Over the Top Page 9

  When I came to, my phone was ringing. It was my mom.

  “Come home,” she said. “Right now.” It was clear from her voice she wasn’t playing around.

  “Mommy, I can’t,” I said. “I’m still at cheer.”

  “Cheer’s over!” she said. “You’re not at cheer!”

  “Tryouts are in a month and a half!” I said. “I am at cheer!”

  “Come home right now or I’m reporting your car stolen,” she said. “We know about your heroin! We found the spoon and the lighter! Oprah was just talking about how to tell if your child is on heroin!”

  As it turned out, I had left a spoon from my Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a lighter out on the back patio at the cabin. Shit.

  “Mom, you’re fucking crazy,” I said. “I’m not coming home.”

  “Explain the spoon and the lighter, then!”

  “I was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch on the balcony!”

  “I’m calling the police!” my mom said.

  I wish I’d been able to have a real conversation with my mom about how I was using marijuana—that I needed it to cope with my anxiety, with living in Quincy, with feeling so hopeless and misunderstood.

  Steve was always instrumental in that—being able to talk my mom down after she saw “Five Things You Should Know About Teenage Drug Use” clips on Oprah and started checking the screens inside all the faucets to make sure they hadn’t been taken out. (If there were no screens in your faucets, your teens were using them to smoke any multitude of drugs.)

  Back at home—and freshly conscious after passing out in a cornfield, so obviously, totally fine—we talked it out. “Mary,” Steve said patiently, “if he was on heroin, he would have track marks and bruising.”

  I ended up coming clean about the cigarettes, explaining that that was why I was vomiting all over myself—not heroin withdrawal. That made a lot more sense to them.

  It was classic Steve: knowing how to deescalate, and be that force of calm and good.

  Not long after that, Steve walked out to the driveway and caught me in the family Jeep deeply receiving a guy I’d been dating. He looked at us, quietly said, “Boys, it’s time for Jack to come inside,” and just walked back into the house.

  When I came inside, Steve was already in bed with the lights out. Classic Steve.

  I was hell-bent on getting out of Quincy and graduating early and bit by bit, I wore away at my parents’ resistance. I took away every reason they had to say no.

  The requirement to get extra credits in order to graduate early? I got ’em. The college cheer squad that you needed to make to leave early? Made it! The ACT score to get accepted? Nailed that shit too. Through every ounce of my mom’s apprehension, I bulldozed my little body out of Quincy, Illinois.

  I’ve always had a little bit of a Sliding Doors curiosity about what would have happened if I’d ended up at a different school. I tried out for cheer squads at University of Colorado–Boulder, University of Arizona, and University of Illinois–Chicago. But my dad went to Arizona, and I’d been to visit his parents in Scottsdale, and when I was a sophomore in high school, we went to Tucson to see the school in real life, so it was familiar to me. I knew I’d be comfortable there. Meanwhile, Colorado was where JonBenét Ramsey was killed, so that was out—even though I made that squad too.

  So I was off to Tucson to make a big splash. Training for cheerleading in college was a whole different animal. It was twice-a-day practices, cheering at four games a week—we did volleyball, football, and basketball—so it was a lot busier, and we had to cover both men’s and women’s. I also took fifteen hours of classes a week my first semester because I wanted to stay busy. But I quickly realized that watching old episodes of Golden Girls and The Nanny on Lifetime in my dorm room was much more fun than going to astronomy (which I had confused with astrology—I couldn’t believe I didn’t get to learn about the zodiac, and instead was subjected to pure math).

  In astronomy class, I sat next to a girl named Sofiya, who was despondent every day and feeling like she had no friends in college. I swooped in for the rescue. She asked if I knew anyone who had weed.

  “Duh,” I said. Pointing to myself, “This little girl, and in my back pocket.”

  I gave her a joint and continued about my day. That night, returning from a problematic sexual encounter, there were ten University of Arizona Police Department cars outside my dorm. To the crowd of onlookers gathered outside, I said, “Oh my God—who’s in trouble?”

  At that moment, a group of police officers approached me and asked if I was Jack Van Ness.

  Oh God, I thought. “Uh-huh. I am.”

  They took me around a corner and showed me a camera that had pictures of Sofiya rolling a joint and smoking it in her dorm room as she took selfies. They told me Sofiya had been caught smoking marijuana in her dorm room and that she had informed them that I was a supplier. They had already searched my room but hadn’t found anything—now they had to search my car.

  “My friend Doroteya has the car,” I said. Doroteya was a girl I had met at my first gay party two weeks prior and, in typical healthy gay boundaried fashion, we immediately became best friends, so I gave her the keys to my car and she drove me around, and then used the car at her leisure all the other times, because why not? She was my best friend now!

  I continued to refuse the car search for the week, at which point I received a letter saying that while I wouldn’t be charged with any criminal proceedings, I was being evicted from campus housing because I’d had knowledge of a controlled substance on campus and hadn’t reported it.

  My mom was furious. I prayed to the thirteen goddesses that the cheerleaders wouldn’t find out. I had already inexplicably passed a drug test—that I had been certain I would fail—so I had come too far to relinquish my spot on the squad now.

  So I cheered my way through the first semester all the way to a 1.7 GPA. I told my parents I had a 3.5. “Everything’s going great!” I assured them as I hopped back on the plane to go back for my second semester.

  Then came the unfortunate task of having to call my parents to let them know that I was kicked off the cheer squad for my low GPA and would have to retake the astronomy class from the term before because I’d been caught cheating (with Sofiya, who I hadn’t learned any lessons about from weed-gate, so we decided to try to cheat on our final together and both got caught). So naturally, because my mom had been cool and allowed me to manipulate her into getting me and Doroteya a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment just off campus so I could continue to pursue my downward spiral of a second semester, I quickly met a local pimp named Bogdan on Gay.com in January.

  I told him I was in dire financial straits and had just dropped out of college. My parents would pay for my rent, as they were on the lease, but car payments, phone, and living money was on me now. Not to mention, how I was going to afford the party-life necessities of marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, and all the other balanced needs of newly eighteen-year-old me. This was the only way I saw to go forward, and how bad could it be?

  Bogdan gave me my first escort bag. It contained a burner phone, condoms, and pepper spray, in case a john ever got too physical. Bogdan was really nice in the sense that he made sure to tell me about the dangers of unprotected sex and let me pay my 50 percent commission for the johns he found through sexual favors to him directly for the first two months. I was swimming in the dough. Doroteya and I were serving Scarface ferosh and I only spent six hours a day shaking, naked, and crying in the corner of our shared bedroom.

  I was thriving.

  I understand that this is probably très jarring to read. But the reality is that LGBTQ+ people face challenges at disproportionately higher rates than their straight counterparts—drug use, sex work, and financial instability can be an unfortunate result. My privilege as a young cis white man whose parents weren’t going to let me drown afforded me the ability to make those mistakes and live to talk about it. I was also lucky that I was resilient by nature, havi
ng already been hardened enough by my experiences in Quincy that I could survive this too.

  Still, this is particularly painful for me to write about. Even deciding how to share this was incredibly difficult. When I was a little boy in a lot of pain and confusion, I used to think that I wanted to help other kids who were going through it like me. I imagined starting a really chic wellness center for other lost gay babies—in my head it was an A-frame log cabin—that would have a juice bar and a yoga studio with really bomb scones and healthy snacks, and probably a spa room once we expanded and started to franchise it out. I never thought I’d be sharing it this way.

  But we have to talk about these subjects, and take them out of the shadows. Which is why I’m doing this—because I hope that speaking my truth might help other little baby Jacks not have to make some of the really hurtful, traumatic mistakes I made. Because a lot of other little baby Jacks never lived to tell their stories.

  So here we go. Soon, Bogdan started wanting to collect his half of the funds, so he sent me to what was, unbeknownst to me, an active meth house. Doroteya would always drop me off at my jobs to make sure that I didn’t end up on a missing persons list. She would drop me off, roll a few houses down, and sit and wait for me to come out. Approaching this house, I knew that something was off. I entered the front door and there was a toothless man who had a smoky lavender hue to his ashy-skinned body. He invited me to the couch that he sat on, pulled out a gigantic bong full of what I now know was meth—I didn’t know what it was then—and asked me if I partied. I said no.

  Just then I heard the sound of three other men coming in from the back of the house. Their energy was not one I was curious to investigate further if I planned to keep all my limbs attached to my body. I asked my client if we could be excused to his bedroom. He obliged.

  In his bedroom, he closed the door and turned and looked at me. “I was a guy like you, once,” he said. “Here’s your cash. I know how important this is.” He put it on the dresser.

  “I won’t kiss,” I blurted out. “Only handjobs. That’s all I’m comfortable doing.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand. This house is kind of scary.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  He sat down on the bed. “Well, I’m actually moving to Mexico tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve been running from some things for some time.”

  He reached under the bed and pulled out a black box. Out of the black box he pulled out a gun.

  I registered that my top was already off and my shoes were at the front door. All I had was my escort bag. The envelope was directly within reach on the dresser.

  In a split second, I made the quick decision to grab the envelope, turn around, and do a dive-roll out an open window. Realizing that there was a screen, but with no time to waste, I burst directly through the screen onto the dusty red clay front yard and ran for my life to the car waiting a few blocks ahead.

  I called my mom the next day, crying so hard almost no noise could come out. I told her I had been selling my body and I had to come home.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “What do you think it means?” I said. “I’m selling my body! Your kid is selling his body!”

  My mom said she would transfer me five hundred dollars the next day and that I could come home.

  In the midst of my escorting months I had found a little black kitten under the hood of a car early one morning with Doroteya when we were up to no good. I brought that cat home and every night I would sleep with him out on the couch because Doroteya would be in our one bedroom in this filthy apartment, and I would think, I’ve gotta get this little kitten out of here. I called him Bug, because he was such a little lovebug. (In truth, his original name was Jayden, but after Britney Spears decided to name her son that as well, I knew that my cat and Britney Spears’s son couldn’t have the same name. Not that there’s anything wrong with sharing a name with Jayden Spears. It was just a little too human for me.)

  So I packed up Bug in my brother’s hand-me-down Jeep, with all my worldly possessions. I’d have to figure out a way to smuggle Bug into my mom’s house and parlay this devastating experience of college humiliation into a new track in beauty school.

  No matter how ugly everything had gotten, I was still convinced I could find a way to make it gorgeous.

  Chapter 7

  Gutsy Queen

  BACK IN QUINCY, I GATHERED MY BEARINGS. I’D ONLY MADE IT through one semester of college, plus another two weeks of my second term—just long enough that we couldn’t get the tuition refunded. Sort of like Nastia Liukin’s comeback in 2012 at the Olympic Team Trials. She knew she had something to add to the team with her skills on uneven bars, but in the middle of her routine, she literally belly flopped from the highest of heights. In that moment she had to make a decision: she could lie there and then slink off that competition floor—or she could jump back on the bars, nail that dismount, and be the Olympic champion queen that she is. Would she make it to the team? Absolutely not! Márta Károlyi would never stand for that. But the point is: Nastia finished with dignity and grace. And so would I. (Except I wasn’t an Olympic champion. I had flunked out of University of Arizona with a 1.7 GPA after turning tricks. But my spirit remained indomitable.)

  When I arrived home, my dad asked if I wanted to meet him for a bite to eat. As I did my best Tyra Banks power-stomp into the local sports bar, trying to give myself a little pick-me-up, I looked up to see my dad was fuming. “I’m so mad at you, I could hit you,” he said.

  “Do it, old man!” I said.

  He actually backhanded me across the face.

  Everyone was mad at me. I was mad at me too. I had gone and proved my parents right, that I had been too young to leave, and just did a face-plant with nothing but a tiny beautiful kitten to show for it. My next move would determine everything. It was clear that I wasn’t cut out for a life of academia. But I also knew that I needed a path forward. I didn’t want selling my body to be how I supported myself. I have no judgment of sex workers—there are so many different reasons why people choose that work—but personally, it put my soul into a blender. I didn’t protect myself. I wasn’t thriving. It didn’t make me feel good.

  If college was the US figure-skating championships, I had fallen on every single jump, tripped on my toe pick and landed on my face, and succumbed to my nerves all over the ice. Now I had stopped training because I’d broken my kneecaps in my last and final jump—and had to move back home devastated and medal-less.

  So I snuck Bug into my mom and Steve’s house and took a job helping out at the family paper to make some money while I figured out my next steps. I had come back, tail between my legs, to a place I had spent so long trying to escape from. Now I saw what my life would be like if I stayed in Quincy and worked at the family business. It was a nonstarter.

  * * *

  A big part of me had always wanted to go to hair school—ever since I was a little kid, trying to zhuzh up everyone around me. But I wasn’t even sure if I would really like it, or if doing hair was just a gay stereotype. I was putting all my eggs into a basket that I didn’t know I was going to love—just because I thought it was fun to color my own hair in high school? Besides, there was that time I turned poor Varinka Prostokov’s hair fire-engine red by accident. What if this was another dead end?

  My family said I’d have to pay for hair school myself after the failed Arizona experiment. So with a dream in my pocket and a FAFSA application, off I went.

  I decided to go to the Aveda Institute in Minneapolis, since it seemed like a cool city, and moved into a tiny apartment across from a 7-Eleven.

  It was an eleven-month program, which came out to sixteen hundred hours of study. It was an opportunity for me to make new friends and reinvent myself. It was there that I started going by Jonathan instead of Jack. The student body was diverse—a lot of blondes from the Midwest, but also a lot of Somali women, since Minnesota had been the only state to take in Somali r
efugees. I was surprised by the diversity of Minneapolis, and being close to downtown and right down the road from University of Minnesota, we had students from everywhere, we had business people, homeless people. We were in a position to learn how to do hair on so many different types of people. They expanded my worldview as well as my hair skills. Not long after we started to study, I was working with textured hair on women of color, so that never intimidated me. Our textured hair teacher, Hethersova, was a passionate educator of all things hair and also a woman of color. Our first day of textured hair class she let us know we would be doing relaxers, braids, reformation curls, and not to be scared of hair on people who don’t look like you. Hair is hair, she would say, it’s our job to learn how our tools manipulate the hair. I’m so grateful for that experience early on in my career because I have seen some hard-core fixes come in and out of my chair, and those early days prepared me well.

  That time at Aveda was what ignited my passion for ingredients and started my understanding of how they can affect our body differently. When you put naturally derived ingredients like an aloe, an essential oil, or a dehydrated quinoa powder on your body, skin, or hair, the way they react is completely different from how synthetic ones do. As someone who had previously only worked with powder in the form of tiny donuts or cocaine, this was enlightening.

  Aveda was derived from ayurveda, which is a form of Eastern medicine based on preventing illness as opposed to treating it. I fell in love with Aveda’s sustainably sourced products and natural ingredients. Once Estée Lauder acquired Aveda, what was once in glass jars became something that felt much slicker, but still, I drank the Aveda Kool-Aid. I was never going to work anywhere that wasn’t Aveda. I became an Aveda girl, through and through.