The Las Vegas Shooter, Two Years Later
Greg Palast
The Las Vegas Shooter, Two Years Later
Greg Palast, left, at 11 years old, and Steve Paddock in elementary school
in 1964. (Photos courtesy of Greg Palast)
Paddock. Palast. We sat next to each other at Fernangeles Elementary School,
and later at Poly High in Sun Valley, Calif.
Steve was a chess prodigy and a math whiz.
He finally got to use his extraordinary gift to do complex ballistics
calculations that allowed him to murder 58 people in Las Vegas in just
minutes from a distant hotel window. That was two years ago this week.
Steve should have gone to MIT, to Stanford. He didn't. For that, he needed
Advanced Placement calculus.
If you went to "Bevvie"-Beverly Hills High-you could take AP calculus. Or AP
French. We didn't have AP calculus. We didn't have AP French. We weren't
Placed, and we didn't Advance.
According to a state investigation led by Tom Hayden, our high school was
situated on top of a toxic dump site. No surprise there.
In Sun Valley, Steve and I were required to take classes called "electrical
shop" and "metal shop" so we would be trained to man the drill presses at
the local General Motors plant. Or do tool-and-dye cutting to make
refrigerator handles at GM, where they assembled Frigidaire refrigerators
and Chevys.
And we were required to take drafting. Drafting, as in "blueprint drawing."
We sat at those drafting tables with our triangular rulers and No. 2 pencils
so we could get jobs at Lockheed Martin Corp. as draftsmen and draw
blueprints for fighter jets.
But we weren't going to fly the fighter jets. Somewhere at Phillips Academy
Andover, a dumbbell named Bush with an oil well for a daddy was going to go
to Yale and then fly our fighter jets over Texas. We weren't going to go to
Yale. We were going to go to Vietnam. Then, when we came back, if we still
had two hands, we were supposed to go to GM or Lockheed.
And any pretty girl at our high school could always make decent money in Sun
Valley, then the porn film capital of America.
Those were the choices we were given. As long as they lasted: After NAFTA,
GM shut down and shifted to Mexico.
Our school, and our incomes, didn't qualify Steve for anything other than
San Fernando Valley College. Any dumbbell could get in. And it was nearly
free. That's where Steve was expected to go, and he went, with his big
math-whiz brain. And then Steve, with his "Valley" degree, went to Lockheed,
like he was supposed to. Then Lockheed shut down plants in 1988. Steve left,
took the buyout.
Here's a little info about the pleasantly named place where Palast and
Paddock were bred. Sun Valley is not really a city. It is the anus of Los
Angeles. Literally. It's where the sewage plant is. And the garbage dump.
It's in a trench below the Hollywood Hills, where the smog settles into a
kind of puke-yellow soup. Here's where L.A. dumps both its urine and the
human refuse it only remembers when it needs cheap labor when the gusanos
don't supply enough from Mexico. And cheap soldiers for your wars.
The home of "Okies" and Chicanos.
I returned there a couple years ago to see my family's old home in the
weeds. I then walked down San Fernando Road, near Steve's old home, along
the now-abandoned railroad tracks. Today, along those tracks that once led
to the GM plant, you see a bunch of busted-up camper-trailers that the union
men bought for vacations. Now they live in them.
Photo courtesy of Greg Palast
Land of opportunity? Well, tell me: Who gets those opportunities?
Some of you can and some of you can't imagine a life in which you just
weren't given a fair chance. In which the smarter you are, the more painful
it gets, because you have your face pressed against the window, watching
them. They got the connections to Stanford. They got the gold mine. We got
the shaft.
But Steve's brain was too big to end up on the tracks. He lived in empty
apartments in crappy buildings he bought, then in a barren tract house
outside Reno. I laugh when they say he was "rich." He wanted to be them, to
have their stuff. He got close.
It's reported that Steve was a "professional gambler." That's another laugh.
He was addicted to numbing his big brain by sitting 14 hours a day in the
dark in front of video poker machines. He was a loser. Have you ever met a
gambler who said he was a Professional Loser?
It's fair to ask me: Why didn't I end up in a hotel room with a bump-stock
AR-15 and 5,000 rounds of high-velocity bullets? The truth is, it's a very
fine line and lots of crazy luck that divided my path from Steve's. I credit
my survival to my job, my career-really, my obsession. As a journalist, I
have vowed to hunt them down, the daddy-pampered pricks who did this to us,
the grinning billionaire jackals who make a profit off the slow
decomposition of the lives I grew up with.
Dear reader, please do not think for one minute that I am justifying Steve's
murder spree. He slaughtered coldly, with intense cruelty, destroying lives
and hundreds of families forever. If you think I'm making up some excuse for
him, then I give up.
But understand this: Just like veterans of the Vietnam War who suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder even after five decades, so too, losers of
the class war can be driven mad by a PTSD that lingers, that gnaws away
their whole lives.
Langston Hughes tried to explain it. After the Harlem riots, he wanted to
tell you why people would burn down their own neighborhood:
"
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it . fester like a sore? .
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Steve, you created more horrors than your cornered life could ever justify.
But I just have to tell you, Steve: I get it.
