Miss Fortune (24 page)

I agreed with Wendy, and this time it was because I thought it was maybe true and not just because I was trying to avoid the titty punch.

Holiday break (or, as it was called back in my day, “The Superior Race's Break for Christmas and Skiing”) had just started. I was
coming home from Christmas shopping at the mall, acting like the bags hanging off my arms were full of presents for my family—“Don't look in here! It's your present!”—when in reality they were full of Little Debbie snack cakes for me to binge on, when Wendy called to tell me that Mr. Critzer had died. Her mother had seen his obituary in the newspaper.

It had gone from “Mr. Critzer has a cold” to “Mr. Critzer is in the hospital” to “Mr. Critzer is dead” in six weeks.

Wendy was the first person I knew who suggested that maybe his death was AIDS related. But how could that be? He didn't look all frail and awful like the people I'd seen on the nightly news. It was all so sudden and bizarre. The obituary said he'd died from pneumonia. It made no sense to me whatsoever. He might as well have died from stubbing his toe.

The last time I had seen Mr. Critzer, we'd been getting ready to perform at an upscale (it had carpet) old-age home. Wendy and I were unloading top hats and canes off the bus, laughing about an incident that had happened the last time we'd performed at a nursing home. During that show, an elderly man in the front row had keeled over in the middle of our rousing version of “Up, Up and Away.” He'd done it right on the lyric “Up, up and awayyyyy.” It was like he heard it and thought, that sounds good, and down he went. The tiny lady he fell on had been really enjoying the show and was annoyed at the interruption. She pushed him off of her, let him fall to the floor, called, “
Nurse,
” and scooted her chair over so she could enjoy the rest of the show. There wasn't much to hear at that point. Most of the choir was unable to sing due to their complete horror at witnessing what they'd thought was a man dying during the show. Thanks to the healing power of music or the end of his seizure, the man popped back up before the nurse got to him and started clapping as if nothing had happened. Wendy and I
were in hysterics remembering this when we spotted Mr. Critzer sitting by himself in the very dimly lit hallway. “Shit,” Wendy said when she saw him. “He's back. Hopefully he won't smell the biscuits and gravy on us. Here, take a mint.”

“You two just never shut up, do you?” Critzer said when he saw us heading his way. His normal “Get these ignorant hayseeds away from me” tone and disgusted eye rolls were gone. His zing was gone. He looked small and tired. My immediate instinct was to cheer him up. “You'll be sorry you're always telling us to shut up when we're up there accepting our Oscars,” Wendy said to him.

For years after his death we replayed what he said back and it never stopped breaking our hearts, and to be honest, freaking our shit out.

“Oh, I'll be long gone before that happens.”

At the time, I'd been angry that he was implying it was going to take so long.

After we got back from our holiday break, everyone was in shock. Counterpoints not only lost our captain; we lost our minds. A sweet old white lady, Bea Arthur, was standing behind Mr. Critzer's piano our first day back. Mrs. Arthur had been the one who had taken over as the director of Counterpoints the year Mr. Critzer was gone pursing his career as a pianist. She'd come out of retirement to help out until the school could find a replacement.

Mrs. Arthur had the unfortunate job of leading the choir through a “grief session.” The sopranos wanted to sob and hold one another. The only thing I wanted to do was visit the hospital where he died. Talk to the nurses. Get some information.

Mrs. Arthur asked us to circle up our chairs.

“I know this has been an emotional time for many of you. Losing a teacher is hard. Losing a friend is even harder. So I thought we could just take some time to just remember.”

Things were going to get ugly, swing choir–style. Shrill and
dramatic. Alison, a contralto who had given Valentine's Day cards the year before to everyone in the choir that were signed “Love in Him” (which, it had to be explained to me, meant Jesus; I thought it was some R & B way of saying “Put some loving in your man”), came after Wendy and me with such venom you'd have thought that we were the ones who killed him. Based on the looks on their faces, it was clear most of the choir felt like Alison did.

She started off calmly asking Mrs. Arthur why the funeral, which took place a week after he died, had been held in a strip mall. We had all gone.

Mrs. Arthur explained that the family chose the location.

My dad had told me that no regular home would handle his body. So they had to rent out an empty store space in a strip mall. It had been some sort of Mail Boxes Etc. store. The leftover shelving on the walls and packing tape in the corner of the room supersized the dreariness of it all. Thanks to the bizarre choice somebody made to have an open casket, we all had a chance to look at his body. For a dead person he looked incredibly healthy. Certainly not gaunt or ill in the way that I'd come to envision AIDS deaths. As always, the sopranos were in their own operatic world of emotion. Alison took her moment in front of the body, wailing and sobbing. All the sopranos were collapsing into each other's arms. “My god, I touched his hand! He feels like chicken. No. This can't be.
Nooo!
”

The thing I was most struck by was the pair of oversize Charles Nelson Reilly glasses Critzer had on. We'd never seen him wear them. Wendy's theory was that someone's glasses had fallen off their face as they filed by for the viewing and the person had been too skeeved out to retrieve them, thinking, “Forget it. I'll get another pair.” Was nobody around after he died who knew what he looked like in life to advise the funeral home? Or were those glasses symbol number 344 that I knew nothing about him?

Through her tears, Alison continued to dominate the grief circle. Now she wanted to know if the older lady standing in the back of the room at the funeral had been his wife.

“No,” Mrs. Arthur said, her voice full of patience and kindness and just the tiniest hint of “you dumb ass,” “that was his mother.”

Alison addressed the entire choir, speaking through a crazy frozen grin and staring straight at me and Wendy. “I just want to say that I loved Mr. Critzer a lot. And I am tired of some of the rumors that are being spread.”

Wendy and I were losing our minds.

I can't remember who said it, Wendy or I, but one of us stood up and yelled, “He wasn't married because he was gay and he probably had AIDS!” I'm thinking it was Wendy since she was more of a yeller. When it came to dealing with large groups of my fellow teenagers, I was more of a nodder and a “yeah, that's right” type.

Alison whipped around to face us, her smile gone. “I would think that you two would feel bad enough as it is. You wasted his time, and he didn't have that much time to waste. You disrespected him when he was alive and you are disrespecting him now that he is dead. He worked all of his life to arrange music, and it is not easy to arrange music. Especially some of the complicated medleys that we've done this year. And then he died without ever having a wife or having kids.”

Mrs. Arthur glanced over at Wendy and me. “Let me just say this. When he died, he was in the AIDS ward.”

The truth, or the indirect implication of truth, felt so good, but not to Alison, who let out a frustrated scream.

“Ahhhh! The principal told us that he died from pneumonia! Why would the principal lie to us? What does he have to gain? He's already the principal!”

Desperate for some sanity and for the bell that signaled the end of class to ring, Mrs. Arthur turned to the boys to save her. “Any of our boys have any experiences they'd like to share? Maybe a happy memory?” A pale, underfed senior who had been ordered by Mr. Critzer, “Never sing. Lip-synch,” raised his hand. He had sweat dripping down his forehead and his voice had a pervy quiver to it. “Once . . . I was watching TV and . . . umm . . . I saw a gay channel. Gay stuff.” His touching remembrance opened the door for Eric, a skinny black tenor, to share his equally unrelated homophobic thoughts about his cousin who was a lesbian “and her big thing was that being a lesbian is a lot more than just not caring what you look like.” Alison started wailing about how unfair it was that she couldn't bring her Bible to school but she had to “sit here and listen to this!” Brett and the other closeted gay boys in the choir sat in complete silence.

I was surprised by how truly stricken with grief some of the students were during the grief session. They didn't know him. Not like I did. Now that I think of it, I might have seen Mr. Critzer in those glasses at some point. In fact, I'm sure I did. It was in his office. He put them on in order to read lyrics printed on the back of a record album. I think. Or maybe he wore them to drive and he came to one of our shows at the JCC with them on? I'm not sure. The image of him in the casket with them on has scared all my other glasses-wearing memories away.

The bell rang, and how Mr. Critzer died was never mentioned in choir again.

I'm buying a plane ticket, and I'm going to the gala. Bob Critzer was never properly mourned, but he's going to be. I'm going to wear an oversize white T-shirt with a spray-painted picture of Mr. Critzer's face on the front, like they do with murdered rappers. I'm going to write
LOSE WEIGHT—ASK ME HOW
on the back to lure
people in. People will tap me on the shoulder: “Excuse me, can you tell me a little about your weight loss plan?” “Sure!” I'll say. “What you want to do is focus on expending more calories than you're taking in. You could also GET AIDS AND DIE ALONE LIKE ROBERT CRITZER DID!”

Wait a minute, I should be calling the planners of the gala directly and giving them the good news. I'm a regular on a “It's not TV, it's HBO” show,
Looking
, for god's sake! The show is about a group of gay boys in their thirties living in San Francisco looking for love. I'm the straight one. The “approachable” one. My character, Doris, is the “fruit fly” or “fag hag” fun one! Paid to be a fag hag. Sometimes the good Lord does have a plan.

Just because two gay pride parades turned me down after I e-mailed them and offered to sit in a convertible and throw butterscotch hard candies and condoms at the leather-bound gay men pushing their babies in strollers (actual babies, not men dressed as babies) along the parade route doesn't mean that I still don't have some “I'm on TV” sway. I'll offer to give a speech about how the choir changed my life and give Mr. Critzer the memorial he deserves. Why didn't I think of this before? And why don't I have more followers on Instagram? The other actors have hundreds of thousands and have to use fake names to avoid being stalked. I'll do a little shout-out about my social media presence during my gala speech.

I may have to lie and say that the sexy boys I'm on the show with are coming with me. I'd love to have those boys with me. What if I showed up with the main actor, Jonathan Groff? Jonathan was on
Glee
, a show about swing choirs! They would lose their minds after I lost mine. I'd forget about correcting the wrongs of show choir history and would spend my whole time making Jonathan leave voice mail messages for my friend's kids as the moose from
Frozen
.

Before I get too crazy with it, I should make sure that Critzer
really has been forgotten all these years. If there's a half marathon in his honor or a musical about his life, I could look like a real ass.
Glee
could have done an entire episode about him; my TV's being used exclusively to play Wii
Just Dance 2014
, so I wouldn't know.

If you died before the Internet came around, you're really dead. I've been scouring the Internet for more than an hour and I can't find anything about Critzer anywhere.

Finally, I type “find a grave site” into my search engine and I find a website called Find a Grave and there he is. His gravestone is small, gray, and rectangular, with his name and birth and death dates on it. That's it. “Robert E. Critzer 1942–1986.” There's a section below the photo of his grave for “family information.” Mother, father, sisters and brothers, and so on. It's blank. For fun—because forget Tinder; nothing is more fun than trolling through graves—I type in the last name Critzer and find three other Critzers buried in the same small graveyard in this little Indiana town.

My
Murder, She Wrote
mode kicks in, and I sign up for a temporary membership at Ancestry.com to see if it will list his parents' names. It does, and it was their graves I'd found. The section for family members is filled in on their pages. Nobody lists Bob. I have a very strong urge to drive to his grave and stick a plastic sunflower by his gravestone. Next I'll be buying Beanie Babies at the gas station to stack on top of his grave, so I better stay home.

I'm back on Ancestry.com to cancel my temporary membership since I'm always forgetting to cancel subscriptions. I'm probably still paying for
Tiger Beat.
They have a copy of his birth certificate. Santa Monica, California, is listed as his place of birth. I'm in Santa Monica. That's where I am at this very moment. I live here. He was born here. The city where I'm sitting right now was his place of birth. This is a sign. I give his spirit a little jazz hand high-five. “Don't worry, Bob. I've got this.”

You know who may be able to help me? Those gay-loving heathens back in Indianapolis, my parents. Mr. Critzer was close with one of my dad's good friends, Charles, an arts writer for
The Indianapolis Star.
My dad had called Mr. Staff after hearing the news of Critzer's death, and he had been the one who confirmed that he'd died from complications from HIV.