Last Day on Earth

by David Vann

  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.

  Steve gets out of Alexian on February 11 and goes back the next day, February 12, for suicidal thoughts and violent mood swings. He’s constantly up and down on all the meds, all over the place, a mess, and maybe he’s scared, also, about what will happen with Pete. He takes 120 Depakote, enough that he really should be dead, but even that doesn’t work.

  Steve’s father talks with the police again on March 2. He has more information now. Pete sells in Lions Park, near the high school, and keeps his drugs in the battery compartment of his Walkman. The police bust Pete for marijuana possession.

  The next week, on March 10, after dinner, Steve fights with his mother about Pete. She doesn’t want him hanging out with Pete anymore. He storms out at seven o’clock wearing his trench coat and jeans, and she calls the police to file a missing juvenile report and lists Steve as mentally disabled. “He suffers from depression,” she tells them. “He didn’t take his last two doses of medication.”

  He walks to John Frazetto’s house, but John isn’t home. The police call and find out he was there at 7:30. They call another friend, Mike Terpstra, who last saw Steve at 10:00 p.m. at Grove Junior High with Pete Rachowsky. They took off, and he doesn’t know where. Two days later, on the twelfth, Steve’s father tells the police Steve has returned and they’ll handle the situation with a physician.

  Steve goes back to his part-time job at the public library, where a lot of his friends work. He’s a page, restacking books. Adam and another friend, Jim, work on the computers. Joe Russo is a janitor. But the next week, on March 17, Pete Rachowsky comes in. He has a court date the next day for possession of drugs, and he knows now where the information came from.

  Pete corners Steve in the library. It’s eight o’clock. The library has mostly cleared out. Pete is tall, reddish-brown hair, on fire. “For less than an ounce, I could get people to take care of you,” he says.

  “Leave me alone,” Steve says, according to a complaint he files with the police. He’s scared of Pete, wants this all on record. Pete steps closer, backs him against a wall. “I could have your house burned down. Easy enough to throw a brick through your window.”

  In June, at the end of his senior year, Steve’s parents don’t include his baby picture and a congratulatory note from the family in his yearbook. Joe Russo’s parents do this, and Adam’s parents, etc., but Steve’s parents stopped filling in his “School Days” scrapbook years ago. They’re afraid of their son.


  Steve slits his wrists for graduation. And he sells all his stuff first, just like before his first suicide attempt. Always planning these things ahead of time. Adam gets Steve’s bass for almost nothing, his Led Zep tablature and amp.

  Steve lives, though, again, and what he graduates to is the group home, Mary Hill Residence in Chicago, run by Thresholds. This will become the worst period of his life.

  But he can’t get in right away. He has to turn eighteen first, in August, so he spends the summer living at home, working at Dominick’s, a restaurant, twenty hours a week. His job history: three Halloweens working as a monster in a haunted house, three summers as a ride attendant at Pirate’s Cove, three months as a cashier at Toys R Us, two months at McDonald’s, two days at 7-11. Six months as a bagger at Jewel. His sister, Susan, is living at home, too, working as a secretary, like their mother. Steve has trouble getting up in the morning, won’t clean his room, fights with his mom about this and is hospitalized again August 2 through 5 at Alexian, then dumped back home again, like human garbage.

  HOW MUCH OF STEVE’S STORY IS ABOUT CLASS? He’ll joke later, “I know I put the ass in classy.” He grew up in a nice enough suburban neighborhood, but class is not only about money. It’s also about education. Steve’s parents were relatively uneducated, as were the parents of his friends.

  My mother moved us to a new neighborhood at the end of my fifth-grade year, and though our new house wasn’t much more expensive, the class change was enormous, and I noticed this mostly in the kinds of friends I had and the level of education of their parents. In the previous neighborhood, in the flats closer to downtown, one of my friends was Leonard Smith. His father was a windsurfer who had basically abandoned Leonard and Leonard’s mother, so Leonard had an angry violent streak and a lot of free time on his hands. Some of his deeds were funny in retrospect, such as when he tried to smoke parsley flakes in binder paper and it flared up and burnt his eyebrows, but he didn’t have limits, and we spent our time wandering drainage ditches, tunnels, and industrial sections. In fifth grade, at age ten, we French kissed with two girls on a dusty couch in a carport, and if my mother hadn’t decided to move, my junior high and high school experiences would have headed further in that direction. Many kids in the neighborhood stole, fought, did drugs, and had sex as early as age ten.

  I remember feeling as a kid that my life wasn’t really my own, that it could be shaped and sent out of control by others. Not long before my father killed himself, he asked me to come live with him up in Fairbanks, Alaska, for the next school year, and I said no. I felt tremendous guilt about this after his suicide, of course, and wondered for at least a decade whether he might not have killed himself if I’d said yes. But I was afraid of Fairbanks, because in my summers there, I could see the kids I knew falling quickly into drugs and sex and crime, and I was afraid of who I might become. I was only thirteen, in seventh grade, but that’s old enough to understand the momentum of a life, old enough to understand that we can become something we didn’t want.

  I think about this for Steve because he refused drugs at first. He was cautious and scared and didn’t want to get into trouble. But three of his friends in his neighborhood became drug dealers, and it seems that almost everyone else used drugs. They became Goths without thinking about what that meant, and their parents didn’t think enough about it, either. Steve and his friends listened to Marilyn Manson, watched horror movies, smoked, stole, blew off their homework (a high percentage of his close friends finished with a GED, even after spending an extra year in high school), and hated mainstream society just because that seemed cool. Being depressed and suicidal was also considered cool, according to Julie. Their parents, for whatever reason, didn’t intervene early enough in the process. So although Steve and his friends seemed to come from somewhat privileged backgrounds, white and suburban and attending an award-winning high school, they were actually lower class, along with most Americans. Then Steve fell even further into the company of the mentally ill, a group considered not even a part of society, an invisible class with no aspirations or promise at all, for whom the days become unnumbered.

  THE MARY HILL HOME is a narrow three-story brownstone, like the side tower on a castle with no castle attached. The street is narrow, lined with cars that have been dented up and beaten. A car parked out front has replaced panels of a different color. There’s an urban park across the street, chain-link fence and playground structures.

  Before Steve moves in, he takes a tour and has a thorough evaluation:

  “DESCRIPTION OF MEMBER: Steve is a 17 y.o. Caucasian male who appears his stated age. He is tall and overweight. During his tour, Steve was very quiet and did not ask many questions. His thought form appeared normal and his affect flat. He did not exhibit any bizarre or inappropriate behaviors during his tour.

  “MEDICATIONS: Steve is currently taking Prozac 20 mg in the a.m., Zyprexa 10 mg at hs [hour of sleep] and Depakote 500 mg in the a.m. and 100 mg at hs. Past medications include Paxil, Cogentin, Risperdal, Lithium and Cylert.

  “SYMPTOMS: Steve stated that when symptomatic he becomes anxious, depressed and unable to sleep. He reports losing interest in all leisure activities, has suicidal thoughts and feels worthless.”

  They wake Steve early here. They monitor his medications so he can’t overdose. They make him keep everything clean. They make him work in the kitchen. He’s washing dishes, and they’re getting paid to make him do this. Then it’s off to therapy. Group problem-solving therapy, Mondays and Wednesdays. Vocational training on Fridays. Then all the one-on-one sessions.

  Rather than getting better, his symptoms get worse. He’s oversedated, overweight, doesn’t want to take his meds. He has special powers, though, he tells his psychiatrist. He can see his old girlfriend, Missy. And he can read minds. He’s been able to do this all his life, but the power is stronger now, for some reason. He knows what they think of him here, how they underestimate him. In group sessions, you don’t need to be a mind-reader, the other residents so slow you can actually see them think, see each twitch of a thought, the forming of each word on their lips.

  When I visit the Mary Hill Home, on a spring afternoon, I see one overweight young white guy in a sweatshirt ambling up to the house. I cross the street and meet him as he reaches the door.

  “How do you like it here?” I ask him.

  “It’s really stupid,” he says. “They don’t really help you. They just throw groups at you. I’m losing my hair because of it.” And he leans forward to show me. His red hair is in fact very thinned out, and he’s young, so maybe this is from the meds, but mostly he just sounds crazy and dumb, and I think this is what infuriated Steve most about the place. He felt he didn’t belong here.

  Steve crawls through the days, through the months, the longest time of his life. Through the fall, through winter, every day unbearable, every day the same. He escapes several times, makes his way home to Elk Grove Village, to his parents’ home, begs them to take him back. Every time they drive him back to Mary Hill. Steve blames his mom, calls her a whore, a bitch, a slut.

  Why won’t his parents take him back? Is his mother a monster who fattened him with horror films in his childhood then threw him away when he became frightening himself? Or is this far too simple? What was his father’s role?

  Steve hates the Mary Hill Residence and is afraid of the neighborhood. When they encourage him to go out, nearly everyone he sees is African American. He rings at the front door, and there’s always a delay before someone comes to let him in. If he’s ever chased, if someone is trying to kill him, this won’t be fast enough. His racism doesn’t start here—he had a KKK card years before—but it does intensify. He’ll talk in later years about how much he hated this neighborhood, how much he hates affirmative action, the idea of helping these people. Did any of this come from his parents?

  He listens to Marilyn Manson constantly now. Julie introduced him. She said it made her want to destroy stuff. It made her feel “really cool.” B
ut to Steve it just feels like comfort, like going home. I’m just a boy, playing the suicide king. Your world was killing me. Nothing heals. Nothing grows. We used to love ourselves. We used to love one another. My prescription’s low. The world is so ugly now. I want to disappear. Our skin is glass. Yesterday was a million years ago. I know it’s the last day on earth.

  Manson speaks to every part of Steve’s life, including the possibility of mass murder, asking the question, What If Suicide Kills?

  Steve is only marking time. But then something beautiful happens. Columbine, April 20, 1999. Steve reads books on the occult, obsessively, but this is better. They can’t hide the news from him. Columbine is everywhere, on every newsstand, on the TV. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just like Steve and his friends a year ago in high school, in trench coats, in the cafeteria, making the jocks pay. A brilliant idea, the propane tanks. If only they had exploded. Like watching himself. A triumph. Going out with dignity, not rotting here.

  Eric and Dylan planned their killings and suicides in advance, like Steve. And there was no limit, really, to how many people they were willing to kill. They set a small firebomb in a field half a mile away that was supposed to go off at 11:14 a.m. to distract and divert police and fire crews. Then the two propane tanks were supposed to explode in the cafeteria a few minutes later, at 11:17. The tanks had enough explosive power to destroy the cafeteria, killing everyone inside, and could even have made the library above collapse into the cafeteria. Eric and Dylan waited outside in two different vantage points at their cars, armed to shoot students as they fled. If the bombs had gone off and the school had evacuated toward the parking lot, they could have killed hundreds.

  The propane bombs didn’t go off, though, and nothing went as planned. Eric and Dylan missed most of the students they shot at, and Dylan didn’t shoot much at all. One teacher thought they were just horsing around and went to tell them to knock it off. Students were told to hide under their desks, and Eric mocked this, said “peekaboo” to Cassie Bernall before shooting her in the head. He bent down so close to her that the recoil from his shotgun broke his nose. He and Dylan were as putzy as shooters could possibly be, the entire event a comedy of ridiculous errors if it weren’t a tragedy, and it continued on for seventeen minutes of killing and another half hour of roaming aimlessly before suicide only because the police were even more pitiful, hiding outside, afraid to go in, protecting themselves. The one teacher who died, hours later, bled out because he wasn’t evacuated in time. It was the worst possible emergency response.