1981
Wright left Texas late in the afternoon and a garbled message for his landlord on the office machine, apologizing for leaving so much behind and saying of course he understood about the deposit. Money was something he could not care about, like a person to whom you are introduced and can think of nothing to ask. The feeling was mutual. He did not know what things cost and could not be bothered to compare the prices of similar goods, and he bought next to nothing save an occasional manic spree after a paycheck—he would emerge from a department store with a fishing rod and an unseasonal sweater, a discounted blender and a white leatherette address book. He was twenty and objectively beautiful, the mangy native state of his body refined and filled by his jobs in construction. There was someone people thought he looked like. He was frightened by conversation and spent any looking somewhere else, a habit that gave him the air of cockiness.
In the middle console of his truck he put two packs of cigarettes he’d emptied into a bowl. He smoked a pack a day, Marlboro 27s, and it felt like the punishment he believed he deserved. To wake up and cough was a perverse pleasure. The man he’d assaulted at work had finally made good on his threats to return the favor, showing up at a bar where Wright programmed hours on the jukebox and played paper games of Hangman with the bartender Frank. A quaint drinking village with a fishing problem, said a sign above the bar. All pool sticks were attached by a generous length of wire to the wall, a measure that kept them from being taken out front and snapped in the service of an argument. Frank knew where Wright lived and had driven him there, three times Wright could remember, more that he couldn’t.
“Hey, soldier,” Wright had said when Brent sat down next to him, a poor opener that escalated things quickly. He was the one to suggest the parking lot. Brent was bored by how little he resisted, making up for what the fight lacked in an antagonist with whatever props were around, a fistful of gravel he rubbed into the side of Wright’s face, a jagged piece of bumper left behind that he used like a bat on Wright’s lower back. “Am I wrong or are you the type of faggot who likes this,” Brent asked. He was genuinely surprised. On his belly Wright flashed a peace sign and threw a kiss over his shoulder. Frank appeared with his .22 on his shoulders, a hand slung over each end.
“I hear there’s some good television on at your house,” Wright heard him say. “I hear cable’s a notifying miracle.”
It had been no heartbreak to leave that apartment, which he’d decorated only with the occasional fortune cookie scroll Scotch-taped to the card table he ate on. The few visitors had been disappointed women. Imitation pearl earrings or turquoise belts way up the waist, pageboy bobs or hair that fell warm down the back, breasts high and mean or low and brown, all of them left confused about why they hadn’t been enough. At first when the moment came and he couldn’t, he apologized and excused himself to the bathroom, but lately he just fell to the side and welcomed them to sleep there or not. If he saw them later in the drugstore or supermarket he never greeted them by name.
The clouds as he left the state had a truant feel, thin and distracted. On the radio was the inaugural address, coming to him in two-bit phrases as he looked for a station playing something else. The president had been an actor, a B-rated cowboy who spoke out of the side of his mouth. Wright imagined him like this still, splayed on a horse in the movie posters he’d passed in the downtowns of places they never stayed long. The watching world, the new president said. Economic ills, mortgaging our future, patriotism quiet but deep, the giants on whose future we stand. After minutes of searching for something else, he turned the knob to off.
It was the weather, he told himself, that he wanted. Northern California had moods like his, the fog in the morning skulking guiltily around the hills until noon, a correlative to the half-dead feeling he had the first few hours he was awake. He respected the sun’s expression there, mercurial and withholding, and how the light breezes turned over into something pushy and corrosive in under a minute. There was a shame in returning, and also he knew that the influx of information any new place required would pass right over him now. He’d spent the majority of his days off the last year in bed, wishing for a meal to appear as though that were something he could not orchestrate himself, newly frightened of things that had happened a decade before. The suicide attempt he refused to think about, how even for that he had not planned well. He put the belt in the plastic garbage liner, after, and wore his pants loose and low. The letters to the astronaut were similarly avoided, a part of his emotional life he starved out unless he’d been drinking, when he wrote and wrote and walked cockeyed to the mailbox six blocks away. He must have known if he left them until the morning they’d never get sent. On the way to California he ate sunflower seeds and sang to himself, Phil Spector’s love songs, catchy and wicked. He hit me and I knew he loved me!
January 21, 1981
Dear Mr. Kahn,
As I was getting ready to leave, looking through the things I own, I kept thinking—it’s strange what persists, more arbitrary than I’d prefer. I have an old driver’s license of Randy’s that he gave me, I don’t know why, some early token of love. I have a photo of Claudette I took with a camera they gave me, her sleeping face revealed in the leftmost third of the photo through a cracked door I made out of focus. A Bible my mother stole from somewhere and rolled joints from, a magazine I’m on the cover of, not the one I’ve mentioned.
I don’t imagine you’ll know this, because it took even the press a few years to put it together, but that was not my first time, at the launch I mean, on the cover of Life. I guess this is something you and I share, that we are some of the few individuals to make it twice. Of course I realize that worshipping coincidence is the province of the insane. No one knows I write to you, have I told you that?
Maybe you remember the photo. I’d argue the composition is the most striking thing about it, although my mother would say it’s my face, the determination there. There’s a row of National Guardsmen, diminishing in size into the distance, and facing them a row of people in their twenties and thirties. Where the two lines meet is a tree, fat and dark and with a canopy that hangs just a foot from the ground, one that was everywhere in San Francisco and which most people confuse with a pine. Actually, it’s a Pacific yew, which you can tell by the little red berries it litters everywhere. I know my trees. My mother always said the way we show our affection for life is in our ability to name it. I would say she’s right about that, although I can’t say my botanical interests were so loftily motivated. If you are a boy without a door that closes, you quickly find and love any place that might hide you. The Pacific yew, fate bless it, gave me that.
In the first line of people, the sameness is shocking, and I don’t just mean the starched epaulets and built-in belts that cut just under their ribs and the rounded helmets strapped on at the same one-hundred-and-twenty-degree angle. I mean the faces and the postures and the way they hold their guns, which I have to say seems gentle, the elbow a little loose to accommodate the length of the rifle as it crosses the torso. There can’t be some military dictum on how to arrange your face, but in this photo the twenty sets of lips are identical, all performing something of an underbite, all looking like they’re keeping something secret behind that lip, a match or a penny. Ditto the forehead, creaseless, and the stare, a kind that has always made me nervous, one that remains firmly on the line of horizon. They’re all white, of course, all of them with their feet spread just wider than their frames and one cocked back, none of them obviously deviating from a general mold of five ten and a hundred and sixty.
The other line is another story totally, faces and postures as different as they come. One bearded man, a head taller than everybody—whom I remember as having some trail mix in his pocket that he kept offering the Guardsmen in a peculiar kind of taunt, saying, Time for a snack, boys?—is in the middle of a leap, has both fingers pointed and a knee raised almost high enough to clear a nipple. The woman behind him, masked in sunglasses and a cut-off pullover sweatshirt, is rooted in her feet and hips but with her torso flown forward and her curled tongue a millimeter away from licking one in the row of barrels. Shin’ya, a friend of my mother’s who once took me to Japantown and bought me wooden sandals so beautiful I could never wear them, is there in that line, too. Her inquiring look coming up through her lashes, her hair falling down a dress I would remember even if it weren’t for that photo—empire waisted and powder blue and always dirty around the floor-length hem. She was the one who helped me gather the flowers, that morning. My mother didn’t attend any protests by then, thought of them as a waste.
I’m the boy, first in the line opposite the guard, with the chrysanthemums—they were white and purple—placing the stems in the guns. It surfaces every few years, the cover of some anthology. There are some secrets to the image, some undersides that would belie the message it sent of an American child demonstrating on behalf of other children, or maybe just a boy focused on keeping thirty of a million guns from going off.
I was angry with my mother when I woke up that day, for reasons I can’t remember now, although I could provide you with a litany of possibilities and past offenses. The time she gave my cot to a fucked-up vet whose fetid piss I never got out, the money I’d set aside over months for the revised edition of Birds Over America that she took from my duct-taped wallet and spent on brown rice and vegetables for fifteen people I’d never seen before. Shin’ya knew this and had invited me for a walk and to this protest in a way that felt adult, not like she was obviating a mother-son conflict as a favor to both of us but like she took real interest in me as an individual. I wasn’t the twelve-year-old son of a woman whose politics she admired but a boy who could tell her what he’d learned, and while we walked in Golden Gate Park, she listening to me talk about the native and nonnative plants, I thought we might look like lovers. I was so emboldened by this that when we ran into a friend of hers, a man who said how long has it been six months and kissed her on the mouth, I accepted the mushrooms he offered shortly thereafter with a temerity that was unlike me. I was a kid who had once, when we had first arrived in the country, slept in a wolf costume mask for a week, comforted by the idea that in my sleep I would not be recognized. We ate them with some walnut bread Shin’ya pulled from her loose-knit white yarn purse—an object I would fixate on when I peaked—and a bar of chocolate the man, who introduced himself as Larry, a.k.a. Soft Serve, a.k.a. Cuttlefish, kept in his front pocket for occasions such as these.
It’s certain you wouldn’t touch them, so I guess I’ll tell you how drugs like those bring about a kind of splitting, unrivaled in my sober life—a division of the world into what we can afford and what we cannot, what we wish to understand and refuse to consider. Colors deepened around me, yes, and I saw into the root systems of trees and how far down the stems of the lily pads in those turbid ponds reached, but more so I became aware of my ability to instantly accept or reject. I loved Shin’ya, her mouth that was parted in surprise or disgust more often than not, the cut of her dress, empire waist as I said, which made her movement seem invisible, not related to a body. Also the copses of eucalyptus and a toddler running across a sandy path with a ball held way aloft in his hand, also the Victorian greenhouse that housed the Conservatory of Flowers, because the oxidizing copper detail made sense to me, the depth and microscopic dynamism of it. Then there were the things I hated, occurring to me as enemies the moment I saw them: The stone archways that cut through hills, five degrees cooler and host to a library of urine smells. Larry, who asked me how I was doing, little man, how I was feeling, once a minute. I remember that I couldn’t look at my sweatshirt, something I’d worn almost every day for weeks—San Francisco is so much colder than it looks in photos—because the stains there, usually imperceptible, the coffee I’d started to drink and the plain chicken broth I sometimes had for lunch and the beer somebody’d spilled on me halfway through his argument with Annabelle, were suddenly vivid. Overlapping, layered by age and intensity, sallow and mottled and distended, they were a loud billboard of the things that frightened me about my life, how dirty it was, how much it was changed each day by how many different people. You’ll notice I’m bare armed in that photo, though everyone else has the benefit of some suede or flannel, and there’s a reason for that. I had abandoned that sweatshirt an hour before, making a sound of such relief that it delighted Shin’ya, and she followed me giggling as we ran from it. It was after that I picked the flowers, apologizing loudly to each stalk I picked.
That we made it to that protest at all is a shock to me. When we first lined up I could not look at those men in uniforms. I believed that my thinking and seeing had been altered permanently, that I would always be the prey of arches and clocks, bearded men and mirrors.
I don’t remember the photographer being there at all. What I remember is seeing the row of barrels, all at the same level, and they were marked very clearly to me as being on the wrong side of the binary that the whole world had become, a string of horrible mouths that were starving but refused to eat. I should say that at this moment my fear was at its zenith. Each of my ribs felt distinct, not part of a system, ready to collapse at any second. My underwear, which had rockets on the elastic hem, some bizarre bid to any remaining childhood my mother had chosen for me, was ruined with piss. It occurred to me then that there was something I needed to be doing, and I loped up to the first gun and removed a stalk from the ragged bouquet in my hand and slipped it in, making sure the petals were flush with the rim, and then I made my way down the line. When I ran out of flowers, a wrist with bells around it appeared with more.
The image itself is so comforting that for a long time I wanted to believe what it said, that here was a boy making himself clear about the country he wanted, a child turning a weapon into something else. But if I look closely at it, the deliberate way my hair was arranged to block the periphery I was too afraid to see, the hipbones that shouldn’t have been exposed in that forty-degree weather, I know what was captured there was a plea, simple and private, to slide down that time in a way I could bear. I’ve never told anyone this, because I like the illusion better and I wouldn’t want to take it from the people who might have been moved by it.
A part of me can’t believe I’m on my way back, and another knows it was inevitable. Have you ever spent any time in Northern California? It’s almost always too cold to swim, but people still arrange their lives around the ocean. That you’ll never read these letters has become a comfort to me. I can thank you for that, at least. I hope you’re sleeping well, dreaming easy.
Yours,
Wright