Juvenile Crimes - Chapter 19
Never Coming Home Again
Grand Forks, North Dakota May 1995 continued…
After my second State Supreme Court case, my workload lightened up considerably. Like a senior in high school nearing graduation, I had a strong case of ‘senioritis’ setting in as my law school graduation approached. Since I would soon be leaving North Dakota for good, I spent as much time with my friends as possible. Grand Forks happened to be experiencing a pleasant Spring in terms of weather and that helped fuel my optimism and sense of adventure.
Jim was back in college at the time, working on his computer sciences bachelor’s degree – he’d have a few semesters to go. He had dropped out a few times over the years, but he was back and determined to get his degree. He landed himself a cool on-campus apartment that served as a handy hangout after class. He also helped me save on rent for the month of May by letting me sleep on his couch up through graduation (every dollar mattered).
Although we had been close friends since the sixth grade, this was the first time that we really bonded while being completely sober. We were grown men, now, with a lot more life experience and perspective. Jim had an epiphany of his own a couple years before that rattled his cage and led to him going sober. No treatment bullshit, he just quit drinking. When I asked him why, Jim told me he didn’t want to end up being that pathetic drunk asshole sitting at the end of the bar begging anyone who’d listen for a drink. Apparently, he’d seen a few of those types. He definitely had a motivation to better himself, and I was both happy for him and proud to see it. We’d shared some dark times together and helped each other get through them. We also had a hell of a lot of fun together, too. Now, at this point in time, we ended up hanging out playing video games at the local mall’s arcade center, just like playing Atari back in the sixth grade, and he kept kicking my ass on Primal Rage just like he used to do with Defender.
Jim had introduced me to Steve Nelson when Jim helped me get a job at a Bingo Palace when I first got back to Grand Forks to start law school. Steve remained a mutual friend. One sunny Saturday in late April, Steve called both of us and invited us to go out on the Red River on his little fishing boat. He was getting it out on the water for the first time and wanted some company. He also had a fresh bag of weed, and that sealed the deal! Neither Jim or I had smoked anything in many months, and it was a beautiful day to go on the water, so why not?
(Please allow me a brief aside about Steve here…it all matters later.)
Steve was an interesting character. His friends – Jim and me, plus a few other guys in my crew of friends – warmly referred to him as ‘Ugly Steve’ behind his back but in kindness none-the-less. One of us borrowed the term from a character in the movie Young Guns, and it stuck because Steve Nelson was objectively one of the…least attractive…people you would ever meet. He had a heart of gold and was an intelligent, thoughtful, extremely good-natured guy, but the poor man was cursed to have a face that looked like the cartoon villain Snidely Whiplash and the respected actor Danny Trejo had a love child with all the worst DNA choices fate could design for a face, plus copious acne scars. I mean, Steve was fuckin’ UGLY. He had a beautiful soul, but he was literally difficult to look at when I first met him. It was like trying not to stare at a burn victim except with the burn victims you feel sympathy, with Steve it just hurt to look at him.
The other thing about Steve was that he was absolutely, positively, a full-blown alcoholic who I only knew as ‘sober’ – I put that in quotes because he loved to smoke Mary Jane, and THAT helped keep him sober from alcohol. How do I know? Because Steve told me all about it over the years – he had a few sad stories but most of his pain was self-induced, and he said as much. Steve was as addicted to booze as a person could be. By age 33 or so, he had been through in-patient alcohol treatment 12 times and outpatient treatment 13 times. That’s got to be some sort of record somewhere. Steve had crushed his liver so badly that toward the end of his drinking days, he’d black out after three beers or so and wind up going on multiple day benders that he couldn’t remember days later after finally sobering up. He was very lucky to still be alive.
In fact, Steve had incredible luck, both bad and good. Just before the prior Christmas, Steve’s father died in a tractor accident – it rolled over on him. The man was in his early eighties and some question existed about whether he had a heart attack first then rolled the tractor as a result. Sadly, his body was too messed up to waste time and effort on an autopsy. Didn’t matter, dead is dead, and right before the holidays. To add to that sadness and stress, Steve had been laid off of work for a few months and he had just run out of unemployment benefits, so he was close to being broke. Three days after his dad’s funeral, he received a Christmas card from one of his old aunts, with a gift – a personal check for $15.00. Steve went to an old workplace, a convenience store where they knew him very well. Steve endorsed the check over to the store (that happened sometimes back then – a business might cash a third-party check if they trusted the person cashing the check). He bought a couple packs of cigarettes and a five-dollar scratch off ticket, he scratched the ticket in front of the cashier, and…