Anyway, despite all the madness, it’s good to hear from you. It kills me to know what you’re going through. I know for your family’s sake you’ve got to do what you’re doing, but I want you to know that a lot of guys who’ve come back from Nam are against the war. You’re in good company.

In the meantime, I think you’re totally justified in trying to save your own ass. I can’t help feeling guilty that you’re over there risking your life and I’m not. In high school I knew that things could be unfair. That fat cats benefitted unduly while workers suffered. But it was all kind of theoretical. It feels a hell of a lot more personal now.

All I can say is, try to stay safe, my friend.

Lucas

A few summers ago, when I started working at the bulk-mail company, I was the owner’s long-haired hippie freak son, on my feet eight hours a day running an envelope-insertion machine alongside the oppressed working class: high-school dropouts, minorities, even a few ex-cons.

No one spoke to me. I assumed they figured that if they hassled me it might get them fired. Most of them weren’t only from a different socioeconomic class but from another generation. Even being three or four years older than me meant they’d grown up as hoods, greasers, or jocks, listening to Elvis, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers instead of Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, and acid rock.

There was one guy around my age. Pale, thin, and slightly built, he wore his dirty-blond hair in a greaser’s combed-back pompadour and always had a cigarette parked above his right ear. He ran a machine a couple of rows over from me, but I rarely saw him anywhere else on the property.

It took about a month to realize that he was actively avoiding me. A sandwich truck swings by four times a day — breakfast, midmorning, lunchtime, midafternoon — to sell coffee, sandwiches, and snacks. Those are the only times employees have a chance to mix. But if pompadour guy saw me near the food truck, he went in another direction. The same thing happened at the start and end of the day when we lined up to punch in/out at the time clock. One minute he’d be in line. The next minute, vanished.

Why was he avoiding me?

The answer came one afternoon during snack break. I caught a glimpse of him slipping out a door that led to the shed behind the building, where old insertion machines, spare parts, and mail bins are stored. I decided to follow. Out back, there was no sign of him, just the tall barbed-wire fence that surrounds the property. I stood there for a moment, puzzled, then heard coughing and saw a puff of smoke drift out from behind the shed.