The New York writer Peter Kaldheim died on Friday in Barcelona in a completely surprising way, on stage at the Cronopios theater while performing a humorous monologue.
Graduated in English Literature from the prestigious Dartmouth University, Kaldheim began a promising career as an editor in his hometown in the seventies, which was cut short by his addiction to drugs and alcohol; addiction that would end up leading him to serve time for drug trafficking in Rikers Island prison.
After that season, his life was plunged into uncontrollable chaos. In 1987, he fled New York during a devastating snowstorm to save his life because he owed a large amount of money to a local mobster. He thus began a journey of almost three years that took him across the United States from end to end. At that time, Kaldheim, alone, without family and without money, was faced with situations between the tragic and the desperate: his ex-wife died in his arms accidentally, many nights he had to sleep outdoors, exposing himself to all kinds of dangers. , he went to soup kitchens, he traveled illegally riding freight trains like in the times of the Great Depression… Thanks to all those hardships, however, he managed to leave his drug addiction behind forever.
In the early nineties, after an inspiring process of personal improvement, he ended up in Yellowstone Park to work in a restaurant; From that moment on, and until his retirement, back in New York, his work activity was going to focus on the hospitality industry. Peter Kaldheim gave a detailed account of this entire epic in his only book, The Idiot Wind 2020), published more than thirty years after the events occurred. The writer Don DeLillo even said of the book that it was a “solid work whose reading provided pleasure from beginning to end.”
It was translated into French, Italian and Spanish. On a critical level, it was very well received in Spain: “Peter Kaldheim’s memoirs are an ode to empathy among those who wander lost and a celebration of second chances. The literary debut of a talent hidden for more than three decades,” was said in La Vanguardia. Devoted to the last moment to the writers Jack Kerouac and Roberto Bolaño, an inveterate reader and a wonderful prescriber, he left unfinished what was going to be his second novel.
He was greatly interested not only in Spanish literature, but also in Catalan literature. Among other reasons, because since its publication in Spanish, Peter Kaldheim established an intense emotional relationship with Barcelona, ??traveling from his current residence in New Mexico to the city whenever he had the opportunity. Yesterday was going to be his first performance in public and in Spanish, something that made him especially excited.
His remains will soon be repatriated to the United States. He leaves deeply dismayed the large group of friends that he managed to establish in Barcelona and who, affectionately, had baptized him as “the last beatnik.”
