Stevie Thompson loved the sun. Those who know the darker side of Burlington streets remember him with his shirt open to the warmth, pushing a grocery cart filled with cans, singing a Patsy Cline song, a tall beer close at hand.

He was a vagabond, a can scavenger, a divorced father of twin boys (one now dead for several years), a drinker; nearly invisible, except to those who knew him.

He didn't make it to the sun this year. The cold reached too deep. Frostbitten, tired to the bone and alone, he hanged himself -- probably Feb. 23, a Sunday -- in an empty three-story barn on South Williams Street, just off the campus of the University of Vermont.

The barn had been his "hootch" for eight months.

He was 53, born in Albany, N.Y., one of the best of Burlington's "canners," and had been homeless for years -- for 28 years, he told a friend. He found the old barn open, an anomaly in a neighborhood of well-tended brick buildings and newish apartments, and set up his last camp in a pony stall by the back wall.

Happier times


A framed photograph of Thompson shot last summer hangs in the kitchen of the Food Shelf on North Winooski Avenue -- his stop every morning for breakfast -- just across the street from Burlington Beverage Center and Bottle Redemption, where he cashed out his cans.

The photo shows a man with a wry smile, his hair still dark and blowing down toward his eyes, his long-sleeved plaid shirt characteristically open to the waist, a black garbage bag slung over his right shoulder.

That was when the sun had warmth. In the summer, "Puffer," as he was known, would sit under a tree with a beer, singing along with tapes on his cassette player.

"You'd see his face light up," said Randi Duval, who works at the Food Shelf and knew Thompson for almost three years. "When he sang he was in heaven."

Donna Green, the kitchen manager at the Food Shelf, remembered him in happier times.

"One day he'd be Elvis, with his shirt wide open, or sometimes he'd come in and sing Patsy Cline songs to me in the kitchen."

"A week before they found him, I gave him some razors and a bag of radishes," Duval said. "That was one of his favorite foods. He sat down and sang 'My Wild Irish Rose' to me. He said he always wanted me to remember him by that song. That was the last time I had to really talk with him."

"Rutland" Mike Ambrose also remembered the singing.

"He had a tape," he said, "Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. We'd sing it, him doing the Patsy Cline part. He could make his voice almost like hers."

The clients and the workers at the Food Shelf miss Thompson. They describe him as a gentle soul, quick to help others, and reluctant to ask for help. He was a good guy, said Maureen Benoit, an acquaintance.

"Moody," said his friend and onetime canning partner Tim Doodell, who remembered Thompson bringing him a bunch of wild flowers and telling him "a wild flower is like a wild Irish rose."

Last days


The week before he killed himself, Thompson told Duval that three toes on his left foot were frostbitten, and Ambrose knew that, too. He saw him at breakfast that last day.

"His feet were frostbitten," he said. "His face was all black."

"He didn't have any heat in the stall," said Ambrose, 50, a tall, lank-haired, sharp-eyed man who learned how to can from Thompson and lived in the barn with him until December. "Some of the canners have heaters in their tent," he said. "He didn't. That's the way it was. I offered him one, free, and it was three-quarters full of kerosene, but he didn't want it."

Then Thompson disappeared, which was unusual, because he was among the most regular, most predictable of the canners, up at 2 or 3 a.m. to do his route and usually the first to cash out every morning.

"It's going to be a missed thing for me," Green said. "I get up at 3. I'd go to my kitchen window and every day, without fail, I'd see Stevie going with his cart up Riverside Avenue.

When she got to work, Thompson was usually the first person she would see.

"It didn't matter how cold it was, or if it was raining," she said, "he'd be here at the Food Shelf waiting at 5:45 to get in. No one had a problem with Steve."

"He showed me how to can," Ambrose said. "How to set up my cart, where to get the cans on people's back porches, in Dumpsters, and the best time. He knew the doorknocks. Everyone up by the college knew Stevie. They kept cans for him. All he had to do was knock on the door. I'd see him on the route," he said, "and we'd split a 40, an Ice House. Most everyone drinks Ice House."

Lt. Walter Decker, a spokesman for the Burlington Police Department, said Thompson wasn't a problem for the police. Vermont District Court records in Burlington revealed just one outstanding offense -- an unpaid $50 fine for violating the city's open container ordinance. The file was closed with a notation: deceased.

So lonely, and so cold


The Food Shelf hosted a memorial service for Thompson on the Saturday after he died. Nada Tokarski, who had known him for years, ended her eulogy with a thought intended to comfort the listeners, many of them homeless.

"In heaven," she told the audience of 40, "we are no longer homeless, alone, afraid, in pain or humiliated."

Two weeks later, recalling Thompson's radical shifts of mood, she offered a more definitive summation: "His life drove him mad."

Over the last months of his life, the cold, the unending days and nights of sub-zero cold, finally got Thompson, his friends said -- wore him down until he couldn't go on.

"He was so lonely, and so cold," Green said. "He couldn't take it anymore. He had all these people here, much like himself, but when he laid down to go to sleep he was alone. Other guys would pair up, but he would be alone. He was so lonely."

Thompson also refused medical care and would not consider going into de-tox, though his drinking meant he couldn't stay in the heated shelters.

"You couldn't talk him into that," Ambrose said. "That was his big beef. He didn't like anyone telling him what to do. He didn't want to get sober. He wanted to drink."

When you lose it all


Thompson had been missing for two days, Ambrose said, when he and Heidi Slayton, an outreach nurse for Champlain Drug and Alcohol Outreach, went looking for him. They found him hanging from a beam in the barn.

"All I can imagine is that he went up there and got drunk and did it," Ambrose said. "If he'd had it set in his mind, he'd have done it anyway. That's the kind of guy he was.

"I didn't can for two weeks after that. It's hard to concentrate. I hope I never have to see that again. You're looking for an excuse to drink, that's it."

Ambrose said he has contemplated suicide himself and understands why his friend did it.

"When you lose it all, you just stop, you don't care," he said. "I've sat at many campfires and seen them cry when they tell their story. You get to the point you look at yourself and say, 'I'm going nowhere. Nothing to live for.'"

It was too bad, Ambrose said, that Thompson hadn't been able to keep it together until it warmed up, because he liked the sun.

"He was cheerful then, happy," he said. "He'd take the ferry over to New York. He loved it over there. As a matter of fact, we'd planned to go over this summer and spend a day on the beach."
Contact John Briggs at 660-1863 or jbriggs@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
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