In memory of Eddie Cunningham

I was so desperately lonely in junior high that I made up imaginary friends to go to school with me. Galen the chimpanzee from Planet of the Apes went to 7th grade with me. There was also this lonely alien child who watched me on his computer from his own planet. I felt he empathized with and listened to me. So lonely for someone like myself that even the made up friends were comforting.

Then one Saturday when I was fourteen, my mother drove me an hour away to the north side of Oklahoma City to attend a Star Trek club meeting. STAR OKC was held in a public library. My mom waited in the car and read a book. To this day, the only thing I remember from that meeting was Eddie. I had found a friend. The first friend I had ever had who was a freak like me.

Eddie was fifteen and had spent all morning on about half a dozen buses just to get to the meeting. He lived in another small town not far from mine. I asked my mother if we could give him a ride home. Bless her, she agreed. When we got to his house, he proudly showed me his room. Every inch of it was covered in Star Trek posters and memorabilia.

We were friends throughout our teens. Through Eddie and others like him, I learned about other Star Trek clubs and about science fiction conventions. We went as far away as Chicago together for WindyCon. We met others like us Ron Moore, David Morgan, Michael McConnel, and dozens more. (Yes, usually guys.) All working class kids from difficult backgrounds who were geek outcasts in our own home towns. We shared growing up together those that made it.

I look back now and realize how messed up we all were. My home-life was the easiest of the bunch -- even being very poor, my dad in a mental institution, my mom working and me fighting with my sisters. My mother loved me and supported me in finding my way. Most the others weren’t so lucky. David never spoke of his parents and didn’t even call or visit them the year he lived with me. At 17, Michael came home one day to find the apartment he shared with his mother, younger brother and sister, empty. His mom had met a new man and had moved away, leaving him his clothes and books but little else. Eddie rarely talked of his family. I remember his mother’s boyfriends and that she beat Eddie with a belt. Yet, here we were smart, creative people who needed each other. We didn’t know how to be friends we didn’t have the experience. But we were. We fought, we hurt each other and we usually forgave each other. Most of them became involved in drugs. I couldn’t go there -- especially after Michael. When his mother abandoned him, Michael abandoned himself to the escape of drugs. Within a few years he couldn’t even remember me, or all we had been to each other. The smart, witty and loving young man I had met and fell in love with when I was fifteen, was dead. Now a babbling idiot wore his face.

Eddie made it out. Or so I heard. One of the other guys told me he moved to San Francisco. I was told, with rather a lurid tone, that he had become a “slave” to some gay man there. Sometime in the late 80s after I had moved to California, I tried to find Eddie, but with no luck. When I moved back to the Bay Area this year, I began looking again. This week found him. An acquaintance who had contacts in the gay men’s leather scene called me with Eddie’s address and phone.

When I called the number, the man on the other end said, “I’m sorry, but Eddie died last month.” I was stunned. All this time and I just missed him. What happened? His partner, Wally, told me he died of an accidental drug overdose on June 2. Wally invited me to Eddie’s memorial this weekend.

I sat in a little church on Fell Street filled with gay men and listened to them tell of Eddie. They told me of the man he became. They read love poetry about Eddie and laid a table with photos and memories, even a Star Trek uniform. I laid on the table the pictures of the boy I knew also in a Star Trek uniform. I told them about those old days of lost children. I wept. For Eddie and all us lonely children who somehow found each other. His sponsor from recovery told me of Eddie’s battle to get clean and sober. And I was touched and comforted to know that Wally and Eddie had been together fifteen years. The love was beautiful and I was glad to know that Eddie had not been alone. And I wept more. I wish I had known the man as well as the boy. Wish he had found a way to heal the damage of his childhood.

A line from one of Wally’s poems to Eddie lingers with me still. It read something like: “That as you lie here in the bed with me, you lie with all the yesterdays. That you cannot know tomorrow, but in me you have all my yesterday’s.” Eddie is part of my yesterdays. Part of my childhood died with him. And Eddie continues on in me as part of my yesterdays.

You are all part of me. You are my yesterdays and, hopefully, my tomorrows.

Love,
Dawn