NOVEMBER

"It's Steven.  Someone hurt him."

On March 9th of 2006, my son Blake was born.  Eight months later,  to the day, Allison and I were lying in bed with Blake in between us when the call came.  Allison had told me all about "Attachment Parenting," which she had researched extensively before Blake came into the world.  I was skeptical, at first, but I cannot imagine having raised him any other way.  Waking up to him was like experiencing Christmas, Thanksgiving and my birthday every single morning.  I cannot tell you how much I miss it.  It was 7:30am.  The call woke me, but I was still fuzzy, so I let it go to voicemail.  I was concerned.  Allison and I were both lifelong night owls and everyone we knew was aware of that fact.  She and I had met at Hollywood Late Nite, a midnight AA meeting above the Lava Lounge at the corner of Sunset and La Brea.  Blake is the same way as us.  We all stay up past midnight and sleep 'til noon more often than not.  Our phones rarely ring before ten.  7:30am.  That was going to be important news and probably not good.  A moment later, I looked at the caller ID and saw the call came from my mother.  A sense of dread overtook me as I called her back.  I suspected the call was about Steve.

Steven had been living on the streets since he was in his late 20's.  Trying to explain my homeless brother to people was a challenge.  They'd get this look of pity in their eyes.  I used to teach in international schools, mostly middle and high schoolers.  I taught in a different city (or country) every week and the kids were always curious about my family and whenever the story of Steve came up, they would always ask, "Why don't you help him?"  The short answer was, "He doesn't want or need help."  Contrary to what many people think, and what I sometimes catch myself still thinking, there is no such thing as your "typical homeless person."  They are on a continuum just like the rest of us, from the psychotic, to the chronic alcoholic to the guy that lost his job and lives in his car to the mom who works and has kids that go to school, but cannot afford the basic necessities of life.  Steven's situation goes something like this.  He's an odd duck, but not crazy.  He was diagnosed many years ago as manic depressive (what they used to call bipolar disorder).  He responded well to medication, but did not like the way it made him feel.  He was not adept at being a "productive member of society" in the mind-numbing, soul-crushing way modern life demands.  He was a poet.  He was an artist.  He spent time with like-minded people as he travelled the country, often hitch-hiking from one place to the next.  He liked to drink, but I never thought of him as a drunk.  He liked to smoke pot and take hallucinogens, but who doesn't, right?  He didn't hear voices or talk to himself.  He was a genius and his mind worked differently than most.  Not always logically, which led to some very humorous stories which were often described as, "pulling a Steve."  Like the time when our family all lived in Andover and we went out to dinner at The Cedar Crest Restaurant in Lawrence.  We went out to dinner once a week or so, me, my mom and dad, Joe and Steve.  Joe and Steve were in their late teens and I was maybe ten.  As a family, there were lots of laughs.  Sarcasm and trashtalk and the occasional practical joke.  I always ordered the same thing at The Cedar Crest, veal parm and spaghetti.  It was one of their specialties.  I'm pretty sure they substituted pork for veal, but it was still awesome.  It came with soup or salad and dessert and we always left with a doggy bag.  Anyway, Italian restaurant.  So, on the table, in addition to salt and pepper, they had a crock of grated parmesan cheese which makes sense.  Steve HATED parmesan cheese.  But he LOVED coconut.  Now, granted, the two look similar, but one has to consider context and most people would.  But Steve was not most people, so he lit up when he saw it and asked my mom, "Is that coconut?"  None of us said a word when Mom told him, "Yes!"  Steve stuck a soup spoon into the parmesan cheese and popped it into his mouth.  Oh my fucking head, you should have seen the look on his face. We were all in tears we were laughing so hard.  Another time, Steven had just graduated from Umass at Lowell with a degree in drafting.  His plan to find a job afterward consisted of him painting the words, "Draftsman For Hire" in huge block letters on the sides of his lime green Datsun B-210 along with our home phone number.  He didn't get any work, but we got lots of calls.  I seem to remember the police calling on at least one occasion, some traffic violation or whatever.  You get the idea.  Steve thought outside the box, but what he came up with was often bizarre.  As a result, holding down a "normal" job, was not in the cards for him.  On the streets, he sold his poems or his drawings or his jewelry.  He panhandled.  He "dumpster-dived".  I loved him, but was sometimes embarrassed, but if anyone talked shit about him, there was gonna be a fight.  He was my big brother, so shut the fuck up.

I expected the call would come one day....Steven is in jail for vagrancy or public drunkenness or some minor drug charge, or Steven is in the hospital with hepatitis, or the worst,  Steven was camping in the winter and froze to death.  But nothing prepared me for the call we got on a Wednesday in mid-November in 2006.

I called my mom back.  Her voice was weak and shaky.  She said just five words.

"It's Steven.  Someone hurt him."

The world came out from under me.  I knew.  But I had to confirm.

"Mom.  Was Steven...murdered?"

"Yes."

I do not remember much after that.  I do not recall how I found out the details, wether it was from my mom or my dad, but to the best of my recollection, this is how they received the news.  A detective from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation called my parents and after some initial confusion, he determined that he was speaking to the parents of Steven Kublin.  A cyclist had discovered my brother's remains in a landfill located in Montrose on Colorado's western slope, a mostly remote area except for ski resorts like Telluride which is not that far from where he was found.  His body had been wrapped in his sleeping bag and set on fire.  Whoever killed him had hoped to make identification impossible, but somehow Steven's fingerprints survived and, as is the case with many homeless people, Steven had been arrested before and within a few days, police were able to make a positive identification.  Steven had listed my folks' phone number as a contact at the time of that previous arrest and that's how they found my parents.

Shock is a strange phenomenon.  I remember not knowing how to respond.  Allison's Mother, Beth and her late Stepfather, Ron Gottesman, are two of the kindest and supportive people I have ever had the privilege to know.  I was so out of it, that I did not know if I should go to my parents' home in Florida.  Ron Bought me a ticket that day.  I remember none of the flight or going to the airport or landing in Florida.  I was shrouded in fog.

When I got to my mom and dad's, it was chaos and tears.  A constant procession of family and friends paid condolences and brought food.  At one point, my mother looked around the room and saw all these people in her house and was bewildered by their presence.  "What are all these people doing here, Ben?"  She asked my father.  He had to tell her the whole story again and she had to re-hear and relive the horrible discovery of her son's violent death.  Dad took Mom to the doctor, just to be on the safe side.  They ran tests and found nothing wrong with her.  Her psyche just became overwhelmed by the news.  I guess it's not uncommon.

We had two impromptu memorials, the one at my parents' house and another in Andover where my other brother, Joe and his wife, Sara, still lived as did many of Steven's friends.

While I was in Florida, I saw my father talking on the phone with the detective in Colorado while my mother looked on and was later filled in on what police had said.  My parents had aged well.  They were both active, played golf and still did all the things they always did.  But this.  This was just too much for them.  They seemed overwhelmed and confused.  I have always been kind of a fuckup.  I too had a hard time working a "regular job," and could never seem to get my shit together.  I had flunked out of college, got demoted while in the Marine Corps, was married and divorced twice and on my way to my third.  I crashed motorcycles and spent money as soon as I made it.  I was not the good son.  No one in my family would have looked to me in a crisis, but crisis is where I feel comfortable.  I watched a lot of Law and Order and had been arrested so many times, that I had become very familiar with police procedure.  I told my parents that I would be dealing with the police until my brother's killer was apprehended and then I would deal with the District Attorney.  It was a survival mechanism for me.  I was in my comfort zone and I was able to feel detached from the horror of what had happened to our Steven as I dealt with the long, mundane, winding road that is a police investigation and in doing so, would spare my parents additional pain.  They were happy to let me take the lead on this.  And so I became the liaison between my parents and the investigators.

My first concern was that because my brother had been homeless, his case would slip through the cracks.  This is not the fault of the detectives investigating cases. Their bosses are pressured to solve cases which are more easily solved or are high-profile.  This doesn't happen because they don't care, it happens because resources are limited, so finding out who sold heroin to a city councilman's daughter who overdosed gets more attention than a whodunit with no leads involving a fifty year old homeless guy.  My brother's case got bounced around from one detective to another, but they were always vigilant and always kind.  They chased down a number of leads sometimes based on information provided by someone claiming to have knowledge of the crime in an effort to get out from under a charge themselves.  All of these leads led nowhere.  Nearly a year and a half later, police knew only what they knew at the time my brother's body was discovered.  Steven had been working on an organic farm called the White Buffalo Ranch (my parents and I visited the ranch and the wonderful people who ran it.  they were crushed when they heard the news.).  He and some like-minded souls had been picking whatever was in season at the time.  Their work was done and Steven was on his way to a gathering of "The Rainbow Family," a group of hippies who wander but are not lost.  I believe his destination was somewhere in Texas.  He was last seen by multiple witnesses the day before he was killed -in the parking lot of a convenience store - hitchhiking by a freeway on-ramp.  And that was it.  I would get updates, but there was no new information.  Just dead-ends.

After the memorials for Steven in Florida and Andover, I returned to Los Angeles and tried to get on with life, which I assume I did.  I was going to AA back then and I will be forever grateful for those people.  Bart.  Carrie.  Mark.  Everyone at Late Nite.  I would go to the 7:30am meeting at the Log Cabin on Robertson.  I said nothing.  I just sat.  No one there knew me and I liked the anonymity.  After the meeting, I would sit outside in a little cutout in the wall of a building across the street and feel the rising winter sun warming my face on a chilly December morning.  During the day, I usually felt numb.  I was not the class clown I had always been.  He was a guy I remembered as someone else.  Bedtime was the worst.  Crying myself to sleep.  Waking up already crying.  Making myself shower and crying in the shower 'til I was dry or until the water went cold, whichever came first.  Almost a year later, I got a job.  Selling ads in the Yellow Pages.  A dystopian corporate environment which was so far out of my comfort zone, I would find myself crying in my car about something other than the loss of my brother.  I hated it, but there was health insurance for my family and they paid me WAY too much money.  My boss was Laura Volberding and she is one of the angels who got me through some very difficult times.  My life was returning to something resembling normal and I thought I was "getting over" the loss of my brother.  Then November came.  I was in training for the new job which was actually pretty fun.  The company put me up in a nearby hotel (I love staying in hotels) along with the other trainees.  I was drinking the company koolaid and was under no pressure to sell anything yet, as this was training.  On the weekend we partied.  It was cool.  I enjoyed it.  Then one morning, I woke up in tears and didn't know why.  I had experienced depression on and off in my life, but this was like a rogue wave that appeared out of nowhere and took me down.  I showered and got dressed for training which was just a few blocks from the hotel.  I tried to shake it off, but my head was spinning.  I thought I was maybe losing my mind.  I had on my business casual attire and looked in the mirror before leaving my room and saw a very sad man looking back at me.  No.  I saw a devastated man looking back at me.  That's when I realized - November.  Ugh.  Is this going to happen every year? (Yes.  And I almost always am blindsided by it.) I tried to suck it up.  I had some coffee and drove to headquarters.  I did not want to miss a training day.  I had just gotten hired and didn't want to fuck this up.  But I could not go into that multi-purpose room or whateverthefuck.  I went to Laura's office and tried to man up while I told her about my brother and before I could even get out my apology for not being able to deal, she looked at me with undiluted compassion and insisted that I take the day off.  It was to be our secret and she covered for me.  It was not the last time she would do that and she is a cherished friend to this day, one of the many gifts that I received as a result of this tragedy.

I am not an angry person.  I abhor violence (all Kublins do).  But during this time, the numbness sometimes gave way to rage.  Rage at a world where a peaceful soul like Steven spends his last moments in fear and pain.  Rage at his killer for thinking no one would miss him.  Rage with no name at all.  I do not own a gun, but I have some experience with firearms.  I began regularly going to the range.  Sometimes, I imagined the silhouette targets were Steven's killer, but mostly I just wanted to blow off steam.  Thanks to my friend, Louie, who understood when I said, "I'm really depressed and need to borrow your Glock.  I promise I won't kill myself with it."

After that first year, I started to resign myself to the possibility that Steven's killer might never be caught.  I found a support group for family members of unsolved homicides.  I never met with them though, because they caught the guy.

After that first year passed, I started thinking.  People suck at keeping secrets.  This is why most conspiracy theories are bullshit.  Most people just cannot keep their mouths shut.  They brag.  They get fucked up and say some shit they didn't mean to let slip.  I got it in my head that in all likelihood, someone besides the killer knows what happened that night in November.  The Detectives even suspected someone might have helped move the body.  I had seen this movie, Bully, about a group of high school students who conspired to murder a classmate who, while he was a dick, didn't deserve to be killed.  It was based on a true story and in the days following the murder, no one talked.  People in general, and adolescents in particular, don't always have their priorities straight.  People don't want to "rat out" their friend, but they are not looking at the big picture.  After some time went by, these kids cracked one by one.  I thought the same thing might happen with my brother's case.  I talked to the detectives who was working the case at the time and told him that I wanted to speak with a local reporter about doing a follow-up story.  They had no leads and thought it might help and couldn't hurt.  Shortly after the story was published, someone came forward.  A father called police and said he thought his daughter's ex-boyfriend might have been involved in the crime.  The man he was referring to would become violent when drunk and at one time threatened to harm his daughter and intimated that he would do to her what he had done to my brother.  Maybe he was just talking shit, but it was the closest thing to a lead they had seen in a long time.  The guy had moved out of state, but they were able to locate him.  He was arrested without incident and still had some of my brother's belongings and, I believe, the murder weapon.

I go back and forth on whether or not there is such a thing as closure.  This thing does not end, but the outcome made it more bearable for me.  If that's closure, then so be it.

Negotiations between the DA and the defense attorney moved fairly quickly.  The DA welcomes the families input and tries to respect their wishes but ultimately does what they think is best.  After discussing the matter with my parents, I spoke with the DA and made clear what was important to us.
First of all, we wanted the death penalty off the table.  We did not even want it used as leverage to secure a guilty plea.  Steven was a man of peace.  All of us are peaceful and loving people and we do not want anyone executed in any of our names.  Secondly, I wanted to avoid a trial.  My parents were healthy and had many good years still ahead and I did not want to see them suffer through that shit.  Also, I did not want to hear some defense attorney make up some shit about my brother, dragging his name through the mud so that one ignorant juror can hang the jury or worse, have there be an acquittal.  Third, this guy doesn't see the light of day while my parents are alive.  There would have to be a lengthy sentence.  Finally, any plea deal was to be contingent on allocution.  If you haven't seen Law and Order, that's the part where the defendant gives the details of the crime.  The how, when, where and why.  They can lie, but if what they say doesn't match the physical evidence, the deal is null and void.  We wanted to know what happened.

*note* If you do not want to read these details, skip the next paragraph*

In October of 2009, nearly three years after my brother's murder, his killer who was facing first-degree murder charges, plead guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.  He will be eligible for parole in 2034 or thereabouts.  He had picked Steven up hitchhiking and offered him a place to stay for the night.  He brought him back to his house, let him shower, fed him and the two smoked some weed and drank some beer.  He claimed he had "helped out" homeless guys before (there are some inconsistencies to that part of his story, but they have no bearing on this case).  He showed my brother to a bedroom where Steven went to sleep.  Later, while my brother was sleeping, he entered the room with a large knife, grabbed him by the hair, waking him up and stabbed him in the neck.

When he was asked why he did this, he claimed to be in a psychotic and violent state when drunk although was adamant that he was not in a blackout and clearly remembers the events.  My parents read a tearful statement.  I read a statement in which I forgave him for killing my brother.  His mother was in the courtroom and she was a total wreck.  My mother hugged his mother and the two women cried in each other's arms.

This is why I forgave my brother's killer.  It is not because I am evolved and enlightened.  I am neither.  It is because he either experiences empathy or he does not.  If he does, I can not make him feel worse than he already feels.  If he does not, then he does not and my hatred will have no more impact on him than would a breeze.  I do not want him in prison for retribution.  I want him in prison so that he does not do this to someone else's family. I forgave him because I often find life to be difficult anyway and carrying the weight of hatred would only make it more so.  I have a son to raise and love.  I have parents to care for.  I have another brother and friends and a dog to love.  I have so many stories to tell.  I don't get a lot of things right.  But this was something I couldn't fuck up.  And it wasn't hard.  All I had to do was let go.

Steven never got to meet Blake.  That is on me.  Two days after Blake was born, Steve showed up on our doorstep.  Allison was sleeping with Blake and we had been advised by the staff at the hospital to limit Blake's interaction with others for the first couple of weeks.  I made a judgement call.  I loved my brother, but he slept on the street and would scavenge in garbage and it was late and I did not want to deal.  I asked him if he had a place to stay for the night and he told me he did.  I gave him $20 and told him to come back in the morning.  He knew the routine.  Over the years, Steven had attended all the weddings and bar-mitzvahs celebrated by our large, extended family.  Happy, hour-long showers would be followed by haircut and beard-trim negotiations.  He'd get some weird looks, but anyone who knew him loved him and he and Blake would have hit it off.  But he didn't come back the next morning.  Not sure what happened there, but I expected they would meet someday soon and I'm sad that they did not.  I see a bit of Steve in Blake.  The poet.  The artist.  The lover of life.  Blake also thinks outside the box, but with nearly Vulcan-like logic.  I could never convince him that parmesan cheese was coconut, although he happens to like both.

"Thumb!"

I used to hitchhike a lot.  From the time I was fifteen 'til I turned twenty-one, I figure I covered over 3,000 miles.  Day trips from my parent's house in Andover to Salisbury Beach in Summer; Adventures with one of my all-time favorite girlfriends, Robyn Parker, or just home because I was too cheap to spring for a cab after a night out.  When I was nineteen, I hitchhiked to Florida from Massachusetts with $20 in my pocket.  I usually had access to a car after I turned 16, but if I didn't, I'd thumb.  The first time I ever hitchhiked was when I was nine years old.

Now, I know lots of people talk shit about how young they were the first time they got laid, "I fucked my babysitter when I was six then sent her out to get me pizza and a juice box." or when they joined fucking Mensa or when they robbed their first liquor store.  Memory is a funny thing and remembering precisely when shit happened, especially from childhood, is not an exact science.  But here's the thing:  My family moved from Somerset to Andover when I was nine. And this shit went down in Somerset.  Case closed.

My oldest brother, Steven, of whom there are many tales to tell, was seven years older than me so he would have been fifteen at the time.  My other brother, Joe, was thirteen.  It was Summertime and the two of them wanted to go fishing at Lewin's Brook, though no one called it that.  People called it Swan Finishing, after the name of the business located in the old mill next to the brook.  It was just upstream from the Swansea Dam which was home to a popular swimming hole in which I had nearly drowned (my brothers, again) a couple years prior.  Anyway, my mom was taking Steve and Joe to Swan Finishing to go fishing. I was bored and always wanted to do stuff with my brothers so Mom told them they had to let me tag along.  They protested.  I pleaded.  They insisted (correctly) that I would quickly lose interest and want to go home, ruining their day by having to listen to me complain for the duration.  There were no cellphones in those days so changing plans was not always easy.  I promised (incorrectly) that I would not lose interest and I meant it.  (As would often be the case for years to follow, my sincerity at the moment of making a commitment had little bearing on future results.).  That day, I got my way, so my brothers ( :[  ) and I (:-) ) piled into the car and my mom drove us to Swan Finishing.  

When we arrived, I was very excited.  I don't know about you, but for me as a kid, playing in and around water rushing over rocks was a blast.  And I was hanging out with my big brothers and we were going to catch a bunch of fish!  

I'm not sure how much time had passed since my mom dropped us off or how long it was going to be until she came for us but I'm pretty sure I lost interest within that first hour.  Steve and Joe were having a blast (they had pretty much ignored me the entire time) and were not interested in hearing me whine/complain or interacting with me at all, for that matter.  With lower-lip pooched out and pretty close to tears, I let out a pitiful, "I wanna go home."

Nothing.  The two of them were fishing and talking and laughing.  I was a ghost.

"I wanna go hoooooooome!"

Crickets.

"I  WANT TO GO HOME!" I wailed.

"Thumb!"

I'm not sure which one of the geniuses said it, but the smart money is on Steve.

Thumb.  Ridiculous.  Aside from the fact that everything I knew about hitchhiking I learned from cartoons, it was hella-far.  I'd been walking to and from school since second grade, but that was less than a mile each way.  I didn't know how many miles home it was from Swan Finishing, but I knew it was WAY farther than from Chace Street School, which we had driven passed on the way.

"I will!"  I threatened.

"OK," they responded, half listening.

Could I?  Would they really let me?  The impossible seemed possible all of a sudden, albeit unlikely. I remember the thought of hitchhiking gradually moving from the part of my brain reserved for notions like:  If I concentrate hard enough, I can levitate to the part of my brain where ideas like: I bet I can eat an entire apple, core and all, in three bites reside.

"I'm serious, you guys!"

"Bye!"

I started to walk away.

"I'm leaving, now!"

Nothing.  They had been acting like I left since we first arrived.  I'll show them.  And so I walked to the road and began my journey home.

I wasn't really planning on hitchhiking; again, I wasn't sure exactly how.  My plan was just to walk.  I had walked with my brothers to the penny-candy store on County Street many times, but I knew it was farther than that.  A lot farther. Once, when our dog, Diamond,  had run away I walked to the A&W where she used to bum fries off people eating in their cars (Me and my dad once saw her in action, with her front paws up against the side of a car and the driver feeding her.  It was her hustle.  I still think of her whenever someone hits me up for change at 7-11.).  I'd walked lots of places by myself, but this was by far the longest distance attempted, to date, and I had underestimated just how far it was.  I was already feeling worn out and my school was still a long way off.  So, I kept walking and stuck out my thumb.

Cartoons are not a reliable source of information.  Of course I knew this.  I wasn't going to stand by the side of the road, wearing a gigantic prosthetic thumb while holding a sign that read, "257 Connecticut Ave or bust!"  I had a vague notion that you could continue walking while hitchhiking, but I didn't know you were supposed to walk backwards-  Whaaaaaaaat?

I'm pretty sure I was still on Stevens Rd (nothing to do with my brother, Steven), walking forward with my arm extended and my thumb pointing behind me, when a teenaged hippie chic yelled at me from a second story window, "Stupid kid!  You don't even know how to thumb!"  She offered no instruction beyond that and I could feel the color rush into my cheeks.  Being embarrassed is a million times worse in front of a girl!  Now I felt foolish as well as tired.  And a little anxious.  I'm doing it wrong; that's why no one has stopped!  I walked awhile without thumbing.  Eventually, fatigue trumped embarrassment and, again, I stuck out my thumb.  I noticed that if I walked backwards, my thumb was pointing in the direction I wanted to go.  Could this be right? I wondered.  How the hell am I supposed to know where I'm going?!  At first I kept looking over my shoulder but I soon found it surprisingly easy to stay on course by looking at the road behind (in front of) me.  This did feel right.  I was sure I had stumbled on the correct way to hitchhike.  I wished that girl in the upstairs window could see me now.  I remember thinking even though I was just a kid that she would like me and maybe even want to be my girlfriend.  I wanted to go back and stand on her lawn and sing to her as she smiled down on me from her window.  And so I sang as I hitchhiked: I've got a pair of brand new roller skates, you got a brand new key....

A man picked me up shortly after that and drove me most of the way home.  When I walked into my house, Estelle was surprised, to say the least.  "How did you get home?  Where are Steve and Joe?"

It told her the whole story including the part where it was their idea that I hitchhike home.  I thought I was gonna get it.  She was really mad.  Her lips were pursed so tightly, she looked like she'd just eaten ten lemons, but most of her anger was directed toward my brothers who had signed off (kinda) on this little adventure.  She hustled me into the car and we picked the two of them up.  They were not at all surprised.  They had been bluffing and assumed I would turn around and come back pretty quick.  By the time they realized this was not the case, their only logical course of action was to keep fishing until Mom came for them, which they knew wasn't going to be very long.  They were laughing when we got there.  They were not once they got in the car.  Dufuses.