Over the Top Page 3

  I didn’t need gigantic Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood moments to know that there was something wrong with me. I got plenty of cues from other kids, from my parents, from my grandparents. When I danced: “Do your movements have to be so flimsy?” my grandma asked. When I developed a devout binding obsession with Hanson and all I wanted was to grow out my hair, but lacked the patience and tenacity it took to get there, so I would put the back of my hair into a mini-ponytail with my fringe out, the boys at school would point at me—sort of a mean and straight version of Karen from Will and Grace saying, “What’s this, what’s that, what’s going on here?”

  The thing is, I had a lot of secrets already, even as a little kid. There was a multitude of reasons my personality was bigger than Dolly Parton’s hair. There was an emptiness I was trying to fill, an unspeakable shame I was trying to soothe. So many things I wasn’t able to talk about yet. Why was I so nervous around my dad’s immaculately handsome, hairy-chested best friend? Why did being in the YMCA locker room send my heart aflutter? Why was it that the other boys wanted to ride bikes and I wanted to figure out how to blow-dry my Barbie’s hair without melting her face? Why did I have flashbacks at night of events that didn’t feel right but no matter what, I couldn’t give voice to? There was nobody to tell about that kind of shame and pain. So creating pockets of joy for myself was an art I learned early.

  * * *

  Maybe it was only because I was so lonely that I was able to make a space in my imagination to be so free. At some point I started choreographing my own carpet figure-skating routines. Even if I had no one to share my deepest secrets with, I could still dance on my own, anyway, and find a space I was passionate about. Those moments of freedom gave me all the little endorphin hits I needed to connect the dark trenches of loneliness together and find a little light.

  From figure-skating routines, I progressed to balance beam routines and trampoline stick-it competitions. By the time I was ten I had won enough imaginary gold medals for the USA to be Shannon Miller, Simone Biles, and Aly Raisman.

  It was a lesson for me. Even in my loneliest times, I knew I could go deep into my imagination and create a better reality for myself, and that spilled into my life in so many other areas. Those little moments kept me expanding instead of shrinking into myself. If my passion for life was a flame, so many people were trying to figure out how to douse water on it—but I kept it burning within myself. No amount of homophobic, misogynistic fuckery was going to pull me out of that.

  People love to say “Be yourself”—but for me, there was no choice! I was too gorgeously myself, with femininity dripping from every pore—I had no option to be anything but myself. She’s as gay as they come, honey. I can’t even do a straight accent—it’s not in my repertoire.

  I lived for an opportunity to make my world more fun and beautiful. And every so often, I’d have an opportunity to bring that vivacious flair to more than just my Olympic performances. In kindergarten, my teacher, Mrs. Tashlikova, announced that we would be doing a pumpkin decorating contest. When my mom picked me up from school, I screamed, “Mom, Mom, Mom! We’re doing a pumpkin decorating contest!”

  “Oh, Jackie, that’ll be so fun!” she said. “Let’s go to the store and get our supplies together. I think it would be really cute to make a mouth out of two tortilla chips and get a kidney bean to use for a tongue.” Now you see where I get my imagination.

  I knew that this was the cutest most award-winning idea of literally all time. My mom worked a lot—from eight in the morning until eight o’clock at night—so she wasn’t always around to help me with school projects. But this day was special. We had a vision. I was sure we would win. My mom? Please. Her creativity was unparalleled. At the very least I was certain we’d make the top three.

  We set all the materials up on the kitchen counter. We carved a pumpkin that had the cutest green apple eyes with red pepper lips. “Or,” my mom said, “we could do a green eyebrow.”

  “Let’s create a banana nose!” I said.

  By the time we were done, we had served a pumpkin face that was truly orig.

  The next day was the judging part of the competition. In the hallway, we all put our pumpkins up on a display case, so on the way into class, everyone had a chance to look at all the pumpkins, then vote. After recess, the winners were announced. These flawed-ass, small-town, no-creativity-having kids had the nerve to not even vote my pumpkin in the top five. I hadn’t been this rattled by an unexpected result since Ross Perot’s unprecedented third-party candidacy took over 19 million votes, which was 18.91 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 presidential election.

  I was rattled to my core. I was sure we’d been unceremoniously robbed. Were people jealous of our family because of the newspaper? It was my first introduction to the cruel reality that haters can be jealous. And Haterade does not taste better cold, or room temperature. It’s very bitter, and hurtful.

  This part of me—this little wounded chubby feminine kid inside—was an easy target.

  * * *

  What would have already been a tough childhood, considering my limp wrist and penchant for sequins, was made tougher by some very early, very confusing encounters that would end up coloring the rest of my life.

  In the church I grew up going to, I went to Sunday school with a group of kids. Sometimes Sunday school was held at a church family’s house, and afterward we would all gather to socialize. There was an older boy who taught me to play a game called Doctor. I would usually end up in a closet missing some of my clothes and not quite sure of exactly what happened—but I felt a heartbeat that I wasn’t used to feeling in my chest, and a nauseating excitement inside that left me feeling a shame that I’d never experienced before.

  At the dinner table, we always talked about what we learned at school that day. One night my mom asked my brother Timofei what he’d studied in school.

  “We learned about HIV!” Timofei said.

  “What did you learn about it?” my mom asked.

  “We learned that you get it when two boys have sex.”

  I dropped my fork. I could feel the color drain out of my face. Tears were streaming down my cheeks before I even knew why. I jumped off my chair and bolted out of the room.

  I sat on the bottom of the stairs, sobbing. My mom came after me. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Jackie, what’s wrong?”

  I told her what had happened with the boy from church. I saw her face twist up in an expression I didn’t recognize. “Where did he touch you?” she said. “What exactly happened?”

  I couldn’t really get the words out. I felt so ashamed, even before I had the language to know what shame was.

  The next afternoon, we met in the living room to have a “family meeting”—to talk about what had happened to me. I know that my mom was trying to get ahead of the issue and resolve it, and to undo any damage done to me, but sexual abuse—having your little-kid world painted in colors that you don’t understand—can’t be painted into a neat little box right away. It’s not something for which you can shake the Etch-a-Sketch and have it not be so. Once it’s happened, you can’t change it back.

  I was so embarrassed that my dad knew what had happened to me, that my brothers knew about it too. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was saying or how it was going to impact anyone.

  “Experimentation is normal,” my mom said patiently. “But we’ll never go over there again.”

  I nodded.

  From the rest of my family there was a definite sense that I was just doing it for the attention, which was almost more damaging than it happening in the first place. But I know that this happens a lot: Nobody wants to believe that their family member or sibling or child has been molested. It’s so much easier for people to think they’re fabricating, embellishing, or confused—or that they’re a co-conspirator in it—than it is to really sit with the reality of what happened.

  Which was that an older boy took advantage of a four-year-old, which was not oka
y, no matter how you slice that particular pie.

  I love a box. I love no loose ends. I love a clearly processed idea. Taco Bell is my favorite fast food because she’s as processed as it gets. But in this case, my introduction to my sexuality needed to be processed, not tucked away in a neat little box never to be seen or heard from again.

  But that’s exactly what we did.

  * * *

  That same year, one night after dinner, I was watching Looney Tunes. It might have been Road Runner. (I also lived for Tom and Jerry, and the NRA-card-carrying Elmer Fudd.)

  “Boys, come into the bedroom!” I heard my mom call. I followed my brothers into my parents’ bedroom and sat down on the floor, crisscross applesauce, on the emerald-green carpet, sandwiched between the water bed and a white wicker loveseat—all of which created a bedroom so painfully ’80s it could have been ripped from a period sitcom.

  “Boris, Timofei, Jack,” my dad said. He cleared his throat. “Your mom and I love you very much and we want you to know that we will always love you. That will never change.” Timofei put his head in his hands and I felt the room shift. Kind of like in Twister, when Bill Paxton picks up that handful of dirt and lets it ominously sift through his fingers, like, Oh no, there’s about to be an F3. Something was going down.

  “Your dad and I are going to get a divorce,” my mom said. “But that doesn’t mean anyone did something wrong.” (Even in that moment, she was diplomatic AF.) “This is nobody’s fault.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Boris said, and then he began to sob, and then Timofei was sobbing too. A silence filled the room. Everyone was crying except for me. Only one thing came to my mind.

  “Can I have the ring?” I said.

  “What ring?” my mom asked.

  “Your wedding ring,” I said. I loved the diamond, but what really caught my eye were the sapphire stones on the outside of the main diamond, which I knew was something that would exponentially increase the value of my geode collection. As an avid rock collector, I knew how to spot a good find when I saw one.

  Everyone laughed. “No,” she said. “You can’t have the ring.”

  I didn’t understand how this was going to impact my life—how could I? Divorce was just something I’d heard Matt Lauer and Katie Couric talk about when they discussed how high the divorce rate was (along with the five-hundred-year flood, which was happening that year, in 1993). All I really knew was that I’d be one of those kids now.

  The day after they told us, my brothers and I dressed our obese yellow lab, Ginny, in Umbro shorts, a basketball jersey, and sunglasses and took her to their bedroom, where they were still sleeping together in bed, to wake them up. We thought maybe they’d see how cute the dog was and how funny we could be and decide to take it back, to not get divorced after all.

  It didn’t work.

  I didn’t cry about it, maybe because I still didn’t totally understand what was happening. Plus, I wasn’t enthralled by my dad’s company, anyway. He wasn’t around much, and his temper was fierce. He had an exceptionally low tolerance for spills, messes, and feminine behavior, which—as you can imagine—didn’t bode well for baby me. So I wasn’t upset that he’d be moving out—but everyone else was so upset, so I tried to act like I was too.

  Mostly I hid away with my gorgeous highly processed kid snacks and my figure skaters on TV. Those girls gave me a glimpse into grace and female badassery I hadn’t yet experienced in my small town—beyond the country club, at least. When figure skating wasn’t on TV, I’d go down to the basement of our little suburban house to practice my figure-skating routines—lining the walls of the room with cushions to create my very own rink, passing endless hours gliding around the room with the grace and ease of a yet-undiscovered Michelle Kwan.

  From the outside, my carpet-skating routines were not actually quite as major as they felt inside my head, but they gave me something so important. Choreographing routines on my own in the basement for hours on end gave my imagination a place to roam free. Nobody was there to tell me how to move my body or what music was right for me to listen to. I could daydream about how if I nailed this short program I’d be heading into the long program in second place and could lock down my spot on the Olympic team. Being able to entertain yourself is a valuable skill, especially if you’re in a prolonged dark space. (For me, that was Quincy.) Maybe that’s dramatic and maybe I’m too sensitive, but there wasn’t much naturally occurring joy in that era for me, so it was up to me to make my own. Especially being such a soft, round kid—who wanted to be a fit, sporty one—dancing made me feel graceful. It gave me a freedom I didn’t have anywhere else.

  Sometimes I even managed to get my two very heterosexual older brothers to participate. At one point, I insisted that in order to get better at my craft, I would need proper judges and critiques from my family, so I made these little index cards with a technical score side and an artistic impression side. I explained to Timofei and Boris and my mom that technical merit score comes from how nice your layback spin is, how clean your jumps are, how swift your footwork is, and artistic impression was more about how expressive you are with the music. When I dance to Mariah, do you feel it? (My mom was very cued in on figure skating, so she didn’t need the explanation.) Once the index cards were ready to go, with their nationalities assigned—Timofei was typically the Ukrainian judge and Boris was a very tough Italian, while my mom liked to be a generous scoring Brit—we were ready to go. One time, my mom suggested that Timofei and Boris each do a routine to give me a little competition. I was shocked when both said yes. Timofei promptly improvised a dance to a Meatloaf song, where he had to do his axels as dunks with a minibasketball into a minibasketball hoop that he had installed at the top of the rink, because apparently this was the go-to method for butching up a potentially femme sports moment in my town. I scored him terribly because who does a fucking toe loop holding a GD basketball—am I right? And after that, I never let them judge my routines again. Fucking Meatloaf. But you know what? I think Timofei had fun. (Boris was so aghast by Timofei’s performance that he could no longer take to the carpet-ice and had to withdraw from the competition.)

  So it wasn’t all bad for Jack. When commercials to support starving orphans in other countries came on in the middle of my Power Rangers—“For only twenty-five cents a day, you can keep one of these babies alive!”—I would think I was so lucky.

  Looking back now, I think: how lucky I was to have a mom and auntie who allowed me to explore my ideas in femininity. Whether it was playing dress-up, my hilarious why-is-this-kid-asking-about-Madeleine-Albright questions, or wondering why my soft body didn’t look like that Bowflex commercial, I had some supportive voices that many people like me wouldn’t have ever had. My parents were raising a queer child in the midst of the AIDS crisis while they were both the age that I am now. I had terrible moments, but I also had moments of freedom and support to grow into who I am now. My father, too, for all of his shortcomings, has come the farthest. At my age, my dad already had three sons under the age of seven. The fear he had for his youngest son and the challenges this son was going to face in life, socially, emotionally, and in terms of health in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, was the impetus for so many of his actions. I’m sure a piece of it was how this would or could reflect on him as a parent, but I know the regret he feels for tearing me out of those evening gowns. I know he would do it differently if given the chance. The ups and downs of life have a way of softening your typical heterosexual man. My dad has come a really long way. As much as I have wanted him to be a more accepting or present father, he is still someone who knows me better than I wish he did, and has a sense of humor everyone falls in love with. My dad could be a dick, but he could also be lovely, and time has softened and taught him a lot. (I also, through twice-a-week accosting phone calls and relentless debates, got him to vote for Gary Johnson in 2016 instead of Trump, so my dad definitely has a heart.) But baby Jack, how little you knew about what you were in for, you little gorg
eous queen.

  Chapter 3

  The Loyal Tea

  HAVING A NEWLY DIVORCED, WORKING MOM MEANT WE HAD THREE different babysitters. I loved Antonina, Darya, and Veronika so much, but I loved Veronika the most, because unlike Darya and Antonina she let me have the entire frozen burrito instead of just half, which were these gorgeous frozen burritos that were brown-paper-bag-material-wrapped, with a purple label for the bean and cheese, blue for the chimichanga, and red for the steak fajita, but I only had eyes for the bean and cheese purple-labeled one that I would place in this gorgeous oval-shaped casserole dish, and drown in half a bag of Kraft Mexican shredded cheese, then add two huge dollops of sour cream, a big scoop of salsa, and a Diet Coke on the side. Afternoon snack delight.

  Occasionally, none of the babysitters were available, so my mom would have to make us dinner, then take us back to the office, where she’d continue working until late at night or have a working Saturday moment. Sleeping bags under the desk realness. Running around a newspaper business after dark, it’s a wonder my hand didn’t get chopped off in the press machine. I was literally running wild. (Also, I definitely took my Rollerblades once and was blading all over the offices of the Herald-Whig.)

  I loved the newsroom. She was hustle. She was bustle. Tons of men in midwestern newsroom suit attire: khakis and button-ups, probably from Sears—or worse, Joseph A. Bank, those pleated pants that make me physically ill to see. Not because they’re ugly, but because they’re just so gender conforming. But what I really lived for was the layout room, where they would be making the layouts for the next morning’s paper. Pre-computers, that meant a layout floor with cutting boards the size of a newspaper where they would meticulously cut and paste each page of the paper before running it through the printing press. There were darkrooms with photos hanging, still sticky with solution, under red lights, and a lady named Galina who ended up dying of a brain aneurysm when she was only forty-six. She had flaming red hair in a jaunty ponytail and smoked like a chimney and I was obsessed with her. Galina would come get me and keep me from bothering my mom, and we would stand in the darkroom together, her lifting me up so I could hang the pictures to develop. I also loved riding the back freight elevator—or as we called it, the “scary elevator,” with a cage that you had to close yourself into. To this day, when I see an old elevator like that, my mom’s voice comes into my head and I can hear her asking: “Are we going to take the scary elevator today?”