The More You Ignore Me (11 page)

Insane!

Corn plotted Rico's demise in the foul projection booth while the reels of film spun in the darkness.

“Maybe I should just lose it to him,” Rachil said one evening, flicking her shy lashes up at Corn, driving him to frenzy there in the dark. “My virginity,” she said. “No big whoop.”

Corn dropped the top reel from the projector, and the sprocket ripped a two-foot tear in the print of
Batman
.

First off, he thought, she was a virgin?

Innocence perplexed him.

Second, lose it?

To Rico?

Virginity
in play
?

Rachil went out to calm the enraged film crowd in the theater while that incompetent spliced everything back together with shaky hands in the booth.

Popcorn and Jujubes filled the air, catcalls and hoots.

“Is everything okay?” she asked upon her return, eyeing the reel wobbling on the rickety projector.

The Joker had suddenly become a blob of darkness, then switched back again in a yellow streak.

Corn didn't notice, for he was a sloppy, horrid worker who didn't really care about film, only a paycheck.

I can attest to the fact that the crowd took notice, and that the manager was notified.

A soda splashed against the booth door, followed by a shouted obscenity.

Within, Corn was at a loss.

“So when . . . you and . . . heh . . . some date, huh?”

“Let's talk, Corn. I'll be at the Boiler Room,” Rachil said. “Gotta meet Rico.”

She made a sour face, and left poor Corn in the booth to think over Rico pumping his hips and Rachil moaning in ecstasy with her hands clawing at his floral shirt while he whooped like a broncobuster.

Southern Bap, Corn thought, alone again, gnashing his teeth. Hippy!

We can imagine this is the moment his deepest plot began to hatch like a nest of roach babies in his mind.

He
would
have her, someway, somehow, even if it took years!

(Screenplay adaptation note: acquire rights to Lou Reed's “Walk on the Wild Side.”)

Shortly thereafter, Corn took up in the spare room of an old makeshift “church” at the edge of town where Rico resided.

It was stage 1 of his plan.

Most students lived in the dormitories or the fraternities, of course, but Rico, once his “hippy” phase began in earnest, professed an inability to live in such “hives.” He set out for the poorer neighborhoods on the outskirts, where tract homes became “churches” and “churches” became bohemian squats.

Poor and bumbling, though, Rico couldn't make do in a “squat” or make rent by himself, even in a nearly abandoned old church in the black part of town, where neither the paperboy nor the pizza guy dared to tread.

So Corn joined Rico at the former Full Gospel Tabernacle, ostensibly to ease his friend's financial burden and to be “friendly,” but we know it was, in fact, to ingratiate himself with the frequent visitor, Rachil, whom Corn obsessed over day and night.

*

A note about the “church”: on its east side, there was a wall of privet and scrub that presented a problem.

It blocked my view to everything.

A hand-lettered sign in the neighbor's window read “No Trustpassing. Will Call Police.”

Obviously, I ignored this empty threat and assumed these illiterate residents would present no impediment if I decided to set up camp there, but in the end the privet proved too dense.

The rampant invasive plant species swarmed east to west, away from this neighbor and around the church, falling away as the red dirt driveway met the other neighbors to the west.

These western neighbors, I deduced, might actually be problematic since they were seemingly
always
outside, though the vantage from the west side was optimal enough to risk it.

A two-beam fence stood in the clearing where the two properties touched, and just beyond the fence sat the three-bedroom house, lorded over by an old woman everyone called Mamma.

Every morning when I left my spot just west of the church, in the deep privet behind the driveway, I saw Mamma ambling around her yard with a bandanna on her head and a full plug of tobacco in her lip.

She waved at me and talked her talk, but I never could understand anything she said.

Good God, her house flooded over—sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, cousins, second cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends—so many that they spilled out into the driveway and onto the fence, even in the early mornings or late nights when I would make my way to the windows.

Rick, Rat, Frank James, Trina, Carbox, Willie, Deidre, Prika, Cedric, Toni, Nanez, Tater, and, every once in a while, twin cousins named Chad and Sam, all teetering on the fence, waving at me, speaking.

Shut up, damn you! My work is done in silence!

Years before Corn and Rico lived in the church, some wayward soul had placed a black metal sign in front of the building's white double doors that, though rusted, still read “Full Gospel Tabernacle” in white letters.

By the time of my approach, the black sign and the white double doors were the only clues that the place was any different from the rows of tract homes down the street, leading into the projects people called—ironically?—the Estates.

Otherwise, it looked like any other dump in the neighborhood, except for the fact that a couple of “crackers” lived there.

Inside the church, the structure still showed traces of “Full Gospel,” but the nave had been partitioned off, the transepts cleared into a living room, and the chancel made into a stage, where, in place of a pulpit, Rico and Corn had put a drum kit, two “keyboards,” three guitars, two amps, a bass, a saxophone, and a clarinet.

Some nights they would make an infernal racket late into the night, the neighbors in ecstatic communion, wailing away on the clarinet or stomping out a hambone rhythm on the church floor.

Occasionally, Rachil sat there, agog on the tattered sofa, trying to express something besides horror at these strangled attempts at “music.”

Corn, for his part, played music constantly, day and night, though I noticed he played two distinct types of music: other people's songs out there on the “stage,” Bo Diddley and Deep Purple covers, while in his room, on a guitar he had apparently bought off some poor widow at an estate sale—a 1954 Silvertone with a small American flag Scotch-taped to the body, ridges worn into the fret board, bloodstains on the tuning pegs—he sang his own songs.

These songs had no hambone.

He recorded them on a shabby four-track held together with, one assumes, rubber bands and chewing gum, but I noticed he never played
these songs
for anyone else, just recorded and rerecorded them on the rickety machine in his room.

He sang and sang, but, dear readers, his voice was so terrible!

Like a gassy internal organ compressed by crab claws.

And of course his songs were all about Rachil—maudlin laments of unrequited love and heartache, about a beautiful girl in love with the sad singer's hippy friend.

They recalled the sounds of mewling kittens stuck in a cavernous smokestack.

The whole episode reminds me of another, much less intensely laughable story from my own time as a budding
teenager, when I spent my afternoons with my two “friends,” Daniel and Emmett.

It is a bit of a digression, but such a story might give you a glimpse into why I knew exactly what Corn was up to.

This way I can express myself without having to blather on in some sordid confessional mode, or worse, attempt to compose some horrid, pathologically sensitive lullaby like Corn himself did, so yes, I will allow myself the indulgence.

You see, Emmett had a sister.

Isn't that how all love stories begin?

She was older, and quite large.

Emmett, Daniel, and I would watch
TV
and play card games in the basement “rumpus room” of Emmett's house deep in the “swank” part of town, while his sister, Parissa, would have tea with her raggedy girlfriends upstairs.

I don't think it's possible for you to comprehend how strange it was to be Persian, as Emmett and Parissa were, in such a time and place, twenty-five years ago in our semirural township, and so just the fact of being at their house was for us, their peers, an admission of some defect on all of our parts.

We had clearly failed at normal company.

While Parissa and her friends pretended nothing was out of the ordinary upstairs—they talked about boys and
schoolwork like the rest of high school feminine society, as if there weren't a dark stink hanging over them, an unacknowledged otherness—downstairs we made no such pretenses.

Our otherness was manifest.

Daniel, “Emmett” (real name: Omar), and I popped zits on one another, burped, gave one another bloody noses, exchanged wadded-up photos and filthy stories, drank concoctions of Schnapps and cough syrup while barely turning our backs to “jack off” into socks.

Every few hours one of us would scramble up out of the basement and cause the girls to shriek, either by spewing soda at them, wagging a discolored penis, or unleashing some form of unholy bodily gas.

We were putrid little pukes, I admit it.

My only saving grace was that I hated Emmett and Daniel, and I hated what I became with them.

I often would sneak into the bathroom to gouge the inside of my thigh with a paperclip as punishment for being there.

But it was worth it.

Why?

Because of Parissa.

Parissa, with her beefy thighs and ponderous cheeks, her dark obtrusive hairs and little feet, her cumin and
proto-Rachil/proto-Charli smell, her husky laugh gargling in the fat of her throat, her secret delight in our disgusting attention.

You see, I would debase myself with Daniel and Emmett for as long as it took, until all of Parissa's friends had gone home and she had showered off her plump haunches and globes (a nighttime showerer, up and at school in morning grease and fume), swaddled herself in a robe, and toddled off to her bedroom in the converted basement.

Then, I would feign a yawn, excuse myself from the puerile company I had been keeping.

They would of course stop belching on each other only long enough to give me a good-bye salute of buttocks and a grunted farewell as I pretended to start on my way home.

But I would not walk home!

I would merely slip around to the side of the house and lower myself onto my belly in the cool grass.

Peering over the window well, I could see—just barely—into Parissa's cramped basement room, where she had most often installed herself like a gibbous moon into a chair to listen to a record or read a book.

Oh what a delight just to watch such a fat girl finally free herself of self-consciousness and let it all hang!

Some nights she'd do leg exercises, scratch her ham-like calf, brush her hair, pick at her elbow . . .

Of course I dreamed that one of these nights she would stop inspecting her toenails and begin to lightly trace her
fingers across her mammoth belly, plunge a puffy hand into the darkness below to rub out the secret passion (for me!) in a squirmy fit of muffled grunts and sighs.

Alas.

I never saw if she did, for after a few months I was caught.

One night as I lay there prone on the dewy herbe, my chin resting on folded hands as Parissa looped her index finger into the back panel of her underwear and with a deft flick sprung the center cloth loose from captivity between her luscious buttocks—what wonders was I in store for next?—I felt a snide little push on my shoulder.

And there, towering over me, was Emmett, cigarette cupped to the inside, cat-that-got-the-canary look on his stupid face.

“Well, well,” he said like the dumb sociopath he was. “Are you looking at my sister?”

“No,” I said, as if I could deny it, to simply erase what was happening with a word.

The absurdity of such a patently false statement did not fluster Emmett.

“Five bucks,” he said.

“What?”

“Five bucks and I don't tell. I let you keep looking. No problem.”

You see?

Do you see what kind of wretched personality I was forced to accommodate?

A pimp!

Far better to be alone, but you can sympathize with a poor adolescent wanting some kind of companionship, can't you?

I wouldn't pay, of course, and so Emmett bolted down the stairs to Parissa's room as I looked on in horror through the window.

I suppose I didn't believe he would actually do it, nor did I believe if I had simply run away she would think him a crazy nuisance and a liar.

Foolishly, I looked on while he burst in and pointed out the window at me.