The More You Ignore Me

by Travis Nichols

  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.

  She, wild-eyed, covered herself up and gaped at the darkness without comprehending—until he flicked the light switch off.

  Then I heard her scream (and him laugh).

  If she had not been startled and handled so rudely by her brother, do you think she would have found my attention quite so unflattering?

  There couldn’t have been many boys—if any at all, honestly—who found her as alluring as I did.

  You might expect, as I admit I did, sitting there in the dark watching her turn her gaze toward me in horror, that she would appreciate the attention.

  Perhaps, under different circumstances, she would have, but Emmett made it so that our great love could never enter the world.

  I was banned from the house and ridiculed further at school as a peep.

  So you see?

  My love has been thwarted from the start.

  I could tell you so many more stories, but why pay so much attention to these admitted travesties when for all intents and purposes they are out my control?

  I know.

  Believe me, I do.

  But I’ve realized a certain vital part of me refuses to accept injustice on whatever scale.

  Chris Novtalis, this corrupt dribble of afterbirth, should not be allowed to shut me out.

  He should not have the authority, in, yes, the exact same way—the exact!—that the president has not earned the right to make his decisions.

  He obviously does not know the lay of the land, is in over his head, and yet he refuses to acknowledge these facts, and by withholding this information, by stonewalling his petitioners, he is making the catastrophe worse.

  During the campaign, he listened.

  When someone brought up a problem—and there were many, we were helpful!—he addressed it forthrightly.

  It was an open and vital conversation in which very serious issues were being discussed, and many problems solved.

  But now that campaign, and that discussion, is at zero.

  There is nothing.

  And, I’m sure you see, that is the very same case on the wedding blog.

  Nothing is happening!

  It is a barren stretch of white waste.

  We are not being heard!

  Only the sanitized voices beholden to the established interests get a say!

  I truly thought the site would be different.

  I should have known, but for a joyous spring—the wild time of innocent youth and happiness—we had a voice, a space, and look at the magnificent work we did.

  The proof is there in the record, but before examining the record further—I’m sorry; I’ve let this digression proceed too far—let us not leave that campus of long ago.

  There is more!

  Of course now it seems so obvious to say that era was the end of something rather than the beginning, but back then, the thrill felt curiously like hope.

  I, for one, believed in my vision of new days with my new love by my side.

  These days spread out before me—a completely different time of understanding and empathy was heralded by our reconciliation.

  Well, “reconciliation” is perhaps not quite the right word since that does imply a mutual act, when in this particular instance I alone did the reconciling, or, rather, pursued my love object with fervor, so in some ways it was an inverse reconciliation, a natural falling away of boundaries.

  I remember when I first saw Rachil truly see me, there in the ticket window with her Louise Brooks bob, sighing, unaware exactly who it was receiving the “employee” discount despite having left his ID at home once again.

  She took me in with her almond eyes, up and down, then raised her delicately plucked eyebrows as if to say, “Well, well, you do indeed exist after all!”

  I tilted my chin at her, not wanting to overplay my hand, and gave her a wink.

  She feigned disgust.

  The point: I had finally made contact with my love and it seemed no coincidence that the cinema played host that quarter to films by the new auteurs, those filmmakers we all thought were harbingers of a revolution, but were, in fact, only the end of an evolutionary cycle.

  After this showing of Born on the Fourth of July, in a daze, I followed (at a discreet distance) Corn and Rachil back to the “church.”

  I should explain here, dear readers, that I had not yet been permanently cast out of the university at this particular juncture, but had simply been “AWOL,” a mysterious absence from the classroom.

  I had hoped for a glorious return.

  The misunderstanding had yet to occur.

  Can I help what others perceive?

  Tell me truly, dear readers: is it my fault what goes on in the minds of others?

  Surely not, you say, and yet here I sit in my humid room, unloved, cast aside, neglected, and banned, because other members of society cannot perceive my intentions and thus judge my actions correctly.

  Incorrectly?

  Whatever.

  Language fails.

  I reach for my tea and hope to find succor, but it is bitter.

  How I wish I could still smoke—but in this I believe the doctor might be correct.

  But then!

  Back then!

  I would squat in the shrubs outside the church, smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening through the window to the conversations between Rico and Corn, Rachil and Rico, Corn and Rachil.

  I spied the dark dimples forming the small of Rachil’s back as she scooped a Spree candy wrapper off the floor of the church.

  “You guys,” she laughed. “Spree!”

  We three—Rico, Corn, and I—swooned.

  She had us all in the palm of her hand, and Rico and I were such naïve fools that we thought she and Corn flirted innocently!

  It would be the last time I underestimated his powers.

  CHAPTER 6

  I let myself in through the church window when I thought no one was home, and I sat at the kitchen table smoking one of Rico’s menthol cigarettes, pondering the wood paneling on the wall opposite.<
br />
  One particular eddy had a striking resemblance to the curve of Rachil’s neck, and the longer I stared, the more I seemed to see her eyes there, and before long, it was as if I could hear her voice, slightly muffled, almost moaning.

  I shook my head to clear it of these sounds—not again!—but I found that no amount of shaking stopped what did indeed sound like moaning.

  One of the neighbor kids suddenly burst in.

  He wanted to use the bathroom because, he told me, somebody had “torn it up” in the bathroom at his house.

  No way was he going in there, he said, no way.

  Fine, I waved him over and nodded my approval.

  He ran down the hall to the bathroom, but just as quickly he was back.

  “I can’t get in,” he yelled, pointing maniacally back down the hall. “They in there hunchin’!”

  “Who’s hunchin’ what?” I asked with a cough, perplexed by the child’s native slang.

  “Your boy! He in there hunchin’!”

  Since I seemed to have the run of the place, the child evidently assumed some “your boy” relationship between myself and Corn.