The More You Ignore Me (9 page)

HORACE

(quietly to himself)

This one is for you, friend.

[
HORACE
fires. Outside of the Inn, crows alight from the trees at the sound, which echoes across the valley.
CHARLI
sees the flash first in her peripheral vision before she feels
CHRIS
's grip on her waist tighten. His greasy fingers slowly release
(though not without a final, fleeting brush across her buttocks!). She looks back and sees the cretin crumpling onto the ballroom floor, his face splattered with what looks to her like clumps of mud. Blood begins to seep from the clumps.
CLOSE-UP
on
CHARLI
as she realizes, slowly, that someone has shot
CHRIS
in his stupid face! She inhales to scream, but before her diaphragm can squeeze out a sound . . .]

HORACE

No time to play nurse!

[
HORACE
has bounded over from the party's edge to grip her by the hair (Brutal, but what can we do? The same nature that will allow
HORACE
to shoot
CHRIS
is the same that causes him to roughhouse).
CHARLI
'
S
scalp burns in pinpricked points at first, then all over her head.
HORACE
pulls her by her hair away from
NICO
and the rest of the party, and as she stumbles along with him she finds herself concentrating on the
RC
Cola machine flickering near the main entrance, wondering what will become of her life now that she is free of
CHRIS
and
NICO
.
HORACE
pulls her into the darkness.]

[
FADE TO BLACK
]

Grim, I admit. In fact, it's a movie not unlike those I suffered through a decade ago when I spent so many nights at the cinematheque, standing sentinel for another young beauty beset by deluded aggressors.

But let's not digress.

I know I sound tough, strident, at peace with my convictions, but it does wear on me, I admit it. It is the most tiresome cliché, but it is nonetheless true in this case: no one understands me.

Even as an ungainly youth I was perplexed at how my teachers and “betters” made connections with so many of my peers, and yet all of these elders steadfastly refused to “get” me or acknowledge my exceptionality. But what is there to “get”? Who am I? Am I so special? Should I have, in the end, changed who “I” was just to be “got” by the knuckleheaded throng surrounding me?

I'm sure your superficial answer is a resounding “no,” as it has been from the mouths of whomever I've asked. But of course you are a hypocrite!

When pressed to the point, you all ask me to change, to conform, to give up my essential self to fit in with the lumpen bureaucratariot! Once again, I refuse!

This must make me unhappy, yes?

Of course this is the conclusion most people draw when they dimly perceive the outlines of my existence, but here is the strange thing: I am happy! Joyous, even!

It is the conformist, the socialite, the wedding attendee, the one who goes along only to sacrifice everything worth going along for, who is unhappy!

I have no burdens on my conscience.

I enjoy my meager meals.

I sleep soundly, when I choose to sleep.

I read.

I listen to Archie Shepp.

It is, as a matter of fact, a quite lonely existence, except for these facts:

1. I have been wronged.

2. I am right.

So, yes, I am frustrated.

I am bewildered.

I am angry.

But I am not unhappy.

I have my integrity, and I have my grievances.

But I require no pity from you.

I merely require justice!

And it is this requirement that prods me to go deeper, faster, to push on into the untamed wilds of my gift, to breach the next layer of consciousness in this charade, and to do so without the inhibitions I have heretofore indulged—off with this constricting shirt!

Let the sweat roll down my sides unimpeded!!!

Isn't it natural?

Why, I'll go barefoot!

Yes!

Let's not be afraid of the truth, my dears!

Let's let our primal instincts take over!

True, we have seen that Chris's physical threat to Charli will be nullified by my proxy at the event itself, and so, you may ask, “Why continue writing when you have a plan of action?”

Because, don't you see, the existential danger still looms!

For Nico.

For Charli.

For us.

The
mentality
Chris engenders has already begun to corrupt us from inside, to hem us in, to cause us to
censor ourselves
.

Oh, it burns!

How could we have allowed him to affect us so?

Make no mistake: he has affected us.

We are not clean.

We are cramped and filthy still.

Off with the pants!

We are, in some ways, behaving worse than Chris!

And is that not his ultimate victory?

Here I feel the guilt, and, yes, shame come creeping, and so I must keep typing in order to evacuate the demons from my soul!

It is of the utmost importance that we battle the forces of oppression with our conjoined imaginations in whatever form the muse allows, but I sense that we won't be able to fully appreciate this oppression without first digging into that loamy humus where we might begin separating the tangled roots of love, desire, loathing, and, I admit it, self-delusion that make up my formative years.

MFL
.

Again,
MFL
!

This was well before the advent of blogs, dear readers, and before I had truly accepted my role as an outsider, so it was a different world, one in which I had to employ a very different set of skills to keep track of my interests.

Let me explain, and in explaining, let me pull you back to another world, another place, and another time: 1989.

Yes, in 1989 I was enrolled in a “work-study” scholarship program with the food services department of the state school all the spoiled children of engorged magnates continue to use as a fallback when their plans for received aristocracy fall through.

There, in Creosotte Dining Hall, surrounded by imbecilic frat boys and airheaded candy stripers, I ran the soft serve stand on weekday mornings.

As per the instructions delivered to me by a hirsute woman of dubious extraction, I kept the cafeteria's cabinets full of sprinkles, and I kept the whirring soft serve machine's various parts in working order using a certain jellied lubricant and scrub brush.

This was no small feat when every young coed desperately and continually needed “a chocolate one, pleeeze,” though I was (and am!) an efficient enough worker to make enough time for supra–soft serve observations of my peers.

Yes, I had to wear a silly paper hat, but more to the point: I first observed
MFL
(whom I will now, in this public space, for legal reasons, call “Rachil”), the inaugural morning of the school year in that Indian summer of 1989, a time when the “punks” all still wore leather, and the cars were all still Japanese made.

And a beauty like Rachil did not go in for “Prince.”

At least not when I first met her.

No, she looked like a young Ally Sheedy, an untouched Ally, an Ally waiting for initiation into the older Ally world.

She liked her soft serve extra soft.

MFL
. Immediately, it was so.

I soon learned that “Rachil” worked as a ticket seller at the newly opened University Cinematheque on East campus, and, it happened that I received a school employee discount at this very same University Cinematheque.

I quickly became the Cinematheque's most loyal patron, suffering through all the films twenty-year-olds now consider “cult classics” simply so I could have a brief minute of face-to-face interaction with
MFL
.

I might have been her
MFL
, if only I had been given the proper chance.

Who can say? The past is passed.

What we can say is that our eyes often met during the ticket transaction, and one time she did indeed touch the side of my hand with her ring finger.

I felt a spark.

But, we'll never know what could have been, because mine enemy (whom I will call from here on out for the very same legal reasons “Corn”) also worked there at the Cinematheque, running the projector from a little dank hovel.

Even from where I sat in the front row, I could often hear him guffawing his way through the films at the back of the cinema.

The soul may indeed grow in darkness, but one must consider which particular soul this is before one registers the fact as a positive or negative occurrence!

Worse still, Corn could often be found hovering outside the ticket booth, practically licking the glass that protected poor Rachil from just such “flirtations.”

He would stand idly by while she attempted to do her job, horning in on the time that was by rights the customers' in order to continue some fatuous discussion of Jay McInerney or Norman Mailer (Corn fancied himself an “intellectual”).

Isn't it ironical that the cinema was the smithy of their base ingratitude and that my secret screenplay forecasts their future manifestations' eventual downfall?

Yes.

It is.

Let's enjoy the irony for a moment.

Perhaps in due time I will post the entirety of my as-yet-unproduced screenplay for your enjoyment, dear readers, but until then let's acknowledge that the screenplay form, glorious as it is in my hands, has its limits.

It cannot encompass all of experience.

If we are to fully understand these types of relationships, which we are indeed to do if we are to proceed, then we need to push beyond all “genre” limitations.

Yes, it is obvious that the past requires a novelist's touch, that majestic sentences must stream from the pinpricks of facts to adequately capture the time and place of my (or any!) sentimental education, for the novelist takes a true story and lies about it, or takes a lie and tells a true story about it. Either way, to the reader it all appears at the same time to be gospel and supreme artifice.

Shall we begin?

Rachil sold tickets in a brightly lit glass-enclosed booth that sat in front of the shabby University cinema, which itself fit snugly inside a student union, a campus hub at the center of a tawdry rural town made nationally prominent only by this second-rate educational institution's rah-rah football team.

Seen from above, the campus looked like a metastasizing cancer growth in an otherwise robust body of farmland.

A boy named Corn ran the cinema's projector in a dark concrete room that smelled like wet Band-Aids and trench foot.

It was 1989.

Night after night, Corn would curl his lithe body around the film splicer, snipping out the stills of titillating scenes for his “private collection,” sweat pouring from his greasy scalp as his wormy fingers did their wormy work.

Night after night, Rachil, an almond-eyed brunette with the dark allure of a young Ally Sheedy, would sell her allotment of tickets and, drawn by a rank impulse quite inexplicable, would knock on the fireproof door to the projection booth while Corn built up or broke down the film.

He would heave open the door and bid her enter with a pervy grin.

Up she would climb, mounting the few steps to the projection platform where Corn sat amid the fluttering reels of celluloid.

On some nights, as Rachil and Corn lounged in that dark bunker, he would watch her laugh her perfect laugh and wonder how he hadn't always known about the blaring clown horn that existed inside of him.

It now blared all day long:
RAAAACHHHHILLLL RAAAACHHHHILLLL!

Yes, it was the horn of love, readers. We can almost pity poor Corn.

Before this horn, Corn had merely expelled his seed into/onto whatever deluded virgin crossed his path without a care for “feelings,” but now, there
she
was, leaning on the steel banister on the stairs of the projection room, rolling her eyes as she recounted tales of barroom boys with earnest ardor, and suddenly the horn sounded in Corn's heart:

RAAAAAAACHHHHILLLLL!

It rendered him glassy-eyed and mute and, yes, full of feelings.

“What a dork!” Rachil would say of a recent beau, chewing a pinky nail, settling onto the projection room floor cross-legged.

“Totally,” Corn would say, in a patently false imitation of the argot of the day, willing to give up everything, including his very way of speaking, to stay in her presence. “Can't these morons see that it's much more fun to be free of ‘relationships' and all their, like, entrapments?”