After seeing Rico and Rachil together that first time, Corn spent the next few weeks acting as if everything were “normal,” as if his entire being didn’t hinge on whether or not Rachil came into his concrete bunker to make fun of poor Rico, or to say the date with Rico was dumb, that Rico was a jerk, that the next date would never happen, or that Rico Rico Rico Rico Rico.
Rico!
Corn wanted to kill him, even more now than when they were teenagers together in the drab suburbs.
Despite all that was so clearly wrong about Rico—his lumbering idiocy, his sincerity, his slovenly carriage—Rachil kept going steady with him!
Insane!
Corn plotted Rico’s demise in the foul projection booth while the reels of film spun in the darkness.
“Maybe I should just lose it to him,” Rachil said one evening, flicking her shy lashes up at Corn, driving him to frenzy there in the dark. “My virginity,” she said. “No big whoop.”
Corn dropped the top reel from the projector, and the sprocket ripped a two-foot tear in the print of Batman.
First off, he thought, she was a virgin?
Innocence perplexed him.
Second, lose it?
To Rico?
Virginity in play?
Rachil went out to calm the enraged film crowd in the theater while that incompetent spliced everything back together with shaky hands in the booth.
Popcorn and Jujubes filled the air, catcalls and hoots.
“Is everything okay?” she asked upon her return, eyeing the reel wobbling on the rickety projector.
The Joker had suddenly become a blob of darkness, then switched back again in a yellow streak.
Corn didn’t notice, for he was a sloppy, horrid worker who didn’t really care about film, only a paycheck.
I can attest to the fact that the crowd took notice, and that the manager was notified.
A soda splashed against the booth door, followed by a shouted obscenity.
Within, Corn was at a loss.
“So when . . . you and . . . heh . . . some date, huh?”
“Let’s talk, Corn. I’ll be at the Boiler Room,” Rachil said. “Gotta meet Rico.”
She made a sour face, and left poor Corn in the booth to think over Rico pumping his hips and Rachil moaning in ecstasy with her hands clawing at his floral shirt while he whooped like a broncobuster.
Southern Bap, Corn thought, alone again, gnashing his teeth. Hippy!
We can imagine this is the moment his deepest plot began to hatch like a nest of roach babies in his mind.
He would have her, someway, somehow, even if it took years!
(Screenplay adaptation note: acquire rights to Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”)