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Story of Steve

His smiling eyes hinted of trouble.  Not the go to jail kind of trouble, but the mischievous exciting kind of trouble.  Steve was crazy, a fun kind of crazy.  We were out one night and ended up at a bar that was having a theme party, a pajama party – it was the 80’s after all.  We didn’t have pajamas, but that was no problem for Steve.  He just stripped down to his boxers, walked into the bar, and joined the party.

He was incredibly handsome.  Tall, with flowing dark hair and blue eyes.  Huge dimples when he smiled.  The girls flocked to him.

But he was also crazy. A sad confusing kind of crazy.   He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia sometime just after high school.  He was OK on his meds, but the meds had all kinds of harsh side effects – so he would start skipping them.  It was occasional at first, but then as the disease took hold he would go off of them completely.  He would talk of places he had never been and recount memories of things that had never happened.  He would continue to function for a while until the disease eventually overwhelmed him.

I came to his apartment one summer day to say hey and check on him.  There he was, sitting in his recliner chair where he had been sitting when I had visited him two days before.  He was wearing the same clothes and smelled of urine.  I don’t think that he had moved from that chair for those two days.  
I called his family and they asked me to call the police.  As an adult, Steve needed to be considered a threat to himself or others before he could be involuntarily committed.  This was a process that everyone – Steve’s family, the police, and Steve – had been through several times before.  He wept like a small child as they searched his pockets and took away his keys and other things that might be dangerous.  He was so confused and he was so scared.

I visited him there sometimes at the mental hospital.  At first he was incoherent and his ramblings were impossible to follow.  But over the course of weeks, with therapy and the help of some powerful drugs, the real Steve would reappear.  
This was the cycle.  Sane but medicated and fully functional, then a slow decline -  losing his girlfriend, his job, and his sanity - perhaps over 12 or 18 month, then complete meltdown and back into the hospital and on.

It is through Steve that I learned empathy.  I rode BART to work in SF as young CPA.  There were a few “bums” that were at the Montgomery station on a regular basis.  One memorable guy was there every single morning, shouting some phrase, a new phrase each day that he would shout all day until he was hoarse – usually something political like “Hey Reagan, Why do you want to put weapons in space when you can’t feed the homeless and hungry here on earth?”  

Some days I would give one of the “bums” the lunch that I had packed for myself.  A colleague once asked “Why bother? These guys could get a job if they wanted”. But I saw things differently. Without his family’s love and resources, Steve would have been another one of these bums. Even with all their resources, Steve had a really hard time.  The guys on the street don’t have a chance.

After yet another full cycle through the mental institution, Steve moved into a house in Walnut Creek with the owner of the home, who he had met in a halfway house after he left the institution.  It was a nice home in a quiet neighborhood.

I was dating Steve’s younger sister and we had NYE plans in San Francisco.  I went to her family’s house to pick her up.

   
The TV was on and everyone was in front of it.  There was a news bulletin going on about a hostage situation in Walnut Creek.  It was the home that Steve was staying in.  Details were slow coming in.  There had been quite a bit of gun fire.  Someone was lying motionless on the driveway.  The postman was cowering behind a bush at the front door afraid to move.  A SWAT team took over the neighborhood.  An armored police vehicle final rescued the postman and dragged the body off of the driveway.  They pumped over 20 canisters of tear gas into the house.  Finally, after there had been no movement for many hours, they stormed the house.  The shooter was found dead in the backyard where he had killed himself, probably at the very start of the ordeal.

Steve had been murdered.  Shot in the head.  Gunned down on the driveway by his housemate.

It was a long night.  The next day we went to the morgue to identify Steve.  His dad was the only one allowed in.  The bullets had made quite a mess of him.   

The family asked me to go to Steve’s house to get some clothes for him to be buried in.  He had been in only underwear when he was shot on the driveway.  When I got there the police were still there doing an investigation.  The tear gas was still incredibly powerful. It burnt my skin, eyes, and lungs as I rummaged through Steve’s room.  I could only stay in the house a few minutes at a time.  There were shell casings on the floor and a small arsenal of guns spread out on the roommate’s bed.  I guess the guy was still allowed to fully exercise his 2^nd amendment rights.

As I took Steve’s belongings to the car, I saw the thick blood on the driveway where Steve had laid for over an hour as the drama unfolded. I asked a police officer who would clean up the blood. He said it was not the police’s responsibility and he wasn’t sure who would do it. I started to walk on, but I could not leave that for anyone else to see. I grabbed a hose and washed the blood into the grass. 

We buried Steve in a closed casket.  It will have been 40 years next New Year’s Eve.  I hadn’t really thought of Steve much in recent years.  But reflecting back, I realized how much Steve’s life, and death, has had such an effect on who I am now.