ALL THRIVE, P.C.
(A LIFE WITH PETER CHRISTOPHER)
Carolyn Altman
My writing got me every good thing I have.
Back in the 1990s in the rainy literary paradise of Portland, Oregon, I would gather with a group of writers at novelist Tom Spanbauer’s house to climb inside each other’s sentences, drink the best wine we could afford, and keep each other laying down the pages. Ritual objects often appeared amongst the candles and glasses on our table: a Jack Gilbert poem; a George Bush, Sr. bobblehead; and one night, a photo of a jock in a baggy gray sweatshirt and shorts on a sunblown Florida beach. He looked like the tight end a quarterback would call when pinned deep: broad shouldered, quick, with a grin that said he would execute through sheer determination and completely enjoy the battle. A boy of about seven or eight stood in front of him, and he had one hand on the boy’s shoulder. The protective grace of that hand made it easy to see that in Peter Christopher, the kid had someone who would give his all defending him down the line.
Except for me, the new girl in the group, everyone at Tom’s table knew Pete from a summer writing workshop he and Tom had taught out on the Oregon coast. Pete and Tom were friends from late 80’s New York, where they lived in crack holes and worked crap jobs in order to study with iconoclastic editor Gordon Lish. They called their beach workshop Dangerous Writing because to them the point of writing was to go not just for the jugular but the entire circulatory system, not once but in every sentence. Pete had flown in from the University of Florida to teach the workshop, and most of Tom’s Portland group had taken it—Chuck Palahniuk, who was warming up for Fight Club, Joanna Rose needlepointing Little Miss Strange, and a number of others. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime weeks and by the end everyone was in love with each other. When Tom passed the picture around and said that Pete’s cancer was back the entire room went still and Joanna began to cry. Over the course of a few years, as doctors blasted Pete’s eye tumor with lasers and burned it with radioactive seeds, people in Portland, Gainesville, New York, his hometown of North Adams, Massachusetts –everywhere Pete had put a hand on a shoulder—held him in their hearts.
The doctors exposed the tumor to radioactivity so strong they had to keep Pete in solitary confinement for a week and slide his food under the door. A few days later, Pete went home to North Adams to rest. He did this by pumping his beater of a bicycle up Mt. Greylock.
Peter Christopher was legendary. I’d missed the week at the beach, but I’d heard the tales and pondered the muscle man picture, first at Tom’s table and then in the years afterward when it hung on his refrigerator in a place of honor. I taught Pete’s collection Campfires of the Dead, using his stories to show how every word and gesture obtained. Between his writing, the picture, and writing group anecdotes, I patched together a mill town hero who’d scored with seconds to go in the fourth, rowed crew for Columbia, earned a karate black belt, endured day jobs writing Golden Books and greeting cards, served as unofficial bodyguard to Gordon Lish and Padget Powell, was a drinking buddy to Harry Crews (who could protect himself), fought off the cancer that blinded him in one eye, and wrote stories that were the brush of a beard against a lover’s inner thigh—rough, thrilling and exquisitely tender.
Then one day I opened Tom’s kitchen door and there sat Pete, black sweater, blue jeans, boot heels hooked on the rungs of a stool. We said hello, and there was so much vibration I had to back out and take a fast walk around the block before I could actually make it all the way into the room.
We sent letters across the country, Pete’s so intense I had to read them first for physical impact and then again, when I’d recovered, for content. We met up in New Orleans, New York, my sky cabin atop an old Cascade volcano, the south Georgia apartment he called his dojo flophouse. Pete told me about the cancer, but his most prized possession was his weight bench, brute force his sole home improvement technique, and we hoped if we ate well and loved hard enough we might fight it off. I planned on forever. Pete knew better.
It’s coming for us all, Babyheart.
We made our home in Statesboro, Georgia, where Pete had a tenured professorship at Georgia Southern University. His classes were dangerous in all the right ways, and students either ran like palmetto roaches or took every class he offered, which was how he liked it. Those courageous enough to stick it out were a mixture of Atlanta tough, fresh off the farm, and swamp dwellers—and Pete adored them enough to come down hard when they slacked off and celebrate when they scored. One of the most frequent comments on his course evaluations was he changed my life, followed closely by he was the father I always wished I had. He signed his comments to his students the same way he signed letters to friends and family: All Thrive, P.C.
When Pete and I married, my son Colby was about the same age as that boy in the picture. Soon we had other pictures and in all of them Pete and Colby are laughing, arms and legs tangled in the wrestling moves that cracked Colby open into a strong, funny young man I didn’t have the quick wit or testosterone to bring forth. In most of the pictures of Pete and me, we are kissing. When the three of us are in a picture together, Pete is gathering as much of us as he can into his arms.
During the week, when we were busy with writing, teaching and school, Pete instituted the Family Five, five minutes when we’d drop everything and pile together on the couch. Weekends, we’d work out and then hit El Sombrero for enormous fajitas and the best iced-tea in town. Boyd’s Barbeque fed local cops, field hands and our house guests, and when we went to Randy Wood’s bluegrass picking shack, Irene let us carry in big slices of homemade coconut cake from the barbeque joint next door as long as we promised not to get crumbs on the rug.
Too much will never be enough, my Beloved.
One July when Colby was away, we celebrated my birthday by canoeing the Ogeechee blackwater and making love on a stripe of sand bar, sunlight slipping through the tupelo. Labor Day was the three of us downing fried chicken in an old railroad roundhouse to blues that wouldn’t quit, even when a retired engineer chugged an old engine out onto the turn table and blasted the horn for the pure joy of it, tumbling steam across the audience and into the Savannah night. Thanksgiving, we swam off Tybee with dolphins and cargo ships headed out to sea. During one stretch of daylight, we rode our mountain bikes ten miles, roamed a civil war fort, ate shrimp fresh off the boat, listened to blues while devouring crabcakes and beer, and on the way home, Pete wanted to stop for jazz. And triple chocolate ice cream. Or would that be pushing it? he’d ask. We always chose to push it.
Today might be the best day of our lives.
He said that almost every morning, until March 5, 2008 when what we thought was stomach trouble turned out to be cancer.
I don’t want to be in this world without you is what I said.
The cancer had metastasized to his liver, which ocular melanoma does about half the time. Pete grew yellow with jaundice and it was hard for him to sit up, but he continued to teach and write. Every day he entered the laundry room he had converted into an office, lowered himself into his wooden library chair, and flipped on his old computer with the totem hawk feathers stuck in the air vents on top. On April 11, he called me in to stand next to him and read what he’d just written. I put my hand on his shoulder and his arm circled my hips. When I finished, what I saw was not gaunt jaundice but the face of the determined hero who knew he had executed the shit out of the situation and taken it all the way. For a moment there was only light between us, and then we found our way back to wooden chair and hawk feathers so he could write again, for as long as he could.
If you’re going to do it, make it count.
Pete died on April 15, 2008.
For his memorial service, Colby and I made a list of all the things Pete always said to us. We stood together at the podium, Colby in musician black, me in my wedding dress, and traded lines one after another in a Christopherian riff. Use your head, it began, and moved through Go Gators and Trust your gut much the way Pete would move through his karate kata in the driveway every morning. Pete would have loved it, or at least been glad that his stubborn, independent family had been paying attention. I read it over and over in the weeks after his death because to hear his words and how brilliantly he bumped them up against one another to give us a shot of something important or funny—or both—let me have him for a little longer.
Pete made it count. He always made it count. That April morning, he read me “Ready” and “Lifting, Rising.” They contain what he would most want us to know.