DISPATCH

by Bentley Little

  I looked up to see Tom standing in line for the Rocket Ride. My brother was with some skank that he’d been dating for the past few weeks, and he waved at me, grinning. “Thanks for the tickets!”

  He’d stolen my other two passes! I wanted to kill him. He’d been snooping in my room, and he had to have been looking pretty deep to find where I’d hidden the tickets. I felt violated. That fucker had invaded my privacy. Thank God I didn’t keep a diary or anything. I tried to think of what else he might have run across, what other secrets of mine he might have uncovered.

  I hated him at that moment. I didn’t like Tom even at the best of times, but at that second I could have easily slit his throat and not lost a moment’s sleep.

  Laughing, he moved forward in line, and he and the skank disappeared behind the ringed globe of Saturn.

  “What was that about?” Edson asked.

  But I was too angry to answer. I was trying to think of ways to retaliate. Telling my parents would do no good—they’d just be mad that I kept them in the dark about my free tickets—and even though I’d experienced a growth spurt over the past year and was now actually taller than my brother, he could still kick my ass. I thought of the bitch he was dating, and I had an idea.

  “Jason?” Robert was waving a hand in front of my face as though trying to awaken me from a trance. It was obvious that he’d been attempting to ask me something.

  “Let’s get out of this area,” I said, grabbing my Coke cup. “My fucking brother’s here, and I don’t want to see him.”

  “The Wild West!” Robert announced. He’d been wanting to go to the cowboy show all morning. Part of his country-western infatuation, I assumed. We’d heard banjo music from behind the wooden fort fence as we’d passed by earlier.

  “No way,” Edson protested.

  But I was the swing vote, and Westernland was far enough away from Spaceland that it sounded good to me. “Let’s do it,” I said.

  “Yee-hah,” Edson muttered.

  I arrived home that night just after eleven, the three of us having caught the final bus. Tom still wasn’t home by midnight, and my parents were fuming about it. Banging his bim in the backseat, I assumed, and I was glad to hear through the walls that my parents were thinking along the same lines. He was going to be in deep shit when he got home.

  I was glad.

  But that wasn’t enough.

  I went into Tom’s room, found the name and address of the skanky bitch, then went back into my room and took out a sheet of lined notebook paper. Tom Hanford, I wrote, carefully disguising my handwriting, is gay. He is only using you to get back at me because I dumped him. Don’t fall for it. I signed the letter Phil and did kind of a flower thing for the dot on the i.

  I put the letter in an envelope, sealed and stamped it.

  I then wrote to the president of Familyland, enclosing my torn ticket stub, and said that I had had a very bad experience at the park and would not be returning.

  A week later, I was sent two more free tickets.

  And though nothing was ever said, Tom stopped seeing the girl.

  Fuck you, Tom, I thought. And smiled.

  2

  Summertime.

  And the living wasn’t easy.

  Life at home was just as bad as ever. During my junior high years, my dad had become, if not a full-fledged alcoholic, at least a more-than-occasional drunk. But after he’d totaled the car and very nearly killed a woman in a horrific accident that was entirely his fault and resulted in a year’s suspension of his driver’s license, he’d quit drinking and had even become somewhat religious. Not that there was any discernable difference in his personality or the way he treated me and Tom. He was still as mean and angry as he’d always been, and in some ways more dangerous, since the alcohol had kept him a little less focused and now he was able to concentrate fully on one thing at a time.

  Like me.

  I was, as he never let me forget, a huge disappointment. Despite the fact that he was a complete asshole at home, my father put on a hearty public face and, like a lot of heavy drinkers, was agreeably gregarious in social settings—even now that he was sober. I, however, was socially awkward and to my dad’s dismay had yet to go on my first date, though I’d just turned seventeen. He was also a big sports guy. He was fat now and the most exercise he got was yelling at coaches while he watched ball games on television, but in his day he’d been on the high school football, basketball and baseball teams. I was lucky to get a C in PE.

  So there were plenty of conflicts to go around.

  Luckily, Robert had gotten me a job at Gemco, a discount department store, so at least I had a legitimate reason for getting out of the house at night. Robert had the position I wanted—working in the music department selling records, tapes and stereos—but I was desperate to earn some extra cash, and I was grateful when there was an opening in Toys and he recommended me to the store’s assistant manager.

  After a pro forma interview, I was hired to work twenty hours a week, eight of them on a weekend day, the other twelve spaced out over weekday evenings. It was an easy job. The hardest thing I had to do was clean up after kids who’d taken toys off the shelves, played with them and left them in the aisles—an occurrence that happened numerous times each shift. But my supervisor, Ellis Cain, was a complete prick. The toy department was his domain, and for me to suggest that it was anything less than a demanding job that could be handled by only the brightest and most industrious was belittling to him. He resented the fact that I, a mere high school student and part-time employee, found the work simple, boring and easy to do.

  So he took it out on me. He blamed me for anything that went wrong, he constantly let me know that the girl who’d had the job before I did had been far better at it, and if ever a kid puked or pissed his pants or spilled his Slurpee, he made sure that I, and not a member of the maintenance crew, cleaned it up.

  I grew to hate that son of a bitch.

  But I liked getting a paycheck, and I liked the feeling of independence I got from not spending all my evenings hiding in my room listening to my parents fight. All in all, it wasn’t such a bad deal, and if Cain could just transfer to another store or even another department, all would be right with the world.

  Robert and I usually spent our breaks together sitting on the low brick wall behind the store. It kept us from having to sit in the break room with the lifers—old women who’d been working there since the Stone Age and who took their jobs way too seriously. One Wednesday evening, Toys was dead—there hadn’t been a sale all night, hadn’t even been a browser since six, when I started my shift—so I decided to take an early break. I walked over to Music, where a frail old man in an ugly plaid jacket was arguing with Robert. “That’s not what I wanted, and you know that’s not what I wanted!”

  Robert sighed as though he’d repeated his defense a thousand times. “I told you, you wouldn’t like it,” he said. “I warned you.”

  “That’s not the music I wanted! I told you I wanted the music from Cosmos!”

  “Yes. And you said the theme from Cosmos was called ‘Heaven and Hell.’ I told you we had the Black Sabbath album Heaven and Hell but that it probably wasn’t what you were looking for and I was sure you wouldn’t like it. You bought it anyway, and I said that if it wasn’t the right music, you could bring it back. You did bring it back, and I gave you a refund. I don’t know what else I can do.”

  “I want the music from Cosmos!”

  “Well, I’m afraid we don’t have it,” Robert told him. “Maybe you should try a record store.”

  “I am very dissatisfied with the service I’ve received! Very dissatisfied!”

  Robert did not respond.

  “Your supervisor will be getting a letter from me!” the old man promised. “I can assure you of that!”

  A letter.

  I was like a cartoon character with a lightbulb going on over his head. I stood there as Robert finished dealing with the man; then the two of us walked o
ut the service entrance to the loading dock. We talked about an upcoming U2 concert we had tickets for, but my mind was on the exciting idea that I could write a letter to Gemco complaining about Ellis Cain. I thought about the quick results I’d gotten from my letter to Buck’s and all of my subsequent missives to fast-food joints and amusement parks.

  There was nothing retail businesses feared more than dissatisfied customers.

  I went home that night and wrote a letter to the store’s manager, another to the president of the company at the corporate headquarters in Delaware. I pretended to be an irate father who’d been trying to buy a new Hot Wheels set but was given the runaround by the incompetent Ellis Cain.

  I was off the next week—I’d worked too much over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, covering for the full-timers who were on vacation—but when I returned, Cain was gone. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, whether he was given a lecture and quit in a huff, or whether he’d accumulated other complaints over the years and this was the last straw and Gemco fired him. All I knew was that I suddenly had a new supervisor and Cain was no longer in the picture.

  I went home that night feeling elated, powerful.

  The feeling lasted until I walked through the kitchen door.

  “What are you smiling at?” my dad growled. He was sitting at the kitchen table, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he was drunk. His face was red, the way it used to be when he was drinking, and there was an ugly belligerence in his expression that usually came out only after a hearty consumption of alcohol. But the table was empty of both bottles and cans, and the only thing in front of him was an open Bible.

  I shook my head, hoping that would be answer enough to his question, and tried to slip peacefully by, heading toward my bedroom.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “Then what were you smiling at?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking of a joke.”

  “What joke?”

  If he’d been drunk, I would have been out of there by now. He would not have been able to sustain this line of questioning. As it was, I might be there for hours. “Where’s Mom?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Who cares?” he said.

  She walked in from the living room at precisely that second, and though she couldn’t have heard my question, she heard his answer and deduced backward with that almost supernatural sense of familial logic that mothers possessed. “Get out of my kitchen,” she said flatly. Her words were directed at him, but I used the opportunity to escape and hurried down the hallway to my bedroom.

  I locked the door behind me, something I’d been doing more and more often. I looked over at my typewriter. I could get my old man fired, I thought. The idea was tempting. My dad had been a ruthless bastard to me for as long as I could remember, and if he hadn’t been the family’s sole support, if I hadn’t needed his money to survive, I would have sat down at that second, written and sent out a letter to Automated Interface and gotten his ass terminated.

  Just the thought of squealing on him for some imaginary transgression, getting him hauled before his boss and humiliated, made me feel happy, made me feel good.

  My parents went out for dinner that night, a rare occurrence that Tom immediately took advantage of by escaping to hang with his white-trash friends. In his hands was a bong. “You better not say a word!” he warned me as he bailed.

  “I don’t care what you do,” I told him. Tom was a loser. He’d graduated from high school last year but still lived at home because all he had was a part-time job at Builder’s Emporium. I think he took one or two classes at Acacia Community College, but he wasn’t serious about school, wasn’t serious about work and was going nowhere fast. Excellent athlete or not, he hadn’t amounted to much, and it did my heart good to hear my parents start in on him with their weekly diatribe, telling him that he’d better shape up or ship out, and as long as he lived under their roof he had to abide by their rules.

  On second thought, I decided that I would tell them about Tom and his bong.

  I had the house and the evening to myself. I was still thinking about that letter, and for fun, I opened my notebook and started writing a complaint to my dad’s boss, pretending to be an anonymous coworker who caught him drinking in the bathroom on his break, and harassing an unwilling underage girl in the parking lot, and—

  The phone rang.

  I jumped, quickly crumpling up my paper. I tossed it into the trash as the phone rang again. I was the only one home, so I hurried out to the living room and picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Good afternoon, sir. Are you the man of the house?”

  It was someone trying to sell something.

  “My balls are on fire!” I yelled, and then slammed down the phone.

  I started laughing. I felt strangely invigorated by my exchange with the telemarketer. There was about it the same sort of anonymous power that came with letter writing, although I was reacting instead of acting. I was suddenly in the mood to really write that complaint about my dad, and I sat down and wrote a five-page, hugely detailed letter, filled with every criticism and accusation I could come up with, given my imprecise knowledge of his job. I seriously considered sending it off, but then I saw the movement of headlights through the drapes, and I tore up the pages and flushed them down the toilet before my parents walked into the house.

  I had a dream that night that I wrote a letter to myself, and in it I stated, My dad is a dick. When I walked out of my bedroom and looked down the hall to my parents’ room, I saw my dad sitting on the edge of his bed. His head was a bald dome with a slit on the top of it, he had no arms, and his entire body was cylindrical.

  He’d been turned into a penis.

  He was a dick.

  3

  My mom was mad again. Seemed like she was always mad at someone, but this time it was Tom instead of me, so while she stood in the hallway yelling at him through his closed bedroom door, I spent an atypical evening in the family room with my dad. We didn’t speak—he read the newspaper while I watched TV—but it was oddly similar to the behavior of a normal family, and the comparison only made me realize how far from the ideal we really were.

  “Finally,” my dad said, folding the paper, “the city’s going to clean up the Eastside.”

  I knew what he meant by that. There’d been talk of it for years. The east side of the city was poor and primarily Hispanic, and people like my dad wanted to plow down all the homes and put up expensive condos in an effort to kick out the current residents and draw a richer, whiter population—which was apparently what the city council now intended to do. I picked up the newspaper once he put it down, and read the article titled REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT APPROVED. It stated that the neighborhood on the north side of Eighth Avenue between Murdoch and Grand would be razed and replaced with a gated community called the Lakes, featuring two man-made lakes and an eighteen-hole golf course. The aging mishmash of small stores, apartment buildings, duplexes and homes on the south side of Eighth would become a destination shopping/entertainment district with a multiscreen theater, upscale eateries, boutique stores and a mall with adjoining parking structure.

  I looked at the photo of the Eastside as it was and at the artist’s rendering of the proposed redevelopment.

  My friend Frank Hernandez lived in that area, just past the train tracks near El Nopale market. My favorite taco stand was also there, a little hole-in-the-wall place where you had to order in Spanish because the workers didn’t understand English.

  I’d never been one of those kids who automatically parroted their parents’ beliefs and opinions—not with my mom and dad—but it was only recently that I’d begun to seriously question what they said. My dad was all gung ho for “cleaning up” the east side of the city, but I liked things the way they were. And the concept of eminent domain, which we’d just learned about in our American Government class, seemed illegal and profoundly an
tidemocratic to me.

  So I wrote a letter to the paper about it.

  I’m not sure if I actually expected my letter to get in, but it did. The Acacia Ledger was a biweekly paper, sort of a local complement to the Orange County Register or the Los Angeles Times, and the lead correspondence in the next “Letters to the Editor” was mine.

  It was exciting to see my name in print, although my old man went ballistic. He threw the paper at me when he arrived home from work. I expected to smell alcohol in his exhalation of breath, but despite his crazed behavior, he appeared to be clean. “How could you humiliate me like that?” he demanded. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  He began hitting me.

  I was tempted to fight back. He was fat and out of shape, and while I wasn’t even remotely athletic, I was younger, thinner and more agile. He could still kick my ass, I knew, but there was an opportunity for me to land one good sucker punch, and if I’d been only a little braver, I would have taken it. Instead, I stood there, blocking as many of his open-palmed slaps as I could, while trying to explain that all I’d done was write a letter and express my opinion, a right protected by the Constitution of the United States.

  Tom, in the kitchen doorway, just stood there and laughed, and I realized at that moment just how much I hated my brother. It was my mom who broke things up—though of course she sided with my dad. She made him stop hitting me, but then she started yelling, too, the both of them coming at me in stereo. I took it, but inside I was glad I’d written that letter, and I felt proud of myself for being able to upset them so. My words had power.

  In the next issue of the paper, the editorial page was filled with letters denouncing me. One from the mayor, one from the city manager, two from members of the public. The paper itself printed an editorial siding with the city, calling my ideas “inflammatory and counterproductive.” I hadn’t realized that my opinions would be taken so seriously—I was just a high school kid!—and I’d had no idea that I would hit such a nerve. Of course, racists didn’t like to be called racists, and maybe my blunt talk had hit them where it hurt.