Tuesday’s Tribute: Friendship Lost

I thought, in my youth­ful naivete, that we would be friends for­ever. But 27 years later, I still don’t know why our friend­ship ended. Per­haps I should refer to it as a “pur­ported” friend­ship or “pre­sumed” friend­ship. If a friend­ship ends, does that mean it was never a true friend­ship (what­ever that means), anyway?

We posed for a faux engage­ment photo on Christ­mas Eve, 1975. Steven was actu­ally point­ing to the mood ring I had just received as a Christ­mas gift.

I can no longer remem­ber the first time I met him. I know that it was near the end of our high school years. We spent a lot of time together dur­ing the sum­mer imme­di­ately fol­low­ing grad­u­a­tion. It was 1974 and we were excited about start­ing col­lege. I spent my after­noons and evenings toil­ing at Straw Hat Pizza, mak­ing $2.00 per hour (that was the min­i­mum wage then). My goal was to earn enough money to pur­chase a Fender clas­si­cal gui­tar. I bought it just before school began in the fall and was relieved to aban­don my pizza-making career in favor of resum­ing my stud­ies. We spent a lot of late evenings at Lodi Lake — on the swings, walk­ing around to the North side, loung­ing on the grass. And when school began, we car-pooled since our days began in the early morn­ing and lasted until late at night when rehearsal for the lat­est offer­ing from the Drama Depart­ment ended.

A cou­ple of years ago, my girl­friends caught me off-guard when they found a photo of us in an old album and began rem­i­nisc­ing about my crush on him. I truly had no rec­ol­lec­tion of ever hav­ing any roman­tic feel­ings for him! Remark­ably, I had com­pletely for­got­ten that for a very brief period of time, I did enter­tain a few vagrant fan­tasies, but, in ret­ro­spect, they could only have been rebound-inspired. He was a gen­tle, sen­si­tive, and con­sid­er­ate guy who sent me flow­ers on my birth­day, opened the car door for me, and wrote a few poems ded­i­cated to me.  But his sex­u­al­ity was never in ques­tion.

Which is what made the abrupt end of our friend­ship so shock­ing, illog­i­cal, and down­right bizarre.

The details are sketchy, at best.  But the way I remem­ber it now, the year was 1982.  I was liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, as was he.  After study­ing cos­tume design in North Car­olina, he returned to Cal­i­for­nia and began work­ing in tele­vi­sion and movies.  He was liv­ing in the Hol­ly­wood Hills and invited me to his house for din­ner. We were both in rela­tion­ships, but spent the evening hav­ing a quiet din­ner at the home he shared with his then-partner.  I don’t remem­ber what we talked about, but do recall that it had been quite awhile since we had spent time together and felt as though we no longer had much in com­mon.  So I do remem­ber sens­ing that it was dif­fi­cult to keep the con­ver­sa­tion mov­ing.  I also remem­ber that a movie was being filmed at a house on his street and, as we sat in the hot tub after din­ner, we could hear crew mem­bers load­ing equip­ment into trucks that were tra­vers­ing up and down the nar­row street.

I never saw him again.  I don’t believe that we ever spoke after that, although there may have been one or two brief tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions.  And then?  Silence.

I asked a cou­ple of friends and was told that he believed we no longer had any­thing in com­mon.  Our clos­est mutual friend con­veyed that he felt I had “a prob­lem” with his sex­ual orientation.  

Which, of course, made absolutely no sense because I knew from the first moment we met that he was gay.  There was never any doubt.  It was never a secret.  He was never even slightly ambigu­ous about it.  My par­ents knew it.  Our friends’ par­ents knew it.  Nobody cared.  

The most ironic part of this whole bizarre saga is that our clos­est mutual friend grew up, as did I, in a main­stream Protes­tant reli­gion. But while I became a civil rights attor­ney fight­ing for equal­ity for all per­sons regard­less of their sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, she became a teacher in a parochial school.  As I became less and less enam­ored with orga­nized reli­gion and even­tu­ally left the church alto­gether — pri­mar­ily because of my for­mer denomination’s refusal to ordain gay, les­bian, bisex­ual and trans­gen­dered per­sons or rec­og­nize and sanc­tify their mar­riages — she became increas­ingly involved in and com­mit­ted to the teach­ings of her church.  She prays that our mutual friend will be healed, i.e., become het­ero­sex­ual as a result of the power of prayer.  She believes that is a real pos­si­bil­ity and that homo­sex­u­al­ity is a sin­ful lifestyle.  He con­tin­ues to be her friend.

Me?  Shut out of his life in 1982 with no expla­na­tion or ratio­nale.  He never expressed his feel­ings or afforded me an oppor­tu­nity to respond.  What did I say that so offended him? What did I do? Obvi­ously, I will never know.

I reached out to him twice over the years, to no avail. I emailed him a few years ago, but never received a response. A cou­ple of months ago, a friend directed me to his Face­book page. So I sent him a friend request and mes­sage, but he has thus far ignored my request.

This past Sat­ur­day, I was hav­ing lunch with sev­eral old friends, one of whom looked at me and said, “He accepted my friend request on Face­book.” Our eyes met and in hers I saw empa­thy, com­pas­sion, and puz­zle­ment, as she shrugged her shoul­ders and added, “I don’t get it.”

I don’t, either.

Steven Zim­bel­man, this Tues­day Trib­ute is in your honor.

I have dis­cussed with our mutual good friends many times that we are too old and have too much his­tory together to let minor dis­agree­ments, slights or unin­ten­tional cru­el­ties stand in the way of our con­tin­u­ing rela­tion­ships. Our friend­ships are sim­ply too valu­able to let any­thing come between us.

Steven, I have reached out to you now a total of three times. I have pub­licly admit­ted that I have no idea what I did to upset you all those years ago. And, frankly, I still get angry every time I think about this sit­u­a­tion because true friends don’t just turn their backs on their friends and walk away. I guess I must con­clude then that we could never really have been friends in the first place. Friends tell each other when their feel­ings are hurt and offer their friends an oppor­tu­nity to respond. Friends have their friends’ backs, stand­ing beside them when times are rough, and cel­e­brat­ing their vic­to­ries with them.

So it is your loss, at this point. You have missed out on so much since you chose to dis­tance your­self from me. You’ve never met my fab­u­lous sons, you’ve never been over to visit us here in the Hickok Home­stead where you and I spent so many hours and had so much fun all those years ago, and you’ve vol­un­tar­ily given up the chance to let me have your back and cel­e­brate your vic­to­ries with you. Those are things that I am really good at, as the rest of our old gang can attest. I am loyal, stead­fast, and would never hurt any­one delib­er­ately. I thought you knew that.

And just for the record: I have devoted my pro­fes­sional life to fight­ing for your civil rights. You’re wel­come. Dude, your sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion was never and is not now an issue. So get over your­self already.

And know that in spite of it all, I wish you only health, hap­pi­ness, and equality.

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