Letter to the Owner of 11389 Gopherwood Street

I’m writing you from the Riverside jail, Presley detention center. I’m writing you to ask your forgiveness for trespassing on your property to retrieve an old manuscript my dad wrote some time back before his untimely end in the mid 1990s. My family always told me it was placed by him in your duplex’s attic space, where we lived with Dave and Clarence from 1985 to 1996.

 I went there to the duplex on Gopherwood street in La Cosa in Riverside this past week and it looked like it always had since I left; dilapidated and, frankly, haunted.

 I have always wondered why you didn’t raze the place and sell the land for another land developer to work with. Put something nice there?

 Anyhow, I’m glad you’ve apparently just been using it for storage and hosting the occasional unhoused person because that meant that the attic was likely in the same shape as it was back in the mid 1990s.

I wouldn’t know until I got back in to the place.

Everyone in my family had told me of the fact that my dad wrote a manuscript and that he was not taking it anywhere except to show family once in a while. My uncle told me he’d left it in the attic space there.

So, I think I acted rashly when I finally entered your property without your express permission… I thought that it would be better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission. Here I am, doing exactly that.

I traveled here to La Cosa from the coast here in California - I traveled by train and thruway bus to get here at midnight a few nights ago and I watched the coastal vivacity give way to dull land and yellowing grasses and palm trees as well as Riverside’s favorite, the magnolia tree. I sighed as my old allergies came back to me with the pollen the plants are all putting out constantly as well as the smog.

Here in the pod where I sit with pen and page as I wait for your charges against me to be pressed or (hopefully) not.

Part of the reason I’m choosing to write you is to explain some of the things that went on from my traveling the from the coast back into the inland empire: the things that finally decided me on my course to the house where I used to live as a young child, the house where you let to live three generations of Peckhams; my grandfather Clarence, my dad Dave, and myself, Davin.

After getting off the train in downtown Riverside I saw the upscale district of the Mission Inn and the Cheech Marin museum where the old branch library used to be. It was midnight and I only walked outside those places. 

 In another life I might have taken pictures with my phone and saved them for later reference in recreating the architectural work in drawings, the Spanish designs and stucco with iron pickets for the fence to keep the world out and let guests take their leisure at copper green tables and chairs inside that garden.

I asked a passerby where the main branch library was and they explained that it is next to what used to be the old bus terminal. ‘If that’s the old bus terminal, where’s the new one?’ I asked more than a few people where and they said it would be completed next year.

So I rode the bus down to La Cosa and looked as we passed my uncle’s old house across the street from the 7-11 convenient store. Got off at the park I knew as Gramercy park but that had been renamed to a more patriotic sounding label like Freedom Park. Then hall where my cousin got married is now a senior center - so that’s great.

I finally began to walk around the block to my friends old house on Ensenada court, to my first elementary school - Mountain View, and then to your house on Gopherwood. I was definitely taking a trip down memory lane by visiting these old places: Ensenada court was as unassuming as it had been back in the days when my friend lived there - a middle class neighborhood all the way. My friend, Carter, lived there… he had the best collection of toys and video game.

 His parents were together for the duration of our childhood and his mother Gwen went to my father’s funeral in my place to release a balloon in my name. 

 His father, Don, saw that I needed to clean up and scrape all the dirt off of my body from my outside activity… he told me that I needed to bathe regularly and showed me how full a bath I needed in order to do that.

 I left there - thinking of all the road dirt that was on my skin currently. I thought sarcastically to my self that this was the perfect time to visit my old school where I had met Carter.

 So I walked a few more blocks to see the school where the warriors, the school’s mascot, still reigned supreme. Not much to remember there except the faintly rubbery smell of the black top.

I can recall being laid out on that black top with Carter on top of me fighting me and ready to beat my face in when I look up to see a large bird sized moth fluttering around, I must look distracted from the fight because Carter asks me ‘what?’ I point to the gigantic shiny gray moth seeming to float on the hot afternoon air and we both stop what we’re doing to follow its progress.

I’m remembering all this while standing there in front of the school where there are no classes being held apparently; looking at the concrete sign with the name of the school indented into it.

Walking away from those memories is harder than I thought it would be.

 Finally I visit my old house on Gopherwood street. Your house. I walk into the old yard and test the front door to the place. It’s locked, like it should be.

I stand there thinking of what’s going on in this neighborhood… there are McMansions all over the neighborhood now and I look at this old house thinking of why it is still here after nearly thirty years. Thinking of what to do with the knowledge that something from my past is inside there, hidden away. I decided I have to get inside.

Sir, please understand that I meant no disrespect when I entered your property that night. I didn’t have to try very hard to get inside: the window was opened easily enough - but what was difficult was the fact that you have been using the place for storage. I moved things out of the way so that I could move around and maneuver to what used to be the kitchen and finally to the entry for the attic.

 It’s good that I’m tall because if I was shorter I am sure I would have needed some kind of ladder to get inside that attic.

It was midnight and I turned on my phone’s light so that I could see the entire attic space easily enough. You haven’t been using that space for storage, apparently. I walked on the rafters and searched for any papers that might be lost around that space. It was beginning to feel fruitless when I began to think like my father for the first time in decades: if I were Dave Peckham, where might I put a manuscript that I didn’t want found easily and thrown away?

I walked to the corner of the attic and lifted up an old piece of cardboard. And there was a large stack of paper, yellowing and tattered by rodent’s attempts to eat it - but still readable.

I hid it away somewhere else, in a large ziplock bag. 

After doing that I saw that I had a visitor in what used to be the kitchen. It was a police officer looking up into the semi dark of the attic space with the bright beam of his flashlight. ‘Hey,’ he said after I lowered myself to the kitchen floor... ‘Do you mind explaining what you’re doing here?’

Apparently my explanation wasn’t enough to convince him to let me go, so he cuffed me and put me in the back of his police car. I was first to be processed in the morning - divested of my street clothes and given this orange jumper I’m wearing now. I’m hopeful you’ll forgive me and that they’ll let me leave. 

 Either way, I’m not sorry I found my dad’s old manuscript. If you see fit to press charges then I will plead guilty and accept my punishment as well as I can. If you can see your way to forgiving me, I hope you’d be willing to view that old manuscript with me.

With hope and respect,

Davin Peckham