Happy Accidents

  One night, as my parents sipped their “first today, badly needed” cocktails, I poured my heart out to them at the kitchen table. I cried as I explained why everything was ruined, and my mom tried to soothe me. “You made one mistake, Janie,” she said. “It doesn’t mean your life is over.”

  But I was inconsolable. I started having dreams in which everyone I knew had gotten a part in a play, and I was the only one who was left out. All these years later, I still have those dreams. And when I wake up, I hug my Emmy.

  Meanwhile, my sister, Julie, made the Pom-Pom Squad. Julie was a big eye-roller, especially with me. She was always bugged by my corny jokes and goofy faces at home, but when I was about to be a freshman in the high school where she was a junior, she was wracked with fear that I would embarrass her. She was skinny and cute and looked like she just walked out of the Sears catalogue. I was clumsy and silly and had a belly. At the breakfast table, she’d say, “Okay! Get all the goofiness out now, before we go to school. Now! Get it out! Get it out! Get it out!”

  My sister and I couldn’t have been more different. She went through a neatness phase where, every morning, she’d make the bed—but because I slept later than she did, I was usually still in it.

  “Just slide out!” she’d say. “Don’t mess it up!”

  I was a slob, so she didn’t want me touching her stuff or wearing her clothes. And she was right—I don’t know if it was the oil in my hands or what, but I had a way of ruining anything I touched. Everyone would get the same paperback math books at the beginning of the year, and somehow, by the end, mine would be completely destroyed—smudged black, dog-eared, bent cover. Everyone else’s was pristine, while mine looked like I’d taken a bath with it.

  So my sister, sensibly enough, wouldn’t let me wear her clothes. “Don’t even touch them!” she said. “You’ll ruin them, or stretch them out, or both.” She even went to the trouble of locking her favorite pair of jeans to the hanging rod of our closet, through the belt loop. Which meant I had no choice but to cut them off. When she saw me strutting down the hall wearing them, she shrieked aloud. As I passed her, she mouthed, “I’m going to kill you.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t care one way or another about those jeans. I simply enjoyed tormenting her.

  I tormented her in other ways, too. She wanted nothing more than to be able to sing, but the family musicality eluded her. So when I caught her in the downstairs bathroom pouring her heart into a pitchy rendition of “Edelweiss” into a tape recorder, I had to play it for all her friends.

  Yet my goofiness and ability to woo with humor worked in Julie’s favor, too. There was a group of “cool girls” that she wanted so badly to hang out with. She was invisible to them. Despite the fact that she was blond and pretty, her shyness could be paralyzing. She wanted me to come to the rescue.

  Two members of this cool group of girls were Carol, the good-time party girl, and June, the wholesome sweetheart who reminded me of Julie Andrews. They were both in my second-semester Algebra I class. I had barely passed the first and was hanging on by a thread as the second semester began.

  When I told Julie that these girls were in my class, she instructed me on how to win them over for her: get them to laugh at me so they’d ask me to go out with them one weekend. I would then bring Julie with me. I said, “What am I, your clown?” This question didn’t really need an answer.

  By the second week, the class was lost for me as far as the algebra was concerned. I obediently became the class clown and a pain in the teacher’s ass. I remember Carol and June doubled over laughing at what I’m sure were my hilarious shenanigans. They invited me to hang out with them one Friday night and I brought Julie with me. We hopped into several cars, cracked open beers, and drove around town. This was a huge group of girls, about fifteen of them. And they were a delightful mix of personalities: some were cheerleaders, some were popular, some not so much, some got straight A’s, some loved to party (my sub-group). What we all had in common was we loved to laugh and hang out. We had our own language and inside jokes. We’d scream from car windows as we drove by the boys hanging out in the St. Jude parking lot, “What’s your gimmick?!” This would just crack us up. I’m still not sure why we found this so funny.

  I had started drinking in my freshman year of high school. At first, it was just a little Boone’s Farm or a beer here and there, but by my junior year, I was drinking every night. And now my new friends and I would party hearty on weekends together. We went to football games and Flings (school dances). We’d have keggers at one another’s house. There was no drinking behind my parents’ backs, though: it was all in the open. It was a drinking culture all round in this neck of the woods in the late 1970s. Our house was the place to go for singing and drinking. We’d sit around the kitchen table, and Mom and Dad would tell stories and sing songs from their youth. My favorite was their two-part harmony rendition of “Coney Island,” a peppy 1920s tune. My new friends adored my parents and couldn’t get enough of them.

  My parents were creatures of their era—they loved to drink and throw parties. As soon as I was old enough to think of it, I’d sneak downstairs after everyone had gone and take sips out of the leftover drinks. I also liked relighting the cigarette butts that people had left behind, so I could practice smoking. Once, when my dad caught me lighting up outside (I was about twelve, and I had literally picked up a butt out of the gutter in front of our house), I overheard him proudly telling Mom in the kitchen, “She’s out there smokin’ like a pro!”

  When my mom would have a few drinks, she might get a bit sloppy and sentimental, and my dad would gently prod her upstairs to bed. But no matter what she drank the night before, she never, ever had a hangover. She’d be up at five in the morning, bright-eyed and ready for the day. So drinking just seemed like a lot of fun. And with this new group of girlfriends, I was starting to do it for real, with the sole aim of getting wasted.

  To the manner born.

  My friend Peggy Quinn’s house was another fun place to party. Unlike the Lynches, the Quinns were good Irish Catholics who dutifully produced a tribe of redheaded children with saint names. What made their house the best place in the world, as far as I was concerned, was that Mr. Quinn had a keg in the basement. I don’t remember that we were allowed to drink from it, but I was captivated by the idea of it. He had a keg . . . in his basement.

  I remember Big Jim Quinn sipping a glass of his Special Export out on his front porch and me out there with him, shooting the breeze upon a summer’s evening. I guess I felt comfortable enough to tell him the secret I had only ever told my mom, Ron Howard, and Anson Williams: I wanted to be an actress. I think he was the first grown-up who took me seriously. Instead of telling me to learn to type or some other surefire way to make a living, Mr. Quinn said, “You get out there and do that, Jane. And be sure to thank me when you get that Academy Award.”

  I flunked that second-semester Algebra I class, by the way, but the class wasn’t a total loss. I had successfully pimped myself out for my sister and got us both into one of the popular cliques. But even in the midst of all the parties and goofing around, I still had that feeling that I was on the fringes of life and not genuinely a part of the world around me. Much of it had to do with my big gay secret and the fantasy life it spawned. I was noticing a different girl every week, but the one I fixated on most was in that same Algebra class, and she was deaf. I imagined romantically rescuing her from her alienated existence and making her feel that her thoughts and dreams were understood. I realize now that I wanted so desperately to be rescued that I projected it all on to her. But to a high school freshman that was irrelevant. I would blissfully slip into daydreaming about sweeping her off her feet whenever the teacher started writing equations.

  What I didn’t know was that soon I would meet someone with whom I would feel connected and understood—my own unlikely version of Prince Charming.

  Chapter 3

  Refuge

  Chris and I first spotted each other
across the crowded floor at a dance at St. Jude’s the beginning of our sophomore year. How I missed noticing him all of our freshman year at Thornridge High, I don’t know. But there he was: smaller than the rest of the guys, hair dyed bright red, and extremely fey. I was taken aback, yet attracted at the same time.

  He seemed to see something in me, too. He sidled over to where I was standing, scanned me up and down, and said, “Hmmm . . . we’re going to have a lot of fun together.”

  My friend Josephine, who was standing with me by the door, giggled. She thought he liked me and wanted to go out with me.

  But I knew that wasn’t what he meant.

  What he meant was that we had found a soul mate in each other, and he was right. We quickly became inseparable best buds. We even gave each other nicknames—he was “Gwiz” and I was “Trix”—just because we thought nicknames were stupid, and it was fun to make fun of stupid things.

  Like me, Chris was not your typical teenager from Dolton, Illinois. But unlike me, he couldn’t have cared less.

  Chris had a big mouth, and when I say this I don’t just mean he was loud (although he often was). I mean his mouth was enormous. Mine was nothing to sneeze at either. We talked about lots of things with those mouths of ours, but the fact that we were both gay was not one of them.

  I had been a pretty solid rule-follower prior to meeting Chris. Chris lived to ignore or, if possible, destroy all rules. He reveled in questioning those in authority and throwing the ridiculousness of their rules back at them. Yes, he stuck out. But he just walked through the world exactly as he was—a goofy, funny, quirky guy. For the first time in my life, I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit—even if my spirit was not as fully exposed. I could look at him and see something of who I was reflected back.

  “Jane is fine. Chris is fine. But Jane and Chris are trouble.”

  Chris seemed to live to make me laugh. I would be walking down the stairs between classes at Thornridge High School, and suddenly, a few steps above me, a guy would trip and tumble down the stairs, arms flailing wildly and books flying past. He would land with a thud at the bottom, then look up at me, all Cheshire cat. It would be Chris, throwing himself down the stairs to crack me up. Again. My own private Stooge.

  He loved to make prank phone calls, which gave me anxiety. He was sly and could be snarky and loved to shock people, especially adults. They never knew what hit them. Once, he said to our Spanish teacher, “Your hair is such a beautiful shade of red—why do you dye the roots black?”

  On Sundays, he was the organist at St. Jude’s. For most of the service, he would play standard church fare, but if you listened closely to his incidental music after Communion, you would hear the dulcet strains of something like “Afternoon Delight,” played in minor chords. He’d catch my eye and solemnly mouth the words: “Gonna grab some afternoon deliiight . . .” No one mocked piety like Chris.

  He was also immune to Catholic guilt, despite St. Jude’s doing everything in their power to break his defiance. He had been in school there from first to eighth grade, and the one person who seemed to be on his side was the hip young priest we all loved because he related to us kids. And it turns out, he did, but not in the way we thought. We later discovered this priest was actually a pervert (the extent of his misdeeds have only recently come to light when he was removed from public ministry in 2005). He’d targeted Chris at one point: when he was in seventh grade, the guy had tried to show him his underwear drawer at the rectory, asking him, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” (hopefully unintentional in his quoting of Peter Graves’s line in Airplane). Before he could get any further, Chris said, “If you touch me, my father will kill you,” whereupon young Chris was sent on his way. Christopher John Patrick would not be intimidated by anyone.

  My whole family adored Chris, but no one more than my sister, Julie, who loved it when he made fun of her dumb-blonde ways. She begged him to mock her. He had heard the tape of her attempting to sing “Edelweiss” and was merciless in his imitation of it. She loved it. “Do it again!” she’d plead. She also loved that he colored his hair and cared about how he looked, and he played it up for her. A few years back, my dad was battling that awful lung cancer and we were all so devastated. But Chris called and said, “Tell Julie I had a full face-lift.” She belly laughed hard for the first time in a long time. He knew just what to say. (He lied. He’d actually only had a partial one. . . .)

  One Ash Wednesday, Chris convinced me to cut choir, my favorite class, and go with him to the Chicken Unlimited across the street. Over Cokes and fries, we used cigarette ashes to make crosses on each other’s forehead, intoning, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When we got back to school, we told the campus cop we had been at Mass. Nothing was sacred.

  On the flip side of this disregard for our family faith, Chris had a love, a reverence even, for the pageantry of the Catholic Church. On Friday nights, when most of Thornridge High was drinking itself silly at a kegger, Chris and I, plus our pal John Carr, would do what we called a “church tour.” John was another sly and witty fellow, soon to come out of the closet. His other big secret was that he wanted to be a priest.

  John Carr hearing confession in Man of La Mancha.

  Back in the late seventies, some churches kept their doors unlocked because they were supposed to be a place of refuge, a place you should be able to enter at any time to escape whatever was chasing you. We knew which ones on the city’s south side were kept open, and we high school snots snuck in. We were usually drunk and doing poppers and giggling our heads off, but there would always come a moment when it got absolutely serious. We would perform the Mass, and we’d mean it. If Chris could unlock the organ, he’d play the entrance hymn, and if not, he’d hum it solemnly. My role was to lead the imaginary congregation in song. John would play the priest, making his ceremonial walk up the aisle toward the altar, kissing the good book and performing all the other ritualistic gestures, and begin the Mass.

  If we could get into the confessional booths, we would take turns playing priest to the others’ confessor. We would mostly goof around pretending to be people from our own parish. We had them coming clean on ridiculous sins like having VD or something. Chris told me that John would actually confess to him. Of course, Chris wasn’t really a priest, so he told me everything. John told him that he was afraid he was gay; that he missed his dad, who’d died when he was a kid; that he feared he wouldn’t get into the seminary because his grades were so bad. John Carr was a bright light—funny and smart—but not a fan of school or studying. He died of AIDS in 1996.

  On some level, I knew Chris was gay. It became harder to ignore once he started driving into Chicago for the weekends, not so secretly going to gay bars and hooking up with guys there—but I still somehow managed to deny it to myself. He lived like there was no tomorrow—smoking, drinking, doing drugs; generally doing whatever he wanted. Chris couldn’t help but be himself. He has always been constitutionally incapable of anything else.

  And he never felt shame about anything he did. Chris’s attitude was The world just needs to catch up with me. In this way, he and I were very different. I really wanted to fit in, wanted to want to have a boyfriend, wanted to want to have kids. I wanted to want what every other girl in the world seemed to want. I did not want to admit, to myself or anyone else, that I did not.

  I tried to act like the straight kids, but I couldn’t even fake it. I went out on a couple of dates with guys, but it was a struggle the whole time. I’d be deep in my own head, thinking, This should be nice. I should want to kiss him right now. I knew how I was supposed to act, how I was supposed to feel, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t be that person.

  Chris was a lifeline, because with him I could be myself. It was also hard to be worried with so much laughing and goofing around, and his self-acceptance was contagious. As awkward as I felt around others, I felt like myself with Chris.

  Choir was where we really flourished. We both love
d to sing, so we never cut this class (except that one Ash Wednesday at the Chicken Unlimited). We’d even sing on the way there. It helped that we had to go through a breezeway with awesome acoustics that ramped up our harmonies. Then we’d spend the first fifteen minutes of the choir hour in the girls’ bathroom, smoking with any boy or girl who wanted to share a hot-boxed Marlboro.

  But the real joy was singing in that choir, with so many different voices coming together. District-wide integration meant that black kids were bused into our white neighborhood for high school. This had caused riots in our school, and cops patrolled the hallways to keep the peace. The choral room in A Building was one of the only places at Thornridge High School where integration worked effortlessly. Black and white kids, football players, cheerleaders, nerds, and wood shop guys all lifted their voices in song together in this room. It was an idyllic setting, not unlike the version in Glee. Our differences seemed to disappear as our voices were raised in song, and the harmony lifted us beyond ourselves. For Chris and me, it was a refuge.

  The other times I felt at ease were when I drank. My drinking self was good and had nothing to fear or be ashamed of. If I was drinking and with Chris, the good fired on all cylinders. Dolton was right next door to a suburb called Hegwisch, a blue-collar area with a famous record store and more bars per capita than any other burg outside Chicago. Al Capone had loved the prairies and heavily wooded landscape of this place and was said to have hidden out there a lot. For us, the winding roads of Hegwisch led to cash-strapped taverns more than happy to sell drinks to teenagers doing poppers. I used to love going with Chris to this one real dive bar called Jeanette’s, a place filled with toothless old men. One obese and gummy guy called “Uncle Frank” would sit immobile in a dark corner and yell at us. “I love you kids!” he’d slur. At those moments, I loved him right back.