Have Your Say by Scott Taylor

There were precious few ways of getting your point across in life and so Vern liked to shout at people.  He shouted at them in restaurants, he shouted at them in supermarkets, he screamed in their faces out on the street.  He would go in to get a sandwich and the woman would apply too little mayonnaise.

“No, that is not right!!” he would scream.  “Not enough, put more on!”

The volume of the announcement would invariably provoke distress, and oftentimes a bit of shock as well.  The reactions verged from complete disregard to outright hostility.  There were times when the listener shouted back or assumed it was an argument and began to get aggressive.  There were times when he was punched in the face.  But Vern had decided that this was the way to go; he’d been ignored for too long and was determined to have his say, to put his two cents in, to be a productive contributing member of society.  Enough was often enough, and in this case enough had been way too much for way too long.

Vern was six feet tall and so thin he was almost invisible.  He was of German descent and had an extremely long face with features that practically slid right off of it.  He was long and droopy, with bags under his eyes and hair like a wire brush.  He was strange looking in general, always had been; his skin sagged and his limbs dragged and his face melted down and the overall effect was to make him appear far older than his years.  This was one of the reasons why he’d always been so roundly ignored.  No one wanted to talk to a weirdo, no one was interested in what he had to say.  You had to do something unusual if you wanted to avoid getting lost in the shuffle.  And this was learned from experience.

Vern was walking down the street one day when he came across a new bakery that had just opened up.  It was down at the trendy end of town, the one where all the boys and girls went on weekends to play dress-up and drink and try to get laid.  Vern was hungry and had a hankering for sweets and so he went inside to see what was what.  A woman stood behind the counter.  She was young and pretty, with blonde hair.

“Do you have any cupcakes?!?” Vern screamed.

The woman recoiled.  “Yes, ahhh… yes sir, we do.  They’re right down there,” she said, indicating the far end of the glass display case.

“That’s fine!”  He moved down the line to inspect.  “A vanilla cupcake and a coffee, please!” he roared.  You could hear the sound of chinaware rattling someplace in the back.  The woman flinched and went to retrieve the requested items.  A mother and son walked in.  The son was only four or five and held his mother’s hand as they approached the counter.  He looked up at Vern as they arrived.  Vern looked down.

“Your shoelaces are untied!!” he shouted at the boy, waggling a finger at the offending laces.  The little boy laughed.  “Why is he shouting?” he asked his mother.

“That’s a very good question,” his mother replied.

“He’s funny looking,” the little boy said.

The young woman rang up the cupcake and the coffee.  “Five seventy-five,” she said.  Vern inserted his credit card and removed it when prompted and signed the little piece of paper.

“Thank you very much!” he said.

“Will you please keep your voice down,” the mother said.

Vern took his cupcake and sat with it beside the window.  He watched as the mother made her selection and paid and then dragged her son to the furthermost recesses of the room, moving to sit as far from Vern as possible despite the fact that the cafe was all but deserted.  Vern sat and munched and contemplated.  He considered it ironic that all the yelling and screaming oftentimes led to being ignored anyway; in fact it happened more often than not.  Sometimes there was no right way of doing things.

They were having a little festival over at the park, the new one with the hamburger stand and the walking path running in a circle.  Vern decided to go; he had nothing better to do and needed to get out.  Normally he forced himself to leave the apartment once every few days or so but sometimes he slipped and forgot and wound up trapped in the place for a week or more.  It wasn’t quite agoraphobia but it was somewhere in the ballpark.  The stage was set up in the usual spot, right between the hamburger stand and the water jets that sprang up out of the ground that the kids liked to play in when the weather was nice.  They had these little shindigs about two or three times a month in the summertime.  Vern didn’t care for them much but there was nothing else to do.  He walked around the circle for a bit, pacing off the territory, getting the lay of the land.  Families with kids, young couples out on dates, people with their dogs, the usual scene.  He found a spot in the grass and flopped himself down.  He struck a pose, leaning back on his elbows and crossing his legs, trying to appear casual, trying to approximate whatever the hell it was they wanted him to be.  The band started, they weren’t very good.  A group of teenagers came over and sat down right next to him.

“This is not my style of music.  It holds no appeal for me,” he thundered at them.  The kids looked at him like they’d been shot, all of them at once.

“Thanks for sharing, man,” the kid with the crazy hair said.  His little girlfriend giggled at his wit.

The teenagers bunched up and ignored him, drawing themselves in a circle and physically barring him from the proceedings.  Vern rolled over and turned to the couple on the other side, a lithe brunette and a big muscular fellar, a fitness nut or something by the looks of him.

“Do you enjoy this sort of music?” he asked the guy, who was sitting closer to Vern than his girlfriend was.

“Volume’s a bit high there,” the guy said, irritated, brows furrowing and biceps flexing.

“You mean the volume of the music?” Vern asked.

“No, the volume of you,” the guy replied.

A short staring contest ensued.  Vern lost.  He got up and walked over to one of the stalls they’d set up along the pathway, to see what they were selling there.  They had stalls for beer and food and jewelry and artwork but this one sold little knickknacks, planters and candleholders and things, decorations to put on tables and hang on walls.  Vern perused the proffered wares.

“Arts and crafts was never really my strong suit,” Vern offered, the decibels increasing with every word that passed his lips.

“Dude, that was right in my ear,” the guy next to him said, another big burly hunk.

“Oh, I do apologize for that!  There are times when I appear to be making too much noise and people begin to object and – “

The guy had already had enough, he shoved Vern backwards and Vern tripped over his own feet and went down.

“My word, well I certainly don’t think it called for that,” Vern expounded as he rolled around on the ground, working to untangle his limbs and regain his bearings.  The guy stomped off in a huff.  Vern stood up and brushed the dust from his sleeves.  “I certainly do feel that that was uncalled for!  Wouldn’t you agree, madam,” he shouted at the girl working the stall.  A security guard came over.

“Sir, you’re going to have to leave,” the security guard said.

“But why, I didn’t do anything!  I was just standing there and suddenly I was being accosted without warning and then I was lying on the ground – “

“Stop shouting,” the security guard said.  He grabbed Vern by the arm and forcibly escorted him to the perimeter of the park.  “Don’t come back here again tonight,” the guard said.

“Well I never,” Vern said, getting flustered for about the fifth time that evening.  It was a sordid state of affairs to be sure.  You went out in public and invariably something bad happened to you, maybe not downright disastrous on every occasion but unpleasant enough to have you fleeing for the safety of your room and swearing to never ever leave the place again.  The world was one big jungle, and Vern was forever in the process of being expelled from the pack.

He decided to take a vow of silence.  If asserting yourself forcefully didn’t do the trick, then perhaps this would work better.  Maybe you needed to ignore them back, maybe that’s what you had to do.  It made some sense if you thought about it.  If you were destined to never be heard, then it was probably just easier to disengage and go with the flow and try to forget the whole thing even existed.  I mean why beat your head against the wall for too long.  He went around town with his lips zipped shut, not making a peep, playing around with it, taking it for a test drive.  It worked okay for the first few days and then by the third day he was getting sick of it already.  There wasn’t much to be gotten out of life if you were unable to interact with it in any way shape or form.  Vern despaired, he faltered, he gritted his teeth and tossed and turned at night.  He wound down in increments.  The silence grew, and with it his pain.  He found himself humming and moaning as he walked around during the day, gibbering slightly under his breath.  ‘Wanna die,’ he said.  ‘Wanna die so bad.’  He felt like screaming like a loon.  He was afraid he was losing it.  What was the answer, what could it be.  He was invisible either way and the awareness of it hurt his heart.  What was he to do.

The silence grew until it was intolerable and then one day Vern started to scream and the cops came to the apartment and told him to knock it off and he tried going back to being quiet but it didn’t work out so well, and before he knew it he was yelling and screaming so much that a group of men in different uniforms came and took him away and that was the last anyone ever heard of Vern.  Which isn’t saying much, because they’d never really heard much of him in the first place.  He shouts as much as he wants now; the padded walls make great sound insulators.  He gets three squares a day and gets to talk to the nurses and other inmates as much as he wants and things are relatively peaceable and sane.  You have to go nuts to make any sense of it, that’s probably the best way of looking at things.

Scott Taylor

Image: White megaphone with a red speaker end being held by a male hand, against a bright yellow background.