The Year I Stopped Being Invisible - 42. Chapter 42

Nathan and I became fast friends, and it's hard to say exactly why. Surely, as I pored through his Soldier of Fortune magazines looking at the ads for mercenaries in the back, his High Times and Easyriders with their garish centerfolds of exotic strains of marijuana and barely-dressed tattooed biker mommas, it wasn't that we had a lot in common. Well, other than Charlie Manson and my newly-discovered passion for heavy metal music.

In the beginning, I suppose, it was because I was feeling sad and forlorn and just needed a masculine straight friend to get my mind off blubbering over Taine. Someone who wouldn't let me talk about what was on my mind even if I wanted to. It was also, of course, because Nathan was hotter than hell and seemed to get off on the fact that he so obviously impressed me on a basic, primal level. I tried to hide it, but I'm sure he knew.

Nothing sexual ever happened between Nathan and I while we were attending Polk High School. There was always an electric charge, however, even though we would distract ourselves for the next four years in his (and, to be fair, my own) endless quest for girls. My heart was broken, permanently, but I was still a teenager and a slave to my hormones.

I think, on Nathan's side, it was partly a by-product of his self-segregation from the rest of the Polk student body. Sure, he fancied himself a bad-ass, and he was, but he really didn't have a close friend other than Terry, whom he obviously didn't respect and only, as he said, kept around for laughs.

With me it was something different. We really talked together, shared our hopes and fears and dreams. Not at first, of course, but eventually he opened up to me as I'm sure he had never opened up to anyone before. Because he knew I cared, and would keep his counsel, and...well, I think he could sense that I viewed him a lot differently than any of the other male students did.

As far as opening up to a girl, well, Nathan could never respect any "piece of ass" enough to trust her with his confidences. I was a guy, we did guy things together, and I think he was fascinated with both my intellect and my obvious attraction to him. He wouldn't acknowledge it verbally, but if that wasn't there, I'm not sure that he would have befriended me, and certainly not as closely as he did.

To him, I think I was the best of both worlds, and two years after we graduated from high school, in 1986, we finally crossed that Rubicon, and spent a long, passionate week of exploring our long-repressed feelings in my apartment in Washington DC. I saw him once more after that, in 1989, but he was different toward me. Remote. As if it had been that electric charge all along, and after it had been released, there was nothing to say anymore.

We never spoke again.

But 1989 was still eight years away on that day in the fall of my freshman year, and by the time that I left Nathan's house -- after enjoying a family meal worthy of an old Norman Rockwell painting -- I knew that we would be friends. As I thanked his parents and went to the door, Nathan took me by the wrist, holding up my arm to examine the bandages from where he had sliced it with his belt-buckle knife.

"You better keep changing this bandage," he said. "If it gets infected and they have to cut off your hand, I'm not going to hang around with you. Stumpy dudes keep the pussy away."

That was as close as I ever got to having him apologize for what he did, but I didn't really care by then -- he had just basically implied that he wanted to hang out with me, after all -- and returned his strange, off-kilter grin.

"Stumpy dudes," I retorted, "can do things to women you can't possibly imagine."

We laughed, and then I was on my way home.

Of course, I went by the empty former house of Taine Maxwell on the way, and of course I stood there for a few minutes sobbing.

Of course I did.

How could he have just left without a word? Hadn't he just invited me to go camping with him and Blaine at Big Bend? Or was that just a ruse, a distraction so that I wouldn't have picked up any tell-tale signs of his impending departure?

Why, I wondered in vain, would Taine do something like this?

I had no idea.

* * * * *

When I got home, I heard barking, and there she was: the cutest little long-haired dachshund that I had ever seen. She looked at me with big, scared brown eyes, sat down on the kitchen floor with her tail wagging so fast it was almost blurring, and rolled over onto her back, then urinated all over herself.

"Oh, Heidi!" wailed Tynah, rushing to the site of the spillage with a roll of paper towels. She knelt next to the still furiously-wagging dog, wiped up the mess, then looked up at my confused face. "She was abused."

I nodded, still unsure as to what the hell was happening, and gingerly knelt down to let the frightened Heidi smell my hand. She cowered for only a moment before licking my fingers, which I guessed meant that she thought I was okay.

Tynah explained to me that one of the female soldiers on-base had tried to keep Heidi in the barracks, which was strictly against the rules. Whenever a superior came in, the woman would shove the poor puppy into a drawer or even into her footlocker, where she would cower in fear, not daring to make a sound. On the few occasions that she had made a sound, this stupid bitch would hit Heidi to shut her up.

"I can't believe anyone would do that to a poor baby puppy, Rick," Tynah said, with obvious pain and compassion in her eyes. "Can you?"

"No," I said. "I don't even know that woman and I'd like to smack her and lock her in a trunk."

Tynah nodded gravely.

I looked down into Heidi's adorable little face as she kept snuffling and licking around my hand, her tail still hammering the kitchen floor.

"You're safe now, little girlie," I told her, and Heidi seemed to understand.

Of course, had that sweet little dachsie known that the last dog we took in had been brutally and savagely gutted in the back yard hammock, she might not have been so anxious to join the Spivey family.

Hopefully, what Heidi didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

* * * * *

After Tynah took Heidi to her bedroom and Rex had fallen asleep on his floor-pillow in the living room, and after I had made a feeble attempt at my homework, giving up while still in the process of soaking it with tears, it was time for the cold hand of insomnia to revisit me for another long and despairing dark night of the soul.

You sheltered me from harm

Kept me warm, kept me warm

You gave my life to me

Set me free, set me free

After a bit of fighting against it, trying to cry myself to sleep to no avail, I got dressed, grabbed my Walkman, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and went out onto the backyard patio. I was sad, yes. Hurt. Broken-hearted. All those things. But the reason I couldn't sleep was that I didn't have an answer to that most fundamental of questions: Why?

The finest years I ever knew

Were all the years I had with you

"It wasn't even years," I answered the song bitterly. "Only a few damn weeks. Only a few weeks in my fucking life I could be happy. Only a few weeks."

And I would give anything I own

Would give up my life, my heart, my home

What could possibly have made them all just leave like that? Without a word, without a clue, without a fucking note?

I would give everything I own

Just to have you back again

I sat there for a moment, roiling with emotions. Anger, sadness, fear, pain, confusion, yearning, betrayal, loss, abandonment, everything...everything bad and cold and dark and sad...How could I have gone through so much crazy shit in my life, survived everything and finally found love, only to have it so cruelly and mysteriously taken away from me?

You taught me how to love

What it's of, what it's of

But, at the center of that black maelstrom of emotions was still one pure, burning love for the boy whose absence had occasioned them. The love of my life. My angel. My Babes. My sweet, sweet Babes.

You never said too much

But still you showed the way

And I knew from watching you

Taine Maxwell taught me something that I was sure I would never learn. He taught me how to love another human being fully, completely, unconditionally.

Nobody else could ever know

The part of me that can't let go

And then he was gone. Just like that, he was gone. Like my dad, my mom, my dog, my friends at so many schools I'd left behind, all gone. But losing Taine hurt the worst, because I had no answers for it. Just emptiness and pain.

And I would give anything I own

Would give up my life, my heart, my home

I sat at the picnic table, smoking my cigarette and wishing for Taine. I sat there for a long time, just staring at the stars up in that immense, vast South Texas sky and wondering if I would ever see my Babes again. If I would ever smell the faint, heartbreakingly sweet scent of strawberry shampoo in his silken hair. If I would ever see those eyes that knew my every thought and fear so well. If I would ever live long enough to once more taste those perfect lips on mine.

I would give everything I own

Just to have you back again

"Where are you, my angel?" I said aloud. "Where are you? Why did you leave me all alone in the world again? Why? Why?"

Tears streamed down my face, and I was shaking too hard to even hold the stub of my cigarette, which had burned down to a long grey ash which felt like my heart. I dropped it to the ground and wandered aimlessly around the yard, listening to the song and aching.

Is there someone you know

You're loving them so

But taking them all for granted

Just aching.

You may lose them one day

Someone takes them away

And they don't hear the words you long to say

It was after two in the morning before I finally wandered back inside, and although I still didn't sleep, the maelstrom of dark emotions had subsided, and all that was left was love. That was all there would ever be in my heart again, I knew. Just love for Taine.

Wherever he was.

I would give anything I own

Would give up my life, my heart, my home

I would give everything I own

Just to have you......back again

Just to touch you once again

Just to have you back again