He looked at the wall and said nothing.
I said, "Eddie Storrs and Frank Zimka are the same person, aren't they?"
He sat there, his chest rising and falling, his face desolate-willfully empty, it seemed. He gave a choked laugh, then fell silent again. Finally, he looked at me and said, "No. They're not the same.
Not really. The terrible truth is, there are two of them."
21
Billy Blount and Eddie Storrs, Blount told me, had been sixteen-year-old lovers at the Elwell School. Before then neither had known he was homosexual, just different somehow, and vaguely but deeply unhappy. In the presence of other male bodies, each had felt a disturbing, unresolvable tension whose source was unbeatable, baffling. The two sad, mystified boys became friends, and during a weekend visit to Eddie Storrs's home in Loudonville, they had been goofing off and ended up in the same bed-and it happened. Two weeks later they spent a weekend at the Blount home on State Street, and it happened again.
The two were terrified. At first they denied to themselves what was happening. They never spoke of it, tried not even to think of it, just did it. Then one night in Loudonville something snapped.
Suddenly each professed his love for the other. They faced it, gave it a name, and let it pour out.
The language they used was out of pop songs with half the pronouns transposed. It was explosive, glorious, liberating-and horrifying. In confronting their love, they also confronted something else: they were queer. A couple of cocksuckers. They were in love and magically happy-as at peace with themselves as they had been at war with themselves before-and at the same time they were frightened and wretched and ashamed of their true selves, which the other boys, and the world, would despise. They loved themselves and each other, and they despised themselves and, at times, each other.
Billy and Eddie contrived to meet in secret when they could-in the woods and fields around Lenox, in their parents' homes, in their own rooms at Elwell when their roommates were safely out on dates or off to hockey tournaments. Both boys' grades fell, and no one could explain why.
When asked about this by their teachers and advisers or by their parents, both mumbled about how the curriculum "lacked relevance" this was 1968-and the grown-ups shook their heads and muttered back about their keen desire to "establish a dialogue" with the boys. None, however, got established. You just did not tell people that you were a homo.
In fact, Billy and Eddie were spending most of their mental and physical energies on devising strategems for spending time alone with each other, and on the anxiety that resulted from their success with these ploys.
"This crazy life lasted for over a year," Billy Blount told me, "until the fall of our senior year, when the shit hit the fan. Some jerky kid from Danbury, Connecticut, caught us one Sunday night doing it on some mats stored under the gym bleachers. This kid never liked me; he was the type who smells a secret weakness in people, then baits you and tries to dig it out. When he caught us, I'd never seen such an evil, victorious smile on anyone's face. He walked straight over to the headmaster's house, and within three days our parents had been notified, and they came and got us. They told us that maybe we could go back to Elwell after we'd been 'cured.' We thought this was funny in a sorry kind of way, but we went along; we humored them. I mean, they were our parents. What did we know?
"The last time I saw Eddie was the day he left Elwell-I left the day after that. While our parents were with the headmaster and our roommates were in class, we shoved the desk against the door in my room and made love on my bed for the last time-what turned out to be the last time.
"As scared as we were, it was beautiful and very, very intense. It was one of the few times in my life when I've actually made love with a man, not just fucked with somebody for fun, or for connecting up with someone you like. We cried and held each other and said we'd love each other forever and ever, and no matter what happened we would find each other someday, and when that happened, we'd never let anyone come between us ever again.
"I remember Eddie bit my lip so hard it bled, and when he saw it, he made me bite him so our blood would mix, and that way we'd be a part of each other until we were together again. That seems pretty freaky to me now, but at the time it didn't at all, and I did it. And I'm not sorry.
Eddie is the first person in my life who made me stop feeling like some kind of weird, dead robot and turned me into a human being with feelings I understood and wasn't ashamed of-or shouldn't have been ashamed of. Back then I didn't know I didn't have to be ashamed. No one told me. Everyone said the opposite. I suppose it would have happened anyway, the gay revolution. So many people were ready. But still-God bless the Stonewall queens!"
In lieu of a drink he raised another cigarette and lit it.
Now I understood-most of it. It was a story most gay men would understand. At Rutgers twenty years earlier I'd been in love with my best friend. He was straight, or so I assumed. And I'd been too frightened to open up to him, to declare my true feelings; the boy meant everything to me, and I was terrified that my revelation would end the friendship.
We parted after graduation, and at some point I moved and stopped answering his letters. Eight years later I thought I saw him-Jake, his name was-in a gay bar in Washington, D.C. The man turned out not to be Jake, though the resemblance was powerful; and the look-alike was an agreeable young man nonetheless, with a personality sufficiently bland and pliant that I could go home with him and seem to fulfill one of the great, unending erotic fantasies of my adult life.
Afterward the Jake look-alike told me he'd never met a man with a sexual hunger as great as mine. I told him the truth of the matter, a mistake, maybe, and he was hurt. I never saw him after that.
I said to Billy Blount, "Frank Zimka is Eddie's look-alike, isn't he? You used Zimka. Regularly."
"Yes."
"And Zimka knew it and went along with it because he was in love with you and was willing to accept the humiliation in order not to lose you."
"Yes. I hadn't planned on telling him. I still don't know which would have been worse, telling him or not telling him. But I called him Eddie one night in bed. He asked me who Eddie was.
And I told him. Not about the forced separation and Sewickley Oaks-that's always been very painful for me to talk about-but about Eddie's being my first great true love, who had left me and disappeared from my life. And then it began. Whenever I was with Frank, he became Eddie."
Blount had only dragged twice on his cigarette, and now he stubbed it out. He said, "I first saw Frank in the Terminal one night. I thought he was Eddie, and I nearly went crazy. When he wasn't-well, you know." I knew. "I didn't really plan on seeing him after that night, but-well, he went for me and gave me his phone number, and-one thing led to another."
I said, "Where is Eddie now?"
"I don't know. After Elwell, I was put in Sewickley Oaks, where I met Chris, and we became friends. She was in for the same 'abnormality' as mine. Margarita had been her lover, and when Chris was committed by her parents, Margarita ran away from home and made it out to L.A., where a year later she heard about the FFF. They rescued us and took us to L.A., where we stayed for six months until I called my parents, and they promised that if I came back to Albany, they'd get off my back. I came home, naively thinking I might find Eddie or at least find out where he was, but my parents would never tell me. They'd only say he was being 'rehabilitated,' as they put it, someplace out in the Midwest.
"I finished high school at Albany High, then went to SUNY, and for all those years I never heard from Eddie or a word about him. For a while, I'd thumb or bum rides out to the Storrs' place in Loudonville and try to talk to Eddie's parents, but they finally sicked the cops on me and I had to give up."