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  This is clearly very sweet, but for me at the time, it was exhausting. I was pissed that someone was taking my mom’s attention away from me.

  * * *

  For me, a young queer kid in Illinois in the early ’90s, my mom was my confidante and safety blanket, and that blanket had been snatched out of my little gay hands. Then at my brother Boris’s out-of-town soccer tournament, Steve came into the kids’ hotel room and asked me if he could marry my mom. My heart sank. I lifted up my hands to cover my face like I’d just been called on The Price Is Right and acted really excited for Steve. “Yes, of course!” I said.

  “I’m going to ask her tonight,” he said. I was crushed. I realized that I would not be getting away from this person. In fact, I’d only be spending more time with him. And then an even more horrifying thought dawned on me: that I was no longer the be-all and end-all of my mom’s universe.

  As painful and confusing as it was to have my mom go from being my best friend to more of a traditional parent, I realize as an adult now that it was so necessary and healthy because their model of a secure and functioning relationship was and remains the main example of a healthy relationship I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen two people be more for each other and in each other’s corner. I’ve never heard one of them speak ill of the other. Their main goal was protecting their relationship in public and in private. There was nothing that Steve kept from my mom, and vice versa. And without that example, I don’t think I would be a shade of the person I am now.

  Steve worked very hard to soften the blow of their marriage and to win my affection. When the relentless bullying got to me, I would try to play hooky from school. I’d tell Steve, “I think I have a flu in my nose or something.” Or I would complain of pains in my temple and eye socket. Really, I was trying to fake a migraine, like the ones I’d seen in Excedrin commercials, but I didn’t know what they were.

  “I’m sorry you’re sick,” Steve said sympathetically. “Want me to take you to the arcade?” I nodded.

  At Aladdin’s Castle, I’d run around and get tickets aplenty, working my way up to get that elusive Barbie Go-Kart that I was never going to accumulate enough tickets for. It was a mini Barbie-mobile; you couldn’t fit in it, but your Barbie could.

  After twenty minutes or so, Steve would say, “It seems like you’re feeling a lot better, son. Let’s take you to school.” He did that to me three times before I figured out his trick. As irritating and rude as it was for Steve to dupe a helpless seven-year-old, I also realized nobody else from school got to go play gorgeous video games for twenty minutes during schooltime, so even though I had to go back, I got to go back with an endorphin surge, and I’d already chipped away an hour out of the school day, and it freed me up from having to truly commit to playing the role of sick because that’s not good for anyone’s day.

  Meanwhile, in some ways my mom was thriving, but I also saw her struggling with disordered eating and her weight. Finding balance for her health did not come easily, and that affected me, too, since I was also out of control in so many ways.

  When the surgeon general in the ’50s came out and said that tobacco was bad for you, my grandfather went from smoking a pack a day to nothing. In one day. He quit cold turkey. My grandparents had lost their eldest son to a tragic car accident when he was only nineteen, when my mom was fourteen. They had a necessary rigidity and sense of duty to fulfill their prominent role in their town and to survive after being rocked by such a horrific tragedy. Not to mention my grandparents’ generation grew up in the Depression and World War II and didn’t have the ability to teach what they did not know. Self-care, self-love, and nurturing yourself were all considered hogwash. Just eat a balanced diet of a bottle of wine a night, a protein, a carb, and a vegetable, push your feelings down, and get on with it. So because they were dealing with that, my mom never had the space to learn how to care for herself. That cycle continued from my mom to me because of the extremely unfair gender constructs in her career and motherhood and life. It’s no fault of hers—she’s a hardworking, diligent, beautiful person who did the best she could and I honor her forever.

  But I was desperate to find a sense of control and comfort anywhere I could. I had no healthy ways to self-soothe, so mostly I turned to food. I felt so much disconnection from my family, disconnection from myself, a general feeling of being out of place.

  Besides, in a tiny midwestern town of thirty-six thousand people, where almost everyone else around me was eating to soothe themselves, too, it was something I could do in the same way, which made me a part of something, when I felt disconnected from everyone.

  Meanwhile, Steve was still trying to connect with me. I was eight, and Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” was ruling the charts. It was the year of Mariah, honey. Her Christmas album had just come out, and she was everywhere. I had feelings to express about that number one smash hit.

  Personally, I was stanning Dominique Dawes, whose showing at nationals that year was iconic—she swept all four ladies’ events in gymnastics, on her way to the national all-around title. Steve had promised to help me build a DIY balance beam. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the kind my Olympians worked with: it was about four inches wide, and he built it from a splintery piece of lumber that he carefully sanded down, then attached a patch of thin light-blue Berber-style carpet around the length of the beam before nailing it to two little two-by-fours about three inches off the ground, making the top of the beam a total of five inches off the ground.

  Once it was finished, I was ready to create my moment of moments. I began my process of choreographing what was to be, I was sure, the most beautiful, moving, and artistically accomplished balance beam set of all time. The mount to the routine was an off-ice-style single toe loop landed with one foot into a straddle-leap that then went into some side-step dance work that built into the apex of the bridge of the song—“And! I! Know! Eventually!”—I composed myself with two final hand rolls to the top of the beam to impress the Ukrainian judge (sitting to the right in my imagination). Then with dramatic flair, I turned my gaze back to the beam into a straight-on stance, with one toe pointed out in front of me, as I lowered my arms to my side with attention and panache, the likes of which had not been seen since Tatiana Gutsu in the ’92 games, into the most technically perfect beam cartwheel, landing right on cue with Mariah’s biggest belt. I successfully landed it only once in thousands of attempts. But my routine was three minutes and forty-two seconds—the exact length of “One Sweet Day.”

  A normal balance beam routine is only one minute, so obviously there were some dead moments in the set and a fair amount of repetition, but it was still stunning, and I set out with the best of intentions. I also broke a coffee table, smashed a window, and gave myself a black eye on more than one occasion. Most painfully this happened once when I was doing a patented Jack Van Ness dismount off the beam, but my knees bent in midair as I caught a fright, launching me, Molly Shannon in Superstar-style, into a pile of chairs my mom was using for a party.

  Steve was most often willing to be my Ukrainian judge, my Chinese judge, and my Russian judge. The rest of my family was so exhausted by the ’94 winter games that by the time the balance beam came around, they’d had it with me. But Steve helped me find my voice in my routine. You would think that would have begun to warm my seven-year-old gay heart, but alas, I found even less patience with him, because his heterosexual artistic tendencies didn’t lend themselves to my creative movements in a way that really gelled.

  But I couldn’t figure out how to do any backward elements off the diving board. My Barani was sick. I could do front punches. I could do front layouts. I could do front pikes. But I was too afraid to do anything backward. I told Steve: “I’m too fat and too scared.” “I can’t do it.” “I’m never gonna do it.”

  One day we were at the country club when Steve turned to me and announced, “Son, you’re gonna do a back dive today. We’re gonna get you over this.”

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bsp; I looked up at him, not believing him for a second. “Absolutely not,” I said.

  Steve’s jam at the country club was to play golf, then go down to the men’s locker room. He had been a triathlete, and now that he was sober, he tried to stay active. His triathlete body had left him years earlier, but his insistence on wearing Speedos had not. He would go to the clubhouse, and downstairs in the locker room, he’d put on the tiniest Speedo you’ve ever seen—no towel, no robe, nothing—just a little Speedo and goggles. He’d strut out to the pool so confidently—“Hey! How’s it going?”—his body spilling everywhere, but so much charm. “Steve, you know I can’t do backward stuff. I almost knocked your dentures out last time.” Nevertheless, he persisted.

  “You can do this,” he said.

  What gorgeous early exposure to body positivity. But all I could think about was how I wasn’t going backward and how he’d lost his mind.

  But this particular day, he got me out onto the diving board, standing behind me.

  “I’m not going to do anything,” he said gently. “I just want you to see what the beginning of the dive feels like.” I walked to the edge of the board, looking back at him, the invisible unknown of the pool behind me.

  “Put your hands up.”

  “I’m not ready!” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Damn it!” he said. And he put his hand under my lower back and forced me into a back bend and pushed me and finally, for the first time, I did a back dive.

  It wasn’t even that high. It was a one-meter, normal-ass diving board. It wasn’t far to fall at all. But I was like, Oh my God, I didn’t die.

  When I went back up onto the diving board, I did a backflip into the pool on my first try.

  And this, knowing that I could go backward, was the first step toward learning how to tumble. Realizing it wasn’t impossible for me.

  As a kid, I felt like I’d never get it.

  Steve didn’t know what he was doing for me, or what he was teaching me. He just couldn’t listen to me complain about it for one more second. Nothing irritated Steve like a mental block. He was a man of action.

  I wasn’t like that. I got paralyzed by things. I’m pretty sure that “I hate uncertainty” was my first full sentence as a baby. So falling backward into something I couldn’t see—that was the scariest thing of all.

  * * *

  So many of my best parts are rooted in my observations of my mom, Steve, and their relationship. Steve showed me how to be confident and proud in my body no matter my size. He believed that other people’s opinions are not a reflection of you, as long as your spirit is thriving. My mom and Steve had an ability to always hold their individual needs, and the needs of their relationship, in the highest stead. Their need to love each other fully always outweighed anyone’s need to be right. If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes, you wouldn’t be reading this book. I don’t know who that person would have become.

  When I’m fiercely loyal, when I have the courage to trust even after that trust has been violated, when I can find hope and faith even when the world has given me every reason not to—that’s the part of me that my mom and Steve nurtured. Even though I was a prickly, prickly rosebush, and she really wasn’t easy to grow, they cared for me with so much patience—as much as they had for each other. That showed me what love is, and that it really can exist. It was the most hopeful lesson that they ever could have given me.

  That day on the diving board, as he did on so many other days, Steve taught me to let go of my fear and try something new. All I had to lose was the moment, and a moment is something that we should never let go to waste.

  Chapter 4

  Roundoff Back Handspring Full

  I’D HAD IT WITH SCHOOL. ORGANIZATIONAL CUBBIES AS FAR AS THE EYE could see. Constant tornado warnings. Well, actually, just that one. And still, not enough closet space. I needed an escape. Not to mention there was Svetlana Vogenskaya. She had the nerve to steal my cousin who was my best friend and make her her best friend. Worse still: Each kid in the class got the chance to write the date, the number of day it was in the school year, and the weather on the whiteboard one morning. The order of which student got to write this information on the whiteboard with the coveted dry-erase markers was based on the alphabetical order of the student’s last name. Which seems fair, but the kids at the beginning and the end of the roster got to go twice through the year because of ending and starting the list—get it? I could’ve gotten to write the date twice if only my last name was VUN NESS instead of VAN NESS. I couldn’t stand how unfair it was.

  School felt like a prison for my young, vibrant queer personality. I raised my hand. “Mrs. Plushenko, I need to go to the office and call my mom. I forgot my glasses again.” Thank God Mrs. Plushenko was the coolest because she, unlike every other teacher I’d had prior and every other teacher I’ve had since, gave me no guff about forgetting things at home. You try being an eight-year-old violin-playing gymnastics-obsessed geode-collecting stamp connoisseur who has to have all those things with him in order to feel safe and nurtured. How else could I get through the daily barrage of insults that came from wearing an off-the-shoulder monochromatic purple sweat suit with purple Doc Martens. From an early age, I was all about shape.

  Mrs. Plushenko nodded and off I went to the school office. There, I called my mom.

  “Mom,” I said, “I was dreaming about Shannon Miller all day and I can’t focus. You have got to sign me up for gymnastics.”

  “Jack, stop calling me in the middle of class to talk about gymnastics!”

  “But—”

  “You’ve pulled me out of my third meeting this week to talk about gymnastics! We’ll get you signed up.”

  “Okay, sorry, I love you, bye!” I said, hanging up.

  Finally, I convinced her to let me join the Gymnastics Center in Quincy. Girls did an all-around practice, but there wasn’t one for boys. All they had was that butched-up power tumbling troupe that performed at local basketball games. Power tumbling isn’t an Olympic sport . . . yet it is a competitive sport. Some of the boys were really good—they’d be doing a punch-front-step-out-roundoff-back-handspring-double-full-twisting-layout-whipback-whipback-double-back-tuck. Some had wasted no time and were in gymnastics class early. Some were what the coaches called “backyard tumblers,” because they were self-taught in their backyard.

  None of them seemed gay, so no one I could relate to. They were rural country boys who just happened to do gymnastics. They would perform at the halftime show of the local university as a way to make gymnastics more locally on brand, and less scary and feminine for the townsfolk. Like, gymnastics can be heteronormative and butch too!

  I assumed that I would be good right away. But as it turned out, I was kind of rotund, and not very strong.

  Rurik Pavlovsky was our upbeat, jovial yet fit gymnastics coach. At practice, we’d do drills. I mostly worked on a triangle-shaped cushioned mat that you’d do back handsprings on, going downhill to make it easier. All of us were practicing when one boy yelled to me, “Your hair is really moppy.”

  “No, it’s not!” I said defensively. “It’s just curly!”

  The boy in front of me turned around. “And you have buckteeth.”

  “No, I don’t!” I yelled.

  A girl named Tashia Tomlovov, whose mother was another coach at the team, approached, with her mom in tow. “Boys, can you move out of the way?” Tashia’s mom announced. We got out of the way for the Level-10s and elites training for the Olympics, watching them flex. One by one, they all did their gorgeous hard-core vaults. After the runway was cleared of the vaulters, it was the boys’ turn to go on this minitrampoline runway to practice flips into the foam pit.

  The boy in front of me turned around and scowled at me. “Come on, fatso,” he said. I watched him nail a roundoff back handspring layout.

  It was my turn. I wasn’t even close to doing backflips into the pit, so Rurik said, “Hey, buddy, let’s practice our drop backs to backbends.
” I took a deep breath and fell into my backbend, but I had no muscle control. Rurik stepped in to grab me, then lost his balance trying to prevent disaster, and we fell into a heap.

  When he made his way to his feet, he looked at me sternly. “Maybe for you, we just do backward rolls for now until we get your backbends a little better, okay?”

  My face flushed. I heard the other kids laugh. I looked down at my feet.

  I kept practicing and practicing, but with nobody who believed in me, and most seeing a huge target on my back with every move I made, the escape I was so desperately seeking vanished into thin air. Not long after, I quit.

  All I wanted to do was twirl and tumble and cheer and move. How could I find my Amy Chow grace? Where was my Shannon Miller flight? I wanted to create the same visual excellence that I saw these powerful women executing, with moves so precise, so exacting, so focused. They were laser focused. It was something I’ve always known I could do if given the chance.

  I also loved the sheer pageantry: I’ve always been obsessed with a special occasion, a big moment to get to look forward to. And the girls I wanted to be friends with, they all did gymnastics. I wanted their camaraderie, the way they were all part of the same team. Those girls would never make fun of me for making a shitty paper airplane. Who the fuck wants to make a paper airplane, anyway? I wanted to put on a leotard and spray a lot of hair spray on my bangs and curl them forward and then hair-spray them more and then put glitter on them. Why would you want to learn to start a fire with two sticks when you could be learning beam technique?

  I never really cared about the male gymnasts, probably because I was so acutely aware of my own soft body. Watching men’s gymnastics just reminded me of what I didn’t have, and how I looked so different from them. With women’s gymnastics, there wasn’t that competition and comparing myself in that way—there was more of an admiration, a sense of looking up to them. The men made me feel self-conscious. The women never made me feel bad about myself.