Dear Hongtower, Epistolary Work

Dear Hongtower,

Consider this the first installment of what shall become a long, convoluted epistolary novel. You, Hongtower, will serve as my interlocutor, since I lack living ones.

Today I spent an hour and a half outside the Los Angeles County Sherrif's Twin Towers Correctional Facility, for the purposes of pursuing a story for City Beat. Matt Fleischer had asked me to stand around out there, looking to make friends, go so far as to ask someone to a drink, and then write five hundred words about it.

First I met a gaggle of loked-out Mexicans with tattoos on their heads, none of whom were old enough to go to a bar. Then I met a tatted-up "south bay peckerwood" as he insisted I refer to him in whatever story he thought I was going to write about him. Apparently, "peckerwoods" are white veteran cons who are not skinheads or Nazis (the latter two are "ideologically different"). I said "Hi, I'm a newspaper reporter," and he said, "and I'm a motherfuckin convict" so I got the impression he wasn't yet rehabilitated. He kept producing a comb, which he'd use to comb his mustache. He also had a habit of throwing his shoulders over his head convulsively. He said he'd been in and out of every joint in California since 1978, when he was 12 or 13. He and this "south-side loke" who had been in Chino for six years for possessing "very large quantities of cocaine" then proceeded to blow a lot of smoke up each others asses about how hardassed they were back in the Big House. The Mexican loke started out by telling me that my questions were weak. "I can read all this shit in a book, dogg. You should be asking: did you ever stab anybody? Did you ever start a race riot? Were you PCed up? Were you active?" he said, "Constructive criticism, dogg. It'll make your story more compelling." He acted like he was on very large quantities of cocaine. I think his criticism was germane, though.

The rest of the day I spent in the ghetto, driving the Kawasaki around Lynwood Correctional Facility, looking for a bar to which I could bring a recently-released prostitute. This effort proved a failure, as Lynwood is composed entirely of industrial ghetto.

I retired to a coffee shop come nightfall, at which I have drilled out this screed.