A Record of Contact

I was flying east to Miami to see a man I hadn’t thought about in years. My name is Cat. Below me stretched the vast, still largely unpopulated United States. Traveling that way felt like time travel. In a world this connected, when else could a person be truly alone? Strapped into a thin seat and hurled through the sky at impossible speed, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, a kind of silence settled over me—one I couldn’t find elsewhere. For a moment, the flight felt like a turning point.

The plotline of my life up to that point had been a series of busts. My father was a deadbeat. A beautiful soul with a heart of coal, my mother liked to say. In all my life, he gave me two pieces of advice: don’t go to college, and don’t read The Catcher in the Rye. Being a good son, I heeded them both.

My mother named me after Cat Stevens, which meant growing up with a name that required constant explanation. She used to wake me singing “Morning Has Broken,” her voice cracking on the high notes. The name was a gift, she said—a reminder that beauty could come from damage. I used to believe her.

I was never good at conjuring original stories. This was a problem for a child who had wanted to be a writer since he learned to read. My fatal flaw was a lack of imagination. Getting carried away in someone else’s imagination was no problem at all. Stories told by relatives or classmates, I could picture perfectly. Television and film overwhelmed me. Paintings could undo me. Books most of all.

When I read “Call me Ishmael,” I smelled salt air, seaweed, wet wood, the reek of fish markets and drying nets, barrels of salted cod and mackerel. The smoke from chimneys and coal fires drifting over the city clogged my lungs. Horses clopped and stevedores barked. The transportation was total.

Gary Paulsen gave me anxiety attacks. I fell in love with Becky Thatcher. Each picaresque character lodged itself in my DNA and surfaced later in my personality. When I tried to write the Great American Novel at thirteen, I made it fifty pages into a Civil War story before realizing I was rewriting The Red Badge of Courage.

One summer night, I confessed my frustration to my mother. She offered a solution.

“Why not write for the newspaper?” she said. “You don’t need to make up stories. You observe what’s happening and write it down as accurately as possible. You already know how to do that. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

Tempo drag was another problem. My timing was off. I entered journalism just as the profession was losing its meaning and potential. The jobs I took to keep above the poverty line and the dream alive, though fun to recount their foibles at parties, were less amusing in practice or lucrative in reward.

I have toiled in warehouses, tended bar, sold fountain pens in a mall, cold-called for the Sierra Club, wrote advertisement copy for an underwear company, served time in factories, and once ran a remote team of seventeen Filipinos at an autonomous-car company. These employers were scattered across the many corners of this country I have crossed and recrossed in search of a home for my quill and my thoughts. No great works did I create, and no fame did I annex, though many works I have created and much fame I have sought. Each day, I sank further into a hole of spiritual, artistic, and financial debt. I told myself that somewhere there was a story large enough to reverse my fortunes, if I could ever find it.

After years of roaming, I ended up back where I started. I took a writing job at my hometown paper, The Salem Standard, where I began my career, and was given an intern’s workload—high school sports scores and local human-interest pieces, many paid for by their subjects.

My timing, once again, was wrong. The paper had lost its building and stopped its print edition altogether. It survived as a ghost ship—a website and a weekly digital newsletter, delivered and mostly deleted unread. My employment status was precarious from the start.

In my role as intrepid reporter, I was tasked with covering the California High School Football Hall of Fame induction at the Rose Bowl, scheduled before a UCLA–Fresno State game. The reason for the lather was that my old high school’s fabled coach, Brad Beadle, would be inducted.

When the assignment crossed my desk, I snorted. He wasn’t a Hall of Fame father. I thought of his dark-eyed only child, Jake, my classmate since kindergarten—a cold, mysterious figure of ignominious fate and ill repute. I had no idea where he was now.

I called my mother to ask about Jake Beadle and his parents. Her memory wasn’t what it had been. Aside from recalling that his father was a football coach and his mother a sot, she had one vivid memory.

“He broke our ping-pong table,” she said.

“I don’t remember that,” I told her.

“I do. I don’t know what he was doing in the house, but I told you he was never allowed back again. That boy was trouble with a capital T.”

The moment of my introduction to Jake Beadle has long been forgotten. He had always been there, his grim specter lurking over me, but it’s hard to say what I actually knew about him. He was not a boy who could be known.

He lived on Heather Court, a few blocks from me, among leaning Victorians and mansions. His house was the only one in the neighborhood smaller than ours. His father, the coach and P.E. teacher, wore a crew cut and a painter’s-brush mustache, and was a revered, remote figure. Jake’s mother, always in velour tracksuits and heavy makeup, was a stay-at-home drunk. If we weren’t aware of her affliction in our younger days, our parents certainly were, and their opinions of Mrs. Beadle trickled down to us. She had been in not a few quaint fender benders and was infamous for the perfume of alcohol that tailed behind her swaying figure on Friday game nights. She was a happy drunk, though, and the community’s attitude toward her was generous and forgiving.

My first interactions with Jake outside of the classroom happened after school one day in the third grade. In the strange, amoebic way childhood alliances form and retreat, Jake and I were brought together at the Pony League baseball field by Mark Papagiannis, the Greek god of our middle school.

For some reason, on this day, the three of us were trying to hit rocks over the left field fence with an aluminum bat. Mark was stroking one stone after another with a liquid smooth swing, sending them soaring over the high chainlink onto the abutting train tracks. For good measure, he turned around and hit a few left-handed over the right field fence.

He handed the bat to Jake, who hit fierce line drives to the warning track, but never could hit them high enough for a home run. In my turn in the batter's box, I hit a few cans of corn that would have been fought over by the shortstop and the left fielder.

When I handed the bat back to Mark, he said, “You two should wrestle.”

I was quite a bit bigger than Jake at the time. He was a short, skinny kid, and I was in one of my periodic chunky phases. But I was no fighter.

Before I could object, Jake swung his leg at my ankles and knocked me to the ground. The next thing I knew, he was on top of me with a ferocity and an acrimony I didn’t think I deserved. My nose was bleeding, and I lacked the sort of quick thinking to do anything about my compromised position.

Apparently bored by the lack of competition, Mark said, “Alright, let’s go.”

Jake hopped off of me, and the two of them left me lying on the infield dirt in bloody confusion.

A few weeks later, Mark Papagiannis and I were in the Beadles’ living room after school for a screening of a porno Jake had stolen from his parents’ bedroom. It was my first glimpse of the coupling of man and woman, and I gagged and recoiled from the view. Jake called me a pussy, and I fled from the house. Embarrassed by my tears.

Freshman year, we sat near each other in biology. His labmate was Rachel Biel, whose good looks gave her a high social status and scared me to death. To amuse her and fortify his reputation, Jake decided to use me as a verbal punching bag.

Day after day, he abused me with the foulest terms, told obvious lies about my mother, and made a fart noise every time I took my seat. You would think such lay tactics would not impress a creature as elegant as Ms. Beal, but the insult of insults was that his methods seemed to work. She clearly enjoyed Jake’s cruelty. In my naivete, I did not understand how meanness and charisma could coexist.

Senior year, Jake was a star athlete. He was an All-Conference wide receiver for his dad’s squad, which won the state championship that year, and the starting point guard on the basketball team. To me, he had the world on a string, but when he passed me in the hall, his dark eyes fixed on me with a lusty, violent vitriol I couldn’t understand.

After graduation, Jake went to college in Arizona, and I went to work at The Salem Standard. Why fritter away four years languishing at student newspapers and fraternity parties when I could learn on the job, writing actual articles?

Rumors about Jake’s freshman year began to surface. There was talk of federal prison, of a sweeping arrest that took dozens at once. Somewhere in the story was a former mob underboss living under an assumed name in Tempe, and a son who followed him into a life of crime. Drugs were involved—ecstasy, they said—and a pool-cleaning business that wasn’t really a pool-cleaning business at all. Each retelling grew stranger, less verifiable.

The stories multiplied. There were rumors that Jake had been initiated into a white supremacist gang called the Shadow Jackals. Some said he was covered in swastika tattoos. A friend swore he was moving twenty to thirty thousand ecstasy pills a week. Others insisted he was living in a mansion, that he’d married a stripper, that he was sleeping with a mob boss’s daughter. The only detail that seemed to stick was that he hadn’t finked, and that he would be gone for years.

Whispers, legends, and lies were rampant in our hometown at the time. Coach Beadle resigned as football coach, citing a greater need to focus on teaching, which was a laugh, since all he did in gym period was roll out the balls and chew gum in the bleachers. A year later, Jake returned to town and joined the basketball team at the local junior college, as if nothing had happened.

Whatever the truth was, I never found out. Even with the benefit of hindsight and a few trade secrets of internet sleuthing, I was unable to confirm or deny Jake’s role in the conspiracy. His name appeared in the paper as part of a trafficking arrest, but the charging documents and prison records remained out of reach.

 

The last time I saw Jake in California was nearly twenty years ago, one summer when Mark Papagiannis was home from medical school and mentioned a party at the Beadles’ house.

“Sounds a little dark,” Mark said.

“We should go,” I said. “I want to see Jake.”

Mark looked at me. “Didn’t he make your life miserable all through high school?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

That wasn’t true. I was just curious. I wanted to see which parts of the rumors were true.

As everyone did back then, we came in through the backyard. A small knot of smokers stood on the cracked concrete that passed for a yard. Menacing, atonal EDM bled out through the sliding glass door into the night. Inside, at the hardwood dining table, sat Jake.

The room was thick with smoke and washed purple by black lights. Jake nodded along to the droning beat. He was shirtless, bearded, his head shaved. He wasn’t covered in tattoos, but the look still surprised me. Bored girls and jittery boys flanked him on either side, arranged like an unholy supper. A mound of marijuana sat on the table in front of him. He rolled blunts with practiced ease, one already tucked behind his ear. I didn’t recognize a single person in the room.

“Well, if it isn’t the gaywad and his pussy cat,” Jake said when he noticed us.

Mark flushed. The insult landed cleanly; he was still in the closet then. We nodded hello, smiled meekly at the strangers around Jake.

“Mind if we grab a beer?” I asked, gesturing toward the case on the table, trying to sound casual.

“Be my guest,” Jake said, smiling. Then he turned away and resumed talking to his friends, none of whom looked at us again.

Ten minutes later, sitting on the couch where I’d once been scandalized, Mark leaned over and elbowed me.

“Let’s go.”

We slipped out the front door without saying goodbye. Before he returned to school that fall, Mark told me Jake had been arrested in front of his house. Possession with intent to distribute was the charge.

 

Eventually, I pulled my hat down over my eyes and left the state for a time. I forgot Jake Beadle. Such is life in this dimension that things tend to take on a circular route. Back in my hometown, nearly twenty years later, working at the same paper and doing the same job I had done at the age of eighteen, I looked at the world crumbling around me and began to wonder how I got here.

Through the miracle of modern technology, I was able to track down Jake’s present whereabouts without much trouble. A familiar face was smirking at me in a liquid crystal display from across the country. Dressed in a sleeveless undershirt, tanned, and still with the toned body of an athlete, these many years later, something was disturbing about the image. His face mocked me.

I began to feel possessed by his story. Not in a mystical sense, but in the way certain ideas take hold and refuse to let go. I believed it might be the one I’d been waiting for—the story that would carry my voice beyond the narrow rooms I’d been speaking into, the one that would open doors and windows that had remained closed no matter how long and hard I knocked.

I booked a redeye to Miami. This would be no nostalgia trip. It was an investigation into darkness.

 

Coming from the slow, needling rain of Northern California into the sultry violence of Southern Florida, I felt a premonitory gloom settle over me. Lightning stitched the early-morning horizon above the Atlantic, illuminating clouds that looked bruised from within. I wondered what kind of person voluntarily walked into weather like this, chasing an old acquaintance across a continent for reasons he could not fully articulate.

At the off-site car rental near the Dolphin Expressway, a woman sat behind a folding table with her feet submerged in a bucket of ice, a battery-powered fan aimed at her face. She waved me toward the back of the lot without asking my name or destination. Nearby, four Russian tourists argued helplessly with a rental associate, signing contracts they clearly did not understand. Eventually, they surrendered their credit card like a white flag.

The Mustang I was given smelled of weed and artificial citrus. I put the top down and drove east, across the MacArthur Causeway, toward South Beach. The city gleamed in the aftermath of rain—palm fronds slick, asphalt steaming, neon colors sharpened by moisture. Miami struck me as a queer place.

My hotel was cheap by local standards but maintained its Art Deco dignity. The room was small, aggressively air-conditioned, and decorated with tropical florals that suggested a forced optimism. Through the thin walls, I heard a couple arguing and, nearby, the shrieks of children. I unpacked nothing.

Like any writer with a functioning nervous system, I felt the urge to delay. I showered, changed shirts, and brushed my teeth twice. Then I got back in the car and crossed the causeway again, heading inland. The sun shone, and storm clouds lay on the distant horizon.

Before leaving California, I had messaged Jake, asking if he planned to attend his father’s Hall of Fame induction. He replied quickly: No. I told him I would be in Miami for a few days and asked if he wanted to meet. Sure. When I suggested a bar or restaurant, he sent his address instead. Come by anytime. I’m always home.

 

Jake lived in Little Haiti, a neighborhood whose surfaces bore the wear of neglect and adaptation. Auto body shops and sketchy-looking cosmetic surgery offices shared walls with shuttered, graffiti-covered warehouses. Most of the signage was in Spanish. Here and there, evidence of gentrification appeared—an art gallery, a brewery—like a test balloon. The residential streets were tree-lined and shady; the homes unostentatious. I saw one free-range chicken crossing a bleached, crushed coral driveway.

Jake’s house was a flat-roofed concrete block painted a tired white with jalousie windows. I parked out front and approached the door, holding my padfolio like a shield. Old fears rose unbidden. I half-expected a childhood humiliation to be revived on contact.

The television blared inside. I knocked. Ribbons of heat hit me, sending little beads of perspiration running down my neck. Jake answered, Corona already in hand at ten in the morning. He looked exactly like his profile picture—tanned, athletic, older in the face but not the body. His eyes were unchanged. Still black. Still unreadable.

He unlocked the screen door with a flick of his finger and turned away. The house surprised me. It was sparse but clean. The terracotta tile shone. Furniture was minimal and deliberate, as if chosen to prevent accumulation rather than encourage comfort.

Jake sat on the couch, muted the television, and took a deep hit from a bong on the coffee table. The cough that followed was wet and punishing. He offered me a toke. I declined.

“Sit down, Pussy Cat,” he said.

The old nickname landed where it always had.

I sat in the armchair and asked the questions one asks when time has passed, but damage remains at the surface.

“Do you live here alone?”

            “Yep.”

            “Sure is hot out there. Do you ever get used to that?”

            “Not really.”

            It was not a promising start. Then something in him shifted. He spoke with a strange fluency, without pause, for nearly an hour. It was the strangest one-way conversation I’d ever had.

He told me he could not return to California without risking arrest. That he no longer spoke to his parents. That his father was a gaping asshole. His mother, he said, had been sweet but weak, hollowed out by alcohol and verbal abuse.

He spoke about football—how he had offered his body to it in exchange for his father’s approval. About going over the middle and getting his head split open for short yardage.

“I’ve got CTE,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s why I’m a moron.”

When I asked what he did for work, he smiled.

“I’m what they call a pool technician.”

            “Is that a euphemism?”

            “I fix and clean pools.”
            I felt the old stories stirring, the Arizona rumors, the mobbed-up pool business. Before I could ask, Jake leaned forward.

“I come from a long line of murderers, abusers, and thieves,” he said. “Cheats, sodomites, and perpetrators of incest. The name Beadle is English in origin, but it comes from a German word, Budilaz. Meant ‘to herald.’ From there, it was borrowed by the French. It became bedel. In medieval times, it crossed the North Sea and became a bydel, meaning a messenger from authority. A public messenger, a minor official dealing with petty blackhanders.”

I tried to interrupt. He waved me off.

“Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil. The vices and sins of his father and his father’s father, to the third, fourth, and five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins.”

He said it the way someone quotes a passage they’ve memorized, with conviction but no ownership.

“Who said that?”

I was waved off again.

He spoke of lineage with the authority of someone who had decided that fate was fixed. He recited family crimes like a catechism—bank robbers, rapists, child killers, addicts. He named ancient curses and modern psychology in the same breath. St. Augustine. John Locke. Burroughs. Blood.

“We’re the House of Atreus,” he said, eyes bright. “Same ending. Different century.”

A truck rattled past outside. Jake coughed again, harder this time. He took another hit.

“These are just stories,” I said.

“So are you,” he replied.

“I’ve only done one good thing with my life,” Jake said.

            “What’s that?”

            “I never had any children. As far as where I’m concerned, this thing, this evil, the branch that exists in me, dies.”

The conversation ended abruptly. Jake stood, cracked another beer, and told me it was time for him to get properly fucked up. There was no invitation to stay and no promise of continuation. I let myself out into the heat.

Two months later, he was dead.

 

Back at the beach that night, I walked until the sun began to drop and the crowds thinned. Somewhere behind me, Jake disappeared again. I had what I came for, though I didn’t yet know what to do with it.

Earlier that day, Jake had talked about Burroughs—about the idea that America was old and dirty long before anyone arrived, that the trouble was already here. Standing at the water’s edge, where the footsteps of conquistadors and Indians had long since been erased by the tide, I found myself thinking about it again. It felt less like Jake carried something in his blood and more like he’d spent his life absorbing what was around him. I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t done the same.

Jake believed he was cursed—that his family history had settled the matter before he ever had a say. I wasn’t so sure. It seemed just as possible that he’d built a story sturdy enough to live inside, one that explained his failures without asking him to examine them too closely. Blame, in that sense, offered a kind of shelter. I understood the instinct.

What troubled me most was how ordinary it all felt. Jake was not a kingpin, not a monster, not even an especially ambitious criminal. The violence, such as it was, remained mostly theoretical. Whatever harm he caused was scattered—felt in small ways, by many people, without ever coalescing into something dramatic.

In the weeks after his death, I asked around. I called former teammates, a neighbor, a man who had once hired him. The answers were consistent and prosaic. Jake had been what he said he was: a pool technician. He cleaned filters, balanced chemicals, showed up when scheduled. He sold a little weed on the side. No one seemed to know much more than that. Of the people I was able to reach, none claimed any real closeness with him. There was no dramatic second life, no secret empire. He moved through the world lightly. When he died, there was little to reconcile.

He had died alone in his apartment; the details were commonplace. Just a body and the administrative language that follows.

 

I returned home from that trip with notes I would never fully organize. Pages of names and half-answers, a handful of quotes, the residue of a conversation that had felt, at the time, momentous. I had gone looking for something decisive—a story large enough to change the trajectory of my own life. What I brought back was stranger and less obedient. It wasn’t a scandal or an exposé; it was just an encounter.

I had the material: the flight, the monologue, the inherited curse, the house in Little Haiti, the chicken, the dead man. It seemed substantial, and yet, it resisted elevation to the remarkable. Every time I tried to enlarge it, it shrank. It seemed…ordinary.

I thought of Jake at eight, then eighteen, then forty. I could not make those versions align into anything grand. Whatever I had believed I might find in Miami had dissolved into something smaller, more stubborn.

And the story–if it even was one—remained unfinished.

Michael James Tapscott is a writer and musician in the San Francisco Bay Area.