She started off calmly asking Mrs. Arthur why the funeral, which took place a week after he died, had been held in a strip mall. We had all gone.
Mrs. Arthur explained that the family chose the location.
My dad had told me that no regular home would handle his body. So they had to rent out an empty store space in a strip mall. It had been some sort of Mail Boxes Etc. store. The leftover shelving on the walls and packing tape in the corner of the room supersized the dreariness of it all. Thanks to the bizarre choice somebody made to have an open casket, we all had a chance to look at his body. For a dead person he looked incredibly healthy. Certainly not gaunt or ill in the way that I’d come to envision AIDS deaths. As always, the sopranos were in their own operatic world of emotion. Alison took her moment in front of the body, wailing and sobbing. All the sopranos were collapsing into each other’s arms. “My god, I touched his hand! He feels like chicken. No. This can’t be. Nooo!”
The thing I was most struck by was the pair of oversize Charles Nelson Reilly glasses Critzer had on. We’d never seen him wear them. Wendy’s theory was that someone’s glasses had fallen off their face as they filed by for the viewing and the person had been too skeeved out to retrieve them, thinking, “Forget it. I’ll get another pair.” Was nobody around after he died who knew what he looked like in life to advise the funeral home? Or were those glasses symbol number 344 that I knew nothing about him?
Through her tears, Alison continued to dominate the grief circle. Now she wanted to know if the older lady standing in the back of the room at the funeral had been his wife.
“No,” Mrs. Arthur said, her voice full of patience and kindness and just the tiniest hint of “you dumb ass,” “that was his mother.”
Alison addressed the entire choir, speaking through a crazy frozen grin and staring straight at me and Wendy. “I just want to say that I loved Mr. Critzer a lot. And I am tired of some of the rumors that are being spread.”
Wendy and I were losing our minds.
I can’t remember who said it, Wendy or I, but one of us stood up and yelled, “He wasn’t married because he was gay and he probably had AIDS!” I’m thinking it was Wendy since she was more of a yeller. When it came to dealing with large groups of my fellow teenagers, I was more of a nodder and a “yeah, that’s right” type.
Alison whipped around to face us, her smile gone. “I would think that you two would feel bad enough as it is. You wasted his time, and he didn’t have that much time to waste. You disrespected him when he was alive and you are disrespecting him now that he is dead. He worked all of his life to arrange music, and it is not easy to arrange music. Especially some of the complicated medleys that we’ve done this year. And then he died without ever having a wife or having kids.”
Mrs. Arthur glanced over at Wendy and me. “Let me just say this. When he died, he was in the AIDS ward.”
The truth, or the indirect implication of truth, felt so good, but not to Alison, who let out a frustrated scream.
“Ahhhh! The principal told us that he died from pneumonia! Why would the principal lie to us? What does he have to gain? He’s already the principal!”
Desperate for some sanity and for the bell that signaled the end of class to ring, Mrs. Arthur turned to the boys to save her. “Any of our boys have any experiences they’d like to share? Maybe a happy memory?” A pale, underfed senior who had been ordered by Mr. Critzer, “Never sing. Lip-synch,” raised his hand. He had sweat dripping down his forehead and his voice had a pervy quiver to it. “Once . . . I was watching TV and . . . umm . . . I saw a gay channel. Gay stuff.” His touching remembrance opened the door for Eric, a skinny black tenor, to share his equally unrelated homophobic thoughts about his cousin who was a lesbian “and her big thing was that being a lesbian is a lot more than just not caring what you look like.” Alison started wailing about how unfair it was that she couldn’t bring her Bible to school but she had to “sit here and listen to this!” Brett and the other closeted gay boys in the choir sat in complete silence.
I was surprised by how truly stricken with grief some of the students were during the grief session. They didn’t know him. Not like I did. Now that I think of it, I might have seen Mr. Critzer in those glasses at some point. In fact, I’m sure I did. It was in his office. He put them on in order to read lyrics printed on the back of a record album. I think. Or maybe he wore them to drive and he came to one of our shows at the JCC with them on? I’m not sure. The image of him in the casket with them on has scared all my other glasses-wearing memories away.
The bell rang, and how Mr. Critzer died was never mentioned in choir again.
I’m buying a plane ticket, and I’m going to the gala. Bob Critzer was never properly mourned, but he’s going to be. I’m going to wear an oversize white T-shirt with a spray-painted picture of Mr. Critzer’s face on the front, like they do with murdered rappers. I’m going to write LOSE WEIGHT—ASK ME HOW on the back to lure people in. People will tap me on the shoulder: “Excuse me, can you tell me a little about your weight loss plan?” “Sure!” I’ll say. “What you want to do is focus on expending more calories than you’re taking in. You could also GET AIDS AND DIE ALONE LIKE ROBERT CRITZER DID!”
Wait a minute, I should be calling the planners of the gala directly and giving them the good news. I’m a regular on a “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” show, Looking, for god’s sake! The show is about a group of gay boys in their thirties living in San Francisco looking for love. I’m the straight one. The “approachable” one. My character, Doris, is the “fruit fly” or “fag hag” fun one! Paid to be a fag hag. Sometimes the good Lord does have a plan.
Just because two gay pride parades turned me down after I e-mailed them and offered to sit in a convertible and throw butterscotch hard candies and condoms at the leather-bound gay men pushing their babies in strollers (actual babies, not men dressed as babies) along the parade route doesn’t mean that I still don’t have some “I’m on TV” sway. I’ll offer to give a speech about how the choir changed my life and give Mr. Critzer the memorial he deserves. Why didn’t I think of this before? And why don’t I have more followers on Instagram? The other actors have hundreds of thousands and have to use fake names to avoid being stalked. I’ll do a little shout-out about my social media presence during my gala speech.
I may have to lie and say that the sexy boys I’m on the show with are coming with me. I’d love to have those boys with me. What if I showed up with the main actor, Jonathan Groff? Jonathan was on Glee, a show about swing choirs! They would lose their minds after I lost mine. I’d forget about correcting the wrongs of show choir history and would spend my whole time making Jonathan leave voice mail messages for my friend’s kids as the moose from Frozen.
Before I get too crazy with it, I should make sure that Critzer really has been forgotten all these years. If there’s a half marathon in his honor or a musical about his life, I could look like a real ass. Glee could have done an entire episode about him; my TV’s being used exclusively to play Wii Just Dance 2014, so I wouldn’t know.
If you died before the Internet came around, you’re really dead. I’ve been scouring the Internet for more than an hour and I can’t find anything about Critzer anywhere.
Finally, I type “find a grave site” into my search engine and I find a website called Find a Grave and there he is. His gravestone is small, gray, and rectangular, with his name and birth and death dates on it. That’s it. “Robert E. Critzer 1942–1986.” There’s a section below the photo of his grave for “family information.” Mother, father, sisters and brothers, and so on. It’s blank. For fun—because forget Tinder; nothing is more fun than trolling through graves—I type in the last name Critzer and find three other Critzers buried in the same small graveyard in this little Indiana town.
My Murder, She Wrote mode kicks in, and I sign up for a temporary membership at Ancestry.com to see if it will list his
parents’ names. It does, and it was their graves I’d found. The section for family members is filled in on their pages. Nobody lists Bob. I have a very strong urge to drive to his grave and stick a plastic sunflower by his gravestone. Next I’ll be buying Beanie Babies at the gas station to stack on top of his grave, so I better stay home.
I’m back on Ancestry.com to cancel my temporary membership since I’m always forgetting to cancel subscriptions. I’m probably still paying for Tiger Beat. They have a copy of his birth certificate. Santa Monica, California, is listed as his place of birth. I’m in Santa Monica. That’s where I am at this very moment. I live here. He was born here. The city where I’m sitting right now was his place of birth. This is a sign. I give his spirit a little jazz hand high-five. “Don’t worry, Bob. I’ve got this.”
You know who may be able to help me? Those gay-loving heathens back in Indianapolis, my parents. Mr. Critzer was close with one of my dad’s good friends, Charles, an arts writer for The Indianapolis Star. My dad had called Mr. Staff after hearing the news of Critzer’s death, and he had been the one who confirmed that he’d died from complications from HIV.
Charles and Bob would go see the Indianapolis Symphony together. Maybe they were a couple. I’ve never asked.
My dad answers the phone.
“Jake’s pool hall. Jake speaking.”
He asks me if I’m doing anything exciting.
I tell him how I’m trying to find out more about my old choir director Mr. Critzer.
He tells me that’s not very exciting.
“Anything else? Any movies with celebrities we’d know? Or is it all the gay show still?”
“The gay show was canceled, and no big movie plans. So do you think I could call Charles and ask him about Mr. Critzer?”
“He’s dead.”
“Is everybody dead?”
“Yep.”
My dad was a big speech giver back in the day. He’ll like the idea of me crashing the gala and giving a speech about Critzer.
“Save your money. They’re never going to let you do it.”
“Actually, Dad, I think they might. I was on Looking and that’s—”
“The gay show? Nobody watched that. Isn’t that why it got canceled?”
The next morning, my dad sends me an email with a link to an article in the Bedford Gazette. The first thing I do is scan the article for my name—old habits die hard—but Bob’s name is there. The article is profiling one of its locals, Judy Harris. She’s starting a musical theater company at the Bedford community center. Judy talks about being in Counterpoints. According to her dates, she was in Counterpoints the same years I was. Her name sounds vaguely familiar.
In the article, she’s talking about how Bob Critzer was her greatest mentor.
Maybe she was a year ahead of me. Why don’t I remember her?
“If it wasn’t for the belief that Mr. Critzer had in me I would have never made it into Carnegie Mellon music school. We all need teachers who are willing to not only write the recommendation letter but make that extra call.”
He made a call for her? I’d asked him to write a letter to help me get an audition with a local vocal coach for after-school lessons, and he’d told me that he never did that sort of thing. Ever. She goes on to say how important it had been to hear from her greatest mentor that she had talent. That in addition, the honor of having “private vocal lessons” with him the last few years of his life changed her life. She hopes to pass some of what he taught her on to her students. He gave her private lessons, and even more shocking that that, he told her—to her face—that she had talent.
I’m not going to the gala. Not because he never did any of those things for me but because they’ve probably already asked Judy to give the speech, which she’ll be thrilled to do after she gets done running in the twentieth annual Bob Critzer 5K.
That night I’ve calmed down considerably. I’m going to the gala not for social activism or to increase my Twitter followers but because I bet it’s going to be a fantastic evening of song and dance. That’s the way Critzer would want to be remembered. Big hands, big faces, deep breaths, red glitter, and five-part harmonies. Not a forty-six-year-old straight woman screaming “IT WAS AIDS!” in people’s faces as they peel their shrimp.
Thinking about how I was just looking for an excuse to publicly emote all this time, making me no better than a soprano, is a bummer. Since my David Bowie fantasy stopped working when he tried to form the band Tin Machine, I’ve had to find other ways to survive dark nights of the soul. In Portland I made the slightly pathetic discovery that if I’m having a awful evening, instead of hopping right back on Tinder to meet the next sex addict who will capture my heart and leaving me sobbing in the rain, I can instead walk very slowly, back and forth, in front of a packed gay bar until someone recognizes me, and my Friday night, and my soul, is saved.
I had to walk back and forth four times in front of the Abbey in West Hollywood tonight before I heard a boy scream and yell, “DORIS!” He probably saw me and immediately knew what I was doing. Who cares? I feigned surprise at finding myself in the heart of the gayest of gay bars.
“Oh, is this a gay bar? Is that what all those rainbow flags mean?”
It’s gay karaoke night. Things are looking up. An ornery little Gay-Asian named Tag is by my side all night. After we share our stories of heartbreak and broken dreams with each other Tag insists my troubles would be solved if I accept I’m a lesbian and or have gender-reassignment surgery. His bold sassiness makes me giddy. The more outrageous he is the more delighted I am. When I ask Tag to check to see if “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” is in the karaoke songbook, he suggests I stick to songs about crazy woman wandering the streets with dead flowers in her hair. “Honey, get to know yourself. You’re an alto and that’s your genre.”
I’m at the bar until closing, hugging beautiful boys, laughing myself into coughing fits and singing Helen Reddy songs. I mean, come on, you gotta love those gays.
Gang Toast
Round white spots have appeared all over my shoulders and chest. It looks like I fell asleep in the sun after somebody’s coin purse spilled all over me.
My dermatologist, Dr. Adair, insists it’s not a big deal. “It’s just a fungus.”
Oh good. I was worried I’d caught ringworm from the manure-covered donkey at the farmers’ market petting zoo. Whew, it’s only a fungus.
“It’s like athlete’s foot, but all over your body.”
No more details are needed. Fungus really ends the meeting.
Dr. Adair’s skin is so perfectly white and smooth, you could use it as a dry-erase board. A fungus would slip right off her. Fungus grabs right on to me and won’t let go. It announces to the world my secret that I don’t always shower after I work out. I really can’t keep a secret.
The final diagnosis—tinea versicolor—is also known as “You’re Disgusting.”
My body doesn’t want me to date. It’s not letting me. I’m the one who wasn’t showering after spin class, so maybe I was getting in my own way, but it is odd that the night after I put myself on Tinder I’m covered in fungi. Honestly, I’m not completely ready to start dating, but I thought if I went on Tinder and saw someone I knew whom I’d always wished I could date, maybe that would be a good way to start. I got as far as writing a jokey profile blurb—“Looking for a man to pay for my other fake boob and raise my child while I have sex with your brother”—and lost my nerve. There’re a lot of stand-ups and men giving speeches at weddings (“not my own!”) on Tinder. Lots of men holding microphones in front of brick walls.
Apparently the fungus is very heavy on my back. There could be a KICK ME sign from middle school back there. It’s been forever since I or anyone else has seen my back.
Dr. Adair mentions an ointment I could use but suggests it would be a lot faster if she prescribed some pills for me.
“It’s super-easy. Just take the pills for four days, avoid alcohol, and—”
“Is there an easier option than the easier option?” I ask. “Like maybe a skin graft or heavy makeup?”
It’s not that I can’t go four days without drinking, but I don’t want to go four days without drinking. If it means I’ll be limited to dating within the fungus community or even have to start showering, so be it. I’m not ready to give up my three glasses of wine a night. Not yet. It would be a shock to my divorced system and could even be dangerous. What if I had seizures—or worse . . . feelings?
Dr. Adair tries to frown at me, but thanks to her perfectly distributed Botox injections, it’s more of a blank open stare. But her tilted head and hand on her hip communicate what her face no longer can: “If you can’t go four days without drinking, I think we need to have a different conversation.”
“Hey, unless that conversation is about good wines under ten bucks and the latest episode of Orange Is the New Black, I’m not sure I could stay interested!” I say. Then I ask her if she could tell me about the ointment and if she could not say the word “ointment” and use “lotion” instead.
The lotion was a perfectly viable option, except that it was to be applied twice a day and I should be sure to have my husband or my partner help me with the hard-to-reach spots in the middle of my back.
“I don’t have a husband or a partner. I’m divorced.”
Dr. Adair is a dermatologist married to a plastic surgeon; the words “I am divorced” are not ones she’s unfamiliar with. I’ve been divorced twice now, so you’d think it wouldn’t feel so awful to say those words, but it does. I’m still so confused as to how I got here. No, I’m not. I know how I got divorced. I’m just completely unsure of how to move forward. My friends keep telling me, “You need to be single for one year, at least.” I had a nice sex fling right after I split with David, and that was even hard to negotiate. After sleeping with the guy, whom I’d known for years, I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to move forward. When do you say “boyfriend,” and how do you know when it’s over when everyone is so busy with jobs and kids? How on earth would I ever fall in love again? All is not lost. I have my fungus to keep me company.
Miss Fortune Page 23