Taurus Season

HOW FAR are you willing to go to reach the top?

True to my usual form, I fucked around and found out.

I’m Chad Martinez: fifteen years old, freshman, nickname “Toro.” It fits me to a T. Not only am I bullheaded, but I work hard and play harder, and my birthday is April 30. Up until recent events, my greatest ambition was to be on the varsity track team. I trained daily, doing laps and intervals before school and hitting the gym once the last bell rang. Every morning, I looked in the mirror and told myself, “Vale la pena.” That means “it’s worth it,” and I had to believe it. As a straight-C student, I knew athletics were the only way I’d get into college. Not just any athletics, either, but track and field. Papa said I run like the wind. Mama said I run faster. Neither one of them knew what happened to me a few weeks ago.

They wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Have you heard of the Minotaurs? Probably not. We’re the loud, proud athletes of Montrose High School. Our colors are maroon and gray, and our mascot is – wait for it – a fiberglass minotaur named Mo. More on him later. At 400 students, we’re one of the smaller institutions in the state, but we’ve fought hard against consolidation. Our track team boasted twenty-six. Coach wanted to boost us up to thirty. Every slot was precious, but the last four were the most coveted.

“Mijo,” Papa said, “You’ve got four years to get that far. Why the rush?”

“Because competing IS a rush. When I win, I feel on top of the world.”

“And when you lose, you come home and eat all our chips and salsa.”

He had me there. “I’m a growing boy.”

“My job is to make sure you grow UP, not OUT.”

Again, he had me. Luckily, Mama had some different advice:

“Go for it.”

Guess who I listened to?

Guess who I tried not to listen to, even when he was barking orders? That’s right: Coach. On the first day of tryouts, I made the error of revealing my nickname along with my real name.

He sized me up. “Toro? More like ‘Mierda del Toro.’” My face grew hot. “That’s your name until you prove yourself. ‘MDT’ for short. Now give me ten laps.” Humiliated, I could have refused, but I kept my head down and my feet pounding. That was the only way to win.

I know coaches are supposed to make you mad, break you down, build you up again, and push you beyond your limits until they’re obliterated. Yet the more Coach called out “MDT” in the days that followed, the more a dark fire of rage and shame consumed me. Rage at the insult, sure, but also rage at myself for not being all I should. As for the shame, it ran deeper and burned hotter. In fits of frustration which happened more and more often these days, Papa said that if I didn’t get my shit together, I wouldn’t amount to anything. I’d be a criminal on the six o’clock news, branded with a lifelong record. The track was my way out of Montrose, my ticket to a better future, so I’d better get more serious about it than anything else. Except for family, of course.

It didn’t help that the roster was so limited. Even juniors and seniors had to start from scratch every year to earn their place on the team, no matter their previous accomplishments. I yearned to be among them. That meant taking one of their spots. No wonder they glared at me with such disdain and resentment. Who did I think I was, anyway? Just a lowly frosh with high ambition.

Only another ninth grader looked at me with anything resembling respect: Zach Cunningham. A homeschool transfer who was behind in all his classes, yet he ran like the devil was after him. I knew I couldn’t measure up against every hopeful, upperclassman or not, but at least I could pit myself against Zach and try to come out ahead. Operative word: “try.”

“What are you doing, MDT?” Coach yelled more than once. “Run your own damn drills!”

Yeah, but I had to run them cleaner, faster, and harder than somebody if I were going to compete at the varsity level. Didn’t the jefe with the whistle realize that? Before tryouts were over, I absolutely had to defeat Zach so that Coach would finally pay me some positive attention.

Little did I know that we were all about to get too much of the opposite.

On the last day of tryouts, Coach called us all over to the bleachers and told us to look up.

My jaw dropped. “Whoa. . .”

Mo the Minotaur stood at the top, his eight-foot frame towering over each of us. Man’s body, bull’s head, maroon and gray shorts painted on with “MHS” for Montrose High School. Rumor had it that in the old days, he used to wear a gold loincloth, but people kept taking it off and/or stealing it. So Mo, as intimidating as his charge-ready expression looked, was essentially a steer and not a bull. Many a joke was made about that, and many a snicker was stifled. Coach took Mo seriously.

“Meet your drill instructor,” Coach said, gesturing upward. “He’ll supervise your final tryout.”

We laughed our typical bro-laugh of “huh-huh-huh,” but stopped once we saw Coach’s face.

I swallowed hard and dared to ask a question: “Uh, how’d you get Mo up there?”

“He climbed. Just like you’re going to climb.”

Dead silence. Coach had lost it. He’d officially crossed the line from “loco” to “loquísimo.”

“Did you hear me? You’re going to run the bleachers until Mo says you’re done.”

Translation: You’re going to run the bleachers until you pass out, puke, quit, or all three.

“When you reach Mo, tag him and call out the number of the set you’re on. No lying. Warm up.”

Coach blew his whistle loud enough to set my teeth on edge. We warmed up and climbed up.

Ordinarily, if I were alone, I’d bound up the steps two or three at a time. Now I knew I couldn’t afford that risk. I took each step one by one, followed Coach’s orders, and headed down. So far, so good. After five of these runs, my quads ached a little, but I was nowhere near done.

“On your left.”

Zach Cunningham passed me on the way up. My heart beat faster, and I felt myself sweating bullets. This was my opportunity. I pumped my legs harder, swung my arms wider, reached Zach, and took the lead. I couldn’t believe it. I might get on the varsity squad after all. Not only that, but I also might impress Chandra and Kendra, these hot twins I wanted to get to know better. How I’d love to ask them to the spring formal, and afterward, get caught in between – ¡Dios mío! Unlike Mo, I had a pair. I couldn’t allow my boys to call the shots. Not now. I had more work to do.

“No sandbagging, motherfuckers! Y’all can do better than that!” Coach’s voice exploded.

What a hypocrite. He was sandbagging in a bullying sense. I ignored him.

Up and down, up and down. None of us had time to ponder the absurdity of having an inanimate object tell us if we were finished. We were toiling harder than we previously had, even during our infamous “ladder workouts.” With no defined set or time limit, the sky WAS the limit on how hard to push ourselves, and push we did. We groaned, grunted, and panted like dogs, each one of us a sweaty world unto himself. This occasion was a tryout, but we busted ass like we were in the Olympics against Usain Bolt. Through all my pain and suffering, I kept my eye on Zach.

He reminded me of a ram: stubborn and fiery straight out of the gate, and packing a hell of a charge, but ultimately fading in the stretch. Zach showed no sign of slowing down or tiring. However, he was making the rookie mistake of going all out on every run, not pacing himself properly. If you treat set ten like it’s set one, thinking the end is in sight, you’re not going to have enough energy if “Mo” says you should keep going. Speaking of which, he stood tall and silent, withstanding the hearty slaps we gave him. As much as we hated this workout, we loved it too.

Until our loyal mascot started to change.

I didn’t notice it at first. Being made out of fiberglass, Mo absorbed sunlight, so I was careful not to slap him too aggressively or spend too much time near him. When I did so on my tenth set, I did a double take. The air around him was shimmering with colorless steam, like you see on asphalt in the summer. I thought I’d better avoid touching him altogether, but Coach bellowed:

“Tag him, you losers! You afraid of a little heat?”

No, I was afraid of a LOT of heat, and Mo would only keep getting hotter. So would I.

Why was it so important that we tag him, anyway?

Hoping and praying that Coach wouldn’t notice, I sat down on the bleachers for a brief break.

“I see you, MDT! Are you pussying out?”

I heaved a sigh, stood back up, wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and went back to work.

Zach passed me again.

At this point, you might be wondering why I didn’t call it quits and go into my cooldown routine. That would have been the smart thing to do. However, seeing the new kid’s energy and speed, his continued stamina, filled me with what we call “ganas”: desire. Desire not only to beat him but to pound him into the ground, stomp on him until I left cleat prints on his clean white jersey.

As I continued into my eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth sets, I no longer cared about making the varsity team per se. My goal now was to make Zach Cunningham know and remember my name, recall me as the one freshman who not only caught him but smoked him. If I could do that, ranking among the upperclassmen afterward would simply be a bonus.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t jealous. I was just – competitive.

“Good job, Cunningham!” called Coach. “Way to hustle. Come on, MDT. Pick it up!”

If I did that, I might not have enough reserves to do – what? Three more sets? Five? Ten? Who knew when Coach would blow his whistle and let us have a much-needed rest?

One more trip down the bleachers. I was lucky I didn’t trip. I prepared to start one more ascent.

One thing stopped me dead in my tracks. Mo. He was GLOWING. Bright red.

“Oh, no fucking way. . .”

I was seeing things, having gotten way too hot, way too fast. That had to be the reason smoke billowed out of Mo’s nostrils. He seemed to be grunting and heaving, too, like he was getting ready to charge. The others didn’t notice, though. They kept running and tagging him like he wasn’t already baking in the afternoon sun. Even Zach was immune to Mo’s transformation.

But what, exactly, was Mo turning into, besides a raging bull?

I was transported back in time to one evening last fall with Mama, Papa, and my grandparents, and the weirdest movie I’d ever seen. It’s called “Metropolis,” and it’s almost 100 years old.

In it, a young rich dude named Freder is the son of a utopian leader. Everything is fine in their fair city – hence the title – but at what cost? Spoiler alert: dehumanized workers run it, being slaves to a giant machine. In the only scene I remember, Freder discovers this device and the poor souls who man it. Like Mo, it emits heat, but unlike Mo, it can’t reach a certain temperature without blowing up. The poor old guy operating the gauges can’t keep pace. The master thermometer rises from 25 to 30, all the way to 50, at which point the multi-story machine explodes, belching steam everywhere and scalding the workers. Several of them plummet to their deaths. The gears that make the machine run stop rotating, allowing Freder, who has collapsed, to experience a nightmarish vision. Instead of being made of metal, the contraption turns into a stone statue with relentlessly staring eyes, a bull’s snout, and a mouth full of gear-like teeth.

Freder immediately recognizes this entity. “MOLOCH!” he cries.

Two high priests stand at the threshold of the statue’s mouth, supervising unwilling slaves into the churning furnace within. Bald and shirtless, these people are cattle, food for an ever-hungry god. They struggle and fight their fate as much as possible, but Moloch’s appetite wins.

To Freder’s horror, black-clad modern workers then follow the slaves, climbing up and into Moloch’s maw in a calm and orderly way. Like they’d been trained to do it their whole lives. The vision then ends with the remaining machinists tending to the injured and the dead, carrying them away on stretchers.

To my horror, the monstrous deity in “Metropolis” morphed into good old Mo.

The wannabes approached him, tagged him, and called out ridiculous numbers: “Twenty. Twenty-five.”

“NO LYING!” Coach roared. “Do you want to be on this team or not?”

Someone too near the steaming statue cried out in pain and fell to his knees. Zach. He’d finally given out. With my last remaining bit of strength, I ran back up the bleachers to help.

“Naw,” he said when I reached him and offered him a hand. His right hand was red and blistered.

“Come on, man. It’s OK. You don’t have to do any more sets.”

“Sacrifice,” Zach moaned. “Mo and Coach demand it.”

I shook my head, snapping it back and forth. “No vale la pena. It’s not worth it.”

More students slowed down and ended their runs, to Coach’s profanity-laced disappointment. A few of them passed me, their faces slack, their eyes locked in thousand-yard stares. When they met me at the bottom of the bleachers, we were red as slabs of meat. Sweat poured off all of us.

I shuddered as a dark theory occurred to me: Every time we tagged Mo, we offered up a little bit of our souls, and he came to life. Moloch, after centuries of so-called progress, breathed again.

“Why’d you stop?” asked Coach. “Did I say you were done – er, did Mo say you were done?”

“No, sir. We did.” I couldn’t believe the words falling out of my mouth were my own. “We’re overworked, overstressed, and overheated. We need rest and water. We’re finished. So are you.”

Silence. Then clapping from Zach. Then applause from the remaining poor bastards.

“You know what?” Coach grinned a rictus grin. “You’re a Toro after all, Martinez. As for the rest of you, minus Mr. Cunningham, you’re lucky we HAVE to have a track team at Montrose High. I’d disqualify all of you for not following instructions, but unfortunately, most of you made it.”

Cheers erupted. We soon found out our fates. Zach and I both earned JV spots.

I did some digging on the Internet and found out that Moloch, also spelled Molech, was one of the most evil gods that you could worship in the Old Testament. As I suspected, he demanded human sacrifice – especially children and babies. I had to wonder: did teenagers count too?

They must have, for in this day and age, the juggernaut of Montrose High School athletics makes cattle out of anyone who wants to make the team. You HAVE to be a bull to succeed here.

I may not have gotten what I originally wanted, but you know what?

It’s Taurus season, and I have all I need.

Credit: Tenet