Miss Fortune

by Lauren Weedman

  That first year in Counterpoints was also the first year I started waking up in the middle of the night with full-blown death anxiety. All those moments of silence during the morning announcements for our departed classmates got to me. The fact that I didn’t know them personally didn’t matter. It felt like I’d reached the age where I was finally eligible for death. They got my application and I qualified.

  The anxiety attacks could be avoided as long as Spook, my cat, let me sleep through the night. Spook was a long-haired white killer who would swallow baby birds with no chewing; she’d just gulp them down whole like she was taking her One A Day vitamin. Her favorite way to pull me out of a deep sleep was to knead on my chest with her paws. Her kitty breast exam would be followed by her trying to stick her paws into my mouth. Even if she started to lick my teeth I tried to keep myself from fully waking up because I knew that once I was awake I’d start thinking about eternity and my place in it. I’d throw Spook out the window so she could go give some baby squirrels death anxiety and lie on my bed, staring into the darkness. “There will come a day when there will be no more Lauren. At first it will be ‘Lauren’s been dead one year,’ and then, ‘Oh, she’s been dead around ten years now,’ and eventually, it will be, ‘Wait. Who’s Lauren?’”

  I’d sit up in bed, my dried-out mouth wide open, and let out a silent arid scream. The only way to pull myself out of the blackness was mind control. I’d actually say to myself, “I am going to have a sexy fantasy . . . here it goes.”

  My go-to fantasy was to imagine a life-size naked Ken doll standing by my bed. Nobody was around to see, and I was allowed to do whatever I wanted to do to him. He’d let me knock on his plastic bump and kiss him. After that, we’d lie on the bed and hold hands. This was eerily similar to my sex life with many of my future closeted gay boyfriends. Sometimes if Ken wasn’t up to the task of trumping my disappearance off the planet, I’d bring in the big guns. David Bowie. The “personal assistant of David Bowie” fantasy was always the same, and it always worked to get my mind off my place in the universe. We never had sex, but he loved me deeper than he could ever love any of the supermodels he had sex with. He’d tell me how he loved my personality and wanted me around him for the rest of his life. He could be himself with me. Even in my sexual fantasies I was a fag hag.

  The best time to catch up on any sleep I lost to the abyss was during my teacher assistant hour. Second semester, I’d offered to be Critzer’s assistant and sit in his office for one period a day to help him with whatever he needed help with. Nobody understood why I’d want to do this. “Do you need an extra hour of him yelling at you?”

  I knew he wouldn’t yell at me one on one, and I never saw it as yelling anyway. When I asked him about assisting him, he’d said, “Oh please, no.” But I begged him, and he let me. He was never in his office. So where was he? The idea that he’d be sitting in the teachers’ lounge, drinking a Capri Sun and chatting about gardening and the symphony with the other teachers seemed impossible. In fact, I never saw him talking with the other teachers. Maybe he felt a little above them. It was rumored that he’d left Counterpoints to pursue his career as a classical pianist, only to be back one year later. Mr. Critzer was a very private man. You could rely on most teachers to snap under the pressure of teaching high school kids and overshare about their divorce and their mentally challenged daughter they were forced to institutionalize, but Mr. Critzer kept his personal life a complete mystery. When he was playing music and directing he was a force, but out in the hallway I’d notice him struggling to carry enormous stacks of music theory books, weaving in and out pods of loud high-fiving jocks, rolling his eyes and shaking his head at them. Which was exactly how I felt. My world was entirely set in my music and theater classes, where a funny chubby girl who dressed like a forty-two-year-old Jersey housewife—Sun-In blond hair, blue eye shadow, and orange tan set off by my full-length baby blue sundress—could thrive.

  The one time he came into his office to pick up some folders he looked surprised to see me. I took that opportunity to create an awkward moment where I asked him how his dating life was going and gave him an “I know you know that I know” kind of nod so he knew that he could speak freely. He grabbed his brown paper bag lunch and walked out.

  It always blew my mind when people refused to see that Mr. Critzer was gay. Nowadays my so-called gaydar gets me in trouble all the time as I walk down the street declaring, “Gay, gay, not gay, kind of gay, gay for Alec Baldwin,” but at the time I was one of the few kids who knew that Mr. Critzer was gay and one of the very few who had no problem with it. This was in no small part thanks to Sid and Sharon Weedman.

  Long ago, the conservative, cat-sweater-wearing, easy-listening-music Republicans I called parents had been show folk. My father was a theater production major in college. He stage managed musicals and my mother danced in the chorus. All of my mother’s dance partners had been gay. My father fell in love with my mother watching her being tossed from one gay man to another in the production of The King and I at Butler University. Most of our Indiana neighbors held on to the popular “homos are fudge packers on a butt bus to hell to have sex with a donkey” attitude, but I grew up with family friends like “the two Jims.” I’d asked my dad if they were brothers with the same name who fell on hard times and were forced to live together, and he’d told me simply, “Nope. They’re gay.” This “Tall Jim loves Big Jim” matter-of-fact attitude had been introduced to me at a very young age. Of course, it was also presented to me at a Klan rally while my father’s lover molested me, but no childhood is perfect. (Oh, gurl, no you didn’t. Snap. Head roll, etc.)

  There I was, marching in the hallways, screaming for everyone to “wake up and smell the gay coffee!” whenever Critzer came up, while each of my high school relationships featured a moment when I was pulled aside by a well-meaning friend and told that my talented makeup artist / choreographer beau was gay. If I had a dime for every time someone tried to convince me that one of my high school boyfriends was gay, I’d have eighty cents. That’s not one boyfriend and eight confrontations. That’s eight boyfriends, one confrontation each.

  My first year of Counterpoints I fell in love with a delicate-boned tenor named Brett. Kerry, a shrill soprano with long red hair, pulled me aside before our big band medley rehearsal and said, “You know how people are always screaming ‘fag!’ at Brett wherever he goes? Like at the mall and church and while he’s sleeping? Do you ever wonder why?”

  Jealousy, I thought. People were jealous. He was confident and talented. He was so much more passionate about music and movies than other boys.

  If someone were really gay, would they swish down the hallway and slap football players’ asses? Would they sketch naked boys with gigantic hard-ons in their journals? No. That would be far too obvious.

  Brett had a toilet seat hung on his bedroom wall and if you lifted the lid up, Woody Allen’s face looked out at you. On our dates he’d invite me to his parents’ modest ranch-style home and make me hummus from scratch while wearing one of his mother’s dresses. The night would end with us talking in English accents as we wished each other “Good night, dahling!” and air-kissed each other, “Mwah! Mwah!”

  On the drive back to my house I’d be giddy with love, thinking this is what it must have been like to have been a part of Andy Warhol’s Factory!

  Except with less sexy time. Our romantic troubles were entirely my fault, I told myself.

  Waiting for me to roll my control-top underwear off and stash it under the front seat wasn’t a teenage-boy aphrodisiac, so I stopped wearing them to show my openness to adventure.

  After three months it didn’t make any difference, and I started to get frustrated with Brett’s lack of physical affection toward me. One night, parked in my Chevy Malibu Classic after his five hundredth blow job, I brought it up.

  “Hey, do you think that you’d ever want to . . .” I nodded toward my lap.
<
br />   “Tie your shoes for you? Never.”

  If I had to get too detailed about it, I knew that I’d end up talking myself out of it. Better to keep it light and jokey.

  “You knowa whata I mean. Ia scratcha your back, you scratcha mine?”

  Brett took a deep breath and turned to face me, “Listen, Chef Boyardee, I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one because you’d die. Weren’t you there when I made my announcement in the lunchroom about how even the word ‘vagina’ makes me sick? It sounds like something that if it got on you, you’d be like, ‘GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!’ I know that I spoke for every person in that cafeteria when I said that it’s a myth that anyone wants to spend anytime down there at all. You can send me a postcard because I won’t be visiting.” He looked down at his watch and screamed, “I’m late! I’m doing makeup for The King and I. I have to turn twenty doughy-white Hoosiers into Asians. Wish me luck.”

  I had lots of gay-boy crushes before high school. It started in eighth grade with Marc Borders. After puberty, I was drawn to the sweet, playful boys. The ones who were quick to laugh and just as quick to grab my arm as we marched down the mall singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” at full volume and doing the little dance step that went with it, too. Even back in eighth grade I had well-meaning friends who were trying to clue me in that my boyfriends were in love with boys. “I saw him making out with this guy and then he gave him a rose and yelled ‘I love you!’ as the guy drove off.” It all sounded to me like crazy made-up urban myth stuff. Their stories were as real to me as “my friend of a friend put her gerbil in the microwave one time . . .”

  It was Brett who, at the beginning of junior year, stopped my friend Wendy and me on our way into Counterpoints rehearsal to tell us that Critzer was out sick with a chest cold.

  Wendy suggested we skip class and go get some biscuits and gravy at Shoney’s all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. “If Mr. Critzer isn’t there, it’s a waste of our time.” Wendy was a buxom redhead who dated straight boys and had a crude sense of humor that would have put Don Rickles to shame. I agreed with Wendy. I always did or else she’d titty punch me and tell me I smelled like a maxi pad.

  After a few weeks of Critzer’s on-and-off absence, we had it down to where if we walked up to the rehearsal room and heard any voice that was not Mr. Critzer taking attendance, we’d just keep on walking out the front door of the school. It was easy to slip out of the school when you were in show choir; you just threw some red taffeta over your shoulder with the “Don’t you dare. I’m a Counterpoint!” snooty attitude that Critzer instilled in us and everybody assumed you were off to sing for some old folks somewhere. Whenever we got scared about being caught by the school cop we’d start singing the Ain’t Misbehavin’ medley for which we’d won first prize at state competition the year before. Thanks to Mr. Critzer’s insanely complicated arrangement, the focus it took to sing it helped keep our nerve up to make it out of the school and into Wendy’s car. We’d hold our final note—“saving my love for youuuuuuuuuuuuu”—until we had safely made it off school property.

  One day we were rushing past the Counterpoints door singing the alto part of “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” It was so low we sounded like those throat-singing monks or a didgeridoo, and our low, rumbling vibrations caught the attention of Mr. Tucker, the vice principal. He was on his way into the Counterpoints room to make a special announcement. “You missed the door, ladies,” he yelled at us. Oops! We stopped singing and sulked back into the room. Starving.

  Mr. Tucker was a serious man who frowned a lot and stormed through the hallways with a giant wad of keys dangling off his belt like some sort of gladiator weapon. Tucker had been a football player and had a smooshed face that looked like someone had sat on top of his head. Or his helmet had been on too tight. The expression on his face was always very gloomy. He could be letting you know that he just saw a puppy licking a lollipop and it would still feel like Vincent Price trying to scare the shit out of you. That day his news actually matched his face.

  “You all know that Mr. Critzer has been ill. Well, I wanted to let you all know that he’s gotten very sick and he’s been moved to intensive care.”

  The choir got very quiet except for Jill, a high soprano who also happened to be Mr. Tucker’s daughter. She broke out in sobs. Wendy leaned over and whispered, “Man, she’ll take any opportunity to break down so her daddy will hold her.” Jill and her father were infamous for calling, “Love you, baby!” “Love you, Daddy!” if they crossed paths during the school day. Their love was so open that we just assumed that they were a couple, which would also explain why Jill always brought stuffed animals to school to comfort her. In reality they were simply a father and daughter who loved each other, and that made us jealous so we turned it into something disturbing so we could handle it.

  Jill was so distraught that her father had to French braid her hair to help calm her down. Something felt fishy. A week ago Critzer had a bad head cold and now he’s in intensive care? “Come on!” Wendy had said to me after class. “He’s a gay man in this conservative, boring midwestern town. Some boy probably complained that he winked at him and they fired him and now they have to create this totally unbelievable ‘in the hospital for a runny nose’ thing so they can cover their gay-fearing asses.”

  I agreed with Wendy, and this time it was because I thought it was maybe true and not just because I was trying to avoid the titty punch.

  Holiday break (or, as it was called back in my day, “The Superior Race’s Break for Christmas and Skiing”) had just started. I was coming home from Christmas shopping at the mall, acting like the bags hanging off my arms were full of presents for my family—“Don’t look in here! It’s your present!”—when in reality they were full of Little Debbie snack cakes for me to binge on, when Wendy called to tell me that Mr. Critzer had died. Her mother had seen his obituary in the newspaper.

  It had gone from “Mr. Critzer has a cold” to “Mr. Critzer is in the hospital” to “Mr. Critzer is dead” in six weeks.

  Wendy was the first person I knew who suggested that maybe his death was AIDS related. But how could that be? He didn’t look all frail and awful like the people I’d seen on the nightly news. It was all so sudden and bizarre. The obituary said he’d died from pneumonia. It made no sense to me whatsoever. He might as well have died from stubbing his toe.

  The last time I had seen Mr. Critzer, we’d been getting ready to perform at an upscale (it had carpet) old-age home. Wendy and I were unloading top hats and canes off the bus, laughing about an incident that had happened the last time we’d performed at a nursing home. During that show, an elderly man in the front row had keeled over in the middle of our rousing version of “Up, Up and Away.” He’d done it right on the lyric “Up, up and awayyyyy.” It was like he heard it and thought, that sounds good, and down he went. The tiny lady he fell on had been really enjoying the show and was annoyed at the interruption. She pushed him off of her, let him fall to the floor, called, “Nurse,” and scooted her chair over so she could enjoy the rest of the show. There wasn’t much to hear at that point. Most of the choir was unable to sing due to their complete horror at witnessing what they’d thought was a man dying during the show. Thanks to the healing power of music or the end of his seizure, the man popped back up before the nurse got to him and started clapping as if nothing had happened. Wendy and I were in hysterics remembering this when we spotted Mr. Critzer sitting by himself in the very dimly lit hallway. “Shit,” Wendy said when she saw him. “He’s back. Hopefully he won’t smell the biscuits and gravy on us. Here, take a mint.”

  “You two just never shut up, do you?” Critzer said when he saw us heading his way. His normal “Get these ignorant hayseeds away from me” tone and disgusted eye rolls were gone. His zing was gone. He looked small and tired. My immediate instinct was to cheer him up. “You’ll be sorry you’re always telling us to shut up w
hen we’re up there accepting our Oscars,” Wendy said to him.

  For years after his death we replayed what he said back and it never stopped breaking our hearts, and to be honest, freaking our shit out.

  “Oh, I’ll be long gone before that happens.”

  At the time, I’d been angry that he was implying it was going to take so long.

  After we got back from our holiday break, everyone was in shock. Counterpoints not only lost our captain; we lost our minds. A sweet old white lady, Bea Arthur, was standing behind Mr. Critzer’s piano our first day back. Mrs. Arthur had been the one who had taken over as the director of Counterpoints the year Mr. Critzer was gone pursing his career as a pianist. She’d come out of retirement to help out until the school could find a replacement.

  Mrs. Arthur had the unfortunate job of leading the choir through a “grief session.” The sopranos wanted to sob and hold one another. The only thing I wanted to do was visit the hospital where he died. Talk to the nurses. Get some information.

  Mrs. Arthur asked us to circle up our chairs.

  “I know this has been an emotional time for many of you. Losing a teacher is hard. Losing a friend is even harder. So I thought we could just take some time to just remember.”

  Things were going to get ugly, swing choir–style. Shrill and dramatic. Alison, a contralto who had given Valentine’s Day cards the year before to everyone in the choir that were signed “Love in Him” (which, it had to be explained to me, meant Jesus; I thought it was some R & B way of saying “Put some loving in your man”), came after Wendy and me with such venom you’d have thought that we were the ones who killed him. Based on the looks on their faces, it was clear most of the choir felt like Alison did.