Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (18 page)

When Grandpa was very ill in the hospital, I remember finding out that my father had to shave him and thinking how crazy it was that someone at the hospital didn’t do stuff like that. My father gave him his last shave and then my grandfather died, and I heard my dad cry for the first and last time. My father was always the optimistic jock, the guy who would try to crack you up, the dad who would be riding the roller coaster at King’s Island next to you and murmuring that no one had died on the ride
in a long time
. He loved to tease, a trait I got from him just as surely as I did
not
get his blue eyes, so just a few weeks after his father died, he was back to needling me in church one time when I—a teenager with issues about which he knew nothing—turned to him and told him, “Drop dead!” Bad timing. He was very hurt and we called a truce, though not before a final, knock-down, drag-out fight that ended with me being allowed to skip church. Haven’t attended a service since.

At my grandfather’s funeral, held seemingly as many days after his death as possible, my cousin and I could see the stitches in his lips; his mouth was beginning to open as if to speak. It was both surreal and so real, so sobering to see our cantankerous, often drunken, but ultimately vivacious grandfather truly gone.

My aunt’s death was more expected, as young as she was. She’d been sick for years, had been through chemo that had bloated her and forced her to wear a wig. She had the voice of a little child, but hadn’t been blessed with the good luck God is said to lavish on little children—her husband died young, she always needed money, and cancer stalked her. She lived with my grandparents, her parents, for quite some time, and whenever we were over I’d volunteer to go get her a Tab or a Fresca from the bathroom where the bottles were stacked against the cool tiles, because my grandparents’ beer filled the fridge.

But it was Pam’s death that ate at me the most that year. My cousin had dated her for what felt like a long while. They were serious. She was a serious person, not just some girl guys dated. He’d met her on a class or church trip when he asked if he could read her V.C. Andrews book
Petals on the Wind
. She loved Frogger, was a prankster, and planned parties with him (and for a game where we had to guess which celebrity’s name was stuck on our foreheads, she chose Ronald Reagan as mine). As fun-loving as she was, he probably never told her that while he was house-sitting during her family vacation, he and I rented
Cheech and Chong’s N’Ice Dreams
and a porno, the first I ever saw, about which I remember even less than the pot movie.

Beautiful and curious with an easy-to-ignite laugh, she took my cousin away from me. No more sleep-overs arranged around middle-of-the-night airings of William Shatner doing the deed to Angie Dickinson in
Big Bad Mama
, no more two-man porn conventions. But I didn’t resent her because she was perfect for him, and seemed to be a perfect person. Her perfection rubbed off on him; he had been the kind of kid who sneered in every photo and was always dirty from poking around in the field out back of his house. Now, he wore preppy sweaters and feathered his hair.

After I was introduced to her, she engaged me in some espionage, enlisting me to buy some Dungeons & Dragons lead figures for him, for which she secretly paid me back on Christmas Eve. In my journal from the era, I noted, “I really felt sneaky—she did, too.” We were two goody two-shoes who enjoyed feeling that way.

Best of all, she’d brought out his appreciation for me once. At a family Easter gathering, we were in my cousin’s finished basement, the scene of so many raunchy shenanigans, and I was cracking wise about something when he stopped me and said to Pam, “See? It’s that dry wit I was talking about.” That made me feel like the funniest guy in the world. All those years as a kid when I was wracking my brain to figure out if being smart or being a writer or being good at spelling would be my claim to fame, maybe I should have relaxed and told a few more jokes.

The last time I saw her was at a family birthday bash. That side of the family had huge parties even before any hats were dropped, so everyone was there. She was just another person at the party, but she was talking to the wife of a cousin of mine about losing weight and then turned to me, eyes beseeching.

“Do I look skinny?”

“Of course,” said I. “Like a rail.” It’s that dry wit. She slugged me and laughed.

Pam’s grandma was very sick and expected to die at any time, so when I got home from school one day soon after the party and my mom told me, teary-eyed, that she had bad news for me, that Pam had died, I refused to believe it. It had to be her grandmother…as if my mom would receive news like this on the phone and not get all the facts. It wasn’t like people were passing the word via whispers into successive ears, with the end result totally off from the beginning—she was right, it was Pam. She’d gone to sleep and simply not woken up. I saw my cousin briefly at her viewing. The next time I saw him was at her funeral, where she was on display in a purple dress and the pastor was telling us we shouldn’t question things because they’re all a part of a greater design.

I awkwardly told my cousin I was sorry. I probably wasn’t mature enough to be a good, supportive friend yet—afraid to upset him, I’d not even called him when I heard. He was beside himself, probably not mature enough to be a form of widower. He was only a kid himself. Just the previous summer we were still doing childish things, like catching bumblebees and burying them alive, insulating frogs in glass-filled contraptions that we’d launch from the tops of bleachers to see if they’d survive (they didn’t), or sinking spades into giant anthills so we could watch the ants lose their minds before we twisted off their heads. We had been boys at an age where death was still entertainment.

Guess which wood doesn’t float?

Ultimately, I think celebrities’ lives and deaths can prepare us for our own lives and deaths, and for death around us. My treasure trove of obituaries suddenly made so much more sense when it contained a few written about people I’d actually known. I realized that I was heading in the same direction of the Grace Kellys and Natalie Woods and the Pams of the world, so I’d better think hard about how to make sure when I got there, my own obituary would be something worth reading.

Divine’s death at only 42 had come a few years later, at a time when I was in college and figuring out my future, which underscored that feeling of urgency to choose the right path. I’m still not sure I did, but I’m so analytical I’m not sure I ever could be.

Living in Chicago offered me my first real opportunities to go out of my way to meet stars. I was scared at first—What would I say? How would I react?—but since I’d missed the boat on Divine, I soon found myself seeking out famous folks on a regular basis with whom I could fraternize for 20 seconds.

The first famous people I pursued in person in Chicago were those so down on their luck that they’d resorted to publishing books (they were kind of like the Internet, but three-dimensional and made of paper) or hawking fragrances, which put them in direct contact with the public for a small investment on the part of each fan and wore out their weakening signing hands even faster than old age.

During this early phase of starfuckery, I was not yet wise to the concept of bringing a damn camera every time. I had not yet learned that if there isn’t a picture of it, it didn’t happen, and that if there isn’t video of it, it didn’t go well. So I have photos from some of the encounters, but no pic-withs.

As I began life at the U of C, I was made to take a physical fitness test. If I’d known this prior to applying, I might never have gone—all I remembered from gym class in middle school was the wrestling unit, for which I got an A only because there was exactly one other boy my size and he was a gentle giant. That unit was unexpectedly gory—a kid with a pizza face always bled out all over the mats when his zits popped during all the grappling.

I lived in fear of physical exertion. When tested on how long it took us to run a mile in high school, I was one of the kids who trotted part of the way and then went for a walk. I think I might’ve taken the whole period.

The physical fitness test at the U of C was shockingly tough. Along with measuring our body fat percentage, I had to do painful stretches, attempt to do curl-ups, bench-press some weights, and then go for a 12-minute run. Because I’d been so active at The Fair Store, I surprised myself by surviving. One of the coaches paid me a vicious compliment: “You’re pretty flexible for a big guy.”

But even though I thought I’d acquitted myself admirably, I was deemed unfit and forced to take the full three semesters of gym—jogging (I got so skinny I’m still jealous of myself), CPR (I got so fat I always stand next to myself to look thinner), and social dance (in which I had to teach a butch lesbian to let the man lead even if she
did
have the broader and more muscular back).

But revved up from the physicality of the day, I went Downtown for my very first starfuck in the big city, and it was the biggest star of them all: Elizabeth Fucking Taylor (she hated being called Liz and probably wouldn’t have been crazy about the middle name “Fucking,” but I was excited).

My journal recalls the hardship:

“She was appearing at Marshall Field’s to promote her new perfume ‘Passion’. I arrived at 12 for her 2 p.m. question-and-answer session. I was eventually smothered into motionlessness by a teeming multitude of grannies and young (stereotypical) gay men. I was so miserable.”

Thank God
I
wasn’t a stereotype…standing in line to see Elizabeth Taylor at Marshall Field’s.

She showed up late in an emerald-green dress that was one part politician’s ex-wife and one part eat-your-heart-out-Ava-Gardner, with “plenty of glitter and eyeliner.” I was dazzled, but not so dazzled that I couldn’t haul ass over to the side where security was keeping people at bay so I could ask her a question. I was young and desperate, so the person with the mic gave me a break. An avid reader of tabloids, I asked Elizabeth if it were true that she and Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn might be doing a movie together. Again, not stereotypical.

Liz replied, “I’d die to work with them, especially Bette, whom I’ve never worked with. I’ve spoken to Bette about it.”

We weren’t allowed autographs or pic-withs, but I’d communicated with the last movie star, who was
my
first movie star.

A year later, I did the whole thing over in the same place with Cher, who was launching her scent Uninhibited (the name made it sound like she squirted it from her tail when provoked), and got to ask her a question, too. I was really good at batting my eyelashes at the people with microphones. Again hat-tipping the ‘bloids, I asked what Cher wanted fans to know about all the tabloid stories out there about her. This was the era of all the rumors that she’d had ribs removed, an operation I was already saving up for. She replied, “Read them for the pictures, not the words.” As everyone laughed, I passed a tube up to the stage containing a drawing I’d done for her, along with her “Skin Deep” 45 sleeve and an SASE. Would you believe she sent me an autograph within a day? Would you believe the atrocious Chicago postal service didn’t lose it?

Still not getting the picture about taking pictures, I regrettably have nothing but lovely memories and plain ol’ autographs to show for being first in line to greet “Incan” diva Yma Sumac at Rose Records. I had been turned on to Yma’s otherworldly caterwauling by trawling Hyde Park’s well-stocked used record stores, where I would spend very little money in exchange for such invaluable vinyl educations as
Marlene Dietrich at the Café de Paris
, Peggy Lee’s
I’m a Woman
, and
Remember Marilyn
, records that it would be unfair to say taught me how to be gay, but records that helped me be the kind of gay I wanted to be, which was a gay man who was beginning to accept that it was okay to have stereotypically gay tastes. So what if
every
gay man loves Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich and other divas? We all love dick, too, and that doesn’t make you cooler to avoid
that
, either.

I was the second person in line for Yma—bearing her classic album
Voice of the Xtabay
—right behind a guy who had brought a suitcase of just about everything she’d ever recorded. Wearing the required black turban of any faded star—though she was the same age Susan Sarandon is now, so that tells you a lot about how the concept of aging is getting old—she behaved like a human crossed with a bird, inspecting everything set before her as if it might be food that she wasn’t hungry for before the man at her side would urge, “That’s for you.”