OVERCOME

or...

Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll: Gordo- Style


In my story The Graduate, reference is made to an event that happens to Gordo the sumnmer after tenth grade. This story picks up directly after that event. You don't need to read that story to understand this one. This story stands on its own, though a knowledge of my other Gordo stories would certainly make this one richer.

By the way, this one is not going to be an "epic." I see three, maybe four chapters. Drugs, sex and rock and roll? I've got a lot to fit into a few chapters!

For BK03, not only will this be MG, it will also be the "What Planet Are We On?" scenario I hinted at earlier.

Everybody, enjoy!

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David Gordon made a decision. He was swearing off sex.

Not that he had ever actually had sex---unless you counted a few really good kisses, copping a feel now and then, and what happened (way too often, he feared) when he was alone in his bedroom at night---but all this thinking about sex! It had to stop! It was getting him into trouble.

The summer that Gordo made this decision, he was sixteen years old, hovering between his sophomore and junior year of high school. His hormones had kicked into high gear, clouding his once sharp mind with thoughts and images that only a few years ago would have appalled him.

For four months he had dated Lizzie McGuire, his lifelong friend who had somehow now become the object of all his affection and fantasies. He loved Lizzie so much, but out of respect for her, he restrained himself. It was difficult, but he was willing to do it. For Lizzie.

Then Parker McKenzie came into the picture. Gordo did not love Parker. He did not even like her very much. But she had obsessively set all her attention on him, and earlier this summer had orchestrated a horrific scene at the beach which found him naked in the water with her, both of them exploring each other's bodies in full view of all their friends. Including Lizzie.

After that day, Gordo and Lizzie were history. Gordo spent sleepless nights grieving the loss of Lizzie's love. He spent countless hours beating himself up over his inexcusable behavior. Why had he done it, why had he touched that girl, why had he kissed her? He didn't even like her! It made no sense. And if there was one thing you could say about David "Gordo" Gordon, it was that he always made sense.

Until now.

With all the care of a Socratic philosopher, Gordo reviewed his dilemma countless times while pining away in his lonely bedroom, throwing a ball repeatedly against the wall until at last his usually amiable mother would crack and scream at him from the next room, "Stop all that racket!"

Out of respect for his mother, Gordo would stop and lie still on the bed and know with certainly what he needed to do to get his pathetic life back in order.

He needed to swear off sex.

-

"Dude!" his best friend Larry exclaimed when Gordo at last got up the nerve to share his momentous decision. "You are totally insane!"

"I'm not insane," Gordo insisted. "But I will be if I don't get this under control. It's taking over my life, Tudge. Look what it's done already to me and Lizzie."

"If you mean that thing where Parker all but raped you in the water---"

"It's not just that," Gordo said miserably. "It's every thought of every waking moment. I'm sick of it. What happened to the smart, self-assured guy I was? I want my life back."

"You're just feeling a little depressed, and a little guilty about what happened," Larry reasoned. "And now you're doing nothing but sitting around, wasting a perfectly good summer, bored and lonely, missing Lizzie. You've got to keep busy, pally. Maybe find a new girl---"

"No!" Gordo exclaimed. "No new girls!"

"But Meryl's cousin is here from New Jersey, and she's so cute, you should see her…"

"Does Meryl know you think her cousin is cute?" Gordo wondered.

"No, and you're not going to tell her," Larry instructed. "Besides, I'm just looking. I would never do anything about it."

Gordo sighed. "Great. For guys who can control themselves. Unlike me."

"Okay, look," Larry said. "You just need to stop dwelling. If you don't want a new girlfriend, at least get a hobby. Better yet, a job. I hear Food Giant is still hiring for the summer. You could start saving for a car."

Gordo nodded. A car. A job. He could have a life again. A life without women and a life without sex, but some kind of life, all the same. Something more than bouncing a ball off the wall and aggravating the hell out of his poor mother.

He went down to the Food Giant, filled out an application, and laid on the mature and responsible act so heavily during his interview that the very next day he was putting on a polyester shirt and bagging groceries.

It wasn't exactly his idea of a good time, or even a good job. He rightly felt that bagging groceries was well below his superior intellect. He should be selling computers down at Circuit City! Now that was the job for him! But job options were limited for a sixteen year old, and at least spending so much time looking at food was keeping his mind off sex and all his personal problems.

-

On the Fourth of July, Gordo spent the whole day working at the grocery store. As he walked home that night, he saw fireworks exploding in the distance and felt very sad. He was supposed to have spent this day with Lizzie and her family, at the beach. But after what has happened the last time he had been to the beach, he couldn't think about ever going there again. And of course, Lizzie wouldn't even look at him now, never mind snuggle up to his side, gazing up at fireworks, a look of wonderment in her pretty hazel eyes.

All his friends had apparently made other plans for the Fourth which did not include him. Tudge had Meryl, Danny had Allison, and even Miranda had Jeremy. Gordo had nobody. When he got home, he discovered that even his mom and dad had gone out together, leaving him nothing to eat for dinner.

"Well, that's just great," he sighed. Luckily, he had brought home a 24- pack of ice cream sandwiches. He plopped down on the couch and began to eat those, getting through five before his stomach began to object.

Every day in Food Giant, as Gordo packed bags, he forced his mind to not atrophy by making a game out of trying to pack each bag better than the last. It could not be too heavy, or too light, and it must be symmetrical and balanced; cold stuff went with cold stuff, soaps and beauty products with other soap and beauty products, raw meats nowhere near fresh produce, and easily squashed items at the top of the bag, not the bottom. His job was a jigsaw puzzle, and the groceries were the pieces.

Bujt even as he kept all these things in mind, he had plenty of brainpower left to notice the wide variety of foods passing by him. Some were simple and wonderful foods, like these ice cream sandwiches, and others were odd and exotic, like Kefir and tofu and persimmons. He was making a point of bringing home one new food each day. Thinking about food so much seemed to help keep his mind off sex.

Ice cream sandwiches weren't exactly exotic, but his mother never bought them, so in a sense they were new, and they were the one bright spot in this otherwise sad and lonely holiday. Until they gave him this terrific stomachache.

But a stomachache was a good thing, in a sort of twisted way, he reasoned, because if his stomach was hurting, it would be that much easier not to be tempted by the other parts of his body which so frequently cried out for attention.

Well, that one other part…

But every day was getting a little easier, and he felt he was making progress in his quest to desexify himself. He was only beginning to get over Lizzie, but he was definately thinking less and less about sex in general.

This looked to be a difficult night in that regard, though, with his melancholy thoughts about being alone on a holiday. So the stomachache was a godsend, a distraction. He did not even stop at the fridge for the Pepto Bismol, opting instead to feel the pain.

As he stood up to go to bed, he loudly proclaimed to the empty house, "What you feed, grows. What you starve, dies."

Gordo had heard his parents, the psychiatrists, say this many times, and had adopted its' wisdom as his gamelan for his future. He would starve his sexual impulses until they were undoubtedly dead. And he would feed his face with all kinds of exotic and wonderful foods, if that's what it took to keep the impulses from springing back up to life.

Unfortunately, as he lay down in bed that night with his stomach churning from too much ice cream, the insanity of this gameplan brought forth a most disturbing image.

He saw himself in ten years from now, enormous from eating too many ice cream sandwiches and persimmons in his desperate attempt to stuff back his sexual impulses. Of course, being sexless, he would have to become a priest…or a monk! That was ridiculous, of course, him being Jewish, but rabbis could still get married, and he didn't want any part of that. He didn't want anything to do with the opposite sex. They were always getting him into trouble! No, his best bet would be to convert to Catholicism, so he could become a monk.

Gordo. The fat monk. He laughed. At last the Spanish interpretation of his nickname, which Miranda had revealed to him many years ago, would have some real significance. Senor Gordo, they would call him. Father Gordo, the fat monk.

Gordo could not really wrap his mind around the idea of being fat. He had always been so short and skinny, it seemed nearly impossible he could ever change enough to actually become fat. It wasn't in his nature, he reasoned.

The same way, he further reasoned, almost despite himself, it wasn't in his nature to give up thinking about sex. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he crazy? Was he---as Larry had put it---totally insane? This couldn't possibly work.

"What you feed, grows!" he repeated insistently to the dark ceiling of his room. "What you starve, dies!" Then, with utmost determination, he rolled to his side, grit his teeth, and fought the impulses with everything he had in him.

He would be Father Gordo, the fat monk. He would never think about sex. He would only think about God and helping other people. He would never do anything wrong. He would never think about himself at all.

But just now, as he finally began to fall asleep, more from mental exhaustion than anything else, he wondered if, when he was a monk, they would make him shave off all his hair. He liked his hair. He didn't want to shave it off. He would look terrible bald.

There I go again! Gordo thought. Thinking about myself Why should I care whether or not I have hair? Who's going to see me, anyway, except a bunch of other bald, fat monks? There won't be any girls around to ----

"Aaaaaargh!" Gordo screamed to the ceiling.

This was a losing battle.