Happy Accidents

by Jane Lynch

  But we went back and forth with it. We’d flirt, but then one of us would pretend nothing had happened. Maybe the image of herself as a professor chasing a slightly unhinged undergrad in and out of happy hours was just too much for her. As for me, I was titillated and then terrified, with no in-between. I felt like if I went forward there would be no going back—I’d be for-real gay, not just in-my-head gay. Then one night we greased the wheels with a few dollar pitchers of beer, and things got interesting.

  We were at a party and she was dancing to a Devo song with full punked-out abandon. I walked up to her, looked her straight in the eye, and put one hand through her spiky hair. I walked away, like a bold idiot, knowing that I had just made the first move. We ended up back at my apartment, drunk, and we fell asleep on the living room floor. In the middle of the night, someone rolled over, and just like that, we were kissing.

  As we were making out, I thought, Oh my god, so this is what kissing is. I had kissed a few boys, but never felt anything and never understood what the big deal was or why people bothered to kiss each other at all. But for me, kissing a woman was different. It was the point of no return.

  The next day in her apartment, I helped myself to her journal. Why would I do a thing like that? Because it was there, she was not, and I have no impulse control. In a fresh entry, written that morning, she asked of our night together, “Have I opened Pandora’s box?” After I went to the library and found out who this Pandora was (remember, I’m still a C student), I had to answer, “Yes, she has.”

  Our relationship proceeded as smoothly as you’d expect between a teacher and a self-hating student who’s having her first-ever homosexual experience. I pulled her close, then pushed her away, then threw myself at her, then despised myself for doing it. I couldn’t stand to see her, and I couldn’t stand not to see her. I was tormented, guilt-ridden, ashamed . . . and out-of-my-mind excited. And I had no clue how to handle any one of those emotions, much less all of them together.

  I hung out in Normal for the summer of my final year at ISU to marinate in the drama of the push and pull of love. To support myself, I got a job detasseling corn with migrant workers in the endless cornfields outside town. I wanted to do something physical and be outside so maybe I could get a tan. What I got was cuts all over my arms because I went sleeveless.

  At the end of the summer, I reluctantly left Normal to start an MFA program at Cornell in upstate New York. I had auditioned for a bunch of grad programs earlier in the year, and to my absolute surprise, Cornell had offered me one of their six graduate positions. Cornell wasn’t Juilliard or Yale in terms of actor-training-program gravitas, but they wanted me! I got a free ride and the promise of two more years doing what I loved in the safety of academia. And seeing as I had projected every last ounce of neediness onto the gay teacher lady, I would imagine my exit came not a moment too soon for her.

  Now that I had broken my relationship cherry, I finally got the sense to call Chris. It had been four years since I’d sent him the cruel letter that had ended our friendship. At home in Dolton over Christmas break, I got out my folks’ Harveys Bristol Cream, poured myself a mugful, and dialed Chris’s number.

  “I’m sorry about that letter,” I told him. “I miss you. And I’m gay now, too.”

  “I know,” Chris replied. And just like that, he forgave me. A fan of late sixties easy listening music, I felt such a joy to hear his familiar sign-off before hanging up: “Don’t sleep in the subway, darling.” I had my friend back.

  My mom always said that if she could buy me a town, it would be Ithaca. It was perfect for me—woodsy, contained, and quaint. I arrived there via train and bus in the late summer of 1982. Ithaca is a lovely little place, full of old hippies and smarty-pants students. Every street is a steep hill, and all the students had wonderfully toned legs. I would have a pair of my own in short order. I had grown up feeling fat next to my bony brother and sister. They effectively taunted me, calling me “ub”—short for “tub-o-lard.” I had tried all sorts of tricks and fads to become slim and therefore happy. But now that I was finally losing weight, I still felt miserable. Once again, I could hardly get out of bed in the morning. Not only did I have that damn gay secret, but the fact that I had just come from the buckle of the corn belt had never been more obvious. Way out of my element, I made social gaffes at every turn. I actually tried to take out a priceless first-edition book like it was a regular library book. I had never eaten a taco or had Greek food. I had never had a bagel, much less a Jewish friend. Cornell was teeming with Jews, Greek food–eaters, vegetarians, and New York City types who kept hurting my feelings. Unlike these kids, I didn’t give two hoots about grade point averages, and how much I knew about anything was not a point of pride for me (yet). I was very alone and felt stupider than everyone else.

  Even though it had a middle-tier graduate acting program, Cornell was an elite Ivy League school. Some kids who had been high school valedictorians found themselves at the bottom of the class when they got there. There were many incidents throughout the years where really good students jumped to their deaths into the gorges that tore through the landscape of this otherwise delightful little hamlet. They couldn’t take their own perceived failures. It was called gorging out. I understood their pain.

  I was all on my own here. I had made my decision to travel across the country for grad school by myself and for myself. I didn’t consult my parents; I just sort of presented it to them. I had a long-running fantasy of someone magically appearing to hold my hand and guide me through the building of a life and a career. However, this fantasy was up against a harsh reality: I was going to have to dig deep to find the gumption to make things happen. I had zero belief in myself and would have loved to have been saved from the work of it.

  One particularly tough morning, when I was doubled over in existential angst, I called in to school sick and the secretary said, “No one calls in sick to this program. It’s not done. You get yourself in here.” I stayed home anyway. For a self-identified good girl and rule-follower this was an outrageously rebellious act. I spent that day obsessively straightening my bed and blowing and reblowing my hair dry. My insides might be a mess, but damn it if my outsides would be. That night, I called the campus gay and lesbian hotline. I think somehow I knew that I had to feel okay about who I was in order to feel like I fit anywhere, or to make anything of my life.

  “I need to talk to somebody,” I said. They told me to go to the Apple Blossom Café, and a volunteer named Alice would meet me there. I loved the ABC Café. It was full of dirty vegetarians and hairy lesbians, so of course I was both attracted and repulsed.

  And so I went to the ABC Café to meet Alice. She showed up, and I recognized her—she was a graduate student in the directing program. “Oh, hi,” she said. “I had a feeling you were gay.” We talked, went out and got drunk, and slept together that night. (For a volunteer, she clearly went above and beyond.)

  This might have ended up being a happy story of finding new love . . . but it wasn’t. I liked Alice okay, but she committed the cardinal sin of liking me more. I couldn’t deal with the attention—it made me want to punish her.

  So I did. I ignored her phone calls, acted cold when we saw each other, and generally pretended that first night had never happened. It was like the old Groucho Marx maxim: never belong to a club that would have you as a member. I saw her a couple of weeks later, and she was with someone else. I was still a mess.

  I loved the conservatory-style training at Cornell. For a depressed person in her early twenties like me it would become the perfect remedy: up at the crack of dawn with fencing or dancing, working until late at night on rehearsal for whatever play we were doing.

  I forgot about myself and I focused on the characters I played. I discovered one of the great, unexpected gifts of learning to act: all the characters ever written are already inside you. It’s just a matter of accessing them and bringing them forward. And having no fear of the dark side.

 
; Seein’ witches as Mary Warren in The Crucible.

  Case in point:

  Stuart White was an amazingly talented guest director from New York City. I met him early in my first semester. He came to Cornell to direct a Reynolds Price play called Early Dark. He cast me as Rosacoke Mustian, a young girl who loses her virginity when the man she loves violently rapes her. On stage.

  This blew my mind. This character was nothing like me. I had never fallen in love with a guy, never slept with a guy, never been thrown around by anyone. I didn’t know what it was like to live in the South during the Depression. I had no idea what it was Stuart White thought he saw in me to make him say, “Yep, she’s the one.” This was also the very first time I had been given the role of a character whose emotional arc was the center of the play. This experience would push me further than I’d ever been pushed.

  Stuart probably knew all of this, but he could probably also see the vulnerability I was always trying to hide from the world: my fear of failure and not being good enough. This lined up nicely with Rosacoke’s fear of being stuck in the generational poverty and pain of her world. He believed that if I could dig deep enough, I could tap into what I needed to bring this young girl to life.

  Stuart knew what he was doing. He would take me for long walks, and we would talk. I started to confide in him, and when I told him I was a virgin (I hadn’t been with a guy, so I thought the term still applied), he almost cried. “That is so sweet!” He was from the South and these were his people. Stuart urged me to see that depth and virginal innocence in me as something I could use creatively. I just had to be strong enough to allow myself to be vulnerable. Great lesson. For art and for life.

  The whole time Stuart was directing us in Early Dark, he was sick. “I can’t seem to shake this cold,” he’d say, just about every week. I didn’t think anything of it until one night when I mentioned it to Chris on the phone.

  “Oh my god,” Chris said. “He may have AIDS.”

  At that time, the early 1980s, AIDS was this mysterious new illness. It was the first I’d heard of it, though it wouldn’t be long before it would decimate the gay male community.

  About a year later, when I heard the news that Stuart had died from AIDS-related complications, I was devastated. What a loss.

  I did a lot of drinking during this time. I had company, because we all did. But at least to me, in my own private Idaho of pain, my drinking was different. Unlike the social drinking my friends did, getting to my “first today, badly needed” was compulsive and all-consuming.

  I had all four of my impacted wisdom teeth taken out while I was at Cornell, and I couldn’t drink for a while after the surgery because I was wiped out. I realized then that I had boozed it up every single day since my senior year of high school. I drank specifically to get drunk. I’d think nothing of tossing back a six-pack of Miller Lite—anything to get that merciful buzz. Although sometimes the buzz wouldn’t come and I’d just feel bloated.

  I wanted to feel good. I just wasn’t sure how to make myself happy, and I wished someone else would get me there. I started spending a lot of time with another grad student, named Hugh. He was a smart, self-deprecating, easygoing guy. We’d go out for dinner at the ABC Café, and he’d look over the vegetarian menu and then order a “rib eye, medium rare.” The humorless vegetarians and bearded lesbians didn’t find it funny. But Hugh cracked me up.

  We’d go out to bars and drink, or we’d drink at home, or on some nights, we’d do both. Hugh had some culture, so I started drinking more exotic beers like Heineken, smoking Turkish cigarettes we rolled ourselves, and drinking flavored coffee. No more Folgers. Hugh was a wonderful friend, and I told him everything, including about my relationships with women. He was cool with it.

  Hugh in the blue shirt I wish I’d kept. It looked better on me. With Beth, my roommate.

  My roommate was moving out, so Hugh moved in. We became inseparable and even started wearing each other’s clothes. I loved spending time with him, but when he started to fall for me, things changed.

  I didn’t really want a physical relationship with Hugh, and if it had been just up to me we’d have stayed close friends. He had reasonable heterosexual expectations and was moving our relationship toward sex. I was curious enough, and in need of affection, that I moved with him. We started having sex, which led me to fear I was pregnant every two seconds. An unreasonable fear since we used protection. No matter what we did (or didn’t do) the night before, the next day I was always convinced I was pregnant. Once, Hugh laughed and said to me, “You’d have to be a goddess of fertility to be pregnant after what we did last night.”

  Hugh was as sweet and kind as he could be, so I soon found myself despising him. He never gave voice to these feelings, but I knew he was falling in love with me. How did I know? Because I had helped myself to his journal (yes, it’s a pattern). I’d push him away, but he’d just wait patiently for me to come back, which I always did. I needed the comfort and companionship.

  Then I became a real asshole. I started pushing away anyone who showed me kindness. That inner diva who had first reared her ugly head at Illinois State reappeared with a vengeance. I was the worst person to have at critiques. No one could do anything right as far as I was concerned, and I made absolutely sure they knew it. In the haughtiest of tones, I’d demand, “What the hell was that?” “How dare you demean Molière in that way!” “Why are you making that face?” “You’re just showing off!” Everything everyone did was wrong, and I couldn’t let anything go. I was undoubtedly an absolute joy to have around.

  Thus began my phase of assholatry, a period that would go on for some years. I just felt like something within me was fundamentally broken. In true Psychology 101 fashion, the crap I spewed at them was the crap I wanted to spew at myself. I was scared to death that I didn’t have what it took. Everyone started to steer clear of me, except for Hugh.

  I was at one of my lowest points, and Hugh took the brunt of it. I even came to hate his accent, not that he really had one, having grown up in Southern California. He was like a puppy, loyal and loving, which I found pathetic. How dare he love me? What was wrong with him?

  I should say that while all of this suffering was unnecessary, it did make for some good comedy. Years later, with lots of distance, I saw my young self in one Sue Sylvester. Hell-bent on revenge and out to crush the dreams of the innocent, Sue is always looking for the next fight. “Get ready for the ride of your life, Will Schuester. You’re about to board the Sue Sylvester Express. Destination horror!” I was awful in those Cornell years, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to make my ridiculousness funny.

  In the midst of my turmoil, I had one teacher—a visiting instructor, actually—who saw what I was doing and tried to help me. Her name was Jagienka Zych-Drweski, and I barely remember anything else about her, but I’ve never forgotten what she said to me.

  She shook her head with a mix of pity and frustration and said in a thick Polish accent, “Jane. You have to learn to let things roll off your back!”

  I wanted to, but I didn’t know how. Unfortunately for me (and anyone else within earshot), it would be years before I’d figure it out.

  Eventually I pushed even Hugh away, but shockingly, we stayed friends, and to this day we call each other on our birthdays.

  When I graduated from Cornell, my mom and dad and Aunt Marge picked me up for a little family vacation. I was twenty-four, with an overbearing perm and an attitude to match. We were making our way to New York City, where I was hoping to ply my trade in theater.

  We drove all up and down the East Coast, sightseeing, the four of us sharing small hotel rooms. I was in a terrible mood the whole time. I was critical of everything and rolled my eyes so frequently I gave myself vertigo. Soon, everyone had had enough of me. Things came to a head in Boston.

  My dad wanted to do the Freedom Trail, a walking tour of historical sites in Boston that’s supposed to be a fun, easy way to learn New England history. But we kept
losing the trail. We wandered through Boston with Dad saying, “Where’s the goddamn Freedom Trail?” as I let my parents know exactly how stupid I thought the whole thing was by complaining at every turn. “Oh my god, we walked all that way for this?”

  The next morning, I opened my eyes to find my mother sitting at the foot of my hotel bed. “You’re ruining my vacation,” she said quietly. I behaved a little better after that, but my inner bitch was only temporarily muzzled.

  Dad, Mom, Aunt Marge, and me on the Goddamn Freedom Trail trip.

  When the Goddamn Freedom Trail vacation was finally over, they reluctantly left me at my new home in the West Village, on Christopher Street. It was the day after the Gay Pride Parade and it looked like a cyclone had hit it. In 1984, New York was not the clean, friendly wonderland it is today. Times Square was a giant porno shop, people got mugged on the subway, and Central Park wasn’t safe after dark. I was living in a one-bedroom sublet apartment with a Chinese graduate student from Cornell, so we had to take turns sleeping on the couch because there was only one bed.

  The sublet was across the street from the gay leather bar Boots & Saddle, and just around the corner from the Duplex, a piano bar where musical theater wannabes and enthusiasts would sing until the wee hours. Being near the gay bars was a double-edged sword: when I was happy, it seemed like a great place to be; when I wasn’t, it felt decadent, dark, and lonely.

  I got a job at a friend’s father’s advertising agency called Creamer Incorporated, which had acquired a PR division called Glick & Lorwin. I had no business being in PR—had no nose for it and no initiative, and basically sat at a desk all day trying to look busy. But for some reason, Boris Lorwin and Ira Glick, the two wonderful older guys who ran it, loved me.