Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (54 page)

What I really need is a shower
, thinks Gordon. To that end, he crawls up on the bed and shrugs out of his clothes. Waging an internal dogfight with dizziness and nausea, he manages to put on a pair of pajama bottoms and sneak down the hall to the bathroom.
I’m safe
, he thinks as he curls up in a ball under the shower’s warm jets.
I’ll just stay in here for a few hours, drinking water and barfing until I feel better. Maybe I’ll even jack off later.

But there’s no chance of that. His mother knocks on the door, shouting, “Get a move on, Gordon! If you don’t hurry up, you’ll be late!”

He’d completely forgotten: it’s a school day.

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“Man, you were so fucked up!” D.H. says, laughing, as Gordon nurses a carton of orange juice at lunch. He imitates Gordon’s voice, hysteric and slurred, “The Green Fairy and the nookie!
An nah nookie!”

“Dude, you weren’t making any sense at all,” Skip says, patting him on the back. “Hey, um… you’re not gonna throw up on us, are you?”

Gordon shakes his head. Wearing a hangdog expression and still battling waves of nausea, he sits at a cafeteria table with D.H., Skip, Twinker, and Jimmy. Hideous took the day off, apparently; he’s not in school. Gordon wishes now that he’d had as much sense.

“How did I get home?” he asks, curious.

“Hideous drove you,” D.H. says. “We threw you in back because we were afraid you’d puke all over everything, but you passed out instead. Your bedroom window was open a crack when we got to your house, so we just pushed you through and left.”

“It’s amazing you held it all down,” Jimmy says. “Lloyd said you drank like half a bottle of gin.”

It was absinthe
, Gordon thinks, wondering why Lloyd would lie about that.
Maybe because it’s illegal….

“That fat pig didn’t try to put the moves on you, did he?” asks Twinker. “Because if he did, I’ll kill him.”

“No, we were just talking about the Templars and some other weird shit.”

“Did he tell you about his talk with Buzz Aldrin?” Jimmy asks.

“No. What about it?”

“Lloyd’s company insures rockets,” Jimmy tells everyone. “Lloyd’s one of their main guys, so he’s always hanging around NASA and JPL, checking stuff out. One day he ran into Buzz Aldrin, the second guy who walked on the Moon.”

“Yeah, we know who Buzz Aldrin is. Jeez…” says Skip.

“Okay, so anyway… Buzz Aldrin had stopped being an astronaut and had kind of turned into an alcoholic, so they went out for a few beers. And Buzz got a little
buzzed
and started telling Lloyd this wild-ass story. He said that right after they’d landed
Apollo 11
on the Moon, they saw two huge UFOs pull up right across from them on the other side of a crater.”

“No way!” says D.H., meaning,
I knew it all along!

“Yeah, it’s totally nuts, right? Buzz swore he radioed Mission Control and told them about the UFOs right away, but the transmission got censored so the public couldn’t hear it. But I guess a bunch of ham radio operators picked it up on a their own special VHF station that bypassed the normal NASA broadcasting lines, so people know what he said. He was all freaked out by it. “These babies are huge!” he kept saying. And then he told Lloyd we were warned off the Moon. That’s why no one’s ever gone back there since 1972. It’s also why they built Skylab instead of a Moon base like they’d planned, which would’ve made a hell of a lot more sense.”

“I’m not buyin’ any of this,” Skip says to Jimmy. “I think your uncle’s full of shit. I could tell right away, the first time I met him.”

“Was that before or after he saw you and Twinker doing it doggy-style up on his roof?”

Twinker bursts out laughing. Her face turns bright red. “You know about that?” she asks.
“See?”
she says to Skip. “I told you people could see us.”

“Yeah, but didn’t the Moon look beautiful?” Skip romantically takes her hand and caresses it against his stubbly cheek.

Jimmy says, “Lloyd seen classified photos of the far side of the Moon, and he says there’s buildings there that look just like the ruins of ancient temples built by the Aztecs down in Tijuana.”

“There aren’t any Aztec temples in Tijuana, Jimmy,” Gordon says, but the hair on the back of his neck is standing up. He has a creeping feeling of
déjà vu
.

“Yeah, well, it was Teo-
some
thing…” says Jimmy. “He also thinks the Moon is hollow in places. Supposedly, after
Apollo 12’s
used uplunar module booster dropped off on the Moon’s surface, seismic sensors left behind by
Apollo 11
recorded that the Moon rang like a gong for over an hour. It’d only do that if it was hollowed out inside. Maybe aliens live in there.”

“Yeah, and maybe blue monkeys will fly out my butt if I click my ruby red heels together,” Skip says.

“Jimmy, your uncle is a seriously twisted man,” says Twinker.

“I’ll admit, he’s got some strange ideas, but he’s basically been a cool guy to me,” Jimmy says. “Like, whenever I do something stupid, like puke in his antique Chinese vase, he never bawls me out. He just says, ‘It’s food for the Moon, Jimmy, food for the Moon...’.”

“Like I said, the man’s a fucking freak.”

“He wants us to go by that Petrossian guy’s office and sign some paperwork after school today,” Jimmy says. “For that insurance deal we talked about.”

“I’m still not sure that’s such a good idea,” Gordon says, fighting off a panicky wave of nausea.

“Why not? It won’t cost us anything.”

“Yeah, dude…” Skip chimes in. “And then at least if you die from one of your massive hangovers someday, we’ll all make out from it. You’d do that much for your friends, wouldn’t you?”

“Friends who saved your ass from getting busted by sneaking you in through your bedroom window while you were passed out,” D.H. reminds Gordon.

“Don’t put so much pressure on him,” says Twinker.

The lunch bell rings. The cafeteria starts to clear out.

“Okay, I guess I’ll go along with it,” Gordon says, putting his head in his hands. “I mean, what the hell, right?”

“Sweet!” says Jimmy. “Let’s all meet in the parking lot after class.”

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On the way to Mr. Petrossian’s insurance office in the blue 1966 Ford Mustang that Jimmy’s mother signed over to him on his sixteenth birthday, Gordon, Skip, D.H., and Twinker are entertained by Jimmy’s retelling of another one of Lloyd’s stories. It’s the story of a man named John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel, known as Jack), the co-founder of a rocket research group at Cal Tech that eventually turned into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory–NASA’s premier rocket science center.

Jack Parsons was a bold, intrepid, self-taught science guy who made some important breakthroughs in the development of solid rocket fuels during the 1930s and ‘40s. He put the “JP” in JPL with his work in jet-propulsion-assisted take-offs, which allowed military aircraft to use shorter runways. There’s a statue of him at JPL (“Jack Parsons’ Lab” some people there call it…). There’s also a crater on the dark side of the Moon named in his honor. But the really interesting thing about Jack Parsons, aside from those accomplishments, was that he sincerely believed he was the Antichrist and he was doing everything he could think of to bring on the Apocalypse.

Sometime around World War II, Parsons got mixed-up with a secret society known as the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Oriental Templars, or OTO)–an offshoot of Freemasonry that practiced ritual magick techniques borrowed from eastern mysticism. The famous drug fiend, British intelligence agent, and devil-worshipping sex maniac, Aleister Crowley, happened to be Grand Master General of the Ordo Templi Orientis in those days. He’d personally singled out Jack Parsons to become the new leader of the OTO’s California lodge.

By 1946, bored with rockets, Parsons was living by Crowley’s Thelemic Law, summed up as “Do What Thou Wilt”–a corollary to Hasan bin Sabbah’s “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” There was quite a lot of occult experimentation going on with Parsons waving around his Magick Rood–or more simply, his boner. Parsons was assisted in these experiments by his Scribe–a young, tubby, not particularly handsome megalomaniac by the name of L. Ron Hubbard, who was on medical leave from the Navy for a stress-related condition induced by firing heavy artillery at Mexican sunbathers and writing bad science fiction.

All that magickal jerking off somehow helped the two Thelemic bad boys attract a foxy redheaded girl from Iowa named Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron–who probably had no idea of what she was getting into. Jack Parsons wanted to conceive a Moonchild with her, a sort of homunculus that would serve as a physical incarnation for the Great Whore of Babylon. Amazingly, Cameron went along with the idea. She and Parsons had a whole lot of ritual sex while reciting invocations from
The Keys of Enoch
written by John Dee, the Elizabethan magus. Hubbard presumably watched. The Moonchild was supposed to grow up to be a Thelemic messiah who would preside over the End of Days. But Parsons must have been shooting satanic blanks, because Cameron didn’t get pregnant.

Things fell apart rather quickly for Jack Parsons after that. Hubbard ran off to Florida with nearly all of Parsons’ money and his former lover, Sara Northrup (the slutty little sister of Parsons’ first wife, Helen; Sara later became Hubbard’s second wife, even though Hubbard was still married at the time to
his
first wife, Margaret “Polly” Grubb, with whom he’d fathered two children). Following that debacle, the FBI started spying on Parsons. As a result, he lost his government security clearance and got kicked out of the rocket industry. He ended up working at a gas station. Finally, in June of 1952, while Parsons was fooling around in a makeshift rocket fuel lab inside his garage, the whole place blew up. Whether it was murder or an accident, no one could say for certain, but the launch countdown was definitely over for Jack Parsons, Rocket-Building Antichrist–he’d had his fiery liftoff.

While those events might come across as a rather severe series of setbacks, actually, according to Lloyd, the ritual fuck magick of Parsons, Cameron, and Hubbard–what they’d called
The Babalon Working
–had been a stellar success. They’d opened an inter-dimensional energy portal for the Great Old Ones and something had slouched through it. To Lloyd’s way of thinking, it was no mere coincidence that Kenneth Arnold had spotted the first American flying saucers (nine of them) skipping across the clouds above Mt. Rainier on June 24th, 1947, just as Parsons and Cameron were finishing up their Enochian sex tricks. The Roswell Crash happened several days later, on the Fourth of July, and lurid accounts of alien abductions–with impartial use of anal probes on both out-of-work lumberjacks and juicy high school majorettes–have been occurring at a furious pace ever since. It was also worth noting that Aleister Crowley died that same year and L. Ron Hubbard was inspired to write his book called
Dianetics
not long afterward (with Sara Northrup’s help). Hubbard then went on to found the Church of Scientology, which teaches ordinary people wearing Dacron slacks and polyester-blend blazers how to become Operating Thetans. And Thetans–again, according to Lloyd–are the closest things we have on Earth to aliens walking around inside human flesh.

And how does Lloyd know all this? Like his hero Jack Parsons, Lloyd belongs to the Ordo Templi Orientis, too, of course….

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Mr. Petrossian turns out to be a meek little guy wearing a cheap gray suit and round wire-rimmed glasses. He shows Gordon, Jimmy, Skip, D.H., and Twinker into his Conference Room (a hastily dry-walled back office with florescent lighting) where they all sit down in standard-issue folding chairs set up around a beat-up laminated walnut table. Mr. Petrossian commends them on having the foresight to start planning for their future at such a young age. He’s very sorry that he can’t offer coverage to Twinker, due to her medical condition, but the rest of them have already checked out and everything’s set to go. As he passes around some papers for them to sign, Gordon thinks to himself,
Petrossian, you sorry bastard… you seem like a nice-enough guy, but there’s no way in hell you’re coming out on the right side of this deal.

Then again,
he thinks
, neither are we.
The way Gordon sees it, they’re signing their own death warrants.

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That story Lloyd told about the Anunnaki is actually a pretty good description of how the Archons work within the Dark Brotherhood. Except for the lizard part. I don’t know where Lloyd got that. Like daimons, Archons can manifest in any way they choose. So you’ve got the Good (daimons), the Bad (Archons), and the Ugly (Lloyd and the other Dark Brothers of his ilk…).

Maybe the reptilian slant to Lloyd’s story is just a case of like resonating with like. After all, every human being shares some of the same genetic codes with reptiles. In fact, if you’ve ever run across Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory, you’ll know that the human brain is actually three-brains-in-one. The oldest part of the brain (the brain stem and cerebellum) is known as the reptilian brain, or R-complex. The reptilian brain is all about physical survival–the three F’s (Feed me! Fight me! Fuck me!… Didn’t I already mention that somewhere?). R-complex behavior is automatic, ritualistic, and highly resistant to change–just like the Vatican. So it would follow that people who identify too strongly with their reptilian brain functions might resonate with dinosaurs and snakes and their legacy of reptilian archetypes, which turn up so often in our creation myths and dreams.

Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe in some cheap-ass sci-fi version of the Many-Worlds Interpretation from quantum physics, a parallel universe was created when a meteor slammed into the Yucatán 65 million years ago and dinosaurs survived the Ice Age by going underground. And now that parallel universe is interacting with our own and the dinosaurs have evolved into big-brained, blood-swilling Tyrannohumans who want us to take out high-interest loans on our credit cards.