by David Vann
But in Steve’s mind, Eric and Dylan were somehow heroes. They took control, and ten days after the Columbine shooting, Steve decides he’ll take control, too. He goes off his meds, and he scores some pot. On Sunday, he smokes a lot of pot. But then he feels so paranoid. He’s outside, in the neighborhood, and he’s panicking. He runs back to Mary Hill, pounds on the door, and tells them he has to go to the hospital. They tell him to calm down, but he insists on being taken to the hospital. He needs to feel safe.
Steve needs structure. He’s not right. He’s broken. They’ve broken him from all the meds, and he’s just smart enough to know. He weeps about it. His life is tragic. His friends thought he was brilliant, but he just worked hard on his homework. His IQ is 100, just normal. Just smart enough to know how screwed up he is.
He pulls it together over time, the rigid daily routine, the long march. They place him in a job at Things Remembered, October 27, 1999, but it becomes the Christmas season, everyone shopping. It’s too stressful. The pressure, all the people, all these little things they want to buy. Gnomes and cottages and angels. Kitties and puppies. He needs to do things in threes to make sure they’re done, checks his apron is tied, checks it again, but he can’t do that here. He has to do each thing just once, and everyone he works with is a moron. He argues, and it’s his fault, of course, then they fire him, just three days before Christmas. Merry Christmas to you too.
By February 1, 2000, though, Thresholds decides somehow that Steve has things together enough to transition out of the residence day program into an SRO, a single room occupancy. He has his own room in a crappy building, and they all share a bathroom.
This is an even worse neighborhood. “His first night in the SRO was rough,” says Jessica Baty, the person who will come to know him best in later years, his girlfriend and confessor. “I remember him telling me about how he heard gunshots and someone was pounding on his door, thinking that Steven was the previous occupant. Steven said that he put furniture in front of the door.” He doesn’t sleep. He hides in a corner and fears for his life.
They place him in a job at Walgreens, but he’s fired after a month, on April 17, 2000, for poor attendance. He’s hired at Osco, a pharmacy, in June, but he’s self-conscious, decides to go off his meds to lose weight. He starts having hallucinations of his ex-girlfriend again. At noon on June 13, he overdoses on twenty Effexor. A social worker wakes him at 1:30 p.m., drives him to work, but by 6:00 p.m., his break time, he feels so bad he goes to the hospital. They keep him on for another month at Osco, then fire him.
Steve is angry all the time, and paranoid. He isn’t hearing voices anymore, but he has to check doors over and over, and touch things. The physical world is a torture of meaning. Threes speak to him, almost prophetically, tell him what to do.
In August, he goes on vacation with his family to Wisconsin. He gets angry, is impatient, impulsive, and he’s too sedated. He and his mother meet with a psychiatrist at the end of August, and they talk about the meds. He’s not actively psychotic anymore, so they adjust the meds a bit, though he’s still on Prozac, Depakote, Seroquel, and Clozaril. He becomes a bit less sleepy.
Steve starts work at K-Mart in September. He thinks people are following him, that they’re against him, ganging up. He gets in arguments with his coworkers, anxious and emotional. He’s working a night job at UPS, too, but he quits that because it’s too physically demanding. He’s feeling sleepy during the daytime but getting used to it.
He wakes up one morning and he’s wet the bed. This freaks him out, but he tries to hide it. It happens again, and again, six or seven times. He’s a bed wetter now, on top of everything else. They reduce the Clozaril, and that helps. He chooses more Seroquel and less Clozaril, even though it will make him sleepier. He can’t be a bed wetter. He’d rather be a zombie.
He visits his sister in October at the University of Illinois, and he’s determined to enroll there next fall. In the meantime, he’ll enroll at Truman College and get a couple courses under his belt. Maybe it’s seeing people his age who are happy. People his age who aren’t drugged out all the time. But at this point something seems to click in Steve. He’s going to get out of here and do something with his life. He’s not as drowsy anymore, but he uses three alarm clocks just to make sure he wakes up each day.
Steve loses his K-Mart job in November when he breaks his hand. It’s in a group session, on November 6, 2000, and Steve feels another resident has insulted him, so he bumps him in the smoking area when the guy tries to block the door. The guy hits Steve in the face, then Steve breaks his hand hitting the guy several times in the head.
This isn’t Steve’s first fight. He reports to his therapist that he was beaten up “a lot” in high school, that he was often the subject of jokes and insults. And he pulled a knife on Adam that one time after the “wiretap.” But what is his history of violence exactly? When does it begin, and how, and with whom? And how did he feel about fighting? Did he like it? He never talks about it in later years, doesn’t write anything. But it shows a certain level of commitment to hit someone hard enough to break your hand, and hitting someone in the head shows intention clearly enough. Was he willing already to kill?
Steve looks forward to Thanksgiving with his family, four days at home, but it goes terribly. His sister tells him she hates him. His mother sends him away early. Then, when he tries to just pick up his money and cigarettes from the therapist, he gets blamed for everything. He tells them to fuck off, he’ll leave the program and doesn’t need therapy.
A few days later, though, he’s contrite. He wants back in, sets up a therapy appointment. And he follows through with his plans for school, enrolls at Truman, a two-year community college, for several classes in January.
Steve charges ahead with school. He wants to succeed, wants to leave his psycho years behind. His therapists warn him that getting overinvolved in school and ignoring his mental health issues will lead to a “hard crash” that will undo everything he’s accomplished. But Steve wants out of the system, finds ways to end this period of his life. He weans himself off his meds at the end of January 2001, and he hides this fact for five months in order to still collect his money. They believe he’s still taking the pills. He reports nonexistent side-effects, begins living a double life. They think they still have him, but he’s on his way out. He gets them annoyed enough they won’t even want him. He humiliates a woman on the staff by playing music with sexually explicit lyrics. He quits seeing his therapist, shaves his head. He tattoos FTW, “Fuck The World,” on his own skin. He complains about noise and sleeping, so they have to move him around.
Steve moves out and gets his own apartment on June 21. He breaks the news of the five-month lie to his case manager the next day. With pleasure. On June 29 they meet again, and Steve says he did fine without the meds. His case manager points out that over the last five and a half months, Steve has “held one job for three and a half weeks, quit school without earning credit, tattooed himself, continued to have no friends, and quit therapy, the job club, and the college support program.” But he also says something else: he suggests they expedite Steve’s discharge, since he’s not willing to work with them anymore. Steve wants out of Thresholds, and now they want him to go.
Steve becomes the Chicago Department of Public Health’s problem. They do an extensive evaluation, which isn’t easy to do. “Client is a poor reporter of his past/current situation,” they write, and indeed he is. He lies and hides constantly. Of his suicide attempts by cutting and overdose, “client states he did these for attention, that he learned this from peers in residential placements.” But they know he was making the attempts in high school, before Mary Hill. “Client has not taken psych meds for six months, says he learned to wean himself off, feels better, stable now.” They don’t trust this, either, and they generally just don’t like his low motivation for seeking help. “Every time I have a therapist, it ends up bad,” he says. He finds therapists annoying. “Same old questions . . .
how are you feeling, etc.”
They do get Steve to talk about his past and his family. He says his sister, Susan, “wants to repress men,” admits his grandfather’s alcoholism, and admits he had a difficult childhood, was the “butt of jokes” and “beat up a lot in school.” Still, though, the Chicago Department of Public Health decides they just can’t handle him, and they determine that his family can afford private services. But Steve fixes the problem. He applies to the Army on September 5, 2001.
Steve needs this. So he checks “no” on his application for suicide attempts. No, also, for “evaluated or treated for a mental condition,” “used illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs,” “depression or excessive worry,” “received counseling of any type,” “frequent trouble sleeping,” and “anxiety or panic attacks.” They give him a $4,000 cash bonus and sign him up for the Army College Fund.
Steve will have to wait two weeks to enlist, and he hates waiting, but then 9-11 happens, so this keeps him busy. Better than Columbine, in a way, everyone talking about it. The camera angle for the Pentagon plane is odd. It seems staged. And where is all the wreckage, all the debris? It’s an 80-ton plane. What are they hiding?
He’s officially enlisted September 20, shipped off to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic. This will become the happiest time of his life so far.
Steve doesn’t get along with his bunkmate, but he loves everything else about the Army. All this structure, all the order. You can imagine how great a relief it must be from his OCD. No more insomnia. No more struggle to get up. No more worry about what to do with the day. Every minute is planned for him. He runs and runs and runs.
Every one of them a maggot, every one of them the same. No more worry about what others will think. No one is thinking anything about him. No minds to read because their minds are beaten flat. He keeps his locker neat, checks everything three times, wins praise for this. Obsessive compulsive disorders are a good thing here.
They train him how to shoot, how to kill without feeling anything. No emotional or psychological response, that’s what they’re looking for, and he can do this. He tells Jessica and his best friend “Mark” about it, even years later. A point of pride. “He did say that the military does desensitize for killing,” Mark says. “He did say that. We talked about it a couple different times. It probably came up in our conversations about Columbine and whatnot. But he just said that the military desensitized. He’s like, ‘I’ve been trained to kill someone and not have the psychological effect. Don’t think of them as a person.’ So it does tie in directly. He did tell me that.”
In the Army, Steve’s not supposed to question anything. If you think about right or wrong, if you worry about morality or ethics or who you are or who they are, this could slow your trigger finger. It could break the chain of command. It could get your buddies killed, and it’s mutiny, treason, traitorous. Don’t think. Just kill when you’re ordered to kill. He loves this, can’t wait to kill some “ragheads.”
The land is flat here, endless in all directions, and the inside of his mind feels like this for the first time, open, stretching on and on, a kind of wind that’s blown all the anxiety away.
THE MILITARY HAS TRAINED most of our mass murderers, including Charles Whitman, the Texas tower shooter who killed fourteen and wounded thirty-one in 1966, the year I was born. He invented the school shooting, really, though he also murdered his mother and wife first, not limiting himself to school.
The military trains all its troops to kill without feeling anything, and so we should fear every American who has served in the military. But they aren’t the only ones we have to fear, unfortunately. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine were high school killers bred from a gun culture that comes at least partly from hunting.
My own earliest memories are of guns and hunting. This was Ketchikan, Alaska, 1970, timber wolves slung across the bow of my father’s boat, trapped and shot. Antlers I found in the rain forest behind our house, moose and mountain goat and Dall’s rams that my father felt were too small to keep. Running through that rain forest at four years old, I imagined I was being chased by bear or wolf, sometimes falling through the false second floor of branches and ferns and decay, disappearing completely, climbing back out in panic. Always holding a toy gun or even just a piece of wood shaped like a gun.
At six or seven, in Northern California, my father finally gave me a Sheridan Bluestreak pellet rifle, powerful enough to kill squirrels if I hit them behind the shoulder. The giving of the gun was a ritual, my father’s pride and pleasure as he showed me how to pump the gun, how to pull back the bolt. He even read a poem from Sturm, Ruger & Co. about a father and son, used it to teach me safety: never point a gun at anyone, always assume a gun is loaded but never leave a gun loaded, always keep the barrel pointed down. This was very soon after he and my mother had divorced, and we had only the weekends now. Roaming his ninety-acre ranch near Lakeport, California, one of those weekends, I didn’t realize the rifle was pumped and loaded, and it fired as I walked. Luckily the barrel was pointed at the ground. But my father turned around, the disappointment clear on his face, and my shame was nearly unbearable.
The next year, when I was eight, he gave me a 20-gauge shotgun for hunting dove and quail. It made the squirrels easy, too, though I had some bad moments, shot a squirrel high up in the trees once, only wounded, and it actually screamed as it leaped from branch to branch. I shot twice more, but the single-shot gun was slow and the squirrel kept getting farther away and just kept screaming, in terrible pain. For some reason, though, this didn’t turn me away from guns but felt like part of the grim reality of growing up, inevitable, as if this type of experience were a given that couldn’t be turned away from. As if we were put here to hunt and kill, and the only true form of a day was to head off with a gun and a dog, hike into the hills for ten or twelve hours, and return with meat and stories. That shotgun became an extension of my body, carried everywhere, the solid heft of it, cold metal, a sense of purpose and belonging. I gazed at it in the evenings, daydreamed of it during the week at school, looked forward to when I’d head out again.
When I was nine my father gave me a .30-.30 Winchester lever-action carbine, the rifle used in all the westerns, and he went down on one knee when he presented it to me, holding it in both hands, as if it were a ceremonial sword. “This is the rifle I learned on,” he said. “This is what we pass down through the family. The rifle I hunted with when I was a boy, the rifle I shot my first buck with, the rifle you’ll shoot your first buck with. It’s a good gun, an honest gun, with only a peep sight, no scope. You won’t be shooting long range, and you’ll need to hit the buck behind the shoulder.”
He moved back to Alaska then, and when I visited, we flew into a remote lake by float plane, camped on a glacier, and slept with our rifles loaded, a shell in the chamber, beside our sleeping bags. “If a bear comes,” he told me, “the bullet from a .30-.30 will only bounce off his skull or bury in his chest and not do anything. You’ll have to hit him in the eye or in the mouth if he roars.” There was no moon. We were the only humans for a couple hundred miles, and I lay awake imagining the bear attacking my father in the middle of the night while I tried to sight in on an eye in the darkness. This felt like the nature of our relationship: I saw him only during vacations now, and he would give me tasks that felt impossible, including making up for lost time. We were supposed to cram half a year into a week.
I shot my first buck at eleven. A rainy weekend in September 1978, on the White Ranch, our 640-acre hunting spread in Northern California. A two-hour drive from civilization, it was the entire side of a mountain, with high ridges, enormous glades, pine groves and springs, ponds and switchbacks, an old burned area, and even a “bear wallow.” Our entire male family history was stored in that place. As our Jeep pickups crawled along the fire roads, my father and uncle and grandfather would tell me the stories of past hunts. The creek where Gary Lampson stepped on a small sleeping black bear. The stand of tree
s where my uncle once shot a spike—a buck with only one point on each side of its antlers, too young, illegal—wounded it, and then couldn’t find it. Places of triumph and shame, places where all who had come before were remembered. All of our family, all of our family’s friends.
My father flew down from Alaska every fall for this hunt. He was in his late thirties then, a dentist like his father, in years of despair leading toward his suicide. Grim-mouthed, hair receding, thin and strong, impatient. Everything in his life had somehow gone wrong, and his depression was something I had no way of understanding at my age. But he hadn’t always been like this. He’d hunted here since he was a boy, and he was known then for being light-hearted, a joker. Whenever he came back, he could see each year recorded in the place, wonder at who he had become.
At eleven, though, I could think only of who I would become. Shooting my first buck was an initiation. California law said I wasn’t allowed to kill a buck until I was twelve, but the same family law that gave me a pellet gun at seven, a 20-gauge shotgun at eight, and a .30-.30 carbine at nine said I was ready now.
I imagined sneaking up through pine trees or brush to make my first kill, but the weekend was rainy, so we hunted directly from the pickup. It felt unfair, even at eleven. The deer would be standing under the trees in the rain, flushed out from the brush. They didn’t like to get wet. I stood in the back of the pickup with my father, holding on for the ruts and bumps. And when I saw the buck, hidden mostly by a stand of half a dozen thin trunks, I immediately felt pounding at my temples. Buck fever. Heart going like a hammer, no breath. The moment of killing something large, another mammal, something that can feel individual, that moment is not like any other. You could call it many things—brutal, wrong, irresistible, natural, unnatural—but what it felt like to me was straight out of Faulkner, the rush of blood and belonging, of love for my father. This was the largest moment of my life so far, the moment of being tested.