“Fuck” Rick Taylor screamed as he cut his fingernail and banged his head in the same moment. He laughs as the blood gets under his eye lid and his tiny metal splinter of metal under his fingernail screams like nuclear war in his mind. Trying to yell to his friends for a shop rag over the loop of Sepultura “arise” blaring from the schools auto shop PA system. Rick nudged the jack that almost dropped the car on his legs, lucky the car is kind of back heavy with a full tank of gas and band equipment in the trunk. He is just able to balance it back on its other 3 wheels and carefully back out before it crushes down on his chest.
He should have been paying closer attention to what he was doing under his 1971 Plymouth Baracuda, but he was so excited about his date tonight. It was 1987 and all his dreams were coming together. Jennifer, his long time crush finally told her best friend she had a crush on him too. Despite his crushing social anxiety, he got the courage to ask her out to a concert last fall and she accepted! For six months it was like a dream. Him a grubby little nerd who spent his days in metal shop and playing the guitar, her an angel who excelled in all subjects, art and music.
Crawling out of from under the ’71 Baracuda’s engine block, the shops PA cuts out and it’s eerily silent. Among his monster magazines, nudie mags and comic books on the workbench is a picture of them together. Rick cant believe his luck, it’s almost as if some divine force watching his life of suffering finally rewarded him with someone to believe in his dreams and sooth his demons as he struggles to find reason to get up every day.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Rick was orphaned young and raised by his Vietnam vet uncle who was an emotional cripple and had no idea who to raise a teenager. Rick thinks they did ok, figuring out life as a motley little family including the pet dog Blackula. All these racing thoughts of both troubled past and hopeful future fade away when a cracking voice of the shop teacher Mr Talbot calls him to the office. Mr Talbot is cool, he is also the science teacher, runs detention and checks out the band equipment from the Audio/Visual dept… despite being a ww1 veteran and easily 40 years past retirement age.
Besides his crazy uncle, Jennifer, Mr Talbot might be his favorite person in the world. He loves to hear his long winded lectures on history and strange anticdotes of a world lost to time. Behind the school is an auto graveyard going back to model T trucks and every thing in between. Mr Talbot was not in the office at the back of the shop, he was likely calling from a bomb shelter in the back he had turned into his study. It was a creepy old place full of relics from decades of world travels from the south seas to Egypt and the Mayan highlands. Down the flights of stairs into a damp domain of a mad scientist.
Mr Talbot looked like he had been awake for days, hunched over his desk full of papers and maps. With a broken voice he asked Rick to go to his house and fetch an artifact, a drop it off at post office box in town before the concert. Rick tried to use every excuse in the book to avoid this stop off. It was a big night with Jennifer and could easily be the big night for them. Mr Talbot was leaving town and needed the mask to be at the London museum before he arrived for a critical lecture on his work.