Over the Top Page 13

  Through my childhood, I had railed against Steve as a father figure. My mom was my best friend, and when he came along, he changed that dynamic. Suddenly, she was my mom. I resented him for this until I was about eleven years old, when it hit me that I only had seven more years in that house, whereas my mom had the rest of her life to lead. I wouldn’t be spending that time in Quincy. She deserved to be happy.

  But Steve was an incredible stepdad. He didn’t have to love me the way he did, and his willingness to do so made me love him back. In addition to diving backward, he had taught me to change tires, bait a hook, and to drive. He would drive me on the back of his motorcycle while shouting “bad to the bone.” He would drive me around extra so we could finish scream-singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” from Sister Act 2, and you couldn’t even afford to get us started on the Moulin Rouge! or Les Misérables soundtracks. What would happen if I lost him? Who would be there for my mom? Who would be her best friend? I sang Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” at their wedding. (Very badly, obv.) But he was my mom’s eyes when she couldn’t see. He did see the best in her, and I knew it. She didn’t deserve to see him fight for his life like that.

  Cancer will always be a thief, a greedy bitch who steals the dignity from the people closest to you. It’s a fate I could not wish on anyone. This fate, this unfairness, this reality was something I would not face—could not face. I would go out into the world and see that cancer drama and I would raise it a sexual compulsivity retraumatizing disaster of equal proportions in my own life. This part, I had control over.

  In retrospect, I know that’s why I took a slash-and-burn approach through my own life so hard. It was so much easier to create havoc in my life than to have to face what was going on in Quincy. I know it was so unfair to my mom to have to show up for me and Steve at the same time. But I was doing the best I could. Those annoying fucking parts. They always think they know how to help. That’s the thing: they really do think they’re helping, because it feels good when you’re doing it. But really, honey? It’s just wreckage city, and everyone is naked and traumatized.

  Once I got to rehab, my therapist said I needed to focus on my recovery and since Sergei and I were broken up and I was in the first year of this new life, no new relationships were suggested. Instead I busied myself in rehab, assuming the role of the pageant mom of the group, doing haircuts and plucking eyebrows in the bathroom. (This was strictly not allowed, but in my mind, so was having bad brows. What choice did I have?) I left treatment, having given my lungs their first working break in eight years. I had a new lease on life and I was ready to get that work-life balance poppin’.

  A few weeks after I got back to LA, Sergei and I had started seeing each other again. A few weeks after that, we were together again. So immediately I’m following the program guidelines exceptionally well. And I was a faithful kitten. Back with Sergei and back to seeing the same therapist. This time, I was being fully honest. For a good eight months. Which—roll your eyes all you want, I know you think eight months doesn’t sound that long—but consider that from the time I met Sergei until the time I went to rehab, it was only about three months. Eight months of good behavior was a demonstration of maturity ferosha that was giving me life.

  Then it came time for my salon Christmas party, and Sergei wouldn’t take work off to come with me. I was angry, but more than that, I was hurt. I had been trying so hard to become the kind of partner that he deserved, but he hadn’t budged an inch in terms of giving me the types of attention that I needed. If we weren’t going to have the type of sex that I wanted, at least could he give me the time? But to no avail.

  You probably know where this is headed, gorgeous reader. Pretty soon I had started cheating on him again, and this time I was doing it like it was my job. I was double-lifeing the shit out of that man.

  He’d leave for work and I’d be, like, “Bye, babe!” and then have a random person come over. We would be complete skanks. Twice in the span of less than forty minutes. When I saw Sergei that night, I’d smile like everything was fine. Again, I know what you’re thinking. I’m an absolute snake.

  And then I tried meth for the first time. That’s hard for me to write. What I really wanted to do in this book was give it a nickname from Harry Potter, like Voldemort—because meth is that one thing that I never thought I could, or would, do. Where I grew up I had seen those mugshot pictures of people’s faces ruined by the drug. That could never be me. But as it turns out, it could be me, and would be if I didn’t get myself to a place where I could learn to quell the demons eating at me. My life was spiraling before my eyes. I’m writing this now because meth has been and continues to be an epidemic in the gay community that we still don’t talk about. My life, and the lives of so many others, has been irrevocably changed by the stigma and shame attached to how gay men use meth, and the silence surrounding it.

  So here’s what happened. I went to the house of a couple I’d met on Grindr and they were smoking from a pipe and they took a hit and then blew it into my mouth. I immediately freaked out in their room. I knew that I had just crossed a line to a whole new Requiem for a Dream level that made me super fucking scared. I left their house, went back to my place, and just stared at the wall in my dark room and cried. The next morning, I went to my therapist and told her what had happened. I knew that I had to come fully clean to Sergei and that I had to go back to rehab. It would be my second straight birthday I was spending in inpatient rehabilitation.

  One thing I have come to notice in my life is that recovery for me has not been linear. It’s more two steps forward, three back, five forward, two back, so I’m always improving but there are setbacks within the improvement. Growing up around so much twelve-step, and seeing so much abstinence preached in rehab and in church, I started to take on an idea that healing had to be all or nothing, which has really not been my truth. A lot of people do hit a rock bottom, find a mode of healing that works, and never mess up again. For me, I was trying to untangle sexual abuse, drug abuse, and PTSD, and it was something that for me wasn’t conducive to a never-never-smoking-weed-again approach. Just because we mess up doesn’t mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect. Somewhere I took on some of the dogma that twelve-step holds true that I don’t agree with now. I don’t believe once an addict, always an addict. I don’t believe addiction is a disease that warrants a life sentence. Twelve-step programs saved my stepdad and they helped save me. Finding groups to be open and honest with is of priceless importance, but if you ever mess up or can’t string a couple months together without a slipup you’re not ruined. There are a million ways to reach recovery. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t find a way that works for you.

  Last time I was in rehab, I’d felt like I needed to get far away from my environment, but this time I wanted to stay close to home. I thought that would give me a better shot at integrating after I got out. And Sergei didn’t cut me off like a dead foot this time. Instead, he accepted the fact that sexual compulsivity was something that was going to be a more multifaceted problem to deal with, but he told me if I promised to be honest with him about everything that was going on, this was something we could work through together. There was nothing I wouldn’t try to save this relationship. I didn’t know if I was worth saving, but this relationship, I knew, had to be. There was no choice.

  Back in treatment, I saw a vast array of amazing people with different challenges come into that group: heroin addicts, alcoholics, gambling addicts. You name it—we did it. The gooey butter cake they served on Sundays at family day? Legend. The group therapy? Major. I met a girl named Helenskaya who I remain close with to this day. I was happy that Steve and my mom, my dad, and both my brothers were able to come visit me for family weekend. As Steve’s cancer was progressing, we all wanted a chance to be able to come together. The family rallied around me in support, and I told them what I had been up against since leaving home. It was a painful meeting, but one that brought us clos
er. I’d done the soul-searching I needed to do to heal. Once this huge family meeting was over where I was able to close the open-ended circle of the painful childhood family memories, everyone now believed me. I was able to tell everyone in my immediate family my truth and what growing up with all that shame around my abuse did to me, and they all heard me. I felt a weight lifted. This time there was no way I was going to face-plant on the ice-skating journey of my life.

  Except that week after I got out of rehab—after a long day of outpatient therapy, which is a 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. sort of group therapy day program, followed by a couple of stressful haircuts at my new salon—I felt the familiar lurching of my body to act out in some way. Just because I was able to be honest with people in my life didn’t mean the habits were magically cleared. Now, for the second time, I had gone to inpatient rehab, transitioned out, and relapsed.

  What I really wanted to do was smoke weed, but I knew that would stay in my system for up to thirty days, and when I went back to outpatient on Monday, it would show up on the drug test. So I decided that the much smarter approach to a quick and consequence-free relapse would be to do an upper moment, because you pee that out of your system in just twenty-four hours. Because living back in rehab, spending my family’s money, no phone, to sit alone in my despair, wasn’t an option. The realization that the honest moment I had with my family and partner wouldn’t immediately cure me was devastating, like really devastating.

  What was the catalyst for my relapse, you ask? It was a mix of the “fuck its” and a chance encounter. (Fuck its are something you can catch when you have just been pushed too far outside of your threshold of tolerance, so you say “fuck it.”) Years earlier, pre-Sergei, I’d gone out with a yoga teacher who said to me on our second date, “You’re so different from any guy I’ve ever dated.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “They all had six-packs,” he said.

  In all the interactions with the people I casually dated, this man hurt my feelings more deeply in much less time than it took most men. Casual body shaming by someone I really liked and had been intimate with left a lasting scar in those early twenties of mine. And of all the people in the world, I ran into that same yoga teacher from those years before. His apartment was on my drive home from rehab and my addict Spidey-sense alerted me that his presence was near at a random stoplight in West Hollywood. I turned to my left and there he was. Into the car he jumped.

  We figured out pretty quickly what trouble we would be getting into. He pulled out a bag and a pipe. We went out all night. I cheated on Sergei relentlessly again, but this time, unlike the first time I had done meth, I stayed and acted out sexually. When I dropped the yoga teacher off at his house, he looked at me.

  “Do you wanna lose your relationship?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.” I was shirtless and missing a shoe but still wearing my sweatpants. In a testament to how weird a drug meth is, none of this felt at all off.

  I went back to my apartment to find Sergei sitting on my doorstep.

  “Something has to change,” he said. And I knew he was right.

  I was sure that the problem absolutely, positively had to be Los Angeles. I was surrounded by temptations and triggers.

  It also so happened that through my inherent skankitude, I had gotten us bedbugs in our West Hollywood apartment and that was just one too many things. Not to mention, Steve’s condition was rapidly deteriorating, and I wanted to be closer to my family.

  Somehow, I convinced Sergei—and myself—that we should move to St. Louis. It was close enough to Quincy for us to be a bigger part of my family’s life, but far enough away that it wasn’t that impending sense of doom—oh my God, I’m going back to the place that I spent seventeen years desperately trying to escape.

  Steve always told me that no matter where you go, there you are. But I was utterly convinced that if we just made a clean break, everything would be different.

  And it was. We moved to St. Louis and my sexual compulsivity magically cleared, like the world’s acne.

  Steve beat his cancer.

  Voldemort was never to be seen or heard from again.

  And the next ninety-nine pages of this book are blank, for you to journal about your thoughts on the book. Maybe you could decoupage some of your favorite actresses. Or color! Just, like, make it your own and personalize it.

  Okay, that’s not what happened.

  It’s about to get dark. And because it’s about to get so dark, here’s a cute little sixth-grade report I did on Bill Clinton. Enjoy!

  (Monica, you are an amazing person and I’m sorry for what you went through. You are an incredibly brave, fierce person.)

  Chapter 9

  Jonathan and the No Good, Very Bad Summer

  PICTURE THIS: I’M IN THE BATHROOM. SITTING AT MY FEET IS MY precious baby cat, Bug. I’m getting ready for the majesty of what was probably the fifth stranger eggplant of the day. Bug is looking incredulously up at me as I dance around in place, waiting to evacuate the cleansing water. I know exactly what he’s thinking. Are you serious? Can you put your balloon down for long enough to pet me and feed me? Can you make it a day without taking a different D? Is there a soul in there? How about let’s turn our phone off, tell that man he’s not coming over, and order some nice takeout and stop this nightmare. If not, I’m going to call your mother. You’ve been shaking naked in the corner holding a box of azithromycin on and off for weeks now. I’m gonna need you to get it together, girl.

  I learned as a yoga teacher that you should never lie to your students. If you say you’re going to do something one more time on each side, you better do things one more time on each side. So in that spirit of honesty, I apologize to you when I said everything was magically cleared after I moved to St. Louis. Because actually, things got worse.

  We arrived in St. Louis in a truly gorgeous time of year, when there was 105 percent humidity with no end in sight. Sergei got a job working retail, but we hoped that with my family’s local connections he would be able to eventually get a better job. Unfortunately that never did end up happening. We had hoped moving to a smaller job market with lower cost of living would help us succeed and lower stress. In reality we both took pay cuts, and somehow between moving and reestablishing ourselves we actually were more stressed and more strapped financially. I got a rental studio to build a hair clientele out of, because it’s always smart to move to a new city with no clients and get a job at a salon that has no walk-ins and is rental based with again literally no foot traffic whatsoever. Sounds like a recipe for success if you ask drug-addled, psychotically depressed Jonathan.

  Let’s talk about that psychotically depressed me for a moment. Part of the problem was my basic neurochemistry. I had been on antidepressants for a year with the therapist I’d been seeing, and I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to understand how they’d been affecting me—that the effects were subtle but still important. I’d thought they were going to be a magic pill, and when they weren’t, I decided I didn’t need them anymore and stopped taking them cold turkey not long after I arrived in St. Louis. That’s when I truly snapped.

  A week after we got to St. Louis, my brother got married. Sergei and I drove up to Quincy for the wedding and it became clear that Steve was, at this point, locked in a fight for his life to an extent that I hadn’t realized. The cancer had spread to his brain. The stereotactic radiation was no longer working to beat back the spots of cancer that kept popping up. Shortly after my brother’s wedding, Steve’s doctors decided that a full brain radiation would be the best course of action to get ahead of this stubborn bladder cancer that kept popping up in his brain.

  The next week, they did the full brain radiation on Steve and he was never the same. My mom called me and asked for Sergei and me to come up to Quincy because Steve had had a really bad reaction to the radiation and a large portion of his scalp had been burned and fallen off. And when I say his scalp had fallen off, I mean off. To th
e fascia. Two days after the full brain radiation, he had acquired an infection that went through his scalp down into his torso that rendered him unable to tolerate any more chemo. His blood cell count plummeted. And for three weeks, he couldn’t take chemo and tumors were seemingly popping up overnight—on his chest, on his neck, everywhere.

  The hardest thing about losing a loved one to cancer is when the tide starts to turn and you know that you’re getting beat and you know how serious each minute has become. The team of doctors kept trying to search for the source of the infection, but they couldn’t get it under control. By the time they finally found an antibiotic that would control it, Steve’s blood count had left him in a state where the only option left was palliative care.

  With that, they made the gut-wrenching decision to bring him home.

  When you’re in hospice, the goal is to alleviate any pain and suffering on your way out the door. And to that end, they use morphine. Steve had been sober for twenty-eight years. Having to dose him every day closer toward death . . . There are no words to describe the heartache of watching your hard-fought sober dad be dosed, unconsciously, with morphine. However hard it was for me, I can’t begin to find the words here that would do justice to the otherworldly heart-wrenching pain that this caused our family.

  A day after we got Steve home, our church choir and all Steve’s closest friends came by to say their goodbyes. Steve experienced his first day pain-free in months, getting to see all his friends and family he’d been separated from while he was fighting like an animal for his life. It gave him those gorgeous chemicals that our brains create when we connect with people, making him think maybe he’d made a mistake, and that he’d given in too soon. We talked to his team again about maybe going back on chemo. They said this was really normal—when you come into hospice thinking that maybe you can go back and fight it. But it’s not real.