Swish (28 page)

Authors: Joel Derfner

BOOK: Swish

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Then, the night before he left, we went to the theater. I had seen
Wicked
before, and I was looking forward to sharing it with Rob. Even if he didn’t want to be gay, I thought, how could he not love a show that portrays the Wicked Witch of the West as a spunky young heroine (named Elphaba) who meets the Wizard, realizes he is waging a perfidious war against the citizens of Oz, and sets herself against him with a power she has barely begun to understand?

Just as I had expected, Rob was mesmerized by the spiky Elphaba and her sparkling rival Glinda. I realize now that I was watching with only half my mind; the other half was reeling with metaphor. Some of it I had expected. We were watching a show about a character who was not like other people and shunned because of it; a character who, after spending much of her adolescence hoping to fit in with everybody else, decided to accept herself for who she was; a character who, hidden behind a black hat and a broomstick and a mask of green skin, found the freedom to choose for herself who she wanted to be. This was the archetype of the coming-out tale—whether gay or ex-gay, anybody in our society who has felt homosexual attractions knows how the story goes. Hell, anybody in our society who has felt
different
knows how the story goes. My decision to dress as a witch for Hallowe’en at age five had been wiser than I knew.

What I hadn’t expected upon walking into the theater, though, was that I would see my friendship with Rob reflected in the friendship between the two witches onstage. Of course there was the obvious: from vastly different backgrounds, with vastly different self-images, heading in vastly different directions, they forged nonetheless a bond as real as it was unlikely. But as I watched them struggle, Glinda against the seductive safety of being loved, Elphaba against the small-mindedness of those around her; as I watched them yearn, Glinda to be good, Elphaba to belong; as I watched them fail, Glinda for lack of courage, Elphaba for lack of facility, I grew less and less able to figure out which one of them was Rob and which one of them was me.

When the two girls barricaded themselves in a tower against the Wizard’s guards, however, I abandoned the attempt, because we had almost reached the act-one finale, to my mind the high point of the show. Glinda urged her friend to apologize to the Wizard so everything would be okay again, but Elphaba responded that something had changed in her, that she knew it was time to leap. “I think I’ll try defying gravity,” she sang, and kept on singing. And then, in the middle of the song, for one exhilarating moment, Glinda seemed on the verge of joining Elphaba in the quest to bring freedom to the land of Oz and to seize a share in that freedom. The witches’ hands gripped Elphaba’s broomstick as if they belonged to one woman.

And then the energy onstage shifted, and Glinda stepped back. “I hope you’re happy, now that you’re choosing this,” she sang, and her best friend answered, “You, too.” The Wizard’s men broke into the room; Glinda rushed to block their way but they pushed roughly past her. It didn’t matter, though, because the girl who would become the Wicked Witch of the West had begun, for the first time, to fly. Swathed in billowing midnight, soaring higher and higher above the stage, as Glinda and the Wizard’s soldiers looked up in awe, she sang that if they cared to find her they should look to the western sky. “I’m flying high, defying gravity!” she exulted, and then her melody became wordless and from high above us her voluminous black robe spread and spread until its eldritch shadow covered the entire stage and the audience’s applause exploded before the curtain had even begun to fall.

“So?” I said, turning to Rob and wiping my eyes as the houselights came up. “What do you think?”

“Wow,” he said, “this is amazing. What a way to pop my Broadway cherry.” I laughed. “They have great voices. If I get the CD out in the lobby, will it be these people singing?”

“No. But the people on the CD will be just as good, if not better.”

“Back in Cádiz,” said Rob, segueing into some anecdote about his next-door neighbor that had nothing to do with witches or Oz or homosexuality, and I felt a rush of disappointment that I had to work very hard to keep off my face.

And then it hit me: My line to Mike about the Wicked Witch of the West turning Rob gay had been only mostly a joke. Some very small part of me had really thought that, when Rob saw Elphaba rise from the ground, singing “It’s time to try defying gravity,” he would smack his forehead, turn to me, and say,
“Now
I see the truth!” Faced with incontrovertible proof of my point of view, he would have to surrender; he would abandon his narrow idea of God and become more than he had ever imagined he could be.

But we weren’t in my own personal dimension, we were in the Gershwin Theatre on Fifty-first Street; and this wasn’t Purim, it was a regular day, neither Mordecai nor Esther in sight; and Rob had reacted to the enjoyable spectacle before him with, well, enjoyment. I already knew how the show ended: the witches’ friendship changed both of them for the better, but Elphaba stayed wicked and Glinda stayed good, whatever those words meant in the version of the world onstage in front of us.

I had wanted to rescue Rob at the theater just as he had wanted to rescue me at the Exodus conference. But now I think that in fact neither one of us
can
be rescued. If he comes to think differently about his sexuality, it will not be because of anything I have said or done; he will simply have come to think differently about the universe and our place in it. The same goes for me: I cannot say for certain that I will never believe in Jesus—after all, I once said I would never end a sentence with a preposition or wear rayon—but I’m pretty sure it would take more than a weekend visit to a friend to do the trick. Every one of us is lost in a different way, and the only one who can save Rob is Rob, and the only one who can save Jon is Jon, and the only one who can save me is me. As we stumble around searching for Truth, the best we can do is to remind one another, when we collide, that there are moments in which we are not alone.

“Hey, should we go get some snacks?” I asked Rob as we sat in the theater.

“Sure,” he said, and we went out into the lobby and stood together eating M&M’s until it was time to go back in for the second act.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks must go to Joy Tutela, the sexiest agent in New York, to David Black, the second-sexiest agent in New York, and to Andrew Corbin, the sexiest editor in New York, for their faith in this book and in me. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, it is to them and to the sexiest assistants in New York, John Burke, David Larabell, Darya Porat, and Johnathan Wilber, that you owe your thanks.

Without Sarah Rose, precious adviser, colleague, and friend, this book wouldn’t exist.

Without Victoria Cain,
I
probably wouldn’t exist.

Bob Alpert, Jon Barrett, David Buscher, John Crook, Rob Hartmann, Phil Higgins, Andy McQuery, Pamela Merritt, John Morgan, Dan Rhatigan, Julia Sullivan, Jennifer Tattenbaum, Greg Yoder, and the members of the Sackett Street Writers Non-Fiction Workshop (
www.sackettworkshop.com
), Ryan Carrasco, Abigail Carroll, Beth Cranwell, Jessica DuLong, Beth Greenfield, Emily Helfgot, Lori Hurley, Laura Longhine, Maureen Miller, Helen Newman, Liz Skillman, and Samantha Walters, gave me invaluable critiques on what they read and forgave me for hating their guts when they didn’t tell me everything was already perfect. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Lauren Naturale, whose patience is as everlasting as her insight is keen, and to Nancy Rawlinson (
www.nancyrawlinson.com
), who knew not only exactly what the writing needed but also exactly how to tell me.

Without the behind-the-scenes work of Ruth Childs, Bob de Luna, Chris Keane, Erik Liberman, Anya Nawrocky, Matthew Phillp, and Veronica Vera of Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, many of the pages between these covers would be blank.

Ted Conover provided excellent ethical advice at the right moment. Tommy Semosh provided excellent advice on both publicity and facial hair.

If
Swish
is not riddled with errors when it veers from its main subject—that is to say, me—it is because of Michael Bailey, Michael Bussee, Gene McAfee, Noam Pianko, Robert Spitzer, Warren Throckmorton, and Dean Wendt.

I must thank Steven Best, Alfred Kleinbaum, Jonathan Portera, Cheryl Whaley, and Eric Wolff for keeping me sane, literally.

I feel especially grateful to those who played central roles in the stories I’ve told: Glenn Bassett, Susan Clinkenbeard, Bill Cole, Sasha Derfner, Gina Fried, Andrew Jonas, Holly Lisanby, Antonio Montovani, Oscar Morales, Daniel Nardicio, Kerry Riffle, and Jonathan Vatner. I owe a particular debt to the men and women I met at the Exodus, International Freedom Conference. I hope they find the peace they are looking for.

My brother Jeremy was there when I started and, though he’s moved across the continent, he has supported me the whole time as if he were still living twenty feet away from me. Though I have forbidden my father, Armand, to read most of the chapters, he and his wife Mary—along with my in-laws, Ken, Ronnie, Cathy, and Dennis—have been more enthusiastic than I could ever have hoped for. Unfortunately my mother, Mary Frances, left this earth before I began writing, but her spirit infuses every page.

Mindi Dickstein, Len Schiff, Rachel Sheinkin, and Peter Ullian have not only taught me most of what I know about writing but also displayed extraordinary patience with the number of projects I’ve insisted on juggling.

Fred Carl, Marie Costanza, Julianne Davis, Martin Epstein, Sean Flahaven, Karen Henderson, Danny Larsen, Robert Lee, Mel Marvin, Sybille Pearson, Sarah Schlesinger, Alex Zalben, and the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at NYU have given me a home.

And last, and most, I want to thank Mike Combs, for more than I can ever say.

ALSO BY JOEL DERFNER

G
AY
H
AIKU

FOOTNOTES

^*1I saw the author of this e-mail three years later at a Margaret Cho concert and he looked
terrible.
He hadn’t gotten fat, but his face was lined and haggard and droopy enough to suggest years spent wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land. Far be it from me to suggest that he had the Promised Land within his grasp and that his present desiccation was merely the natural result of his failure to do anything about it when he had the chance.
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^*2This is a lie. Typos are a sign of a deeply flawed character. But I was deceiving myself too.
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^*3I recently started studying Middle Egyptian in earnest, and it is now clear to me that the reason the extraordinary-Drip-ad guy never responded to my ad was that the Middle Egyptian was
complete gibberish.
Here is what I should have written: (Loosely translated, “a man beautiful of form, excellent of mind, effective at causing laughter, who came forth from the womb open-hearted to the suffering and afflicted, and who is master of the secrets of jubilation.” After last week’s homework I can also add “who knows how to reattach a severed head” but I worry about limiting the applicant pool. I still can’t say “and a top,” but I’m only on Lesson 14, so the relevant vocabulary may be coming up.
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^†4I am including this pair of blog posts and the previous footnote only so as to be able to drop casually the fact that I know Middle Egyptian. Please love me?
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^*5Extraordinary-Drip-Ad Guy, I’ve corrected my Egyptian mistake. Why haven’t you called yet? That’s okay, e-mail is better, anyway. My computer is set to check it every minute, so when you get in touch I’ll be able to write back immediately.
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^*6
http://www.joelderfner.com/music/files/I_Don’t_Know.mp3
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^*7
http://www.joelderfner.com/music/files/Good.mp3
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