Remembering Eric Denis La Mon: His Killer Turns Himself In After All These Years
author: Cat
|
Can it really have been seventeen years ago? I guess I lived close to the streets in Portland longer ago than I thought, and I can't believe I had finally lost track of the years since then. Today, something that has been haunting my memories for longer than I care to remember comes home again. And with it, come bright, colorful images of a young man who was so, very lost, and who is still so, very missed. I can still feel the bullet hole that seemed to have gone through us all that night. But after all this time, it's more tempered by the boy I knew he was, than by the hole he left behind.
|
Let me start with the end. Eric was shot and killed in the dark of a Northwest street corner, on his way home from a nightclub that I had dragged him to, and I guess it was seventeen years ago now. For years I held tightly on to that, the fact that it was me who had put him there. I could hardly bear the guilt. I blamed myself in so many ways for what happened to Eric that night, but I realize now that, somehow, it was also some weird sort of comfort to cling to that awful connection. The guilt I felt for all the things that brought him to that street corner was a long, thin, strand of thread, as ephemeral as a spider's web, still holding him and me strangely connected, even after so many years. I think I've never really forgiven myself, but neither have I forgiven all the others who are to blame for what happened to Eric Denis La Mon.
God, I had smoked cigarettes from his mouth that night as we prowled the streets of the city (even though I do not smoke). I had danced with him in whirling, clumsy, dizzying circles, carelessly, violently, intentionally knocking everyone else off the floor, bruising ourselves, laughing wildly. And I barely even remember it. By early the next morning, when the frantic pounding at my door awoke me from a poisonous slumber, I had already forgotten most of it. I would have tried harder to keep the details clear in my mind, would have stayed sober, would have said goodbye, if I had known it would be his last night in the world. But I did not.
It's funny, but none of us ever really expected Eric to last very long on this planet. There was just too much damage, and nowhere for him to go that was worthy of him. I had actually tried, again and again, to picture him as a grownup, doing the things I imagined grownups did, and I never could. He was a burst of flame that would have to burn out early, I thought. I could never see him doing anything banal and mundane like people would have to do if they stuck around too long, I thought. I knew he would not last, but I had thought it would be later, and that it would be a needle in his arm that took him away gently. Instead, it was much too fast, much too soon, and much too shockingly violent. I wonder now why we didn't try to save him, if we all knew where he was headed. But I guess we were all so damaged then. All we could do was watch, and play along.
The world was clearly killing Eric all along.
I know what they said about him after he was gone. There were people who were afraid of him. He had grown up fighting for survival, and had a reputation as a dangerous man. (And yet he was, I now realize, still only a boy in so many ways.) His own mother had given him away like a puppy when he was only a child. (Forgive me, Karen, but this is what I saw.) He spent his childhood moving between foster homes, Lord High, and the streets. Unloved, afraid, and unfulfilled, I guess he learned to defend himself, and impressively at that. This is what I heard later, after he was gone. But I had known him for years, and that dangerous man was not the Eric I knew.
I knew a confused, lost boy who juggled in my hallway, who rode a skateboard better than anyone I knew, who slept on park benches here and there and popped out at me in the most unlikely places. I knew a boy whose hair was straw yellow, or lime green, or some odd combination of colors, and was always standing on end like that of a scarecrow. The young man I knew was beautiful in a kilt, and told a good story. He had a tattoo of Little Alex from A Clockwork Orange on his chest, and another one of a gas mask, and lots of others that I can no longer recall. He liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and took what he could get where he could find it. He was always an adventure to be around. And every time I try to juggle, I conjure him up again, patiently, eagerly, sweetly trying to show me how to do it. He wanted to be a good person, and he wanted the world to be a good place.
I know who he was to other people, because I've heard all their stories. Most of the people who knew him held a great deal of respect for him, even if not for the reasons I cared about him. I'm pretty sure there were things in his life that he was not proud of. But to me, he was soft, and thoughtful, and caring, and his life was worth something. He was beautiful, in spite of it all. He cared so much about the world that it killed him. It drove knives into his heart every day until he had to numb the pain. He was addicted to heroin, even though he usually denied this. He was not proud of it, like a lot of the people I knew back then. I remember sitting with him on a fire escape once, with his strange, farting, new girlfriend Athena, while he tried to make sense but could not. He nodded in and out of consciousness while I sat with him. And when I tried to help him hold the threads of his thoughts together through long pauses, he looked at me plaintively and told me he was only tired. I said I know. Then he leaned forward, hung his head, and sadly confessed that he could not kick after all. I said, I know.
We sat there like that until the sky turned purple.
But this is not all there was to him. He was an artist in so many ways. His life was a work of art. In spite of all that had been done to crush him along the way, he still fought for himself, for the animals, for the people he cared for, and for the world. When I met him, he was filled with so many causes. He was boycotting South African corporations, because apartheid was still going on (God, it really has been a long, long time). He didn't really have the resources to effectively boycott, but he insisted anyway that no one should buy anything from South Africa. He was fighting a militant battle against homophobia, and was involved with Act Up. And he was struggling against racism with all his might. Rumor had it he had been a SHARP (Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice), but he always denied that too. He did not like gangs. He thought it was mindless and cowardly to act as part of a gang. I heard, after he died, that he had been a SHARP for a very short time, but had quickly determined that it was not for him, and then felt really sheepish about ever having been involved at all. I never heard about it from him, so I do not know the truth. But I do know that he shaved all his touseled hair once, before I met him, and universal opinion was that his head looked just like an egg. This is where he got his street name, which stuck: Egghead. He often went by Eggy. Strangely, the last vestige of him left in the world that I know of is on the corner of NW 18th and Flanders, carved into the sidewalk. If you go there, you can still, very faintly, see where he scratched this name into the sidewalk many years ago now, when the cement was still wet. A strange, and somehow fitting, sort of monument for a boy who lived and died on the streets.
I remember the flavor, but no longer the substance, of huge, liquid collections of words we shared. Colored like dusty books and rainy streets and autumn, these word balloons all seemed so deep with meaning even if I have forgotten almost all of them now. I feel warm recalling the shape of them, even if I can no longer make out the fine details. He did not blame anyone for the pain he felt, and did not dwell on it. Instead, he put all the energy of his being into trying to change the world for the better. And when that did not work, the bitterness sometimes collapsed him. In the end, I suppose, it collapsed him for good.
The strange and shocking circumstances of his death are the saddest thing of all. We were all poisoned that night. I don't even know how we parted. I did not even say goodbye. I might have, had I not been so foolishly, stupidly poisoned. There had been a sharp knocking on my door in what must have been the wee hours of the night, after we had unknowingly parted ways for good. I was unable to drag myself over to the door to answer it. I still do not know who it was, but I know what they wanted. Eric had been taken over to Emmanuel, and was laying in a hospital bed, life bleeding from him, and I did not know. Someone was trying to tell me to get over there, but I, in a self indulgent stupor, did not know. I went back to sleep, and did not learn about the gunshot until several hours later, after he was gone. I awoke all stiff and sore and with a black eye that I must have gotten as we danced. I was laughing when I woke up, even if too sick to sit up. Laughing at the little bits and pieces I remembered from the night before. And then the knocking came again, and I learned that Eric was dead.
I do not think I laughed for a very long time after that.
It was so shockingly unreal that I'm still not sure I ever really absorbed it. It was so incongruous. Like an equation that simply didn't add up. This was the image I kept coming back to, again and again and again after that. An equation that I kept trying to make sense of, but it did not make any sense. There was no answer.
In the hours after, we all tried to piece it all together. What the hell. I cried in the bathroom while people filled my apartment, trying to figure it out. How could this have happened. I mean, he had been right here, right there in my hallway, only hours before. He had been real, and tangible, and alive, and now they're telling me he's gone for good. How? Why? How to make sense? Who was to blame? Someone had to be blamed. There had been two people with him, and they said there had been an altercation. They'd been walking past a building only a couple of blocks from where I lay sleeping in my building, not knowing. Someone had been sleeping in a doorway. He shouted at Eric and the others to shut the fuck up, let him sleep. I don't know what happened. Words were exchanged, a fight erupted, someone saw a gun. Gatt! The three of them ran. The man with the gun fired, and shot Eric in the back. He'd managed to crawl to a house nearby, and an ambulance came. The two people with him hovered in the background, wanting to help him but needing to stay away from the police. I know he called out one of their names, and still they did not come forward. A memory that must haunt them. The ambulance took Eric away.
Over at the hospital, the people there noted his tattoos, his street-worn body, the tracks on his arms, the smell of poverty on his person. Maybe they could have saved him, if he could have afforded their compassion. I have always, always thought so. So I blame them, too. He'd been shot through the liver with a .22 caliber bullet. Or so I was told. He was bleeding internally, and was in shock. His friends who were not stupidly sleeping through the ordeal were there, and his mother was there, and they asked how much effort they should put toward saving him. Karen told me later that she had asked if he would be a vegetable, and they could not guarantee that he would not be, and so she had said to let him go. I know that Karen had not led an easy life either, and I wanted to see her decision as courageous, but I never could. Instead, I was unfathomably angry. I was angry that she had given him away when he was just a boy, I was angry that he had had to live on the streets all those years, and I was angry that she did not even try to make them save him. And so I blamed her too. I know that is uncharitable of me. Karen had been a friend to me too. And his death destroyed her too. But I could not forgive her then, for everything that she could have done differently and did not.
In the corporate media later, they described him like they usually describe people who are killed by the police: They made up a story of someone we should not care about. They said he had a record. They said he had tattoos. They said he had been on the streets. They said he was a junkie. This is what they say, though, isn't it. These few facts, that might have been true in some respects, but were taken out of all context, removed from the substrate of a life that been rich and worthy in a way that even my words cannot really convey. A few people who had known him peripherally talked to the media, but most of us did not. As if they cared. Because even at that, he was left with nothing but a 30 second blurb and a mug shot, a half paragraph in the back of the metro section. A few amorphous scraps of misinformation, dismissal, and misinterpretation. But I remember who he really was.
I have to say that I heard in the news that he had been shouting "racial epithets" at the man who killed him. I do not know if this is true. I do not take the word of the corporate media for anything, and I have never heard this from the people who were there. I find it unlikely, because Eric fought racism for as long as I had known him. The woman he had loved when I met him was Black, and both of them struggled to end racism in the world. But it was all over the news that he had been a "skinhead." Someone who had barely known him had stupidly talked to some reporter, and told them about the SHARP episode. But to a corporate reporter, a skinhead is a skinhead, and they made no distinction between a SHARP and a racist skinhead. So I think that's where the "racial epithet" thing came from. An assumption. I do not know. I don't really feel comfortable denying it, though, even so. Not because I believe he was intentionally racist, but because, even if Eric had not been shouting racial slurs at the man, the fact remains that Eric and the two people with him were white. And the man who had been sleeping in the doorway was black. There were three of them, three white men, confronting one black man. At least one of the three white men, I sadly know, was beating him. How was this man to interpret that, if not a threat to his life? It has been very hard for me to accept this last paragraph to Eric's life. I know it is not the epitaph he would have wanted to leave behind. I want so much for people to see him the way that he was inside, the way that I knew him. And the way that he died went so much against the man he always tried to be, the man he was trying to grow into. So I want to explain this away somehow, to point out how difficult Eric's life had been, how feral he had had to be all of his life just to survive at all, how he could not have been thinking about the racial dynamics, but must only have been caught up in the fight. Because I cared deeply for Eric, it hurts so much to talk aloud about this chapter in his story. I find that I want so much to excuse and justify and minimize the reality of this, but I cannot. And Eric would not have wanted me to. Even if he was too wild with the toxins and misjudgments of the night to see all the racial dynamics of this in that one, shattering moment, I know he would have seen it later, had he lived. I know he would have recognized the horrific inappropriateness of what the three of them did, even if he did not deserve to die for it. I know he would not have tried to dismiss it or explain it away, and I will not do him the dishonor of trying to explain it away for him. He was what he was, live or die. I think he would want these details of his story out in the open, and dealt with. So there it is.
Something else about that awful event, so many years ago. Something I feel compelled to add. We found the killer ourselves. I don't remember how, but we all figured out who it was. We were all pretty close to the street then, and we all knew it was a guy who hung out on the wall over by Stadium Fred Meyer. One of us actually confronted him over it. And he confessed. He never denied it. He cried, and said he had been afraid. He did not realize that he had killed him, he was only trying to defend himself. He said he was a Vietnam Vet, and had learned to be quick on the trigger when he felt threatened. He had a gun, and he reacted without thinking. He had been trying to sleep, and they had been loud, and he had yelled at them, and then they had attacked him. And this I accept, more than I accept any corporate reporter's assertion about anything else. We all did. We all knew that it was true.
This is how it was, then. Street culture. While I knew Eric as he really was, deep inside where he was gentle and sweet and strangely innocent, I also knew that there was a hard edge to him and he was filled with spirits that he fought constantly against. And if someone had yelled at him to shut the fuck up that night, I knew that it was very likely that he would have risen to the challenge and reacted foolishly. All the young men I knew from the streets then would have. They all tended toward nihilism, toward violent reactions to any threat or challenge, toward proving themselves in the only way they knew. Any adversary was something to be conquered, live or die. This was the way he had learned to survive. It was a dangerous and destructive way to live, but it was all he really knew when it came to dealing in the dark.
God, we were all so hurt and torn apart by the hole left through Eric. We wanted so much for someone to blame, someone to hold accountable. Someone to pay. But when we found him, the man who had killed someone we had loved, it was clear that we were all to blame. This man, who had pulled a trigger and blown a hole through the city that would never be filled, he was destroyed by what he had done as surely as we were. He was in tears. He said he was so sorry. He said he didn't mean to do it, and it was clear that he meant it. And it was even more clear that holding him accountable was never going to bring Eric back. And I guess that was all any of us had ever really wanted. We wanted to find the man because somehow, we thought we could make him undo it. But we could not, and he could not. There was nothing to be done.
No one ever went to the police after that. Why would we? We did not.
He left after that. I think it was the next day. None of us ever saw him around after that. About a year later, a letter showed up in the newspaper. It was from him. He had sent in a heartfelt confession, saying he was sorry, that he did not mean to kill anyone, and that he was only trying to defend himself. I remember the police then, saying that he should turn himself in because he might not be guilty of a crime if it were self defense. And I remember being really angry with them for that. Not because I wanted the man to suffer, but because I knew they did not care. They had written Eric off as just some street kid, and were anxious to just close the case and move on. The killer had done them a favor, I supposed, and maybe they could just give him a medal for it. I was disgusted by their quick dismissal of the importance of Eric's life and death. But even so, I would like to think they meant it, that they were telling the truth when they said they might not hold him accountable for the killing. Because today, he is in custody. And I think he has already suffered enough. We all have.
I learned today that his name is David Lee Patterson, and that he turned himself in down in Texas for the killing. He's been burdened by the heavy weight of this for all this time. He, not the police, not the corporate media, not the world, but he understands the enormity of what is missing now. He wandered into a police station and confessed. And I ache for this man, as much as I still hurt for missing Eric. I picture Mr. Patterson, now 60 years old, having lived with this on his soul every day for the past seventeen years. He, alone, never dismissed what happened, and never forgot it. I'm so sad at what he took away from the world, but I'm also very sad at what was taken from this man. The streets are a hard place to be, and I do not think Mr. Patterson deserved all the pain and guilt he has evidently been living with for so long, no matter how much I miss Eric. I believed him when he said he did not mean to kill, and I believed him when he said he did it in self defense. I wish he had not pulled that trigger, but God knows a person living on the street cannot afford not to defend himself. I know Eric would have understood that, even if he might have wanted things to have gone differently than they did that night. It was a code he lived with, and everyone on the streets understood that. I do not think suffering from this sin for all those years was fair to Mr. Patterson, but I am grateful that he continued to care. He, too, has felt the long, silvery strand, connecting us all together. I do not think he deserves any more pain. Strangely, I think the man who pulled that trigger is the one person I actually forgive for what happened to Eric. And I think Eric has probably forgiven him too.
|
contribute to this article
contribute to this article
add comment to discussion
view discussion from this article
|
5034814159
David Lee Patterson was only defending himself.
Two victims. Both deserve some peace.