Creek Running North

The last time I saw Pete Valentic I avoided him, crossed in a hurry to the other side of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley so that I wouldn’t have to talk to him. I stepped out in front of a Datsun pickup truck, idling at the corner of Channing waiting for the light to change, and ducked past a crowd of dreadlocked, tie-dyed hacky-sack players. Pete never saw me. He just kept walking, barefoot and breeze-tossed hair, that grin of his gracing one passerby after another. He was oblivious to their reactions. I stood and watched for a moment. A young woman smiled at him, grazed his shoulder with the palm of her hand as she passed. A frat boy contracted from brow to shoulder, put out at this hippie making eye contact. He sidestepped and ducked into Mario’s Mexican Restaurant. A dog — there are always a million dogs hanging out on Telegraph — walked up to Pete, sniffed an offered hand, then leaned against his leg familiarly.

I had just talked to my father that morning, asking him to send one of my LPs out from Buffalo. The Force Of Life by The Red Star Singers, some execrable Marxist-Leninist folk music that I enjoyed back then. Dad was confused. “Your friend Pete stopped by a couple months ago, picked up all the albums you’d left here. He said they were all his.” Only a few of them were his, and rather than be embarrassed at my not returning them I was incensed that he’d taken mine as payback. As I saw him walk toward Durant I felt a twinge of remorse at avoiding him, but I let him go.

Two years before, I was crashing in Pete’s apartment in Buffalo. Susan and I were moving to Portland. She’d gone to New York to visit her parents. She’d been gone a week. The phone rang. She told me she was staying in New York for a year. She’d gotten a job and would save some cash to set us up in Oregon. I hung up.

Pete walked with me down to the shipping channel. We watched lakes freighters pull past soundlessly, the humid Buffalo night close around us. I was bereft, feeling utterly empty. He took my hand in his. At the end of the walk, I had decided to move to California.

I went to New York to say goodbye to Susan. She was mainly unavailable. I went to the big nuclear freeze demonstration, met with other draft resisters in the Village. After I’d been in New York a week, Susan invited me to a party. I went.

In that third-floor apartment on Central Park West, I was livid. Pete was there. He asked what was wrong, but he already knew. “I have to get out of here,” I said. He came with me. “I’m really trying not to be jealous,” I explained. Pete knew Susan better than I did. “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong,” he said. “She’s your fiancée, and she’s making out with other guys at a party?”

“You deserve better.”

Leaflets still swirled through the park sky from the march. We didn’t have a dollar between us. We walked from the Seventies, past Columbus Circle and Times Square, down to the Lower East Side.

A few days later I was heading west again, with someone I’d met through an NYU “riders wanted” bulletin board. She was leaving an apartment in Brooklyn Heights a few months after finding her roommate dead, a suicide. She was heading for Boulder, and from there to Idaho. We left Brooklyn late in the evening, camped illegally in the Catskills, and were just getting to western New York in her old car as the sun set. “I know someplace we can stay in Buffalo,” I said.

Pete was home, with someone he’d met in Manhattan: a sensitive-looking woman named Debbie. He confessed, in an aside, to having a crush on her. He left to go meet some friends across town. He came back and found us in bed. I am not proud of this. Pete seemed unfazed. His smile never wavered. “I’m just glad for you.”

“Better her than Susan.”

I got to Berkeley. I met Elissa, got involved, moved in with her. The rains came, then spring. We had a seder. Halfway through the haggadah, Elissa sat up with a start. “We didn’t open the door for Elijah!” I got up, went to the door, opened it. Pete was there, hand poised in mid-knock. He had a Pomeranian under one arm.

Time passed again.

I was walking home from work two weeks after I avoided Pete that day on Telegraph. Elissa had been out running, and met me half a block away from our house. “Pete’s dead.”

It had been a very bad month.

Debbie, her new boyfriend Ken and I drove down to Santa Cruz the next day. Pete had been living on the beach, and was hit by a car in nearby Watsonville while hitchhiking to a Grateful Dead show. We went to the county coroner’s office to claim his personal effects: one shoe, one sock, a backpack and a Bob Marley T-shirt. We drove to Davenport to find the people Pete had been living with. We offered them his things. They seemed remote, peculiarly unaffected. They didn’t want his stuff. I took the Marley shirt. The coroner had chuckled sympathetically when I asked about the lone shoe and sock. “Impact does strange things. He could have had that shoe tied on tight, and it still might have flown a hundred yards.”

Pete died twenty-one years ago, and I’ve only lately figured out just how much he loved me, a forehead-hitting realization. He was in love. I was clueless. Nothing would have happened, and it would have been a wedge between us. It was best I didn’t know, I suppose.

I am such an idiot.

One day during my last winter in Buffalo, Pete and I took our dogs to the river on a walk. Kudzu, my dog, was a sweet collie mix. Pete’s dog Hohner was a wolfhound mutt. His favorite toy was a firebrick: he carried it in his mouth as we walked. The Niagara River had broken up: January ice rolled past at about ten knots, seven feet down the vertical concrete wall on which we stood. Hohner, a handful at the best of times, was fascinated by the floes. “Hohner, NO!” Pete yelled, but it was too late. There was a horrific splash. The frantic dog tried again and again to pull himself up atop the ice, floating downriver at a scary clip. He weighed a hundred pounds; each berg would topple just as he climbed it, tossing him back into the deathly cold water. There was a fire crew at the end of the park, and they saw the whole thing. They sped over with ladders and grappling hooks, tried to place a ladder down into the ice. No good. They might as well have tried to walk onto a cloud.

It was the only time I ever saw Pete not smiling. We were certain we were watching the death of his dog. Kudzu was frantic, crying at the predicament her friend was in. She weighed only forty pounds, and I had to restrain her with both hands to keep her from jumping in to try to save him. Hohner had been in the water for five minutes, long enough to kill a man. And then — obviously tired of waiting for the stupid humans to figure out what they were doing — Hohner kicked off against a large block of ice, flew into the air, and locked his front paws onto the top of the wall. The firefighters grabbed handsful of paw, fur and collar. They pulled him up onto the snowbank. Hohner trotted back to his brick, picked it up. We walked back home.