Miss Fortune (25 page)

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.

R
ound 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.

Dr. Adair wants to help me get rid of my fungus. She's gone through this before with some of her elderly patients who live alone. “What I have them do, and it works really well, is to take the ointment and spread it on a doorjamb, and then they can lean up against it, rub up and down to distribute the ointment over the infected areas. Do you understand what I mean?”

If I apply fungus ointment with a doorjamb, if I take off my shirt and rub up and down against a door frame, like a bear scratching its back against a tree, I will have hit a new divorce low. I cannot think of a more depressing divorced moment besides signing the actual divorce papers.

I'd rather take the pills. I don't care if the white wine I won't be able to give up causes partial paralysis.

I can't start dating right away anyway; I'm leaving for Boise for a week. Dating in Boise would be impossible. Even if I'm just looking to have some crazy divorced sex. It's such a small town, it reminds me of the joke I heard a comedian tell about being in a small-town airport and hearing an announcement over the PA: “Hey, Paul. Come here.” The guy was so funny, but I can't remember his name. I'll find him on Tinder when I get back in town.

I'm going to Boise to host a fund-raiser for the Boise Contemporary Theater. I'm looking forward to seeing my friends and breathing clean air, but I'm dreading the live auction part of the fund-raiser because I'm going to be auctioned off like a heifer. It's “Dinner with Lauren Weedman and six of your friends catered in your home by a local fancy chef.” There's something about being single now and wanting to date, wanting to be wanted, and standing onstage as somebody begs for money for you. “Do I hear three hundred? Three hundred over here? Three hundred over there . . . You're not going to find an overbite like that anymore, people. Orthodontics have come too far; she's rare. Honey, dance around and show them how you can entertain yourself. How about two-fifty; let's start at two-fifty.” I'm going to get so marked down that the part-time lighting guy who works at the theater could afford me.

Once I'm actually in Boise, I meet up for some pizza with my friend Keily, a feisty little lesbian poet with a Mohawk who is sick of hearing me make fun of myself.

“Shut up. You could get a hot young guy so easy. Stop saying you're a fungus-covered heifer!” She laughs and gives me a high kick to the hip. “Oh man, you're killing me, Weedman!”

She's punched me so many times with her bony little fists since we've been walking to lunch, I had to ask her to walk on the other side of me because my right arm was getting sore.

When I do meet someone good-looking, I get so blinded by the thrill of a handsome man's attention I overlook the little voice in my stomach that yells at me, “Bitch, please, stay away from that man! You don't mess with a self-identified sex addict! No more ‘Oh, I've done some bad things that I deeply regret but I've changed' or ‘Oh man, I forgot my wallet in the car again.'” Apparently, my inner voice is a scene from
How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

The fund-raiser could turn into a form of speed dating for me, according to Keily, if I grabbed a chair as I'm being auctioned off and started humping it. “And even if you didn't get a date out of it, you'd freak the shit out of all the wives.”

Keily is more punchy and roundhouse kicky than normal because she's getting her first tattoo tomorrow. A local tattoo artist who won a Baked Potato Best of Boise award last year designed a Celtic symbol for strength that he's going to draw on Keily's arm. Keily knows exactly what she wants, where she wants it, and what it means to her. I may find that inspiring; I may not. I'll check with a few other people who know about that sort of thing better than I do before I decide.

“Weedman! You should get one with me!”

Funny she'd mention that. I've been throwing around the idea of a second tattoo. A little design to symbolize this recent life change. As if I'd ever forget.

Getting a tattoo at my age feels a little weird. Ten years ago, when I got my first tattoo, I was already worried about what would happen to the integrity of the design as I aged. I imagined being seventy, with my grandkids trying to clean up their old bearded grandma. As they were retying my nightgown, they'd notice something they'd think was dried food in the wrinkly folds of my chest skin. “Oh, let me get a wet rag and get that, Grandma.”

“That's not dried spaghetti, kids,” I'd say, pulling my skin out to straighten it. “It's a lone wolf howling in the silhouette of the
full moon. It's not bad hygiene. It's a symbol of Grandma's core loneliness!”

But then I realized that old skin will just be a big mash of moles, scars, bumps, holes, and waffle-iron burns, so who cares.

How can I say no to Keily, the only gay in the village? I'm always trying to get her to admit how hard it must have been growing up gay in a small town in a red state. She denies it, but I don't believe her. There must have been a few stares at the rodeo. Whispers behind her back at the annual potato festival, if there is an annual potato festival. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer recently. I love her mom. I don't want her to tell her mom that I wouldn't get a tattoo with her. Her mom will think it's just like when nobody would sit next to them at the potato rodeos.

Getting some “ink” would be the perfect subculture/hipster/midlife crisis “I'm with you, sister” thing to do. I have no idea what I'd get or where.

Like a Native American chief receiving a vision, I proclaim, “The lesbian with the Mohawk knows her heart, and the black hawk has flown the skies at dusk. It is time for me to get another tattoo.”

The phone in my hotel rings at eight
A.M.
; it's Keily.

“Weedman! Get up! You're getting a tattoo today! My guy's booked months ahead of time, but I found a place that can take you today. Get in your car and start driving!”

That isn't going to happen, I tell her.

I'd planned on looking up some design ideas last night, but instead I ended up going barhopping with a very handsome pilot from Georgia. He sat next to me at the hotel bar, and after we talked about flying for Delta and the differences between Atlanta and Boise, he offered to get me out of the stuffy hotel bar and show me some local bars. His name was Dale. He wasn't really my type,
and thank god. This guy had a job and owned houses in two different cities. Not a lot of “funky independence” art lover coming off him, but I'd thought that was much better. I felt safer. He's a “do the right thing” guy, I thought.

Fast-forward three hours later. Mr. Do the Right Thing was drunk whispering in my ear in front of a table of his friends: “I'M GOING TO LICK YOUR PUSSY.” His friends were mortified. “I've never seen him like this. I'm so sorry. Hey, Dale, cut it out, man.” Dale put his arms up over his head and stumbled backward, slurring, “It's all good . . . I'm all good,” only to do it again two seconds later. “DON'T YOU WANT ME TO LICK YOUR—” “Dale! You have got to stop. You're not getting anywhere with her like that, man.” Stumbled backward, arms up. “We're good. It's all good!” I'd gotten nervous after the first few drinks when Dale started telling me how “we are the smartest people in Boise” and how nice it was to have “intellectual discussion after being around all these dumb porkers.” This was after I'd asked him to pass me a napkin to spit my gum into. The local bar he took me to was a sports bar full of hard-core-looking white people. I'd stupidly bragged to Dale about being on
The Daily Show
, a problem I had the last time I was single twelve years ago. I couldn't get through any first date without mentioning it. It felt like bragging about owning a boat, except that I was fired so I don't know what I was bragging about. Dale didn't act impressed but apparently he was because he must have mentioned it to some of his buddies at the bar. Before he started shouting his lurid whispers in my ear, he was telling me about a compulsive-hair-pulling support group his ex-wife goes to.

That was six hours ago. I'm a little shaky. Keily cannot believe I had a night like I've just described. “That was here? In Boise? Are you sure you weren't in Eagle?”

Today is not the day to get a tattoo.

“Shut up! Your artist's name is Virginia. Weedman! That's my mom's name! It's a sign! My mom says you're like a daughter to her, like family, even though we never see you, by the way. Because you're a total dick, Weedman.”

That's a low blow. Bringing up her mom. She knows I love her mom.

Last night was awful, but at least I walked away with my dignity. I didn't do anything ridiculous. Dale started out very normal. I'm not sure what he was doing hanging out at the hotel bar, but it was nice until it wasn't and then I left. That's dating. One down, 8,999 to go. You know what? Maybe it is a sign. My therapist had told me that yes, my family had broken apart, but I was going to get another family that was going to be so much bigger than I'd imagined it. This is what he meant. Keily is my sister. She is a part of my family and she's driving me nuts. To shut her up I'll get a tiny little star in invisible ink on the bottom of my foot.

Anywhere you want to go in Boise, Idaho, is never more than a five-minute drive. I've been on the road to the tattoo parlor for about seven minutes. In those extra two minutes the entire city changed. It's dustier. More “Hmmm, so what happens out
here
?”

The moment I park my car in Ink You's parking lot I have a very bad feeling. A
Breaking Bad
meth house, Satan screaming “GET OUT!,” blood pouring down walls, pig head in the window bad vibe. At first, when I caught myself judging the gravel in the parking lot as “dirty,” I thought I was nervous and looking for any reason to back out of getting the tattoo.