Swish (14 page)

It would also be simple to say that I came away from the experience thinking
There but for the grace of God go I,
but that wouldn’t be true either. Partially this is because I recognize that most of the factors contributing to psychosis are absent from my life. Mostly, though, I prefer to believe that God has no grace to give. Because the alternative is that He gives grace capriciously or, even worse, that He plays favorites. Some desolate valleys become places of springs, and others wither until they are sere beyond hope, and if God is the one who chooses which is which then I would rather live in a universe lucky enough to have escaped His notice.

Finally I gave up trying to figure out how to tell the story. My friends would just have to wait.

When Mike came home from the hospital that evening, I told him about the class and about the breathe-in-breathe-out lady and about how I couldn’t tell whether she was asking a question or rebuking me.

“Neither one,” he said. “She was just having a good time. You were saying it, so she joined in. That’s the behavior of a person who’s very impaired.”

“My explanations were less depressing.”

Class the following week unfolded in much the same fashion, but the week after that nobody showed up.
Great,
I thought.
Even insane people don’t like my class.
I had unplugged the boom box and was putting my sweater back on when who should walk in but the breathe-in-breathe-out lady? “I’m here to exercise!” she said.

There is little I dislike more than teaching an aerobics class of one. A room full of exercisers creates an almost palpable energy, and it’s very easy to draw on that energy to teach. When there’s one person there, you have to be just as energetic as you do when there are twenty, but there is no crowd to buoy you up, so you have to generate all the energy yourself. When a single person shows up for a class I’m teaching—thankfully a rare event—he or she invariably says, “Oh, if it’s just me, let’s not worry about it, I don’t want to make you stay,” to which my oppressive sense of responsibility forces me to reply, “No, no, if you’re here to exercise then we’re going to exercise!” Then I make up some cockamamie story about really enjoying teaching one person because it means I don’t have to try to teach to different levels of experience simultaneously. Then I remind myself to TiVo whatever I want to watch that night because by the time it starts I will be dead to the world.

But Sarah (such was, I finally learned, the breathe-in-breathe-out lady’s name) was here to exercise, and besides I really enjoy teaching one person because it means I don’t have to—oh, never mind.

The CD I had brought that day started with a remix of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” “You like Whitney?” Sarah asked as we moved from step-touches to marching in place.

“Yeah,” I said. She started giggling. “What? What’s so funny?”

“You like Whitney!” She kept giggling.

“Do
you
like Whitney?” I asked, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. I am insecure enough about my taste in popular music without having it impugned by a crazy person.

“Not really.”

“Oh, then let me change the song.”

“No, I like this song. Breathe in breathe out, right?”

“Right.”

We moved into side lunges with reaches. Sarah was an inept exerciser, but what she lacked in skill she made up for in enthusiasm. When the CD moved to the next track and Laura Branigan started singing (“Was it something that he said/Or the voices in your head/Calling Gloria?”), Sarah sang along. “This is good for your muscles, right? Makes you strong?”

“Well, it makes your heart strong. And that makes you healthier.”

“Breathe in breathe out,” she nodded.

By now Sarah seemed able to handle the basic steps of the routine, so I figured I’d add some variety. “Flap your arms like a chicken,” I said, demonstrating and making chicken noises. This is not a standard aerobics move but I secretly enjoy making chicken noises and I was glad to have an excuse. Sarah flapped her arms dutifully, though she did not join me in the chicken noises. “Okay, follow me,” I said as the CD moved to the next track. I step-touched forward, still flapping my arms, and led Sarah around the room, out into the hall, and back in again.

I am dancing around a pool table, flapping my arms and clucking like a chicken while the Weather Girls sing “It’s Raining Men,”
I thought,
and
she’s
the crazy one?

“I like you,” Sarah said as we started heel digs.

“Oh, thank you,” I said, very nervous about where she might be headed.

“
As a person,
I mean,” she said quickly. “You understand? I like you
as a person.
”

“I like you too,” I said, relieved. “Okay, watch my feet here and do what I’m doing.”

For the next few weeks, Sarah was the only person to show up for my class. “I have to stay out of trouble,” she said one day during hamstring curls. “Stay away from boys, you know?”

“Boys are definitely a lot of trouble,” I said.

“I want to get married, so I have to stay out of trouble.”

“Who do you want to get married to?”

“I don’t know yet. First I have to get well. You know I’m mentally ill, right?”

“Yes. That’s terrific, move your legs exactly like that. You’re doing a great job!”

“I want to stay away from boys, stay out of trouble, so I can get married. I was going out with a boy but it was too much so I stopped. Are you going out with anybody?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to marry her?”

I turned to stone.

During the ensuing silence I continued the knee lifts. “Nah,” I said finally.

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m just not the marrying kind. Move your arms like you’re throwing a basketball. Yes!”

But the thing is, I
am
the marrying kind. I want desperately to get married (by which I mean
married
married, not civilly united or domestically partnered or any other modified participial adjective the government might condescend to toss me). Mike and I have spent hours arguing about our theoretical wedding. I want us to get married grandly, wearing morning clothes. I’d book the Basilica di San Marco for the event if I could, but I do not hold out much hope that the Patriarch of Venice His Eminence Angelo Cardinal Scola will be easily won over. Mike, on the other hand, wants to get married in shorts in the middle of the woods. When he revealed this and I asked him, appalled, where our guests would sit, he actually said, “On the beautiful green earth.” The fact that I did not break up with him at once should be taken as an indication of how deeply I care for him.

So how could I paint Sarah a picture in which he was nowhere to be found?

Even as I told myself I was protecting her, I knew it wasn’t true; I was protecting myself. But from what? Did I think she was going to bash me? The medicated mentally ill are statistically no more violent than the general population. Furthermore, even if she had tried to harm me, she was not physically strong enough to do so, and it would have been the work of three seconds to overpower her. We were in a neighborhood known less for its enlightened acceptance of gay people than for its history of race riots, but that had been years before, and besides Sarah was from somewhere else.

Not long after I had started teaching aerobics, a friend interviewing me for a project in her sociology class asked, “Has discomfort with being open about your sexuality ever led you to modify your behavior?”

“Nope, never,” I had answered breezily.

But I realized now that my answer had been a total lie and that in fact I modified my behavior all the time. What about four days earlier, when I had told a waitress at Chevy’s in Times Square that my
friend
needed a refill on his soda? What about the week before that, when I had pretended not to hear the teenage punk shout “faggot” at me as I went through the turnstile into the subway? What about the week before that?

“What would you say being gay means to you?” my sociology-student friend had asked.

I had thought for a long time before saying, “It’s nothing, and it’s everything.”

Yes, being gay is just one of a thousand thousand traits that make up my character, no more remarkable than my love of M&M’s or my ability to mess up a room in fifteen seconds flat or my failure to understand the appeal of Luke and Owen Wilson.

But I believe that the desire to love and be loved is the strongest force on earth. And in that way, being gay affects every interaction in which I take part—just as being straight affects every interaction in which straight people take part. Every human motive is in the end a yearning for companionship, and every act of every person on this planet is an effort not to be alone.

So what right did I have to sneer at Sarah when I thought she harbored a romantic interest in me?

The following week three people came to class, including Doug, the drooling guy, and the whooper from the first day, whose name, it turned out, was Jane. Sarah, meanwhile, was in a bad mood. “My brother and sister get more rest than me,” she said. “I don’t think that’s fair. Do you think that’s fair?”

“Um,” I said.

Fifteen minutes into the class, she asked Jane—who had started whooping again—whether she was tired. “No,” said Jane, and kept on aerobicizing. Sarah looked at me and mouthed
she’s tired
while making the crazy-screwball gesture with her finger beside her head.

I wondered whether I should report to anybody that Sarah was in a bad mood, but then I figured, hey, it’s a group home, they already know.

“I love your hair!” said Jane to me between whoops, without breaking the hamstring-curl pattern. “I used to have hair just like that.”

“Oh, thanks!” I said. “But I think you have fabulous hair now.” Her hair was actually pretty great, equal parts copper and brass, held straight out from the back of her head with a bandanna. “Terrific work, keep going just like that!” Sarah looked unhappy at being left out of the conversation so I opened my mouth to tell her she was doing terrific work too but what I heard myself say was, “Breathe in breathe out!”

“Breathe in breathe out!” she responded enthusiastically.

For relaxation music at the end of class I had brought a CD of François Couperin’s
Lessons for Tenebrae,
a profound lamentation for Jerusalem exiled in Babylon.
The ways of Zion do mourn,
sang the soprano in Latin.
All her gates are desolate, her priests do sigh.

“Shut your eyes,” I said as I turned the lights off. “Listen to the music. Relax your muscles. Let your head slump down onto your chest. Feel the stress of the last week drain from your body.” The
Lessons for Tenebrae
are not uplifting, like Psalm 84 with its early rains and pools of water, but the music is more compassionate.

And from the daughter of Zion all her majesty is departed; her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.

Suddenly Jane started singing along, unhindered by the fact that she knew neither the words nor the music. The quality of her voice suggested not mental illness but something like peace.

All that honored her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness: Yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward.

Jane, Sarah, and Doug were all sitting on the couch in the darkened activity room, and I stood next to them. We had a minute or two left before class was officially over. And in the meantime, Doug remained still, and Jane kept singing, and I thought about going through the desolate valley and finding it a place of springs, and Sarah kept breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out.

O
N
M
USICAL
T
HEATER

I
always thought musicals were stupid.

But I changed my mind during my senior year at Harvard not long after a girl named Gina Grant was admitted for the following autumn. The national media made a huge fuss over her: she had an IQ of 150, she was co-captain of her high school’s tennis team, in her spare time she tutored underprivileged children—and all this despite the fact that both of her parents had been dead for years. She became a latter-day Horatio Alger, shining proof that anybody could scale Olympus by working hard enough, even an orphan.

Unfortunately the reason she was an orphan, the media soon discovered, was that at the age of fourteen she had used a lead crystal candlestick to bludgeon her mother to death. She had served six months in a juvenile penitentiary for her crime and her file had been sealed, but Harvard revoked her admission all the same, and in the fall she enrolled at Tufts.

I believed, along with most of my peers, that Harvard had mishandled the situation badly. Not that Gina Grant should have been lauded for her actions, but what right did Harvard have to render its own judgment above and beyond what the state had already deemed appropriate? Horatio Alger was no longer telling this story; he had been replaced by Thomas Hardy. Here was a girl who had made a mistake—an awful one, to be sure—and whose dream had as a result been placed forever out of her reach.

None of this made the story any less funny, though, so of course my family became obsessed with her. Not only because of the Harvard connection, but also because she was from South Carolina, where we lived. I couldn’t call home without spending an hour talking about Gina Grant. It was as if we were tuned to our own Gina Grant Channel, all Gina Grant, all the time. One evening my brother, choking with laughter, suggested that I write a musical about her. I thought this was the most hilarious thing I’d ever heard and the next day I shared the joke with all my friends, who also thought it was the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard.

One of these friends was a director, coincidentally also named Gina. “I’m going to write a musical about Gina Grant, hahahahaha!” I said.

“Well, I’ll direct it, hahahahaha!” Director Gina said.

And then we stopped laughing and stared at each other. We looked at the calendar on the wall. We stared at each other again.

“The school year is almost over,” I said.

“We have to act fast,” she replied.

“Today is Wednesday.”

“If you write it by Sunday, we can rehearse next week and open Friday.”

So we did.

For the most part I felt nothing but scorn for an art form that required the pretense that it was natural for people to communicate with one another in rhymed song. Despite the many opportunities available to me in high school, the only musical I’d ever tried out for was
Grease
; after the auditions, during which I sinisterly hissed lines from the show like, “I don’t know
why
I brought this
tire
iron, I coulda
ripped
those babies off with my
bare hands
!” the director cast me as Eugene, the gay geek, and then cut all the homophobic jokes, leaving me with virtually no part at all. The only musicals I’d done since then were Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, in which
every
character is a gay geek. I felt that the world already had more than enough Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, so we modeled our show on the only other musical I really liked, which was
Little Shop of Horrors,
a masterpiece that uses the ridiculousness inherent in the musical theater form to its advantage. We decided that our show, too, would revel in its own absurdity. We made Gina a tragic heroine and gave her a trio of backup singers, but instead of Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronnette (the names of the girls in the
Little Shop
trio), we called them Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone; they were the Furies of Greek legend, the immortals who pursue the wicked unto the ends of the earth to exact retribution for their crimes. Then we threw in Gina’s abusive parents, her boyfriend, Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, his wife Angelica (who in our show wore a big pair of angel’s wings cut out of poster board), an ensemble of Harvard admissions officers, and Joan of Arc’s executioner (it was that kind of show).

For most of the musical numbers I just rewrote the lyrics to summer-camp songs or hits by the Shirelles:

GINA

Mama said there’ll be days like this;

There’ll be days like this, my mama said.

THE FURIES

Until you bludgeoned her to death!

But though I racked my brain and my CD collection, I couldn’t find a song to steal for the turning point of the show; given the tight deadline, I finally gave up looking and wrote something myself. And it was kind of fabulous—“I know I’m just a little girl,” six-year-old Gina sang, “but I’ve got dreams,” and the music communicated something of the vulnerability of those dreams. When I played the song for her, Director Gina, who had studied at yeshiva, said, “Hebrew has two words for ‘create,’
asah
and
bara.
”

“Okay,” I said.

“Asah
is to shape something out of something else that already exists. That’s what I do as a director. The script is there already, I just bring it to life onstage.” This made sense to me;
asah
was exactly what I did when, for example, my choir sang a piece composed by somebody else. “But
bara,
” Director Gina continued, “is to bring something into being out of nothing. I can’t believe I’m saying something so cheesy, but I feel like that’s kind of what you’re doing here.”

“Asah
is making something from something else?”

“Right.”

“And
bara
is making something from nothing?”

“Yes.”

I furrowed my brow in thought. “Do you think you can figure out a way for the guy playing Alecto to have to have his shirt off for the entire show?”

We presented
G!
for two nights in a black box theater in the basement of my dorm with a cast made up of friends who owed me favors (and at first a guy I had a crush on—not the guy playing Alecto, a different guy—but he sent a clear signal by not showing up for the first rehearsal, so we fired him) and tape-recorded piano accompaniment. I played Tisiphone, in fishnets. Sixty or seventy people came to see the show, and they all loved it (“The best thing I’ve seen in thirty years,” said a professor of mine afterward, though I’m not sure he would have been so effusive had he not been four or five sheets to the wind). The show ended with Gina Grant on a ladder, barred from climbing any farther. She sat down on the top step, sighed, and put a Columbia cap—the real Gina had not yet chosen a college—on her head.

I did not realize that in doing so she would change my life.

For most of my childhood I knew that when I grew up I wanted to be a cantor, the second-in-command who leads the sung prayers in synagogue. This filled my relatives with dismay, because rabbis, they explained, make much better money. It turned out not to be a problem, however, since, after the
Facts of Life
episode in which Mrs. Garrett’s bakery burned down and was replaced by a gift shop, I realized that, although being a community’s religious leader would be deeply fulfilling, the spiritual rewards it offered paled in comparison to those of running a boutique.

I changed my mind again after a meeting of the Charleston Young Musicians’ Society. (If there had been a shred of doubt in anybody’s mind that I was gay, my membership in the Charleston Young Musicians’ Society should have removed it.) My friend Cathy’s voice teacher Sam came to talk to us, and I have no recollection at all of what he said; I remember only that he was brilliant and terrifying. I began lessons with him and before very long it became clear to me that I was destined to be the greatest tenor in the world.

Strictly speaking, my desire was not so broad. I was not interested in the unsubtle opera written by Puccini and Wagner. Far more satisfying were the songs of Schubert and his ilk, composers who opened three-minute windows into the soul until syphilis turned them into gibbering madmen. But it was Baroque music that thrilled me to the marrow of my bones, music from the pens of Handel and Couperin and Bach, music of the early eighteenth century, music written in a time when everybody wore wigs but homeless stinking urchins, when
parfumiers
filled women’s makeup with lead for its whitening properties, when singers shone more brightly in the firmament than kings. And the men who first sang this music were the most glamorous creatures ever to stride the earth. (Much of their glamour sprang from the castration they had undergone as children to preserve their soprano voices—audiences were known to cheer “long live the knife!”—but after very brief consideration I decided that, even though castrati could maintain erections and reach orgasm, there was still such a thing as going too far in the name of historically informed performance.) In later years I saw a sumptuous Belgian movie called
Farinelli,
based on the life of the most famous castrato of them all, and I have never forgotten a scene at the opera in which, approaching the climax of an aria, the title character suddenly stops singing and fixes his gaze—“icy” doesn’t even begin to describe the malevolence in those eyes—on a woman in the audience whose attention is focused not on the stage but on the cup of tea in her right hand and the book in her left. She keeps reading for a moment and turns a page before realizing that the entire audience is staring at her, at which point she pales and sets her cup down, trembling so violently she almost overturns it. Farinelli smiles coldly and starts the aria again. After the opera is over she sends him her diamond necklace and then he publicly and viciously rejects her sexual advances.

Who wouldn’t wish to command such power?

Furthermore, the lyrical and musical language of Baroque music is extravagant, unequivocal, full of lines like
The serpent, once insulted, rests not until his venom spreads through his enemy’s blood
and
Come, my son, and console me; but if life is forbidden you, at least die on my breast,
lines that allow the singer to cry out with the fullness of every honest emotion and at the same time to refine each of those emotions to its noblest state. Anger, love, despair, joy, hatred: the alchemy in this music transmutes them into gold that fills the voice.

But as I improved—Sam was a very good teacher—I began to discover an even deeper desire underneath the hunger for glory and purity of feeling. One week the supplemental reading in my high school English class (I was the kind of teenager who did the supplemental reading in my high school English class) was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Poetic Principle,” and in it I found the following lines:

It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains…the creation of supernal Beauty. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which
cannot
have been unfamiliar to the angels.

Manic-depressive, laudanum-addled, Poe had captured the essence of what I longed for. And that’s the amazing thing about singing: when you do it right,
you are that earthly harp.
If you can let the notes come not from you but through you, if you can empty yourself of pride and cunning and rodomontade, then you leave room for music to fill you, to melt everything in you that is not holy, to lift you up and fling you to the farthest reaches of human possibility.

Not that I did it right all or even much of the time. But occasionally I came close. A few years after my first professional gig I was giving a concert in a Boston chapel with an acoustic that softened every sound in it. “Gentle airs, melodious strains,” I sang, my voice caressing every molecule of air in the room as even the dust motes shimmered in the setting July sun, “call for raptures out of woe,” and the melisma on the word “woe” floated higher and higher and then higher still, and I felt I could sustain it forever, and my body disappeared and I understood what it is to be eternal.

Until my junior year of college, that is, when I lost all physical sensation in the back of my throat.

I could still produce a pretty tone; I just couldn’t perform the subtle manipulations of the vocal apparatus necessary for glorious singing, because I couldn’t feel the vocal apparatus.

And I spent the next two anguished years in the offices of doctors none of whom could figure out what the fuck was going on, not even the really really hot one who waited just a moment too long to release my hand when he introduced himself and whose subsequent failure to heal me was therefore an even greater betrayal than the failures of all the others, and I woke up every morning crying and I wrote overwrought letters to my friends during the summer (this was before e-mail) about how my own body was cutting me off from my destiny. Luckily I had very forbearing friends but still.

And then finally somebody diagnosed me with severe gastric reflux and told me the acid shooting up from my stomach into my throat had done so much damage my voice would never come back.