Over the Top Page 8

  But we always made up. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, we went out to get a Christmas tree with my family. “We’ll drive together,” he said. Nothing could have thrilled me more.

  He let me wear his jacket and for a minute I felt like I was truly his. Out in this Christmas tree farm in the middle of nowhere in Illinois, taking cute pictures and playing hide-and-go-seek, it felt like we were a real couple.

  By that point I was finally old enough to have my own friends, instead of going everywhere with my family, so we could go to the Pomona Diner and eat toast with gravy and nasty turkey and apple pie.

  This is what the inside of my brain looked like: When do I get to see you again? When’s our next date? What’s our next plan? When’s our next mall trip? When’s our next swim meet? If there wasn’t a next, I was not okay, and I would be calling him trying to figure out how to manifest one.

  We weren’t together. I knew we weren’t together. He was straight, and I was the gay one. So I was incensed whenever anyone implied that he was gay, or that we might be together. I had to defend his heterosexuality, even though I didn’t want him to be heterosexual.

  Instead I escaped into fantasy, usually while listening to Christina Aguilera’s Stripped album. In the raunchiest corners of my imagination, I would be in the locker room, towel-drying myself. “Beautiful” playing in the background. There would be a tap on my shoulder. It would be Fyodor. He would kiss me. “I’m gay,” he would murmur. “And I do love you.”

  “I know!” I’d say. “I’ve known all along.”

  It didn’t have to be in the locker room. In my fast-paced daydreaming teen brain, it could be anywhere from a bowling alley to Bali. The sweet nectar of the sheer thought of a reciprocal feeling was enough.

  The year I turned sixteen, we went on a weekend vacation to Chicago with my mom. It was so gay—it was almost like we were trying on being a couple.

  We went down escalators arm in arm. We shared a room without my mom that had two queen beds. We saw an older gay couple buying gay erotica at Barnes & Noble and started talking to them. They told us that they knew about people who got caught having sex in the restroom stall at Barnes & Noble and told us to be careful.

  I couldn’t believe that they mistook us for a real couple. Fyodor couldn’t either.

  “I’m straight!” he said defensively. I just gasped and tucked my boner into my waistband because I had immediately pitched a tent.

  In hindsight I realize that older couple must have thought we were cruising them and mistaken us for being much older than we were, so they were giving us a warning about not getting caught doing the nasty in public bathrooms. Sisters helping sisters! But at the time, I didn’t totally get it.

  Maybe that was the beginning of the end—us spending weekends together, like it was too intimate to really last.

  Not long after that, one day in the hallways between classes, Magdalina Steflikov stopped me. “I cannot believe you would tell people you and Fyodor are boyfriends!” she said.

  “Who is saying that?” I said.

  “You know!”

  “I don’t!” I said. “I don’t know anything about that!”

  It took two or three more conversations like that with our friend circle until someone finally said, “You told Varinka Prostokov you were having sex with Fyodor.” But I had never told Varinka that we were sleeping together—I just said that I was in love with him.

  I can’t remember exactly how Fyodor told me we weren’t going to talk anymore. Maybe he didn’t even need to. I just understood that this was the new reality.

  In one day, my life as I’d known it changed. My closest friends were no longer my closest friends. They believed the rumors and they did not believe me. I was no longer welcome at our little lunch table. The holder of all my hopes and dreams just bent over and took a huge shit right on them in such a callous way and I knew at that point that I couldn’t live in Quincy with these people for two more years. I would have died first.

  At the time it hurt me so deeply—it really turned me inside out. All these years later, looking back at the children we were, I realize that he never tried to hurt me.

  But he did.

  Much later, I would learn about how attachment is the root of all suffering. How desperately I needed to attach myself to him and how much I needed him to be something he wasn’t. It wasn’t because he had it out for me—but I couldn’t know that at the time. I allowed myself to be hurt in that relationship as much as he hurt me. The power we assign to people is the power we give them—it wasn’t organic to the relationship.

  I had felt so happy and so complete with him, at least in certain moments, that losing him was acutely painful. Even now, as an adult, there are parts of me that still run from that experience, even if it ended up being the thing that helped start me on the journey from loneliness to a grateful solitude. From hating being alone to now loving my alone time, that evolution has been the most important to my well-being.

  At that juncture, knowing that my competitive swimming journey was something I could no longer stomach and that cheer would get me a lot farther from Quincy, I was ready to veer off into my new direction. That meant spending only one more year in this town, getting as far away as I could, and sucking every dick I crossed in the process, honey.

  She had been starved for affection and now she would no longer suffer rejection.

  The amount of shame I had incurred at this point by being cast aside by Fyodor meant that I alone wasn’t worth living for. I wasn’t that interesting. I was too fat, too femme, too loud, and too unlovable. Now, according to the rumors believed by the people who I loved the most, I was a weird sex liar. That sent me on a many-years-long downward spiral of taking my inner child and beating him into corners.

  I’d survived sexual abuse already. Now I was suffering the rejection of my closest friend. It left me with nothing left to lose.

  Steve always told me: Son, you don’t have to ride the elevator to the basement. That’s a principle I’ve always tried to keep in my back pocket.

  But Steve also always told me that every basement has a bottom. With a badly bruised ego and a broken heart, I was ready to make like Kelly Clarkson’s sophomore album and break away.

  Chapter 6

  MY CLOSEST FRIENDSHIPS HAD DISINTEGRATED. SWIM TEAM NO longer had my homosexual heart’s desire. She was ready to break bad.

  In the early internet age of gay.com and MapQuest, with an insatiable thirst for somebody who wouldn’t reject me, I was off to the races.

  I was young, lost, and reckless. And I was ready to make as many uninformed decisions with my body as humanly possible.

  Not long ago, I was talking with my mom about all the pieces of my younger years that she didn’t know about at the time, and I told her how much I wish I had not had to lie to her as a kid about where I was going and what I was doing. I wasn’t able to be open with her and honor her as a parent, and as a result, I exposed myself to even more bad situations than I would have if I’d been able to be transparent. I learned to please my parents, instead of learning how to be a secure and functioning adult.

  Becoming a secure and functioning adult? That was the farthest thing from my mind.

  Since I couldn’t open up to my parents, I had started looking for older men to explain to me what all this was. My gay urgings. My raging hormonal curiosities. I had more feelings and thoughts coming out of me than the mini powdered donut holes I had going in. And just like my obsession with donut holes, those feelings—I didn’t know how to manage them. So I wanted to find a sexual sherpa(s) to guide me through this desolate sexual tundra I was in. That landed me in dingy apartments next to Super 8 motels, and a weird stranger’s apartment who had a second cousin with a lazy eye out on the couch who kept knocking on the door really intrusively while I was trying to get out of my mind the fact that an old man made up of human soft-serve was hemming and hawing his nasty body into my supple young frame.

  Those situations were
truly traumatizing and not only tore pieces of my soul away, because I did things with my body for people that I regretted, but it also showed me the extent of pain that I was capable of numbing and sitting in. It wasn’t until I was in my midtwenties that I started having sexual experiences that I was actually enriched from, instead of torn apart by. When I fell in love for the first time, I learned what truly connected gorgeous sex was meant to feel like.

  In the meantime, I was wild. Sex with strangers. Stealing my mom’s car to drive to Springfield, Mapquest printouts blowing around in the back seat while I smoked a joint out the window. (I didn’t have my driver’s license yet.)

  I also engaged in a lot of phone sex with guys I met in AOL chat rooms, which really helped me through the countdown until I could leave Quincy.

  It was a weird limbo period, a mishmash of the innocent activities of my childhood and this dark, secret life—and me oscillating like a little horny baby between the two. You know how in the gym, you do a circuit of workouts? That’s how my days were too—only my circuits went like this: Trampoline station. Donut on couch station. Chat room station. Phone sex station. Violin-practicing station. Cheerleading-chant station. Binge-eating station.

  The phone sex station was ultramajor. You’d chat up someone in the Gay 20s or Gay 30s room and then jump on the line to give yourself a little hanky-panky. There was also a site called dudenudes.com, which was a very scrappy preporn site that gave me just enough content to get my rocks off.

  In the chat rooms, I met a boy from Ohio, and we would listen to “Come Away with Me” by Norah Jones and talk for hours on the phone and have really intimate jerk-offs, and then, unusually, we would keep talking after, while we made our respective postcoital snacks. He was very involved in his high school’s theater program, and he would complain about how unfair it was that the “straight boys” in theater auditioned for the same roles he did, but because he was so feminine he never got them.

  We emailed each other pictures from school—chaste ones, never nude, and it would take actual hours to download those bloated jpegs on a dial-up connection. In one he sent me, he was dressed as Willy Wonka in a Halloween costume. It was my first experience with what I’ve come to recognize as a disease you can acquire from any man you’re into: he shares something with you that causes such a knee-jerk ugh reaction that it turns you off him forever, and you can never quite shake it. The Willy Wonka thing was the beginning of that disease.

  My parents couldn’t figure out why our long-distance phone bills were so much higher than they used to be. “Who’s this person in Ohio?” they asked me.

  “Nobody!” I screamed. “Someone from camp!”

  Which, like, sorry him! He was so cute and ginger. For all the times I’ve been hurt I did some hurting, and I hope he found himself a gorgeous adult life.

  In doing a lot of the work I’ve done to heal the wounds inflicted on me in Quincy, I can see how in that era there was so much emphasis—both external and internal—on being who I needed to be for my parents, which happened to be the glaring opposite of everything I needed to be. My mom still accepted me completely and loved me all the way. Yet in the way that sometimes love just isn’t enough, she couldn’t teach me how to fully love and nurture and accept myself.

  This may come as a shock, but I don’t have a doctorate in parenting. I don’t know what it’s like to raise a child. But I know that when I was growing up, the emphasis was on fitting into the mold that was expected of you while under your parents’ roof. You respect the rules and don’t talk back. Once you’re eighteen, you can do what you want. But if your parents pay the bills, they run the house. The emphasis is less on raising someone who can take care of themselves and more on following the ideas that have been passed down to you.

  And then, suddenly, you’re eighteen, and you’ve become a baby adult who’s so angry and doesn’t know how to self-soothe—you only know how to soothe your parents’ nervous system.

  What I needed to learn was how to get through a really painful experience of being bullied. How to deal with embarrassment. How to deal with feeling gross about myself. How to deal with extreme discontentment with my body image. But those weren’t things that we talked about in our house. It was about following the rules, not about knowing how to move through life in a way where you could ask the question, “What’s the next best decision for me?” I needed to learn how to become a more curious, well-rounded, independent person, the kind of queen who could work with other people but still be a ferocious bitch. Instead, I’d spent my life up until that point trying, and failing, to fit into roles that didn’t fit me at all.

  I was extraordinarily lucky in the sense that my family never kicked me out of the house. They were trying to manage the ramifications of raising a queer kid in a society where it wasn’t acceptable to be queer at the time. It groomed me to be someone who really turned my discomfort inward and used it to hurt myself.

  It came out in food. Tons and tons of food. In sex with strangers. In hours spent numbing out in chat rooms. In a super unhealthy relationship with my body. I didn’t even know what healthy coping was.

  If I’d known then what I know now, I would have told my little baby self that being strong and masculine has everything to do with having the courage and audacity to be different. It’s such a better way to be a man—bold and courageous—than squashing it down and trying to fit into a very basic idea of how men are supposed to be. Not to mention that the concepts around masculinity are as tired as the day is long.

  Not that I ever really had a chance of pulling that off.

  Anyway, I was desperate to get out of Quincy. I was in so much pain from everything that had gone down with Fyodor—especially on the heels of having my childhood sexual abuse nearly outed to my whole community—that I couldn’t bear to stay in that town for my senior year of high school.

  I set about finding other little forms of escape. When I got home from cheer practice at night, I would wake up my mom and Steve to let them know that I was home and safe, which was a rule in our house. The house was so big and creaky that every tiptoe you made would cause the whole house to lurch and groan, and one of our dogs might bark at any moment. Then, without starting the car at the top of the driveway, I’d put that shit in neutral so it didn’t make a peep, and push it to the edge of the street before giving her a start.

  I had new friends, honey, and they were dangerous. They smoked weed. They broke curfew. We were Bad Girls.

  With my new girls—Karina, Andreja, Elina, and Helenka—we drove around to gas stations until we found one that would sell us booze and cigarettes, then go to buy a dime bag of weed so we could roll a B and hit a route. We listened to Usher, went through the Taco Bell drive-thru, and embraced our Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants bad bitch journey.

  That year, it came time for my family to make our annual trip to our cabin on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was a fifteen-hour drive from Quincy. We weren’t going to the mitten of Michigan—we were going all the way up to the fingertip attached to Wisconsin.

  In the car, we’d play games. One of my favorites we called “The Cow Game”—dividing the car down the middle, and however many cows were off grazing in the fields on the side of the car you were seated on would up your total cow count. But if your side of the car drove past a cemetery, all your cows would be wiped out, and if you drove by a farm that had a white horse, you’d triple your count. My grandfather, in an eternal effort to never lose, knew every landmark on those roads, so he would reroute us, and the trip would end up taking eighteen hours as we avoided cemeteries and drove past every white-horsed farm.

  But when we took this trip the year I was sixteen, I was already starting to unravel. I didn’t yet know how to roll my own blunts, so my girlfriends had rolled me four or five, which I’d stuffed into my pack of Newport Light 100s. It was hard to come by cigarettes—I’d have to go to, like, eight gas stations to not get carded. On the way up, I smoked half a cigarette, then stubbed
it out and put it back in my pack. They were too precious to waste!

  At the cabin, I loved to wake up and pour myself a big bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, then go outside and smoke half a blunt and eat my cereal while the sun came up. A beautiful Bob Ross meets a stoner General Mills moment.

  Driving back from the cabin at the end of the trip, we stopped off at a gas station, and I realized I still had a stale half cigarette in my pack, so I smoked it. It tasted gross after collecting dust in my pack for a couple days, but I kept powering through it. After all, I’m no quitter. I washed my hands and drank some water after, but I still felt queasy.

  On the way back, I was in the back of the car, starting to feel more and more nauseated. I could taste it from the back of my throat to the tip of my toes, from a foot outside my hands all the way into my pee-hole. I had become the stale half Newport Light 100. The edges of my lips felt like they were turning the same mint-green color of the box. I was so sick. But I couldn’t tell my mom and Steve that I had started smoking cigarettes—they could never know.

  I felt it rise up in my throat and, uncontrollably, I began to puke all over myself. There was no bag to deposit it into, so I just puked on my shirt.

  “Jack, what’s wrong?” my mom said.

  “I’m sick,” I gagged.

  We pulled over to another gas station and I changed clothes, throwing the other outfit away.

  The next day, I went to smoke weed with my friends at a cornfield we always went to called Roller Coaster Road. We’d smoke, listen to music, and hang out. I had Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” on repeat and we were dancing around, playing a game called Elevator where you would crouch down and take a few calming breaths, then the giver of the elevator would take a smoking blunt, burning side in their mouth, and blow into your mouth as you stand up. My poor brain, I’m so sorry for the ways I’ve hurt you.

  As I reached the apex of my elevator, I felt a swarm of bees inside my head. It was the last thing I felt before I passed out. My friends told me later that I just fell to my knees and collapsed, then rolled over stiff as a board. Like I imagine Alexander Hamilton dropping to his knees as he was killed. In the process, I fucked up my face hitting the ground.