We were sitting at Richard’s kitchen table, like so many other times, and we were sharing a joint that Richard had rolled, some of his very good marijuana, finely pulverized in his coffee grinder, for a very evenly-burning experience. As I remember it, we had been talking for some time.

During a critique of political personalities, the subject of Ronald Reagan came up. I remarked that Reagan was perfect to be a president, superficially, because he looked the part. A Hollywood leading male, who looked good on a screen, on TV, and who could deliver the lines that were written for him impeccably.

“Well, you know that Reagan’s success was directly tied to him having the best astrologers,” said Richard.

Now this was the mid 90s, and Reagan and astrology was a well-known story for many years, from the National Enquirer to Time Magazine to TV. It was a joke, akin to Bigfoot. I have no doubt that I made a face showing how ridiculous I thought the idea was.

“Oh, come on, that’s just tabloid B.S. Reagan was such a success because he was an actor and played his role, very well. He could read the words written for him and deliver a speech like no other.”

Richard became agitated. “He did everything by astrology, as governor and as president. He was sworn in as governor at 2am…” I had heard that already, and said something to the tune of people were superstitious, and that it had been confirmed he used, or his wife used, astrology, but I didn’t buy that using astrology accounted for his success.

I am not going to tell you I remember every detail of this moment, but Richard was truly angry, and he stood up from the table. “It was astrology” he demanded. He was looking right at me. His lip quivered.

The thing is, it wasn’t that important to me. Reagan hadn’t been president for years, so who cared?  Who cared, even if he was the current president? Who cared at all? It seemed to me to be a weird thing to be hung up on.

Now I don’t poo-poo astrology, nor tarot, nor non-organized religion for that matter. But I also don’t demand that they work, either. I would never use them as the basis of my political opinions.

Personally, I am science-oriented about things like medicine, farming, and public policy. But I’m not a scientist nor socially tied to a set viewpoint–I don’t care about losing face with atheists or other scientists or reductionists for entertaining the idea that some so-called “pseudo-sciences” have some amount of merit. I’ve seen too many weird things to discount the spiritual side of things, whatever that means. We do seem to be “connected” in ways that science has not yet discovered.

But I would never get angry because someone had a disagreement about such a speculative and unprovable topic as astrology. To demand that Reagan’s political success was because of astrology, to me, was nuts. To get angry at someone for not agreeing to that seems weird. Strangely weird. It was an awkward moment, but it was clear Richard was really upset about this, and he demanded that I agree with him.

So I said some placating statement, agreeing that ASTROLOGY was why Reagan succeeded.

This conversation did not end our friendship. I just passed it off as an old hippie being very particular about their hippie ways and opinions. Sorry to generalize, but I found hippies were often very particular about things others might find trivial. You might be able to eschew the wearing of clothes, you could paint your car with flowers, you could stop using clocks or commercial toothpaste and that would all be accepted. But you also might do something like wearing your seat belt in a car or pass the pipe the wrong direction (“it MUST be in the direction of the sun…”) and someone might get very upset. It has been my experience that it is hard to predict what is taboo to those in the counterculture, hippie, raver, or otherwise, but hippies had more such things than other groups. Richard getting angry about Reagan’s use of astrology was just one of those quirky hippie things.

But anyway, I totally forgot about it for 20 years. I only remembered it after reflecting on my memories of Richard for a few days. It remains the only moment I saw Richard angry.

Other than this conversation about Reagan, I do not remember talking to Richard at all about astrology. I also do not remember any conversation about making ciphers, or serial killers, or any other subject that might be related to Zodiac.

Reflecting on the memory, it still seems like such a strange thing to get upset about, and more so for a guy who didn’t normally get mad. Of course, this is not evidence, but nevertheless it happened. I was faced with the nagging idea that Richard Gaikowski COULD be the Zodiac.