Free Dispatch by Bentley Little Page A

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.
 
    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 antidemocratic 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