Over the Top Page 7

  Because there’s only so many spots for basketball cheer—she’s prestigious. There were sixteen total spots—eight for varsity, and eight for JV. And with this big-boned, large-and-in-charge gay girl in town with her roundoff back handspring, I wanted to let them know that the pressure for tryouts was fierce.

  We were all practicing our routines at tryouts. “Hey, girls,” I announced. “Let’s go to the gym.”

  With the poise and dignity of Kerri Strug, I collected myself at the half-court line. Facing toward the hoop, I did a sashay-jump-run into the most gorgeous roundoff back handspring with a big ol’ bounding rebound, just to let them know there was enough power for a few more at the end of that. And once I performed that gorgeous roundoff back handspring, I turned to see the girls with a shock on their face that I would not soon forget. I rode that shit all the way through tryouts right into a spot on the varsity football and soccer cheer squad, and the junior varsity basketball squad. But don’t you roll your eyes at my JV experience—because we had a very competitive, deep field for basketball cheerleading, and no sophomores ever made varsity. Even though honestly, I probably should have. Because I was that good. Thanks, homophobes.

  Rurik Pavlovsky had told seven-year-old Jack that he should stick with back rolls because he wasn’t ready for back handsprings, and that had kept me away from gymnastics. But I’d finally found my way back to my love for something I’d been scared away from.

  After I made the squad, Olga Valentinovna pulled me aside. Pride lit up her face. “Jack,” she said. “I have never seen someone with less natural ability learn to tumble. You made that happen through sheer determination.”

  I had shown up for myself and accomplished something that I was convinced I’d never be able to do. And what’s more, I was a part of a group for the first time after years of feeling alienated and disconnected from the people around me.

  The part of me that’s a cheerleader is a powerful one. She’s endlessly resilient. She manifests things. She willed herself onto a hit TV show. She can find the silver lining when there’s not even a playbook to begin with. When people ask me, “How are you so positive?” I never know how to respond. I think there is a piece that’s nature, and there’s a piece that’s nurture, and in this case, I have a naturally tough-as-nails, Michelle-Kwan-esque part that just don’t give up. No matter how many times I fall and fuck up my face trying to tumble.

  Finally making the squad made it not matter so much that I’d been betrayed and bullied and that everyone called me a faggot.

  When I was flying through the air, for the first time, I belonged.

  * * *

  As an adult, I was devastated when I found out about the culture of abuse in US gymnastics. To find out that so many of the girls I look up to have endured such harrowing ordeals is heartbreaking. Their courage and strength in bringing the conversation to light inspires me to speak about what has happened to me. It is unfair that abuse occurs, but the PTSD that occurs from the abuse is even more unfair, in addition to the host of behaviors we incur that stem from the abuse. It makes celebrating the joy and accomplishments of your life that happened anywhere near or around abuse harder. Speaking as a survivor of sexual abuse myself, I need to have my joys and accomplishments celebrated without feeling the weight of my abuse. The problem with that need is that it isn’t always possible. Both my joy and accomplishments existed and so did the pain from my abuse. How can we feel one without the other? Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories. I found a lot of my healing when I realized that my suffering didn’t undo my joy. So much of my childhood was painful, but there was also a lot of it that was beautiful and fulfilling and happened exactly as it was meant to happen. Survivors deserve to have self-expression, self-confidence, self-acceptance, and an unstigmatized view from society. Pervasive abuse continues to happen because there is a feeling that you can’t talk about it because it is hard and uncomfortable to do so. But just like joy and pain coexist, so can discomfort and humor. Which is why you gotta buckle up, buttercup, because I can go from comedy to tragedy in three seconds flat. And that’s not damaged or not normal. I hope culturally we can continue to normalize the idea that being a survivor is so much more common than anyone realizes and we all deserve to be heard, but more importantly are deserving of a recovery full of love, laughter, and light.

  Chapter 5

  Lovestarved

  MY TEENAGE DREAM WAS SERVED ON THE PERFECTLY CHISELED, cold hard platter of Fyodor Orlov’s lightly and rustically hairy pecs. It was never destined to be my pillow. I was never fated to safely rest my adolescent gay face on it in the way that I so desperately needed. He stirs haunting reminders within me to this day.

  Okay, backing up. When I started swimming, I was in the seventh grade, and I was serving you five-foot-five, 195-pound realness. The swim teams were separated into levels, and all the boys in my age group were either in gold or platinum.

  I had to start in bronze with the seven-year-olds.

  There was one other girl my age who shared a similarly late start, and a lack of swimming ability. We were both just trying not to get laughed at by the small children.

  How embarrassing to be arriving at four thirty in the afternoon to swim with the little kids when everyone my age was already leaving, because they’d gone straight after school. But what was I supposed to do? I wasn’t a natural swimmer. I had B-cups and no idea how to move my feet quickly. This was a problem.

  There was only one thing in the world I wanted, and it was to make it into the platinum group so I could spend more gorgeous time with the super cute boys and their lean swimmers’ bodies.

  The handsomest boy in the platinum group was Fyodor. Okay, maybe he wasn’t the handsomest—that honor would probably go to Maks or Lukasz—but he was definitely a threat to the competition. If he could only have nailed down his evening wear competition, he could have been my Miss Universe. (And if only I could have nailed my swimsuit competition, I could have been his.) He was a natural swimmer, and the kind of guy who thrived under competition and pressure, whereas I was likelier to crumble. All Fyodor had to do was think about practicing and he would qualify for state. He was naturally talented, with a perfect swimmer’s build, a gorgeous chest, with a little speckling of chest hair, and gigantic deltoids. He looked like he was on steroids, but he just came that way. He was such a gorgine specimen. An Adonis in our midst. The most Dorito-shaped hold-me-till-the-pain-goes-away then run-me-over-in-your-car then resurrect-me-with-your-perfect-square-shaped-yet-spherical-endlessly-hard-meat pecs I’ve ever seen. My feelings for Fyodor are best explained by the number one hit song “How Do I Live” by LeAnn Rimes.

  In hindsight, he was pimply and had braces and was definitely a sixteen-year-old, but wow—I thought he was soy fucking hot.

  As my ascension to swimming fiercedom progressed, I qualified to be in the same group Fyodor was in, which meant we got to spend more time together at weekend swim meets and daily after-school practices. I would give every fiber of my young distraught homosexual self if it meant I got to touch the back of his toes at practice.

  * * *

  If Fyodor knew he was gay, he was never out; meanwhile, I was never in. He insisted that he wasn’t gay. That made it a deeply fraught, weird relationship. To this day, we’ve never kissed, even though we spent so many nights in the same bed. He wouldn’t come out to me until we were twenty-three, by which point we’d all but lost touch. It gave me a bit of validation in myself that I wasn’t crazy, and happiness that Fyodor could live his truth and tell me about it.

  Back then it started with a series of awkward exchanges where I would try to connect with him—my adolescent tits heaving as I toweled myself off: “Hey, where’d you get your swim bag? I need one like that for practice too!”

  “Oh,” he said. “My mom got it made for me. I’ll ask her. Call me later and I’ll tell you where it’s from.”

  Pretty soon I was calling him seventy-five times a week. This was before c
ell phones, of course, which meant I was sitting, sweaty-palmed, by my landline, dialing those numbers I knew by heart.

  I got better at swimming, motivated by Fyodor, and also the desire to lose weight. When I left seventh grade, I was five foot four and one hundred and ninety pounds. When I came back for eighth grade, I was five eleven and weighed one-sixty.

  Part of it was just natural, but also was me changing the way I ate and exercised. I wanted to look like the other boys, to turn those B-cups into pecs.

  Fyodor was always nice to me. Out of all the boys at swim, he was the least ashamed to be my friend. When people made fun of me, he defended me. Of course, to him I was fair game—he would make fun of my chest, pushing my pecs with one finger, yelling, “Your boobs!”—but if anyone else did that kind of thing, it was game over for them.

  One time, during Hell Week over Christmas break, when we had both early morning and afternoon practice, Fyodor took some of Steve’s horny goat weed—which was kind of like Viagra, but herbal, and sold at gas stations—and ended up having to play sick because he had a boner for six hours. You can’t swim with an erection like that. I didn’t partake, because I knew better, and also because I didn’t want to pry too deep into my mom and stepdad’s sex life.

  Fyodor and I were together all the time. Our lives merged. But even as we got closer, so much between us went unspoken. I wanted to be with him, and I was sure he was gay. Why wouldn’t he just admit it? But at the same time, I was terrified that he would find out that I was in love with him.

  I could settle for a kind of middle ground: being curious. I wanted to experiment.

  It’s such a precarious thing to grow up and learn about your sexuality. Even years later, now that he’s fully out of the closet, I have feelings about it—like, even now he’s never going to feel the way that I felt about him. That attraction just wasn’t there. Now I’m confident enough that I assume everybody’s going to be into me—how could someone not be attracted to me? (I’m kidding, but also not—I actually have developed a gorgeous delusional sense of self-esteem from all these trials and tribulations. But not adolescent baby Jack. She didn’t have the range.)

  * * *

  One of my best girlfriends, Evgenia, who during middle school spent the school year in Quincy but summers in Las Vegas with her dad, had informed me that there was something called a “cattle call”—which was a mass audition to find America’s next top superstar. I’m paraphrasing here, but that was the message that I got. She told me that these cattle calls happened a lot, and you never knew where you were going to run into an agent, so every time you go to the mall, you better be ready to serve looks. This could be the day that you become the next Britney fucking Spears. “Don’t you know that a lot of people get discovered by getting dressed up and going to malls?” she said. I was gagged and knew then that I would never be half-assed when it came time for me to go to a mall.

  So when Fyodor invited me to go to the mall with his parents while we were out of town at a swim meet, I said, “Of course. I just have to change my clothes in case there’s a talent scout there.”

  “What?” he said.

  “There could be talent scouts at the Springfield Mall!” I said. “I can’t go like this!”

  I went back to the hotel to change. I remember the outfit clear as day: a powder-blue Gap just-above-the-knee cargo short with a matching blue horizontal-striped sweatshirt, paired with a really gorgeous Birkenstock. I did my hair by putting a lot of gel in my fringe and letting the rest of it air-dry, because I wasn’t sophisticated enough yet to know how to start putting product in the back of my hair. It made for a really crunchy, curly fringe, with everything else naturally dried.

  I was ready to take the Springfield Mall by storm.

  Maybe it was dumb of me to think I was going to get discovered there, but I was still savvier than Fyodor was. Fyodor wasn’t the quickest, and I loved that about him. He wouldn’t have known the capital of Missouri if it hit him in the face. His idea of a really chic weekend was going to his family’s beach house in Branson to drink beer on the lake with his friends. That was never a destiny that your girl was going to hitch a ride on.

  But I didn’t really know that at the time. All I saw was how hot he was. And such a boy. The boys who I wanted to be with back then were all heterosexual (or so I thought), who probably had dingleberries and skid marks but, God, were they gorgeous.

  Somewhere in him, Fyodor knew that I had feelings for him, and that must have made him feel good. But that was the manipulative part of the relationship that wasn’t healthy for either of us: Me fighting for his affections. Him stringing me along so I would keep validating him.

  I don’t blame him. It couldn’t have been easy for him either. I know it wasn’t. He faced the same struggle of coming to terms with his sexuality and the expectations of his family and society telling him who he was supposed to be. Having the most aggressively-in-love-with-you, stars-in-his-eyes baby Jack nipping at your heels at every swim practice must have been hard. But we had mutual love for each other, and it was choked by the circumstances of the universe that were beyond our control. I can see that now that I’m an adult, and looking back, it negates every salty feeling I have toward him and his family. They were all actually really lovely people who gave me lots of really gorgeous memories. We were all just doing the best we could with what we knew, and I just didn’t know very much back then.

  So we made like gay Lewis and Clark and went on a sexual exploration. We tried watching porn together. Or we would walk around naked at the same time, which was really the sexiest thing we ever did. Or we would watch movies and cuddle—just shy of spooning. All that tension would build, but it never culminated in the way that I wanted it to. I’ve experienced it as an adult too—like when you’re trying to figure out if you can suck your Uber driver’s dick or not. I call it the forearm graze test. If your arms touch and the other person doesn’t pull away, you can proceed with cuddling. If they pull away, you need to understand consent and accept that it’s not going to happen.

  We got drunk together for the first time, on Bacardi 151 and vodka, pounding shots. That night we definitely masturbated next to each other and then he threw up for two hours in my bathroom before his aunt came to pick us up and take us to Steak ’n Shake.

  Then, to add to my agony, Fyodor went and got himself a girlfriend. I insisted on inviting myself to their dates, and then I would insist on buying dinner—“I got it!” I’d yell—just to make sure that I was as much a part of a relationship as both of them were. There were no boundaries. Very unhealthy. Very enmeshed.

  We listened to burned CDs in the car: Evanescence and P!nk, “Cry Me a River” by Justin Timberlake, the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack, and Destiny’s Child—the album with “Survivor” on it. And Avril Lavigne. Heavy Avril Lavigne.

  I remember at our last state meet that we went to together, we had to shave our legs, and we got in the bathtub together to do it at the same time, bobbing in floating pools of nasty boy-leg hair. It was our last meet, because I wasn’t going to qualify for state. We were fifteen. He had such a man-body—defined pecs and gorgeous abs and inexplicably tan for a white kid in the dead of January. (In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he went tanning—in fact, he definitely went to Sun Place Tanning in secret.)

  But instead of trimming the hair and shaving it, Fyodor was seesawing it off, and hard, with dull razors, and blood was coming out as he was shaving. I grabbed the razor out of his hand. “That’s not how you do it!” I said, and I showed him how to do it softly, gently.

  And then we put on our cute little sweatpants and went back into the bedroom and climbed into the bed we were sharing. It was a cold night, and I remember when I fell asleep in that room, I already had stubble on my legs.

  This was all I wanted—to be together and lie under blankets, to creep on him in the locker room, where we were always dressing and undressing around each other. It was charged and felt like a relationship, even though we nev
er made out.

  When he spent the night, we’d gradually remove items of clothing. “I’ll take off my shirt if you take off your shirt.” And then we’d both be shirtless. “I’ll take off my pants if you take off yours.” And then we were just in our underwear.

  “Let’s go run around the cornfield in our underwear!” And then when I came around the corner, he was completely naked.

  Oh my God, I thought. Now what’s gonna happen?

  We found a big hidden stash of Playboy magazines from the ’70s—hairy bush aplenty. We jerked off next to each other, rained-on Playboys in hand—talk about a budding young bromance. I’d spoon him while we slept, then he would wake up and yell, “You’re on top of me!” and I’d retreat to my own corner of the bed.

  When he got his driver’s license, he got an ’87 Datsun, but his parents wouldn’t let me ride in there alone with him because they thought I was too distracting and too loud. Which was rude, annoying, and completely unfounded.

  So we’d get into full-blown lovers’ quarrels over the pettiest things—whether I was going to spend the night, or whether I was going to ride somewhere with him. But what enraged me most was when he was going to go hang out with some girl instead of me. One night, I was so furious I actually shoved him.

  “You’re fucking crazy!” he yelled.

  “I don’t care!” I said.

  I was livid, because I didn’t want him to date other people, but we weren’t actually together. It was a huge pink elephant in the room.

  “Oh, you gotta go on your date with Yelena, because if you don’t have your alone time with her every week, then what will people think?” I said. I was losing my mind. “Oh, because your braces and your gelled hair are so hot, Fyodor! With your fucking old weird car!”

  “I don’t need this,” he said. “I’m not doing this.”

  I chased him into the driveway, and he sped away. I had to turn back around and ask his mom to take me home.