The More You Ignore Me (17 page)

This can be quite crushing.

It's called in various circles “becoming an adult” and/or “growing up” and/or “having a psychotic episode.”

I admit I held this particular crisis at bay for longer than anyone could have reasonably expected, which may have been the reason it was so traumatic when it did arrive for me.

I'm not sure.

When I was old enough to know better, years after the Football Incident and the Parissa Disaster, I found myself still hanging around with this couple of fellow outcasts, Daniel and Emmett.

I mistakenly thought that my status as an outsider, as a reject from the wretched society of young yes-men and frigid debutantes, signaled some flaw in me, so I took up with whomever I could, an error I've made only rarely in the years hence.

These lonely hooligans—Emmett with his pathetic downy mustache and Daniel with his bog-like complexion—would lounge about Daniel's mother's home on afternoons while our peers were performing their afterschool athletic feats and self-servicing “civic” duties.

This dank duo had other plans.

They would concoct various schemes to amuse and challenge themselves while laying about Daniel's den, then, as the sun went down, set out to spread their filth.

How so?

One example: they would rummage through the trash of the town's one illicit newsstand in hopes of finding discarded scraps of titillating images—a half breast here, a pudenda there—and then they would shove these scraps into the mail slots of priggish girls' homes.

Also: they would order furniture
C
.
O
.
D
. to the science teacher's house, stretch plastic wrap across a busy intersection or two to see what kind of chaos they could stir up, make prank phone calls to grunt obscene noises at elderly women.

That kind of thing.

These two had regaled me some history-class afternoon with tales of their derring-do, and I suppose I tried to impress them with an offering of my own.

“That's nothing,” I said, idly sharpening a pencil with my pocketknife. “If you really want to do something fun . . .”

And then I told them of an idea I had nurtured since a late-night drive from my Meema's home when I was a five-year-old.

The idea was this:

To cut a piece of cardboard into a rough approximation of a midsized mammal—a raccoon, a cat, a dog, or opossum.

Then, paint this approximation black on both sides.

Cut four almond-shaped eyes from a sheet of aluminum foil and affix these—two to a side—to the creature's head.

Create some kind of stand for the creature so it will rest on its own, upright.

Then, after the sun has gone down, place this creature in the middle of a road, preferably a winding, dark road with a moderate amount of traffic—not so much, of course, that you would be spotted putting it out, but enough that you wouldn't have to wait hours for a “victim.”

Finally, wait in the nearby bushes for the aluminum eyes to reflect the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

The driver will have to then decide if he (or she) is prepared to take a life for his (or her) ease of transportation.

Genius!

Needless to say, Emmett and Daniel nearly burst at the seams in fits of spittley cackles at the plot.

I was once again accepted, though I admit I felt a tickle of shame in my seated region.

Why did I try to impress these buffoons?

Regardless, I was breathless for the bell, and, as soon as it rang, we sprinted to Daniel's house.

Drunk on their acceptance, I tried to smile through the rest of the afternoon.

The den smelled of cabbage and crock-pot, feet and some peculiar boy rankness that I had only mild whiffs of at home.

Daniel's older brother Frank lay half-dead in an armchair, shirt off, conspicuous hairs.

He seemed partially disabled, slumped behind us, watching
TV
with a dead face.

He sent a chill through my being.

I often think of him now as a kind of cautionary tale when I find myself descending into sloth, idly clicking through photos of young women.

When night fell—early in a country January: 4:45
PM
—we set out through the snow with our “cat.”

With no little difficulty, we established our craft in the center of the road, just before a patch of ice, and then we scurried into the ditch.

I watched the clouds of our breath expanding out into the night air at intervals.

No one spoke.

We tensed as one when we heard the high idle of some town car making its way up the hill, when, out of the darkness, its headlights crested the hill.

No breath.

Need I go on?

Must you torture me with this memory, you infernal sadists?

Sometimes I wonder, dear readers, if it might be possible for you to ease your demands on me.

It's as if a plastic bag is around my face, and you are behind me, slowly twisting the handles in your grip until no air can get through.

Let me just say that the ruse worked better than I could have ever hoped.

Isn't that enough to satisfy your morbidity?

Do you require that I detail the squalling tires, the flash of brake lights, the horrible metallic crunch that chased us through the underbrush, horrified at our power?

I didn't know then what would happen.

How could I have known?

I wanted . . . well, I'm not sure what I wanted, but it's over now. I am an adult.

No matter.

It's in the past.

Why do I bring it up?

Because I know that a similar crisis doubtlessly occurred on a certain night for Rico.

The secret night.

Yes!

I will get to it soon enough, but we must, I realize, before then, talk about the other fish in the sea, namely Vita, that crafty minx!

We must also watch out for her in her comment-stream manifestations even to this day!

(
SAXAPHONE
)

(
HIGH HAT
)

(
MORE SAXAPHONE
)

Rico—distraught, adrift—thought that perhaps he would go to Peru.

The “real” had suddenly become elusive.

Yes, he spent hours in a ripe gym and a few days a week “waiting tables,” time spent in the midst of sweat, saliva, and excrement, but I could see that it had all begun to
feel no different from sitting at his desk with a Stone Age “rolodex” in some municipal office.

Clarity of purpose.

He had lost it.

Corn, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted.

He now spent all of his time at Rachil's apartment doing unspeakable acts I still can't quite muster the courage to imagine, so the church sat barren and empty most nights, with only Rico sadly tapping on a snare drum, or idly poking at a
TV
dinner.

It was a sad scene, so it's no surprise that a neighbor, perhaps that rabble-rouser Tater, somehow convinced Rico to have a party, and though he clearly was in no mood for it, one Friday I saw the church gussied up with “Christmas” lights, a keg. I heard some kind of musical travesty warming up inside.

A party.

Outside, “neighborhood” folks milled about with the sniveling undergrads.

At first, I feared my cover would be blown as I made my way up the drive, but I greeted Tater and Nanez (I believe we had become friends), handed off my “spare” bottle of gin, and then stood sentinel at the keg (the “tap man,” coveted position!).

I soon spied poor Rico slumped down on a rusted white aluminum bench the size of a small car that had been delivered from God knows where into the yard.

Jagged pieces of perforated metal hung ragged from the seat, and Rico began running his fingers along the edge.

Slowly.

While men in bandannas and overalls waved tea sticks in the air and heckled one another, Rico clenched his teeth in what seemed to be anticipation of his skin catching a stray piece of bench.

I imagined it would be a triangular piece that would catch his skin, pulling the layers one by one until they loosed a stream of blood, but as his fingers came to the bench edge the disturbed metal settled back into the intended form of the seat, for there was no blood, no tearing.

His hand was intact.

Does a broken chair still contain the essential elements of chairness?

Once a person can no longer sit in it or on it, does it become something else?

It would be called a “broken chair,” of course, gaining a modifier and thus complications.

Heart.

Broken heart.

Man.

Married man.

Cuckolded man.

Bereft sad sack.

Is torn skin still skin?

Rico settled back onto the bench, quite upright but not apparently uncomfortably so, and crossed his right leg over his left (what I like to call the French fashion).

His foot bounced along to the rhythm of the band tuning up inside.

In front of him on the gravel drive: a sunburned man with a sunburned child on his shoulders bobbed in time to the beat pouring out from the church.

Where did this man and his child come from?

Who brings a child to a keg party?

This neighborhood continued to baffle me.

“Do you like dancing, buddy?” the man said, eyes turned up to the child.

The child, arms sunk by his sides, on the man's shoulders but with no sense of elation, said nothing.

“Do you like dancing, buddy?” the dad asked again, bobbing faster.

“Everybody dances,” the child related glumly, shooting a petulant look, a monumental frown, at Rico, who—finally!—smiled.

The myth of childhood.

Rico surely had begun to know its folly.

This sad little not-dancing child confirmed it.

Wordsworth was an idiot.

Rico took out a cigarette and rolled it between his fingers.

The sun had come down completely, and the cicadas had just begun to pulse.

The mosquitoes.

Maybe, Rico seemed to be thinking, he should just let life take him.

Give in and let whatever would come to him come.

During an argument over which resident had dish duty one night at the church, Corn had patronizingly told Rico that he had no talent for idleness.

“Not a flaw!” Rico had said (true).

Since he was little, Rico said, he woke up every morning with the word “Go” rising steadily out of his consciousness until at last he opened his eyes with it at full volume: “
GO
!”

But it seemed he had now begun to ask, “Go where?” He could not quite formulate the proper answer, and so here he sat on an aluminum bench trying to mutilate his hands.

Perhaps it was time.

I started to make my way over to him, taking a nip of gin for courage.

His foot jogged at the end of his crossed legs, his fingers tapped at the back of the bench, and anyone watching closely would see that he was licking his lips—one pass over the top with his tongue, then bottom lip over the top, top over the bottom—every few seconds.

The crisis was happening.

But then a voice: “Ugh, it's unpleasant out here. Are you getting eaten alive? Move over.”

It was not time!

A slightly plump young woman, a beer in her hand, plopped down on the bench next to Rico, swept her hair up from her neck, and set the floppy mass on top of her head with a sigh.

I paused, swerved back behind the keg, hid.

I took up the tap again but kept an eye on Rico and this plump one, Vita.

I appeared to be at my post only to administer the beer to the growing throng of undergrads trickling in through the weeds, but I was, in fact, taking note.

I saw Rico's eyes flick down and spot the armpit stubble and white clumps of deodorant just above the edge of this woman's bra.

Women were always threatening to burst their self-imposed bonds with hair and sweat and blood!

The potential energy surely thrilled him, just as it did me.

“Why am I even at this lame thing?” she said.

She tilted her head back and stuck a fat tongue out of the side of her mouth, then wrinkled her nose in an attempt to right her listing cat's-eye glasses.

“Oh right,” she sighed, “I have
a job
.”

She held a Super 8 camera with her left hand and waggled it in the air.

What could she have meant?