Steve Curran
-

I met Steve in the fifth grade at Orchard  School. He had moved here from Kentucky and we became friends. Steve was funny, outgoing, athletic skilled and was in general a great guy to be around. As the years went bye, Steve and I did alot of things together. We were co-captains of our woeful Rockets football team, God did we suck, but we loved riding our bikes to Vet's field in uniform and helmets, jumping curbs and feeling untouchable surrounded by all that plastic and padding. We wrestled 9th grade at GW and always had to wrestle off for the 115 class Steve usually won that battle and forced me to go up to 118 where i usually got my as kicked.

Summer meant shore and quite often Steve would come down to our LBI house and stay a couple of weeks. He tried to teach me to skim board and i sucked at that too, but he would be out there for hours at low tide. All through high school you could find Steve at every party, able to talk to anyone, always laughing or being pissed at Nancy Brown for one stupid thing or another. by night's end he would have seen the light and they would be just as happy couple as ever.

After high school Steve and I and Pete Gillis also, all worked at Hartly Speakers in Ramsey making Stereo speakers and at Hageman Roofing  in Dumont. It's here at Hageman, where we worked with another guy named Andy,  that the friend I had known changed forever. Andy was a junkie and he got Steve started on a course that would lead to his death.

Steve succumbed to heroin plain and simple. Whatever it was that caused him to seek the self destructive indulgence has never been clear to me. There was a pain inside that only he could reach and heroin was how he got there. Some say it was breaking it off with Nancy that triggered the start of his addiction I can't say and I knew him as well as anyone could.

His mother a nurse knew of his problem and eventually got him into a rehab program. I was very glad when I found out he was trying to cure his addiction. After his stint in rehab he seemed better, happier and it was starting all over again. Slowly, beers at Espo's, getting high in the alley, seems okay, then a half gram here a gram there and before you know it he had gone to Harlem one night and was brutally murdered in an alley.

I was devastated, not shocked, just blown away by what had happened to what was once one of my closest friends, and I didn't have many. All the cruising in the Gremiln, gone. All the concerts, gone. Listening to him try to teach himself guitar, gone. My friend was just gone, in an act of murder.

There was no witness,there was no arrest, no justice, no closure, and for his friends no service or funeral. He just left us.

So I write this small tribute to my friend, Steve I miss you. May God take of your soul.

Michael Coyne