The only time I ever went to a psychic was two weeks after I heard Peter had died. The girl I was dating at the time dragged me there –Tanya, the one after Louise, before Emma, that one. Some friend of hers had recommended this psychic and, well, you know how women are. They all end up giving their money to some kind of fortune teller at some point. Idiots. Then you have us guys, what we want to know about the future, a psychic won’t tell us, like whether we’re going to get laid tonight. I was figuring my future was secure when I agreed to go.
So, we arrived at this psychic’s house, and I was surprised to see that it looked normal. No voodoo symbols on the doors or anything like that. Her name was Mary, and she seemed pretty normal too, although she was a bit of a whale, which wasn’t a surprise. We walked in the door, and she took Tanya’s hand and immediately freaked out, like she got some vibe. You could see that Tanya was buying it hook, line and sinker. Then this Mary told us to follow her into her “reading room” and I whispered to Tanya, “Somebody should harpoon that whale”. She elbowed me in the ribs. Normally she would have laughed out loud, so I could see she was all serious about this.
Mary collapsed down into an easy chair with these well-squashed green cushions. Tanya and I sat across from her, on two wooden chairs; a small table between us with a box of Kleenex, just waiting for the flood from Tanya when her Oma-Nanny showed up. And that’s when I would move in with my comforting embrace. I was going to get a lot of play of out of this one.
Mary picked up a piece of crystal and started in. That was it. No chanting, no candles. No nothing. But the weirdest thing was that she didn’t start right off with Tanya, instead she turned to me and said, “Peter is here and he wants to talk to you.”
Now, Peter had lived across the street from me growing up. We’d always been great buddies, the kind of friends that only boys who’ve seen each other pee in a puddle can be.
But, by the time I went to this so-called psychic, I hadn’t seen Peter or thought about him in years, so obviously, this woman had really screwed up on her research. Oma-Nanny was the mother-load. I didn’t believe in all this bullshit, and if I did, it wouldn’t be Peter I’d be looking for.
It’s true, we’d had some great times growing up. Our little street was at the edge of the city, jutting out into farmland and orchards on one side, and a wooded bush on the other. Most of the day you would find us up a tree somewhere. Course, more often than not, Peter was falling out of one, though he would have called it “flying out of one”, with a beach towel cape tied around his neck. He broke his arm when we were eight, “flying” out of the cherry tree at his house. We nailed boards to the limbs and made seats. That way, when we were done playing superhero, we would have some place to rest, while we ate a few cherries and launched the pits onto the roofs of the passing cars.
One of our best adventures was taking a pellet gun out to the peach orchard after dark. We would hide up in a tree and shoot the peaches’ brains out. We hated peaches – way too fuzzy, and drippy, as you soon discovered if you shot the ones above your head.
Before long the farmer would come to investigate. We would watch from up in the branches, camouflaged by the leaves, as he searched the orchard. He never thought to look up. We would have been ready if he had though and would have pelted him with his own peaches. Looser.

We were the kings of our neighborhood. People who didn’t know us thought we were brothers. I’d often wished we were. My own brother was an asshole. Peter had a way of attracting people to him. He could get away with anything; this little blonde-haired kid that all the grownups thought was so adorable. Like the time all of us kids were gathered around this construction site, where a huge, impressive backhoe was excavating a basement for a house. We were throwing a Frisbee around in the vacant lot next to it and calling out to each other in our construction worker Italian accents, “hey, Luigi, catch da Frisbee. Hey, Luigi, don’t drop it, ya pie-zann”. Then, I made the fatal mistake of attempting a fling right over the site. The Frisbee landed in the excavation with the backhoe heading straight for it. The other kids stood glaring at me while Peter just walked up to one of the workers and asked if we could have our Frisbee back. The guy, (I don’t want to say his name was Luigi, but it probably was), waved to the backhoe to stop, jumped in and got it. The next thing I know, there is Peter, the sun shining in his hair, standing triumphantly on the top of the pile of dirt, our Frisbee in his hand.
In my memory it never rained during summer vacation. Is that possible? Our summers seemed a long string of days spent outside, messing around in each other’s backyards, up to the car-banks, into the orchards and woods, until Peter’s Mom rang that old school bell she had, telling us all it was time to come home to supper, or bed, and kids screams of “coming” ringing out across the neighborhood.
We loved going to the car-banks — high, weed covered, dirt banks flanking a lane that had, once upon a time, been a train track. We’d play flag-raiders all day down there. Well, flag-raiders in the daytime; kick-the-can at night. Games of power– the hunter and the hunted. Except, Peter was never “it”. He could rig the “one potato, two potato” to end up landing on the fist of whoever he needed “it” to be, which was usually a kid named Sean. It didn’t matter how many kids there were playing, Peter would always make Sean “it”. It was an amazing sight to witness. “Sean’s-it-for-catterpit-and-doesn’t-know-how-to-get-out-of-it.” Stupid Sean, or “Poo”, as we sometimes called him. Not sure why, he was low man on the totem pole. I was just glad “it” wasn’t me. Ok, sometimes “it” was me. But “it” was never Peter.
We only had to step out of our backyards to be in the woods and orchards. Every lunch would be taken on a “hike” to our fort or out to the car-banks. Most days it was peanut butter sandwiches or peanut butter and banana. We didn’t like jam with our peanut butter. Jam was for sucks. We would head out, heads held high, our Moms secure in the knowledge that we were never far. But they had no idea what adventures we were having on our hikes.
Like the day we found the huge hole in the ground at the raspberry field and Peter convinced everyone that it was a meteor strike. Or the time we went exploring up behind the cherry orchard and found the old burned up barn where you could still hear the screams of the ghost cows that got fried into bacon there years ago. Or the day we helped the police find the robber.
Oh yeah, the bank robber. I haven’t thought about him in years. That day we’d headed out back through the fields with our usual packed lunch. We were both wearing our new “frigonelli-fruit-boots”. That’s what we called the high-top runners, just new that summer. You could run like the wind in them. So, there we were, running around in circles, chasing each other, chasing butterflies, chasing grasshoppers. The wind was blowing a blustery smell across our faces. You could almost feel it lift you from the ground as you ran.
I caught a garter snake and tried to chase Peter with it, but he got mad and called me an “auger”, so I called him a “fweeso”. See, Peter was making up a new language, so that kids from other neighborhoods wouldn’t know what we were talking about. “Auger” was a jerk; “fweeso” was a baby. Peter was working a lot of the words out, but really, I was the only one who cared to learn them. Anyway, the “auger” vs. “fweeso” debate might have gone on for a while, but just then, way off in the distance, the Cyanamid plant blew its noon horn, and we were distracted with idea the of lunch. We headed into the woods, towards our fort, but along the way met up with the robber.
I think we were both kind of surprised to find an adult in the woods. Underneath the tall trees the sky was made of leaves, and you were completely cut off from the outside world. We called it the “Rain Forest”. Every stick was a sword or gun; every tree a place to hide. We had a great fort. We’d lashed logs and sticks around a clump of trees to make walls and then up in the branches above we’d pieced a rickety platform together that couldn’t hold more than two people at a time. And, next to the fort ran a creek that had all sorts of great bugs. It was here that I succumbed to a nasty double dog dare and had to eat muddy creek water, though Peter relented enough to mix it with Kool-Aid.
So, getting back to the robber, there he was in our woods. I guess he’d been watching us for a while before we noticed him. It took us by surprise to see a guy standing there, staring at us. He was all dressed up formal like, in a suit, but with a bright red scarf around his throat, even though it was pretty warm. He told us he had his own fort in the woods, and he invited us to follow him. We were mesmerized. Here was a guy that lived in the woods! Our dream life!
He took us to where the creek ran down into a gully that was hidden from view. I could see a kind of lean-to, basically a bunch of branches piled against the tree. It was pretty small so he said we would have to take turns checking it out.
Oh, yeah, and then he had said we would have a campfire and roast some marshmallows, so I headed off to collect some wood. Of course, he took Peter down first. Peter always got to go first.
Anyway, that was about the extent of it. I don’t recall we ever did have that campfire. Next thing I knew, Peter was back, wearing the guy’s scarf around his throat and all red in the face, like he was angry about something. The guy said I should come down into his fort with him now. But he told me to get the scarf from Peter, who didn’t look at me when he handed it over.
It must have been a pretty sad excuse for a fort because I don’t really remember it. The last thing I remember is the guy putting his hand on my shoulder, in that fatherly way that grown-ups always think is endearing to kids and looking like he was just about to tell me some amazing story, when he suddenly cocked his head, like he’d heard something, and said we had to go. Then he walked away, into the woods.
I grabbed Peter and we took off. We got out to the dirt road that ran through the woods and were heading back to our street when, all of a sudden, coming around the bend were a bunch of cops. We stopped dead in our tracks, watching them approach, and Peter grabbed my arm, his face all contorted and hissed, “don’t tell them”. It was then that I realized that the guy’s scarf was tied around my wrist. I took it off and threw it away.
The cops asked us if we had seen anyone around. I pointed back towards the clearing and told them there was a guy back there in the woods. They were suddenly alert, told us to get home right away, and they headed off in the direction I’d pointed. I was so excited! I was sure he was a huge criminal, probably a bank robber. I figured there would be a reward or something like that, for helping to capture him!
We ran home like heroes to tell our parents. I’m not sure how Peter’s parents reacted but Mom didn’t believe me at all. And when my dad came home from work, he just told me I had a big imagination. Jerk.
The next day, I was playing with my dinky-toy parking garage in my bedroom when Mom came to the door with a strange look on her face. A police officer was there, and he wanted to talk to me. I’d been expecting this, so calmly walked out to the living room where he was waiting. I must admit, I think I had a little 12-year-old smirk on my face, knowing that my Mom was finally realizing I’d told the truth, and I was a bank-robber catching hero!
The policeman asked me to give a description of the guy. So, I told them he’d been wearing a suit and the red scarf. But then I remembered that when he’d undressed, he’d had on this red plaid shirt.
I don’t think they ever caught him. My parents never said, and we never talked about it again. And Peter and I didn’t get our rewards, though we were always heroes my own mind.
Anyway, those were good times, growing up with Peter, at least in those early years. In the woods, at our fort, we had such great adventures — although I don’t think we ever went back there after the bank robber incident. I guess we just moved on to other things, and I started hanging around with other kids, though I never had such a close friend again.
Peter began to run with a different crowd and wasn’t around much after that. It happens, I guess. People grow up and they change, and Peter really changed quite a bit. He began to miss school a lot. Then he got into drugs and started hanging out with all kinds of weirdoes. And finally, he got into trouble with the police. He turned away from everyone, including his parents, and friends, and me. And, I guess, I didn’t so much try to connect back with him either. I heard that, even as an adult, he was heavily into drugs and alcohol and in the end his life just seemed to drizzle away.
Not that mine was any great shakes, I guess. And, certainly, the women I have dated like to tell me that I have “intimacy” issues. They tend to invest a lot of time exposing every bad choice I have ever made. Then things get rough. I admit, I have trouble keeping my hands to myself, and then that’s usually it.
Anyway, Peter finally ended up living alone in a scanky little apartment on Main Street. I don’t know what he did for money, or maybe I can guess. So, I wasn’t surprised when I heard that he’d died of an overdose/alcohol mix. It took three days for anyone to even notice he was dead. Way to keep invested in the world Peter.
And so there I was, two weeks after he’d died, at this psychic’s and she tells met that Peter is here and he wants to talk to me. She tells me about the time Peter broke his arm, falling out of the cherry tree. She tells me he still goes up to the car banks and walks around there. Creepy!
She tells me that Peter wants me to know that growing up in our neighborhood was the best time of his life, and I was wondering if that was true and thinking it was probably the same for me. But then she started going on and on about a scarf, did I remember the incident with the scarf, and I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said Peter said it had ruined his life and he didn’t want it to ruin mine and scarf, scarf, scarf. And I wasn’t getting it, so I finally just told her to shut up. She backed off then and said he just wanted me to think about it and, if I did, it would make sense eventually. But it never has.
It is weird because most everything else that she said about Peter was true.