Macklepuss and I were friends when we were undergraduates at Brooklyn College. That was the 1960s, and Peter was running straight A’s when he gave himself a furlough, ran straight F’s, and decided to see some of America. We weren’t 20, but Peter was already intent on getting to the action as a witness. In what I recall was a VISTA program — Volunteers in Service to America—Peter organized welfare mothers in Indianapolis, and I’d get phone calls phone booths in truck stops along the interstates, phone calls Peter swore were free because they were on a borrowed credit card from one Robert Zimmerman, who most of us knew as Bob Dylan. Peter liked to brag he’d call in the Indianapolis late night radio station and ask for Shostakovich’s Fifth, frustrating the DJ. After a while, Peter lit out for the western territories until he ran out of country to conquer, then in San Francisco bought a Chevy for less than $100 that smoked and fumed eastward until it broke down on the George Washington Bridge, where Peter abandoned it after having gone all but the last few miles to home in Brooklyn. He loved that car; it did not quit and it delivered.
That was when Peter first started working in the Brooklyn halfway house for schizophrenic teenagers, the Blueberry School, a converted Victorian on a tree-lined street. I visited him there, and as I accompanied him to his office in the din and noise, I said, “Puss, this place is a mad house,” to which he replied, “Yeah.”
Peter’s first publication was an expose of the inconsistent treatment he received at New York City’s STD clinics where he’d presented himself as someone who worried that he had “the clap.” The Village Voice ran it, and I was jealous as hell because I was also going to be writer. I was a schoolteacher with a safe draft deferment, but when the time was right, Peter encouraged me to quit, saying, “It’s got to be somebody. Why not you?” After that, Peter worked for UPI and later AP. The night of one of New York City’s blackouts, he called me. I by then was living on the bluffs of the Hudson River in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and Peter asked what Manhattan looked like. “It’s f******g dark,” I said, and the next day the wires ran a story, “It’s awfully dark,” said one New Jersey resident. This was a lesson in practical journalism.
Peter as a young man played a merciless game of tennis; applauding every shot an opponent made, but giving no quarter. He’d dance to Creedence Clearwater Revivals “Suzie Q” on any pretext, and he danced terribly, a version of the white-boy shuffle complete with shrugging shoulders and that overbite that showed intensity. When he was dating Catherine, she’d ask me for details of his life as an adolescent, and I told her the truth — he was a loyal friend and decent guy. What she saw was what she’d get. There was no dirt. At their wedding in a New York hotel, they served only champagne.
-- Perry Glasser
.JPG)
