He Hit the Wall and It Disappeared

Peter S. 1945-2025

I met Peter some years ago, before the pandemic, when we both volunteered at Catholic Charities.  I can’t remember how we struck up a conversation, but we had many things in common, including an interest in writing, and decided to get together.  He lived in Marshall, a small town about thirty minutes from Asheville, and one of the great pleasures of seeing him was visiting that place (which was devastated last year by Helene, though his property was okay).  I got in touch a few weeks ago to explain why he hadn’t heard from me sooner this summer, because we’ve been looking after my brother-in-law, who’s been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.

Peter expressed his sympathy and let me know he’d been having some struggles with cancer himself.  He’d had a recurrence of his own prostate cancer, then was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer; he’d had extensive treatment and needed some time to recover before he had the strength to get together.  I hoped our summer stay wouldn’t end before he was feeling better.  But the next e-mail I got, a couple of weeks later, was from his wife, who told me he’d come down with pneumonia because of his treatment, and had died the day before.  I’d known that was possible, but it came as a shock.

I’d never been to Marshall before I met Peter.  It was like driving into the past, I drove alongside a beautiful, shaded rushing stream, then along a major river, into a tiny town with a Main Street of two lanes, with free parking places all over the place, most of them still available.  There was a bakery with good muffins, and a diner across the street where Peter could get breakfast (I would have eaten breakfast four hours before).  Either place was fine for talking.  The mornings were quiet, and nobody was trying to get us out of there.

The last couple of times we met, last summer, I would park and wait outside.  After a while I would see Peter’s lone slender figure walking down the sidewalk, bent a little to one side, walking slowly.

It was uncanny how many physical locales we had in common.   My primary home is in Durham; he had lived there for a number of years.  I grew up in Pittsburgh; he had lived there for a while and knew the city well.  The same with Cambridge; I had lived there when my wife was in grad school, and he’d lived and worked there for years.  We knew all the same baseball players from our youth (though he was a New York guy and rooted for the Giants; I was a Pirates fan).  And of course he had lived for some time up here in the mountains, and came to Asheville often.

He had a passionate interest in writing, especially poetry—he gave me a chap book of his poems—and also wrote stories.  He not only read the New Yorker’s stories religiously; he listened to the author read them, and listened to any explanation they gave about the background of the pieces.  He didn’t read as widely as I did because (I think) he was dyslexic, and reading was difficult for him.  But we had lots to talk about, writing, local writers, workshops he’d been to.  He’d gone to a writing workshop as recently as last year.

He’d grown up nominally Jewish, though I don’t believe his family practiced a religion.  He now considered himself Catholic, and attended Mass regularly.  He also did various kinds of outreach; he didn’t just work for Catholic Charities, but also went out and visited folks on the margin as part of a Catholic outreach organization.  He spent a lot of his time doing such work when I first knew him.

He’d grown up in a working-class family in New York, and his father had been abusive, beating him up regularly.  He suffered from PTSD from that experience, and self-medicated with drinking and various drugs.  He was a major alcoholic when he drank, drinking the hard stuff (as we used to say), drinking first thing in the morning, staying drunk a lot of the time.  He apparently still functioned and worked even so.

After he’d been married for a while and had a couple of kids, then got divorced, he was sharing custody with his wife, and on one particular day he was supposed to pick up the children and realized he couldn’t.  He was too drunk, or hungover, something.  He had to call his wife and tell her—obviously, his alcoholism had been a major part of their breakup—and after he did, he was driving somewhere and it was as if he drove through a wall.  On one side of the wall he was an alcoholic; on the other side he never wanted to drink again.  He subsequently got help in maintaining sobriety, from a priest whom he met somewhere (it was because of that man that he eventually joined the Catholic church), and also from AA, but he had actually stopped drinking in that mysterious moment while he was driving his car.

We had that whole subject to talk about, addiction in general, what addiction is, why addictions compel us, what’s the alternative.  It was like talking to my friend Levi.

We also had religion, our spiritual paths, the places we’d lived, politics, baseball, human psychology, the writing workshops he had recently attended and what he had learned.  We’d start talking and one thing after another would come up, as we both—or at least as I—sat there wondering how it all happened.  At the end of those conversations, especially the ones last summer, there was a feeling that combined elation—I had really talked to someone—with a corresponding sadness: now I had to go back to daily life.  We had to make plans to get together, and there was a fair amount of driving on my part; meetings hadn’t been possible recently because of things that were going on in my life and (it turns out) his, but I always looked forward to them and hoped recently that they were right around the corner.

But they’re not.  They’re never happening again.  I miss them.