For the prêt à porter du jour, I’d vacillated between going as Abu, wearing a Moroccan abaya with a Saudi kufi, or as Ronnie Dobbs, wearing Evan Wade’s mullet wig accessorized with my steel, World War I tommy helmet and heavy oiled duster. While the Arab look would have been more practical and comfortable, it […]
peter eichenberger
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Wrecking downtown in order to save it
In order to properly celebrate the opening of Fayetteville Street to cars, it was necessary to close it and allow only pedestrian traffic. During the parade, swooning spectators were presented with a period Pontiac executing big, greasy burnouts where trees recently had been cut down and removed. Zero miles per gallon at 120 decibels! Woo-hoo. […]
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Raleigh bad boy no more
The synchronicity is unmistakable. Last week, the new Raleigh was launched, and a legendarily irreverent and obscene slice of the old one, Bobby Hocutt, checked out. Bobby Hocutt was a name scrawled on my secondhand copy of the obscure and brilliant LP The United States of America. When we met, I mentioned the record. Hocutt […]
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Cup worship
Sitting at the Players Retreat talking with a bud of mine, a regular old hippie Freemason. “So, you guys doing anything to take over the world this week?” Ric smiles, shaking his head. “I dunno, it just seems a common theme in human hierarchies. I mean, look at the Catholics.” “Shoot, I can’t even get […]
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I went to a hockey game and a love fest broke out
“The wolf is hungry. He runs to show. He’s licking his lips. He’s ready to win,” the music blared from a pickup truck, the first of many times we would hear “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” a huge hit for Germany’s biggest band, The Scorpions, and the anthem, I guess, for the Carolina Hurricanes. OK, […]
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Turning the Neuse River into a noose of trash
Business decisions and good salesmanship lubed with Cherry Bouncegood old-fashioned boozeled to Raleigh becoming the capital. But the lack of water transportation made Raleigh a bad idea in a time when there were no trains or paved roads. Even small barges could go only as far as Smithfield. The prescient might have considered Lillington. So […]
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Hero worship
Sadlacks Heroes, the beer-music-sandwich institution on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, started as Baxleys, a simple sandwich wagon back in the 40s that was dragged in and assembled for former soldiers flocking to N.C. State on the heels of World War II. But it was on the toes of the disco years, the early 70s, when […]
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Our addiction to TV is killing us
Years ago, in a wicked part of my life, coming in late, late, gacked, I flipped a TV on and caught that bloated charlatan, Jerry Falwell, in mid blubber. I pulled and cocked the cute-as-a-rat snubnose .38 revolver I used to carry. The reptile in my brain hissed and boom–fat boy had a hole in […]
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Coming clean
Friday, Feb. 17, 10:03 a.m., I am gliding along New Bern Avenue. It was the kinesthesia, the speed and the sensations of this machine reacting to the surface of the road that really got the squirrels racing around the attic. Just a ride in a pretty nice Saab, but it’s the first ride since I’d […]
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Inside Eichenberger’s brain
Over the decades, the reality director in my head had chosen to represent humanity with this scene of a leviathan steel ocean liner, ablaze with lights, belching thick columns of black smoke and plunging through a rough, dark sea toward maritime catastrophe. I had written myself out, standing a quarter mile a-port, safe and alone […]
