Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (19 page)

“Now go have fun at your party.”

“I will, Momma. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

And I walked away from her again, feeling for a few moments like I was almost weightless, trying once again to imprint everything about this night onto my mind, my heart fuller than it had ever been. It was already the greatest night of my life.

T
he next time I saw Mom was two months later, on July 1st. I only had one day off a week, but now that I could afford it with my Broadway salary, I planned to visit her as often as I could; I didn’t know how much longer she would be around, so I wanted to make the most of the time she and I had left. I booked myself on an early-morning flight on Monday, with my return scheduled for Tuesday morning, getting me back into New York just in time for that evening’s performance.

In the preceding two months, the show had continued its meteoric rise. We were nominated for ten Tony Awards and won four, including two for Jonathan. We won three OBIE Awards, including one for Michael Greif’s direction and one that the entire cast shared for Outstanding Ensemble. Jonathan and the show won Best Musical from the New York Drama Critics Circle, the Outer Critics Circle, the Drama League, and the Drama Desk. We consistently sold out every seat and every standing room ticket at every performance. We sang “Seasons of Love” on
The Rosie O’Donnell Show, The Late Show with David Letterman,
and the
Today
show. Jonathan and our show were the subjects of segments on
Primetime Live, CBS News Sunday Morning,
and
48 Hours.
And in May we went into the Right Track Studios to record the cast album for DreamWorks Records, which had won the rights to our show after what was reportedly an intense bidding war among several labels. During the first month of our Broadway run, we didn’t have one full day or night off, and yet no one in the cast had missed any performances.

And, as if that wasn’t enough to keep my head from spinning off its axis, I had fallen in love. His name was Todd. When I met him, the day after opening night, he was just finishing up his senior year in NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program where he was taking a playwrighting class with John Guare, the writer of
Six Degrees of Separation.
John had discussed
Rent
with his class (he was a big fan, having written about us in
Vogue
) and had encouraged Todd to get in touch with me, thinking we’d hit it off. I don’t know if John was trying to set us up romantically, but midway through my first conversation with Todd, which began on AOL, moved to the phone, and lasted for hours, I was already smitten. His fierce intellect, his barbed sense of humor, his self-deprecating sweetness all came through loud and clear on the computer, and even more so on the phone. I just hoped he was cute. The next night I was going to find out; we’d arranged a date for after the show. Coincidentally, we lived a block and a half from each other in the East Village, so our rendezvous point was on the corner of Second Avenue and Tenth Street. He obviously knew what I looked like, but the only thing I had to go on for him was his description of himself in his Instant Message: “Some people say I look like Robert Downey Jr with short hair, others say a little George Clooney, but skinnier. I hate the latter. And the former is a bit too uppity for my tastes. He looks like a fop, too.” Neither man particularly interested me, but I was charmed and intrigued enough to see how accurately he’d described himself.

Even before he came up to me and shook my hand, I knew it was him walking toward me as I leaned against the brick wall of the Second Avenue Deli. I was relieved to see that he was adorable, with big brown puppy dog eyes, a boyish face, short dark hair, and just the right amount of scruff on his cheeks. My crush was cemented.

We enjoyed a fast and furious courtship, even though I tried to make myself slow it down; with all that was going on in my life, with all of the pressures of the show and Mom’s illness, I didn’t think it was the best time to get involved. But we shared an unusually intense passion for music and film and theatre and books, and he was a night owl like I am, so our schedules were copacetic. And he loved lying in bed with me after I got back downtown after a performance, as we listened to the latest Superchunk CD or watched
Fearless
on laserdisc or as I read the most recent draft of his latest play or screenplay. And he made me laugh often, even when his humor was sliced through with meanness (his cynicism was a nice contrast to my generally genial outlook). And I soon found myself spending almost all of my time away from the theatre with him, hardly ever going home to my own apartment except to shower and change clothes. And I didn’t care that Todd smoked, because he was conscientious about not smoking around me, and he did his best not to smell or taste like smoke when we got together. And even though the first time he took me home to his apartment, he wouldn’t let me open the door to his bedroom (because, as I found out later, the floor was buried underneath an incomprehensibly chaotic pile of detritus—magazines and Starbucks cups and ashtrays and screenplays); even though I was wary of his intensity which bordered on mania (his thoughts seemed to charge forward ahead of him, like lightning, carrying his mouth along with them, but always full of keen observations and sharp witticisms); even though I wished that at times he wasn’t so cagey about his family life or his romantic or sexual history (he alluded to making a habit of seducing straight boys in high school, but refused to go into detail as to how he went about doing so); even though there were times I felt pressured by him to come over when I was exhausted from the show and might have preferred a night off to myself; even though all of this was, on some level, perhaps a little too much too soon for me to take, the truth was: I loved sharing my success with someone who wasn’t intimidated by it (he’d sweetly brought me consolation flowers when I didn’t get nominated for a Tony), someone who appreciated the show and the impact it was having, someone who enjoyed my company for my sake and not because I was becoming a mini celebrity, someone who was genuinely attracted to me, whose body fit with mine, who enjoyed sex as much as I did, and, perhaps most important, someone who enjoyed long, meandering conversations in bed after sex as much as I did. And so I couldn’t stop myself from saying to Todd one night as I lay next to him, “I think I’m falling.” And even though he didn’t say the same thing back to me, when he shyly gazed into my eyes and put my hand on his heart, I knew that he was falling, too.

So by July 1st, when I went home to see Mom, I wanted to tell her about him, but I didn’t know how to bring up the subject; I didn’t know how she’d feel about my having a new boyfriend. And as I was traveling home and thinking about what I wanted to tell her, dreading a probably uncomfortable, and possibly ugly, confrontation, I thought through all of our past conversations about my relationships with boys. I was reminded of the first time my queerness had come up between us: it had been in the fall of 1986, when I was fourteen, in the full, wild throes of puberty, and I was hanging out with an older kid from my high school named Ricky.

“Let’s play Spin the Bottle,” Ricky said.

Ricky was the ringleader of our group’s little gatherings. He was dark-haired and olive-skinned, Italian (judging by his last name, D’Angelo), and older-looking than his eighteen years. Maybe it was his eyes: they were dark brown, and they seemed to hold some kind of secret. Whatever secret it was lit them up, giving him a sort of illicit authority when he talked, making me think of conspiracies or back rooms or money-laundering schemes, stuff that people got involved in when they were well out of high school. There was an energy about him that wasn’t just gossipy or teenager-goofy; it was
naughty.
He was slim and quick and effeminate, which he made no effort to hide. In fact, he had, at one point the previous school year, dyed his hair a shocking pink, an unheard-of act for a guy to do in 1985, especially in Joliet.

I hadn’t really known him for long, but he was the ringleader, and that night, as usual, we were at his house in Shorewood, the slightly more upscale community adjacent to Joliet. His loud, obese mother was also home, in the living room watching TV. She loved when Ricky brought his friends over. “Oh, HI, how are YOU?” she boomed in her nasal voice from her easy chair when I dropped in. “Nice to
SEE
you again!”

“Mom, we’re going to be in my room,” Ricky said.

“Okay, Ricky. See you all
LATER!”

There wasn’t any asking for permission in Ricky’s house. He expected to get, and got, what he wanted. And what he wanted that night was all of us in his room drinking and playing Spin the Bottle. And that’s what we did.

The players that night were Ricky; Bryan, an officer in Joliet West’s ROTC who was Ricky’s age, with that similar older-than-he-was quality, his New England accent an anomaly in our town; Doreen, whose dyed red hair was spectacularly sprayed and sculpted to swoop over her forehead, almost covering one eye, its side-part extremely low, near her ear, like a balding man’s comb-over; Laura, compact and tough, sporting a New Wave pompadour, her hair poofed up on top and buzzed on the sides and in the back, but with a bonus tail stemming from the base of her skull; Frances, slim and pretty, with freckles, big blue eyes, and dark dark dark black hair, which fell around her face without quite as many products sprayed or gelled or moussed into it; me, at fourteen by far the youngest participant; and Andy Dick—yes,
that
Andy Dick, years before he was famous—also eighteen, my closest friend in the group and the real reason I was there. I had met Andy two and a half years prior, when I played the title role in
Oliver!
at Joliet West. He played Dr. Grimwig, a tiny role in Act Two, and in any other production undoubtedly completely forgettable, but not so in our production. Andy, gawky and skinny and unafraid to do anything for a laugh, sprayed his blond Afro—he looked like a tree, with his lanky frame and huge hair—completely gray (the shiny, silvery gray you only get out of those ‘Streaks ’n’ Tips’ cans used for makeup effects in amateur theatre productions), and decided that his Dr. Grimwig was ninety years old and dying of emphysema. So his two-minute scene with me wherein he asked me how I was feeling, and then pronounced me well, stretched into four or five minutes, as he coughed and wheezed and sputtered and hacked up phlegm and ad libbed crazy exclamations. The audience loved it, laughing uproariously, and it took all of my concentration to keep from laughing. We became instant friends, and from that moment on Andy constantly made me laugh.

There we all were, in Ricky’s room, ready to play our game. Violent Femmes’ eponymous album blared from Ricky’s stereo system, if you could call it blaring; his stereo was one of those Radio Shack cheapies with the tiny simulated-wood speakers, and everything that came out of it sounded pretty thin and sad, but we didn’t care.

I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record,
Gordon Gano, the Femmes’ lead singer, sang.

Oh yeah?
we all chimed in.

There wasn’t much to Ricky’s room: just a bed, his pathetic little stereo, and a couple of posters messily thumbtacked to the formica-paneled walls, posters of Duran Duran and Bauhaus and The Cure. We all sat on the floor at the foot of his bed, in a circle, clutching our wine coolers or beers or screwdrivers or plain old straight vodka. I was drinking wine coolers.

Gordon Gano sang, and we sang along:

Our Spin the Bottle rules went like this: the spinner got to tell the spinnee what to do, and everyone
had
to do whatever the spinner said. So it had elements of truth or dare, but without the truth, and with the essential Russian roulette factor of the spinning bottle.

“I’ll start,” Ricky said, and he spun. It landed on Doreen.

“Oh, shit,” Doreen said.

“Doreen,” Ricky said, “I want you to give Laura ear sex.”

Doreen blushed and smiled, and Frances playfully hit her in the arm.

“Go Doreen,” she said. Ear sex was a favorite activity in our Spin the Bottle games. I hadn’t known it even existed until I started playing with this group.

Laura rolled her eyes and took a sip of her wine cooler, then went over to Doreen. Doreen kissed Laura’s ear, really giving it a thorough licking. Laura squealed in delight. I still didn’t quite get the appeal of ear sex; it seemed slobbery to me, messy, and not very tasty, but I was still intrigued. No one had ear-sexed me yet. In fact, I rarely got hit by the bottle. That had to change. I wanted some action. I swigged the last of my wine cooler and opened another one.

“Oooooo, look at that,” Bryan said. “Laura likes that.”

Finally, Doreen and Laura broke apart, both of them grinning huge grins. Doreen tidied up her lip gloss and drank some of her beer, and Laura sat back down in her spot on the floor. She didn’t wipe her ear. I resisted wiping it for her. Then Doreen picked up the bottle and spun it. It landed on Bryan.

“Okay, what is it this time?” Bryan said, rolling his eyes as if he had truly done
everything
there was to do.

“Hmmm,” Doreen said.

Bryan’s mouth gaped open in mock horror. “Uh-oh.”

“French kiss Ricky.”

“Yeah!”
Andy growled.

Bryan smiled. “Okay.” And he lunged at Ricky, and the two of them kissed, quite aggressively, Ricky holding on to Bryan’s face, Bryan grabbing on to the back of Ricky’s neck, both of their tongues working overtime. Ricky’s eyes opened as he kissed Bryan, and with an eye facing me, he watched me watching them kiss. I could feel my cheeks burning, but I didn’t look away.