Short Bus Hero (17 page)

28. Demonophobia /
dē-monˈ-ō-fōˈbē-ə
/
fear of demons

T
hree slivers of ice
chase each other around the perimeter of the sweating highball glass Stryker swirls in his fist. The scotch and soda make a much more pleasurable cocktail than bitterness and shame but he has no choice but to swallow them both, the former just beginning to blot out the taste of the latter. Stryker is the only one sitting at the bar, in the relative dark. The cacophony of hemorrhaging slot machines, ringing bells, and intermingled cries of pleasure and pain echoing through the adjacent cavernous casino sound filtered and distant.

There would be no WWC contract. The realization hits Stryker hard. The misery he feels is worse than the day he’d been forced to move out of his lavish Squirrel Hill home and into the stinking shithole in Braddock.

How could it be true? He was one of the biggest stars in wrestling, only a few months ago, with all the material rewards that came with such a distinction. He’d lost everything: the house, the cars, the boat, absolutely everything. Why hadn’t he saved anything during all those successful years? How could he have been so foolish? He felt like Mickey Rourke’s character in
The Wrestler
—broke, defeated, desperate, alone, a one-trick pony with no pasture in sight.

The bartender brings him a fresh drink and turns away, texting someone on his tiny phone. Stryker imagines the guy is telling someone that the famous loser, Stryker freaking Nash, is getting totally shitfaced at his bar, right this second.

He doesn’t give a shit.

His mind flashes on Ally’s sweet round face, on Lois’s trusting brown eyes. He bats the thoughts away as one would beat out flames on their own burning clothing. The images of the Formans pull those scribbled out faces and censored text of Stryker’s past along with them into the melee in his head. He floods his being with alcohol until his thoughts become incoherent threads of pain.

A tall blonde wearing a black sheath and fishnet stockings saunters up to the bar and takes a seat a few stools away. The smiling bartender rushes over to take her order. He grabs a pair of bottles from the back-lit shelf behind him and flings them up into the air, catching them by their necks and pouring the contents into a chrome martini shaker. The blonde watches him with the wonderment of a child at the circus. After the barkeep has made some ridiculous toss and grab with the shaker, the woman claps her hands and shows off a perfect smile. Stryker follows the contours of her profile with his eyes. She has a slightly protruding forehead, partly covered by the fringe of her bangs, a hooked nose, and full, perfectly colored red lips. She looks at Stryker. He sees the spark of recognition widen her heavily made-up eyes and pull at the corners of her voluptuous lips.

Who’s the carny “butcher” now?

“How’d you like to buy a girl a drink?” she says, slinking over to the stool next to Stryker and climbing up to sit down.

“I’d like that very much,” he says, nodding to the bartender. The bartender smirks and winks as he mixes her fru-fru drink. The woman is a regular. Lots of men buy her drinks, every day. Except for Wednesday, when she goes to church in order to avoid the Sunday crowds. When she’d left Oklahoma, she promised her mother that she’d keep going to church every week. Apparently, lots of other people promised their mothers the same thing because they really pack them in at the Assumption Roman Catholic Cathedral, two miles from the epicenter of Sin City. This woman is not morally bankrupt. Like most Vegas residents, she merely stands at the edge of complete ruin.

One drink leads to a dozen more. Hours pass in a numb haze of awkward laughter and slurred chitchat. A very public and passionate kiss in front of the pirate ship at Treasure Island ignites a fuse that leads to the powder keg of Stryker’s suite. A clear slap and a broken heel come sailing out of the murky mess inside Stryker’s head.

Stryker fumbles for his key card as he and his—
ahem
—“friend” kiss and grope each other in the hotel hallway. The lock snicks open and they stumble into the suite. She pulls him toward the red velvet sectional sofa, kicking off her stiletto heels as they cross the room. For an uncomfortable amount of time, they cling to each other on the couch, mouths sealing them to one another, hands everywhere, clothing cast onto the plush carpet below. Stryker stands, pulling her to her feet, and gestures with his eyebrows toward the adjacent bedroom.

“Carry me,” she says. His muscles were sore from the Vilification, and he’s drunk as shit, but he’s into her, so he bends to pick her up.

“Okay.” He lifts her, then sets her back down on the floor. “Wait, there’s something I’ve always wanted to do.” She watches him weave his way to the closet that stands by the suite’s front door. He squats down and reaches into the closet, punching a code into the digital lock on the safe. When his hands emerge, clutching an obscene pile of cash, her mouth falls open and her heart soars. He’s actually done this before, he just doesn’t remember it. He grins at her as he passes on his way to the bedroom. He spreads the cash all over the bed and grabs her in a tight embrace, kissing her neck. Her eyes never leave the money.

She places her hand on the front of his jeans. She doesn’t feel anything. She sighs and looks at her watch. In her mind, she is probably already roaming the mall at Caesar’s Palace, buying clothes and shoes and jewelry.

I don’t, in fact, know for sure what she’s thinking—she’s kind of off-limits to me. When I try to see into her thoughts, it’s like looking at a garage door. It’s always like that with the Lost Ones. Sometimes, though, they leave the garage door open.

But you never want to see what’s inside anyway.

Stryker’s mind, I can tell you, is definitely elsewhere. Where, I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to be thinking at all, about anything. The unintelligible images and words are even absent at the moment. He has reached the state of serene oblivion he’d set out to find. He sits down on the bed, bills crumpling beneath him. The woman kneels between his splayed knees and smiles up at him, licking her perfectly outlined lips.

Okay, I could not endure what I knew would come next. Way too much for me.

I pick up a crystal glass from the nightstand and throw it against the wall. It explodes in a sharp blizzard of crystalline fragments on the edge of the slate hearth in front of the fireplace.

Stryker jumps.

The woman turns to see what he is gaping at. Not seeing anything, she resumes her fruitless stab at arousing his carnal desire. Too late, baby. This guy’s got work to do.

I unleash a piercing howl.

Stryker’s hands fly to the sides of his head and he shouts in pain and surprise.

His lady friend remains oblivious to my presence. She stands up and gives Stryker a look of confusion mingled with disgust. If I had one of those cell phones, I would snap her picture.

“What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?” Stryker doesn’t hear her. His eyes track wildly around the room as he jumps to his feet. “Listen, if you’re having DTs or something, I gotta get out of here,” she says, glancing around the empty and fully intact room.

Stryker still doesn’t hear her. Not over all my screeching and smashing things. I smash the glass covering the painting above the headboard. I pull drawers out of the dresser, ripping them right out of their cheap squeaking tracks. I launch a front kick at the TV and shatter the screen with the ball of my foot.

Dude, I should have tried out at the Vilification. I’m kind of a black sheep anyway.

His eyes roll around in his head as he pulls at his hair and flops back down on the bed. He has no freaking clue what’s going on. I slash at the curtains, cutting them into ribbons that flutter in the air blowing through the wall mounted heating unit. His mouth stretches in a silent scream.

I laugh at him.

I wish I could interrupt all stupid human tricks, you know, maybe scare people into being good.

“You are totally freaking me out,” the whore says to him. As he seems absorbed in losing his mind, she gathers up her clothes, pulls them on, grabs a handful of hundred dollar bills off the floor, and backs out of the room. “Fucking nut case.”

Then, I let him see me. I appear in a series of stuttering jump cuts, my face a blur of continuous side-to-side motion, smoke curling from the top of my head and from the tips of my fingers.

Stryker’s eyes bulge in their sockets as they follow me from hearth to window. He thinks he is going crazy. He doesn’t think I’m real. He thinks it’s the booze and the drugs playing tricks on him.

Then, I punch him square in the nose, feeling the cartilage fold beneath my smoking knuckles. Then, he knows I’m more than a trick of the liquor.

The crack whore slams the door behind her. Off in search of her next trick or fix, no doubt. Call it a waste of a life.

Stryker cries out, his eyes the size of dinner plates. “What do you want from me? Who are you? What are you?”

I whisper to him in an ancient hideous and chiding voice. “What are you hiding from me?”

He ignores the blood gushing from his nose and tries to follow my flickering image with his eyes. “What? I don’t know what you’re—”

I grab his unzipped suitcase from its stand and hurl it just over his head. It explodes on the wall above the ravaged dresser in a firework of designer jeans and polo shirts.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” he whines.

“Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

A
child
with a scribbled out face takes shape somewhere in his mind.

“I’m not hiding anything. Please, who are you? Oh, my God.”

He can’t tear his eyes away from the flickering image of my whirling head. He is trying to make out my face. He can’t do it. His mind can’t grasp the concept of me, of what I am, yet it begins to open and yield its long-kept secrets.

His entire body shakes. Nausea rises within him, his eyes squeeze shut against what feels like a vicious migraine headache.

Then, he lets go.

Something inside slips.

I see images appear as if assembled from a heavy mist.

A
smiling woman with short brown hair
, sitting at a
picnic table
on a sun-dappled suburban deck.
The woman
, crying
in a
doctor’s office.
The woman, longer hair hanging in
sweaty strings,
giving
birth
in a hospital
.
A baby with a
round face
and almond
-shaped eyes,
drooling
.
Crowds
cheering
his name
as the woman yelled
at him over the phone for
missing
another
birthday.
The
pediatrician
telling them that the boy could still enjoy a
full life,
go to
school,
hold a
job, even
get married someday
if he so chose. Boozing. Drugs. Embarrassment at
taking the kid to a friend’s for a
dinner party. “No, that’s not my
son
.” Walking out
on them with the
snow falling on
the circular driveway
. The woman
watching from the front
steps,
the
clueless toddler
in her arms. Shame.

I understand.

It is vague and obscured, but I know what he is hiding, what he’s hiding from.

It makes me sick.

Could I be wrong about this guy? Could Ally be wrong?

No. I do not doubt her for a minute. She is true and pure.

I whisper to him that he was wrong, always wrong, in his denial. But, it is not too late; he’s been wrong about that as well.

He has been given another chance. Call it a miracle.

Take it, I whisper to him.

29. Apeirophobia /
ə′pīr·ə′fōb·ē·ə
/
fear of infinity

“I
want to be immortal,”
Jason whispers to Raven. The cold rain ticks against the family room picture window. The trails of moisture mirror the tracks of Jason’s fat tears and melt the room, plaster ceiling to pet-stained cut pile rug, in dripping black shadows. “Like you.” Raven’s heart cracks. It never occurred to him that anyone, no matter how rabid a VNO fan, could possibly think any of it was real.

But Jason is desperate. He vaguely remembers that the whole vampire thing is a fake, but ever since I appeared to him, he started thinking that maybe it could be real after all. In hindsight, I should have just stayed out of his whole trip. But, he’s so damn important to Ally. There was no way I could just let him think that dying is the total end of everything for someone as special as him. Did he think I was a vampire? I don’t know, maybe.

Oh, what did I do to that kid?

Like humans, angels don’t always use the best judgment. Sometimes, we’re stupid, too (but you didn’t hear that from me).

Anyway, Trish had called the wrestler to tell him that Jason was getting worse, and that he had asked to see him as soon as possible. Raven had been in the middle of a rehearsal, but he rushed out of the gym and sped the fifty miles to Pittsburgh, still in his ridiculous vampire costume with red-tinged corn syrup dripping down his chin. Yeah, he’d gotten some strange looks from passing motorists along the way. He was grateful there were no cops on I-70 for a change.

Over the past few weeks, he’d gotten to know Jason pretty well. There had been a party in his honor the day he was announced as the promotions vice president. Everyone had piled into the dining room at Uncle Chuck’s Grill and welcomed the kid aboard. The office staff had been a bit apprehensive and stand-offish, worried about their jobs, but the wrestlers cozied up to the boy and listened as he spilled his complete life story, from being picked on at school, to his first trip to Cedar Point, to what chemotherapy is really like. The wrestlers were used to snapping post-match pics with kids like Jason, but they didn’t really know anything about what it was like to have Down syndrome. What they learned from Jason is that those Dear Ones have likes and dislikes, rational thoughts, dreams, desires, and feelings, too—just like everyone else. And the empathy those people have, amazing. The wrestlers all feel like better people for having met Jason. And they are.

They also learned what it means to experience real pain and sadness. The young man’s fiery eyes told of an unimaginable sorrow and horror, and those eyes melted even the hardest of hearts. Jason had only been able to make the trip to Wheeling a few times due to the severity of his illness, but Raven and Lestat and a couple of the other wrestlers drove up to see him a couple of times a week. Jason knew every VNO wrestler, every venue they’d competed in, every statistic there was. His enthusiasm was contagious and all the wrestlers loved to talk with him. They all admired Jason’s courage and would do anything for that boy.

During that time, Jason had grown darker, more sullen. He struggled to hide his internal freak out from his idols. They’d made him feel special. Cool. Maybe not “normal,” but like he mattered to a world outside his own freakish realm. He began to dream that they could help him.

Every day inches Jason closer to the end of what he thinks is everything. He doesn’t fully understand what “dead” means, but he has flashes of panic which break his parents’ hearts. At night, as they tuck him into bed, Jason’s eyes grow wide as he clutches at his mom and dad, begging them not to let him die. There is screaming and tears and misery until the Xanax kicks in and they all hold each other in their shared chemical numbness, until Jason falls asleep, drooling on his dad’s shoulder. Then Trish and Jeff hold each other as they watch their son sleep, knowing that soon he’ll be gone.

Raven moves close to Jason and hugs him. He doesn’t want the kid to see the water that has welled up in his own eyes. He buries his nose in Jason’s sweet-smelling hair and closes his eyes. When he’s regained his composure, he sits back on the couch and looks at Jason’s wet face.

“Buddy, it’s not real,” Raven whispers. “I wish like hell it was, but it isn’t.”

More tears fall down Jason’s face. His mouth gapes like a jack-o-lantern frown. Trish walks into the room. She’d been listening to them talk from the next room. Her face is haunted and hard, and her eyes glitter with pity and despair. She’d tried to explain to Jason about vampires being a myth. She thought he understood. It tears her apart to see him grasp at shreds of fairy tales.

“But vampires live forever. They drink people’s blood and fall in love and have magic powers.” Jason puts his hands on the sides of Raven’s face, getting white greasepaint on his hands, making his idol look him in the eye.

“That’s just in the movies and in books,” Raven says, pulling his face away, smearing his make-up. He wants to cry, but feels he has to stay strong for Jason’s sake.

“No,” Jason says, “I’ve seen you do it. You guys drink each other’s blood all the time. It makes you strong. It makes you fly. And you’ll live forever.”

Raven looks away.

“Plus, you only come out at night. And you sleep in coffins…and…and…and that’s why Ally bought you guys for me.” Jason smiles as though he truly believes the lies they sell.

“It’s not real, none of it’s real,” Raven says, laying a hand on Jason’s arm, looking into his face. “It’s all made up. You know Annie? From the office? She writes the stories we act out. It’s like a play. You know, theater?”

Jason bares his teeth and furrows his brow. He yanks his arm away as if Raven’s hand were made of flames.

“I don’t believe you!”

“Look,” Raven sighs, “how could I be here in the daytime if I was a real vampire?” Raven looks to Trish for help.

Jason has no answer to his question.

“Honey,” Trish says, “Ally bought the league for you because she wanted you to be happy, not because they could make you into a vampire.” She’s surprised that her son has been thinking these pretend vampires could save his life. It makes her want to wail and scream and pound her fists on the wall and break things. It is the most pitiful thing she’s ever heard.

Her son is dying.

“You’re a liar, then! You’re all liars! I hate you! Go away!” Jason covers his eyes with his forearm and sobs.

Raven leaves, feeling fraudulent and ridiculous. Call it a job hazard.

I know that feeling well.