The More You Ignore Me

by Travis Nichols

  The gray partisans above and below cried out in protest, but rules are rules, so the players jogged back down the field to huddle up again.

  I felt suddenly refreshed.

  Sober.

  “There are rules! ” I screamed. “There is justice! When the QB is down, there are consequences! And Rico knows this! He recognizes! Mother, take heed!”

  The game was over; the Blues won.

  I don’t remember exactly what happened next. I was so overjoyed that my mind raced in a fever as grumbling gentlemen in ponchos and army jackets stuffed my hands with money. I began then and there to truly admire and feel such an affinity for Rico.

  My “gut” was inspired!

  I tried to suppress a belch by ducking my chin and flexing my abs, but a dark rattle shot through my nasal passages and made my eyes sting.

  Always partial to the game of Risk (my system: always take Kamchatka early), I saw the latest gambling scene on the quad as a negative image of a real war, with the old and “infirm” risking it all at the front, on the “ball field” in their blue and gray, battling for favor and pride, gentlemen of a certain age with bad mortgages, broken marriages, and kids who despise them, all dotting the fields playing these “games” to determine which group is the better (UNION vs. CONFEDERACY?), while the youths of the world looked on.

  He enacted justice.

  This, I thought, was a young man of the future!

  A compatriot!

  If I am not able to have Rachil, then by God, Rico should!

  Elated, I followed him from the field onto the city bus (late, as always), and I observed him closely as he sank into his seat in contemplation.

  I assumed, perhaps, he was thinking of how to solve the war—the one outside the city limits, the state, the county, the region, the USA, the continent—to seal it in time and give it over to reenactors and historians.

  That is what I had been contemplating there on the bus, so I said aloud to all the passengers, “Develop an alternative energy strategy and let the indigenous sort themselves out. Simple!”

  I believe Rico would have agreed with me, but I saw too late that he had a worn paperback in his hands and a nefarious set of headphones on his head.

  If only he had turned back to talk to me then we might have come together to solve a foreign policy struggle that still plagues us as a country to this day, but he did not ask for my ideas on the subject. No one, in fact, had asked for my ideas on the subject, just my tact in not mentioning it to anyone—especially not on the bus!

  But of course I have always refused tact!

  I have, in fact, long advocated for the war.

  Everyone I know has been horrified at my advocacy (I should share with you some of THOSE arguments, my dears!), but to Rico, I see now, my advocacy surely would have made sense. (He would now, I’m sure, understand my position on the blog; one cannot be neutral in the conflict between freedom and oppression.)

  He would see that I refuse to give tacit approval to oppression, that I have fought against it in whatever capacity I could throughout my life.

  Rico would know instinctively that I clamor for a fight, a new narrative, a patriotism of the left that won’t disdain the soldiers who protect it.

  Later, while his City Parks basketball team practiced lay-ups in the gym, I sat in the bleachers reading aloud from Thomas Paine, did I not?

  And when I drew up plays for the team as an extra help to the coach, I consulted this new “counterinsurgency” strategy, yes?

  A glorious time!

  I had felt once again like I was part of a country! And a team!

  I could have been, if not great, then quite good at basketball, dear readers, so this is not just idle claptrap.

  Up until ninth grade I was considered one of the top players in my class, an avid defender, an annoyance deployed by the coaches to harass the opponent’s best scorer.

  But my weakness, where I so desperately needed tutelage, was with my jump shot.

  Oh sure, occasionally I would “stroke it” and hit numerous shots in a row during practice, such that my teammates would marvel at my ability and give me little pats on the behind.

  But in games something happened. Some mania would overtake me.

  Perhaps it was that I wanted my form to be perfect.

  I’m not sure.

  But I would catch a pass and—wide open!—square to shoot.

  I would repeat the mantra I had made for myself: “Knees, elbow, wrist!”—shorthand for “bend at the knees; lock the elbow in; follow through with the wrist; make the shot.” but the game happened so quickly that I would catch the pass and chant my chant in a rush only to find my body could not keep up with my mind. (Or, maybe, that my mind could not keep up with my body?)

  Nothing would behave.

  My knees would dip too low, my elbow would creep out too wide, and my wrist would lock into place so the barely spinning orb would be sent into the ether, never to hit the backboard/rim apparatus.

  Naturally I became an object of ridicule amongst my “peers,” and instead of taking me under his wing to tutor me in technique and strategy—I would have been such a pupil!—the incompetent hack of a coach cut me from the squad!

  Crushed, I renounced the game.

  For years I refused to even acknowledge a pair of sneakers on television.

  They were dead to me.

  Over time, yes, I came back to the game, but by then my prime had passed, my skills had atrophied, and my talent had gone fallow, all thanks to an ignoramus coach!

  I have resolved not to let the same thing happen to the kids in my current location, who practice at the recreation center, but has anyone thanked me?

  No!

  In fact, they have had on numerous occasions the janitorial staff escort me from the facility!

  Rico clearly felt bad about all of this.

  I watched him let out a deep sigh a few nights later at the “Parkside Loco,” no doubt upset with himself he hadn’t been more understanding about my “coaching” at the gym.

  Shame tickled the back of his throat.

  He made it to the shrimp “buffet” with his cleaning rag, but there he quite naturally gagged.

  Flies buzzed.

  I snuck over to him and whispered from behind my napkin as he adjusted the plates and forks:

  “Did you know that Sartre said he never had a day of despair in his entire life?”

  Rico made no indication that he heard me, though I said it repeatedly.

  Flummoxed, I began chewing on my napkin, but then I saw that Rico must have indeed heard me, for he suddenly slipped away from the puce shrimp and walked downstairs shaking his head.

  Parts of the restaurant were under construction, and a drop cloth and a can of paint had been shoved behind the creaky bathroom door just to the left of the stairs.

  The smell of glue and sawdust swirled into my nostrils as I snuck to the door just as Rico closed it.

  A draft wafted in from behind me as Rico undid his “Button Fly” shorts to urinate, but before he could unfurl a stream into the bowl, he tensed.

  Looking back over his shoulder, directly at what had become my regular “observation crack” in the door, Rico suddenly stepped back with an impish grin on his face, causing me to inhale sharply and feel my heartbeat in my throat.

  Had I been caught?

  He took two steps to the corner, and—rather than press his face into the crack to confront me with his crazy eyes—he bent over to the paint can and stirring stick.

  He popped open the paint can with his keys, then reached for his dangling genitalia.

  Strange.

  Was it part of his job?

  Was he required to finish painting?

  No.

  Dear readers, he dipped the tip of his penis into the can of taupe paint.

  It must have felt quite cool there on his (uncircumcised) penis, because he smiled a rather too large smile as he dunked his member in the paint like a “Long John”
into coffee.

  Then, waddling over to the sink—can in hand, penis in can—Rico smiled his crack-toothed smile ever wider and let out a hiccoughy giggle.

  Giddiness began to course through my own crouched arteries as well.

  What a marvel was this Rico!

  The nervous system, indeed!

  What would he do next?

  With his left knee propped up on the sink and his right hand guiding his dripping, taupe penis, he spelled out, awkwardly (and, it appeared, a bit painfully), a word on the bathroom mirror.

  At first I couldn’t make it out, for his hunched frame blocked my view, but at last, after he gave a satisfied grunt and slid back from the sink, I saw it—I knew he still carried the torch!—all was not lost!—“R-A-C-H-I-L-!”

  The last of the ! dripped down into the sink.

  (Despair! Never in his life!)

  The paint must have begun to sting his penis hole, because Rico had no time to admire his work before he began hopping back and forth on the balls of his feet.

  He ran the hot water into his cupped hand while whispering a series of hushed “ow”-like utterances.

  FYI: Having just performed this same paint-by-penis procedure in the name of research here in the bathroom I share with the filthy rabble on my floor, I surmise it took a bit more than just warm water to remove all of the paint from Rico’s penis.

  Rico scrubbed a little with his thumb, then commenced his delayed urination in the general direction of the bowl.

  (Urination causes quite a few more “ow”s.)

  I watched a single drop of urine fall on his left shoe and, there in my observational crouch, shook my head in wonder at Rico’s fashion sense—those shoes!

  Once again, boat shoes with no socks!

  The boy suffered for fashion.

  It was summer, so he had hundreds of little bites on the tops of his feet and on his bare ankles.

  Mosquitoes must have loved to feast on his fragrant blood.

  Even here in my room, I scratch at the red nubs covering my own ankles, having similar blood, though I mitigate the blood feast with daily doses of garlic from my own private stock I plant every year in an abandoned lot near my residence.

  My favorite variety is a Spanish garlic I have dubbed “Don Legarto.”

  I pop five to six cloves of Don Legarto in my mouth a day, and yet still the mosquitoes feast, infernal creatures!

  The tight shoes rubbed, but Rico knew pain was not so different in quality from pleasure, and besides, he had developed a strong mind and so chose to ignore the waves of red pricklings washing up his shins.

  Or, rather, to savor them.

  As I do now.

  He left the bathroom and his (loud and clear!) message behind.

  He wiped a tear from his right eye.

  As a teenager, Rico partially blinded himself in this right eye when he tried to juggle three five-pound weights in a rank weight room used by his high school track team.

  I imagine Rico must have thought juggling was a state of mind, and so he saw no need to practice, a theory he no doubt picked up from his idiot buddy Corn.

  In actual practice, of course, one weight ricocheted off the other, which hit the next, and that one clanked onto the upper left quadrant of Rico’s face.

  It’s only hubris if you fail.

  His best friend had surely said that, just as my own stepfather did, lording over my hospital bed with his dark mane and his craggy face when I finally came to after one of my own high school accidents.

  “What accidents?” you ask?

  I know I seem so free of trouble, how could there have possibly been accidents?

  There were many: Fall from roof, boiling water spill, errant BB puncture, thigh stab (pencil), thigh stab (stick), curbside tooth crack, and, of course, football leg.

  Football!

  Why didn’t I think of this earlier?

  As I watched Rico’s game, it must have been this trauma that made me feel so strongly that sense of justice finally being served.

  Oh, the memory stings worse than paint in a penis hole!

  Back then, I merely wanted to play with my peers like any other boy.

  I would have never called them “friends,” for I had no one I could call what Montaigne called “fast friends” besides the loathsome Daniel and Emmett.

  Beyond these two, I merely had a crowd of airheaded contemporaries I was forced to spend my high school days with in torpor and resignation. I signed up for football thinking perhaps it promised a kind of excitement.

  Oh yes, now it seems comical.

  Shouldn’t I have known better?

  Well, yes, of course, I should have, but at fourteen?

  Surely we can’t expect boys of fourteen to accept the horrid world as it is without any hope for change? Whatever your opinion on the subject, the fact of the case is that I joined the freshman football squad.

  It was even more of a disaster than you can imagine, even before the fateful incident that permanently affected my development.

  Merciless taunts, a total lack of compassion, willful misguidance, practical jokes, all at my expense.

  And then, just as I resolved to leave the field of play forever, I was called in to play running back for one play in an obscene practice.

  I know I should have refused and flung my helmet into the crow-infested trees.

  What would they have done?

  What could they possibly have done to me that would have been worse than what actually happened?

  Nothing.

  Of course—nothing.

  But I gleefully took up the gauntlet as my sniveling peer group chortled on the sidelines.

  I strapped the cursed helmet on—filthy thing stinking of plasticky sweat—and jogged out to the huddle.

  I confess, I imagined some small moment of glory, a fraction of what the other boys received daily, if only just to understand something more about the carefree psychic terrain they romped through.

  The play was called and lo, I was to receive the ball in a handoff and run behind hulking number 44, Clint Nester, fullback extraordinaire!

  The huddle clapped in unison—my last gesture of group solidarity, I swear it now if I did not then—and lined up in position.

  The cliché rings true.

  It all happened so fast.

  The center snapped the ball, the quarterback shoved it in my gut with a sneer.

  I followed number 44 through what appeared to be an opening in the defensive line, but then—nothing.

  A minute later, I came to.

  I was flat on my back with horrible stinking weight crushing down on my leg, darkness, and a blinding pierce shooting up my appendage.

  I was trapped.

  I heard laughter outside the wet-sock heat of the pile, but all I could see were the grimy jerseys and pads writhing above me, and then Clint Nester—my own teammate!—lurched into view with an insane leer smeared across his face.

  Our masks separated us, but I could taste his sour soda breath twisting around my uvula.

  Panic began to rise, even before I felt his grubby paw push my facemask up while another boy—hand slithering from God knows where—pressed his thumb under my jawbone, into the soft part of my chin (a “pressure point,” I later found out).

  The panic swirled in my core.

  They grunted out their laughter as the pile continued to squirm all around me, and then—I can barely admit it even now, thirty years on—Clint Nester, oppressor, performed a heinous act.

  He pushed his own facemask up, stretched out his neck, and he licked me!

  His slabby damp tongue ran along my Adam’s apple, worse than a blade.

  I went blind with rage, released sounds inhuman and unfamiliar to nature.

  Of course I thought I had friends on the team, a few other outcast boys who sympathized with my plight as I did with theirs.

  We had made a pact, a tacit one, but a pact nonetheless, that if any of us were singled out unnecessarily by
the popular, the adept, the regular boys, why, we’d stand with the injured party!

  But of course as soon as I heard that god-awful snapping and felt that insanity-producing tongue, I turned to those boys—my friends!—and I saw them through the maze of cleats and ankles snickering with the rest on the sidelines, basking in the transitory approval of the mob.

  It affected me much more than the pain in my leg (a pain I still suffer from, not incidentally).

  Having my friends, my comrades, turn on me when I needed them most, it plunged me into a deep depression.

  I had loved my fellows as much—if not more—than myself, but lying there in agony in the lawn clippings and litter, I felt my ultimate solitude engulf me in an instant.

  I would be alone from then on.

  Or I should say, since I had been alone up until then as well but was innocent of it, I knew I would be alone from then on and this knowledge had the potential to retard my development irreversibly.

  And my leg was broken underneath it all.

  CHAPTER 13

  Pain.

  Freud.

  That perverted psychopath made it a cliché to say that sex is violent, but it is nonetheless true, and Rico knew then—just as I had since the Football Tongue Imbroglio—that this particular truth contained a still more radical truth within it: love itself is violent.