The Ignored (26 page)

The salesman sped back, almost out of breath. He handed the keys to
Philipe. “Let’s take her for a spin, Mr…?”

“Smith,” Philipe said. “Doug Smith.”

We walked across the lot and got into the car, Philipe in the driver’s
seat, the salesman in the passenger seat next to him, me in the back. Philipe
and I put on shoulder harnesses. The salesman did not, obviously wanting room to
move around in order to properly deliver his sales pitch. Sure enough, he
shifted his position, half turned toward Philipe. “Air-conditioning is
standard,” he said. “As is the AM/FM radio/cassette player.”

Philipe started the car.

“Pull out there,” he said, pointing to the lot’s front gate. “We’ll go
around the block.”

Philipe followed his instructions. The salesman droned on about the
car’s features.

We came to a stoplight. “Hang a left here,” the salesman said. He
grasped the dashboard with one hand as Philipe maneuvered the turn. “Note how
she handles on the curve.”

Philipe slammed on the brakes.

Chris flew sideways, nearly thrown out of his seat, hitting the side of
his head on the padded dash.

“Good brakes,” Philipe said.

The salesman, obviously shaken, was moving back in his seat, trying to
regain his composure. “You shouldn’t—”

“Get out of the car,” Philipe said.

“What?”

“I have a gun in my pocket. Get out of the fucking car or I’ll blow a
hole through your fucking gut.” Philipe had slipped a hand into his windbreaker
pocket and he was holding it there, finger pointing outward.

All trace of unctuousness was gone from the salesman’s voice. He was a
frightened baby, and he was practically blubbering as he fumbled with the door
lock. “Don’t shoot me,” he begged. “I’ll go… Take the car… Do what you
want… Just don’t… shoot me….” He successfully managed to open the
door and stumbled outside, closing the door behind him.

Philipe took off.

He was laughing as he sped down the street toward the freeway. “What a
dick!”

Through the back windshield, I could see the salesman running crazily
down the sidewalk away from us. “You think he’ll remember us?”

I looked up front, saw Philipe’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Sorry,” I said. “Dumb question.”

We were the first of the new car owners to make it back to Bill’s house,
our prearranged meeting place. The others were already there, waiting outside on
the porch, and they came walking across the lawn to admire the Mercedes.

John and Steve arrived with the Z about fifteen minutes later. Bill and
Don and the Jeep pulled up soon after that.

Buster looked at the old cars, the new cars, and shook his head. “It’s a
damn fleet,” he said.

Don patted the hood of the Jeep. “We’re moving up in the world.”

Philipe had gone inside the house to get a beer, and he came back out,
drinking straight from the bottle. He stood next to Junior, eyed the new cars,
and shook his head. “You know,” he said, “it’s a shame to let these new wheels
go to waste. Let’s do something with them.”

“Like what?” Pete asked.

“Road trip!” John said.

“I was thinking of something a little more appropriate, a little more
fitting for the Terrorists for the Common Man.”

“Like what?” Pete asked.

“Like knocking over some banks.”

There was silence.

“Banks?” James repeated nervously.

“Well, ATM machines. Same difference.”

No one said anything.

“What are you, a bunch of old ladies? Come on, you pussies. We just
stole a hundred thousand dollars worth of vehicles here, and you’re afraid of
kyping a little cash from a teller machine?”

“Bank robbers?” James said.

“Don’t think we can do it?”

“We can do it,” I said. “We’ve killed and not been caught. We’ve
vandalized; we’ve stolen from stores; we’ve looted Rodeo Drive. We can sure as
hell pick off a few bank machines.”

“That’s true,” James admitted.

“He has a point,” Steve said.

Junior let out a whoop. “Let’s do it!”

“Let’s do it,” Philipe agreed.

We went first to a hardware store, walked out with sledgehammers and
crowbars, exiting through the unattended nursery section on the side of the
building. Then we drove around Orange County, picking out banks that were not in
open, populated areas, that had instant teller machines hidden by trees or
bushes. Following Philipe’s lead, we walked straight up to the machines, pushed
aside whoever was there, and smashed the hell out of the metal withdrawal
drawers. At that point, an alarm usually went off and the other customers began
running, but we continued to bash in the machine until the entire front facade
was gone, and then took the money from within before leaving our cards and
walking calmly back to the cars.

We hit six banks that first day.

Ten more the next day.

Our haul was somewhere around forty thousand dollars.

We split it up, then deposited it in the ATMs of our own banks.

The ATM robberies were high profile, big news, and we began reading
about ourselves in the newspapers consistently, seeing the aftermath of our
exploits on TV. It was downright creepy. There were the people who’d watched us
commit our crimes, who were witnesses to what we’d done, and they remembered
nothing. Some recalled seeing a group of people, but had no specific
descriptions to provide. Some out-and-out lied, usually white middle-aged macho
men who invariably recalled seeing black or Hispanic gang members.

“Yeah!” Philipe would jeer, throwing pretzels at the television. “Blame
the minorities!”

It was even more unnerving a few days later watching the police arrest
two Hispanic men for committing the robberies. The men looked rough, were
definitely not upstanding-citizen material, and if I had not known better, I,
too, would probably have believed them guilty.

I thought of Frederick’s of Hollywood, of the “perps” who had been
“caught.”

“I guess they needed scapegoats,” James said quietly.

“Fuck ’em,” Philipe said. “Let’s prove those men innocent. Let’s knock
off a few more ATMs.”

“One of these days those video cameras are going to capture our
pictures,” Don said. “What’ll we do then?”

“They’ve got our pictures already. But no one can remember what we look
like. Don’t worry.”

The next day we did rob three ATMs, all of them in the city of Long
Beach, and that night at my apartment we tuned into the news, VCR at the ready,
to see the results. The ATM robberies were not the top story—that went to a
shooting outside a Westwood theater showing a new gang-themed movie—but they
were second, and an obviously frustrated police spokesman said that the men
arrested yesterday in connection with the crimes were now being released.

Philipe grinned. “Kicked their ass.”

“But we’re still not getting credit,” I said. “We’re a goddamn crime
epidemic, and we’re still not getting the credit for it.”

“Maybe the police are just trying to keep our names out of the news,”
Buster suggested. “Maybe they don’t want to give us any publicity.”

“Maybe,” I said.

James was sitting in one of the chairs, staring thoughtfully at the
television as a camera showed the police rounding up suspects in a drug sweep in
Compton. He looked up. “You know,” he said, pointing to the TV, “we could solve
this gang problem.”

Philipe turned to face him. “What?”

“We could get into places even the cops couldn’t go. We could walk in,
confiscate drugs and weapons, walk out.”

“We’re not superheroes, dipshit. We’re average, we’re not memorable, we
don’t make an impression, but we’re not fucking invisible.”

“What’s with you?” I asked Philipe. “It was just a suggestion.”

He stared at me, and for a moment our eyes locked. I had the feeling
that he expected me to understand why he was angry, what was bothering him, but
I was completely at a loss, and he broke contact and looked away.

I felt as though I’d missed something. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded. He looked suddenly tired, worn out. “I’ll see you guys
tomorrow,” he said wearily. “I’m going to bed.”

Before anybody could say anything, he was heading down the short hallway
to the bedroom.

“What the hell was that about?” Tommy asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

John looked around conspiratorially. “You think he’s like… ?” He
tapped his forehead, rolled his eyeballs.

Junior looked at him disgustedly. “Shut the hell up.”

I went into the kitchen, pulled a beer out of the refrigerator, opened
it, drank. My face felt warm, hot, and I stood in front of the open refrigerator
door, letting the cool air wash over me.

Steve walked into the kitchen. “Can I get one of those?”

I pulled out a beer, handed it to him.

He stood there for a moment, twisting the bottle in his hands, fidgeting
indecisively. “Look,” he said finally, “I know how you feel about it, but I
think you should change your mind.”

I looked at him over the refrigerator door. “About what?”

“About rape.” He held up his hand to ward off my response. “I know what
you’re going to say, but I’m just asking you to see it from our side. It’s been
a long time since most of us have had sex. Not that we ever got a lot to begin
with. And I know you know what I’m talking about there. You know how it is.” He
paused. “All I’m saying is… well, don’t cut off our only chance. You’re
close to Philipe. He listens to you. And right now he’s put the kibosh on the
sex because you don’t like it.”

I sighed. I really didn’t feel like getting into this right now. “It’s
not sex I don’t like. It’s rape.”

“Well, you don’t have to do it. You don’t even have to know about it
when we do it. We’ll keep you completely in the dark, if that’s what you want.
Just don’t… just don’t try to make us behave exactly the way you behave.”
He was silent for a moment. “Some women like to be raped, you know. Some fat
chick, she knows she’s not going to get sex on her own. She’d be grateful if we
gave it to her. She’d love it.”

“Then ask her if she wants to. If she consents, there’s no problem.”

“But she won’t consent. The rest of the world… they’re not as
uninhibited as we are. They’re not as free. They can’t say what they feel; they
have to say what’s expected of them. But that fat girl? She probably fantasizes
about being reamed by a group of healthy young studs like us.” He grinned. He
tried to make his smile winning, but it came out rather sickly and pathetic.

I looked at Steve and I felt sorry for him. He was serious about what he
was saying, about the arguments he was putting forth. To him, Philipe’s
elaborate theories about our existence and our purpose in life were nothing more
than justifications for his own petty actions and small desires. His mind, his
world, his worldview were that limited.

Maybe none of it did have a purpose, I thought. Maybe there was no
reason for anything. Maybe the others were right and we should do whatever we
wanted to merely because we had the ability to do so. Maybe there should be no
brakes on our behavior, no artificially imposed boundaries.

Steve was still fidgeting with his beer bottle, anxiously awaiting my
response. He really believed that my opposition to rape was the reason he wasn’t
getting any sex. I looked at him. There were differences between us. Big
differences. We were both Ignored and were alike in a lot of ways—in most
ways, perhaps—but there were definitely differences in our value systems, in
what we believed.

On the other hand, here I was: murderer, thief, terrorist. Who was I to
moralize? Who was I to tell the others what they could and couldn’t do, what
they should and shouldn’t do? I closed the refrigerator door. “Go ahead,” I told
Steve. “Rape away.”

He stared at me, surprised. “What? You mean it?”

“Fuck whoever you want. It’s none of my business.”

He grinned, clapped a hand on my shoulder. “You’re a hero and a he-man.”

I smiled wanly. “I know.”

Together, we walked back out into the living room.

We woke up late the next morning, all of us, and after a hurried
catch-as-catch-can breakfast, we cruised over to the mall and caught a matinee
of a bad science-fiction movie. After the flick ended, we walked out into the
sunlight. Philipe blinked back the brightness, drew a pair of sunglasses out of
his shirt pocket and put them on. He was silent for a moment. “Let’s go to my
place,” he said.

We were suddenly silent.

His
place.

Philipe’s place.

I could tell the others were as surprised as I was. Over the past
months, we’d gradually gotten around to visiting everyone’s house or condo or
apartment. Everyone’s, that is, except Philipe’s. There’d been reasons, of
course. Good reasons. Logical reasons. But I’d always had the feeling that
Philipe had
arranged
for it to be inconvenient to stop by his house, that
he had, for some strange reason, not wanted us to see where he lived, and I
suspected that everyone else felt the same way.

Philipe looked at me archly. “Or not,” he said. “If you don’t want to,
we can go to your place instead.”

“No,” I told him hurriedly. “Your place is fine.”

He chuckled, obviously enjoying my shocked surprise. “I thought so.”

We followed him to his house.

I don’t know what I expected, but it was certainly not the bland tract
home in which he lived. The house was in Anaheim, in a typically average
neighborhood, surrounded by rows of other houses that looked exactly the same.
Philipe pulled into the driveway, parked, and I pulled in next to him. The other
cars parked on the street.

I was… disappointed. After all the waiting, after all the secrecy,
I had expected something else. Something more. Something better. Something that
was actually worth keeping secret.

But maybe that’s why he
had
kept it secret.