I recently learned that Stephen “Gerz” Gerzovich passed away.  He was my classmate and fellow Theatre Arts major at Santa Clara University (SCU) from 1970-1974.  We acted together, took classes together, lived together.  He was one of my closest college friends.  Despite living on opposite coasts, we stayed in contact for the first five years out of school, then lost touch.   In 2010 we reconnected for a few hours when I visited him at his apartment in New York City.  After that, our disconnect unfortunately resumed.

Now that I’m in my 70s, the deaths of people I know or knew are starting to become common.  So it wasn’t surprising to hear of Steve’s passing.  His death, however, hit harder than those of other old acquaintances from whom I had drifted.  That’s because it made me reflect on just how close he and I had been, and how much he had meant to me at a seminal period in my life.  As we were ultimately very different people, it was understandable that our lives went down separate paths.   But in those four critical years he and I were close companions in the great adventure of college, helping each other navigate that difficult but rewarding passage into full adulthood.    I couldn’t help but feel regret over not having stayed in contact.  And I suddenly missed him.

I can’t recall the exact moment I first met Steve, but my memories of him begin with THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, the Thorton Wilder play on which I made my acting debut on the main stage of SCU’s Lifeboat Theatre.  He and I had bit ensemble parts as “Conveneers” (conventioneers) in the second act, though Steve also got to play a wooly mammoth (or some such creature) in the first.  

In the next show – Joseph Heller’s WE BOMBED IN NEW HAVEN – we both had slightly larger roles.  By then we were enough of a pair that people joked that we were the freshmen Laurel and Hardy. (I was tall and skinny; Steve shorter and more rotund.)   This led a fifth year-senior to cast us in her student production of THE DUMBWAITER, Harold Pinter’s one-act play about two hitmen waiting in a basement room for their next assignment.  Needless to say, we were thrilled.

To us an exotic older woman, our director lived off campus in an apartment with a boyfriend.  As we were now her protégés, Steve and I were welcomed to hang out at her place.  Counting ourselves lucky to be included in the social circle of these older students, we eagerly did so, Steve – one of the few freshmen who had a car — driving us over there in his Pontiac Firebird.  THE DUMBWAITER, however, quickly turned into a disaster.  At age 18, Steve and I were completely over our heads doing Pinter, clueless about the play’s nuanced themes and absurdist elements.  We were also too young and inexperienced to handle the improvisations the director had us doing, improvisations in which we explored personal feelings in order to connect with those of the characters.   Indeed, Steve became so angry and distraught during one that he threw a heavy prop at me in a genuine attempt to inflict physical harm.   It was scary.   It was soon after this incident that the director, perhaps realizing she was playing with fire, abandoned the project. 

You’d think that, after he tried to kill me onstage, Steve and I would fall out.  But no. Ironically, it made us closer.  During the semi-traumatic rehearsal process, we had revealed ourselves to each other in ways friends rarely do.  And as survivors, we now had a unique bond.  

Of all the many late night talks Steve and I had that freshman year, I remember one in particular in which I confessed and lamented my virginity.  Steve immediately had us evaluating the female students in the theatre department and scheming as to how I might convince one of them to help me lose it.  Alas, there could be no reciprocal honesty from Steve about his sexuality.  A few years after graduation, he came out as gay, but he wasn’t about to do so in 1971 at a Catholic university.  Sheltered and naïve as I was, I had no inkling.  And when he slyly intimated that he was sexually active, I never thought it could possibly be with men as well as women.

I feel a tremendous sadness over the fact that, as close as Steve and I were, he could never reveal this side of his life.  While he got the full me, I only got a part of him.  I have often thought about the emotional turmoil he must have been secretly experiencing, and have wondered if his freakout at that DUMBWAITER rehearsal was a temporary eruption of the feelings he worked so hard to contain.   Even sadder was that my ignorance persisted for our whole four years at Santa Clara.  Come graduation, I was almost as oblivious to his true sexual identity as I had been the day I met him, this despite hints he would occasionally drop, hints I was too clueless or self-absorbed to pick up.  It didn’t help that he would sometimes tell tales of heterosexual adventure, tales that might have been true… or not. This was a thing with Steve that could be as endearing as it was aggravating.   With a mischievous, Cheshire Cat smile, he would spin stories with straight-face conviction, never letting on whether they had actually happened or he was pulling your leg.   

By sophomore year, one could say that Steve’s and my relationship had become “comfortable.” We were good friends and knew it. There was nothing to prove, nothing to question.  When I started dating a girl who wasn’t in the theatre, he never hesitated to lend me his car so I could take her out to dinner or a movie.   But he also didn’t hesitate to express his disapproval, telling me she was plain and boring.   While Steve was charming, funny, generous and supportive, he could also be catty, sometimes saying unkind things with calculated intention. 

Steve was a solid student, but never an exceptional one.  He had, however, a knack for making himself stand out in class.  For the final project in a stage design class, he made a wax statue of Richard III that was cleaved down the middle (as if by an ax) to symbolize the character’s dysfunction.  As if this wasn’t effective enough, he climaxed his presentation by taking the statue out into the theatre’s parking lot and setting it on fire.  I was envious of this panache, especially given that the design I had long labored over had failed to impress our teachers. 

At the end of sophomore year, Steve and I decided that, for junior year, we would get a place together off campus. We consequently didn’t sign up for on-campus housing and applied for permission to move off, a risky move given the administration, needing to keep the university’s copious dorms at full capacity, would likely say no.   Indeed, come the commencement of the school year, we were denied and arbitrarily assigned separate dorm rooms.  Steve fared well, getting a room in Campisi (one of the newer dorms in a complex originally built for women) with a junior I knew well from freshman year.  Not having the same good fortune, I was stuck in old, decrepit Nobili Hall with a freshman.  It took a week, but I was able to transfer to the same Campisi floor as Steve, moving in with a junior who, like me, was an Angeleno.  While Steve and I weren’t rooming together as planned, we had the next best thing — a short walk down a hallway from each other.  

It was in the fall quarter of that junior year that Steve landed his first starring role:  the harlequin “Truffaldino” in Carlo Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS.  With this part, Steve “arrived” as an actor in the department.  Steve was never a prima donna, but, beneath a cloak of confidence, he could be a bundle of nerves and insecurities, and find fault with director or cast mates.   There was many a late night, post-rehearsal talk in which he processed.  

As there was no problem living off-campus senior year, Steve and I planned to get a place together with my Campesi roommate.  Come September we landed a house on O’Brien Court, a street in a funny little neighborhood tucked between factory warehouses, the railroad and a freeway.  As it was only a four-block walk to the Lifeboat, our home became the theatre party house, especially on Tuesday nights, which, at SCU, were tantamount to Fridays as there were no classes on Wednesdays.

I have a lot of good memories of O’Brien Court, but my favorites are of the nights Steve and I would come home from rehearsal and have what one might call the “daily debrief.”  We’d put on a record (always Steve’s choice), pour some Scotch, maybe light up a joint and talk, processing the rehearsal, evaluating the state of the show, gossiping about the theater department and laughing… a lot.  At the beginning of these sessions, Steve had a way of settling into his favorite chair to preside over our meeting.  He’d tuck his legs under him, beam one of his Cheshire Cat smiles and kick off the conversation with some phrase like: “Shall we begin.”  If there is one image of Steve I will take to my grave, it’s of him in that chair.

When I visited him in New York in 2010, we hadn’t seen each other in almost thirty years.  In town for a night before going down to Princeton to watch my son defend his dissertation, I went by Steve’s place in the morning.  It was, admittedly, a little awkward until Steve made coffee and we moved into the living room, where he sat down, tucked his legs under him and gave me one of those smiles.  Then we began, quickly finding the “comfortable” of our old friendship…