Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (17 page)

And the answer would have been the same: both—they’re the same thing.

The only person more surprised than I was by Divine’s death was probably Divine himself—and even
that
I can’t be sure of.

The most
shocking thing to me, when the overstuffed drag sensation born Harris Glenn Milstead passed away in 1988, was that it happened and days went by without my even knowing about it. I’ve always been so plugged in when it comes to celebrity death news that I’m usually the one who breaks it to others. Even before cellphones and the Internet, I knew when a famous person died a skipped heartbeat before their next of kin.

When Andy Warhol had expired the year before following routine gallbladder surgery, I was still in high school—I hadn’t yet moved to NYC (that was coming in 1992) to get a chance to meet him, so it was kind of rude that he jumped the gun on me, Valerie Solanas should pardon the expression. A girlfriend from art class, this bubbly, frizzy-haired, wide-eyed innocent (who grew up to be a Tea Partying mom, go figure) presented herself as Andy’s #1 fan, so when I saw her at school the day after he croaked, I offered my condolences. “So sorry to hear about Andy Warhol,” I said, patting her bejeaned and bejeweled (it was the ‘80s) arm.

She went all deer-in-the-headlights on me and squeaked out, “What
about
Andy?”

It was like I’d run up and screamed, “129 Die in Jet!” I never again assumed anybody else was as plugged in about which stars are dead and which are alive, even if the Internet has since become one giant heart monitor for the famous.

Speaking of which, not knowing Divine had died could be chalked up to the fact that he died before I owned so much as a computer let alone spent most of my waking hours on one. I was consumed with my studies at The U of C, not really aware that the Divine poster on my wall was from his South African gig. (I didn’t realize until way later that he’d played Sun City, and when I did I felt guilty in retrospect. That’s the best kind of guilt because it’s over quicker. And I still own the poster, which is okay because even though it’s kinda bad, it’s really old. Old trumps bad, which is why it’s okay to love Joan Crawford.)

I’d gotten into Divine out of nowhere. Late in high school, when my family splurged on a VCR (I’d had to pay $50 to rent one for the day when Live Aid aired so I could tape every minute of it), I picked up the scandalous VHS videos of
Pink Flamingos
and
Polyester
and
Female Trouble
and watched, rapt, alone, as crazy people and Tab Hunter did crazy things on camera with no regard for how their peers would react or how future employers might judge this behavior. And here I was stressing out about whether getting a C in gym in middle school would affect what college I’d get into. I didn’t exactly think the funny parts were all that funny and the foul chicken sex made me pity the fowl, but I found the movies fascinating and important, enough so that when I discovered Divine albums available as imports at a dinky record store in nearby Flint, I had to buy them because I couldn’t believe that creature could sing…and he couldn’t. And it was great.

I think I liked Divine’s Warholian anti-music even more than his Warholian anti-movies, even though he gave legitimate performances in those movies and the music was all about the beats; his vocals would make Harvey Fierstein bleat, “Ma!”

By the time
Hairspray
was coming out, I was not as into Divine as I was into Madonna (I wasn’t as into
oxygen
as I was into Madonna), but he was a fave. I’d recently passed up a shot at seeing him make an appearance at a Chicago gay bar largely because I myself had yet to make an appearance at one—my worry was not that if I went into a gay bar everyone there would know I was gay, but that if I went into a gay bar everyone there would know I wanted to
have sex
. There’s a difference. (I’ve since gotten over this affliction. Call me.)

I had just been to see
Hairspray
with my friend and coworker Sandra before Divine died, introducing her to his humor. She was my supervisor at a literary agency where every manuscript and every book and every 100-pound box of said manuscripts and books she claimed had “a soul” and had to be gingerly moved by me to wherever she dictated. She loved bossing me, but I think she enjoyed it when the power flowed in reverse in the area of drag queens and she got to learn about a new counter-culture icon. (And unlike my Andy Warhol-obsessed classmate, she grew up to be not a Tea Partier but a union lawyer—the exact opposite.)

Then, one day, I came in to work and Sandra said, “Sorry about your friend, Divine…” in exactly the same way as I’d broken the Warhol news to my art-class friend the year before. She was smiling in that way we do sometimes when something is not exactly funny but not exactly the end of the world, but still kinda sad. I had no idea what to think. I just knew that a guy who used to sell me gallons of Dr. Pepper in my dorm’s snack shop had been mercilessly pranking me with false Marlene Dietrich death reports so I didn’t quite believe Divine could really be gone at first. I was in shock that I was so uncharacteristically disconnected, too. I felt like a settler being told by a breathless rider that Lincoln had been shot…two
months
earlier.

But dead he was. At the time, it was first said he’d asphyxiated in his sleep, a by-product of obesity and a relentless marijuana habit. It was later determined he died of an enlarged heart—big personality, big impact, big heart.

Divine had just been on the cover of
Interview
, which I immediately bought and morbidly saved. Actually, isn’t all celebrity-collecting morbid? Even if the star is alive, you’re acting as if they’ve passed.

Speaking of morbid hoarding, I went back to my dorm and dug through newspapers in the recycling room to find Divine’s tiny
Chicago Tribune
obituary, which used his birth name and a crappy movie still. So many lesser stars had before and have since received much splashier in memoriams. I know life is not a contest, but death kind of is.

That recycling room was golden, by the way. One time, I found a stack of scorching-hot gay skin mags sandwiched between less penetrating periodicals with the same address stickers. That meant whoever whacked off to the porn was probably one of the guys in that room on my floor—one was a conservative, asexual nerd, and the other was a blond godling with luscious lips, a killer bod, and a mostly-naked Chicago Film Fest poster by Skrebneski on his wall. Come to think of it, I don’t think either one of them was the more obvious choice for who might’ve owned the gay stroke mags.

Divine always recognized that his role was to entertain but never gave up any of his essence to do it. He cringed at the idea of denying who he was. He was gay and a big, fat man who did drag. Today’s scaredy-cat gay celebs could learn a lot from Divine. It’s ironic, but the big sissy had more balls than almost any gay figures I can think of today, and I’d never choose that ass who remade Divine’s most famous role over Divine.

Being informed about famous people’s deaths was always a favorite pastime of mine. As a kid in Michigan, I even owned a scrapbook of celebrity obituaries I had cut out from
The Flint Journal
and saved. I did this intensely for about three years, from 1980 to 1983, so I wound up with stacks of death—Gloria Swanson (April 4, 1983—age 84), John Lennon (December 8, 1980—age 40), Jan Clayton from
Lassie (
August 28, 1983—66), Princess Grace (September 14, 1982—age 52). Mae West’s (November 22, 1980—age 87) came with a yellow stain on it to remind me I’d rescued it from my puppy Cinnamon’s housebreaking days. The dog is, of course, dead now, too—she went at age 8.

When Natalie Wood died, the first thing I remembered was that a classmate had used her Raintree print ad as part of a class assignment on advertising. I marched back into my classroom the very next day, as others were making “guess which kind of wood doesn’t float?” jokes and approached Heather, a girl I didn’t socialize with or know outside of sharing a teacher, and asked if she would give me the ad.

“Why?” she wanted to know, as if I should have any clue.

“I just really want it,” I shrugged. Skeptical of my motives, she gave it to me, perhaps waiting to see what I would eventually do with it. Probably her last guess would have been: Tuck it into a plastic sleeve and keep it forever.

The ad was what we would now call Photoshopped, but what was then called airbrushed—you can figure out if someone on Grindr is lying about his age if you can lure him into a conversation about photo retouching, because anyone over 40 can’t help saying “airbrushed” unless they’re a design professional. Natalie’s airbrushed visage was probably too perfect in that ad; it’s somewhere between “porcelain mask” and “zombie queen,” but either way it’s stunning. To retouch signs of age is not dissimilar to holding on to printed obituaries, really—both actions are about refusing to accept the passage of time.

The celebrity deaths that had most caught my attention were, in order, Elvis Presley (my cousin Wally and I discussed this months later, until he became outraged when I tried to argue that the semi-concurrent death of Bing Crosby had also been a big deal), John Lennon (because it was caused by a fan), Princess Grace, Natalie Wood (both of them were ‘50s glamourpusses and both died tragically young, things that titillated me), and finally Divine, the first celebrity death that gutted me as an adult. The first gay star whose death affected me.

Because of my history with people who are history, I wasn’t only surprised to find out that Divine had died, or even that I hadn’t known about it right away. I was also surprised to be so
surprised.

For some reason, even though we all know we’re going to die, we forget about it. It’s like
Groundhog Day
every time a famous person croaks. “What? How could this be?” We’re reminded of death pretty consistently, then our minds helpfully trick us into forgetting the fact that we’ll die someday, too.

Loving things and people is a great way to put thoughts of death in the
back of your mind, at least until something or someone you love dies. And I think this might be at the root of why people (or at least why I) become obsessed with loving certain
things
, with collecting, and with fandom as divinity, the anti-death.

Armed with that scrapbook full of
Flint Journal
clippings memorializing the lives of stars, most of whom I’d known little about until reading they’d ceased to exist, I’d been kind of ready when 1984 became a banner year for departures in my family.

We lost three people from three different generations of my family that year—my dad’s 76-year-old father, who had a heart attack; my dad’s 50-year-old big sister, Phyllis, who we all called “Phoo-Phoo” and who had long battled breast cancer; and my cousin’s first serious girlfriend, who at the age of 19 died in her sleep, apparently of some sort of brain virus, the most unnatural case of “natural causes” imaginable.

The death of my grandfather was shocking, but shouldn’t have been. He was a drinker and had a temper, though was very proud of me and would do two things to express that pride: (1) Save mementos of my successes in school, and even newspaper clippings of my sassy letters to the editor (like the one in which I hoped God would take the life of Oral Roberts as promised if he failed to raise the money needed to build his medical center; or the one in which I extolled the virtues of pansies, nature’s prettiest flowers), and (2) Firmly, to the point of discomfort, finger my long ear lobes as if they were the Lutheran version of rosary beads. He got pretty cranky as he got older, and I would mimic his outbursts by letting loose a string of indecipherable swear words. I thought he was funny, but I can see why my mother wasn’t thrilled at which of his traits I was picking up.