Last Day on Earth (3 page)

I COMMITTED MY CRIMES ALONE
partly because, like Steve, I was losing all my friends. Eighth grade was the time of “cut-downs,” competitive insults. After my father’s death, I was weak. Ian VanTuyl, who had been my best friend, began using everything he knew against me. At school, on the blacktop, we’d all stand around in a circle with our hands in our pockets and Ian would say that my front teeth were too big, or I smiled too much, and I would grin weakly and not know what to say. This is how you become a target in junior high. Others in the group were relieved, because this meant they were no longer targets, and they heaped it on. Every day I was made fun of, every day, all day, and so I know some of the rage Steve must have felt, and I know what it means to be an outcast in your social group.

Like Steve, I turned to secret sex. A girl with a terrible reputation, someone from a poorer part of town. At her house after school, her parents never home, we made out on her bed. I put my finger inside her and couldn’t believe how soft she was, but then she said we could have sex, and this scared me too much. I wasn’t ready. I had limits. My friends were just starting to drink, but I refused. It was something about control. My father’s suicide had come as a shock, and perhaps I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t drink and couldn’t have sex because I wasn’t willing to let something happen again that would be beyond my control.

I broke up with this girl, and then a guy named Ryan started having sex with her and telling everyone about it at school, started calling me a pussy. So now my friends had two new ways to make fun of me, about drinking and about sex. I still invited them for sleepovers, and had an agreement with my mother that we could go out toilet-papering people’s houses and such and she’d pretend not to notice. One time she forgot and came out into the hallway when she heard a sound, so then she had to shield her eyes, looking down, pretending she was really
sleepy, as she talked to me and we all stood there with TP in our hands. She was a good actress.

Outside, toilet-papering a house, my friends still made fun of me, but I had an edge they didn’t. I’d stick around as they all ran away. I’d walk up into the yard and unscrew the light bulb on the front porch, walk around into the backyard, even. Compared to what I was doing at night on my own, none of this felt like anything.

In the afternoons, I was going into neighbors’ houses. I had their phone numbers, and this was right before answering machines became widespread, so I would simply call their house and let it ring the entire time I was inside. If anyone came home, they would rush for the phone and I would slip out the way I’d come in, which was always through the small sliding bathroom window. Everyone in our neighborhood left that window open. It was difficult to climb in, headfirst, balancing on the toilet and trying not to break anything, but it always worked.

I never stole anything. I think I was just alone, an outcast, with a life that felt empty, so I was looking at all the stuff of other peoples’ lives, trying to see or feel what made them. I also looked for pornography, of course, and guns.

I had fantasies during this time that cast me as the underdog, everyone against me. I would imagine myself out behind the school backstop with the .30-.30 having to defend the honor of some girl as my classmates, all boys, attacked. I held them off, shooting them one by one with the rifle. So it was a fantasy born of reading too many of my father’s westerns, Louis L’Amour and later the adults-only ones by Jake Slocum. It was the fantasy of an outcast becoming a hero, showing everyone. But there I was, imagining a school shooting.

STEVE SPENDS ALMOST NO TIME AT HOME.
He lives at his friends’ houses the fall of eleventh grade. He’s better friends now with Julie Creamer, a big girl who’s on lithium for bipolar, same as Steve. His parents put him on it. It helps a bit. You’d never know Julie was on it; she’s light and fun and chatty. Her mother asks for help moving the furniture, and Steve handles it himself, tells her to relax, he’ll take care of it. Home away from home. He feels safe here.

At school, in the parking lot where all the Goths hang out, Julie gets Steve to try pot for the first time. He’s resisted before, even with Pete, but she gets him to try pot she’s bought from Pete, and he’s skipping around afterward, like a new bird. She’s laughing and trying to get him to stop. “Lancaster will bust us,” she tells him.

The other hangout is at The Tubes. A short walk to the forest preserve, hop a fence, slog though mud and wet grass past the federal nursery, rows of trees. In the next field, a dozen leftover concrete sewer pipes six feet in diameter, tall enough to stand inside. Shelter from rain and snow, the constant wind. He tries to get Julie to give him head here, but when they kiss, it’s awkward. She feels like she’s kissing her brother, and she wonders whether he’s really attracted to her. They date for two days, then decide to just be friends.

Most the time, at least half a dozen of their friends are here. They light chemicals on fire, blow shit up, shoot pellet guns, make out, smoke pot, sneak away to the porno stash in the trees. Whenever they shoot, Steve brags he has a membership with the NRA. His godfather, Richard Grafer, bought it for him.

“We know,” Adam says. “Like you haven’t told us a million times.” Adam and Steve are friends again, sort of, and they bring white spray paint one day for tagging. Steve tags a white swastika on the front of one of the pipes. “You’re doing your swastika wrong,” Adam says.

“No I’m not,” Steve says.

“Remember how you used to put ‘Hi Ho Hitler’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler’?”

“Shut up. I’ll show you what’s real.” And Steve gives Adam a business card from the KKK. Then he tags “blows” under “Metallica,” even though he loves Metallica.

On colder nights, they hang out in one of the bathrooms. Steve’s godfather, Grafer, works for the forest service, for Cook County, so Steve has access to the keys. The bathrooms are cinderblock stand-alone huts in the wilderness. Their own concrete chalets. They’re used, also, by gay cruisers. If you back into a parking space here, you’re asking for a visit.

Steve has been with a man before, but his friends don’t know this. Secret sex, like his summer with Nicole.

Steve hangs out a lot with Pete Rachowsky. They get arrested September 22, 1996, for trespassing on railroad tracks and the Pepsi lot, planning to go through some dumpsters. By the end of the semester, as it gets colder, Steve has become odd, even for him, and antisocial.

“Is something going on at home?” Julie asks him.

“Nothing,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Steve decides to commit suicide, plans it ahead of time, holds a sale first to get rid of all his stuff. His friend Jason gets his guitar. His friend Lee gets his video games. “He sold all his shit,” Adam says.

December 14, 1996, Steve overdoses on Tylenol and calls Missy. His parents throw him into Rush, a hospital, for a week, but something becomes unstoppable about these suicide attempts. Steve is anxious all the time, depressed, unable to sleep. He blows up on the meds, goes from skinny to obese, 300 pounds, in just a couple months. Rich can’t understand what’s happened. Steve is like a zombie, with a faraway stare, “like the personality was just sucked out of him.” Julie tries to talk with him, and most the time he’s just glassy-eyed, so out of it he won’t even look at her.

In one clear moment, he stands at the mirror with her, at her house. He has terrible acne, one of the side effects. “You don’t need makeup,” he tells her. “You look beautiful. I look like shit. Look at me. This is horrible.”

People talk about him at school that winter. He’s sitting in the cafeteria, an enormous and exposed room right off the main hall, a place where you can’t hide. He’s with Julie, and a couple of jocks come up to him. They know his sister, Susan, and they know Joe Russo’s older brother and sister. They know everything about him. “Hey, Suicide Steve, what’s up?” one of them asks. “Uh-oh, don’t say that, Crazy Mierczak might off himself,” the other says. Then the first one flips Steve’s tray onto the floor, all his food.

Steve walks out to the Goth lot and Julie follows him. “Who cares about them,” she says.

“Just back off,” he says, and he won’t say anything more the rest of the day.

The next day, though, he tells her, “I love school because I love working. But I hate school because of everyone in my classes. I hate everyone.”

“You can’t hate everyone,” she tells him. “You don’t hate me.”

“No.”

“So the others?”

“I do. Some people I wanna hurt.”

BY THE FALL OF HIS JUNIOR YEAR,
when Steve first attempts suicide, his life is already destroyed. And then it gets worse, steadily, month by month.

I can understand some parts of that life, including being an outcast. I finally left all my friends the fall of tenth grade. We were all in band, like Steve and his friend Adam, and we went on a field trip down to an amusement park in Southern California. I hated Ian VanTuyl by that point, had fantasies of killing him, shooting him with one of my rifles. He deserved it, in my opinion, and I hated all my other friends about half as much for going along with him. They were brutal to me, every day, constant humiliation. So on this trip, I finally got off the bus they were on and got on the other bus. This one was for all the cheerleaders and baton twirlers, so I wasn’t exactly welcome there, either, but I knew a couple of them, and they invited me over to help me get away from my friends.

So that was it. I wandered school friendless for the next two weeks. At lunch and snack break, when everyone huddled into their groups, I felt exposed and awkward, like I had a target on me that said loser. And I felt my life sliding away, a sense of doom that I was destined to repeat what my father had done, as if his suicide had a kind of magnetic force. I didn’t imagine it happening soon. I imagined growing old enough to get married and have kids, and then watching my life fall apart as my father’s had, with infidelity and divorce, guilt and depression that would make me finally pull the trigger, fulfilling my fate. Doom is the only word that fits, and that feeling would last, waiting always in the background, for twenty years.

But after wandering friendless for those two weeks, I started hanging out with a new friend I’d met on the wrestling team, Galen Palmer, and he turned my life around for the better. He introduced me to his friends in drama, and I tried out to be in the after-school drama workshop, an
unusual program run by a teacher who had studied with the Polish Laboratory Theatre. Instead of pretending to feel emotion or planning out gestures, the focus was on improvisation, on working indirectly through associations, such as making your voice sound like dry grass if the part called for sadness.

I wanted into this group badly. I wanted friends, and I wanted to belong. So at the auditions, I told the truth about my father for the first time. For three years, I had told everyone that he had died of cancer. His suicide just felt too shameful, a personal shame, something dirty. But to this group, I told the story of the day we found out, and they let me in. What it meant for the shape of my life was that instead of continuing to spiral down into a double life, things began to improve for me, and this is what never happened for Steve in high school. His life spiraled into drugs, medications, suicide attempts, sexual shame, bitter fights with his mother, threats of violence. It’s hard to know how exactly it all happened. Who handed him a KKK card? Who was the man he first had sex with, and was it consensual? How was he able to plan his own suicide in advance and even sell his things? I’ve visited all the places he went during those times, I’ve talked with his friends and spent time with them, gone to their houses, but I just don’t have the experience to really understand. I haven’t been on those medications, for instance.

Prozac is the one antidepressant approved for use in teens, and it’s famous for causing or heightening suicidal thoughts. Depakote may have been the drug that puffed Steve up and sent him to 300 pounds, though Lithium can have that effect, too. The main problem may have been that he was on cocktails, combinations of drugs, so who knows what all the effects were. Of all his symptoms over the years—psychotic episodes, hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, violent rage, insomnia, checking behaviors, despair, etc.—which ones were his and which ones belonged to the medications? It’s partly because of the drugs that Steve goes off the chart and I can no longer connect his life to my own. Terence wrote, “Nothing human is foreign to me,” but a person on drugs becomes something different than human.

ON APRIL 8, 1997,
Elk Grove High School denies a request by Steve’s parents to have a case study evaluation. They give his parents a handbook on dealing with students with disabilities. By this point, Steve’s parents see him as mentally disabled and are asking for help, but the school refuses to help. April 13, Steve overdoses on forty Ambien and slits his wrists. Hospitalized at Rush. In the fall of his senior year, November 4, 1997, he tells his mother he doesn’t want to go to school anymore. They fight, he says he’s not going, and then, at 11:00 p.m., he takes fifty Depakote, an entire bottle, and goes to sleep.

He’s surprised to wake up in the morning. And he’s able to get dressed, go to school, but his first teacher notices right away how drowsy he is, and he’s taken to the nurse’s office. “I want to die,” he tells the nurse, according to the police report. “Life sucks.” This time he’s taken to Alexian Brothers Hospital. His mother arrives within an hour, but does this make a difference to him?

They keep him in for only three days, which his friends feel was too short a time, driven by insurance limitations. Two months later, he’s back at Alexian again, January 10, 1998, for suicidal thoughts. Four days earlier, the cops stopped him, along with Pete Rachowsky, after a neighbor reported they were smoking marijuana. The next month, February 7 to 11, he’s back again in Alexian. While he’s there, on February 9, his father walks into the police station and tells them Pete Rachowsky is dealing acid, fake acid, marijuana, and something else he can’t remember the name of. The information is from his son, Steve. Pete keeps his drugs hidden in his radio. Steve’s father wants Pete and several other high-school dropout drug dealers kept away from his son.