Over the Top Read online

  Alyosha was a sweetheart, but he was extremely traum due to a very vuln past that rendered him mildly alcoholic adjacent—he had a nasty habit of drunk driving. But he was right in my friend arousal template and I attracted those kinds of people with my bleeding heart. I love someone with a story—always have, always will. So I wasn’t surprised when I got a call from a WeHo gay bar called Trunks that Alyosha was blackout drunk and lain out on the bar, and if someone didn’t come to pick him up, they were going to call the police.

  When I got to Trunks, there Alyosha was, facedown on the bar. But standing against the wall, there was another guy I’d never seen before. He was like a bald black Mr. Clean: six foot three and striking, with big brown venti mocha latte eyes and a big ol’ muscular chest. His name was Sergei. And he was alone.

  “Is anyone sitting here?” I said, pointing to the seat next to him at the bar. He shook his head no. So I picked Alyosha up like a sack of potatoes, threw him over my shoulder, put him in my car, locked the door, and went back into the bar.

  “I’m meeting friends at the Abbey,” he said. “Do you want to join us?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.” We called Anatolia to come pick up Alyosha and off we went. I could only hear every third word he was saying, because the music was deafening, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he wanted to hold my hand and I was instantly in love.

  Sergei and I went to every bar in West Hollywood that night. Our conversations weren’t deep, but they were playful. I couldn’t believe that a boy taller than I was, with a toothy grin, who was visually so masc-for-masc could be into a hippie vegan topknot yogi like me.

  When he dropped me off at home, we made out—but we didn’t hook up. That was unusual for me because typically I would have had him park his car, come up to my place, and vanish into the wind, never to be seen nor heard from again. But not this time. There was something wholesome about Sergei. I really liked him. I could see my stepdad walking me down the aisle of St. John’s Episcopal already.

  Two days later, the next time we hung out, we watched TV and ordered in vegan food. I was proud of myself for making it to the second night before we hooked up. It was the first time I could remember that I felt really connected with a guy I was having sex with. I felt validated in my humanity instead of a degraded mess. My mom had always told me as a teenager that sex was meant to be two spirits coming together. Taking someone inside you is allowing their spirit inside you. Ew, Mom! Gross! But she really did tell me that, and as I experienced connected sex for the first time, I was both riled that the speech she gave me as a teenager was rattling around in my brain and also vaguely comforted that she had turned out to be right.

  On our first real date, Sergei picked me up and took me to the Getty in his car.

  That day at the Getty was so gorgeous and magical. It was my first time there, and I couldn’t believe how shocking it all was—all that white marble. He held my hand. He wasn’t afraid to hold my hand. We took cute pictures positioned like we were at prom—him standing behind me. There was no piece of him that felt ashamed about those moments of public affection, and that meant something to me. He was the first person I didn’t see as being remotely ashamed of me.

  One of my early boyfriends once put his arm around me leaving school, and the instant shame caused me to recoil. So often for gay people, sex and attraction is kept behind closed doors. Of the numerous people I’d been with sexually, there were maybe two total I would’ve felt good about being seen with. Sergei was the ideal image of a partner, the manifestation of every dream I never knew I had.

  I also loved how I felt when people looked at us. I loved how we looked together. I’ve noticed that a lot of people in the LGBTQ+ fam—specifically the L and G—have a tendency to date our identical twins or polar opposites, which I think is just so cute. This isn’t a blanket statement—just a gentle observache. With Sergei I could feel the balancing of each other, his masculine to my feminine. He was the captain of the football team and I was the head cheerleader.

  Once I met Sergei, the mixture of oxytocin, endorphins, vasopressin, testosterone, and estrogen was so intense and exacting that I’m still not sure I’m over it or ever will be fully. He was my first true love.

  I flexed my butt cheeks every time he grabbed my butt for the first four months. I was so busy trying to be what I thought he wanted, which, for some reason, I was sure was nothing more than a really tight butt.

  We had a fundamental disconnect in how we communicated our needs, especially in terms of how we communicated in bed. The way we connected sexually didn’t match the level of intensity I had experienced through so many years of casual app-driven or under-the-influence sexual behavior. (After all, I’d been a very busy girl.) I was unable to tell him what I wanted and needed, which was a great level of intimacy. But we had differences in how we did our gorgeous horizontal tango. Falling in love in what felt like my first real adult relationship and not having him seem to want to passionately throw me around the way I thought he would hurt. And being young, gay, and new to how our gorgeous butts work during sexy-time put strain on our relationship. Because I didn’t feel that fire from Sergei, it set me up to feel rejected.

  Moreover: I didn’t have much time with him. He was such a hard worker. And he had created a good life for himself through nothing but hard work—nobody had helped him. He worked overnight—from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.—and then would go to a coffee shop, where he worked as a manager. Then he would sleep from 4 p.m. until 10:30 p.m., then go back to work.

  So pretty soon I found myself in a relationship with someone who had thirty minutes a day to give. He was so exhausted all the time that by Sundays, he was a zombie. And that wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

  My mom was a work addict, and even though of course I knew how much she loved me, if your love language is quality time and you’re not getting that, it doesn’t matter how much someone tells you they love you—you need the quality time. (If I lost you at “love language,” put this book down and read The 5 Love Languages, because that shit is major. Actually, don’t put this book down—just google it really quick, then read it after you’re done with this book.) Looking back on it, it’s interesting that the first person I fell in love with was similar to my mom in that way. They could show me with their actions and tell me with their words that they loved me, but they couldn’t make the time if I lit myself on fire. So, to answer your question, yes: I fell in love with a big black muscular version of my mom.

  I didn’t always like us together. I always wanted what he didn’t have to give me. And for my part, I couldn’t accept him for who he was, and where he was.

  But, honey, the beginning was gorgeous. Getting tipsy on Sunday Funday, him coming to my house from work the night before to crawl into bed when he didn’t have to work at the coffee shop.

  The first time he ever came with me to yoga, I was nervous because I wore tights with shorts over them to practice in. We were sitting on the couch, and I was in my underwear, and I stood up to get ready. Then I turned to face him.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. “I wear tights to yoga. American Apparel tights and a low-cut, droopy racer-back tank. Serving major Richard Simmons realness.”

  He looked at me funny. “Okay,” he said. “I wear basketball shorts. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I’m going to wear tights.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s great. And can you stop flexing your butt every time I grab it, babe?”

  I was so scared that he was going to reject me. But it didn’t even dawn on him that my tights might make me seem feminine, or that people might judge us. At the time I was still trying to masc it up. Even on Grindr, pre-Sergei, I would very much be like, “Sup, bro?” (Or possibly the ultracasual and even more simple “Sup?”) Even telling that story now, I feel waves of shame because while I’ve become confident and I now love my feminine side, growing to love that part of me took a long time. N
ow all I can do is shower that wounded part of myself that rejected their femininity with compassion and be grateful that I shook off the shackles of toxic masculinity.

  Sergei accepted me as I was. I loved that about him—that he thought I was cute no matter how I dressed, that he didn’t think I was too femme. Of course, he worked every night and every day and would only have a few hours a week for me. But at that point, I was so relieved to find someone who would accept me and love me at all, even if they could only give me a few crumbs of their cake, that it felt like enough.

  Until it didn’t.

  Before moving to LA, I would cruise on gay.com and later Grindr, when that first came out. As life and work got more intense, my hookups did too—in ways that were risky, and soul-eroding. I’d find myself in an impenetrable bubble of searching for something—usually a much older man who was into role-playing the same scenarios that happened to me as a kid. I was trying to re-create these events from my childhood, only in this version, I was the one who had control. I didn’t have the language to explain what this acting-out was about, but through tons of therapy I’ve learned that this was my trauma’s way of working its way out when I reached my threshold for tolerating everything from my unprocessed past, my job, and my relationship with Sergei. As my pain points were triggered, this was how I self-medicated. I felt driven to have hookups like this by some out-of-this-world part of me that was fixated on re-creating these situations to give me this sense of power, because now I could choose where, when, and how my space was entered. I always used condoms—I was terrified of getting STDs—but I had this way of finding myself back in the bubble.

  The first couple times this happened, it felt extremely scary. The mixture of adrenaline and endorphins and panic and excitement was very similar to what I had felt as a kid. What I wasn’t prepared for was the cycle that that created. After I’d been retraumatized, in the days that followed, I was overcome with a sense of shame and grief and panic. What kind of person does this? Who wants to do this? I wasn’t even on drugs. What did it mean if this was something I craved? The shame ran down into a fundamental belief of what I was worth. Which wasn’t a lot. I didn’t know how to deal with it. As I bottled up the shame, it would build and build until I had poked the bear and then I’d be right back in the bubble, looking for it again.

  Right before I met Sergei, it had started to feel like an issue—not like it was approaching crisis levels, but I found myself cruising for sex daily as opposed to weekly. I chalked it up to being in a new city with a ton of gay people around. After all, if you’ve been on the Atkins diet for twenty-one years and then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of the Girl Scout bakery, or Taco Bell headquarters, what do you think is going to happen? I think everyone has the propensity for compulsivity in different areas of their life if the factors all align.

  Back in Arizona, I had been on the floor as a hairdresser, building my own clientele. When you’re in that role, it’s almost like you’re the star of the show—clients ask you about yourself, and you develop real relationships with people. But in this new job, as an assistant, it was never about me. Everything that went wrong was my fault. No one was shy about letting me know that. The need for validation and the desire to be nurtured and sought after was stronger all of a sudden, because I never felt like I was doing a good job or being seen in any way. Being a survivor of sexual abuse, looking to sex for validation and nurturing felt very normal and comforting to me.

  I had been looking to those random hookups over the previous year to fill those gaps in my schedule and in my heart. Once I was with Sergei, I had all this alone time. I didn’t have a ton of friends and I had to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the mornings.

  So after we’d been together for a few months, I went back on Grindr. It was easy to justify: I thought I could just make friends. I wasn’t going to do anything. Maybe we’d trade some dick pics. It was fine. Nothing was going to happen. I knew it was wrong. I knew it was a secret I had to keep. But knowing that something felt wrong, and that I had to keep a secret, was a kind of double life that I was very familiar keeping. When you’re a survivor of abuse, living in chaos can be the most upsetting yet comforting thing in the world. It was for me.

  As all my epic, face-plant run-me-over-with-your-car moments always have, it started this way: It’s going to be fine. I won’t tell anyone. Nothing bad is going to happen.

  Part of me wondered if maybe I needed a therapist who I could talk to about this, because I was starting to get worried about the real-world implications that this behavior could bring to my life. Was it normal that with this handsome drink of water slumbering in bed next to me, all I really wanted was to find an uncle daddy to pretend to play Doctor with me while I was sleeping? Was I a horrible person? Was I incapable of being in a healthy relationship? If I have this propensity to lie to such a good man, do I just fucking suck as a human being? I felt like a prisoner in my mind, as the shame built and built.

  I did end up finding a therapist with the help of Natacha, who had morphed into something like a West Coast mom for me. I was hoping to soothe some of those fears, calm down the acting-out behavior, and save my relationship. But the hard thing about therapy is: if you’re lying through your teeth through a lil friend of mine I like to call “omission,” the therapist can’t really do their job. And then you’re just clearing out your mom of her hard-earned money for your $160-a-session therapy. God, Mom, I’m sorry for being a shit, but at least I eventually paid off your mortgage, right?

  Finally, after several months of mismanaging myself, the dam broke. I cheated on Sergei. It wasn’t even with a guy who I could fulfill my shameful fantasies with—he wasn’t even someone I was attracted to. It was a means to an end, so I could be done with the constant state of anxiety I felt about the never-ending shame pie I was shoving down my throat every night. I wanted to be in love, but I wanted to be out of pain more.

  The day after, Sergei came over after his shift. The secret I’d been so sure I could keep immediately clawed its way out of my throat into his ears upon his arrival. He broke up with me on the spot and left for his night shift.

  I spent the next five nights going to the bathhouse and doing things I would later regret—the kind of sex I couldn’t have with Sergei. I didn’t take any drugs. I didn’t need them—I was high on grief. I was just so ravaged emotionally that I had to ravage my body too.

  After Bath House Bender-gate, I knew I had to do something. I was at my bottom du jour and I was tired of running from the demons. My therapist had already told me that she thought I was dealing with sexual compulsivity, so I’d started attending a twelve-step group for sex addiction in West Hollywood, which was a lot of beautifully damaged queens, just like me, who gave me a real look at recovery, but also the kinds of consequences I might face if I didn’t take this seriously. Having Steve’s positive experience with a twelve-step program guiding me, I had no qualms about engaging in a recovery of my own. Just like wearing tights in yoga, this was something that I had been nervous to share with Sergei when we were still together, but I did, and he accepted me anyway. He knew that this was something I struggled with, and he’d been supportive—up to the point that I had actually cheated on him.

  So with the help of my therapist, to whom I had already fully come clean, I decided to go to an inpatient rehab in Tennessee that had a sex addiction unit. I called Sergei the night before I went, and he came over, and I told him about my week in the bathhouse, and we both cried.

  “Can we talk while I’m there?” I asked him, through choked tears. I really wanted to show him that I didn’t want it to be over.

  “We’ll see, Jackie,” he said.

  Because of the privilege that my family benefited from financially, and the extreme maternal shame that my mother felt from seeing me struggle so mightily for all those years of abuse and bullying in Quincy, I knew she felt personally responsible for so much of my situation. When I told her I needed help, she was even mor
e desperate than I was for me to get it. She shouldered the financial burden of sending me to rehab. She would have given anything for me to be well. As the old adage says, you’re only as happy as your most miserable child.

  There was another person she was desperate to see heal. Steve had recently been diagnosed with early-stage bladder cancer. Mom and Steve knew the struggles I had been facing and, as I was going off to rehab, were realizing that the diagnosis he had been given was in actuality not correct. It wasn’t early-stage. It was terminal cancer that had spread to his kidneys and liver. He was told he had eleven months to live. But I knew Steve wasn’t a quitter.

  My mom and Steve had done their best to shelter me from the diagnosis in the first place. When Steve got diagnosed with cancer, he and my mom knew he would beat it. In my family, we used my grandma’s miraculous beating of cancer as a benchmark for the power of a positive attitude. Steve had that positivity down, in spades. He had beaten addiction—he would beat cancer too. He had always been one of the most positive people I’d ever met. So this cancer diagnosis, coupled with my mom’s wanting to see me get better, had her shielding me from the scope of the day-in and day-out of his exploratory treatment, which kept me from knowing how sick he really was. I was also half a country away, working seven days a week in two states. I couldn’t see it with my own eyes.

  As he started chemo and began to fight the cancer, my mom didn’t hide the severity of it anymore. I started to hear in Steve’s voice during our phone calls what pain he was in, and learn about the invasiveness of the treatments. Think bruised pee-hole. Think tons of blood work. Think endless days of relentless tests. Steve was never a complainer, but he was bruised and battered. I was scared for him. What would happen if my mom had to live without the love of her life?