He was used to being homeless. He was used to sleeping in his car in Philly parking lots. Once, he picked up a Tinder date, drove her 3 hours from Baltimore to Philly, rode around looking for his ex-girlfriend, didn’t find her, and only told his date the truth about his ex and why they drove to Philly on the car ride back. I don’t remember how she responded, but I think they went out a few more times.
Big Steve unrolled cigarettes, made a bong out of a water bottle and a pen, hit tobacco out the window of the rehab we were in together. Our rehab used the ‘confrontational model,’ which is just as bad as it sounds—the whip-you-into-shape model—and held super-groups where we verbally hammered someone when they were fucking up. Big Steve always roasted people a little harder than everyone else did. He always hugged the victim extra-tight afterwards.
We called Big Steve Big Steve because he was big (300 lbs, 6 foot 4), and we had 3 Steves in rehab. When I hugged him, I thought he might absorb me. One time I took a run at him and he didn’t budge, as if fixed to the concrete curb outside that shitty rehab. We called middle Steve Average Steve and he asked us to stop because he’d been called average his whole life and of course we didn’t stop and the whole community got super-grouped for that one. Little Steve was the littlest, but he’s not really relevant.
When we switched to outpatient, I came out to Big Steve as bi, one of first people I told, and he took a large slurp from his water bottle and said, Who isn’t a little gay, told me he fucked his bestfriend, Slush, and their friendship wasn’t the same after that. His eyes started watering and he tilted his head back into the ash-stained seat of his beat-to-shit pickup truck and lifted his left shoe to show me the name SLUSH written across his heel in layers and layers of black Sharpie, and he started crying harder, moans fogging up his blotchy November windows, and he told me he got Slush hooked on dope, that he gave Slush the hit that killed him, that he was nodded out beside Slush, that he woke up in a slick of chunky yellow bile and Slush was no longer breathing.
Big Steve got super-grouped for hiding piss under his bed. Big Steve got super-grouped for carving ANAL into the brand new couch cushions in our rehab’s group room. Eventually, he got booted out of treatment. It’s a shame he never got super-grouped for showing back up to treatment high. Before we got the chance, he left rehab against medical advice and shot dope and overdosed and up and died and I’m ashamed to say I still think about how much fun we all would have had roasting him and I’m ashamed to say I still think about his piss when I hear an empty Aquafina water bottle crinkle.