Chapter 12: Nightstalker

There are three other incidents from those middle school days that haunt me.

The first I’ll discuss was in an arcade. A creepy looking guy, about twenty-something, with bulging brown bug-eyes and a Nightstalker look to him, appeared from nowhere, as if a specter, a shadow, and he was standing closely behind me as I played a video game.

A small crowd of people were mobbed around the video game machine, and I distinctly remember something brushed up against my ass, maybe a hand or dick and I turned around to see the creepy fuck standing even more uncomfortably close to me.

At the time, too, I was carrying a hunting knife. A large one, with a serrated blade. There’d been much violence in those days, so I wanted to be prepared for anything. This was obviously a situation where the knife would have been handy.

However, to this day, it’s fuzzy. I do believe he touched me. But I’m not 100% sure. He was far too old to be hanging out in a kids’ arcade. It’s likely he was doing something insidious. My friend Taylor was next to me, and I wonder if he had been touched or noticed anything. We never spoke of it.

What would have happened if I withdrew the knife, stabbed the creeper in the stomach? Would I have been blamed? Put in juvenile hall? If he did touch me, would I not have been punished? Did he have a prior record? Did he attack someone later? Is he rotting in jail now? Would stabbing him have prevented a future incident?

These are questions that dance like zombies in my head. They’re like zombies because they’re dead and can’t be answered. They’re like zombies because, in a way, they’ll be alive until my brain dies.

In the next two incidents, I was on the offensive.

The first was with this kid, Manny, a child magician, who was tanned bronze as the metal and had short, slicked back blond hair like a Wall Street stockbroker. He’d moved in from Fort Lauderdale, by way of NYC, I think.

For some reason, I fucking hated him, and enjoyed picking on him. It was probably me filled with the negative energy from my stepbrother beating on me and channeling that onto him.

After school, Taylor and I followed the magician home. I wanted to fight him. I was punching him, lightly, in the face, shoving him, and he was crying, in streaming hot tears, begging me to stop.

An old Jamaican gardener nearby, who’d been tending to a lawn, broke up our quarrel.

I’ll never forget the gardener, in his heavy Jamaican accent, asking me why I wanted to fight.

The gardener, pointing at the crying, whimpering magician, said, in all sincerity, “Look at him. He is crying woman!”

Taylor and I then looked at each other. And instantly burst into laughter. It was easily one of the funniest things we’d ever heard. It wasn’t just what the gardener said, but how he said it, with his serious, contorted face and his accent that had made it so uproariously hilarious.

To the magician, though, it had to compound his suffering to an unimaginable degree.

Taylor and I left, faces red as tomatoes, hyperventilating in laughter at the poor magician, who remained in utter dismay, tears running down his cheeks, snot pouring from his nose.

Later, I saw the same kid, the magician, at a karate class that my parents begrudgingly allowed me to join, but only for a few lessons.

I’m sure I was the reason he’d taken up karate, and how fucked is that, to see your tormentor there at the karate class you’re taking to learn to defend yourself...

But after the “crying woman” quip, I couldn’t bring myself to fuck with him anymore. Even then, I knew better.

I ran into him, later in life, five or six years after high school, in a strip mall parking lot.