s house is by far the most fabulous one of them all.

In the light of a full moon and the double row of Tiki torches in the front drive, Lloyd’s mansion looks like one of the Great Lodges built by rich industrialists and robber barons on the lakes of upstate New York. It’s all weathered cedar shingles and exposed log beams with a grand river rock entranceway and at least three rock chimneys climbing high into the starry sky. From the ivy-cloaked top floor, tall leaded glass windows cast a warm amber glow across the tennis court on the estate’s eastern side, where a group of underage zombies, princesses, and astronauts have already gathered to chug beer and slurp slushy piña coladas.

“Ahoy, mateys!” Jimmy shouts, swinging on the carved mahogany
art-nouveau
front door. He’s dressed as a one-eyed pirate, waving a cutlass around inside the stone foyer as if he’s slashing at invisible marauders. An electronic organ solo booms, burbles, and chirps from the lamp-lit living room behind him.

“What is this shit?” D.H. asks, referring to the music. “It sounds like Lawrence Welk trying to get funky.”

“It’s a group called Mannheim Steamroller,” Jimmy says. “My uncle’s got one of those new compact disc players, but he doesn’t have that many CDs yet. This is one of the only ones.”

“Well, it sucks,” D.H. says. With a dismissive shrug of raccoon fur, he sweeps past Jimmy into the vast living room, taking no notice of the open-beam ceiling and the antique Stickley furniture. He heads straight to the stereo system. Tall Klipsch speakers are built into bird’s-eye maple bookcases flanking a 400-watt Onkyo receiver, a Bang & Olufsen linear-tracking turntable, and a high-end Nakamichi cassette deck–along with the coveted compact disc player from Sony, which isn’t even supposed to be available in the U.S. until spring. “Where did your uncle get this?” D.H. asks, pushing the Sony’s
Eject
button. The music cuts out at once.

“Lloyd had it shipped direct to him from Japan.” Jimmy says. “He’s got all kinds of weird connections from his insurance business. It’s like the Mafia, almost.”

“Did you bring any of your own music?” Gordon asks him, surveying Lloyd’s extensive collection of jazz albums.

“How ‘bout some
Ted Nugent Double Live Gonzo!”
Jimmy crouches and plays air guitar on his cutlass, grimacing like a diarrheic rhinoceros. It’s apparent to everyone that he’s already drunk.

“Ted Nugent was lame before we even started high school,” D.H. says. “We need some
real
music to get this party started. Lucky for you, I brought along a mix tape.” He pulls a 90-minute Maxell cassette from his coat pocket and slides it into the Nakamichi deck. Nobody argues with him. D.H. has a knack for finding obscure songs that have a way of making his friends feel weirdly empowered–even heroic–just by listening to them.

The first tune is already familiar to everyone–a Talking Heads song called “Memories Can’t Wait” off the
Fear of Music
album. Lately, D.H. has been getting into the sort of jangly, propulsive music that has been labeled New Wave since about 1976. Gordon picks up the empty cassette box to take a look at the complete song list scrawled on the back in D.H.’s tiny, spidery script:

“What’s with all the Magazine songs?” Gordon asks D.H.. “And just one Bob Dylan cover? That’s so unlike you.”

“I know…” says D.H., “but my new favorite album right now is Magazine’s
Secondhand Daylight
. It’s got this great cover photo of a burnt-up human head on a pike against an institutional green background. And the songs are amazing–really dark and cynical. One reviewer even said something like, ‘Magazine is the band Albert Camus would’ve been in if Camus had a band.’”

“Sounds awesome,” says Jimmy. “Who the fuck is Albert Camus?”

It takes Gordon and D.H. a while to hip Jimmy to Albert Camus and his partners in existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. By the time they’ve finished, nine beers and three piña coladas have been drunk between the three of them and the huge Klipsch speakers are resounding with the icy, majestic synthesizers of Magazine’s “Permafrost.” A collective chill runs up their spines as the band’s lead singer, Howard Devoto, hauntingly intones:

As the day stops dead

At the place where we’re lost

I will drug you and fuck you

On the permafrost.

“You’re right,” Gordon says to D.H., “this is a great,
great
song.”

“It’s perfect music for a first date,” says D.H., bobbing his head in time with the bouncy, submarine-deep bass line. “It also goes over really swell at bar mitzvahs.”

“It makes me think that Sartre guy was right when he said, ‘Hell is other people,’” says Jimmy, trying to show off some of his newly acquired knowledge. He holds up an index finger, as if calling for a time out. Then he turns and casually projectile vomits into a Tang Dynasty vase decorated with a faint carving of peonies. After wiping his mouth on his poofy white pirate sleeve, Jimmy turns right around and brays, “Let’s all sing!” He waves his arms about like a sloshed opera conductor as the chorus comes around again. “Everybody now! ‘
As the day stops dead…
’.”

And that’s how his Uncle Lloyd finds them, coming home early from his business trip. Beet-cheeked, squinty-eyed, morbidly obese, Lloyd walks in through his front door carrying a rumpled suit bag over his shoulder and in his right hand, a brushed aluminum Zero Halliburton suitcase. He sets the suitcase in the entryway as he looks into his living room and sees at least two-dozen shit-faced teens standing around singing a song about date rape in Antarctica. Rather than getting indignant, as any normal adult might, Lloyd just waves to Jimmy from across the crowded room and calls out:

“Hey there, pal, did you remember to water my frickin’ aspidistra?”

“Uncle Lloyd!” Jimmy shouts with uninhibited glee.

“When I drove up I saw Frankenstein and his bride screwing like wild dogs on the roof of my chalet,” Lloyd smirks.

“That’d be Skip and Twinker,” Jimmy says. “They’re goddam animals. I’ll go outside and turn the hose on ‘em, if you want.”

“That would violate my personal ethos. I refuse to get my nuts in a twist over a case of youthful lust. I actually find it invigorating. So let ‘em hump!”

“Did you hear that everybody?” Jimmy announces to the room. “Lloyd says it’s okay to go up on his roof and fuck."

A collective cheer goes up from the alpha-males in the group, but not one of the girls shows a similar enthusiasm.

“So James…” Lloyd says, moving through the crowd, “before this orgy you’re promoting gets underway, why don’t you introduce me to your friends?”

“Um, sure…” Jimmy discreetly positions himself between his uncle and the vomit-filled Tang Dynasty vase. Patting a nearby swath of raccoon fur, he says, “This is my buddy, D.H.; D.H., meet my Uncle Lloyd.”

D.H. doffs his purple pimp hat and takes a stage actor’s bow.

Lloyd asks, “And what does the D.H. stand for?”

“Doctor of Hemorrhoids,” D.H. says, improvising on the spot.

“Deboned Homunculus,” Gordon contributes.

“Ah.”

“That’s Hideous over there on the couch,” Jimmy says. From the couch, Hideous nods his spiky head. The air around him is humid with recent farts–the gastric aftermath of a protein shake loaded with B-vitamins that he rashly drank after kung-fu class.

“Hideous. How apt…” Lloyd mummers. Touching his own eyebrow, he says, “You’re bleeding a bit there, son.”

“I know… but I not get bwud on sofa,” Hideous assures him. “You pwace is so awesome! I enjoy to be inside it vewy much.”

“And this guy here,” says Jimmy, not bothering to translate, “is my good friend, Crash.”

“Now Crash I’ve heard of,” Lloyd says, looking Gordon up and down. “I assume that moniker wasn’t bestowed on you at birth.”

“Hell no,” Gordon says, feeling a tad belligerent.

“His real name is Gordon. We just call him Crash because he crashes into stuff a lot.”

“He suffers from narcolepsy,” D.H. says, affecting a clinical demeanor.

“Oh? Is that just the quack opinion of a Doctor of Hemorrhoids, or does it have some basis in medical fact?”

“I’ll have you know, sir, I’m no quack.”

“Actually,” Jimmy says, “we started calling him Crash after he crashed Hideous’ truck into a bunch of cheap-ass Mexican garden trolls and a highly-valuable black velvet painting of a Siberian Tiger.”

“Okay, now this I have to hear….”

So Jimmy tells the story, with Gordon and D.H. filling in details:

Late last spring, Hideous had been driving Gordon, Skip, D.H., and Jimmy back from a day of ditching school up in the mountains near Dinkey Creek. Hideous was sober, as usual. Oddly, so was Gordon, owing to a particularly vicious hangover from the previous weekend that had caused him swear off alcohol for a while. Everyone else had been drinking beer and smoking pot all afternoon. Gordon and D.H. sat in back of the truck enjoying the rush of pollinated wind while Jimmy and Skip, up in the cab, decided to smoke one last joint to smooth the ride home. Hideous objected, but was overruled, and the cab soon filled with potent marijuana smoke. Twenty minutes later, Hideous was incapacitated by a contact high–his first.

Hideous pulled over, saying he could no longer steer. Giggling like a schoolgirl and demanding Oreo cookies, he flung open the driver’s side door and ran mincingly into the foxtails on the side of the road. When Jimmy and Skip tried to wrestle him back into the truck, Hideous held them off with mocking kung fu moves accompanied by Bruce Lee-style battle squawks. They were at a stalemate. No one was fit to drive. But then Jimmy suggested that Gordon take the wheel. As the only sober person, it was his duty, Jimmy explained, and narcolepsy was no excuse. Everyone promised not to excite him. Hideous thought this was a fine idea–hilarious in its way. He clambered over the side of the truck into the pick-up bed and promptly fell asleep.