A true story about America

As a teenager, bouts of loneliness would surely have sent me deep into the world of cyberspace had I owned a computer or been able to connect to the internet. Growing up in Israel in the eighties and nineties was a form of time travel; the generational gap between our newly born country and the world around it entreasured us with a childhood of single-station television, penny bubblegum that unwrapped to reveal a prized sticker and apricot seeds as substitutes for marbles in the sandy back yard of our elementary school, all before Israel caught up with the west and introduced it under the exclamatory heading; “America!”.

During a family vacation to visit relatives in Los Angeles my parents left me to spend a few hours at a comic book store on sunny Melrose, another marvel that hadn’t made it to Israel yet. On a rickety display stand near the store’s entrance, stacked mostly with flyers by young artists in search of work or hopeful bands in search of drummers and bass players, I found a six page newsletter printed on brown paper that immediately caught my attention. It was an international pen-pal newsletter. There were two or three editorials and testimonials on the front page which I skimmed over, and the remaining pages were devoted to a mosaic of classified ads by people seeking to write and be written to. I folded the newsletter over so many times in a nervous rush it had become as thick as a paperback novel. I hid it in my pants and carried it around for the rest of our trip to America.

A week or so later, behind the safely shut door of my room in Israel, I lay on my bed and unfolded the newsletter. I carefully inspected each classified ad in search of the one that would be right for me. I would know it when I saw it. A few things were as clear as truth to me: I would be writing my guts out, giving nothing but reality at its cruelest. I would only be able to write this way to a girl; males were out of the question. She would have to be older than I was, so sixteen at the youngest, but no older than twenty, an age still unimaginably old. I needed to feel drawn to her name; it had to flow out of the word ‘Dear’ in a manner that left no room for doubt. And she had to be from America.

I’d finally found her: Holly from Kansas. She’d been one of the few to add words of physical description to her ad; she was a nineteen-year-old redhead interested in love and the narrative of life. I composed a short, hand-written letter and took great pleasure in every step of the process; in copying her address onto the envelope, in licking the stamp on and the envelope shut, in walking to the nearest drop-off box and in releasing the letter into it. But the most exciting thing by far was finding a letter addressed to me awaiting my fingers on the dining room table as I walked in home from school. It was something I could hold, sense, smell, read and reread; paper and ink that had seen careful care and made their way to me from America.

Holly from Kansas had become infatuated with my writing based on my first short letter, which had been mailed by a teenager all the way in exotic Israel and spelled out in perfect English. Her love only deepened with every confession I sent. She reciprocated with a stream of compliments about how special I was, how mature beyond my years, and then told me about herself. She was dating a thirty-one year old mechanic from her town by the name of Keith, who was treating her well. He was married, but the divorce was only a matter of time. They hadn’t had sex yet, at least not intercourse. “Sex is a very special thing for a woman,” she wrote in her mature, nineteen-year-old wisdom. I didn’t mind the existence of this Keith, in fact I felt I was getting the better end of the deal. He was living out a humdrum existence with Holly in Kansas, knowing nothing of her deepest feelings. Those were reserved for me. After a few letters Holly politely requested that I send her a photograph or two of myself. I chose the most flattering, natural pictures I could find and included them in my next letter to America.

In her response she fawned over me as if I was a puppy, I was “that cute!”. I rummaged through the envelope and found that she’d enclosed a picture of her own. It was one of those small highschool yearbook portraits that had been taken against a blue marble-textured backdrop and featured Holly all made up and smiling, her attention directed unnaturally to the side. My stomach dropped. Her smile was an insecure grimace of sharpened teeth. Her pebble eyes squinted helplessly from within the mounds of flesh that were her face. My Holly from Kansas was big, fat and ugly.

I couldn’t bear the implications of that image, that those beady eyes had been lapping up my impassioned words and that those obese fingers, intertwined just below the photograph’s frame, had been responsible for the delicately cursive writing I’d waited weeks at a time to study. I would ascribe my next actions to a piercing clarity were they not so erratic and frantic. I ran out to make sure that my house was empty, clawed into every letter she’d ever written to me and bunched them all into a ball, then stuffed it in my wastebasket and lit it on fire.

My breath of relief was short lived; my lungs filled with smoke. In my impulsiveness I hadn’t given a moment’s consideration to the fact that I’d stuffed burning papers into a wicker basket. It was aflame. I had to kick it aside to jump out of the room. By the time I’d drowned the flames out the house had filled with thick, smelly smoke, and a dark brown tear-shape had been scorched onto the outside of my door. I did my best to air out the place before my parents returned, and had my door propped uncharacteristically wide open to hide the stain. It was the first and only time in my life that I had ever held my door open to hide something.

When my parents returned they lifted their heads and sniffed the air with furrowed brows. The smoke had cleared but the stench remained, and I heard my father say “The air conditioner is acting up again. We have to get someone to take a look at it.” He came up to my room and said “Don’t turn on the air conditioner for a while, something’s wrong with it. It smells funny.” He took a few steps away, then stepped back and knocked on my open door. “What?” I asked nervously. “They’re coming tomorrow to put in a hardwood floor and new doors for you and your brother’s room. It’s a few days of work, so you’re going to have to be without a door for a few days.”

Normally that would have been horrible news; the idea of spending days with no door to my room made me shudder in nakedness. Instead I felt fantastically lucky. I would wipe the slate clean, erase any evidence of Holly ever having existed and, in a few days, have a new door, one that I would guard with extra care and never allow another American fantasy through it, not if I could help it.