Over the Top Page 6
Most of all, I loved how they had all the attention on them: an entire crowd riveted while you’re so serious. I loved the drama of composing yourself on your fourth and final tumbling pass, dramatically bringing your arms down and you do that one last big inhale before you spring like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky down that floor.
* * *
In sixth grade, still looking to re-create that glamorous eleganza of Olympic pageantry, I decided to try out for the talent show with a lyrical interpretive dance that was never executed the same way twice to Jewel’s “Pieces of You.” I was excited to show my mom.
After I finished, it was silent in the basement, just the two of us. She sat on the edge of the couch so she could be face-to-face with me at my height. She held my hands.
“Jack, if you do this—if you try out with this—the kids will never let you live this down. They will always remember you for this. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Honey, she was serious as a heart attack.
“You will always be the boy who did this dance at the talent show.”
“I know! It’s a really good dance! It’s so hard to make the talent show and this is totally gonna make it in!”
“I’ll support you no matter what,” she said. “But are you absolutely sure you wanna do this?”
Ew, lady! Yes! Look at this face! Did I stutter?
“Yes,” I said. “I will attack this program with my double-toe single-loop combination!”
It was the first time that she had acknowledged to my face that she saw me being bullied already, and that something I was about to do might make it worse. She’d always given me room to be myself, to play with my Barbies and to wear tights. But when she made me aware that she knew what that was doing to my reputation, it sent the message that it meant something to her as well, and to our family. It wasn’t conscious. She didn’t do it on purpose. But this did not a secure baby Jack make. I didn’t understand why she would care about anything other than what I wanted to share with the world. Or at least the hundred people in the auditorium.
And why would she? Nobody in my family really knew how to self-soothe. By the time I was in my early teens I had so much compounded trauma causing me to act out and reject authority from my parents. I wanted to numb out. I didn’t have the vocabulary for the experiences I was having, which were all tied up in shame and sexuality.
It was confusing. My mom was in her own fight for professional validation and professional respect, which she had to work really hard for, and I respected that about her. Steve was a stay-at-home dad, so he was always attentive to me, but there were certain conversations I never wanted to have with either of them.
We didn’t have tools, and nobody could give them to me. I thought sharing things was dangerous. As it turned out, I was right.
* * *
It started when my brother Boris walked in on me in the bathroom. I had discovered the art of bingeing and purging from a Lifetime movie that starred the actress who played the Pink Power Ranger and was called Perfect Body. I thought that was fierce and started to do it too—because who doesn’t want to eat a whole box of Thin Mints and get away with it? It lasted for a couple years, until I finally stopped after I popped blood vessels in my eyeballs and gave myself a nosebleed, so it was really motivated by pure vanity. (Also, I started hating it.) My mom wanted me to go see her therapist, whose name was Dimitri Noranovich. I knew that Dimitri had been my mom’s therapist since I was six. My mom had a few brushes of her own trauma—sometimes she would sleep for three days straight. Through therapy, medication, and the help of her psychiatrist weaning her off said medication, she’d gotten a handle on her mental health. I trusted him implicitly because of how he’d helped my mom.
Dimitri wore thin-rimmed glasses, khakis, and a button-up. His breath smelled like garlic powder and instant coffee.
I sat down and we began to talk about how I was fighting with my mom and having some issues at school. When I finished my monologue, his first question came so quick, it caught me off guard. “Have you ever been sexually abused?” he asked.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Has anyone ever touched you in a way you didn’t want?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I was genuinely confused.
“There’s no need to get defensive,” he said.
I hesitated. “If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone, right?”
“Right,” he said.
“I can tell you,” I said again. “And you can’t tell anyone?”
“That’s right,” he said.
So I told him the story of what had happened when I was kid—about the older boy who would take me into his room and play Doctor. I didn’t have the words at the time to explain how it had made all those little synapses connect in my brain—because when something like that happens to you when you’re at that young age, the connections between shame and sex, and the way we communicate about those subjects, is already so confusing.
I told Dimitri everything I could remember. Maybe the conversation in that hour meandered to other subjects too—it wasn’t the only thing we talked about—but when I walked out of that room, I felt so much better. A weight had been lifted. I went home and went to bed. I slept soundly. I was sure I had done the right thing.
The next morning, I went to my first hour of English class and there was someone I had never seen before—a man in an official-looking suit standing right outside the class. I looked at him. Huh, I thought.
I sat down at my desk and pulled out my binder when the teacher came over to me. “Jack,” he said softly. “We need you to come to the principal’s office.”
Instantly, I knew. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This is not good.
I went to the principal’s office, where the dean of students was there. Calmly she told me that the boy who I had named to Dimitri the day before had been taken into custody. I leaned back in my chair and it made a loud, dull thud. My mouth was agape. My tongue felt like sandpaper. Time came to a standstill.
My mom met me at school and took me back to Dimitri’s office. We passed a cemetery that I had passed ten thousand times before but it had never looked quite like that. We passed the high school stadium. It had never looked like that before. There was a film of gray over me, knowing that my mom knew the biggest secret that I had ever kept. When we’d talked about it when I was a little kid, it had been easy to write off as experimentation. Now that I had told an adult the full extent of what had really happened, it constituted abuse serious enough that the therapist had had to report it.
When we sat down with Dimitri, I could hardly speak. His office was on the first floor, with an open window covered by a screen. I stood up and ran to the window and kicked the screen out and leapt out the window. I ran through the parking lot into a cornfield and fell down as I was running.
My mom found me and brought me back to the car. My nose was bleeding. I was so embarrassed and ashamed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all going to be okay.”
“It’s not going to be okay,” I sobbed.
“We have to go to the Department of Child and Family Services,” she said. She told me that she had talked to my aunt, who was a lawyer. Great, I thought—now she knows too.
“You can choose not to participate in this, and they won’t have a case, and we can deal with this as a family in our own way,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. If you want to do this, you can. But realize that if you do and there’s a charge, it will be in our paper. Our family’s paper.”
My heart sank. “We love you no matter what,” she said. “And it’s your decision. But if you don’t want this to be public, you just have to say, no matter how they ask you about it, that you choose not to participate in this because it would be detrimental to your mental health.”
I nodded. And when they asked me about it, that was what I said. The only thing I said. Over and over again.
For weeks, they sen
t investigators to swim practice, trying to catch me being unsupervised. It didn’t help that my family was well known in town, which probably made them even more eager to catch them in a lie. But because no one involved was willing to handle it through the Department of Child and Family Services, the case was dropped.
After the fact, privately, both families wanted me and the other boy to sit in a room and talk about it. I said no. In no world was I safe in that room. But it put me in another impossible position: it was either go through with that, or I would be seen as the difficult one again.
This was how I learned to turn everything against myself. It would take nine years of high-risk, self-destructive behavior before I would finally learn to take my toddler by his little curly head and let him know that he was okay.
* * *
We didn’t talk about this stuff after it was over. But there were so many things that we didn’t talk about. Steve was sober and my mom didn’t drink, so if liquor disappeared from the cabinet, where did it go? If I left a questionable chat open on the computer and was asked what it was about, I’d say, “Nothing! Leave me alone!” and the conversation would stop there.
By the time the extent of the abuse came to light, the years of disconnect and miscommunication between my parents and me was a whitewater-rapids-level river—not crossable safely. At first, I was terrified that if I talked about it, it would be misconstrued as being my fault—that I had wanted it, or asked for it. I was convinced they would think that, and I had reason to be.
Because in my family, it was always my fault. I was dramatic. I was loud. I was clumsy. I was “out there.” I was passionate. I was over the top, honey. This time, it really wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t allow myself to be in a room full of adults where that possibility was on the table.
The keeping of these secrets had created so much perceived acting-out behavior that came spilling out in all kinds of different ways that in my family I had garnered the title of what my therapist calls “the identified patient.” Which is the person in a dysfunctional system who becomes the problem person by acting out the pain of the dysfunctional system. Which draws away attention from the true inner conflicts of the people in the system. I couldn’t bear the pain of being the problem person anymore. I was determined to change the narrative.
Navigating through trauma, depression, and despair is a full-time job, which made it even more crucial that I found some light in the dark. I’m not sure what it is—if it’s God-given, if it’s my chemistry, if it’s the nature or the nurture—but my whole life, becoming obsessed with something made me pass the time in all sorts of joyous ways. Honey, she has got to keep busy. By the time I was in eighth grade, I was ready to take on my next obsession conquest. I had shown rocks who was boss. I had learned everything there was about stamps. Coins—forget about it. I already had every penny made in America from 1889 to 1999. My collection was complete. I was ready to cheer.
So when Glafira Conradovich asked me on a dare to try out for junior varsity cheerleading, I was ready to make a splash.
Tryouts were fraught with tension. They were at the high school gymnasium—not the junior high—and there were at least a hundred girls there for ten varsity soccer spots, ten varsity football spots, six junior varsity football spots, and then twelve basketball spots. I couldn’t tumble yet, so I didn’t have to worry about those . . . yet.
I learned my chant and one-minute-long cheer with a diligence that hasn’t been seen since Michelle Kwan’s surprise come-from-behind win at the 2000 World Figure Skating Championships, and I approached every day of cheer tryouts with seriousness and earnestness because what started off as a joke was now my golden ticket to social belonging.
The day of tryouts came: Friday, May 10. I remember it like it was yesterday. And I gave it my absolute all. I left it all on the gym floor. I spirited to the judges with unparalleled enthusiasm. My exuberance and team spirit dazzled every single one of those hoes. But could they see past the social norms and gender constructs of this little cornfield town to appoint the first gay male cheerleader in Quincy’s history? I went home drained. Spent. Exhausted. The seconds turned into minutes. The minutes turned into hours. The hours turned into days. And, bitch, that was just to get me to Monday morning. I had to somehow crawl my fourteen-year-old gay body through all day of school Monday with a quiet desperation.
We had to wait until Monday after school to see who made the coveted list.
When that final bell rang, I pushed kids out of my way with a George Costanza reckless abandon. I sprinted down the stairs to the hallway where the piece of paper was posted and held my breath until I found my student identification number—which I still remember by heart—typed on the list of junior varsity football. I was in.
The very next month, cheer camp ensued. That year at our fall homecoming pep rally, all four squads were coming together to do an epic routine. I was so excited to get to work with all the senior girls. Karlakov, our choreographer, who was much like the choreographer in Bring It On because he did essentially the same routine for all the local high schoolers but none of us knew, came in and gave us a drop-dead gorgeous routine. I myself—yours truly—had a fierce dance solo where all the girls squatted down but I popped up with a fierce “C’mon!” motion into choreography as the lyrics to The Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” reached their chorus apex.
The season was really fun. We had eight games and I only had five beer bottles thrown at me. I only had “Faggot” spraypainted on our driveway twice. And only a 65 to 75 percent increase in people saying to screaming “Faggot,” or “You fucking faggot,” or “Cocksucker faggot” at any given moment. So I would say my freshman year of cheer was really a success. But when football season was over, I had to go jump in that pool and start training for swim. I’d been swimming off and on since middle school, when I realized it could help me lose extra weight that was contributing to the bullying. But swimming didn’t make my heart soar the way cheer did. My cheer fever was at scarlet highs.
I knew that I had to set my sights on being a year-round cheerleader, which meant that I had to learn to fling and flail my six-foot-one gay body with no core strength and hurl it into a roundoff back handspring in addition to a standing back handspring, which were the minimum requirements to try out for the basketball cheer squad. By the time football cheer wrapped in October, my goal was crystal clear. I had to be able to do a roundoff back handspring by the first week of May 2002 in order to make my high school cheer dreams a reality. This, of course, forced me to re-face my earlier failed gymnastics career, when Rurik made me feel I would never learn to tumble. But this time I had a newfound teenage swim-svelte strength (which we will get to later) and a new awareness of my body born from nine more years of self-taught trampoline and floor figure skating and imaginary Olympics competitions. Much of my childhood was spent feeling fat, eating pizzas, cookies, Pop-Tarts, and a smorgasbord of other delicious food to soothe the pain and discomfort I was feeling. This had a profound effect on my body image and my self-worth. It took me a long time to learn I was perfect just the way I was.
The difference between swim training and cheer training was passion. I was fortunate enough that Olga Valentinovna, a celebrated regional trainer—and the mother of local gymnastics superstar Tashia Tomlovov—took me on as a private client. So in addition to three nights of group tumbling classes a week, I also had two nights a week of private lessons to hone my skills as the first big gay basketball tumbling cheerleader in Quincy’s herstory. But I was met with the cold hard reality that at six one, and −7 percent body muscle, learning to tumble was going to be a feat of physics that I was nowhere close to mastering.
By March, I had only progressed from the tumble track down to the foam floor—which is a far cry from the unforgiving no-spring thud of a gym floor—and the reality that I may not have my back handspring by the first week of May was causing me to cry myself to sleep on a nightly basis. And not a gentle cry. I’m talking you-
just-saw-your-golden-retriever-get-murdered-in-front-of-you cry. Earth-shattering cries. Like when The Great British Baking Show moved from the BBC to Channel 4, costing me three of my closest friendships to Mary Berry, Mel, and Sue. But I knew that I had to keep going.
With the quiet determination of a five-day training regimen toward my roundoff back handspring greatness, I kept struggling. And kept facing that fear. And with each day I inched closer. And closer.
But you see, tryouts were on a wooden gym floor. There was no wooden gym floor in the gymnastics center. The closest simulation we could render was the vault runway, which was just a two-inch-thick piece of foam over concrete. By April, my Olympics floor routine was proficient enough for Olga to urge me onto the vaulting runway to start readying me for the actual tryout surface.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m scared, but I’m gonna go for it.”
I’ll never forget the first time I threw my roundoff back handspring on that hard vault runway. Not realizing that engaging your core and squeezing your legs and butt together relieves the intense impact of landing your whole body on your wrists, I just launched my body upside down. The impact I felt from my wrists to the roof of my mouth to my hips to my lower back to my knees to my ankles was like jumping off a really tall bunk bed, when you get that pain so deeply achy in your heels you feel like you’re gonna puke—it was like that. But the point was, I barreled my body into a back handspring on the vault runway, and I knew with a month to spare, I could refine this into a usable roundoff back handspring on a wooden floor.
There were bruises. There were twisted ankles. But there was a determination that existed only between my ears that was stronger than any bodily harm I encountered, queen.