A TRIBUTE TO TIM PETERSON - Submitted by Mark Tucker - Class of '71

Fair warning, dear reader: if you are offended by drug usage (or honesty)
you may not want to read this.

I can't for the life of me recall when I first met Tim, but am dimly aware
of, one day between classes at HHS, talking to this guy with really long
blond hair, intrigued by his intelligence and remarkably even personality.
He was wearing that trademark army coat of his and holding an equally
signatory RC Cola. He was, even then, I found as I spoke to him, as
thoroughly wrapped up in politics as I was in the arts. This guy was
intelligent, took no part in any of the idiot in-groups on campus, and
wasn't even vaguely interested in the mediocrity that passed for the norm
there. What a unique find, I thought, in this weird SoCal pocket of
pseudo-scholastica. I was 100% apolitical, even anti-political, so I'm not
sure how or why we hit it off so well, but we did... and I thank the God I
don't believe in for that, as I found in Tim one of my three true brothers,
kindred souls my mother never presented me with, and a refuge away from the
numbing, boring, underachieving sameness of school and city life.

We became fast friends and, as wherever I was living was always the party
house, knocked around together a lot. Whether it was the clapboard
motorcycle shack where I lived in the back of my parents place, or one of
the places I rented after my high school years, you could find, almost
nightly, a gaggle of free-spirited HHS'ers and others partying their brains
out. Through such circumstances I met Tim's buddies, schoolmates I otherwise
only knew distantly: Rick Barrows, Jack Rice, Richard Diaz, etc. Then, as at
any time, I could have cared less for the hypocritical proto-"Just Say No"
mindset laid out by media and "peers" (who are currently swozzling alcohol
and pharmaceuticals like soda pop and candy): we had a great time, stoned
out of our gourds, playing marathon Risk games, sortie'ing to Sand Dune Park
with our girlfriends, messin' around at the beaches, heading out to the
mountains, etc.

Tim, I, and our circle of friends practically lived at The Whiskey-A-Go-Go,
seeing Uriah Heep, Steely Dan, Capt Beyond, and a welter of killer rock
bands. When not there, we were at the Forum, the Shrine, the Santa Monica
Civic, San Bernardino Swing, Troubadour, you name it, drinking in the Moody
Blues, Hendrix, the Who, Tull, Zeppelin, King Crimson, and an endless
processional of mind-blowing music...not coincidentally downing goodly
quantities of drugs and alcohol, living the life we enjoyed. Neither of us
made much money, but it didn't cost all that much to just exist back then
and we never again, in all our later wage-earning days at "prestigious"
jobs, lived life nearly as well. There was even a period of two years when
he and I were constantly together, despite the fact I was living with a
girlfriend, loaded every day and loving life to the full, whether just
sitting around playing Rummy 1000 and listening to electronic music or in
the midst of a fete with friends. Along with a year I later spent with
Richard Shively in Florida, those were amongst the happiest years of my
life.

But all good things come to an end. We both harbored dark and malignant
childhoods, and the inexorable karma of life forced us to grapple with
deeper questions than "who's got the reefer?" I had gotten Tim a job at one
of the penny-ante metal shops I worked at, so, when he was laid off, his
mother got him and, a little later, myself a job at Northrop (where I
remained for 25 years). Responsibilities now took much of our time but we
saw each other frequently, at work and outside. He inevitably wore down my
resistance, now that the workaday world demanded I pay attention to it,
opening me up to conspiracy politics and the base of true power in this
country. He used to call Ray Bream and other talk show hosts, debating
politics with their heavyweight guests, not only holding his own but often
besting them philosophically and even getting job offers on the spot, over
the air, none of which he took, preferring aerospace. For various reasons, I
quit doing drugs, watching erstwhile so-called friends scatter like straws
in the wind because of it, and began devoting all that now-free time to a
more serious pursuit of literature and the arts, but Tim had planted a
political consciousness in me and it continued to grow. From this, I stepped
up my second "career" as a free-lance trouble-maker, more intensely than
ever wrangling with antediluvian mindsets wherever I found them.

After a couple years at Northrop, dissatisfied with its stultifying (lack
of) consciousness, I took a voluntary lay-off, spent a year going to college
with HHS Seminar colleague Richard Shively (the last of the really free and
good times I'd see), then travelled around the country, observing what was
out there, trying to discover what might possibly present itself as a life
worth pursuing, eventually landing on-staff at an alternative educational
institute in Oregon and staying for a year. Wherever I went, though, I
fought with whatever power structure I encountered, finding the usual
small-mindedness and mean-spiritedness that unfortunately typifies too much
of our country, especially in the business sector. Tiring of non-stop
combat, and understanding that things were essentially the same everywhere,
I dragged myself back to L.A. All that time, Tim had figured I'd tire of the
B.S. and was waiting with an offer from my bosses to return to Northrop that
very day.

Nothing had been lost between us; it seemed not a day had passed since I'd
last seen him. We took up right where we left off. We both devoted much of
our time to the women in our lives, but still frequently had dinners
together and talked at work. Those times were every bit as pleasurable as
our more carefree years. In between liaisons, we even roomed together for a
time, at my place in Manhattan Beach, and, as I was interning nights in
holistic medicine, working a second job in it, I was able to get him off his
perennial cigarettes and caffeine, showing him ways to keep his body and
mind in top trim more efficiently, so he could pursue his efforts more
mindfully. He saw the benefit, cleaned his act up in a blink, and carried on
those exotic political interests of his. Not long thereafter, we both got
new girlfriends and split up the MB pad to live with them.

But, as time progressed, Tim began an association with a bunch of
high-powered politicos and businessmen that started to pull a cloud over his
sunny and normally imperturbable countenance. He was invited to the GOP
conventions, something even Capitol Hill dignitaries would kill God for, and
met with key personnel in government and the armed forces (he even met
Ronald and Nancy Reagan), delving ever deeper into the, for lack of a better
term, Establishment structure, finding out alarming things, passing much on
to me. His mood and personality began to change, a distance rose up between
us...not through any disaffinity but because of an internal wall that was
forming through what he was discovering and the demands the pursuit made on
him. We kept in touch but less frequently. Tim was always a true brother,
even in the darkening times near what would become his end, but when he
desired to keep something to himself, not even the devil could wrest it from
him, and he began fogging up with secrets.

Still, we were brothers and I was best man at his later wedding, though his
wife and I could barely tolerate each other. In a way, that wedding was a
presage of things to come, being an odd affair and, I think, Tim's attempt
to reconcile himself in the world, a thing murderously dangerous to any free
spirit. Thereafter, all of us would get together occasionally, he and his
wife with me and my girlfriend, still occasionally playing Risk, having
drinks, talking...but things were changing, and not for the better. All one
can do in such circumstances is wait, help when it's needed, if it's wanted,
and see what happens. We'd meet away from our social circles, shoot the
breeze, nosh, and compare political notes, but these instances became rarer
and rarer.

Time passed. I saw Tim a couple days before his...suicide? Murder? The
details of his death are still murky and what I've been told of it leads me
to believe suicide, under the circumstances cited, was impossible. But he
told me that his marriage had fallen apart, that he was moving to an
apartment in Hawthorne, and that he needed to get his head together. I
offered to help him move, having a van and having moved furniture as a
profession at one point, but he thanked me for the offer, declined, and
remained a bit vague about his new digs. I was satisfied to let him do as he
felt he needed, but was still a bit struck by the oddness of this otherwise
unusual inconclusiveness. I never began to suspect what followed.

When my parents died, I could have cared less, I didn't shed a tear. When
the remainder of my family proved nearly as aberrated as my progenitors, it
did not surprise me all that much, and, as I estranged myself from them, I
just shook my head at their foolishness. But, when Tim died, I wept like a
child. My heart sank through the ground and I was stunned for a long long
time. I still barely remember his funeral and the days that followed. I got
over it, of course, as he and I both understood the oddnesses of temporal
existence and the disjointed shambles of the cycle of death and rebirth, but
Tim's passing hit me like no other. It occurred only days after our last
conversation and I understood, fully now, what it meant to have someone so
deeply kindred ripped from your side, never to be seen again. There remains
a hollow corner of my heart that will never shed its dull ache, and to this
day, even amongst the friends I have, I miss his company. In a world and
society that worships only money, circumstance, and opportunity, I had found
a rare true soul free of all that and now he was gone.

Tim and I were the best of brothers and individuals who fit no mold. It's so
damnably hard to locate any human being who's not fully subsumed in herd
consciousness. Tim had the qualities attributed to René Magritte, the famous
surrealist painter: you could pass him on the street and never look twice,
but here was a man filled with marvelous and strange things, holding in
himself a world out of synch with the sad lunatic globe he tread. He was
intelligent, mild in his dispositions, and held no rancor with anyone, not
even people who had done him grievous wrongs, ever friendly to all he met.
I've never had much patience in my disposition but what little I have, I
learned from him. I never failed to be fascinated with his ability to get
along with everyone. Had he eventually managed to work out the enigmas he
found with the evils he located in the political world, I suspect he would
not only have one day become a politician but a statesman. In him, there was
always a very deep overriding social concern. Few suspected his true depths,
but those who did knew what a rare individual they'd chanced upon and
remained his friends to the end, which came much too quickly. I know he and
I will meet again, hopefully on a better world than this joke, and have no
doubt we'll be just as fast friends as ever we were, as though only a
fraction of a second had elapsed. But there are times when I think that my
days on earth are just expectant time-passing, until some unguessable future
when I can hook back up with him and the other souls in the universe that,
over oceans of time, I've bonded with, so we can finally begin to live full
and worthwhile lives, erasing the memory of the shallow smug idiocies
endured on this and other mudballs. It's a concept lost on those blissing
out behind the meager attributes of Earth, but we always aspired to things
beyond this paltry planet and its insufficient somas.

Tim, I miss ya, buddy. You wouldn't believe how politically engaged I've
become (I almost make me sick) and I found answers to a LOT of the questions
and curiosities we had. I'll tell you about them when I see you, but that'll
take the most frustrating of all things: time...and, no, I still haven't
figured out that one yet.


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