Introduction

Steve once told me, "The candle burning twice as bright, burns half as long"

I never expected he would hold true to that prophecy.  He seemed too perfect to ever be gone.  Stainless Steve was the measure of my own mortality, the eternal man of limitless resources and strength who would always be there long after I departed.

     When I was about 12, I found myself foolishly following Steve up Mount Baden-Powell in the San Gabriel Mountains.  That day, I had my first tutorial in Steve's world of Agony and Ecstasy. There certainly was a lot of Agony trying to keep up with his fit 20 year old self virtually running up the mountain.  Then fear as he disappeared ahead of me and the panic of feeling young, alone, and lost, then sudden Ecstasy rounding a corner and seeing him waiting for me.  That, of course, was followed by another round of Agony as he flashed a smile and immediately started running up the trail again whilst my burning legs and lungs screamed "NOOooooo!!". That damn angelic smile!  But it was enough to keep me going, chasing after that mountain sprite who was also my hero.

      Of course it ended in the complete and restful ecstasy of the top, sitting by an ancient bristlecone pine gazing over the unfortunately smoggy San Gabriel valley, eating lunch and talking about books and movies.  As an eager adolescent, I always hungered to hear of Steve's stories, exploits, and general knowledge of the world.  He was such a real and natural teacher.  Even by the age of 20 he had done so many incredible things compared to anyone else I knew of.

     "Thanks for taking me.  I know I complained a lot, but its amazing to be up here."

     "Indeed" His laconic favoured response of those years.

      After some silence I ventured again,

     "Hey, what happens when we get old.  Think we'll be able to keep doing all this stuff?"

     "Old, hmm.  We'll find out if we get there. The candle burning twice as bright, burns half as long!"

      Again he flashed the angelic smile, "Let's go. There's a good burrito near Cal State San Bernadino."

     55x2=110 years.  Yes, that seems about a proper span for Steve if you took away that wild candle fire that burned underneath, warming his spirit with the stainless glow.  I guess I am at peace knowing he never had a goal to live long, but only to live well.

     Still, I miss him terribly, especially since we barely spent any time together since 2003.  Our lives went radically different directions then, but underneath there was always the expectation that there would be a reconnection phase, an open time like our youth when all the wealth of the distant years would be shared.  He just finished building a beautiful house with Lisa.  And here I am with my wife on the other side of the world, building a nice mountain home.  How we looked forward to sharing it with him! That he would show my little children the Agony and Ecstasy of the Himalayas and the Rockies by turn.

But life had other plans.

The Great Silence has its mysteries, and I doubt anyone would have Steve be a gram different than what he was.

He was a pillar of my life.  Thinking it gone, I am ready to collapse.  

But since there is no collapse, I tend to think that the pillar is still there, just invisible to these eyes.

Life, Tell it like it is

     Being 8 years younger than Steve, I do not recall seeing him much as a very small child.  My mother liked to recall his disappointment when I joined the family.  His 8 year old self was not too happy that she was going away to the hospital for some time.  She apparently mollified him by saying, "Don't worry, I'll bring you back a new brother." A proposition met with a great deal of excitement.  However, when she did finally come back home bearing me in her arms, she was surprised to find him looking resentful:  "You said you were bringing me a brother. That's just a baby."

     Steve had little interest in a baby brother, so off he went to his adventures to find some real brothers, while I was smothered and coddled in the gushing feminine waves of my loving sisters, cousins, and all of their friends.  Steve was an ephemeral figure during this time, lurking on the fringes of my life.  He always seemed to be doing something interesting, but I was too young to understand what.

     We lived in a large rambling house on 4 acres of horseland in the West Covina hills.  Aside from the air pollution blowing in from L.A., it was a pretty fab place to grow up.  For some reason Steve had his own room quite isolated from the rest of the family.  My sisters, parents, and I all lived clustered in a few bedrooms along a main hall.  Continue down this long hall for a while and you arrived at a large open party room. The farthest end of this room presented a homespun bar with rough wooden counters and high stools.  Turn left there, and you entered Steve's "lair."

This room was so different from any other in our house. Thick shaggy carpet, floor to ceiling Budweiser beer wallpaper, and a ripping 70s silver strobe globe hanging in the centre in lieu of a light.  It was a small room, 75% of which was taken up with a huge waterbed with, you guessed it, Budweiser sheets.  Considering Steve designed this room and the bar outside when he was 13, well that is a guy who comes into life knowing what he likes.  And what he liked was drinking.  Or perhaps doing the opposite of what he was told, since drinking beer was forbidden until 21 years I think?  Yes, Steve was quite the rebel through his teens, but more on that in other posts.

As a little 5 to 7 year old, I was fascinated with the alternate universe of "Steve's room" tucked far away from the comfortable normalcy of the rest of the house and lands. Steve was rarely home it seemed, so I often would creep in there and rummage through his stuff.

My first strong memory of contact with him came when I was around 7 years old.  Fascinating sounds started flowing, day by day, from his end of the house.  Eventually he welcomed me into his listening sessions.  In the closet of his small room he had installed an 8 track tape and LP record player, and he had amassed a huge collection of LPs and 8 track tapes.

One day he was playing some hard rock and I started dancing wildly to "Burn" by Deep Purple.  A rather wicked song, I vividly recall Steve making a grinning skull face and shaking his head back and forth, his long hippy hair flopping about.  I went crazy with play and adulation and soon was tormenting everyone I knew with the "Burn dance."

Steve quickly introduced me to his massive music collection. In 1975 LP jackets were a major art form, and I spent hours studying the intricate designs of the record covers while listening to the music in the background.  Rush, 2112 displayed a red blazing pentagram against a background of stars.  Yes, Close to the Edge, full of arboreal psychedelic soft painting. Rick Wakeman Journeys to the Centre of the Earth had a vast underground cavern filled with countless faces, evoking something of Michaelangelo.  Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon with its mysterious prism.  The list went on and on: Sly and the Family Stone, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Grateful Dead, CSN, Jethro Tull, Average White Band, Supertramp, Earth Wind and Fire, Alan Parson's Project, Stevie Wonder, Commodores, ELO, Foreigner, Steve Miller, Eagles, Genesis, Beatles, Paul McArtney and Wings, and Steve's favourite band of all: Steely Dan.  I recall finding one of his Steely Dan album covers particularly fascinating: some sort of cricket or grasshopper submerged in a blurry tank of water.  Weird, fascinating, and slightly scary, which is somewhat how I regarded Steve at the time.  He was like a mysterious door into a frightening and exciting world beyond my safe parental and sisterly boundaries--happy familiarity defined by Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music cheerful virtue.

There were countless other records I cannot even recall now. Like everything Steve did, his foray into 70s music was done with extreme passion.  I do not know where he got his money, but his little closet was 90% filled with LPs.  There must have been thousands.  Every minute he was home there was some new music coming out of his room.  He seemed happy that I liked nothing better than hanging out with him, asking endless questions about music, art, life and whatever else came to mind while the music played.  I recall going crazy on a particular song or riff, for example "Life" from Sly and the Family Stone:

Life, Life,
Tell it like it is
You don't have to die before you live

I would enthusiastically request playing that piece over and over.  Steve would never argue, but rather say "Yeah, its a nice song. Maybe you would like this too..." and he would put on something else that I never heard before.  He always tried to break anyone out of obsessive loops, suggest they constantly try different things, keep growing, learning, expanding, making sure that life was always "fun".

Of course, discerning readers might notice a glaring omission in his early 70s LP libraries: the complete absence of Creedence Clearwater Revival.  They might also alarmingly note that he had every Eagles LP.  More on this later....

"Life":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOB5vw7aNGc

Primo

     Around the time of my getting involved with Steve's world through music, a new actor appeared on our family scene who would bond in a most profound way with Steve.  This was the dog, named Primo.

     Primo, a mutt of unknown origin, would prove the aphorism, "Dogs take after their owners."  In the Steve-Primo case, we might add a second line to said aphorism:

Dogs take after their owners,
And owners take after their dogs.

I do not recall how Primo entered our household, but there was barely ever a moment from then on that he and Steve were not together.  Although a mix and match mutt, part shepherd, doberman, and sheep dog, he was strikingly handsome.  He also was every bit the alpha male that his name Primo bore.  Finally, he also owned the Stainless aura, just like his master.  I recall him fighting and wrestling a neighboring dog in the dusty gullies behind our house.  Primo emerged from this huge cloud of dust, fangs, and fur as one might expect.  One brief head to tail shake later, however, he miraculously showed like a shining mascot for a dog food company.

     Steve learned to drive around this time, and one would often see him away to some unknown destination in his yellow MGB coupe, Primo the sitting passenger.  I did not know it then, but later Steve would tell me that during his 16 to 18 years, he would often skip school and head off with Primo to explore the mountains and deserts of California. Like Steve, Primo was gifted with seemingly endless energy and endurance.  This did not work out so well on the days where Steve had to go to school.  Dogs, of course, were not allowed in school, so Primo would have to stay home. Perhaps everyone thought he would be happy dogging about on our 4 acres? Nope.

      Apparently, the first day Steve went to school, Primo simply jump-sailed over our 8 foot fences and followed him. At first this worked out fine, as schools in the 1970s were quite laid-back, with few rules and regulations compared to today's schools.  Steve would be sitting in class, and sometime later Stainless Primo would cooly saunter in and quietly sit down next to him, listening to the lecture along with Master.  In fact, Primo quickly became very popular at South Hills High School.  He was an exceptionally charming critter when he wanted something.  In this case, it was simply to hang around with Steve wherever he went.  Primo soon became the school mascot and his fans amongst the teachers, coaches, and faculty bent the rules for a time.  But of course, other students started bringing their dogs to school, frightened students started demanding "dog-safe spaces." ETC.  We know how it goes.  In the end, Primo had to stay home.

     Of course for Primo, Primo does not "have" to do anything. First were built higher fences.  "Surely a dog cannot get over a 10 foot fence?"  A few days later, "Surely a dog cannot get over a 12 foot fence?"  A few days later, "Looks like Primo will have to stay tied up for the day."  A few days and a shredded fig tree later,  "Surely Primo cannot chew threw the Big Oak Tree?"  One ruined dog leash and a few days later, "This Dominator D-24 leash is used on bears in the circus."  The Dominator D-24 did indeed do the trick, but we lived in an area with many retirees.  The phone calls came flooding in, "Your stupid dog is barking and howling non-stop the entire day!"   In came the Dominator D-9 muzzle.  Lo and behold, Primo was subdued.

     Or so we thought.  That evening Steve opined "Hmm, Primo is not his usual self.  He's bitter."  By the next morning Vengeance had struck.  My mother's prized Venetian blinds, painstakingly installed all along the sunny side of the house had been one and all shredded.  Primo was staring everyone down at breakfast, his challenging gaze speaking volumes, "You want to mess with me? I thought so."

      A day of fiery argument followed.  In the end, my Dad ruled that Primo would be allowed to stay in the family, but would be punished and trained against destruction.  I vividly remember my mother thenceforth naming him "Primo, the 10000 dollar dog."

     Primo's bitterness at being separated from Steve because of school did not really end until my Dad brought home a mate, another little mutt of the female persuasion, Budweiser.  Budweiser could not be more opposite a nature than Primo.  She was as stupid as he was clever, cowardly as he was brave, loved to follow as much as Primo loved leading, seemed to be constantly covered in grit, twigs and dust, was not very pretty, and finally became very fat and lazy from endlessly eating avocadoes. Nevertheless, Primo jealously took charge of her and lost some of his possessiveness towards Steve.

     Steve and Primo finally split when Steve left home at 18, but I recall one more story Steve recounted to me later.  Ever the rebel in those days, he and his gang of friends decided to mock the yearly election cycle of the Student Body President. One of Steve's friends entered the election as a pseudo candidate, promising absurd things like paid holidays for students, a smoking zone in the school cafeteria, and the school sending a squad of football players to attack the Soviet Union.  At the final rally where the candidates made speeches, Steve entered the back of the hall, shouted something in Russian then "assassinated" their candidate with a water gun.  Another friend unleashed Primo from behind the stage who went running to "attack" Steve while the dying candidate dramatically cried out his last words, "Save the children! Save the children!"

     Since Primo had not been seen at school for a year or so, everyone erupted with applause and laughter when he appeared so that in the confusion he did not see Steve "the assassin" but ran around licking various people instead.  In any case, the stunt got Steve and his group of friends a week of suspension which was a perfect excuse for Steve to engage in some "spiritual searching" about "disrespect for democracy and the electoral process".  In his MGB.  With Primo the passenger.

The Dog Pack

     Steve always had a special relationship with dogs and there were many "Primos" throughout his life.  Contrast this with cats, which, in his younger years at least, he hated. "Stupidest animals on the planet" he would scoff.  I loved cats equal to dogs and resisted his characterization so he elaborated, "God gave cats too many physical gifts, no room for brains."  He really did not like cats, which struck me as odd at the time.     Later I understood it to be linked with the solitary nature of cats.  Dogs were pack animals, and Steve loved packs.

     And not just dog packs.  Another quality that his teenage years impressed on me was his very own pack of high school buddies.  Rebels, clowns, carousers, sports-teammates, Steve was the unofficial leader of a "gang", his very own "dog pack."

     I was too young to join in their adventures, but he would often bring them all back to our house, hiding out in the distant homemade basketball court at the far end of our property where they would drink beer and tell hilarious stories of their exploits.

     While they were rebels and troublemakers, dedicated to mocking and "biting their thumbs" at the status quo, there always was an enchanting Robin Hood quality to what they would do.  If they took someone to task, that person typically deserved it.   Destruction usually took place, but always directed at the soulless banality of suburban life and the "here's how you should live" morality of advertisers.  From top to bottom, "fun" seemed to be what they were aiming at, and fun usually came, in Steve's world, from doing something unexpected or extraordinary, or at least ludicrous.  He was the leader of the pack because he was the initiator and had that perfect way of breaking ordinary guys out of boring routine and into adventure.

     In the recounting (which is all I heard), I vividly remember how Steve would make sure each member of the pack would have a moment to shine.   For example, after an adventure creating some kind of chaos at a local bowling alley  (bowling water balloons filled with yoghurt or something), some member of the pack would be laughingly telling his story for a while then Steve would interject
"And then Boelmann shouted Jesus Christ!" and howl with laughter.  The conversation would fly off in another direction until Steve would interject again,
"That's when Pasquarella took off his shirt!" and more howls of laughter.

I rarely remember Steve talking about himself, but he would make sure each member of the pack had his moment to shine in the story, so they all would become legends of their own particular fable.  He loved the group and the total experience of togetherness and I suppose that is what made him the natural leader.  Fun was about sharing the fun, and it was his calling to draw a group together and make sure each member felt totally included.  By denying his own importance he gave space to the others to make the experience their own.  He was always such an unneedy person that he was "psyched" to give himself fully to you.

For example, around the same time, he could tell I was loving baseball from watching a lot of games on TV with my Dad.   So he set up a part of our back yard as a mini Fenway park.   The grassy lawn became the infield.  The dry tracks beyond the hedges was the outfield and the large fences bordering the horse area was the Green Monster.  Knowing that I was a 10 year old kid dreaming of baseball glory like I had seen on TV, he would play against me just hard enough to make me think he was trying, but he would always make sure I won, punctuating the thrill by playing the "announcer" that recreated the sense of the game with me being the star.  I remember it being hugely satisfying and fun and I left our games with the distinct feeling of, "Damn, I am good!"  I recall one day boasting to my Dad,
 "Hey Dad, I beat Steve in wiffle ball today 7 to 3!"
Dad replied, "Good job, but I think you've got a pretty nice brother too."

That was Steve.  Taking infinitely from himself, and giving it to others.  Often going so far to trick them into thinking what they did came out of themselves.  As long as it made them happy, he was happy too.

He was the alpha of the pack.