Last Day on Earth (2 page)

Nothing happens for a while. They wonder if they made it wrong. They think about running back across to check. Then it blows, an explosion louder than they could have hoped for. Glorious. They run back through the forest, hyped up on adrenaline and joy, laughing.

Five days later, on February 10, Pete’s mother, MaryAnn Rachowsky, finds two-liter bottles, Works toilet cleaner, and aluminum foil in her son’s backpack. She tells the police, they haul Pete in for questioning, and he eventually gives up Steve and Joe.

The detectives call Steve’s parents on the twenty-second, and they agree to bring him in for questioning. “We spoke to Steven’s parents and they related that Steven was very nervous and scared about being at the police station and he realized that what he had done was a mistake,” reads the police report from February 24, 1994. “They advised that they
would discipline him and would like us to speak to Steven to scare him in order that he would not make any bombs in the future.”

Steve is remorseful. He tells the police that fifteen students know how to make the bombs. He gives names. He vows he’ll never do something like this again. Does he already hate himself at this point? Are his apologies already over the top, as they will be in later years? The police aren’t psychiatrists and of course can’t see the future. They see only a scared, remorseful kid, a minor offense, no property damage, no injuries. They station-adjust him, close the case, send him home to be disciplined by his parents.

MY OWN JUVENILE REPORT IS FROM 1980.
Only one contact with the Santa Rosa police, and not with the .300 magnum. It was a BB gun, a hot summer’s day, at the fence in our backyard. A fifteen-foot drop-off to the neighbors’ yard below, since we were on a hill. Pine trees along the fence, shady and hidden. My mother at work.

I usually shot at birds with the BB gun and also a pellet gun, but today the neighbors’ dog was barking at me. A black Lab, like the one I’d had with my father. I’d spent weekends at his ranch in Lakeport, California, before he moved back to Alaska. That dog had greeted me every Friday evening by knocking me flat. I’d see the white diamond on his chest, then I’d hit the ground.

I don’t know why I decided to shoot at the neighbors’ dog. I have only the facts of Steve’s life to understand what he did, the details of scenes, and really that’s all I have from my own life. I can’t remember enough of what I felt or thought twenty-eight years ago. A self is not a constant thing, and a mind changes from year to year and can’t remember how it thought before. We think we remember, but that’s fiction, built on the few facts that were noted and stored away.

A beautiful dog, rich black coat, tail wagging as it barked. It was on a back porch that was only a concrete slab in front of a sliding glass door to the living room. The neighbors’ yard was large, with a lot of trees, so the dog was at least fifty feet away, maybe more, and I do remember thinking that a BB was far too slow to do any damage, especially at this range. At the most, it would feel like a swat.

I aimed a couple feet above the dog’s back to account for the fall of the BB and pulled the trigger. A light cough of air, and the brass BB arced away and fell even lower than I had thought, hitting the concrete under the dog’s belly and slapping into the sliding glass door behind. Then there was a pause. The dog wasn’t barking. I wasn’t breathing,
and all was still. I could see the BB stuck in the glass, but since that was impossible, I thought I was imagining it.

The glass moved in waves. Large ripples over its entire length, become a liquid, something I had never seen, something I didn’t know was possible, and then it exploded. The entire sliding glass door shattered into thousands of fragments.

The sound was loud, and I should have been running away, but I had just witnessed the most beautiful and improbable thing.

Then the neighbors’ sons emerged from the shattered doorway and I ducked down. They were yelling, and after a few more moments, I heard them start up their VW van and roar down their street to come around the block.

I ran into the house with the BB gun, to the hallway closet, pushed it behind my mother’s coats and pulled out my old BB gun, the broken one. I ran back outside to our shed and was opening the door when I happened to see my neighbor, Ned, looking out his bedroom window at me. He was a year or two younger than I was, a small kid, and we were friends, sort of. I had shot him once with the BB gun, a really lucky shot as he ran down the sidewalk away from me. Just pointed the gun high in the air, and he was far away, running fast, but the BB somehow arced perfectly and hit him in the back. Luckiest shot of my life, and today had been the unluckiest.

I put my finger to my lips to ask Ned to keep this a secret, then ducked into the shed to place the BB gun and ran back inside the house.

The van pulled up, the neighbors pounding at our front door. Did I open the door and talk with them? I remember their yelling, and I remember what they looked like, two older boys in high school, stoners with long hair, and I remember feeling frightened, but I could have been watching through the peephole.

When my mother came home, she believed in my innocence. She wanted to clear my good name. So we drove around to the neighbors and sat in their living room next to that shattered, missing door, and she laid into them for how their sons had frightened me. She was a
school counselor, an authority of sorts. But they knew I had shot at their dog, which pissed them off even more than the glass.

My mother then took me to Ned’s house. I remember sitting down with Ned’s parents. Ned had squealed on me already about hiding the BB gun, but his father said something like “we know David’s a good boy,” and Ned’s mother pursed her lips and made it clear she knew that wasn’t true. My mother looked at me then, a curious look, as if I were some new kind of monster.

Then we visited our other neighbors. They reported seeing me on the roof with a pellet gun, said they were tired of me shooting all the doves off the telephone wires. They liked doves, and no doves came here anymore.

My mother called the police. I was still maintaining my innocence, and she wanted the truth. I thought it was bad form, personally, to call the police on your own son, but she cared only about truth and justice, not distracted at all by blood.

I lucked out, though. The cop who arrived was the daughter of “Green,” our neighbor at our previous house, an older woman who became like a grandmother to me and my sister.

The three of us stood at the fence right where I had stood to fire the shot. “Can you trace the angle the BB was shot from, some sort of ballistics?” my mother asked. She seemed ready to pay for the test herself.

“It must have come from up the hill,” I said.

We went into the shed to look at the BB gun. “It’s broken,” I said. “It doesn’t even work. I thought about trying to hide it because I was scared, but then Ned saw me, so I just put it back.”

Green’s daughter tested the gun, and it was indeed broken. My mother didn’t know about the other BB gun. But she told Green’s daughter about my pellet gun stunts and everything we’d learned from the neighbors.

Green’s daughter thought for a while, then said I was a good kid, I got good grades, I shouldn’t be shooting BB guns or pellet guns, but we’d never know what happened to that sliding glass door. It wasn’t possible to figure out the angle of fire with a BB. She said we should just assume I was innocent and let it go.

So nothing happened, and I continued shooting. From
Survivalist Magazine
I ordered a converter kit for the .300 magnum that allowed me to shoot .32-caliber pistol shells in the rifle. They were much quieter and could be mistaken, even, for firecrackers. They were very accurate through that long barrel, and I could hit streetlights right from my own backyard.

I ordered the converter kit with my mother’s knowledge and blessing. This was the time of nuclear holocaust fears, of
The Day After
and
The Beach
, and she liked the idea of squirreling away some food and water. We had long excited talks about how I would be able to hunt and provide for the family in times of Armageddon, and this converter kit was a part of that plan, would allow me to kill small game with a rifle that could also snipe bad guys with its full .300 magnum shells. These discussions put us very close to the Michigan Militia that Steve admired, put us dangerously close to his libertarianism, to the primacy of the individual or small clan over the larger group or society, especially the federal government. It was insanity, but it wasn’t uncommon at the time.

I also tried, like Steve, to make bombs. I filled a small glass apple juice bottle with gasoline and stuffed a rag in the top, set it in the middle of a neighboring street late at night, and lit it on fire, then ran back a hundred feet. Nothing happened. I didn’t know how a Molotov cocktail was supposed to work, didn’t realize it had to be thrown and shattered, that it wasn’t technically a bomb. I couldn’t consult with anyone, because I had realized early on that if you want to commit crimes, you have to do them alone. No one else can be trusted.

I HAVE TO GO BACK TO STEVE’S DOG,
the pug, because even though “nothing human is foreign to me,” Steve does things early on that strain that idea.

Adam watches Steve drop the pug numerous times, light it on fire. Its loud breathing just really annoys the shit out of Steve. Then one of Steve’s other friends, Joe Cuzma, comes to tap at his window. This is eighth grade, the same year as the Drano bomb, and they don’t have cell phones yet. They just knock on each other’s windows. But Joe looks in Steve’s window and sees him behind his dog, fucking it. At least this is what he tells everyone at school. “That guy’s messed up,” he says. Joe is tall, excitable, his head waving around and tongue lolling as he holds an imaginary dog and air-fucks it. Everyone laughs. Everyone.

“I was teaching it dominance,” Steve tells Adam and another friend, Rich Johnson. “I was showing it who was alpha dog.” And this isn’t the same as denying it happened.

Steve loses friends, Joe Cuzma and others. He’s very protective of his remaining friends, worries that Adam is spending too much time with Joe Russo and Lee Bode, worries Adam will steal them away and he’ll have no one. So he starts talking about Adam behind his back and doesn’t know that Joe and Lee tell this to Adam.

Adam has another thing Steve wants, a new business with a friend Mike, raising feeder mice and rats for snakes. Steve wants in. So Adam invites him over, a setup. “I arranged a wiretap,” Adam says. He hides a tape recorder, and when Steve arrives, they talk. Steve’s looking at the tanks, figuring his way in, mice scrabbling at the glass, the smell of sawdust and urine. Adam leads with questions to get Steve to admit he doesn’t like certain people, gets him to say bad things about them. Steve’s barely even paying attention, worried about what he has to offer, how he can become a part of this. Adam gets him to admit he stole CD’s and liquor from Joe Russo’s older brother and sister.

Later that week, on Friday afternoon, Steve goes over to Joe Russo’s house, another tract home like his own, but right across from the preserve, away from traffic, on a corner with a larger lawn. Joe, Lee, and Adam are playing a video game on the TV, and this is what Steve fears, Adam taking away his best friends. He tries not to say anything, because Joe’s dad is in the other room. He sits down and then Adam turns off the game. He hits play on a tape recorder, and there it is, for all to hear. What Steve has said about his friends, his admission that he stole from Joe’s sister and brother. He tries to stop it, tries to get to the tape recorder, but Adam stops him, and then Steve starts hitting Adam, screaming.

“He lost all his friends that day,” Adam says.

The next day, Steve challenges Adam to a fight after school. Other kids hear about it. Steve pulls a knife.

“It’s not worth it,” Adam tells him, scared shitless. “All these people, everyone will see. You’ll get in trouble.”

And Steve sees this is true, sees that Adam has cornered him yet again. Then he gets suspended, and Adam only gets detention.

Joe Russo’s older brother is on the football team. He tells all his buddies Steve is bad news, and word gets around. When Steve enters high school as a ninth-grader in the fall, he’s already an outcast.

Goths. This is what Steve and his friends become in high school, except that Steve is an outcast even within this group. Just beyond the school grounds is a parking lot where they all gather and smoke. Long black trench coats, black leather boots, chains and spikes. Officer Lancaster lurking at the edges with his bionic mic, trying to catch drug deals.

It takes time, unbearable time, all of ninth grade and into tenth grade, for Steve to regain his friendships with Joe and Lee, and there’s always an edge with Adam. Steve waits for his life to change, passes the time with Pete Rachowsky, who becomes a drug dealer.

Steve and his friends form a campus club in the fall of their sophomore year, try to get a radio station. It starts with just a few short bits to go with campus announcements a couple times a day. Free Your Minds,
they call the club, and it’s unsuccessful. They’re not liked, after all. Who would want to listen to them?

Steve doesn’t care much, though. Somehow, the miraculous has happened. A girl named “Missy” likes him for some reason, and suddenly he has a girlfriend. She’s cute, too, looks like Liv Tyler, wears a black choker. His parents let her stay over a couple nights a week as a “family friend.” Then, in the winter, Missy dumps him, tells everyone he has a small penis, can’t satisfy her in bed. Steve’s older sister, Susan, is no help. She laughs at him too. She’s always had an easier time. The two of them are night and day.

So Steve goes for the lowest common denominator, “Nicole,” “a girl with a self-esteem problem, a girl you wouldn’t want your parents to know about,” according to Adam. Secret sex for that entire summer after tenth grade. No one is supposed to know, except Steve’s friends. At Rich’s house, there’s a foam lounger that reclines. They call it the Flip-N-Fuck. They do it on the ottoman, too, in Rich’s living room late at night, just a moving sheet with two bodies underneath.