Miss Fortune (22 page)

T
he sound of Eddie the mailman's wad of keys jingling up the sidewalk signals my favorite moment of the day. The mail is here! Not wanting to seem desperate for good news that the mail never brings, I hide behind my curtains, ready to run right out the moment Eddie slams our apartment building's mailbox shut—
slam!
That's it. He's done. I bolt out of my apartment, and as I round the side of the building, Eddie isn't walking away from our mailbox; he's walking toward it. The noise I heard had been the mailbox next door slamming shut, and he was just now coming to ours.

With a put-on “Oh, are you here? I thought it was Sunday” look, I take my pathetic little stack of mail from Eddie. No twelve-dollar residual checks today or cards from my mother with one-dollar bills taped on the inside to buy myself a Diet Coke. There's a notice warning Santa Monica residents that if they choose to go swimming at any of the Santa Monica beaches this summer to be careful not to get any water in their mouth unless they want anal leakage.

Sadly sorting through my tiny pile, I find a letter from my old high school, North Central. There's something that sounds like sand swishing around inside the envelope—an invitation to a
beach-themed high school reunion? Knowing my old school, it's more likely that the reunion would be an American pride “Love It or Leave It!” theme and the envelope is filled with anthrax. I don't care what the theme is; I'm not going to fly across the country to drunk-sob “
Am I pretty now?
” in the face of a pudgy middle-aged white man wearing that “don't tell me you're not asking for it” combo of khaki pants and a tucked-in blue dress shirt.

The suspense is not killing me as much as my imagination is. I rip it open. It's an invitation to a party celebrating fifty years of my old show choir, the Counterpoints. Red glitter pours out of the envelope all over the sidewalk.

COUNTERPOINTS ALUMNI!

INDIANA'S MOST PRESTIGIOUS SHOW CHOIR IS 50 YEARS OLD!

JOIN US FOR A BLACK-TIE GALA AFFAIR AS WE CELEBRATE OUR GLORIOUS PAST WITH PERFORMANCES BY THE CURRENT COUNTERPOINTS CHOIR!

High school existed in two places for me: theater class and Counterpoints. “Once a Counterpoint! Always a Counterpoint!” A large banner with our motto hung in the rehearsal room. It was written in pizzazz-y exuberant letters and followed by four exclamation points. It was screaming at us to “Put on that Ritz!” “Stomp at that Savoy!” “Be My Funny Valentine!” The rest was of high school was a blur of acid-washed jeans and Hostess fruit pie lunches. Little clumps of musical theater geeks would run full speed, like a nervous herd of chubby gay zebras surrounded by lions, to get to the safety of swing choir rehearsal. The grand pooh-bah of swing choir was the director, Robert Critzer. Mr. Critzer was grandiose, mocking, and snooty and
far too talented to be teaching high school show choir in a windowless room in Indiana.

As members of the elite Counterpoints, we left school, sometimes several times a week, to entertain at children's hospitals, shopping malls, Jewish community centers, and old-age homes. Lots and lots of old-age homes. Critzer preferred a senior citizen audience. They had respect for the music he loved—Fats Waller, Cole Porter, anything from the big band era. Thanks to the pillows that propped them up and the nurses who clapped their hands together, they were an attentive and enthusiastic audience.

I didn't walk around talking about how much I loved being in Counterpoints, but love it I did. We all did. Nobody had to be there. It was not a graduation requirement to know how to wear a bowler, carry a cane, and sing “Puttin' on the Ritz” to the sound of oxygen tanks. It was an elective.

My Counterpoints pride was fierce and I did love all the bells and literal whistles of the choir, but most of all I loved Mr. Critzer.

Mr. Critzer wore dark green polyester suits that helped confirm the rumors that teachers made only slightly more than welfare recipients. When conducting, he took off his jacket, revealing neatly pressed dress shirts that always had yellow armpit stains. That grand diva of the music department wore Goodwill clothing when he obviously belonged in white fur capes.

Critzer refused to let us do what all the other (lesser) choirs were doing, like break-dancing to an a cappella version of the little-known and often mistaken for Kenny Hollywood's “Eat Me I'm a Danish” (a parody of “Rock Me Amadeus”) in full-length pink taffeta. “Listen, I'm sure it does bring their audiences to their feet,” Mr. Critzer would say whenever a Counterpoint would report on the life-changing show they had witnessed over the weekend in hopes of convincing Mr. Critzer to let us do more popular songs,
“but when you're performing in the mall, everyone's usually already standing.”

The gala planning committee must have blown their budget on glitter and stamps because the invite is on a flimsy piece of eight-by-ten copy paper and looks like it was formatted with an old Word template usually used for nursing home announcements promoting free movie nights and callus shavings.

Included with the invitation is a single-page “History of Counterpoints.” I do a quick scan for my name. It's not there. There's no reason it should be; I've just developed a bad habit that I can't break of scanning for my name on any written document. About two-thirds of the way down the page, I see Mr. Critzer's name.

Bob Critzer, the choir's former director, earned a master's degree from Butler after completing a BA in music from UCLA in 1964. Like all members of the choral factory, he had excellent keyboard skills and was an exceptional teacher of music appreciation and history. His lectures were of college caliber. He was also a perfectionist in his expectations re performance. Bob served as director until his untimely death in late December 1986 at the age of 44. Bea Arthur took over leadership until the end of the 1986–1987 school year.

That's it? Untimely? Is it “untimely” to die of complications related to AIDS? I don't expect them to do some big dramatic “Ode to AIDS” musical number like
Glee
would do. But come on. Why not at least give Mr. Critzer something special? Some post-life honor. I bet they wouldn't even admit it was AIDS today; that's how backward it is there. Even the gayest thing in the city, swing choir, won't admit to it in a red state.

Untimely, come on.

The words “you homophobic faggots” slip out of my mouth.

Eddie's head jerks up from his mailbag, “No check again, huh, Lauren?”

That's right. Eddie can hear me. I forgot how his headphones are just a glorified headband to keep his long hair out of his face. I found that out the day David and I were walking behind him and I commented that Eddie had the calves of a six-hundred-pound man. Without turning around, Eddie yelled back at me, “I walk a lot!”

Eddie and I keep it real with each other. When I was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and he handed me a stack of fifteen residual checks that added up to forty-six dollars, I openly wept in front of him. The day Anna Nicole Smith died he was so distraught I had to sit on the steps with him until he had the strength to go on.

Not wanting Eddie to think I walk around screaming “homophobic faggots” willy-nilly, I fill him in.

Eddie stops sorting through a pile of Bed Bath & Beyond coupons and shakes his head solemnly. “That's rough. Rough. I can't believe it. Anyway, you know they got a karaoke night on those Carnival cruises and you know my song, Lauren? ‘Summer of '69.' I been singing that song for going on twelve years. That's how long I've been going on those cruises. Matter of fact, they just upgraded me to VIFP status. Very Important Fun Person.”

Eddie points to his headphones and gives me a “Sorry, gotta take this call” guilty shrug, slams the mailboxes shut, and takes off down the sidewalk. I guess his headband is plugged in today after all and he's got an important incoming call. He's already zipped down to the end of the block, pushing his little mail cart in front of him: “Hey, man, what did I tell you, Peyton chokes in the postseason . . .”

There's a VIFP who knows how to relax and enjoy life. The
apartment buildings around me are filled with young easygoing dudes like Eddie. VIFPs in the making. They work hard. Play hard. Jog on the beach. Drink tequila. Keep it simple.

I need to do more of that in my life, and I will, right after I avenge the death of my high school show choir director.

The longer I wade around in this puddle of red glitter, the more outraged I become. How many wrongs can there be around one man's death? It's time to make it right. If I know that somewhere in the world gay men are being hurt, even if they're already dead, I cannot bear it.

“I love gay people” flies out of my mouth all the time. As if “gay” is all anyone needs to know about a person. As if once I say “gay” you know exactly what to expect. It's a simple description, like saying something tastes like popcorn. “Oh, stop there, I get it.” It's such an overgeneralization. The problem is that in a huge, big, generalized “gay pride parade” way, I do love gay people. I love them at my job, in my home, at parties, and at the movies with extra butter.

Gay issues have always been my issues. They affect my job, my community, my quality of life. Gay boys are my canary in the coal mine whenever I've been deciding if I could live in a city. If a delicate creature covered with bright yellow feathers can't thrive in a city, I won't be able to either. If I can't drive my car straight, but not narrow, into the gayborhood or “follow the rainbow flags” to gay karaoke or turn right on Harvey Milk Way to get to my gym, I can't possibly imagine living there.

Holding the invitation in my hand, I mull over how it all started with Bob Critzer.

In the three years he was my choir director, the nicest thing I remember him saying to me was, “You look much thinner. You should have throat and sinus surgery more often.” Three years of
bitchy banter sounds exhausting, but I was younger then and it flew by like a three-day weekend in Provincetown. I heard the term “fag hag” plenty of times in high school. I hated it. Neither the fag nor the hag comes out sounding dewy, sweet, and kind. I wasn't a fag hag. I was just a teen with a weight problem who loved a man with chiseled cheekbones and a caustic wit. A simple midwestern gal who loved her gay choir teacher. Nothing more.

The first time I saw Mr. Critzer was at show choir placement auditions. He breezed into the choir room, his nose tilted up in the air, one hand cradling a giant stack of sheet music and the other swinging out to the side and randomly gesturing, like he was composing music as he walked.

He gave a quick “I hate you all” glance around the room and then sat down at the piano and started trilling up and down the keyboard like Liberace.

In order to get into Counterpoints you had to be able to sing “On a Clear Day.” It was a tough and humiliating song with painfully high notes and throat-ripping low notes that only a four-pack-a-day smoker could hit. It was so difficult that people would either whisper the entire thing or belt it out off-key. It was like a talent show at an insane asylum for deaf people. I stood in front of Mr. Critzer for my audition, shaking with nerves. He gave me a squinty glare that probably meant “You're a dime-a-dozen low-voiced alto who will look fat in our dresses,” but I saw it as “You and I are bigger than high school; we are divas. Let's show these rubes how it's done.”

I opened my mouth and started singing. Critzer stopped playing the piano and looked out the window. “Sorry. I thought for sure that a semitruck just went rumbling past. My
god,
that's a low voice.” It was humiliating to be compared to a passing big rig, but it was also an honor. He hadn't said a thing to any of the other students auditioning. Not even the few rare perfect-pitch sopranos.

Singing had always been something I loved to do, but I'd never considered myself to be especially gifted until I was standing in front of Mr. Critzer. High school was full of opportunities for trauma. There was a large jock kid who would moo like a cow whenever he passed my locker. There were fistfights in the hallways and moments of silence during the vice principal's morning announcements for the young boy or girl who had been killed in a car wreck over the weekend coming home from the prom. Even with an old-timey song like “On a Clear Day,” it was so enjoyable to have a way to release all the tension and emotions just by opening up your mouth wide and letting sound come out—“singing,” I believe they call it. Critzer always pushed me to open up even wider, go even deeper. I was so hungry for it, you would have thought I was singing in secret under Taliban rule.

Thanks to the low turnout of five-hundred-pound gospel-singing black men, I got in.

He kicked me out the first week.

Before the class bell rang, I'd been regaling my fellow altos with my classic “The time a guy sneezed into my mouth when I was going downhill on a roller coaster” story. Mr. Critzer came rushing into the choir room, threw down the ridiculously tall stack of sheet music he was always carrying around, and with wildly dramatic facial expressions and sweeping arm movements (he looked like Norma Desmond directing traffic), he silently mimed his commands to us to “All rise . . . eyes on me . . . deep breaths . . . wide face . . . one and a two and a—”

Normally, I couldn't take my eyes off of him, but I was almost at the point in the story where I sit in the church van for the rest of the day, petrified that nobody will ever want to kiss a girl that has had another man's snot in her mouth. Mr. Critzer slammed his hand on the piano. “LAUREN WEEDMAN! If Jesus Christ himself were standing up here, you would not stop talking.”

His face, which was already pretty ruddy, turned bright red.

In Indiana, to hear Jesus Christ's name said out loud in a public school without being followed by “is my lord and savior” was shocking. It had a bit of a “motherfucker” spice to it.