The Boo Radley of Central Square

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

The Boo Radley of Central Square

by Hannah Cotier

On the corner of Brookline and Franklin Streets in Boston, there’s this fence.

It is almost six feet high, and spans half the block in either direction. It is painted purple and yellow and green, and begs passersby to stop and read it, even if they’re rushing to catch the T or lugging bags of groceries.

“Be aware,” it says, in painted white letters. “Everything has two sides and everything is alive.”

These sorts of sayings are written all over the fence, weaving around grizzly bears, moose, and starburst cutouts which showcase the wild garden growing behind it. It surrounds a three-story brown apartment building that, on an otherwise typical Cambridge side street, looks almost out of place.

In a way, it is. The fence and the home belong to Peter Valentine, a wiry man with a white beard and handmade, brightly patched felt clothes. Valentine was one of many tenants who were forced to re-locate from their Blanche Street Apartments in the early nineties to make room for University Park, a mixed-development project spearheaded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Most of the street’s residents moved on. But Valentine stood firm and stayed in his home, convincing the Cambridge Rent Control Board that the three-story apartment was rightfully his. He told the board that his Karma was perfectly balanced there, and he could not leave. So, when Valentine moved, he took his apartment building with him on the back of a flatbed truck.

Close to twenty years later, he and his house have become fixtures in Central Square and the Cambridge community. His house, called Moose and Grizzly Bears’ Ville, is where he teaches a course in electromagnetic martial arts. Or, as he calls it on his painted fence, “a better way through the woods.”

Electromagnetic martial arts [EMMA] are a psychic defense system against the things in the world that threaten us. A combination of meditation, prayer, and creativity, they are intended to help you protect yourself from anything, including galactic aliens, natural disasters, invisible attacks, and parallel universes, according to the brochure.

Valentine teaches EMMA through physical movements and mental exercises, as well as discussion. He meets with his students for two four-hour meetings to teach them the foundations, and follows up with roughly fifteen shorter meetings for review and practice.

The fence that surrounds his house is a whimsical portrayal of Valentine’s belief system, which some are quick to dismiss as nonsense. In a way, Valentine is the Boo Radley of Central Square, a sort of fascinating “other” in the midst of a neighborhood that sometimes misunderstands him. He has been called a doomsayer and a lunatic by bloggers and reporters who have never spoken to him.

Valentine does not do interviews, partly because he suspects that various agencies are aware of him and conspiring against him, including the CIA. He has likened EMMA to the precautions of a chicken farmer who goes around to every nook and cranny of his farm’s fences to make sure that predators can’t get in: he insists on being thorough in his methods of self-protection. Valentine guards against all the evils in the universe, both the real and imaginary.

Yet despite his suspicions about the outside world, Valentine is an active member of the Cambridge community. According to one of his students, he sees himself as the protector of all of Cambridge. He rarely leaves the neighborhood, and monitors the area using various metaphysical surveillance techniques set up in his home. The fence proclaims that his house is “The Neighborhood Pentagon: Dependable Operations.” He attends City Council meetings to weigh in on decisions, and has received “thank you” letters from Cambridge mayors, city councilors, and city managers.

But much of Valentine’s work is his course. There are copies of the application on his front door, and on the handwritten forms, Valentine cautions that there is “no guarantee of response.’ Also, the class doesn’t come cheap: a $400 investment, there is to be no haggling over the price. It is time-intensive, it is difficult, and it does not promise all the answers.

Jim Hobbs, a free-jazz alto saxophonist, was one of Peter’s students. He used to work at a copy shop in Harvard Square where Valentine would make photocopies of his brochures, handouts, and applications. Hobbs knew the unusual story of Peter’s house, and they would chat when Peter stopped in. Hobbs often plays gigs with his bands The Brothers Heliopolis and Fully Celebrated, and occasionally, Peter would go to hear them play.

In 2005, Hobbs received a package at the music store where he works. It was a case containing a bright orange pocket trumpet. Hobbs had never seen anything like it, and decided to bring it to his gig at the Lillypad that night, planning to mess around with the funny-looking horn on stage. As he was setting up for the show, Peter Valentine came into the venue dressed entirely in orange.

“Peter walks right up to me - doesn’t see this horn anywhere, doesn’t even know I have it - and says, ‘I want to learn trumpet’,” Hobbs recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, I’ll be damned. Have this one.’”

Hobbs set Valentine up with the orange trumpet and a mouthpiece and gave him some lessons at the store. In exchange, Peter offered Hobbs his course. They began meeting once a week for about six months. The night Hobbs agreed to learn electromagnetic martial arts, he says that a large shooting star fell “like an exclamation mark in the sky” right behind Peter.

Though Hobbs wanted to see these strange events as purely coincidental, he could not shake the feeling that Valentine possessed a spiritual strength.

“The way I viewed Peter then was that he was the first person who ever truly began their own religion,” Hobbs says. “He’s put what he’s learned into his own sort of words and categories and explanations and techniques and rituals. It’s all his own.”

During their weekly meetings, Hobbs and Valentine discussed big philosophical questions. They walked around the neighborhood and practiced heightening their senses to emotional tensions, which Hobbs says he could always feel once he tuned in to them.

“We use so little of what we’re capable of in that regard,” he says. Though he started taking the class “with a grain of salt,” Hobbs describes Peter’s teachings as possessing a raw truth, as opposed to religious truth that’s been mulled over and handed down for centuries.

He says that he still calls on some of the techniques Peter taught him when he gets overwhelmed with financial concerns or projects or personal conflicts.

“The amount of work he pours into [his course] is really what blows your mind,” says Hobbs. “For me, that’s what separates him from a kook who’s just drunk on philosophy and is pretty easy to come by. He’s not in any way altered, and he’s working at it all every second, just the way I would imagine a true, original, untainted-by-any-culture holy man would. He’s just finding it all out for himself.”

Valentine’s students are not the only ones who are curious about his unique philosophies. In the summer of 2008, Cambridge Community Television [CCTV] created a short documentary about the fence as part of Zip Docs, a media-mapping project by the station to profile landmarks in Cambridge.

“When I first saw [the fence], I thought it was very profound. [Peter] was talking about things on the fence that were food for thought, for the soul, the consciousness, everything,” says Heather Goldman, one of the students who worked on the documentary. “So for me, he represents someone who, in a way, is the subtle soul of the community.”

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Talia Ralph is a Canadian living in Los Angeles. She graduated with a degree in magazine journalism from Emerson College. If you ask her to bust a move, she probably will. Photos by Hannah Cotier. A version of this piece originally ran in Gauge Magazine.