Dispatch (12 page)

My parents were fighting when I got home, my dad drunk again, and I sneaked past them, coming in the front door rather than the kitchen door, and safely made my way to my bedroom undetected.

Two days later, I was called into the principal's office. I knew it was serious because I was taken out of PE. Call slips came to other rooms from the office quite frequently, but PE always seemed to be exempt—I assume because it was too much trouble to make kids change back into street clothes. I was summoned, however, and not allowed to change but forced to wear my gym shorts. I traipsed across the quad feeling foolish and conspicuous. Amid the overdressed administrators and secretaries in the office I felt positively naked.

Mr. Poole was waiting for me.

He did not look happy. Leading the way into his office with a minimum of fuss and conversation, the principal closed the door behind me. He moved behind his desk and picked up a folder, not sitting down and not offering me a seat. "I was struck by your behavior at the SAC meeting the other night," he said.

I had a knot in my stomach, dreading what was coming next.

"I thought it odd," he continued, "that someone who was used to meeting with various community groups, who was supposed to have a special facility for getting competing organizations to share resources and communicate with each other, would be so ill prepared and obviously uneasy with the committee setting. So I did a little research." He turned on me. "There is no Sobriety Institute. There's no such thing. As for the other organizations listed in the letters we received about you, the two that actually exist have never even heard of you.

"You wrote those letters," the principal said, and the disappointment in his voice made me feel lower than I'd ever felt in my life.

I neither confirmed nor denied it. I simply stood there, exposed and embarrassed, the knot in my stomach tightening.

He stared at me in silence for several moments. "Do you have anything to say for yourself?" he asked finally.

I met his eyes and kept my expression blank, trying to mask the humiliation I felt.
"Go back to your class," he said, and I couldn't tell if that was weariness or disgust I heard in his voice. Both, probably.
I walked through the office in my gym shorts and T-shirt, sprinted back across campus to the boys' locker room and arrived just as everyone else finished showering and was putting on their clothes. "So what was it?" Frank asked. "What happened?" All of the eyes in my row were on me.
I thought of losing my place on the Student Advisory Committee, having my extracurricular activities struck from my record, not getting any grants or scholarships, being stuck in my parents' house. "Nothing," I said.
I went home that afternoon and wrote a letter.

Dear Ms. Gutierrez, Mr. Bergman, Mr. McCollum and other Members of the Board,

I don't even know how to tell you what happened to me. I am a freshman at Rutherford B. Hayes High School.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Principal Poole molested me in the girls' bathroom
XXXXXXX
after school on Friday. He made me
XXXXXX
do things to him and he had sex with me. I can't tell my parents. I can't tell my friends. I can't tell anyone in the office. I want to kill myself. You're my last hope. It's too late for me, but maybe you can stop him before he does it to anyone else.

 

That was a hard one to write. I was tempted to go into more graphic detail, but I realized this wasn't a
Penthouse Forum
letter, and though my teenage hormones were urging me to insert the description of a hard-core sex scene, my brain was telling me to remain rational and focused. I didn't want to make it sound too cold and formal, though, and I worked hard at getting the tone right while divulging only what was necessary to take that pecker down.

The scratched-out sections were a last-minute addition, an attempt to show the girl's state of mind.

I kept it anonymous so they wouldn't be able to look up names or track down records.

Except it didn't seem to work. I gave the post office a generous three days to deliver it, then added another day for the board to discuss things, but a week passed and then another, and the principal was still in place and at his desk. Of course, there could be turmoil going on behind the scenes—a united front was always presented to the students—but I needed to make sure that Poole was ousted as quickly as possible, before he had time to completely derail my scholarship plans. I was sure that he'd told Zivney, and no doubt word had spread among the faculty at Hayes, but I had the superintendent on my side as well as the mayor. A few judicious letters, and I could have this whole thing turned around and working in my favor.

If only I could get rid of Poole.

I wrote another anonymous note. This one from a secretary. This one to the board
and
the police. In it, I discussed the principal's inappropriate behavior toward female students. I pretended that I had been in the bathroom a week ago and overheard two girls talking about being forced to give him oral sex. I wrote that I didn't believe it at first, but today, after school, he met in his office with a female student who had been caught smoking marijuana on campus. Instead of the automatic expulsion that should have happened, she'd been let off with a warning, not even a suspension. And when I heard the noises coming out of the principal's office, I understood why.

I said that I wished to remain anonymous because I didn't want to jeopardize my job.

That did the trick.

I have no idea what was said behind closed doors, but the upshot of it was that Mr. Poole resigned his position and left the school immediately.
Immediately.
No two weeks' notice, no farewell speech. I had mailed my letters on a Tuesday, and by Thursday morning his office was empty and he was gone. I know because I entered the administration building for some contrived reason or other every single day—to check.

I hoped that meant that he hadn't had time to tell anyone else about his research into the Sobriety Institute, that he now had other, more important things on his mind that would render that subject insignificant.

I only hoped he didn't put two and two together and realize that both my ascension and his downfall were accomplished by letters. It might make him think.

I should have had him killed.

That was the thought that occurred to me, and it didn't even give me pause. I still felt proud rather than abashed about my part in the witch's death, and I knew that if the need and the opportunity arose, I would not shy away from doing such a thing again.

I gave things a week to settle down, then started asking around, but since it was well into the school year, I was told, one of the vice-principals would become acting principal, and a new full-time replacement for Mr. Poole would not be hired until September. Mrs. Zivney would move up to the position of acting VP for the remainder of the year.

I calculated the angles. I was off the SAC, and Zivney no doubt knew why. But I now had a new counselor, Mr. Tate, and with all of her new added duties, I could probably stay under Zivney's radar. I could still apply for all of the loans and grants I'd originally intended to pursue.

Except that I needed a recommendation from someone impressive, someone higher up, someone farther along the chain than a teacher. Anyone from this administration was out of the question. Alerting one of them to my intentions could derail everything.

The mayor!

Yes. I'd sent him my original packet of letters, too, and I doubted that Poole had had a chance to talk to him about me yet—even if he had, Poole's reputation was now lower than shoe-wiped dog shit.

The mayor would work.

I still had a chance to escape my life.

After school, I told Robert and Edson I couldn't hang out with them, that I had something to do. I caught a ride with Frank, who passed by city hall on his way home each day, and had him drop me off. I should have called ahead, but as it happened, the mayor was in, and he agreed to see me. A secretary led me to his office, and I put on my Joe Humble act. "Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Mayor. My name's Jason Hanford and I'm a student at Rutherford B. Hayes High—"

As I'd hoped, he remembered my name.

"Jason, of course! Our star humanitarian. How are you doing?"

Had he been told? It didn't seem so. He appeared genuinely happy to see me—or at least as happy as a smarmy local politician could get.

"Oh, I'm okay," I said.

"What brings you by these parts?"

"Well, actually, I'm here to ask you a favor."

He suddenly grew more wary. The "Anything I can do for you" that I was hoping to hear failed to materialize. Instead, there was only a cautious, "Yes?"

"I need a letter of recommendation," I told him. "For a scholarship application. I have one from my English teacher, but I was supposed to get one from Mr. Poole, too. Now he's gone. I could get one from one of the vice-principals, but it would carry more weight if I could get one from somebody higher up. That's why I thought maybe I could get one from you."

The recoil was almost physical, but his voice when he spoke was smooth and calm, inflected slightly with false regret. "I'm sorry," the mayor said, "but I can't be seen as playing favorites. I was elected mayor of the entire city. If I gave you a recommendation and did not give recommendations to other students at your school—or students at the other three high schools in the Acacia district—then I would be saying, in effect, that you are better or more qualified than all of the other students."

Yes
, I wanted to tell him.
That's the whole point. That's what recommendations are for.

But I nodded as though I understood his predicament and sympathized.

He must have sensed how he was coming across. "Besides," he said, "I'm really busy right now. I'm not sure I'd have the time to do justice to your achievements. You'd probably be better off getting the superintendent or someone from the district to give you a recommendation. Or, better still, one of the community leaders you work with. It would make you seem more well-rounded."

"I can write it for you if you don't have the time. It won't be too gushing. It won't say I'm better than anyone else. It'll just say that I'm a good student, a valued member of the community, et cetera. All you'd have to do is sign it."

"I can't do that," the mayor informed me with insincere sadness. "It wouldn't be fair."

I nodded, said nothing.

You're going down, motherfucker
, I thought.
 

The word processor was quiet. Not like a typewriter. It was loud when I printed—both the dot matrix and daisy wheel printers I'd purchased were quite noisy—but the actual keystrokes were practically silent. Still, as I wrote my letters to the city council, my dad banged on the door, yelling that it was late at night and I was disturbing his sleep and if I was going to wake up the entire goddamn house with my typing, then by God he was going to come in and smash my—

"You're drunk again," I said through the door, my voice dripping with disgust. "Go back to bed and leave me alone."

"Rick!" my mom yelled at him from down the hall at almost exactly the same time.

Amazingly, he retreated, returned to his room, left me alone. I knew he'd been feeling guilty about losing his job, and shame over not being able to provide for his family had made him more compliant with my mom's bitchy demands. Even drunk and mean, he was still a shell of his former self, and I felt glad. No one deserved emasculation more.

I continued typing.

I'd been thinking all afternoon and all evening about how to take down the mayor, and I'd finally come up with a plan. I dusted off my old buddy Carlos Sandoval, president of the Hispanic Action Coalition, who had amassed an impressive array of statistics showing that under this mayor, the hiring and promotion of Hispanic employees had dropped to a historic low. There was a consistent pattern of discrimination that tied in with the mayor's aborted push to redevelop the Eastside. What's more, though they refused to come forward for fear of reprisals, several employees admitted privately to having heard the mayor use racial slurs.

I made this up off the top of my head, but I trusted that someone would investigate under the old where-there's-smoke-there's-fire theory and discover whether or not any of it was true. If there did happen to be some sort of hiring discrepancy, everyone would assume bigotry was the cause.

I sent copies of the letter to the
Acacia Ledger
, the
Orange County Register
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the other members of the city council, the city manager and the city attorney. Someone would bite, I knew.

It turned out to be all of them. Carlos Sandoval's diatribe appeared in both the
Times
and the
Register
unedited on exactly the same day—a first, I believe—and when the
Ledger
came out a few days later, it ran an article on the fact that Sandoval had dared to criticize Acacia's wonderful mayor, poison-pen letter causes chaos, read the asinine headline on the front page. The editors were all part of the mayor's circle, cronyism at its most obvious and sickening, and it was with righteous indignation that I fired off a series of letters from various members of the public taking the
Ledger
to task for making more of an effort to discredit Carlos Sandoval than to investigate the charges he made. In my senior government class, we'd just finished talking about the role of the press in a free society, and I was genuinely incensed by the
Ledger's
actions. My letters were filled with quotes from Thomas Jefferson and other First Amendment heroes, and I assume my passion shone through because all of the letters got in.

That surprised me. I mean, it didn't surprise me that the
Times
and the
Register
printed my letters of support for myself, but the
Ledger
was so actively hostile that I would have thought they'd want to silence all dissent. They printed my letters, too, though, and they even printed a
real
letter from someone who agreed with me, which was both shocking and thrilling.