Last Day on Earth (23 page)

Josh Stone hits a setback around Easter, when someone burns Steve’s cross. There have been other attempts to take away or vandalize the sixth cross, but this one hits Josh hard, and he’s struggling again.

“I understand it’s tough for the people who knew him,” Joe Peterson says. “It’s true there aren’t a lot of memorials to him. And I’m glad.”

Three months after the shootings, Jessica still cries every time we talk. “I feel this need to protect him,” she says. “He was such a private person.” We were supposed to meet for dinner, but instead we’re standing in a Barnes and Noble in Champaign, thumbing through books on the tables near the front door. Her friend Josh is with her again. He’s her
moral support each time we talk. He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t know anything about him.

She shows me her new tattoo, six stars on her left forearm. Steve’s is red and black, NIU’s colors, but I don’t think she realizes these are also the colors of Jigsaw, Marilyn Manson, Nazis, and Steve’s “Terrorist” T-shirt. She touches one of the other stars. “I don’t know the other names yet,” she says, and cries much harder. “I’m not ready yet for the other names, for what he did.”

After the shootings, Jessica received all those painful and confusing gifts from Steve, including the platinum wedding band, and even
Fight Club
seems to have a message for her: “You shot yourself,” the protagonist’s girlfriend says at the end, and he answers her, “Yes. But I’m okay. Marla, look at me. Trust me. Everything’s going to be fine. You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

“I’m worried about who you’re talking with,” Jessica tells me, and she makes me name Julie, Rich, and Adam again, Steve’s high school friends. “I talked with Susan,” she says, “and she couldn’t remember them.” So I mention the “wiretap” arranged by Adam, the Tubes, and now she remembers the stories. “Oh no,” she says.

But the worst two, for her, are sex with his dog and Craigslist. “You can’t write about those,” she says. “Steve was such a private person.”

“I have to make sense of his life,” I tell her. “And sexual shame is part of why he hated himself so much, which is part of why he was able to do this. If I leave out the secret summer of sex with Nicole, or all the people from Craigslist, he doesn’t make any sense.”

Jessica is crying again, and I feel terrible.

“I’m really sorry,” I say. “I’ve never done this before, and I don’t think I’m ever going to do it again.” And this is true. This story has been grueling, and I have no desire to investigate anything like it ever again.

“On the way over here,” she says, “I was freaking out about talking with you. I was asking Josh, why can’t I just tell him what to write and what not to write?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “And we don’t have to talk anymore. We can stop.”

She takes me up on that offer. “I need to go home and cry,” she says. Afterward, she posts on her Facebook page that “Jessica is thinking that
if Steve knew the consequences of what he was doing, I think he would have thought twice,” and by this I think she means not only the deaths and injuries and effect on her, but also the exposure, Steve’s private past laid bare.

Steve’s memorial service, with his family and friends, is not held until June 28. They have to wait that long, four and a half months. Jim Thomas isn’t able to go, it turns out, which he finds terribly disappointing. He’s just returned from California, has a touch of the flu, and finds out a second cat is diabetic and needs insulin shots twice a day, but the main problem is that something really scary is going on with one of his eyes, so he doesn’t trust himself to drive on the expressway. “I wanted to be there, if for nothing else than to support Jess. Both bummed and guilt-laden, but there’s really no way I could have made it.”

Mark goes and says it’s good to find some closure. “Obviously it was a tragedy,” Mark says, “and in any kind of tragedy, you have to feel bad for the victims, but Steve himself was a victim. And a lot of people didn’t identify that, and mental illness. Steve was a victim of himself. I don’t see that it was really planned. I remember back in fall of 2006 that Steve enjoyed the guns and the shooting range. In DeKalb, he went to the shooting range. He wasn’t a gun nut, though. He owned a couple guns, but no big deal. The media, they’ll put a spin on it and say he’s a gun nut and then blame it on guns and all that stuff.”

Jessica writes, “I don’t think that the memorial helped me all that much. I just kept thinking how it was exactly not what Steven would have wanted. I keep forgetting that the memorial wasn’t for Steven, but for everyone else. Jim was disappointed that he couldn’t make it. I was devastated when he said that he couldn’t come. There were a few NIU people there and that was comforting to me. Some UI people were there too, but they were there more for Susan than for Steven.”

Memorials are important, and one issue still to be decided is the future of Cole Hall. The governor of Illinois and NIU’s president proposed demolition, leaving the site as a memorial, and building a new “Memorial Hall” nearby for $40 million. But after more discussion and an online survey of students and faculty, the plan shifted to
a remodeling for $7.7 million, no longer using it as a classroom, and building a new auditorium elsewhere. In January 2011, limited renovation work finally began.

Put into perspective, though, six gun deaths is nothing for the United States, and this discussion of Cole Hall misses the point, if I may be forgiven for saying such things. One weekend while I was in DeKalb investigating, April 19 to 20, 2008, there were thirty-six separate shootings in Chicago, with nine homicides. Is it “media spin” to mention this? Weapons included an AK-47 assault rifle, which is becoming more readily available in the United States. We average over ten thousand handgun deaths a year in this country, and the Supreme Court upheld, in June 2008, an individual’s right to bear arms, striking down a gun ban in Washington, D.C., and threatening such bans in Chicago and elsewhere. After the NIU shootings, the Illinois state legislature tried to pass that bill that would have limited handgun purchases to one pistol per month per person, meaning anyone could still have gone out and bought a dozen handguns per year, and even that couldn’t pass. DeKalb’s own representative voted against it. Every time I drive into Champaign to interview Jessica, I see signs by the side of the road that claim “Guns Save Lives.” If that’s not spin, then what is spin?

I DON’T THINK I’LL EVER ENTIRELY UNDERSTAND
the year after my father’s suicide. I told everyone my father died of cancer, and I didn’t see a therapist. I didn’t have a real conversation with anyone. Instead, I shot things, the guns a terrible substitute. A year of the most basic brutality, a year I’m lucky to have escaped without hurting anyone. I was an insomniac—and would be for the next fifteen years—and as I lay wide awake in bed every night, I couldn’t help thinking over and over about the .44 magnum my father had used to kill himself. I had fired it once, at maybe eleven or twelve years old, and though I had used both hands, it flew back so hard it nearly hit me in the face. But the scariest part was that it fired with only the slightest pressure on the trigger. It was difficult to put your finger on the trigger and not have it fire. So what I kept wondering was whether my father had really intended to kill himself. What if he was just thinking about it, just testing it, or what if he had one moment of deciding but it was only a brief moment and, with the hair trigger, that was enough? I wanted to hold that pistol in my own hands, feel the possibility, feel the heft of it and know what it felt like pressed against my head. And I’m glad now I didn’t have that opportunity.

I finally sold my father’s other guns when I was in graduate school. I needed the money, but I also just didn’t want them in my life anymore. What I really wanted was for them never to have existed. But once I sold them, I was surprised by this terrible feeling that I had sold off a part of my father, because I have so little of him left. He vanished with his suicide. We sold our land, also, that hunting ranch, for peanuts, stupidly, and it was mostly the land that held our family’s history and that connected all of us every year, scattered now.

I still love my father, even twenty-nine years after his suicide. The feeling hasn’t diminished at all, hasn’t faded over time, but I have
nothing left to attach it to. If I could hold his .300 magnum now, would he come back to me, some closer memory, some echo of hiking with him through live oak and manzanita, watching him raise that rifle high over his head as we pushed through brush? If I remember that rifle, really focus on it, I can remember the sunlight on my father’s light-brown curly hair, receding, his lopsided grin as he looked down at me. But more than that, I can almost remember how the moment felt, what it was like to be there with him, to hunt with him, what it was like to belong. My father was what attached me to the world.

It turns out I don’t really have that many similarities with Steve. I certainly don’t share his racism, libertarianism, love of horror, fascination with killers, military training, ambivalent sexuality and sprees online and with prostitutes, medication and mental health history, drug-dealer friends, tattoos, disturbing mother, interest in corrections, etc. But I did inherit all my father’s guns at thirteen, when I was most hyped up on hormones, and the world meant nothing to me after he put that pistol to his head. I had nothing to lose. And I had witnessed a lot of brutality.

I watched my father gut shoot two deer once. It was on the upper glade of our ranch. We spotted a group of deer, including two bucks. We were so far away, they couldn’t possibly sense us. My father sighted in with his .300 magnum. I watched through the binoculars.

A great boom like artillery, my father recoiling, and I saw the buck hit in the stomach, gut-shot. It fell over and began tumbling down the steep slope, gathering speed in the dry grass. It was screaming, just like a human being. The voice really the same.

The second boom and the second buck was hit the same way, terrible luck. My father would be upset. A gut shot spoils the meat. He was a very good marksman, so this was unheard of, that he would gut shoot two in a row. This buck fell and rolled the same as the other, screaming also.

The two of them tumbled together down that long glade as we watched, and I’ll never forget their voices. I’ll never be able to erase them, though I’d like to.

I think we can be damaged, and I think Steve’s life was already destroyed before he left high school. He had an incredible drive, though, to make something of himself, and I think that must have made his final act all the more bitter to him.

I owe enormous thanks to my editor Tyler Cabot at
Esquire
. He assigned this story to me, then worked tirelessly, every day, for months, through the entire grueling process of interviews, writing, editing, and fact-checking. The two of us were equally familiar with more than a thousand pages of information from the police files in addition to all the interviews, and it was an amazing conversation, the closest collaboration I’ll ever have with anyone. This is his book as much as mine.

I also must thank Terry Noland at
Men’s Journal,
who assigned an essay, “My Father’s Guns,” which became an important part of this book, and the National Endowment for the Arts for generous support while I was writing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs has now plucked two of my books from oblivion and given them a life, so I can’t say thank you enough to them, or to the contest judge, Lee Gutkind, and it’s been wonderful to work with the University of Georgia Press, just as it was wonderful to work with the University of Massachusetts Press.

I greatly admire Jim Thomas for his generosity, intelligence, and strength to pursue the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and I was surprised that so many people would talk to me about such an upsetting story. Julie Creamer, Adam Holzer, and Rich Johnson, for instance, and many of Steve’s friends at NIU, including Aimie Rucinski and Kathryn Chiplis, and another of his professors, Kristen Myers. This is a community of generous, smart, warm people dedicating their lives to helping others, and so it’s terrible that this event happened to them.

Jessica and “Mark” will probably not be happy with some of the judgments and comments I’ve made, but I want to thank them for talking openly with me, and they certainly have my full sympathies in their bereavement, as do the members of Steve’s family.

The book is dedicated to those traumatized by Steve’s shooting, and I do believe that discovering and printing the full story is worthwhile. Joe Peterson and Brian Karpes, the teacher and teaching assistant in the classroom, have told me as much. They’ve said that not knowing was worse than knowing, even though the truth is ugly.