Dispatch (16 page)

All was right with the world.

But I kept an eye on my mailbox.

Just in case.
 

Music has resonance. When I listen to music, I'm taken back in time. Not to the time of the music's origin but to the time it entered my life. Rick Wakeman's
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
doesn't make me think of 1972, the year in which it was released. It makes me think of 1984, the year I found that album at a Garden Grove garage sale.

That was the year I went national.

It was a letter to
Newsweek
taking the president to task for what I saw as inconsistencies in his foreign policy. It was a position I held, but it was also one I knew would impress Dr. Emerick, with whom I now had another class. Mine was the lead letter, the one with a headline, and though the two letters below mine were on approximately the same topic, it was mine that inspired vitriolic responses the following week, including one from a State Department official clarifying what he saw as mistakes and mischaracterizations I'd made.

I lived for this stuff, and I fired off two replies, one under my own name and one under a pseudonym, making all of the readers who disagreed with me sound like uninformed morons, making the State Department official sound like a fascist jerk.

Two days later, I received a special delivery letter in the mail.

It was from the president of the United States.

Not a form letter on official stationery but a handwritten personal note on informal notepad paper signed by Ronald Reagan himself:

Dear Jason,

I read your

Newsweek
letter critiquing my foreign policy and found it very interesting. Of course, I disagree completely, but I was very impressed by the way you put together your argument and by the way your letter flowed so naturally, so effortlessly, so gracefully. You are indeed a fine correspondent, and I admire your epistolary ability. Your pseudonymous defense of your initial letter was equally inspired, and a rather witty touch. I had a good laugh over that one...

He'd recognized my fake letter?

I didn't know how that was possible, but it was true. Reagan had somehow seen through my sham and caught me. From all indications, the man was not the brightest bulb in the pack, yet he'd figured out what none of
Newsweek
's gatekeepers had been able to notice.

His own letter was not too shabby, either.

I continued reading:

...I would like to invite you to visit me at the White House. I believe you and I would have a lot to talk about. I cannot of course offer you a ride on
Air Force One
(ha-ha), but I would love to put you up in the Lincoln Bedroom for a night or two if you could make your way out to D.C. I think the two of us would get along swimmingly.

I read the message again. And again. And again. I didn't know what to make of it, didn't know what to do. I thought about the president's offer, considered it, and discussed it with Don and Dr. Emerick and some of my newfound friends, all of whom were impressed as hell by the invitation. It was true that spring break was coming up, and I had coupons for free stays at a variety of hotel chains, but I still wasn't sure I wanted to go. The problem (though I refused to admit it to anyone) was that I couldn't speak as well as I could write. In letters, I could debate with the best of them, but in face-to-face conversation with the movers and shakers of Washington, D.C, I was afraid that I'd come off as the wiseass punk I really was.

It was Dr. Emerick who convinced me to go. He stood before me in his office at the top of the Humanities Building, put both hands on the arms of my chair and, through the tangle of hair that covered his face, looked into my eyes. "This is your chance to speak truth to power," he said, voice filled with emotion. "Don't squander it. You can make a
difference
."

I looked at him, met his eyes, nodded. "Okay," I said.

But I didn't do it.
 

Don wanted to come, but I decided I'd rather travel alone. So I loaded up the Dodge Dart and headed east, not planning an itinerary, intending simply to drive until I got tired and felt like stopping.

I thought it odd that the president would take my words so seriously. Hell, he was attacked in print every day in newspapers all over the nation. His popularity was sinking, and there seemed to be a lot of people who thought his policies as disastrous as I did. Why would he single me out for a meeting?

But I guess I knew the answer to that already. It was the same reason I received free passes and complimentary tickets when I complained and other people got thank-you-for-your-opinion form letters, the same reason my letters were printed in the newspaper when others weren't, the same reason—
my dad was killed
—I got results when I took on city hall.

Because I had a talent for writing letters.

I got as far as Las Vegas before deciding to turn around.

I couldn't go home. Not yet. Don and Dr. Emerick and everyone were expecting me to bravely and perhaps quixotically take my case—
our
case—to the president, so to maintain the illusion, I would have to be gone at least a week. So, once back in California, I headed north. As before, I had no plan, and as it was starting to get dark when I reached Santa Barbara, I decided to stay there for the night.

The next morning, as I was checking out, the desk clerk said that he had a letter for me. That was impossible. I'd chosen this place at random. No one knew I was here. But he reached under the counter, and sure enough, there was an envelope with my name and room number on it.

"Who gave you this?" I asked, turning it over in my hand. I saw no stamp or postmark; it had obviously been hand delivered.

"It was here when I came on duty this morning," the clerk told me. "I could ask Dane. He was on night shift."

"Could you do that, please?"

The man—Otis, according to his name tag—picked up the phone and dialed a number. After a wait that must have encompassed twenty rings, the call was finally answered, and Otis asked Dane who had dropped off the envelope. Someone he'd never seen before, Dane reported, but he didn't really remember what the guy looked like or how he talked. I thanked the clerk for trying, paid for my stay with a corporate card that still entitled me to three more nights at any Ramada Inn nationwide, then went outside to my car, where I opened up the envelope.

I read the letter. It began,
Dear Jason,
but what followed was a bizarre present-tense second-person description of a sexual encounter with a beautiful woman.
(She is sopping wet, and she spreads her legs wide and pulls your head down to gently kiss her labia...)
What the hell was this? There was no doubt in my mind that it was connected to those other letters I'd received, the ones associated with my dreams. This time, however, the sender had missed the boat. I'd dreamed of nothing even remotely similar, and there was nothing in the strange letter that jogged any part of my memory.

Maybe this was different; maybe it was predicting a dream I would have in the future instead of confirming one I'd had in the past. Of course, now that I'd read it, I might have such a dream because the idea had been placed in my head. So there was no way that would prove anything.

Maybe it was predicting something that would really happen.

No, that was ridiculous. Yes, it was amazing that whoever had written this letter had found me, but this time he'd missed his mark. I tore up the envelope and its contents, tossing them out the window of the car as I hit the highway.

The only thing is...

It happened.

Just that way.

I met the woman in San Francisco. She was a waitress at the hotel coffee shop, and something about her reminded me of old Sandra Fortuna from high school. Thinking of Sandra got me thinking about sex, and looking at the waitress, I imagined doing her. It had been a while, and I had to admit the celibate routine was growing old. Something told me I had a chance here. The waitress, Jolene, had no rings on her fingers, and she seemed to hover around me more than any of the other patrons, so I stretched out my dinner, eating slowly, sipping refill after refill of iced tea, ordering a piece of pie for dessert, even though I was full and didn't really like pie all that much. Finally, as I paid my bill, I got up the nerve to ask what time she got off work. "Nine," she said, smiling, and I took her pen and wrote my room number on the bottom of the check.

There was a knock on my door at 9:08.

She was indeed wet down there, and, yes, she pulled my head down to kiss it. I did so hesitantly, tentatively, while she sucked my cock as though her life depended on it. This, too, was predicted in the letter, but at that moment I didn't care, and it was only after I'd finished that I began to reflect on the eerie synchronicity of it all, on the fact that dark elements seemed to have left the page and entered my life.

Indeed, the very next day, I saw a homeless man hit by a pickup truck in fairly heavy traffic. The driver stopped and there were plenty of other people around, but as I passed by, the homeless man, bleeding from his mouth, turned his head to look at me—and smiled. It was spookiest damn smile I'd ever seen, and it remained with me throughout the day, even as I passed by a field littered with the carcasses of dead cows, and saw a pigeon fall out of the sky and land on the table next to me outside a McDonald's.

The witch.

I couldn't help thinking that all of this was letter related, and I did not relax until I finally stopped at a TraveLodge late that afternoon and checked into my room for the night with the admonition to the desk clerk that I was not to receive any messages, that any notes or letters addressed to me were to be immediately thrown away and I was not to be notified.
 

I was happy to get home, and I made up an elaborate lie about my trip to Washington, D.C., telling everyone how a black town car with a driver picked me up from my hotel and took me straight through the White House gates, where I was led directly to the Oval Office.

I didn't like Nancy, I told them. Her Stepford smile gave me the creeps. But the president was warm and easygoing, and the two of us hit it off. Although he was a good half century older than me, we were comfortable together, and there was none of the awkwardness I sometimes felt while talking to people I considered adults. We'd always thought that Reagan was a nice guy but a little dim, that he'd be a good neighbor, someone you could trust to water your plants and feed your dog while you were on vacation but not exactly the kind of person you'd want running a country. I saw nothing to contradict this preconceived notion. He listened to my arguments but didn't comment or have any visible reaction, and when I was finished, he blithely offered to tour me around the White House.

"Typical," Dr. Emerick muttered.

My story was believed in full, and for a brief period of time, I even became something of a minor celebrity on campus.

The strange thing was, Reagan and I actually began a correspondence.

It started when I wrote a letter apologizing for not being able to visit him. He wrote back, joking that now he wouldn't be able to change my politics with his breezy charm and Teflon smile. I replied that now I wouldn't be able to change
his
. I added that my initial letter had been a class assignment and my follow-ups had been something of a lark. I told him I'd been wondering why he'd invited me to the White House and semiapologized, saying that if my letters had upset him so much that he'd felt obligated to summon me to Washington, D.C., perhaps he was taking my words a little too seriously.
I'm not upset
, Reagan wrote back.
But we take all letters seriously. Each letter a person writes represents five thousand people who don't write. Or ten thousand. I forget the numbers and I'm too lazy to look them up. But you can be sure that if one person takes the time to complain about what I said or did, there are a lot of other people who feel the same way but just don't make the effort to do it.
I thought of that playwright, Joe Orton, writing letters about himself. There must be a lot of us out there writing fake letters, I reasoned, and I found myself wondering how much of the world that was presented to us through politics and the media had been influenced by letter writers. Maybe we spoke for others, maybe we didn't (my guess was that we didn't), but either way, we wielded a disproportionate amount of power.

I realized that I had begun thinking of myself as a Letter Writer—with a capital
L
and a capital
W
. A lot of people wrote letters; a lot of people probably wrote a lot of letters. But most of them did so for fun, for work, to communicate. How many did it because they
had
to? I did, and I found myself wondering if there were others like me, men and women who had this compulsion, this need to write.

I asked Reagan once if there were other constituents with whom he corresponded on a regular basis, but he never answered that question, and though I brought it up again from time to time, I never received a response from him. On some subliminal level, did he know, could he guess, that my letters were different from the others he received? Did he have any clue that he was being manipulated into writing to me, that it was not my personality or my ideas or any ordinary attribute that was compelling him to respond but instead the letters themselves weaving a sort of spell on him?

Gradually, I stopped writing to the president. I'd begun to feel like a fraud. I disagreed politically with Reagan on nearly everything and while we sometimes touched on politics in our correspondence, we stuck primarily to superficial banalities. It didn't seem right to hog his time this way, since neither of us was really getting anything out of it, so I called it off, let it slide.

I missed him, though.

I really did.
 

Letter Writer.

Just what was that exactly? What the hell did it mean? I spent the rest of my sophomore year trying to figure out who I was, paying only enough attention to my studies to make sure I made the minimum grades to remain in school. I even tried to stop writing, though it was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

I took two jobs in the summer, and it was a relief to be so busy. I was becoming far too introspective. I needed to stop thinking about myself and my problems all the time and just get out and do things, live my life like everyone else was.

But I had too much invested in my letters to stay away from writing. They'd delivered me from my parents' house, they'd vanquished my enemies, they'd brought me money and food, and before the fall semester, I was back before the typewriter and the mojo was working again. I even fell into a Cyrano-like arrangement where I helped Don write letters to a longdistance girlfriend, trying to keep her happy and not suspicious as he fooled around with bimbos that he met in local bars. But I received another one of those unmarked envelopes in the mail the night after I had a terrifying dream about my mom hiring Tom to hunt me down and kill me. I tore it up unopened and flushed it down the toilet, but vowed to write less, to stay off the radar of whoever—

whatever

—was watching me.

Two letters a week, I decided. That would be all.
Moderation in all things.
It seemed a good rule to follow, and it actually seemed to work. My life balanced out a bit. I indulged my desire, fufilled my need, but didn't let it overtake the rest of my life.

My junior and senior years were happy and uneventful.

That's the way I liked it.

That's the way I wanted it.
 

I met Vicki Reed on my first day of grad school. I'd earned my BA in English but was going after an MA in political science, having decided that I would become a high school teacher, and though I'd taken quite a few poli-sci courses, I still had a couple of undergrad makeup classes to finish in order to meet the requirements. Vicki was petitioning for a linguistics course along with me, and for the entire duration of the first session, we both waited in the hallway while the quirky teacher—who obviously had plenty of spaces available—pretended we did not exist.

We chatted while the professor took roll and performed required first-day bookkeeping duties. From another room across the hall, the office of one of the humanities professors, came the sound of music. I leaned back, peered into the open doorway and saw a stocky man with a thick walrus mustache and a graying ponytail. "
Terrapin Station.
The Grateful Dead," I said, identifying the music.

Vicki groaned. "Oh, no. You're not one of those, are you?"

"Those what?"

"Those freaks who know the name of every song on every album by every band."

"I am," I said proudly. "Or at least that's my goal."

"Why?" she asked.

That threw me, and before I could even come up with an answer, she said, "I don't think music should be named. It should just be heard."

"But ... but then how would you know what to buy?" I asked. "If you hear a song you like on the radio, you have to be able to tell the person at the record store what it is."

"I suppose that's so," she conceded. "But I have nearly a hundred classical albums that were given to me by my dad. I love them all. I don't know the names of any of them, but I love them."

I was incredulous. "But you
have
to know."

"Why? When I'm in the mood, I put one on and listen to it. I don't love it any less because I don't know the name of it. And besides, I've always felt that people memorized music trivia just so they'd be able to impress other people in conversation. What does the name of a piece have to do with anything?"

"Because if you want to hear a
specific
piece of music, you have to be able to select it. Music is not all the same. Sometimes you're in the mood for something fast or slow, or maybe a particular song will go with a particular mood you're in. You can't just grab records at random and put them on."

"I do it all the time."

She was exasperating.

Exasperating but interesting.

And very pretty.
 

I asked her out on a date. We both got into the linguistics class, and after everyone else left and we'd been officially added to the roster, we celebrated with coffee at the student center. Sort of a predate date. We talked easily, there were no awkward pauses, and we left each other wanting more. That night, we'd intended to go to a movie—a revival of
Serpico
at the Student Center Theater, with Frank Serpico himself scheduled to speak afterward—but dinner stretched out longer than we'd intended, and we spent another half hour talking in the parking lot before getting into the car, and by that time the movie was half over. Instead, we drove to a nearby park and walked along the trails before settling down on a bench beneath a lamppost to watch the lovers stroll and the joggers jog and the moon rise from behind the nearby condominiums.

Was it love at first sight? Not exactly. But pretty damn close. I'd gone out with a lot of girls in my four years at UC Brea—I'd had sex with a fair number whose names I either never knew or forgot before the end of the evening—but I had never
connected
with anyone like this. It was a cliche to say so, but I really did feel as though we'd known each other all of our lives; the comfort level was that high. It made me sad, too, in a way, made me think of Robert, Edson and Frank, the friends of my childhood whom I'd allowed to just drift out of my life. I'd not been as close to anyone since, and being with Vicki made me realize how much I missed it, how much I hungered to be intimate with someone again.

After that first night, I was sure that she was the person I wanted to be closest to.

She told me she loved me on our third date. I told her I loved her, too.

The semester sped by. I thought about her constantly, we were with each other as much as humanly possible, but surprisingly, our grades did not suffer. If anything, we were good for one another—when we studied together, we actually
studied
—and in the linguistics class we were both headed for easy A's.

Would she like love letters?
I sometimes wondered. Of course. All girls did, pretty much. I desperately yearned to write to her, knowing that I could express myself much better in print than I ever could in person. But there was no way to correspond with her that didn't seem forced and awkward. If one of us were going on a trip or something, if we were going to be apart for even a single weekend, I could justify writing her a letter. But we were both here and we spent all of our free time together, and it was impossible to do without it seeming strained.

At my insistence, we took an extendeded class together for fun: "Music Theory for Non-Music-Majors," a more in-depth version of the music appreciation course that was one of the general-ed requirements. It was there that I learned about Philip Glass and John Adams, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk. But the real discovery was Daniel Lentz. A West Coast composer who'd taught at USC and UC Santa Barbara, Lentz wrote music that touched me, that affected me, that made me think and made me feel, that just deep down amazed me. I don't know how or why, but as I listened to the piece the teacher played, I was stirred in a way I had not been in a long, long time. The piece was called
the crack in the bell
, and the text was from an e. e. cummings poem titled "next to of course god." There were all the trappings of minimalism—repetitive synthesizer lines, clear operatic female voice—but it came together in such a way that even sitting there in an uncomfortable desk in a crowded classroom, I felt excited, as though I'd discovered something new and entirely original, and for perhaps the first time in my life I understood how people became passionate about art. I wanted everyone to hear this music and I wanted them to feel about it the way I felt.

Vicki reached for my hand. She understood, too! I squeezed her fingers, met her gaze and smiled, and after class, I asked the teacher if I could borrow the Lentz album. Although he said no, he promised to make me a cassette tape, which he gave to me at the next session.

Vicki and I both became huge fans, and as much as anything else, it was this shared aesthetic that cemented our bond, that let us know we were meant for each other.

Just as you start seeing vehicles identical to your own once you buy a car, I started finding Daniel Lentz albums in my trips to used-record stores now that I knew who he was. I picked up a CD of
the crack in the bell
at a shop in Anaheim and found two vinyl albums—
Missa Umbrarum
and
On the Leopard Altar
—at Music Market in Costa Mesa. Although she refused to learn the names of any of his compositions, I considered it a personal triumph that Vicki knew the album titles, and between me and the class, I think she started coming around a little to my way of thinking.

We each tried playing Lentz's music for our friends, but even our most musically adventurous acquaintances did not seem to get it. His work spoke to us, though, and the exclusivity of our passion pulled us even closer together.

During intersession, Vicki went home to Phoenix, spending two weeks there with her parents for Christmas, while I remained in my dorm room as usual, pretending the holidays weren't happening. My mom and Tom were somewhere in Orange County, probably still in Acacia, but I made no effort to contact them and they did not contact me. I doubted they'd even spoken to each other since Tom left home. Almost all of my other friends and acquaintances were with their families for the holidays, as well, and the ones who weren't were the ones I couldn't stand being around for very long.

This was my chance to write to Vicki, and I took it.

In the movie
Roxanne
, Steve Martin admits to Daryl Hannah at one point that while she was away on a trip, he wrote her a letter every hour or something equally fanatic. It was a line meant to make the audience laugh, but to me the idea was heaven, and it was what I wanted to do with Vicki.

For some reason, though, I held back. Not in quantity: I wrote her each morning and again each night. And not even in quality: my letters were good, heartfelt, sincere. But I didn't put that extra effort into them, that little bit of alchemy that would have pushed them over the edge and made her beg for more. I told myself it was because doing so would be cheating and I wanted to win her fair and square. Maybe there was a little of that in it, but mostly I didn't want the taint of my letter writing touching our relationship. For there
was
a taint. Letter writing was not some harmless pastime, was not even a blessing or a gift. It wasn't exactly a curse, but that was closer to the truth than anything else. Simply put, I did not want the darkness of my letter writing to infect our life together.

When she returned to Brea, we decided to move in together. The letters I wrote had helped seal that deal, but we'd been talking about it even before she left, and being apart made us realize how much we wanted to be with each other. We wouldn't be allowed to live in a dorm, which meant that I'd lose my work-study discount since I'd be living off campus. Vicki, though, had a friend who was a real estate agent, and that friend found us a great deal on a sublet apartment fairly close to campus.

All was right with the world.

Almost.

The week before classes resumed for the spring semester, Vicki received notice in the mail that she was about to lose her scholarship money because, although her GPA was high, one of the courses she'd taken the previous semester was not eligible for inclusion, according to the award committee. It was a squirrelly scholarship to begin with, I thought, sponsored by Vicki's father's aerospace company, but she needed the money to attend grad school. She had a killer internship lined up, one that could lead to a great job if everything played out as planned, but if she lost the scholarship, she'd have to drop out for this semester—at the very least—and that would cost her the internship and the job.