The Year I Stopped Being Invisible - 41. Chapter 41

Everybody holds their breath

As he passes by the horns of death

I stood in front of the arcade, clutching my black leather jacket tightly to my chest, the large kitchen butcher's knife pressed firmly against my body.

It was 6:55 pm.

The arcade was in a strip mall right around the corner from my street. There was a realty office, a flower store, a laundromat, and the arcade, with a small parking lot on a slope leading down to Montgomery Road, which wound up to the H.E.B. grocery store a few blocks away before merging with Walden Road. Polk High was about a half-mile north.

Across from the strip mall were houses, and -- as I looked to my right, about half a block down -- a small concrete path leading to another of the endless prefab developments dotting the northeast side of San Antonio.

As I looked at the path, I saw Nathan walking toward Montgomery.

And the crowd jumps to its feet to roar

For the Matador

He was a formidable figure, tall and lean with a blue denim jacket over a plain black t-shirt. He wore his usual tight, sky blue boot-cut jeans and fashionably weathered cowboy boots. His roach-killers clomped on the pavement as he strode purposefully across the road, his large metal belt making audible clanking noises as he moved closer. My hand instinctively reached inside my jacket, just to make sure the knife was there.

It was.

With the scarlet cape against his hips

And 'Ay, Toro' whispered from his lips

I studied Nathan as he approached. He was an incredibly attractive boy, I realized. Coltish and aggressive, a young buck with only two purposes in life: fucking and fighting.

Just for a moment, I was unsure which one of those two options I would have preferred.

He caught sight of me, his golden feathered hair bouncing slightly as he walked. He smirked, and those beady eyes dialed in on me until I felt like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

Finally, he reached the arcade. Without further ado, he stripped off his jacket, tossing it across the top of a nearby trash can.

His tanned, muscular biceps flexed. His chest and abdomen rippled beneath his tight black t-shirt. I found my gaze suddenly riveted to the almost obscenely-large bulge beneath the aggressively blatant metal buckle.

And, for a moment, I completely forgot why I was there.

And inside my heart is beating for

The Matador

"Let's do this," he said gruffly.

He flexed his powerful arms again and beckoned to me with his large hands, the universal symbol for "come at me, bro."

I took note of his long, thick fingers and began to wonder what they signified. I felt as if I could almost smell him, an intoxicatingly musky blend of teenage pheromones containing both sex and aggression.

As I watch his body turn and twist

He doesn't know that I exist

Though I've shared so many dreams before

With the matador

I nodded at him, my eyes never leaving his, and slowly slid the large butcher knife from my jacket, clutching the handle as if I was Michael Myers from Halloween, one of my favorite horror films of the time.

My lip was quivering. I was shaking, angry and afraid and strangely aroused all at the same time. I was ready for blood. I was ready to slash that shirt from his muscular torso. I was ready to slice and cut at those sprayed-on jeans until they fell away to reveal...what? A great, big, hairy, smelly teenage dick. Just what I wanted at that moment.

The love of my life, the sweet angel whom I pictured waking up with every morning forever...my Babes...was gone.

GONE!

Taine was gone, with no warning, no reason, just gone, vanished from my life!

All I wanted at that moment was to slice and hack the clothes off this brute, this barbaric shit-kicker, and have him standing there, bronzed, naked, bleeding, his cock engorged and huge, and have him somehow...somehow...fuck the pain away.

I looked at Nathan, the butcher knife raised in my clenched, white-knuckled fist, and I saw something in those beady eyes that I had not seen before.

Softness. Compassion. Pity.

Tonight we'll meet beneath the silver stars

Dance to mandolins and soft guitars

I dream I give my love once more

To the matador

I lowered the knife, that comically large suburban housewife's onion-chopping friend, and burst into tears.

Nathan frowned, backed up a step or two, and then burst out laughing as I imagine he had never laughed before.

He grabbed his jacket from the trash can, slung it rakishly over his shoulder, and approached me slowly, tenderly. He took the knife from my trembling hand and dropped it into the trash. Then he threw an arm casually around my heaving, sobbing shoulders.

"Come on, Bubba," he said. "Let's go to my house. It's just over there."

And as he leaves the ring they cheer

Sombreros fly into the air

And I throw the crimson rose I wore

To the matador

* * * * *

Nathan's house was right next to the end of that path to Montgomery, separated only by a ratty wooden fence with a space in it to allow us to pass. It was a typical suburban home: Dad's beige Buick in the driveway, fancy sitting room up front with plastic-covered furniture, just like my house.

His parents were welcoming and friendly. His dad, Bob, was the local Episcopalian minister, his face round and pleasant with wire-framed, studious-looking glasses and the remnants of black hair, which were assiduously combed over the large bald expanse of his head in a manner which was charming rather than silly.

His mother, Verna, was right out of the 1950s. She wore a heavily-starched pastel blue dress, with a white lacey apron. I tried to place her face for a moment, because it seemed incredibly familiar to me. Finally it clicked, and the reason that it took me a while was that she was in color, and I remembered the face in black-and-white. She was a dead ringer for Jane Wyatt, the mother in Father Knows Best.

Nathan had a 12-year old sister as well, Gretchen, who was a tomboy and completely enraptured with the country singer Louise Mandrell. She was small, freckled and pigtailed in a checkered shirt and old-school dungarees, and I was absolutely positive that Nathan had a budding young lesbian in the house.

After all the appropriate introductions had been made, Nathan gestured me down the hall from the well-appointed dining room to his room. Or should I say, "cave". Nathan's room looked like a bomb had gone off. His bed was disheveled, there were stacks of magazines -- Creem, Soldier of Fortune, Guns & Ammo, High Times -- everywhere. There was a Mountain Dew can by the bed filled with expectorate from Norman's habit of "dipping" smokeless tobacco, Skoal or Copenhagen.

I sat on his bed and looked behind me to see a hole in the wall covered with what looked like maggoty shit.

"What the hell is that?" I asked, as tears dried on my cheeks.

Nathan flopped down in a grizzled office chair opposite me and grinned.

"Terry came up with this brilliant idea," he said. "We cooked up some rice and didn't have anything else to eat with it, so the little fucker decided we should mix it with peanut butter. We were both stoned as fuck, so we did it. I took one bite...one goddamn bite...and chucked my bowl into the wall just as hard as I could. I keep it there as...kind of a memorial."

I nodded, although I thought that letting peanut butter and rice rot on your wall just above your bed was the craziest thing I had ever heard.

My eyes wandered across his walls. Posters of Cheryl Tiegs, Judas Priest, some hunter holding the largest automatic weapon I had ever seen, a High Times centerfold of some strain of pot called "Nicaraguan Red"...

And then my eyes lighted on a sheet of notebook paper Scotch-taped to the wall right over his pillow. It was a highly- detailed drawing, in fine-tip blue marker, of a man. The man had dark jeans, a white t-shirt with a swastika on it, and held up his right hand giving the Devil's horn sign. The tip of the marker had been so fine that I could make out hundreds of individual lines, and the picture must have taken hours and hours to render. The face was the scary part. The face was that of a bearded man with devilish mustache and goatee. His face seemed to hold dozens of small wrinkles, and his eyes burned right through me as I studied the drawing.

The eyebrows were arched, but heavy. The hair was wild, and every hair was individually drawn. There was a swastika in the middle of the man's forehead, and I knew who he was immediately. I had read a book about him when I was eleven, picked up from a used bookstore in Surfside Beach, South Carolina for the princely sum of seventy-five cents. He became a life-long obsession.

Had I wondered, had I disputed Nathan's drawing skills, the picture gave me ample clues. To the right of the fiercely- staring man's head was written "HELTER SKELTER!" To the left, in painstaking Gothic font, was written "CHARLIE MANSON IS MY NAME!"

I began to think back on the book I had read. The horrible murders of August 8th and 9th, 1969. The mad, murderous guru who had sent out an army of drugged, sex-addled young zombies from the fires of Hell at an abandoned movie ranch in California with one goal in mind: complete annihilation of the ruling class. The upper crust. The "pigs".

I thought of the images that book had spawned in my young mind. Of a Texas track star, completely overwrought with speed and evil, standing in the living room of 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, in the hills over Los Angeles, looking at sleepy, frightened houseguests of a beautiful, very pregnant movie star and announcing, "I am the Devil. And I'm here to do the Devil's business."

My eyes turned back to Nathan. He was reclining in the office chair, his long, muscular legs spread wide, offering me a view of what looked like a large adult guinea-pig stuffed in the crotch of his jeans. He was looking at me.

And smiling.