Dispatch (17 page)

She cried after reading the letter from the committee, sobbing on my shoulder that she didn't know what to do, that she'd had no idea certain courses were acceptable and others weren't. She'd just assumed that since it was a scholarship based solely on merit, she would receive the money for the entire time she was in graduate school, no matter what. Yes, she had to provide the committee with copies of her transcripts at the end of each semester, but she'd assumed that was a mere formality.

"What's going to happen now?" she asked, her voice catching. "I'm screwed."

"It'll be all right," I said reassuringly.

"How?" she demanded, the tears still streaming down her face. "How will it be all right?"

"I'll take care of it," I promised. "Leave everything to me."

She looked at me hopefully. "Really? Do you think there's something you can do?"

"I have an idea," I told her.

Dr. Edward Lebowitz, PhD

Dear Sirs,

I understand that you are planning to withdraw scholarship support from Vicki Reed, perhaps our most promising student of the past six years. Without bothering to audit my course or even talk to me about its stringent academic requirements or practical applications vis-a-vis Ms. Reed's intended profession, you have taken it upon yourselves to capriciously decide that Ms. Reed does not deserve to maintain her scholarship because my course does not meet your standards. May I ask what standards those are and who makes the determination as to whether my class meets them?

Vicki Reed will not be able to continue attending UCB without the financial assistance provided by your scholarship and promised her. The university is not willing to lose a student of her caliber without a fight, and rest assured there will be a costly, protracted and very public battle should you decide to withdraw your support of this outstanding student. I, personally, take offense at your casual dismissal of my class and my work. I have been an instructor at this institution for many years and have never before encountered such disrespect for my person or my professional standards. I urge you to reconsider your decision before I bring the president of the university, the Office of Admissions and numerous lawyers into the fray.

Yours truly,
Edmund Lebowitz

I kept it from her, my letter writing. Vicki was completely honest with me, telling me of her past mistakes, her little quirks, voluntarily exposing to me her every potential fault, wanting me to know her inside and out: the good, the bad and the ugly. But I withheld this part of myself, the most essential part, who I really was, instead passing myself off as a normal guy who was planning to become a teacher.

Vicki was an inveterate letter writer herself (though not, I might add, a Letter Writer). A political activist heavily involved in the nuclear-freeze movement or what passed for it in suburban Orange County, she was always signing petitions and writing letters to congressmen. I could have helped her. I could have lent an expertise to her causes that I knew no one else had. But I didn't. I got her scholarship back for her, and I was willing to do whatever I needed to do if she was ever personally in trouble, but writing letters for me was like playing with dynamite—sometimes it was effective at clearing rocky trails or blasting tunnels through mountainsides, but it could also blow up unexpectedly, leaving limbless bodies in its wake. I couldn't afford to use it for anything that wasn't absolutely necessary.

Although sometimes I got us tickets to plays in Los Angeles or comped meals at nice restaurants by the beach.

Old habits die hard.
 

While I'd desperately wanted us to move in together, I'd also felt more than a little trepidation about it. Dating was one thing; living with each other twenty-four hours a day was something else. All right, it wasn't quite twenty-four hours a day. But it was pretty damn close. We were both students at the same university; we had one class together; we'd arranged our other classes and work schedules so we'd be able to spend as much time as possible with each other. It wasn't inconceivable that we might start to get on one another's nerves.

We didn't, though. That was the amazing thing, the wonderful thing. Our lives expanded to include each other, and the more time we spent together, the better we got along and the happier we were.

I started keeping a journal. It was almost like writing letters, and I used the traditional "Dear Diary," in an attempt to quench the burning need within me and satisfy my habit. I liked it, but it wasn't enough, and soon my spare moments were spent scrawling complaint letters to professors and administrators at school, dashing off letters to the school newspaper. I tried to keep my concerns small, my focus local, but it was hard and I did not always succeed.

"Love is all you need," the Beatles sang, but in my case it wasn't true. I
wanted
it to be true. I
wish
I could say that when I was with Vicki she was my everything and I never even thought about writing letters, but the fact was that my girlfriend and my correspondence satisfied two different desires, appealed to two opposing impulses. I needed both.

Then one Thursday, I came home from work and found Vicki sitting on the floor in the middle of our small sitting room, surrounded by scores of opened letters and clipped newspapers. She'd found my archives, my stash of letters—originals, Xeroxes and published versions—and from that, she'd obviously pieced together a picture of what I'd done, what I'd accomplished.

She looked up at me as I entered the room. "You never told me about all this," she said accusingly. "You never let on that you were so politically active." She picked up a Carlos Sandoval letter. "That you fought city hall and won." She threw the letter down, standing amid the pile of papers.

I was angry. My privacy had been violated. But at the same time, I felt guilty and ashamed. I
had
kept this from her. So it was with a sense of relief that I admitted all, that I answered her questions about the chronology of events and how I'd impersonated people from fake organizations.

But still...

I held things back.

And lied.

I hadn't saved everything—luckily!—and there was no evidence of some of my more dastardly deeds. For the most part, I'd saved only those letters that had gone public, that I'd submitted for publication. While that was an impressive portfolio in and of itself, it would have paled next to the letters that were left out.

Principal Poole.

The witch.

My dad.

She knew I was a letter writer but not that I was a Letter Writer, and I was content to keep it that way. Nothing good could come of delving too deep. Hell, even I didn't know what I really was or how many others there were who were like me.

We sat together amid my papers as the sky outside grew dark and the room inside grew darker. Neither of us made a move to switch on the lights, as though we both feared that any extra movement on our parts, any attempt to break the spell, would shatter our relationship and leave us alone to pick up the pieces. We were at our most vulnerable point as a couple and things could go either way. So we sat there and talked. Until she was once again reassured that she knew who I was, and I was once again reassured that she hadn't really found out.

We made love after that, but she put away my letters first, returning them to the folders in which she'd found them, and I realized just how lucky I was to have her. She might not know everything, but she understood intuitively how important the letters were to me. It made me love her all the more.

Now, at least, Vicki knew about my letter writing, so there was no longer any need to hide it. I tossed out my namby-pamby reservations, my rationalizations for keeping the two halves of my life separate, and I turned my full attention to writing the letters Vicki wanted me to write.

I got results.

Democrats in Congress grew backbones once again and started passing substantive environmental legislation. Reagan and Gorbachev
both
started negotiating for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Did Reagan know what I was doing? Like Obi-Wan Kenobi sensing a disturbance in the Force, did he feel me entering the debate, using my letter-writing abilities to push both sides together? I don't know. We'd lost touch. He never wrote to me, and I only wrote to him surreptitiously, under the cover of various pseudonyms and activist groups. I had the feeling that if he
did
know, he wouldn't like it.

Vicki bought me a personal computer.

The Iran-Contra scandal kicked into high gear.

It's amazing what you can accomplish with a letterhead. A simple imprint on a piece of typing paper confers legitimacy on even the most illegitimate ideas and schemes. Who knows who belongs to the myriad ad hoc organizations that spring up to protest controversial issues? I'd had no faith in citizen groups since my fight with the city of Acacia—

and my dad

—over the Eastside, but most people saw the name of an activist organization and their minds conjured up pictures of informed individuals committed to a cause who held regular meetings and appointed officers and consulted lawyers and bargained with elected officials.

I thought of one guy in a room with a PC and a printer.

Like me.

I was far more sophisticated now than I had been in the days of Carlos Sandoval and the Hispanic Action Coalition. I hadn't even noticed at the time, but the acronym for that fictitious organization was
HAC
. And that's what I felt like when I thought back to those days. A hack. I was so far beyond that now.

Still, old Carlos had served his purpose and had gotten a lot done, as had my old buddy Paul Newman, who'd been my entree into college, where I'd met Vicki.

But I was after bigger fish these days. I was no longer interested in petty deceits like getting myself a free lunch or obtaining a scholarship or even fighting city hall. No, my concerns now were national, and following Vicki's lead, I hit the Reagan administration hard. We signed petitions, wrote letters, made phone calls. Then, to back it up, I brought in the big guns. Unbeknownst to her, I buttressed our positions with words from a whole host of fictitious activist organizations and even experts in the fields of ecological science, environmental law and nuclear physics. Their letters to targeted newspapers and periodicals echoed publicly what our other correspondence said to politicians privately, creating the impression that there was a groundswell of support for our views.

Each letter a person writes represents five thousand people who don't write
, Reagan had told me.
Or ten thousand.

And then...

And then we were interviewed.

I had no idea who these men were or where they were from. Vicki and some of her more paranoid friends, particularly those who regretted having missed out on the sixties and feared repressive retaliation for holding politically incorrect views, assumed they were agents of Attorney General Ed "Miranda be damned" Meese out to intimidate us into silence. But I suspected something else even then. Despite their stated intent, they didn't seem to care about the content of the letters as much as the letters themselves. They seemed to me to be trying to find the source of the letters, to determine whether the person or persons who wrote them knew how special, how truly effective, the letters were.

There were four of them, dressed identically in black suits that could have denoted federal agent or rigid corporate dress code. They arrived at night, after nine, on a Sunday, and I think it was the time as much as anything that freaked us out. They stood on our humble welcome mat with stone faces, and the man in front stated blandly that they wanted to speak to Jason Hanford and Vicki Reed.

We let them in—we were afraid not to—and they immediately spread themselves around our tiny living room, two sitting, two standing, leaving only a small spot on the couch for us.

"Have a seat," the one man said as he withdrew a pen and clipboard from a flat briefcase. He was the only one who had yet spoken, but the others were also taking out pens and clipboards.

We sat, not knowing what else to do.

The questions came fast and furious, from first one man and then another, none of them speaking over each other but none allowing even a hint of breathing room between answer and next question.

"How many letters do you estimate you write per year? Per month?"

"Do you write letters every day?"

"Do you send all of the letters you write?"

"Is most of your correspondence personal, professional or political?"

"Do you ever write more than one draft of a letter?"

"Do you ever send the same letter to different organizations or institutions?"

The questions kept coming, all of them in the same vein. I looked from one man to another.
They know
, I thought, and the idea chilled me to the bone. But I did not let on that I was at all suspicious. I simply answered each question as it came, and pretended as though such a Sunday night interrogation was routine.

"May I ask what all this is about?" Vicki asked at one point.

"You may not," came the terse reply.

They left less than half an hour after coming in, giving us no clue as to who they were or why they'd interviewed us. Before walking out the door, the first man to have spoken, the one I assumed was the leader, turned back. "Tell no one we were here," he ordered us. "Or we will return."

I watched them get into a black car with no license plates and drive away. I was frightened but furious. My mind was racing through the letters I would write to the authorities if these guys were from some private company or to the appropriate oversight committee if they were governmental agents of some sort. My letters would rip all four of those fucks new assholes. I would be avenged and heads would roll.

Only I couldn't write any letters because I didn't know who the men were or where they were from.

By the time I closed and locked the door, Vicki was rocking back and forth on the couch, holding her stomach, great sobs wracking her body. "We—" I began.