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.
“When?” Pete asked.
“Tuesday.”
I looked around the group, nodded. “Tuesday it is,” I said.
We drove to the meeting separately. Philipe didn’t want us all riding together.
There were cars in the parking lot when I arrived, and the other terrorists were milling around by the building’s back door, where Philipe had told us to meet. Only Philipe himself was missing, and I parked my car, got out, and walked over to the group. None of us spoke, and there was a feeling of hushed expectancy among us.
Buster had brought a friend, a man also in his mid to late sixties who was wearing the uniform of a Texaco attendant. The name tag on the old man’s uniform read “Junior,” and I couldn’t help smiling at the incongruity of the name and the face. The old man smiled back at me, happy to be noticed in even this small way, and I immediately felt sorry for laughing at him.
“My friend Junior,” Buster explained. “He’s one of us.”
Apparently Junior had not yet been introduced to the others, because at this announcement they all gathered around, shaking his hand, welcoming him, the artificially imposed silence of a few moments before effectively broken. I did the same. It felt strange to be on the inside looking out. I had been in Junior’s shoes only recently, and it seemed weird and slightly disorienting to view all this from the opposite angle.
Junior ate it up. He had apparently been told by Buster beforehand about the terrorists — he did not seem confused or surprised upon meeting us — and there was a smile on his face and tears in his eyes as he shook our hands and repeated our names.
It was at that moment that Philipe arrived. Resplendent in an expensively tailored suit, his hair neatly trimmed, he looked almost presidential, the model of a modern leader, and he strode across the parking lot with the air and authority of one used to being in charge.
The rest of us grew quiet as he approached. I felt a strange excited shiver pass through me as Philipe stepped confidently up the curb. It was the type of moment I’d experienced before only as an observer, not as a participant. I felt the way I had in movies when the music swelled and the hero performed heroically. For the first time, I think, I realized that we were part of something big, something important.
Terrorists for the Common Man.
It was more than just a concept to me now. I finally understood what Philipe had been trying so hard to explain.
He looked at me and smiled, and it was as if he knew what I was thinking. Taking out his key and security card, he inserted both into the electronic slot on the wall next to the door, and the door clicked. He pushed it open.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
We followed him inside the building. He paused, closed and locked the door behind us, and we proceeded down a darkened corridor to an elevator. Philipe pushed the Up button, and the metal doors instantly slid open, the light inside the elevator cubicle seeming harsh and far too bright after the darkness.
“Second floor,” Philipe announced, pushing the button.
The second floor was even darker than the first, but Philipe forged ahead and turned on a bank of lights and a series of recessed fluorescents winked on, illuminating a huge room fronted by a built-in counter and partitioned off into smaller sections by modular wall segments.
“This way!” he said.
He led us behind the counter, through the modular maze of workstations, to a closed wooden door in the far wall. He opened the door, turned on the lights.
I had a queasy momentary sense of déjà vu. We were in a conference room, bare save for a long table with a television and VCR on a metal stand at its head. It looked almost exactly like the room in which I’d been introduced to Automated Interface.
“This looks just like the conference room at my old firm,” Don said.
“It looks like the training room at Ward’s.” Tommy.
“It looks like the county’s multipurpose room.” Bill.
Philipe held up his hands. “I know,�
�� he said. He paused, looked around the room at the rest of us. “We are Ignored,” he said. He looked around the table. His gaze landed on Junior, and though he said nothing, he smiled, silently welcoming the old man to the fold. Then he continued, “We are of a kind. Our lives have traveled along parallel paths.
“There is a reason for this. It is not by chance or accident that our experiences echo each other’s, and it is not by chance or accident that we met and joined together. It is by design. We have been chosen for a special purpose, and we have been given this talent to use.
“Most of you did not realize at first that it was a talent. You thought it was a curse. But you’ve seen what we can do together. You’ve seen the places we can go, the actions we can perform. You’ve seen the opportunities available to us.” He paused. “We are not the only people who are Ignored. There are other Ignoreds whom we don’t know and may never know, living out their lives of quiet desperation, and it is for those people, as much as for ourselves, that we must fight. For we have the opportunity, the ability, and the obligation to claim rights for a minority that the rest of the world does not even know exists. We are here tonight not only because of what we are, but because of what we have chosen to be: Terrorists for the Common Man!”
Again, a tingle of excitement ran through me. I almost felt like cheering, and I knew the others did, too. Yes, I thought. Yes!
“What does that mean? Terrorists for the Common Man? It means that it is our responsibility to act on behalf of the forgotten and the disregarded, the unknown and the unappreciated. We will give a voice to the people who have no voice. We will bring recognition to the people who aren’t recognized. We have been ignored all our lives, but we will be ignored no more! We will make the world sit up and take notice and we will shout to anyone who will listen, ‘We are here! We are here! We are here!’”
Steve pumped his fist in the air. “Yeah!”
I felt like doing the same.
Philipe smiled. “How do we accomplish this? How do we grab the attention of a society that has so far paid no attention to us at all? Violence. Creative, constructive violence. We kidnap and take hostages, we blow up buildings, we do anything we have to do to get our point across and make Middle America sit up and take notice. Playtime’s over, kiddies. We’re in the big leagues now. And it’s time for us to get to work.”
From the inside of his expensive suit, Philipe withdrew a hammer. Calmly, coolly, he turned around and smashed the screen on the TV. There was a loud pop, and glass shattered outward, accompanied by a small shower of sparks.
He used the hammer to smash the VCR as well.
“This will get in the Orange City News,” he said. “There will be a short blurb of an article stating that a person or persons unknown broke into City Hall and destroyed audiovisual equipment. That’s it.” He knocked the TV onto the floor. “All of our previous attempts have been amateurish and unfocused. We have not gotten the attention we deserve because we did not choose our targets wisely and did not properly identify ourselves.” Once again, he reached into his jacket. “I have had cards made up. Professionally typeset business cards that list the name of our organization. We’ll leave these at the scenes of our crimes so they’ll know who we are.”
He passed the cards around, and we all got a look at them. White with red lettering, they said:
THIS IS A BLOW FOR THE IGNORED
TERRORISTS FOR THE COMMON MAN
“Yes!” Steve said. “Yes!”
“Now the more damage we do, of course, the bigger the articles about us will be, the more attention our acts will get.” He walked around the table, past us. “Come on.”
We followed him out to the room with the workstations. He bent down to turn on a computer terminal that was sitting atop a desk. “They forgot about me,” he said. “They didn’t think to change my password. Their mistake.” He pulled up an initial security screen, typed in an ID and password, and a list of property records appeared on the screen. In one column were the names of the parcel owners, in another the assessed valuation of each property.
Philipe pressed two keys.
The records were deleted.
“Gone,” he said. “Now we’ll be portrayed as expert computer hackers who deleted hundreds of important government records. It’ll probably make the Register. Maybe the Orange County edition of the Times.”
He straightened up, pulling the terminal onto the floor, where it fell with a crash. He kicked in the screen, then used his arm to clear the top of the desk, sweeping everything onto the floor.
“We can do anything we want,” he said, “and they’ll never be able to catch us!” He jumped on top of the desk, held his hammer high. “Let’s tear this fucking place apart!”
Like Willard’s rats, we set about following his order. I tipped over one of the modular walls, smashed a terminal myself. I pulled open file drawers, yanking out anything I could lay my hands on. It felt good, this destruction, invigorating, and we spread out, taking out our aggression and frustrations on the anonymous inanimate objects of Orange City Hall.
We trashed the entire floor.
A half hour later, sweaty and out of breath, huffing and puffing, we met by the elevator.
Philipe surveyed the damage, grinned hugely. “This will be noticed,” he said. “This will be reported. This will be investigated. We’re off to a good start.” He pressed the elevator button, the metal doors opened, and we stepped inside.
In the instant before the doors slid shut, he threw his key and security card out onto the second-floor carpet.
“There’s no turning back now.”
Three
I was like an adolescent who suddenly becomes enormously wealthy or an ordinary man who becomes dictator. I was drunk with possibilities, greedy to use my newfound power.
We all felt that way, I guess, but we didn’t really talk about it. The feeling was too new, too strong and pure, and I don’t think any of us wanted to dilute its potency by discussing it. For my part, I felt excited and absurdly happy, almost intoxicated. I felt invincible, as though I could do anything. As Philipe had predicted, our trashing of Orange’s city hall made not only the Orange city paper but the Times and the Register. Although our fingerprints were all over everything from the back door of the building to the vandalized workstations, although Philipe had tossed his key and security card on the floor in front of the elevator, although we had scattered our new business cards about the area, each of the articles clearly stated that the police had no suspects and no clues.
We had been ignored once again.
I should have felt remorse, I suppose. I had been brought up to have respect for other people’s property, and until now I had never even thought about destroying something that did not belong to me. But Philipe was right. Breaking the law was justified if it led to the eradication of an even greater wrong. Thoreau had known this. So had Martin Luther King. And Malcolm X. Civil disobedience was an American tradition, and we were just the latest soldiers in a long battle against hypocrisy and injustice.
I wanted to vandalize someplace else.
Anyplace. I didn’t care where.
I just wanted to smash and break things.
We met the next day at my apartment. Everyone was talking about what we’d done, each man rehashing his own personal contribution. No one seemed more hyped than Junior, our newest terrorist. He kept giggling, the laugh of a schoolboy, not an old man, and it was obvious that this was the most exciting thing to have happened to him in years.
Philipe stood by himself, next to the doorway to the kitchen, and I moved next to him. “What are we going to do next?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Who knows? You got any ideas?”
I shook my head slowly, surprised not only by his answer but his attitude. The rest of us were pumped up, high from our first outing and ready for more, but Philipe seemed… I don’t know. Bored? Disappointed? Disillusioned? All of those and none of them. I looked at him, and the thought crossed my
mind that he was manic depressive. That didn’t fit, though. Manic depressives were either up or down; there was no middle ground. Philipe was more even-keeled than that.
Maybe, I thought, he was feeling remorse.
Maybe he was feeling what I was supposed to feel.
I still wanted to hit someplace else, to strike another blow against the empire, but I decided that maybe this wasn’t the time to bring it up. On the table to my left was the Show section of the Register, the entertainment section, and I picked it up, glancing at the top article on the front page. Fashion Island, in Newport Beach, was hosting its annual jazz concert series. I’d been there last spring, with Jane. Throughout March and April each year, jazz artists gave free Thursday evening concerts in an outdoor stage area set up near The Broadway.
“Let me see that,” Philipe said. He took the paper from me. He had been reading over my shoulder and had obviously found something that caught his interest. He looked over the front page, and a grin spread across his face. His eyes, dull a few moments before, were animated and excited. “Yes,” he said.
He strode into the middle of the room, held up the newspaper. “Tomorrow,” he announced, “we’re going to a jazz concert!”
We’d planned to arrive early, but by the time we battled the work traffic on the freeway and made it to Fashion Island, it was five-fifty. The concert was scheduled to start at six.
Bleachers and folding chairs had been set up for the audience, but both were filled and people were starting to stand around the periphery of the concert area. We stood in front of a men’s clothing store, watching the people pass by. It was an upscale crowd of beautiful people, the type of people I’d always hated. The women were all model-thin with short skintight dresses and designer sunglasses, the men blond and athletic and young and successful. Most of them were talking business.
Apparently Philipe felt the same way I did. “Obnoxious jerks,” he said, surveying the crowd.
The Ignored Page 16