peter the great
I loved Peter Eichenberger. I never met the man and now that he is cycling across the sky, I never will. I knew him only from brief cable access appearances on Todd Mormon’s Monkeytime show and from his acerbic, witty, pithy (and a thousand other adjectives I’ve left out), and of course truthful prose, first in the now defunct Spectator and then in the Independent. For those of you in the universe beyond Raleigh, NC, Peter was an intellectual for the common man. He refused to be dragged into the greed and corruption in which we are all drowning, and for that Peter paid a price. It is said he smoked and drank too much but it seemed a perfectly natural response for one so afflicted by the horrors of our world. He felt the pain of the homeless, the disenfranchised, the marginal beings on the edge of our society, he was one of them in many ways, but his voice was that of a lion, his pen mightier than any sword. One friend said that Peter never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, but perhaps he saw things a little clearer than the rest of us. In 2004 when Peter was hit by a car while cycling late at night down Bickett Boulevard, my first thought was that the bastards had finally gotten him, another conspiracy theory come true. After all, Peter made a lot of people in power uncomfortable. Before the accident, Peter was John the Baptist, howling in the wilderness, afterwards he was beatific, like Jesus, preaching the gospel of love, not religion (let me make that clear), just love for his fellow man but he never lost his edge. He could still, with a surgeon’s skill, make a perfect incision in hypocrisy and peel back the layers of lies that concealed it. If you are ever lucky enough to read any of Peter’s work, his tales of injustice, of government conspiracy, of the downtrodden among us then you will be among the blessed his words have touched. In time the accident took its toll, the stress of coma, the seizures from brain damage and perhaps too many late nights at Sadlack’s and Peter was silenced forever. Peter should have died that dark night on Bickett but he wasn’t about to let someone else write his obituary yet ( http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newsobserver/obituary.aspx?n=peter-eichenberger&pid=146838943 ). He left us this Thanksgiving, while sipping tea and reading the newspaper (the printed word his Bible to the end). I loved Peter Eichenberger and I will miss his heart and his mind, and of couse, his soul.
