Happy Accidents

by Jane Lynch

  I also experimented with a new version of myself. I wanted not just to try on a different “me,” but also to feel more a part of the Brady gang. Grunge was in, and the Urban Outfitters that had just opened on Sixth Avenue was selling it. All the girls in the cast either shopped there or looked like they had. Skirts, plaid, and cowboy boots were a hot look in this circle. I was not much of a skirt wearer, so my interpretation of this look was long underwear bottoms that I wore under flannel boxer shorts, plus the boots. This would have been an excellent choice if my goal had been to look like a homeless cowhand. I also stopped shaving my legs and underarms, which was actually somewhat fashionable at the time. This was a fairly radical departure for me, as heretofore I’d been a fan of Peter Pan collars. Like a character you grow into by putting on the wardrobe, I loosened up, accessed my inner earth mother, and found some compassion for myself.

  I became obsessed with the Indigo Girls and started to write my own music, tunes with titles like “A Blood Red Tear Stains My Face” and “I Gave You the Gun to Shoot Me.” I think I was trying to impose some Sturm und Drang on my story, so I wouldn’t feel so woefully inadequate in the drama department. Though they were written in earnest, I would use one of the songs years later to get huge laughs in a one-person show.

  I started taking yoga and began reading Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen. She wrote about the stories of goddesses and how these classic figures exemplify aspects of every female self. I fell in love with her notion of archetypes and that they live in all of us. I used this idea to methodically take apart my own psyche and apply a goddess to each proclivity. My inability to connect intimately with another human being was the goddess Artemis operating in my psyche; she rode solo, was chaste and immune to love. My one-track mind and ability to focus on a goal to the exclusion of all else was my inner Athena. I looked for the goddesses operating in others as well. It was a methodical and organized way to understand something that overwhelmed me. Reductionist, yes, ridiculous, perhaps, but it inspired me and helped me to understand my own self and the world.

  It was the exploration of my inner Aphrodite that led me to the 10th Street Baths in the East Village. Wednesday was Ladies Day, and I was enraptured from the first moment. All stone walls and wooden benches, the place made me feel like I’d been transported way back in time to the Isle of Lesbos. Naked ladies of all shapes and sizes lounged about and luxuriated themselves like Greek goddesses. In the steam room I saw one woman comb conditioner into the hair of another. Next to the baths, an impromptu yoga class was doing downward facing dog while giving the rest of us an anatomy lesson. The cold wading pool was filled with the freshly steamed. I left all body shame at the door, and on that first day, I did it all: I steamed, I sauna-ed, I dunked my naked body in the cold water, and I sipped hot tea. At the end of the day I had a massage with a Russian man named Boris who said I could call him Bob. As he rubbed baby oil farther and farther up the inside of my thigh he purred, “I am like doctor, yes?”

  I left thoroughly uplifted and full of bliss. I also took home a yeast infection and a cold sore on my lip, but I went back the next week.

  I started going to AA meetings at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center on 13th Street in the West Village, not because I was looking for love (in fact, relationships and sex were the furthest things from my mind) but because all the best “circuit” speakers seemed to pop up there. Circuit speakers were sought after and known for their awesome stories of transformation. Mostly, these were drug addicts who had been at death’s door and who, through AA and finding a power greater than themselves, had been reborn.

  I also met one of my best friends, Laura Coyle, through that Center, though she never was in AA herself. When I started going to AA meetings, I met her girlfriend, Trixie, a triple Leo who basically sucked up all the energy in a room, including the energy that was Laura Coyle. Laura has never been a shrinking violet, but in the glare of Trixie, she was kind of a vague background haze. . . . That is, until one day in yoga class.

  I was a devotee of Integral Yoga, which was across the street from the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. After we’d go through all the asanas and breathing exercises, stretching and energizing every muscle in our bodies and exchanging all the stale air in our lungs for fresh, we would chant. This was my absolute favorite part. In a half lotus, I’d rock back and forth and bliss out to the experience of sound resonating in my body. It felt like my soul was being massaged, and I just loved it. On the day that Laura Coyle became something other than a vague presence to me, we had a substitute teacher. When this female instructor I’d never seen before began to lead us in the chant, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She sounded like Miss Hathaway from The Beverly Hillbillies: thin and reedy voice, and absolutely no ear or rhythm. Why is this happening? Who allowed this? Appalled, I opened my eyes and looked around the room. Am I the only one who notices this? I caught the eye of Laura Coyle, who, unbeknownst to me, was also taking this class. I saw she was having the same experience of yogic horror, and as that recognition passed between us, we started to giggle. I looked away and dropped my head forward so I wouldn’t laugh out loud, but of course I had to look up at her again. Laura was doubled over. When she looked up at me, I saw she had tears running down her cheeks and that her shoulders had started to shake, and I lost it. I was lucky I didn’t pee through the long underwear I was wearing for everything now, including yoga.

  New best buddies. Me and Laura in the yoga changing room.

  And with that, a lifelong friendship was born.

  Throughout my life, friends would come and go. Laura stayed. Although in the glare of her girlfriend Trixie she had seemed almost retiring, I would very quickly discover her huge and loving energy. She is the most emotionally available person I’ve ever met. However, her blasting energy and love of life are not for the faint of heart. Her humor is fast and manic and goofy; she will tweak your nipple after just meeting you. In later years we would watch episodes of Absolutely Fabulous together. She is the perfect Edina to my Patsy, and she would go all-out to reenact moments from the show for me because she knew how much it slayed me.

  We were in a crowded Sears one day and it was over one hundred degrees outside. While I was waiting in line to pay she said, “Watch.” She walked out the automatic glass doors in full view of everyone in the store, and when she hit the heat outside, à la the “Morocco” episode, she collapsed into a heap on the pavement. Who would do that for a friend?! Laura Coyle, that’s who.

  We would find something hilarious and play the joke to each other all day long. Like the day we kept seeing empty strollers all over Santa Monica. We walked all over yelling to each other in horror, “Where are all the babies?!” The humor would usually be lost on others long before it would die for us as we’d play it over and over. Laura would say, “We just killed that!”

  Laura is a singer/songwriter. Her voice is incredibly beautiful, and she plays the guitar as if it were an extension of her very soul. She writes fantastic songs, and she holds the stage like few others. She can be singing about the joy of falling in love in one moment, and making you cry the next with a song about loss. Offstage she makes these emotional jumps with nary a transition. She can be cracking up about something in one moment and then crying about the plight of dolphins in the next. She has great compassion and can easily take on the suffering of others. I always say “Now, don’t go global on me!”

  When I met Laura in New York, I had always been quick to end friendships. I would semiconsciously build a case against them, and at some point it would come to a head and I’d have to say, “I’m outta here.” Laura would not let me do this, though I tried in dramatic fashion more than once.

  The closest I came to succeeding was in 1998 when we were roommates in Los Angeles. We were hiking the ridge up Runyon Canyon, talking. I had been resenting what I interpreted as her flirtation with a woman I had a crush on. All the way up the ridge, I built a case against her. I needed her to admit it, a
nd apologize, but she would have none of it. I got all worked up, and by the time we hit the top I was yelling and she was crying. She could not admit what she didn’t believe she’d done, and I could not let go of what I thought I’d seen. So I said, “That’s it! If you won’t cop to this, I am through with you.”

  We walked down the hill and got into the car in silence. I was a wreck, still hurt that she wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to hear, but more than that I was afraid I had gone too far with my anger. I had pushed her away, and I found myself terrified that she would actually go. But Laura said, “You know, Jane. I’m not going anywhere.” And I started to cry.

  It had never occurred to me that a friendship could survive a huge blowout like that. I tended to whip up a gigantic outrage (something at which I excel) so that I could dump my friends before they dumped me. I believed it was “one strike and you’re out.”

  But Laura and I have been friends for twenty years now. I credit the longevity of our friendship to that moment in the car at Runyon Canyon. It was the turning point for me. Trust replaced tests.

  The Real Live Brady Bunch ran for ten months in New York, and then in 1992 the Soloways took it to Los Angeles, to the Westwood Playhouse (now the Geffen Playhouse). I went to the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and withdrew my life’s savings—$10,000—and lit out for Hollywood.

  We all got apartments in Westwood, at a huge student housing–type building on Le Conte and Gayley, a bit down the street and across the road from the theater. Again, everyone bunked up together except for me. I got a huge one-bedroom that I furnished sparsely from a furniture rental place on Wilshire. It was all very white-lacquered and faux Southwestern. It looked more like a cheap hotel in Phoenix than a home.

  Laura and Trixie called me on opening night to say break a leg. They also gave me the great news that they were about to make the cross-country trip via Route 66 to Los Angeles. Trixie was thinking of opening a restaurant in town, and Laura was still in her shadow, following along. “Hiding her light under a bushel,” as her mom would say. Though I had only known Laura for a few months, I was thrilled to have my pal on her way to me.

  I was nursing a huge, naive crush on Laura at this point, too. I chastely idealized her and daydreamed about having her sing just for me: any thought of sex or carnal desires would have sullied it. Her music made me swoon as I listened to it on cassette tapes in my car and on a boom box in my cavernous apartment. She wrote such beautiful songs of longing and lost love, and I lost myself in the quiet yearning and almost mournful quality of the words. I exalted her. She became an ethereal goddess to me.

  Now, if you met Laura Coyle, the last word you would use to describe her is ethereal. She is firmly on the ground. But such was the extent of my projection, and my need for an enchanted love that lived only in the confines of my own imagination. I really don’t think I wanted Laura to be my girlfriend, but I did want her to let me fantasize about how perfect our love could be. I chose the wrong girl.

  Laura arrived and we started hanging out all the time. She and Trixie moved into an apartment on Speedway, the last street before you hit the Pacific Ocean in Venice Beach. They convinced me to move from my apartment in Westwood to a second-floor ocean-view studio a few buildings down the street from them. It was tiny but clean and open and only eight hundred bucks a month. I was tickled pink that these gals wanted me. I also secretly prayed for the demise of Laura’s relationship with Trixie, so that I could have the fantasy of her all to myself.

  Laura was on to me. “What’s up with you, Jane? Are you in love with me?” “What?!” I would say incredulously. “Think highly of yourself much?” She said, “You’re all goo-goo-eyed right now and I want to know what’s going on with you.” I’d dismiss her, hoping she couldn’t see what she was obviously very hip to. Damn if she wasn’t trying to kill my crush for me by making me come down to earth and talk about it. Reality always kills a good fantasy. I hated to lose this one, but as the good times continued to roll with Laura and I got to see more and more of who she really was, our true real-life friendship solidified itself. In other words, I gradually stopped projecting on to her who I thought I wanted her to be and fell in love with my friendship with the real Laura.

  So much so that when she told me she and Trixie were going back to New York, I was devastated. They had moved me all the way out to Venice Beach, away from the only friends I had (such as they were), only to leave me alone, again.

  Right before Laura left, she looked me directly in the eye and said, “Please don’t think I’m abandoning you.”

  She knew me well. I didn’t want to be known that well. I wanted her to know the good and funny me, not this dark and tender me. I, of course, denied that I would be affected in the least by her absence and urged her to have a great trip! But I’d never felt as alone as I did in those days after Laura left.

  After Laura’s exit, Venice Beach revealed itself as an increasingly unfriendly and hostile place. I had to park in a lot a few blocks from my apartment, and I’d walk down Speedway at night, jumping at every noise. I always thought I was going to get raped. My head, which is usually a very busy place, would fill up with gruesome images of what could happen to me.

  I couldn’t even get joy out of living by the ocean. The vast expanse of blue extending to the horizon made me feel frighteningly insignificant, so I kept my shades closed at all times. If I happened to catch people walking down the beach, I would wonder why they were so happy when I was not.

  One night, an earthquake rocked my little apartment just as I was taking a middle-of-the-night pee. The shower curtain rolled back and forth on the rod and I couldn’t stop peeing quickly enough. I took this as an act of nature aimed aggressively and directly at me.

  Then in the very early morning hours of July 14—my thirty-second birthday—I awoke to a bloodcurdling scream. I looked out my window to see a guy with a shaved head and covered with tattoos, obviously drunk, brandishing a machete at another guy and cutting him, just slicing him up. There was blood all over the pavement, I could hear sirens coming, and I just thought, WHAT THE FUCK! IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!

  While this certainly didn’t endear me to my beach apartment, it did make for a rather witty share at my AA meeting that day. I got laughs and lots of “Happy Birthday”s out of it. Most people thought I’d been in AA for years because of the way I told stories. I spoke at a lot of meetings and turned down a lot of women who wanted me to be their sponsor. Thinking back on it, I probably could’ve made some good friends. I just couldn’t get past the fear that once they got to know me, they would be disappointed. So I walked around like a circuit speaker, and I acted as if I knew and liked who I was—even though on the inside I was feeling more and more like a fraud and a dark mess.

  During the day I was fine because I was busy and had the comfort of routine. Every day started with coffee, then a meeting in the morning, errands, a nummy lunch out at one of my favorite joints in the afternoon, and then the show at night. But by the time I took the terrifying walk from my parking space to my apartment, I was so sad and alone. I went to bed that way, and throughout the night I would wake up darkly depressed.

  Once, in the middle of the night, during a time when I was almost paralyzed with grief, I awoke from a deep sleep into a vivid illusion. Lying in bed, I felt warm, loving arms go around me, as if someone were holding me. Though there was no one there, I was suffused with a feeling of pure love and comfort, and I fell back into my deep sleep. I was in the car in the early afternoon of the next day when, with a start, I remembered it. I had the distinct feeling that I was not alone. It was such a relief.

  Soon after, I met the woman who would help me make my next huge leap. I found her at a women’s AA meeting. She was in her late fifties, with a solemn, world-weary demeanor. Though she was quiet most of the time, when she did speak, everyone leaned in to listen. Her compassion was palpable. I never knew exactly what her story was, but I had shared something at a meeting one day that had to do with f
eeling disconnected from my family. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was one of those honest, revealing things I regretted saying as soon as it came out of my mouth. After the meeting, she came up to me and said, “I can hear how painful this is for you and how much you love your family, and just know it is never too late.” I felt I had been heard and gotten. I found out she was a therapist. I went to a few more of these meetings before I asked if I could make an appointment with her.

  The time had come for me to do something about feeling so alone. I had slowly but surely been distancing myself from my mom and dad for years. Julie and Bob were barely on my radar. Julie had gotten married and had four kids I barely knew. Though I knew where he worked, I wasn’t really sure what Bob did for a living or if he had a girlfriend. Family was supposed to be your rock; mine felt like something I had set sail from a long, long time ago. Why had I cut myself off from them, when I really loved them? It was the gay thing. I still hadn’t told them.

  I went home every year for Christmas, and we would spend time together doing holiday stuff. But the conversation always stayed on the surface of things, and I talked mostly about my career. What personal details I did share didn’t land as I wanted them to. For instance, I told them I was in AA, and they just didn’t get it. My mom told me she thought I was just going through a drinking phase in college. Later she told me she thought I joined AA because I wanted attention. It wasn’t something I could convince her of. I hadn’t only drunk less than most people in AA, I looked like a lightweight next to many members of the extended family. I remember hearing about an uncle on my mom’s side who lost a leg due to gangrene from alcohol poisoning. When I suggested that he might have been an alcoholic, as people do not normally lose limbs to moderate drinking, my mom dismissed me with “No, he just liked to have a good time.”