Jed Wolf

Other than musical theater ensembles, which are hardly the same, the last time I sang in a legitimate choir was at a college in Vermont in 1980. After being cooped up with my partner and her two kids eight miles from the Canadian border, hippie life was wearing thin.

Rather than admitting I was gay, I needed something besides heating with wood, raising farm animals and living much like them in the long pipe-frozen winters to distract me from increasing paranoia.

Trying to make smokey clothes smell less while cleaner laundry clunked on clotheslines was challenging but making myself presentable enough to sing shoulder-to-shoulder in a chorus was scary. I was in college trying to get a music degree when after the first choir rehearsal, the director mentioned wearing perfume or cologne was forbidden and I knew who she was talking about.

I was twenty-four when I attended Johnson State. Waiting tables and growing weak pot barely bought groceries but my musicality was undeniable so rather than squandering my self-taught talents on family sing-a-longs and alcohol-fueled bluegrass jam sessions, I decided while awaiting “Guiding Light,” to heed Phil Donahue and attempt to make something of myself.

Nearly thirty winding miles away, Johnson was an hour on pavement so between snowstorms, I often travelled a remote dirt road over several mountains which took less time in decent weather. Hippies I played music with raved about the credentials of the Julliard graduates teaching there so I thought I might find a home away from home while slogging slowly toward a degree which would too easily elude me.

Overlooking the spectacular Sterling Range, some of the Vermont’s highest mountains while blinking for the first time at the blinding snow-covered campus, I couldn’t care less about teaching and secretly hoped attending college might give my questionable existence an air of plausibly.

Every trip through the mountains was an experience. I brought home a deer once that had just been hit by a truck for my girlfriend Karen to butcher. She was good at everything that I wasn’t, and we were good for each other until we weren’t. Though I loved her and especially her two little girls as much as I could, I felt perennially guilty for not loving their mother enough and relieved to periodically get away.

I could make lovely sounds on many instruments. Though I mainly played keyboards, the piano teacher back was so clearly a fag, I was too scared to be in the same room with him, so I sang the Star-Spangled Banner for a female voice teacher who made me a vocal major on the spot. By the time I learned male singers were in always in demand, I was an anchor among other likely closeted baritones who’d rather wade through endless deep snow than be gay.

Driving to and from campus on rutted dirt roads practicing French art songs while raising kids and goats and splitting nightly firewood under Arora Borealis in flannel shirts with a heavy beard, I had no idea real singing demanded truth.

Rock Hudson was nearly dead while I distracted myself locked away in practice rooms trying to sound like a man. Working hard to be someone else, I barely noticed soloing with Maria Von Trapp’s granddaughter who also attended Johnson. I couldn’t understand why I with my bitten fingernails and overly sensitive voice was chosen to sing so many solos.

I hated my vulnerable voice on recordings and was scolded for trying to butch it up. Rather than appreciating opportunities to sing with the Vermont Symphony, I pretended to be tough and scowled my thin-skinned way through every performance rejecting compliments. Only closeted or otherwise fucked up artist types have ever related to this level of disassociation.

After receiving a scholarship to attend master classes with a renowned tenor who’s name conveniently escaped me, I spent a week with fifteen other singers from across the country at the Shelburne farms estate mansion overlooking Lake Champlain. After getting drunk every night and singing art songs hungover all day, I awoke terrified the final morning out of the closet.

Though we rarely discussed it unless drunk, my older girlfriend who I’d lived with since I was 20, knew I was attracted to men, but she loved me and chalked up my bisexuality with her own on occasion. I feel a terrible ripping sensation in my heart to this day recalling when I left. My only regret is that without my horrendous secret, I might have remembered more of those precious thirteen years though, we never would’ve met.

After our inevitable split and a near-death experience, I flew oversees to write songs with a rock singer I met on the street with a supposed record contract. After losing him in Rome to a random Tunisian I slept in a few parks then called my parents.

Returning too damaged for anything but romance, I moved in with the first man I met who told me soon after to quit music, so I did. “If I hadn’t made it by age thirty why bother,” he said while undressing me.

Creativity has always brought me to my knees. Though not in the religious sense, music’s relentless demand for truth changed the course of my life on many occasions. Above that boyfriend curled below me in a fetal position, I stood screaming, “I don’t care what you think you controlling mother fucker!” then left to write songs which would require enough blood, sweat and tears to keep me out of anyone’s bed for the next five years.

My only memory of first grade at boy’s school is of being elbowed for singing hymns too loud, yet I continued to sing and play in many groups since. I mounted an off, off, Broadway musical for three nights and endured leading roles in community theater. Though my one-man show practically killed me, I dragged its dreadful equipment with me to Florida out of habit where I wound up singing only in nursing homes.

Since Covid, I’ve not played or sung a note in three years until last evening.

Though I considered it often, I resisted joining the St. Augustine Community chorus since moving down here without knowing why. They didn’t require auditions, but I talked myself out of joining even after being quadropoly vaxed until a few days ago.

Among all the amazing things happening in this town I choose not to I participate in, joining the chorus has tugged for my consideration like a needy child since I moved here. I could ignore the flourishing community theater full of younger, prettier thespians, but after hearing the STACC on YouTube, I felt something beckoning.

Dave regularly attends various classes at Flagler college. He shops and routinely haunts junk stores while I curate our backyard. Covid seemed designed for recluses like me. While most others felt adrift, I loved quarantine until recently when rather than wondering if swallowing pond water, eating random mushrooms growing in my compost pile or contracting flesh-eating bacteria might kill me, I decided to walk into town and attend a choir rehearsal.

“But I don’t do churchy things,” I heard my mind quibble as I headed out at 5:15 pm to walk there in my clean shirt, shorts, underwear, socks, and sneakers rather than barefoot in the pair of ragged multi-purpose nylon shorts I’d worn for years.

The dome of the Memorial Presbyterian Church looms about a mile away above perhaps the most gorgeous town in the United States. It shimmers across a Venetian style drawbridge beneath spectacular bay sunsets while I scan for acceptable TV. Anyone else would be thrilled to have special access to the memorial Henry Flagler built for his beloved doomed daughter Jennie Louise, but crossing the bridge of Lions covered in sweat, I nearly turned back.

By the middle I was soaked. I deliberately hadn’t worn deodorant for fear of being whiffed by some allergic singer but as several dolphins breeched beneath me, all I could think was what a fool I was for attempting to walk anywhere in five o’clock sun.

Suddenly I was back on the Waterville Road during mud season, late for choir practice when a moose lumbered down the bank ahead of me and stopped unwilling to move. Unwilling to break for fear of getting stuck, I nearly plowed into her leaning on my horn. Would I have rather hit her than be late for choir or was I more afraid to get stuck in the Cold Hollow Mountain mud, I wondered fanning myself with my soaked shirt beside blazing bridge blazing traffic. Reaching town, I searched but immediate shade, was taken up by homeless people so I continued walking and fanning.

Sneaking in the back entrance of the former Hotel Ponce de Leon into one of its gilded Victorian men’s rooms of what is now Flagler College, I tore off my shirt. Unwilling to look at myself wiping my old torso with paper towels like a disturbingly old little boy, I told myself I didn’t care about being a soloist and I simply wanted to reestablish my sanity whatever that might have ever been, I hoped dabbing my face.

Anything besides gardening would help, I grieved as sweat continued to pour and memories of being desperately self-conscious released dormant paranoia. Being around others will help, I kept repeating as I left the grand hotel’s cool back stairs and entered it’s lush expansive grounds.

Squinting at the goldenly dome of the Memorial Church between intimidating date palms while slinging my wet tee shirt like a subtropical shirtless half-blind Jean Valjean, I spread it on a bench to dry. Slouching in the shade, I wondered how long before a security guard would suspect I was drunk or homeless when I had a sudden urge to sleep. I’d eaten early and these days like clockwork naps are required after dinners.

I’m regularly lurched awake by mental constructs before sleep and already joining a chorus added fresh items to my prop closet of nightmares. Gotta’ hand it to the Florida sun, I thought watching the last of the shirt’s moisture evaporate before my eyes. I scaned for a shady approach to poor Jennie Louise’s edifice while donning my completely dry shirt and headed off.

As I entered the church’s gothic courtyard listening for Jennie vespers, the six o’clock detuned chimes began clanging from the St. Augustine cathedral a few blocks away. Regularly programmed with an array of beguiling melodies to enchant tourists, I refused to consider the significance of “Send in the Clowns;” my depressive mother’s favorite song she and I most loved to sing drunk at the piano.

Far beneath gargoyles I made out perched along the ornate Presbyterian eves stood a presentable older, yet at least fifteen years younger than I gentleman with dyed hair studying sheet music. Distant thunder rumbled as my imagination laughed at and prepared to vomit rainwater on me. After excusing myself then asking if the intense man was there to sing, he told me, “The amateur chorus is on hiatus.” He sang in several smaller, more refined choirs that met weekly that required auditions which I must arrange for with their directors. “Unlike SACC, these groups sing repertoire not just anyone can handle,” he said. They were well into rehearsals and I’d need to wait ‘till October.

Gazing up half blind, at what I’d assumed were gargoyles, wondering if I could even see notes anymore, I asked what turned out to be decorative turrets (Presbyterians don’t have gargoyles) to have mercy on my soul as a gaggle of flirtatious older woman arrived assuming I’d auditioned and would be joining them.

“It’s a boy,” one of them said, causing others to laugh in reference to the scarcity of men in choirs. Another took my arm as the gentleman glared at me, but before either of us had a chance to say “um,” I was already heading upstairs.

Besides déjà vu, being around singers with their telltale personalities was triggering. Without auditioning or knowing a soul while realizing everyone including the turrets imagined I was meant to be there, I glanced at the director who nodded back at me as if she too was under a spell to want me.

Though I’d never heard any of the music, the rehearsal was fabulous. “Like home away from home,” I thought catching myself smelling one of my armpits.

Sonorous vibrations from complex chords gave me the chills as I struggled to see blotchy note values with one eye. Two hours flew by, but rather than showing enthusiasm or introducing myself for fear of explanations, I darted for the stairs like I had in my twenties.

Thick with aromas of exceptional downtown food, St. Augustine’s evening air is edible. There’s nothing like it on a summer night as I imagined trekking to and from rehearsals through America’s oldest city in January wearing only a light sweater.

Though I might prefer dolphins to moose, continually in my head, I cared little for the coincidental animals accompanying me to and that or any rehearsal. All I wanted was be enveloped within the lush sound of thirty people singing John Rutter. Of all choral composers on earth, he’d always been my favorite.

I seemed to be okay with so much swirling in my head unable to be present in my own life. Someone might have been photographing night herons in the colorful wiggly reflections, but I didn’t care. Though there are always some, I don’t remember a single other walker on the bridge heading home. All I recall was fumbling with my phone to find Rutter’s “Mass of the Children” and “Feel the Spirit” on YouTube.

College memories flooded in as my shirt fiercely flapped in the dark warm wind before the storm hit. I saw myself returning in tears from a voice lesson listening to a cassette tape of an exquisite baritone singing Fauré. Maria had been excruciatingly flat holding her last note of our duet as I recalled for the first time in forty years singing us singing the finale movement of Benjamin Britten’s “Chichester Psalms.” I remembered countless formerly painful flashbacks making my way home before the rain, yet none of them were as dark as I remembered.

I’d attempted to snuggle under a wool bespread in a garret overlooking the Adirondacks with the man who taught me to pronounce German Lieder. The audience gasped at Maria’s flat note as mine which was correct sounded wrong too. Gazing at the big dipper before it disappeared behind the clouds, I welled up recalling my father who always barked at me to relax whenever he heard me sing and felt him give me his blessing for the first time ever.

Miraculously I had no trouble sleeping that night and the following morning, rather than continuing to listen on YouTube with its tenacious, derailing advertisements, I purchased recordings of the two Rutter pieces on iTunes then shared them with Dave.

The two of us sat on the couch while glorious rejoicing in our living room welled him up as well. He held my hand as I sobbed uncontrollably, knowing we’d both devoted what might have been the best years of our lives to the relentless insecurity of being split in two by homophobia. By the Mass’s end, whatever potential each of us had for remaining happiness emerged into clear focus.

“Not much for me in this town,” I sobbed ironically recalling myself as a toddler crying for attention which rarely appeared. I’d pleaded with strangers to see my Manhattan shows and tortured myself to learn foreign languages so I could sing repertoire correctly. Enduring relentless critiques from depressed teachers and fellow singers, after decades of equipment and other failures tearing at my heart until only brain-damaged nursing home residents could appreciate me, Covid preferred I tend to my garden.

“Lord, have mercy, I said when I first heard weekend cover bands wafting across the water. I could never listen to music while working outside and could only stand the drone of politics or apocalyptic predictions while gardening. Even birdsongs unnerved me as any series of tones made me want to run.

“It’s okay to want to be liked,” I heard myself repeating the following night after listening to the Rutters all day. I looked forward to attempting to learn the bulk of my parts before the next rehearsal and was determined defy my age by writing about the truth.

I’ve pretended I could sight read my entire life. After so many daunting experiences and schooling, I’m embarrassed to admit I never learned. Though I can write it, I’m a deer in the headlights when it comes to reading. I’ve only used sheet music for words and reminders of impending movement but now in addition to being mildly dyslexic with only one eye, I’m half deaf from tinnitus at sixty-six but far less a less of a liar than I used to be, I struggled during that rehearsal and told the man below the Gargoyles that I could read.

Glued to what little I could gather from the blurry sheet music, I mimicked what I could from the baritones beside me. Frequently lost yet Helen Keller stoic, without my former powers of recall, I stared at the music like a blank old man afraid to be seen losing his mind.

During announcements I learned they’ll need about five or six thousand dollars for professional instrumentalists. Nothing was mentioned about paying outsiders to sing the exquisite solos woven throughout the program. Among so many impressive voices, my plan is to learn the bulk of my parts in all thirteen pieces by next week, so I’ll be less likely to be asked to leave.

Though I hope I won’t need to beseech any more turrets for mercy, memorizing will be good for my synapses while keeping me out of the garden. If temperatures and humidity continue in the nineties as expected, next week I’ll drive.