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 subgroup). 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.
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