The More You Ignore Me (16 page)

He ran the hot water into his cupped hand while whispering a series of hushed “ow”-like utterances.

FYI
: Having just performed this same paint-by-penis procedure in the name of research here in the bathroom I share with the filthy rabble on my floor, I surmise it took a bit more than just warm water to remove
all
of the paint from Rico's penis.

Rico scrubbed a little with his thumb, then commenced his delayed urination in the general direction of the bowl.

(Urination causes quite a few more “ow”s.)

I watched a single drop of urine fall on his left shoe and, there in my observational crouch, shook my head in wonder at Rico's fashion sense—those shoes!

Once again, boat shoes with no socks!

The boy suffered for fashion.

It was summer, so he had hundreds of little bites on the tops of his feet and on his bare ankles.

Mosquitoes must have loved to feast on his fragrant blood.

Even here in my room, I scratch at the red nubs covering my own ankles, having similar blood, though I mitigate the blood feast with daily doses of garlic from my own private stock I plant every year in an abandoned lot near my residence.

My favorite variety is a Spanish garlic I have dubbed “Don Legarto.”

I pop five to six cloves of Don Legarto in my mouth a day, and yet still the mosquitoes feast, infernal creatures!

The tight shoes rubbed, but Rico knew pain was not so different in quality from pleasure, and besides, he had developed a strong mind and so chose to ignore the waves of red pricklings washing up his shins.

Or, rather, to savor them.

As I do now.

He left the bathroom and his (loud and clear!) message behind.

He wiped a tear from his right eye.

As a teenager, Rico partially blinded himself in this right eye when he tried to juggle three five-pound weights in a rank weight room used by his high school track team.

I imagine Rico must have thought juggling was a state of mind, and so he saw no need to practice, a theory he no doubt picked up from his idiot buddy Corn.

In actual practice, of course, one weight ricocheted off the other, which hit the next, and that one clanked onto the upper left quadrant of Rico's face.

It's only hubris if you fail.

His best friend had surely said that, just as my own stepfather did, lording over my hospital bed with his dark mane and his craggy face when I finally came to after one of my own high school accidents.

“What accidents?” you ask?

I know I seem so free of trouble, how could there have possibly been accidents?

There were many: Fall from roof, boiling water spill, errant
BB
puncture, thigh stab (pencil), thigh stab (stick), curbside tooth crack, and, of course, football leg.

Football!

Why didn't I think of this earlier?

As I watched Rico's game, it must have been this trauma that made me feel so strongly that sense of justice finally being served.

Oh, the memory stings worse than paint in a penis hole!

Back then, I merely wanted to play with my peers like any other boy.

I would have never called them “friends,” for I had no one I could call what Montaigne called “fast friends” besides the loathsome Daniel and Emmett.

Beyond these two, I merely had a crowd of airheaded contemporaries I was forced to spend my high school days with in torpor and resignation. I signed up for football thinking perhaps it promised a kind of excitement.

Oh yes, now it seems comical.

Shouldn't I have known better?

Well, yes, of course, I should have, but at fourteen?

Surely we can't expect boys of fourteen to accept the horrid world as it is without any hope for change? Whatever your opinion on the subject, the fact of the case is that I joined the freshman football squad.

It was even more of a disaster than you can imagine, even before the fateful incident that permanently affected my development.

Merciless taunts, a total lack of compassion, willful misguidance, practical jokes, all at my expense.

And then, just as I resolved to leave the field of play forever, I was called in to play running back for one play in an obscene practice.

I know I should have refused and flung my helmet into the crow-infested trees.

What would they have done?

What could they possibly have done to me that would have been worse than what actually happened?

Nothing.

Of course—nothing.

But I gleefully took up the gauntlet as my sniveling peer group chortled on the sidelines.

I strapped the cursed helmet on—filthy thing stinking of plasticky sweat—and jogged out to the huddle.

I confess, I imagined some small moment of glory, a fraction of what the other boys received daily, if only just to understand something more about the carefree psychic terrain they romped through.

The play was called and lo, I was to receive the ball in a handoff and run behind hulking number 44, Clint Nester, fullback
extraordinaire
!

The huddle clapped in unison—my last gesture of group solidarity, I swear it now if I did not then—and lined up in position.

The cliché rings true.

It all happened so fast.

The center snapped the ball, the quarterback shoved it in my gut with a sneer.

I followed number 44 through what appeared to be an opening in the defensive line, but then—nothing.

A minute later, I came to.

I was flat on my back with horrible stinking weight crushing down on my leg, darkness, and a blinding pierce shooting up my appendage.

I was trapped.

I heard laughter outside the wet-sock heat of the pile, but all I could see were the grimy jerseys and pads writhing above me, and then Clint Nester—my own teammate!—lurched into view with an insane leer smeared across his face.

Our masks separated us, but I could taste his sour soda breath twisting around my uvula.

Panic began to rise, even before I felt his grubby paw push my facemask up while another boy—hand slithering from God knows where—pressed his thumb under my jawbone, into the soft part of my chin (a “pressure point,” I later found out).

The panic swirled in my core.

They grunted out their laughter as the pile continued to squirm all around me, and then—I can barely admit it even now, thirty years on—Clint Nester, oppressor, performed a heinous act.

He pushed his own facemask up, stretched out his neck, and he licked me!

His slabby damp tongue ran along my Adam's apple, worse than a blade.

I went blind with rage, released sounds inhuman and unfamiliar to nature.

Of course I thought I had friends on the team, a few other outcast boys who sympathized with my plight as I did with theirs.

We had made a pact, a tacit one, but a pact nonetheless, that if any of us were singled out unnecessarily by the popular, the adept, the regular boys, why, we'd stand with the injured party!

But of course as soon as I heard that god-awful snapping and felt that insanity-producing tongue, I turned to those boys—my friends!—and I saw them through the maze of cleats and ankles snickering with the rest on the sidelines, basking in the transitory approval of the mob.

It affected me much more than the pain in my leg (a pain I still suffer from, not incidentally).

Having my friends, my comrades, turn on me when I needed them most, it plunged me into a deep depression.

I had loved my fellows as much—if not more—than myself, but lying there in agony in the lawn clippings and litter, I felt my ultimate solitude engulf me in an instant.

I would be alone from then on.

Or I should say, since I had been alone up until then as well but was innocent of it, I knew I would be alone from then on and this knowledge had the potential to retard my development irreversibly.

And my leg was broken underneath it all.

Pain.

Freud.

That perverted psychopath made it a cliché to say that sex is violent, but it is nonetheless true, and Rico knew then—just as I had since the Football Tongue Imbroglio—that this particular truth contained a still more radical truth within it: love itself is violent.

How can one person trust another if he (or she!) knows that the other has the capacity to love?

Would you, dear readers, stake your life on the supposition that the love might be directed at you, only you, forever and ever?

No!

You would not!

You're not insane!

So we can imagine now that Rico, being a somewhat bright and sensitive young man, was suspecting he would not, knowing that Rachil did indeed have the capacity to love, stake his own life on the supposition that she would somehow use this capacity to love
him
.

There at the Parkside Loco, ignoring the painful bites on his ankles and the sting in his penis hole and the tears in his eyes, he came to a conclusion: love
itself
was violent.

He was not.

He had learned this after he failed to take up arms against his friend when the sneaky rapist—and why not call him by that name?—stole Rico's love away from him there at the church.

And so being nonviolent, perhaps it followed that Rico himself did not actually love?

Not in the way Rachil did, evidently.

He might, in the end, not have the capacity to love.

There, beside the shrimp buffet, under the twirling fans, he looked as if he thought he might feel this lack of capacity acutely, that it might portend some awful, lonely end to his life.

I could tell he had become fearful of the pain love caused.

Rachil was dangerous.

His feelings for Rachil even more so.

Love was dangerous.

So he was, because of Corn, reconsidering his life.

This is sad, dear readers, yes, but all was not lost.

A young woman strode by in a knit cotton dress that had been hastily pulled over a bathing suit; Rico and I both noticed the damp bikini's outline.

This bikini held (loosely) a firm pair of buttocks.

I gave out a yip, a signal to Rico to let nature take its course, to allow himself to begin to think of other women, for other women would surely make Rachil jealous and draw her back to him.

Rico was not as unfamiliar with other young women as I then thought, I found out later when so many flocked to his defense.

Each of Rico's previous girlfriends—three from high school and two from his first year at college—when asked what she saw in him, mentioned, if you can believe it, the allure of his always slightly milky and always slightly out of focus right eye.

Many other women who have not ended up girlfriends of Rico surely find it repulsive.

There is a little dark coloring in the iris and there is copious, unsentimental weeping from the corners.

But Rico had realized something that took me decades to learn: there is no use trying to please everyone.

In fact, the idea of individual taste can be used to one's advantage.

A girl who wants to think of herself as an individual can be flattered into thinking she is via a deranged eyeball, or, in my case, a veritable cornucopia of physical oddities.

Who knew?

Rico!

Bravo, Rico!

If he did not love, Rico would, he most likely reasoned at this point, rather not be lonely.

The young woman in the wet bikini swanned into her seat, her smooth legs crossing like clouds.

The other fish in the sea swam up into Rico's (and my) vision.

Ladies.

Gents.

We can now imagine Rico began here considering these other possibilities truly just as soon as the last drip of taupe paint dripped into the sink in the bathroom down below.

You see—I've only just now made this connection—language
is
action!

Rico expelled a demon from within his soul by deploying the totem word in taupe paint with his penis on the mirror there at the Parkside Loco.

These things work, dear readers, though I don't fault you your skepticism.

Rico was entering a new phase, a secret time I'm sure even now Rachil knows little about, since she was off cavorting with the evil other, Corn, at the time of this transformation.

I'm confident you've experienced something akin to a certain feeling Rico felt during this secret time, and so you are well aware that there comes a time when the person you thought you were dies.

A time when you behave in such a way that has no relation to your conception of who you are.

“I would not do this,” you think, “I am not this kind of person,” and yet you
are
doing it, so the only conclusion is that you are not the person you thought you were.