Dispatch (15 page)

We finally found a one-room studio in Orange, a good ten miles from my mom's house, in an area she never visited. Robert and Edson waited while I called the number on the for rent sign from a pay phone. The owner agreed to meet me at the apartment in a half hour.

"I still can't believe you're doing this," Edson said, shaking his head. "Don't you think it's a little drastic?"

I decided to spring it on them: "My dad was murdered last night."

Silence greeted my revelation. Neither of them knew what to say or how to react. They knew that my old man and I did not get along ... but he was still my dad.
What would they think if they knew I'd written the letter that got him killed?
I wondered. I could tell from the expressions on their faces that they were even more confused about why I had decided to move out of my house than they had been before. Abandoning my mom in her hour of need? What kind of son was I? What kind of
person
was I?

They didn't know what it was like living in that house, I told myself, but still I knew I had to say something that would get them back in my corner.

"My mom kicked me out," I lied. "My dad and I might not have gotten along, but he was the only thing holding our family together. Now..." I shrugged.

"Shit," Robert said sympathetically.

Edson just shook his head.

"So what are you going to do?" Robert asked.

"Hopefully work as much as I can this summer and then go to college in the fall."

I don't know if my plan sounded naive to them or merely unrealistic, but it was clear from their skeptical expressions that they did not think it feasible. No matter. I needed them for the moment to help me transport my belongings, but I was already starting to think of them as part of my old life. I was starting a new life now.

The studio apartment was fine, and most importantly, it was cheap. I took it. I showed the owner proof that I was eighteen, signed the contract and paid first month's rent, last month's rent and a cleaning deposit in cash. At the last minute, I'd decided to bring my mattress, box spring and bed frame, since all of them would fit into the Cherokee, and I was glad I had. It was going to be a while before I could afford any furniture.

Hell, did I even need furniture? ' Not really, I decided. As long as I had a place to sleep, a roof over my head, a stove and a refrigerator, I was set. I also had my stereo, which would help make up for the lack of a television.

It took twenty minutes to unpack, another five or ten to put the bed together. The three of us stood there awkwardly, not sure of what to do or say next. Robert cleared his throat. "We'd better hit the road," he said. "I need to get the car back."

Both of them had homes to go back to, parents who cared. I understood that intellectually, but emotionally I still felt a little jealous.
You'd have a home to go back to if you hadn't had your dad killed
, a small voice within me said, but I ignored it and pushed it aside.

We said our good-byes; then I closed and locked the door, looking around my little one-room apartment.

Home.

This was now my home.

I walked over to the kitchen area in the corner, opening the empty refrigerator, turning on the water in the sink. I didn't even have a glass to drink out of, I realized. I needed plates and silverware, too. I moved to the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and the door to the tiny shower stall, took a piss in the toilet. Continuing my tour, I walked along the south wall, looked out the window at the street outside, checked the metal basket hanging beneath the mail slot.

And found a letter.

My fingers closed around the envelope, and I pulled it out.

It was addressed to me.

As late as lunchtime, I'd had no idea where I was going to stay, where I was going to live. I'd decided upon this place only at the last moment.

But there was a letter waiting for me, with a canceled stamp dated yesterday.

A chill passed through me. I wanted to drop the envelope, wanted to throw it away, wanted to leave and find somewhere else to live. But instead I looked at it, opened it.

There was no return address on the envelope, and the letter itself was cryptic. A brief generic
Dear Sir, This is for you.
Enclosed with the letter was a photograph. I saw the back of the photo paper first, the Fuji Film watermark, and for some reason I flashed back to Kyoko Yoshizumi. For a brief fraction of a second, I thought my old pen pal had tracked me down to resume our correspondence and had sent me a current picture of herself.

Then I turned the photo over and saw the circus tent from my dream.

The one with the ancient children and the prehistoric skeleton.

I dropped the picture, staring as it fluttered to the ground.

This is for you.

I didn't know what was going on, but whatever it was, it frightened me. I had a feeling that it had something to do with my dad's death—
killing
—and the letter I'd written to Rosita's brother. I felt like that character in "The Tell-Tale Heart," although it wasn't guilt that plagued me but the fear that I would be caught, that someone knew, that the letter would be retrieved and scientifically tested and it would be proved definitively that I was the writer, that I was responsible for the murder of my own father.

It was a conclusion that made no logical sense but felt true, and I decided to wean myself away from writing. Not for the first time, I was possessed by the distinct belief that composing letters brought me perilously close to the edge of something, a deeper layer or level of reality that most people were never allowed to see. The thought frightened me.

I had to stop, I told myself. I had to stop.

That night, I dreamed of a dark factory where skeletons sat at an assembly line pasting stamps on envelopes that passed by on a conveyor belt.

In the morning, there was an envelope in my mailbox with no return address.

I tore it up without looking inside and dumped the pieces in the garbage can in the alley.
 

The summer passed quickly, and in the fall I enrolled at UC Brea. It would not have been hard for my mom to track me down had she wanted to do so, but she didn't bother to make the effort and I was glad. I had no desire to see that witch again.

I found a work-study job and was lucky enough to be assigned a cheap dorm room on campus. I bought an old Dodge Dart from a guy on my floor whose dad had bought him a new Jeep.

Edson was at UC Brea, too, but we were in different classes, on different tracks, and we hardly ever saw each other. Robert had gone to UCLA and was living in Westwood. I was not sure what had happened to Frank. As I'd expected, as I'd known, we drifted apart without the glue of public school to hold us together.

But I didn't really care.

I settled easily into college life. I liked it.
 

Cowpunk. Paisley Underground. The music world became littered with the labels of subgenres that didn't stick, and thrift stores piled up with the records of one-hit wonders as the world shifted from vinyl to CD. I made out like a bandit, spending all of my discretionary income on music, expanding my record collection to include everything from ABBA to Zappa.

I briefly dated an unbearably pretentious girl who was into the Cure and Gene Loves Jezebel and who dressed in black emulation of Morticia Addams. "Music is entertainment, not a lifestyle," I told her, but the truth was that I took music far more seriously than she did, and it was
my
inability to disassociate her from her musical taste that eventually drove us apart.

In my spare time, I wrote letters to the
Los Angeles Times
and
Rolling Stone
, even
Pulse!
and
BAM
, two freebie music papers I picked up at Tower Records. I complained about music reviews, took writers to task for their lapses in taste and for having such a herd mentality and made suggestions about which music should be written about, covered and reviewed. Nearly all of my letters got in, even those I wrote under fake names, and to my surprise, my opinions actually seemed to have an effect on the content that appeared in these publications.

I found that I wanted to write only about music. What I'd done to my parents seemed to have left me with an aversion to writing about anything heavier or more serious.

Well, that and the letter I'd received with the photo of the circus tent.

I'd been skirting along a precipice I wanted to be far, far away from, flirting with something I didn't and probably couldn't understand. I had a talent, I realized, an ability to write letters and use them to effect change, to get done what I wanted done. But there was a dark undercurrent present, as well.

I wanted to write letters. I
needed
to write letters.

But I'd made a conscious decision that from here on out the subject matter would remain trivial.

And so I stuck to music.

It was the 1980s, the Reagan decade, and everyone in college seemed to be a business major. I had no major, no idea what 1 wanted to do with my life. I was tilting toward English because writing seemed to be the only skill I possessed, but my mind was open. I enjoyed the art history class I took, the cultural anthropology course, everything but math and the hard sciences.

In my freshman English class, an overview of modern literature, I learned that in the 1960s, the British playwright Joe Orton had invented two letter-writing personae, one a reader who loved his work and one who hated it. He proceeded to carry on a fake dialogue with himself in the press, alternately condemning his work and praising it in a successful effort to generate controversy and keep his name in the papers.

A man after my own heart.

A letter writer.

That cheered me up for some reason, kept me going.

I went by my old house sometimes, though I wasn't sure why. Nostalgia, perhaps. Or some subconscious desire to rewrite my recent past. My mom lived alone there now, and if my life had been a movie, the thought would have been poignant or melancholy or some damn thing, but the truth was that I felt nothing. I knew my mom. She was tough as steel and twice as cold, and I knew that even though my dad was dead and Tom and I were gone, she was fine, living her life as though nothing had happened.

I saw Tom once, by accident, but he didn't see me. He was at a Mobil station, getting gas, and he looked chubbier than I remembered. I was stopped at a red light, and I watched him emerge from the station office, go up to a car worse than mine and start pumping gas. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and his hair was cut unusually short. I couldn't tell much about him from that brief glimpse, but I hoped he was poor, hoped he was alone, hoped he was unhappy.

It would serve the prick right.

At school, I spent a lot of time in the university library, where I checked out and read all of the Joe Orton plays I could lay my hands on. Walt Whitman, I learned, wrote fake reviews of his work and submitted them by letter to the major newspapers and periodicals of the time.

I read Whitman, too.

And I started writing real letters again.

It was all because of a political science class. The professor, Dr. Emerick, was the sort of wild-eyed Marxist caricatured in bad movies and feared by those who had never attended college. Intensely serious and fiercely intellectual, tall and gaunt with a huge gray beard that hung down to his chest, he was laughed at behind his back by most of his students, but his class was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed it. As part of our midterm, we were each required to write a letter to an elected official or the head of a major corporation, taking him to task for doing something we disagreed with. This was right up my alley, and despite my vow, I knew I could not resist. The temptation was too great. Besides, I rationalized, it was an important part of my grade. I
had
to do it.

So that night, I sat down in front of my IBM Selectric (I could not afford another word processor or a PC at this point) and quickly composed a critique of the governor's recent decision to increase university fees in California. I was taking a position I agreed with but also, more importantly, Dr. Emerick agreed with. The words flowed smoothly, the letter coming so easily that it seemed almost to write itself. I felt energized as I pulled the paper from the roller and signed my name at the bottom, more alive than I had all semester. I wanted to write more. My roommate was gone for the evening, partying as usual, and by the time he returned sometime around midnight, I had created nearly a dozen letters addressed to various elected officials, newspapers and periodicals. My grade was secure, I knew, but that wasn't the important thing. The important thing was that I was writing again. The dam was broken, and a torrent of words flowed from my fingertips. Finished with topical events, I still had a burning need to write, and with my roommate passed out on his bed, I kept the typewriter humming, churning out page after page of complaint letters to all of the restaurants and stores I'd patronized since the beginning of the semester, as adept at manipulating businesses' fear of public opinion as I'd ever been.

Within a month, the responses were rolling in.

I was back in the groove, back in the swing of things. Threads I'd started in Op-Ed letter pages continued to grow without me, some flowering into full-fledged controversies with my help. I'd outgrown McDonald's and Burger King; now it was IHOP and Don Jose's and the Black Angus that sent me complimentary passes. My roommate, Don, and I suddenly became much closer as the freebies arrived, and I soon had a whole set of new friends with whom I went to concerts and clubs, bars and meat markets, all thanks to the medium of complaint letters.

A few well-chosen words of praise for myself in my work-study job at the student store, a few negative comments about some of my coworkers, and I moved up the ranks from stock clerk to floor manager.

It was addicting. And despite what I'd done to my dad, despite the fact that my previous efforts had drawn the attention of ...
something
... I kept on, kept it up. This was who I was, this was what I was supposed to do, and if before I had
liked
college life, now I
loved
it. I was popular, my grades were up, and my soul was satisfied by the intellectual stimulation and emotional satisfaction I gained from writing letters.