The Ignored (20 page)

Philipe saw what I was getting at. “Yes!” he said excitedly. “We all
thought of that word, didn’t we? It occurred to each of us independently.”

“I’m not sure what that means,” I said. “Or if it means anything. But it
seems too weird to just be a coincidence.”

“It means we were meant for this,” Philipe said. “It means we were meant
to be terrorists.”

“Manifest Destiny!” said Tommy or John.

I felt uneasy with this kind of talk. I did not feel as though I had
been
chosen
for anything, I did not think God had picked the ten of us
for some special purpose, and the idea that there was a power guiding us, a
reason and a will dictating our actions, made me very uncomfortable.

Philipe looked at his watch. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I think we’d
better hit the road.” He pulled a twenty out of his pocket and tossed it on the
table.

“Will that cover it?” I asked.

Philipe smiled. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t notice if it doesn’t.”

We split up in the parking lot, agreeing to meet again the next morning
at the municipal courthouse in Santa Ana. Philipe said he had a plan to throw a
monkey wrench into the American legal system, and he wanted to start small, with
a test, to see if it would work.

Philipe was planning to get a ride home with Steve, but he turned back
to me as he headed across the asphalt toward Steve’s Toyota. “Are you coming
with us?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Of course.

I had killed a man this morning and then spent my afternoon casually
hanging out with a group of people I didn’t know from Adam who called themselves
terrorists, and I was already thinking of myself as one of them, was already
taking part in their activities as if it were the most natural thing in the
world.

“Pick you up at seven-thirty, then,” Philipe said. “We’ll grab some
breakfast first.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

I drove home.

They were at my apartment at seven-fifteen the next morning. All of
them. Waiting on my doorstep. I’d just finished taking my shower and was getting
dressed, and I answered the door wearing only my jeans. I was glad to see them.
I’d spent most of the night tossing and turning, trying to figure out why I
wasn’t more suspicious or more curious or more… something, why I had just
accepted the terrorists and fell into step with them; but when I saw them again,
all that worrying and speculation seemed irrelevant. I was one of them. That was
why I felt this way. I had never been part of anything before in my life, and it
felt good to know that there were others just like me.

I was absurdly glad to see them, and I grinned hugely, unable to help
myself, as I invited them in. All eight men crowded into my mismatched living
room.

“Wow,” James said admiringly. “This place is great.”

I looked around my apartment, seeing it through his eyes, and for the
first time since I’d redecorated I thought that, yeah, it was pretty great.

I finished dressing and combing my hair, and we went to McDonald’s and
grabbed some Egg McMuffins for breakfast. We took three cars. I rode with James
and Philipe in Philipe’s Dart.

It was as though we’d known each other forever. I was not treated as an
outsider or a newcomer, and I did not feel like an outsider or a newcomer. I’d
been instantly assimilated into the group, and I was comfortable and at home
with my newfound friends.

No, not my friends.

My brothers.

Court did not begin until nine, but we arrived earlier, at eight-thirty,
and Philipe withdrew a large canvas bag from the Dart’s trunk. We asked what it
was, but he smiled and would say nothing, and we followed him into the building
and up the stairs to a traffic courtroom, sitting down in the theater like
section in the back that was reserved for defendants and members of the public.

“What are we going to do?” James asked.

“You’ll see,” Philipe told him.

The court started to fill up with other traffic violators and their
families. A clerk came out and read off a list of names. A bailiff entered the
courtroom, and then the judge, introduced by the bailiff as the Honorable Judge
Selway. The first case was called, and a policeman and a dreadlocked black man
who identified himself as a taxi driver began discussing the circumstances of an
illegal turn.

There was a pause in the discussion.

“Judge Selway is a putz!” Philipe yelled.

The judge and the rest of the court staff scanned the seats. There was a
crowd of people in the court, but they were all scattered, and in our section
there were only us and a Hispanic couple.

“Your daughter fucks cotto salamis!” Philipe yelled. He nudged me,
grinned. “Go on,” he urged. “Say something.”

“They’ll arrest us for contempt!” I whispered.

“They don’t see us. They forget we’re here the second after they look at
us.” He nudged me again. “Go on. Go ahead.”

I took a deep breath. “Get a dick!” I called out.

The judge pounded his gavel. “That’s enough!” he announced. He said
something to the bailiff, who walked up to the railing in front of us.

“Pussy!” Buster said loudly.

“Cocksucking fuckwad!” Tommy called.

The judge banged his gavel again. The bailiff looked at us, through us,
past us. The Hispanic couple looked around as if searching for the source of
this disturbance.

“Your mother takes it up the ass!” I cried. I turned, grinned at
Philipe. It felt good to shout like this.

“Pussy!” Buster yelled again.

“Eat shit!” I screamed. There was anger in my voice, as there was in the
voices of the others. I hadn’t realized I was angry at anything, but I was, I
discovered. I was very angry. I was exceedingly angry. I was angry at fate,
angry at the world, angry at everything that had made me this way, and years of
rage and frustration came out in my cries.

“I pissed in your sister’s mouth and she begged for more!” I yelled.

“You’re a fat-assed, pantywaisted, tater-twanging, wuss-boy!” James
called.

Philipe opened his canvas bag.

Removed several cartons of eggs.

I laughed, excited.

“Do it quickly,” he said, passing the cartons down the row.

We began throwing. An egg hit the bailiff’s hat, knocking it off.
Another, immediately after, broke against his bald head. The judge ducked under
a hail of eggs that splattered against his desk and the wall behind him. I let
one fly, aiming for him, and hit him squarely in the chest, the yellow yolk
brightly obvious against the black robes. Declaring a recess, the judge hurried
out of the court into his chambers.

We were out of eggs almost immediately, and Philipe grabbed his bag and
stood. “Okay, guys. Let’s go.”

“But we’re just getting started,” Steve complained.

“We’re not invisible,” Philipe said. “We’re Ignored. If we stay here any
longer, they’ll catch us. Let’s cut out now.” He walked out of the courtroom and
the rest of us followed.

“Pussy!” Buster yelled before leaving.

I heard the bailiff yell something, and then the door closed behind us.

We were high on adrenaline, our spirits soaring, and we fairly floated
down the hall, laughing and talking together excitedly in a close-knit bunch,
going over what had just happened, repeating our favorite lines, calling out
things we should have said but hadn’t been able to think of at the time.

“It worked,” Philipe said wonderingly. He turned toward me. “Imagine if
we interrupted a major trial, something all of the media was covering. Think of
the exposure we could get. We’d make the newscasts for sure.”

“So what’s next?” Steve asked as we pushed open the glass doors and
walked out through the front entrance of the building.

Philipe grinned, put his arm around Steve’s shoulders, around James’.
“Don’t worry, boys. We’ll think of something. We’ll think of something.”

My brothers.

We got along instantly, and although there were definitely some
terrorists whose company I preferred, I basically liked them all. To be honest,
I was so ecstatic to find people of my own ilk, others who were Ignored, that I
probably would have been happy even if I’d hated Philipe and his followers.

But I didn’t.

I liked them.

I liked them a lot.

I got the feeling that, despite all of Philipe’s talk, they had not been
very organized before now. But something seemed to come together with my
arrival, something seemed to coalesce. I brought nothing special to the group,
no ideas or ambitions, but it was as if I was some sort of catalyst, and what
had been just a loosely knit gathering of men joined by the circumstances of
their existence suddenly started to become a cohesive unit.

Philipe spent most of his time that first week with me, finding out the
details of my background, trying to indoctrinate me and make sure I saw things
from his perspective. It seemed important to him that I buy into his concept of
Terrorism for the Common Man, and although I already did, and told him so
repeatedly, he still felt the need to go over it with me, explain it to me, as
though he was a missionary and I was an unbeliever he had been assigned to
recruit.

I worried at first that Stewart’s murder would somehow be traced to me,
that the police would put two and two together and notice that I hadn’t shown up
for work since he had been killed. When Philipe came for me on Saturday morning
and knocked on my door, I half thought that it was the police, come to question
me. But Philipe explained that none of the other terrorists had been caught or
even questioned, and that it was highly likely that my coworkers had forgotten
all about me and had not even mentioned me to the police.

I saw no mention of Stewart’s murder in either the
Orange County
Register
or the
Los Angeles Times.

We spent that week on vacation, having fun while Philipe formulated
plans for upcoming terrorist projects, and I thought that it was the best week
I’d ever had in my life. There was a short January heat wave, and we went to the
beach. Since no one noticed us, Philipe said, we could stare to our hearts’
content, and there were women galore, all available for our visual enjoyment. We
compared breasts and bikini lines, rated postures and posteriors. We would pick
out one woman and all concentrate on her, watch her swim and sunbathe, watch her
adjust her top, watch her surreptitiously scratch her crotch when she thought no
one was looking. All this time, one or another of us would provide running
commentary on her each and every move. On a dare and in a mood of lunatic
bravery, Buster ran down the beach and pulled loose the bikini ties of all women
who were sitting alone on their blankets.

We went to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, sneaking in the reentry
gates one by one while the guards were looking in another direction. We went to
malls and shoplifted, daring each other to steal bigger and bulkier items,
running like hell and laughingly losing ourselves in the crowd when Buster was
spotted carrying a monstrous boom box out of Radio Shack. We went to movies, one
person paying, then opening the exit door so the rest of us could sneak in. It
was like being a kid again, or like being the kid I never was, never had the
guts to be, and it was wonderful.

Through it all, we talked. We talked about our families and our lives
and our work, about what it was like to be Ignored, about what we could do as
Terrorists for the Common Man. Only Buster and Don had ever been married, it
turned out. Buster’s wife had died and Don’s had run off with a securities
consultant. Of the others, only Philipe and Bill had even had girlfriends. The
rest had been as ignored by women as they had been by society at large.

I still didn’t believe that Manifest Destiny crap, but I had started to
think that, yeah, maybe there was a reason we’d been created like this. Maybe
some higher power did have a special purpose for us, although whether that
purpose was to initiate greatness or merely to serve as comic relief to the
footnotes of contemporary culture remained to be seen.

We always met at my place. I offered to drive, to pick up Philipe at his
house, but he always said no. Ditto for the others. I didn’t know if they
weren’t ready to completely trust me yet, if this was some type of security
measure or paranoia on their part, or if things just happened to work out this
way, but that first week I never saw where any of my fellow terrorists lived.
They seemed to like my apartment, though, to find it comfortable, and that made
me feel good. A couple of times we rented videotapes, and we watched them in my
living room, and once they all stayed overnight, crashing on my couch and on the
living room and bedroom floors.

It felt good to be a part of something.

It was on the second Saturday that Philipe suggested that we begin
another vandalism campaign in an attempt to draw attention to our plight. We
were at my place again, chewing down on a Taco Bell lunch, and I pushed my chair
back onto two legs, steadying myself with one foot. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do
it. What’s the plan?”

Philipe shook his head. “Not now. This isn’t a social outing we’re going
on. This is terrorism. I need time to make some preparations.”

“What are we going to hit? Where are we going to start?”

“Where? City Hall. Orange City Hall.”

“Why there?”

“It’s where I used to work. I still have a key and a security card. We
can get in.”

“You used to work for the city of Orange?”

“I was one of the assistant city managers,” he said.

That surprised me. I was not sure what I’d thought Philipe had done
before becoming a Terrorist for the Common Man, but it was not that. I guess I’d
seen him doing something more glamorous or more dangerous. Something in the
movie business maybe. Or working for a detective agency. This made more sense,
though. Philipe might seem like a leader to us, but he was still Ignored, a
faceless nonentity to the rest of the world.