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Excerpt:
Jesus dressed in black when he hunted, but it was not for camouflage. To camouflage yourself from a vampire was to assume that sight was the only sense they used on the prowl. Should that day come when Jesus was outmatched by a vampire, and all that separated him from death were the few moments it would take for the demon monster to do its worst, it would not be because he hadn’t blended himself with the night.
Everything about vampires was nocturnal, from the hours they kept to their aversion to sunlight. As evolution would have it, their eyes were made for darkness. To hide from a vampire in the middle of the night was to swim in the ocean to hide from the sharks. No, Jesus had more pragmatic reasons for wearing black while hunting vampires. Bloody reasons that would disgust a sensible person. Gory reasons that belonged in the theater of the macabre.
For them, he was death incarnate.
He was Jesus the Mexican Vampire Hunter.
Jesus Hector Guerrero had become a vampire hunter as the result of both choice and circumstance. To look at his life—from his childhood, watching professional wrestling and playing on Daniel’s trampoline, to his adult years, training as a mixed martial artist and smuggling anabolic steroids—it becomes clear that his less-than-straight line into vampire hunting was one that shone with inevitability, like a hungry flame in a dark, dingy cave. But before he kneeled before the television in awe of Royce Gracie or killed his first vampire in Memorial Park, Jesus hid under his bed, shying away from the world, with nothing but a coloring book and a box of crayons to keep him company.
Jesus was a loner by nature and his mother’s inability to conceive a sibling for him, despite her best and most passionate efforts with Jesus’ father, insured that he would be an only child. A creative boy with an artistic soul, Jesus loved to draw. One of his earliest memories was of being in preschool and, all of five years old, standing before a large easel with a blank canvas. For no particular reason that he could remember, Jesus decided he wanted to paint a tiger. In his mind’s eye, he saw a tremendous cat with ferocious teeth and tangles of muscles beneath its orange and black stripes.
At the conclusion of about five minutes worth of painting, in which every second was a careful meditation of the patience and diligence that would one day come to define him as a vampire hunter, his canvas displayed nothing more than an indecipherable smattering of orange and black paint. Of that memory, what Jesus remembers more clearly than anything else, was the frustration that came with his inability to paint the picture he so clearly saw in his imagination. Jesus abandoned acrylic paint and adopted crayons as his medium of choice, which, of course, led to the inadvertent “disappearance” that would become the centerpiece of his mother’s favorite tale.
He grew up in the Inland Empire, has a Bachelor’s Degree in English and a Master’s Degree in Composition from Cal State San Bernardino, watches his favorite movies over and over again, learned many a lesson from professional wrestling, wonders if he’ll ever be famous enough to be on “Dancing With the Stars,” thinks good stand-up comedy is rare and under appreciated, is scared of Vladimir Putin, wonders if it’s too late to learn how to play the guitar, gets depressed when he hears the theme song from “M*A*S*H,” wonders why Teen Wolf never made it to the NBA, and wants Morgan Freeman to narrate his life.
He is also the host of THE MARTIN LASTRAPES SHOW PODCAST HOUR. Subscribe on iTunes or listen on the official website MartinLastrapesShow.com. New episodes every week.
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Thanks for hosting today, Shyla! :)
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