Got this awful news from Nick yesterday. We could only talk on Gmail, so I only got the brief version of it, but it sounded like it was very sudden and came as a surprise. On the plus side, Nick said to me, it was a quick and painless way to go, and Bad Bob managed to live his life on his own terms and stay weird until the end.
When you asked us to contribute one story about Steve, there was only one that popped into my head. I thought, no, too cliched, everyone has heard this one a million times, but the more I thought about it, and the more stories that popped into my head, this one kept coming back to me. It is how Steve will be remembered to me forever.
Junior year of high school, easily the most important in terms of grades and college admissions, I'm busy taking my finals, while all of the class of '05 is on break. Nick thought it was funny to come to my house every night around 1 AM and light of fireworks outside my window. Funny the first time, medium funny the second time, downright infuriating the third time. Friday comes, I've had almost no sleep, and I'm at school, when I see Steve walking down the hall. He stops to say hello and I explain why I look so tired.
"Your son has been waking me up at 1 in the morning, every night, with fireworks. I'm going to kill him."
"Do you have any fireworks?"
"Yeah, a couple."
"Keep Nick out late tonight, then come by my house Saturday morning at 8 AM. I'll leave the door open."
Saturday morning comes, my alarm goes off, and I drag myself out of bed, suit up, and head over to the Dantzker household. Sure enough, Steve, now fully in his Bad Bob alter-ego, meets me at the door, hushes me, and leads me upstairs. We meet in his office, where he hands me a lighter and points me towards Nick's room. We creep along the hallway, he stops, and I crawl into the room, put the fireworks on the ground, light them, and barely stand up before they start going off.
You can't imagine the sound those things made. Loud explosions, a cloud of smoke, the smoke detector started going off; they had woken up half the neighborhood. Nick later told me that he at first thought that a war was starting. As he jumped about a foot in the air off his bed, he saw two figures laughing through the smoke. He only realized later that it was me and his Dad.
Not sure why, but this brings me to another story. Anyone who is familiar with Steve remembers his trademark headphones. One time I asked him what he was listening to, expecting music or an audiobook. He took them off and explained that he was listening to a dissertation of the 12th century Genghis/Kublai Khan-implemented Mongol code of law. I laughed at first, but we soon fell into a discussion about it, and I found it fascinating. He obviously found it even more fascinating, and went on listening after we had finished.
I'm not sure how these two stories go together, and maybe that's the point. I always thought Steve was great because of what a paradox he was to me. One second he was helping me prank his son by allowing me into his home to set off firecrackers at 8 AM on a Saturday morning. The next moment, he was going in depth into the complexities of ancient Mongolian marriage codes and their implications for the Mongolian society in general. He was incredibly intelligent and very interesting, but he also never stopped being a kid. Sometimes, sitting on the couch with Nick, I forgot Steve was a dad, and thought of him as just another one of the guys.
After Steve had helped me to set off the fireworks, I sat downstairs with Nick, who was still recovering from the shock. Nick, over and over again, questioned Steve's parenting skills, repeating, "Seriously, what kind of dad does that to his own son?" He was kidding, of course, and I could see from the way he said it that he wouldn't have had any other dad in the world but Steve.
My sincerest condolences to the whole family. I will never forget all the great times I had at the Dantzker household, most of them thanks to Bad Bob. And I have no doubt we will still be telling stories about him for a long time to come.
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