For subscribers who believe email is dead

This particular email is about the world's first 2pac impersonator. He is not a ghost. He is very real. I found him on a Thursday morning in 2012 at an audition studio near Echo Park of Los Angeles, wearing a pair of Black Levi's and a black leather vest -- no shirt. He had a natural baldy maybe — maybe you never heard of him from his YouTube days, search him: "Josh Harraway".

I had spent part of my career as a journalist learning as much as I could about news related to Tupac Shakur, even his unclassified FBI files, so Mr. Harraway was familiar to me. At the audition, he sternly warned me about the perils of looking like the iconic rapper in LA—a moment as profound as a father-son talk, which left a deep impact on me.

It wasn't like when Sarah Paulson received a controversial six-page email from another actor critiquing her performance—an outrageous breach of professional etiquette.

Looking back, it was fate that I connected with Mr. Harraway. The chance encounter changed it all for me — well, really it was the unexpected invitation from my aunt, a talent agent in Larchmont Village. Living with her meant not only a roof over my head like Jamie Foxx in his sitcom show, but also a chance in the entertainment industry through her agency and self-submitted auditions.

On my very first day in LA, the moment I switched my phone from airplane mode, I received an email about an audition—my first chance to play 2Pac at Coachella. This is where I met Mr. Harraway, my doppelganger, a type of ghost version of yourself, one of you are the bad version the other the good — like a character in a David Lynch film, Muholland Drive.

On my way back from the audition, I turned out to be the bad one, who got into a car accident in my aunt's H2 Hummer. I tucked the other driver’s trunk into itself. I was then only allowed to drive her 2010 blue Jaguar, the one with a CD player that only played 400Hunnid by Y.G. She said, I was a perpetrator and a pedestrian who needed to walk.

So yeah, one day as I walked to the top of Runyon Canon, my fingers brushed the railing on the observation deck, then I saw an old bald man maneuvering a bicycle over the bike rack. He was brown and leathered, with half a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth. He kicked his bike stand down. He looked at me and asked if I had a daughter like it was alluded to in timeline of Drake and Kendrick Lamar's Rap Battle. I said, no. He asked what I was doing here. I told him.

"A actor, huh?" he said, dragging a puff of his joint. He pointed to a figure dangling from his bicycle seat. "You oughta check out that guy. Now there's an actor." It was a Funko Pop of Wheelchair Drake as Jimmy Brooks in Degrassi. It looked like a 1-of-1 that you'd find on an Etsy page.

He dropped his roach and stomped on it. "Go on and email him if you don't believe me."

He returned to his bike. I let go of the deck rail. It was rusty, and some of the rust came off on my fingers.

Every email is a ghost story.

I appreciate the benevolent ones like this one.

WHAT I HAVE WRITTEN here is what Richard "Dee" Perry told me in our conversation that last morning in LA -- which stretched out much longer than this email. He made a blog, a podcast, a playlist and now this newsletter. I composed the convos into narrative newsletters, in his voice, because I'm not sure anyone would believe the story if you ain't hear it in his voice.

You may not believe it anyhow and think it’s from A.I.

But ask yourself this: Have you ever emailed a no-reply email address and gotten a reply even if it's A.I.?

If so, was the email like the one sent from Email Expert Jake Gyllenhaal’s Sci-Fi drama in Source Code?