[APPLAUSE]
Peter Wilson.
Thank you.
Well, it sounds like we're talking about the same guy.
It doesn't see me at a multiple personality disorder
or anything like that.
In fact, he didn't seem to me to have very much guile
or artifice at all.
He didn't live a tactical or a strategic life.
He was one authentic guy.
So being number 19 here is kind of challenging.
And to meet the time constraints,
I'm going to have to talk faster than I
think, which always gets me into trouble, so I got a script.
Steve for me was a friend who happened to be a poet
rather than a poet who happened to be a friend.
Of course, both the poet and the friend were the same guy,
but I didn't really intersect much
with his professional or his literary life.
Truth of the matter is I've only read a fraction of his poems.
So that's something that I will be doing.
We first met, Steve and I, in the summer of 1967,
44 years ago, oh my god, 44 years ago,
when I was a philosophy graduate student.
The two of us were teaching at a summer enrichment program
for mostly Black high school students
in Greensboro, North Carolina.
And Steve was someplace between being a student at Iowa
and a gainfully employed adult here in Arizona.
One of my students asked me if I knew Mr. Orlen, whom he said
was really something to see.
He would jump up on the desk in front of the class
to energize them, and he maintained
that he could teach anybody to write a pretty good poem.
So I met him, and we hit it off.
And weekends, we took to driving down the road to Durham
to meet up with my new bride, formerly new bride,
back there someplace.
So when we get to Durham, we would do the kinds of things
that people in their 20s would do in the '60s,
and we would talk, and talk, and talk.
Steve was my poet.
I was Steve's philosopher, and Lynn was our psychologist.
And life was good, and there it was spread out in front of us.
And over the next 40 years and up until just recently,
we only got together about a half dozen times,
and that's only for a few hours each time.
So that averages out to about once every six years.
Always, there was a kind of seamless picking up
of the conversation, based on a fairly immediate sense
that nobody turned into a schmuck since we saw them last.
But this always impressed me.
I mean, what was it about Steve--
and we've all said this in a variety of ways-- what was it
about Steve that could turn a few hours every now
and then into a lifetime friendship, one of my more
profound lifetime friendships?
And I don't know what he was for you all, but here's
what he was for me.
Number one, he was a tough guy.
He was a bad guy.
He was almost an outlaw, but he was sensitive.
He wasn't mean, sort of like Robin Hood, or Zorro,
or Clint Eastwood.
He was a friend of the underdog as someone said.
And he once told me that he thought we were lucky
and that we hadn't screwed up our luck.
And I took that to mean that he felt
he had escaped an early unhappy fate,
and he was forever grateful for that.
And I think much of Steve flowed from that sense of self.
Close behind, number two, he was oh, so curious.
He had sort of a nothing-human-is-alien-to-me
kind of guy.
That's who he was.
Now this made him seem non-judgmental,
but I think he was judgmental.
He just never let his judgments get
in the way of hearing what you were saying,
of understanding, and of accepting.
And most importantly, he didn't need
to find the flaw in you in order to feel better about himself.
He was a generous guy.
In fact, there's a guy who lives out
of a shopping cart up at the corner of a Speedway
and Country Club who misses Steve quite a bit.
It's true, absolutely true.
He had a wide, and he had a wonderful set of friends.
The people I met through Steve, sort
of beginning with Gail and Cozi and going
on to several people in this room,
are all great souled and not only that, but good drinking
buddies.
And you know, finally, he had pretty good fashion sense.
I mean, most amazingly to me, he managed
to have a bad hair day every day, but he still looked good.
And this probably had something to do with the black shirts
that he liked to wear.
The way the mind works, first impressions and all,
I always saw Steve, someplace in there,
as a young guy jumping up on the desk trying
to energize the conversation, even though lately,
the last few years, he'd mostly stay sitting in the chair.
He'd envelop you when you walked into the room.
He sent out those big bear hands toward you.
He'd give you a big bear hug.
And then you get a drink, and then you'd sit down
and you talk.
And if you were me, you'd like yourself
because Steve would make you be wittier, and more
loving, and more perceptive than you tend to be on your own.
And I think he did that for a lot of people.
So Steve, it looks like you're a generous, smart, creative,
authentic outlaw with pretty good taste.
And you managed all that while living your life
with a lot of honor, and a lot of integrity,
and that's exactly what a mensch is.
It was a good life and you were one sweet man,
so thanks to you.
So nice.
Hear, hear.
[APPLAUSE]