THE TIM FREEMAN JOURNAL

My uncle Steven Gates (John Oblinger) circa 2005 posing with two young female models, most likely for a beer promotion.

But for everything my uncle was to me, he will probably best be remembered for all the things he wasn’t.

I hardly knew my Uncle Steve.

My mother’s younger brother was born in the late 1940s. My grandparents named him John Oblinger, but when he was in his 20s he legally changed his name to Steven Gates out of spite for them.

Uncle Steve was raised in Skaneateles, NY and Shaker Heights, Ohio. As the youngest sibling in a family of five, John was an only child at home while my mom and aunt both attended separate colleges in Ohio. My mother used to frequently recount the incident which may have played a hand in causing John’s lifelong downward spiral. The story goes that one day when John was a boy, he fell backwards off a porch railing and hit his head on the ground hard enough to receive a concussion. The tale offered me little solace and insight into John as a person, and it only left me wanting to know more about the mysterious uncle who I hardly knew.

Most of what happened during the twenty or so years after Steve left home is a black hole of conjecture. I know that he attended college briefly (possibly in the Midwest) before dropping out. I know that at one point he borrowed $2,000 from another uncle, incurring a debt which he never repaid. And I also know that he turned up at my grandmother’s second wedding and shared a joint with my dad.

Uncle Steve wouldn’t officially enter my life and my conscience until 1984. My grandmother hosted Thanksgiving that year at her home in Skaneateles, a quaint town nestled in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate NY. My family and Uncle Steve were both invited to this holiday celebration. Also in attendance were my Aunt Sally and Uncle Peter and their children (my cousins) Ashley and Maggie.

By this time Uncle Steve had made his way out to Los Angeles where he worked as a movie theater projectionist. In his off hours he trolled The City of Angels’ underbelly looking for cheap pleasures and companionship. Later details would reveal that Uncle Steve had a penchant for hookers and drugs, and that a host of unsavory characters and creatures populated his life. I was too little to know any of this in 1984, but something about Uncle Steve repelled me even at that young and tender age.

In 1984 I was an innocently naive 8-year-old who was completely devoid of any sarcasm. Uncle Steve had a sarcastic sense of humor that I mistook for a biting cynicism. Knowing that he operated movie theater projections for a living, I believed that my uncle must have had some sort of toehold in the movie-making business. We watched an episode of Siskel & Ebert together the day before Thanksgiving, and afterwards I became curious about the behind-the-scenes special effects magic of Hollywood.

“What happens in a movie when a guy falls into a swamp, and then he walks out all covered in goo?” I asked my uncle. “How do they make him covered in goo?”

My uncle snorted before saying, “They probably just dump a bucket of slime on him before he emerges from the swamp.”

I knew Uncle Steve’s answer was insincere, and I couldn’t understand - given his vast knowledge about the art of movie-making - why he would show so little interest in his nephew’s genuine curiosity.

But there were other things besides his sarcasm that tipped me off to Uncle Steve’s repelling qualities.

My grandmother was a sweet and loving woman, but she ruled her home with an iron fist whenever she played the hostess. She wouldn’t hesitate to chew your ear off if you set a drink on the table without first placing a coaster beneath it. It didn’t matter who you were. If you dropped your gym bag in the hallway and walked into the bathroom to take a shower, you would receive a verbal whipping for treating her domicile like your own personal pad. Nobody was immune to my grandmother’s correcting remarks that year, neither me nor my family nor my aunt, her husband or their daughters. Uncle Steve, on the other hand, seemed to incur the lion’s share of my grandma’s caustic criticism. This would go a long way in painting the image of Uncle Steve early on in my mind as an estranged relative. 

My uncle Steve liked to talk; one of his talents was that he could strike up and maintain a conversation with a total stranger.

Throughout the 1980s Steve had a reddish-brown mustache. He smoked cigarettes and wore glasses. He had puffy hands and a soft stomach. And he talked. Steve was a very chatty guy who could strike up and maintain a conversation with a total stranger. What annoyed my grandma most about Steve’s garrulous ways was that his talking seemed to have no shape or direction – it flowed like puffs of smoke from a cigar, amorphous cloudlets that floated and swirled according to no predictable or tidy rhythm. Steve’s conversation could fill up a room and bring delight to a listener’s ear, or it could annoy the heck out of a person. His talk was full of trivia and descriptions, but unfortunately it was low on purpose and substance. It is safe to say that Steve liked to talk for the sake of talking.

Steve would visit us at our home in Sacramento, California a few years after the 1984 Thanksgiving get-together in Upstate NY. His trip coincided with a visit from my grandmother, so once I again I had to witness Steve being verbally corrected again and again. I recall my grandma, Steve and I visiting The Nut Tree, a roadside collection of eateries and attractions located in Vacaville between Sacramento and San Francisco. We did many things together that day - we rode a train around the Nut Tree complex, and we tasted many delectable foods. We spent several hours taking in the sights, smells and tastes of Northern California’s culinary treasures. Before we headed home, my grandma wanted to go off and shop by herself. That meant Uncle Steve was in charge of me for the next hour. For a while Steve and I simply strolled through the various food displays and fruit stands. At one point he bought me a giant chocolate penny that was wrapped in bronze-colored foil. But suddenly, I became separated from my uncle. I must have wandered off in one direction while he wandered the other way, like two kids pulled apart by their own individual curiosities. When I realized that my uncle and I had gotten detached, I quickly panicked. I started looking frantically for my uncle but it was no use. I searched for him for the next fifteen minutes before I bumped into my grandmother. “Where’s you uncle!” she stammered, sounding more angry than frightened. “I don’t know,” I said. We spent the next half hour looking all over the Nut Tree for Uncle Steve. We asked security guards, fruit venders, cooks and bakers if they had seem my uncle, but none of them did. Suddenly we came across Uncle Steve sitting at a bar. He was sipping a beer and talking to another man, acting as nonchalant and unconcerned as we were acting worried and excited. My grandma all but ripped Uncle Steve from his bar stool like a little boy and dragged him out of the Nut Tree by his ear. In actuality, the scene was probably much less dramatic than how I recall it, but I remember being embarrassed nonetheless as we exited the roadside complex as my grandma hurled a barrage of exasperated remarks at my uncle for being so irresponsible.

On the car ride home Uncle Steve explained how he was talking to a man who he met at the bar, and he claimed that he simply lost track of time. “That’s all you do is TALK, Steve!” my grandma said, her voicing cutting through the air-conditioned air of the rented Cadillac. “Talk! Talk! Talk!”

I started to unwrap my chocolate penny from its bronze foil wrapping. “Don’t eat that whole thing,” Steve said. “You’ll get sick.” Despite my uncle’s warning, I ate the entire chocolate penny on the 45-minute car ride home, and true to his prediction, I spent the evening vomiting into the toilet.

Uncle Steve’s world would come crashing apart after the Northridge earthquake of 1994. The movie theater where he was a projectionist sustained damage during the quake, and my uncle along with several other people lost their jobs. Uncle Steve was able to get by on unemployment for a while, but as the months dragged on, he was unable to find work at another movie theater. Once Steve’s unemployment checks stopped coming in, things quickly got worse. Steve was suddenly desperate. He began asking family members for help, but relatives were reluctant to financially carry Steve through his troubled times. He lost the apartment where he had been living since the early 1980s and became homeless. During this time Steve would frequently call our house in Sacramento and beg my mom for help. “I don’t know what to do,” he once said, “I’m gonna take someone out!” My mom pleaded with Steve to seek help for his psychiatric ailments, using her social work savvy to refer him to various agencies which could help him get the support he needed. But Steve was having none of it. He wanted to come live with us, and my mom was afraid he would show up at our front door out of the blue one day.

Uncle Steve’s problems continued throughout the late 1990s. His whereabouts were sketchy for a time, and contact with family was sporadic. When my parents moved to Upstate NY, they opted to have nothing further to do with Steve. They decided not to divulge their contact information to him, and instead all of Steve’s complaints were dealt with by my Aunt Sally (Steve’s older sister) and my grandmother. Other family members would shut Steve out of their lives as well.

Uncle Steve would start writing hate mail to my grandmother blaming his parents and siblings for his unfortunate lot in life. The letters were discursive and often didn’t make sense, written in a furious style that was half-schizophrenic. I saw another side of my uncle in these letters – the boy who never felt like he fit in with the rest of his family, and the man with mental demons simmering just below the surface of his personality. My parents had been telling me all of my life that Steve was a sad and troubled man beleaguered with problems, and now I felt like I finally understood what those problems were. It was as if Steve’s bad side had always been visible, and the talkative charming man he used to be was only an act he put on to make himself presentable. Looking back, I wonder if Steve’s incessant talking was a way to keep the mental tornadoes at bay. Maybe Steve thought that if he stopped talking, the demons would take over (I have often found glibness to be a good concealer - of drunkenness, of insecurity, of boredom, etc.).

After Steve’s lifelong wrath had become manifest, he suddenly dropped off the radar completely. Steve stopped calling and writing and asking family for money. It got to the point that my grandma had to hire a private investigator to track him down. Despite all of Uncle Steve’s crazy antics and bad behavior, my grandma truly did love him. She never stopped calling him John, and she often displayed a pang of hurt whenever his name was brought up in conversation. She would often say, “Steve has a lot of problems,” shifting the blame from Steve onto the condition of mental illness that plagued him.

As Steve was eventually tracked down, it would be a long process getting his life back to some semblance of normalcy. Steve still refused any suggestions that he should be treated for an undiagnosed mental disorder. I personally do not know why Steve displayed such antipathy to treatment, except perhaps because it had something to do with schizophrenics being unable (or unwilling) to recognize that they have an illness in the first place.

After it became clear that Uncle Steve would never seek treatment for his disease, my grandma made the decision to financially support him. It was a move that exasperated my mother, since she was a social worker and a big believer in social programs. In my mother’s opinion, people like Uncle Steve required the help and assistance of the federal government’s safety net. My grandma may have been financially carrying Steve out of love, but my mom believed love was just a tricky emotion that made people do unwise things (like financially aid a family member who is entirely dependent on others).

Circa 2006, my uncle Steve posing with some newfound friends at a bar in Venice, CA where he was a frequent customer.

My grandmother would continue to support Steve until her death in 2008. Before that happened, however, Steve was able to make upward strides even as his physical health deteriorated. He moved back in to the apartment he had originally rented since the early 1980s, and he was able to re-establish the controlled rent price which had allowed him to live in Venice, CA on only a movie theater projectionist’s salary. Steve also was able to control his outbursts. There would be no more hate mail or desperate phone calls, and judging by Steve’s Facebook page, he was attempting to form healthy relationships. But after Steve passed away in 2010 from cardiac arrest, the contents of his apartment would reveal that the bad habits of the life of a loner still plagued him.

My brother was living in Venice in 2010, and the duty of cleaning out Uncle Steve’s apartment fell to him. “It was purely disgusting!” he said when I asked him what Steve’s apartment revealed about his life. “There was filth everywhere!”

The contents of Uncle Steve's apartment reveal the bad habits and eccentric hobbies of a lonely soul.

Aside from being dirty, there was some marijuana on a table and a small collection of pornography. Breathing apparatuses to attenuate the symptoms of sleep apnea were beside the bed and couch. It also appears that Uncle Steve had an extensive collection of VHS tapes and DVDs. He liked to record and catalog movies and TV programs with a librarian’s accuracy for order and detail.

But aside from the contents of the apartment revealing the habits of vice and obsessive-compulsive eccentricity, it was what happened while my brother was sifting through the remains of Uncle Steve’s earthly possessions that gave the clearest insight into what Steve did during his last few years of life. At one point a man knocked on the door who my brother described as looking like an unsavory character. He introduced himself as a friend of Uncle Steve’s and said he was the one who found Steve’s body. Perhaps he was the person who delivered Steve’s drugs and prostitutes. Perhaps he was a prostitute himself. Either way, my brother found the exchange with this man a little bit odd.

There was also an unsavory female character who turned up while my brother was cleaning out Steve’s apartment. My brother said she stopped in only briefly, and that she showed little concern when informed about Steve’s death. Since there was no money or sex to be had from Uncle Steve anymore, there was probably no point for her to stick around and mourn.

My brother concluded from these two exchanges that, “Uncle Steve hung around with some pretty unsavory characters.” It is not hard to guess that this is what Steve did with his free time, given that he was an unmarried, childless loner with an undiagnosed mental illness and a family that didn’t want anything to do with him. Perhaps Uncle Steve’s unhealthy habits got the best of him and that is why he was sick, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, I will never know. When Uncle Steve died, the mysteries of his life died along with him.

My brother buried Steve’s ashes at Venice Beach in Southern California. He jokingly said the ashes looked like cat litter, and he buried them rather unceremoniously as if they actually were cat litter. That day when Steve’s remains went into the ground was the last time his family or anybody else would have any contact with him.

Uncle Steve passed through this world like a phantom. His impression on me may have been fleeting and tangential, but for some reason I suspect Steve touched (and was touched by) everybody he briefly knew in exactly the same way. With the exception of his parents who are now at rest with him, Steve probably wasn’t loved by too many people in this world.

That is not to say Uncle Steve’s time here on Earth was futile and pointless. The Buddha told us that “Life is suffering,” and the Bible teaches us that “Suffering builds character.” We keep on fighting and climbing until we get knocked down, then we get back up and continue fighting, until the day somebody puts us in the ground.

This is how I interpret the life of the uncle I hardly knew. Maybe I knew him all too well.