Peter Walsh

Peter Xavier Walsh was a good friend in high school, college, and the first few chapters of our adulthood. I came into his orbit during our high school spring musical: Oklahoma! in 1982. He was a Sophomore. I was a Freshman. He had a part, I was more of an extra. We were both drawn to the same girl. She liked him more, but I didn’t blame her.

Peter was absolutely and always his own person: inquisitive, dryly hilarious, wound up, savvy, mysterious, unflappable, gifted as a writer and performer, and oh what a storyteller. There’s this Jack Kerouac poem about Charlie Parker with a line: “How sweet a story it is when you hear Charlie Parker tell it.” That’s what listening to Peter was to me. He had a captivating, conspiratorial style. Whether he was recounting the time he got picked up hitchhiking in Fairfield by Leonard Bernstein or explaining the Hutu/Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, Peter made you think that he was imparting to you and you alone the secrets of the universe. He may well have embellished a detail from time to time, but it was only in the service of a good story.

His memory was astonishing. Somewhere there exists a paperback copy of John Cheever’s complete short stories that has pencil dots before each title in the table of contents. Peter made those dots the day I bought the book on his recommendation at a used book store. He’d read every story and remembered each one (and there were over sixty!). The one-dot stories were okay, the two-dots were good, and the three-dot stories were exceptional. His favorite three-dot story was “The Swimmer,” about a middle-aged man who decides in a burst of virility to swim from a Sunday-afternoon party to his home, eight miles away, since most every house in the affluent community has a pool. What starts as whimsical quickly turns devastating. Like Peter’s own writing, the story is powerful and yet economical.

Peter got along with everyone in high school. It will come as no surprise that he was voted “Best Sense of Humor” (along with that girl we both liked). But who would have guessed that he’d also get “Most School Spirit”? I don’t think he honestly did have that much school spirit, but he certainly did spirit around Roger Ludlowe.

He was class president. In fact, he even stumped for my run at class president, writing and singing my campaign jingle as I strummed the chords to the Beatles’ Revolution:

“You say you want a revolution

Well, Doug Adams is your man

You say you want a real solution

Well, Doug Adams has a plan”

I honestly didn’t have a plan, but Peter didn’t mind.

Peter was more athletic than he let on. He played varsity ice hockey, going to practice at ungodly hours of the night and early morning. He played tennis. And he was amazing with a frisbee, effortlessly spinning the thing on his finger. He knew all four throws: backhand, forehand, hammer, and push. He had great balance and coordination, which helped his drumming immensely. That and duct tape.

He was involved in a bunch of clubs in high school, wrote for the school newspaper, and made a memorable video for Mr. Roper’s TV class. It was about an attack by a fleet of evil frisbees, kind of like “The Birds.” He actually made the sight of a frisbee flying over a hill look slightly menacing and totally funny.

In addition to all that, Peter DJ’d at the Fairfield U radio station WVOF, overnights. Yet somehow he got good grades. I don’t know how or when he slept, although he did enjoy a cup of coffee. He would, in fact, become an early proponent of the “iced coffee.”

At a cast party for something, as we were preparing to leave, Peter started using his gloves like puppets, dancing to whatever music was playing. He and I turned this into a “glove ballet.” We’d hold up both of our gloves and perform a loosely choreographed dance with turns and leaps and so forth. It was stupid but I thought it was hilarious. The glove ballet.

Summers, Peter worked a variety of awesome jobs. He operated a hot dog stand in Fairfield Center for a while. I seem to remember a bow tie. Another summer he made bank at the Pepperidge Farm factory in Norwalk. His task was to trouble-shoot, I think, ensuring that no minor break-downs would stop the line from moving. He told a story about a time he got caught on a conveyor belt and rode it like a roller coaster up to the factory ceiling. My sister Sally and I took jobs there the next summer and I can tell you, that ceiling was high.

Music cemented our friendship. I played in an instrumental surf band, the Hypnobeats, with Peter DuCharme, who I’d known from living in Milford before my family moved to Fairfield. He’d got me started playing guitar. Our first show was at a house party in Hamden or New Haven, and I invited Walsh to come along. He brought a tape recorder and recorded that show, providing commentary like, “No nukes!” At the end, Walsh concluded that the party was “getting a little out of hand” before stopping the tape. Another classic Walsh line was that things were “up in the air” -- euphemisms that gently suggested a proximity to and yet safe distance from total chaos.

Later that year, I started a new wave band in Fairfield with my friend Kevin Foote, who played bass. We asked Peter Walsh to join, even though he didn’t play an instrument. In another classic Walsh move, he somehow acquired a drum set and taught himself to play within the week. What’s more, it quickly became apparent that he was the only one of us who could sing, so he added lead singing to his drumming and pulled off a Phil Collins kind of thing. A senior named Tom Hall joined us. He was from California and actually knew how to surf. We called ourselves the Contorted Forks and played mostly covers like 867-5309 / Jenny, Rebel Rebel, and What I Like About You. I’m pretty sure Walsh wrote his first song for that band, a cheerful number called, “I Don’t Like You.” We played the Penfield Pavilion in Fairfield and a few Battle of the Bands-type things.

At one point, we thought it would be cool to all wear different hats on stage. That would be our gimmick. But then we decided it wasn’t such a great idea. However, Kevin loved wearing hats and had a pretty good collection, so even though the rest of us stopped, he kept up the hat routine. Before one show, one of us asked him to take off his hat on stage (it was either a Tam O’Shanter or one of those Greek fisherman caps). And he was all, “No, I’m not going to sell out.” Walsh and I thought that was hilarious, so in the following years, whenever talk turned to the idea of an artist “selling out,” we’d say that the artist had “taken off the hat.” Of course, the best artists never did.

Speaking of art, I remember one summer taking the train into New York to check out the Museum of Modern Art. Peter was into Warhol and Diane Arbus at the time, so the trip was probably his idea. It may have been his first time to the City. We were walking up 42nd Street, having just left Grand Central, when this guy approached us and asked for a favor. He said his brother had fallen to his death from the side of a skyscraper while working as a window washer. The guy was in from out of town to collect the insurance money. (Somehow this seemed reasonable to Peter and me. What did we know about the ways of insurance?) He continued with some convoluted explanation about how he’d already gotten half the money but didn’t feel safe walking around with it and would we, two total strangers, kindly hold it for him for a few hours, until he’d collected the other half? In return, he’d pay us a hundred bucks each for our trouble. He quickly pulled out and flashed a wad of bills, which we looked at greedily. So Walsh said sure, we’d do it. Then the guy said, okay, but to show me that you won’t walk away with my money, you’ve got to prove that I can trust you. So he instructed Peter to place his wallet on top of the wad, which Peter did. Then the guy pulled out a long handkerchief and wrapped it around the whole thing, tying it up all tight and handing the bundle to Peter. He told us not to open the package until we saw him later. We agreed to meet on the corner of so-and-so at three, and the guy took off. Well, Walsh and I of course opened the package immediately just to see how much money we were dealing with, and low and behold, the stack of bills was gone, as was Peter’s wallet. In their place was a bundle of rags.

But the MOMA was fun.

One Christmastime, Walsh and I thought we could make some money by busking on the main street in Westport, the fanciest place we could think of. We figured the rich shoppers would think we were adorable, feel the true meaning of Christmas, and shower us with their extra wealth. However, not one person made eye contact with us and various shopkeepers actually asked us to move away from their stores. In retrospect, I think it was our song selection that worked against us: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Paint it Black and Mother’s Little Helper. We hadn’t yet learned the lesson of “know your audience.”

When Tom Hall went off to college, the Contorted Forks disbanded so Walsh and I joined Peter DuCharme’s new group: Stately Wayne Manor. We practiced and played our own songs, mostly in New Haven. Then the two Peters and I branched into another group called the Vertigo-goes. During this time, it became clear that Walsh had an amazing ear for melody and that his lyrics were sophisticated and evocative, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes sweet, sometimes harrowing. He wrote about hitchhiking to New Haven, the wisdom of the Buddha, trick photography, garden parties, Gal Fridays who hid their gin drinking -- you know, normal teenage boy stuff. Sung in a mellow, confident Nick Drake style. I never heard a Walsh song I didn’t love and I was lucky enough to hear many of them as we moved apart geographically and he picked up with the Flying Nuns and then Hypnolovewheel, ruminating in his music about thin ice all around and watermelons on the vine and ceiling fans becoming lemon meringue pies.

Peter was always kind to my little sisters. My sister Sally had some tough years socially in high school and remembers Peter being happy to include her in our plans. The three of us would go to the movies, Peter probably driving in his parents’ MG. Another night, when my parents and Sally were out of town, Peter picked me up to do something while my other sister, Annie, stayed home, supposedly to watch TV. When we were ten minutes away, I realized I’d forgotten something, so we drove back. When he got home, there were cars parked everywhere and loud music coming from the house. Annie was throwing a party. There must have been a hundred kids there. Peter and I walked through the mayhem (another Walsh word) to get whatever it was I’d forgotten, said hello to Annie and made sure she was okay, and left, never speaking of it again. My Mom always said that Walsh was so “scrubby faced” because he constantly looked like he had a fresh shave.

In the summer of 1986, I got the Vertigo-goes two rooms in a frat house on the Tufts campus. Three hundred bucks for the entire summer, with access to the house kitchen and all the peanut butter and fluff sandwiches any young man could possibly eat. Walsh and I got jobs painting houses, traveling by T all over Boston. We lasted about a month until our boss offered Peter a promotion and labeled me “lackadaisical,” which hurt a little. We both quit. Peter took a job at a camera store, I found a temp thing, and we had a good summer of frisbee golf, songwriting, and general merriment.

Peter had impeccable taste in music and pop culture and, through the years, sent me many a mixed tape. If Peter suggested it, it was probably awesome: R.E.M., Alfred Hitchcock, Robyn Hitchcock, Diane Arbus, The Twilight Zone, The Coen Brothers’, early Scorcese, Mystery Science Theater 2000, The Larry Sanders Show, the Byrds, the Mekons, Bowie, ultimate frisbee, The Complete Stories of John Cheever, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love… I could go on. Somehow, before there was an Internet, Peter managed to acquire information about what was cool and happening and avant garde and wonderful. He knew where Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth lived in Fairfield, the titles of each Twilight Zone episode, and not only how to get to Devil’s Glen in Weston, but where it was safe to jump in. Through all these things and more, I am reminded of him constantly.

One weekend in high school, my family went out of town and asked Peter to watch our dogs Abby and Betsy. When we returned, Peter had left a note about his dog care experience. “Doug,” he wrote, “A & B refused to eat. They must have really missed your family because they were generally neurotic. Call for details.” Sadly, those "details" are lost to history, but I can tell you assuredly two things about them: one, they were delivered in a deadpan style and two, they were hilarious because they'd been observed by Peter.

Peter Walsh was a good friend and a great artist with an eye and ear for the details. He will be deeply missed. He never took off the hat.

My heart goes out to his family.