Murph, you closed your last letter with words that have stayed with me—about the small heaven we can make of our memories. I think that’s what we are doing here, the three of us.

That afternoon on the Nooksack River together, it was lost to me. And it all came back just by telling it, telling it to you both who were there. It was not like the Pensieve; writing it did not remove it from my mind, or lessen it. Telling it resurrected the memory and gave it new, larger life inside me.

I sense some similar magic in the faint image from your past, Wuck, coming into startling texture in your telling: your young hand on Big Red’s bristly coat under the open Oklahoma sky. It’s as if all three of us could suddenly feel that heat, that immense spine under our fingers as we read along with you. What a small heaven we can make together.

That’s what propels me to return to this document with you both, through these months of suffering, this blur of week after week.

You contrasted the memory-tending, Murph, with what you called the “hell of wasted years.” Maybe that’s why I’m slow to write my letters now: I’ve turned a corner from the small heaven of that sepia afternoon with you friends on the river to a blindingly recent chapter of my life I can surely summarize as a hell of wasted years. I can’t ignore this sharp contrast now, in the writing; there is no joy in the telling of what’s to come, just ugliness and sadness, blow by blow.

But sometimes that’s what we have to do.

This last month, actually, I’ve been doing exactly that with gas station surveillance footage: three police officers beating the shit out of another man—a friend of mine, Jesus—now wrongly in jail and facing life in prison for assaulting these same officers. I’ve been working with the public defender and a videographer friend of mine to slow down the grainy, uncut record of that gray January morning, adding captions and repeating frames, literally recounting their blue punches to my friend’s brown face, their knees to his stomach, their tasing of his pinned body atop the wet asphalt. Blow by blow. I began doing this when the defense attorney said the undoctored footage did little to move the prosecutors. “They’re all cop-lovers,” the defender told me over Zoom, “who only see in this footage a Mexican guy <quote-01>resisting arrest<quote-01>. They don’t see what we see.” <quote-02>Interpretation—as New Criticism made fashionable during the last century—is as important as the artifact itself<quote-02>. So when I angrily recounted over the Zoom call my own blow by blow, how I saw it all go down—naming what was already visible and threatening to have my friend put the footage online to pressure the prosecutors’ office—the defender cut me off with a smile: “A video like that would actually be very helpful for when I next meet with the prosecutors.” So we got to work.

A week later, these same prosecutors agreed to lower the charges and give my friend time served; he will be out with his kids in a few weeks instead of facing decades more in federal prison on a <quote-03>third strike<quote-03>. So while I’m weary of slowing down the tapes, I am also convinced of how necessary this corrective is to combat denial.

So.

The Tuesday after you guys left Seattle, the young woman sat down in my office at the Presbyterian Church, took a deep breath, and said she didn’t know where to start. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble or break up our ministry, but she felt guilty, she said, afraid. She feared also that I wouldn’t believe her, “Cuz I know you and Lulo are so tight. Everyone knows you’re best friends and that you love him. So I thought it’d just be easier if I show you the text messages.” Time slowed to a crawl as she slid her phone across the boardroom table; I knew this was where my life would pivot.

“Scroll to the top,” she said. I tried. It kept going—swipe, swipe, swipe—the colors and bubbles and photos blurring like the spinning reels of a broken slot machine. “We’ve been having an affair pretty much since the day we met, since that day six months ago in this same office when I came to talk about us helping Gavin work on his release plans. Lulo got my number from you, probably told you it was about helping Gavin more. But it wasn’t about Gavin.”

I nodded that I was listening fully, not dismissing anything she said, but told her that I would need some time to read through the texts, that I could get her some coffee or water or something while she waited. “No, I’ll just sit here. It’s ok. It’s nice to be in a place that’s just quiet, you know?”

Maybe I nodded for her sake before <quote-04>losing myself in the text history<quote-04>. What began as shitty and shameless flirting advanced quickly into first then second rendezvous before descending into a toxic dance of accusations, threats, and bullying, all of which spiraled into descriptions of and demands for sexual favors Lulo expected and then afterwards recounted with degrading bravado.

I’d stood proudly by Lulo at his wedding a year earlier, named him a godfather at Abram’s baptism that same year.

I kept scrolling. I saw him threaten to hurt her brother for interfering in their fights, exude a crude menace I hadn’t seen from him in a decade. Time and time again he cussed her out, called her fucked up things, warned her against infidelity, told her he’d sent homies over to her apartment to monitor her driveway. He named homies our ministry had been serving for some time, guys I thought he was helping, mentoring. They’d become Lulo's pawns. I’m not sure if they saw the ministry as a cover or if they’d naturally submitted to the quid pro quo of the streets: the homie Lulo helped me out with my fines and drivers’ license, and so I got his back. Whatever he asks me to do, I’m down.

He laughed—“ha ha ha”—when she hinted at “telling Chris.” He wrote that I, Chris, would never believe a “dumbass bitch” like her,  that I knew not to believe drug addicts and whores and their gossip, and that I’d never agree to meet up with a woman one-on-one, anyway. <quote-05>“I know chris.”<quote-05>

To scroll through six months of text history is to follow a condensed, shorthand artifact of a relationship, especially a relationship without abundant time in one another’s presence. In fifteen minutes of scrolling, the relationship went to darker and darker places, and the downward momentum of the sprawling screen carried me with it.

This wasn’t just an affair—a supreme fuckup in his personal life, a betrayal of his wife and kids—but a direct abuse of his ministry position: the co-executive director of a widely trusted nonprofit organization in the Pacific Northwest moving in on the girlfriend of a prisoner he served, a man who trusted him to care for his fragile new life and networks through reentry. Esther then told me how Lulo <quote-06>forced her to dump Gavin<quote-06>, how he wrote a letter to him saying, “haha i fucked your bitch,” and told him to stay away from Underground Ministries and the One Parish One Prisoner team that had already begun writing him.

More than all that—for me, at least—was the level of long-game duplicity I’d only seen in movies. This wasn’t my friend, this mind exposed in digital evidence here. Not the thoughtful guy who prayed for homies in parking lots with me, who begged me to keep talking to him when our airplanes lifted off—“like you did on phone calls when I was in the hole.” This manipulative and slimy asshole in the text thread wasn’t the guy I saw six days a week for the last four years since his release. This was a separate life he’d maintained, an old part of himself that must have grown back like a weed over the years, something he’d kept private—a relapse that would never show up on a UA, an addiction that wouldn’t obviously impair him like drinking or meth. Those relapses I know how to handle. Usually guys withdraw suddenly, stop answering their phones. After months of silence I get a call from jail, their voice sheepish, hoping I won’t hate them.

This, as you both might guess, would play out much differently.

The woman across from me was anxious now as I looked up and returned her phone. She told me she’d asked to meet this week because she knew Lulo was out of town, with his family on vacation. She said he’d threatened to hurt her brother if she told anyone or tried to leave town. I told her we’d take this very, very seriously, and that I’d need to consult with our advisors before I knew what the most appropriate first step was.

She said she felt so guilty, that she didn’t want to ruin his life. I assured her that he was a grown man, that he was ruining his own life, and that it took courage for her to come forward. I told her that her safety was important to us, that we’d make it a priority in discerning how to first approach Lulo.

All of this I managed with just part of my brain, one hand on the professional wheel. Inside, however, I was already off the cliff, falling. Our work was done. It was only a matter of time before everything was wreckage and flame. I felt like a car freefalling in slow motion on a movie screen. It was a stillness, a numb recognition of what was to come.

“But I just don’t think he should get away with shit like this, either,” she said. “Like what happens with pastors when they do shit, and everybody covers it up and makes it no big deal and moves on. I mean, I know I fucked up and it’s my fault too, but I’m not telling the whole world I’m a leader of a fucking ministry, trying to help people and asking for money, you know?”

I said she was right and told her she had my word: this was not going to be brushed under the rug. I needed to talk to Lulo first, I said, but assured her all of this would come before the board.

As I spoke, though, I realized that I wouldn’t have a chance to have it out privately with Lulo, at least not here in Washington, for over three weeks. That very Friday, I was flying down to LA to meet up with Lulo for an annual Homeboy Industries gathering, but he’d be staying with family and I with different members of our organization. What’s more, after the third day of the conference, I’d be leaving the keynote wrap-up early to catch a flight bound for Tokyo—a trip my dad and I had planned over the last two years, a chance to visit the land of his childhood now that I had my own son and had begun writing about the worlds that made the men I knew.

I didn’t want to put my nightmare in motion only to pretend I could pause it and have it wait for me while I toured Japan with my dad.

I kept scrolling through my calendar, looking for <quote-07>a date when I could really talk with Lulo<quote-07>, so that Esther could measure her anxiety and secrecy against a trusted timeline. Alas, the day after I was slated to return from Japan, I’d be getting on another flight to southern Utah for our annual fly-fishing retreat with longtime supporters and men just out of prison.

This miraculous bit of scheduling—months of painstaking negotiation like fitting Tetris pieces on my late summer calendar—was now for naught. These three vouchsafed weeks previously the source of great anticipation had now become the opposite: a cruel gauntlet to somehow endure, an interval carrying terrible new meaning I couldn’t disclose until I got to the other side, to where I could finally return to this office with Lulo and put it all on the table. Just us.

I gave her the date. She said it would work, that it would give her time to pack her things. She wanted to move out of the area. She knew he would find ways to make her life hell, to turn everyone she knew against her. She also wanted to try and get some money back from him first. That’s when she first told me about the monetary favors he’d given her, money Underground Ministries had been advancing him to help his family during some supposedly lean months. Eventually, she said, he’d started demanding loans from her. He owed her a thousand bucks or so that she’d need before she could move.

I told her we’d be in touch in a day or two and walked her to the parking lot, as professional as a career diplomat.

I wonder now if I could have pulled the trigger right then and there, called Lulo in the middle of his vacation with his family. Or could I have pulled him aside during the Homeboy conference, the rest of his family vacation and my trip to Japan be damned? Could I have simply skipped Utah? Should I have been so considerate of Lulo's feelings? Would it have been unfair to those whose flights we’d purchased to California, to Utah? <quote-08>I knew, at least, that I couldn’t cancel on my dad<quote-08>, ruin a trip he’d spent eight months assembling in emails and phone calls to childhood friends. I suppose I could have immediately taken it all to the board, sure, but I knew I’d lose <quote-09>what trust I had left with Lulo<quote-09> if I didn’t speak with him first. And that card, my fidelity to him, despite his devastation of my trust, was the only chance I had of bringing my fucked up friend out of defensiveness and into possibly cleaning up this mess with me and his family, with the extended circle of homies in prison, with other churches in the state, and with the supporters far and wide who trusted us. His shame, his insecurity, his hope—these comprised the fragile soul-chemistry inside him that would either detonate like a bomb or resolve into the difficult sweetness of repentance and repair, our trade and craft—supposedly.

At the time I thought I could manage it. I thought I could hold the chaos somewhere inside myself for three of the most intense weeks of my adult life—hold it in and hold it tight. Of course, this was just the beginning of my mental health adventure over the <quote-10>next eight months<quote-10>.

I thought to call you, Wuck, at some point in Japan, and then in the middle of a meadow in Utah alongside an oxbowing stream of wild brown trout, to ask you what panic attacks were like. If that’s what I was experiencing, why I was having trouble breathing. You were the only friend from my past who had admitted to having those things—<quote-11>other than Lulo, calling me from solitary confinement<quote-11>.

I was so afraid of losing the man I thought had become my best friend. So afraid he would turn on me, a reality far more painful than losing a coworker or some supporters.

I can’t help but remember that stunt some of the guys pulled off at the cabin during my bachelor week—pretending to erupt into a fight serious enough to upend not only our last day together at the cabin but possibly the entire wedding. I’d left early in the morning, I remember, to knock out some wedding chores, and when I returned, Doug and Andy convinced me <quote-12>that a handful of the guys were flying home early<quote-12> (Murph, I know you were asleep through it all, and that you, Wuck, were not a major protagonist in the elaborate charade, which is odd, since you’re the only career actor in that group) and that more drama was on tap.

When Andy finally broke into laughter—after I’d pried his and Ramon’s bodies off each other, after I’d chased Doug out into the fields to (now famously) beg that he please let his tenderness rise and not fuck up my entire wedding by being his old meathead-asshole-self—when all you guys came around me in the driveway as I collapsed onto the ground, it felt like an answer to a prayer: that the nightmare suddenly end, that I wake up and everyone love each other. Andy—sweating and obscene and violent just seconds before—suddenly breaking character, suddenly flashing me his big sheepish grin: that smile was like the white horse that ended the <quote-13>apocalypse<quote-13>.

The next day at the rehearsal dinner, Murph, your mom said she heard what those boys had done to me, that she was so sorry. I just laughed. I was elated. The resolve had been euphoric. And in some odd way it felt kinda thoughtful: my friends—from childhood in Upland, from college in Berkeley, from gang outreach in the Skagit Valley—had all come together and fooled me so well because, in the end, they knew me so <quote-14>well<quote-14>.

My friends, all of them, know how gullible I am. They know how much I cherish them, how much I yearn to bring my worlds together, to—in shepherding fashion—create new communion, collar and pews or not. They knew I would flip out, take on peacemaking negotiator intensity. <quote-15>There is a gift in being lampooned well, to have your friends know you better than you know yourself<quote-15>.

It’s that safety I now return to, writing you both here.

It’s only in that safety that I can slow down the footage now, find sanity in annotating the blow-by-blow. It’s certainly better than hastily interpreting my feeble self-defense—like my friend at the gas station—as the problem.

I’m ashamed to admit that part of me—deep in my body, I feel it now—is still waiting for that euphoric resolve, where Lulo and the guys in prison who threatened me in the weeks that followed, where Ramon who defended me, where Esther and Gavin and our board members and our supporters, where Lulo's wife and his daughter Corita and Rachel and Abram all suddenly appear and laugh and surround me, guilty that the joke went a little too far. And we’d all go inside and have pancakes and continue on with our lives and vows as <quote-16>before<quote-16>.

I can only locate that desire buried somewhere inside me because I’m writing this to two friends who know the story of the happier cabin charade. Shared memory. It envelops me now, like a familiar blanket, like something real I can hold onto, something I can unfold and spread out over the shivering places inside, something I can use to tuck myself in. Like I do Abram before he snuggles into the warmth of his comforter for the long night ahead.

Remember that song you played for me, Wuck, the one you wrote a decade or so ago in New York, the one you played for me in your dad’s pickup on our way to dinner that Guy Night?

I got a close-knit group of guys back out west

You know that some have done better than others

I got you asking me what it is that holds us together

I said the blanket takes the shape that it covers

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