The following is part one of a two-part series
Amanda Peterson’s two braided ponytails flop about freely. Wearing a baby blue shirt, plaid pajama pants and three drawn-on freckles on each cheek, she and several other bright and googly-eyed performers joined in a Barney-like harmony that could have made the most negative of Nancys smile.
Peterson glowed. At the age of 17, she seemed to fit right in with the audience of elementary kids she was performing for.
This is the girl I remember.
Fast-forward a few years, and Peterson is sitting in a room next to a doped-up woman who’s been screwing her lover for the past two weeks.
Heartbroken and replaying the slaps delivered from her beau, Peterson tells her first love, a then 30-year-old Robbie Kountz, that he needs to leave. He goes outside to drink a beer.
Kountz, better known by the police as Jack-Rabbit-Robbie (for his uncanny ability to run and get away from cops), had various warrants for his arrest. So when he saw the cops coming up, even though they were looking for someone else, he darted off. They took right after in hot pursuit.
When Peterson looked outside to see him fleeing, a female police officer took notice of her in the window. She demanded Peterson to put her hands up and come outside. She stepped out of the door with a lit cigarette in hand, contemplating the ferocious anger and stifling the sadness lodged in her chest. When the officer instructed her to drop that cigarette, Peterson responded by flicking it in her face.
For Peterson, the girl I remember with swaying ponytails, this marked the end of a two-year drug ballad – running from cops, friends and family alike—with a man who she thought was her knight in shining armor.
Peterson grew up as the middle child in a church-going family. She describes herself as daddy’s little girl: never disrespectful, never disobedient and never wanting to fight. In fourth grade, she began expressing herself in her journal.
“[It] became my only friend,” said Peterson, 22. “I wore high waters and had braces and glasses.”
She was a walking target for the viciousness of elementary students.
“I would sit in my sister’s room and I would start crying,” she said.
A quiet and shy, notebook-wielding little girl she would remain, until high school theater began to get her out of her shell.
But even then, she was pretty much a lost cause.
“I never kissed anyone, never had a boyfriend, never flirted … I didn’t understand the difference between hitting on and conversation – I wish I knew,” she said.
Though her love life had more in common with The 40-Year-Old Virgin than it did with The Notebook, she graduated from high school in Portland, Ore., with some good friends and a newfound urge to express herself. Freshman year at a bible college in Maine was her golden year.
She remembers thinking, I’m going to be me, while learning to play piano, drums and guitar.
“I learned a lot about myself,” she said. But it wasn’t long before she was forced to return home and help her mom with family issues.
Peterson went from guitars and drums to mops and brooms. But it had to be done — her family needed daddy’s little girl. She transferred her credits to Portland State that summer and it was that summer that she met a 28-year-old Robbie Kountz.
He swept her off her feet.
It was a rough night for Peterson: arguing with a good friend, crying in front of everyone at the party she knew, making a scene. Kountz used that as a chance to play Mr. Right and slide into her life.
“He was good that night … I have to admit,” said a friend, who wished to remain anonymous.
He would be her first kiss – she was 19-years-old.
And then, she fell in love … and then she fell stupidly in love.
She dropped out of college and moved to Oregon City with him – isolating herself from friends and family alike.
“I did anything for him,” she said. Love was an addiction: Even when she found out he was married with children, she couldn’t escape it.
Just one night changed the tempo of that love. Forever.
After returning from a week-long voyage to god-only-knows-where, Kountz received money from Peterson on her break from work to go get himself some liquor. Peterson returned to work, and moments later, received a call letting her know that her car had been found wrecked.
Kountz had been running from the police when the brakes on her car went out. He fled the scene and escaped, but he left his cell phone behind in the car.
Peterson’s father arrived at the accident and found the cell phone. Kountz then called her dad and issued a threat to him that he would “lose something very important to him” if he didn’t return it.
Her dad thought he was talking about Amanda, but Kountz was actually referring to his truck.
Concerned about her safety, her father and brother showed up at her house, and began exchanging curse words with Kountz – eventually leading to her slamming the door on her father and running with Kountz through the back door.
And so, the innocent girl I remember, Amanda Peterson, began her adventure—through Hell.
[email protected]
Harris: A girl I once remembered
Daily Emerald
September 29, 2010
0
More to Discover