Prick of the Spindle: Nonfiction: Corrigan: Steve

It’s the fall of 1979, and I’m lying in a pile of leaves. I’m thirteen. Steve, two years older, is on top of me. He has me pinned with his legs, his hands clamped over my wrists.

I feel no fear. There’s nothing malevolent about Steve, who plays with the exuberance of a cartoon dog. Nonetheless I insist, “Let me up.”

As soon as I finish counting, Steve kisses me quickly and leaps off me. But he let me finish counting first, so now I have to break up with him. Don’t I?

One night, some months later, Steve calls to ask if I’d like to get together and smoke a joint. By this time I’ve begun using pot, a drug I fell in love with the first time I tasted it. Not even the awful side effects—raging paranoia, the feeling that my throat is closing up—will dim its glamour for me for the next six years.

Therefore I agree to meet up with Steve. I do so despite the fact that he’s now dating my best friend, whom he asked out the day after we broke up.

We walk to some nearby woods, not saying much. When the joint is gone, Steve pushes me up against a tree.

We continue these meetings on and off for a year, though Steve and my friend continue to go out. When I think about it at all, I rationalize my behavior with the idea that our relationships are so different that there’s no overlap.

Girls in our town, like girls everywhere, are supposed to want romance. Teddy bears, roses, maybe some jewelry. But I don’t need someone’s arm girding my waist as I walk the halls at school. That’s what Steve and my friend have. I need time alone in my head. I need space to breathe.

On the other hand, something in my body is clanging like a bell. It started when I was eleven, and it’s been growing louder ever since. Steve is the perfect answer to that clang. He himself has a lovely body, as well as one of those beautiful/ugly faces that are often more attractive than conventionally pretty ones. Adding to his tally of assets is the fact that he’s acquired a car, a rusty old Catalina. Plus, he always has a joint on him.

We drive off the main roads onto a network of dirt paths, where we smoke and fool around for hours without even leaving the car. In the winter he leaves the motor running and the heat on, a delicious luxury, though it’s amazing the exhaust doesn’t kill us.

Gradually my encounters with Steve taper off. I enter into more conventional dating arrangements with other boys. My friend breaks up with him, too. She starts dating a member of Student Council, while Steve takes up with a fellow Deadhead.

I graduate and head off to college, though I still hear stories about Steve sometimes. He and the Deadhead have a son, then another. Somewhere in there he leaves her and goes to California, then returns.

I imagine him struggling with responsibilities he doesn’t feel up to, vacillating between desire for family life versus the freedom of a Deadhead, of life on the road.

After all, it’s a common enough struggle. Most people get through it. So I’m not prepared for the next news, which my mother delivers over the phone a few months after I start grad school. Steve has hanged himself in his family’s garage.

I know people who’ve attempted suicide. Usually the attempt occurred before I met the person, so I learn about it well after the fact. Each time I feel no particular surprise at the news. My internal reaction in each of these cases is something along the lines of, “Yes, that makes sense; you seem like a person who might think about suicide now and then.”

Yet when I hear about Steve, my reaction is complete disbelief, though my inability to understand doesn't stop me from returning to it again and again in my imagination. I desperately want to understand what Steve has done, want someone to tell me the story of how the sweet, exuberant boy I’d known could become someone who has killed himself.

But there is no one for me to discuss it with. The best friend and I are still in touch, but we never discuss the old days, gingerly stepping around anything that could turn out to be embarrassing or painful for us to confront together.

On my next trip home I see an opportunity to speak about Steve when I spend an afternoon with John, a teacher from my high school. We have a few beers that afternoon, so the sequence of our conversation is hazy later: did I ask John if he knew anything about Steve before or after he told the story of the father of one of his daughter’s classmates, who’d been found hanging in his toolshed?

John is particularly upset by this man’s story because the discovery of his body also led to the discovery that he was a gasper: someone who partially strangles himself to increase his sexual pleasure. He’d been engaged in this act when he died, making the cause of death autoerotic asphyxiation. Accidental suicide.

At one point, John’s face darkens as he spits out, “Oh, that one. That's another one that had to do with drugs.”

Later, trying to assemble Steve’s story into a coherent whole, I think about this answer. Everything about it puzzles me. John’s tone when he mentioned drugs was uncharacteristic. I’d never known him to be judgmental about drug use; he was one of the teachers considered able to connect with the druggie kids. And what had he meant by “another one?” He hadn’t said anything about drugs when he told me the first story. Why did he tell me about the other guy anyway? Was he implying Steve had been a gasper as well?

Left with so little knowledge of Steve’s situation, but with my desire to know undiminished, I begin to contemplate the case of the gasper instead, even to combine the two dead men into one. Suppose Steve was a gasper; would that make his death more or less sad? It would certainly make it more embarrassing, I think, remembering the stultifying mood of our hometown, where discussion of even mundane sexuality is impossible.

On the other hand, it would be cheering to think Steve’s death had been accidental, that he hadn’t been aiming for death at all but rather for a really mind-blowing orgasm. In a perverse way, there is actually something life-affirming about this idea. For this reason, I cling to it for a while, until reluctantly I find my mind turning again: wasn’t going to such extremes for the sake of a moment’s pleasure a suicidal gesture after all?

It takes me a long time to reach the conclusion that really, there is no difference: both deaths are equally sad, and equally impenetrable.

In finding my answer to this question I gain some sense of closure about Steve’s death; as much as I’ll ever feel, I suspect, since the case of the gasper has come to take the place of Steve’s in my mind, the former substituted for the latter, the latter always remaining a distant and untouchable mystery.

Before I started spending time with Steve, I hardly even knew I had a body. Up until then, I spent most of my time up in my head. Despite the clanging, the forays I made down into my body were brief. But with Steve, my body began to store its own memories, separate from those of my mind. They were happy memories, and that happiness, I feel sure, has affected the tone of everything that has come since.

Therefore I will always owe a debt to Steve, for those hours stolen away in a beater Catalina. The imprint of his body is on mine.

Dawn Corrigan has published poetry and fiction in a number of print and online journals, and blogged at The Nervous Breakdown from 2006 until 2009. She currently serves as an associate editor at Girls with Insurance. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming at Wigleaf, Dogzplot, CellStories and Otis Nebula.