Swish (6 page)

It felt like home.

Two days later I went to my first cheerleading practice, and it was a joy from start to finish. The ratio of bases to flyers was off, so I learned the flyer parts, the first of which involved my placing my hands on the shoulders of two rugged men named Andy and Gian, leaping into their hands, and being lifted up so that my feet were at the level of their chests. This was called a half extension and it was terrifying.

It wasn’t so much that I was so high up—I was maybe four feet off the ground—as how unstable it felt. When you’re on a four-foot-high wall you can just walk along it as if you were on the ground. But in Andy and Gian’s hands, though the two of them were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, I might as well have been trying to balance in the middle of the air on Jell-O. The rest of the squad was gathered around us, so if things went awry I was unlikely to crack my head open, but while my brain understood this my trembling body did not.

And then came the dismount: on Princess’s cue, Andy and Gian flung me up into the air, and I became briefly perhaps not a sub-Saharan predator but still a creature I had never been before, bound not by the laws of physics but only by the reaches of my own vision, which seemed in that instant fierce and limitless. I hung for a heartbeat weightless and immortal, filled with possibility, and then I fell.

I do not usually remember my dreams; when I do I find that they have been stories of writing sequels to
Paradise Lost
in ungrammatical French rebus, or of silencing my critics by producing a knitted model of the human brain and naming all its parts correctly, or at least faking it in such a way that they don’t realize I have no idea what I’m talking about. On occasion I also dream, boringly, that I am falling. The instant before I hit the ground I wake up with a start, my heart racing and my eyes wild and my breath short, because what choice do I have but to die, if not tonight in my dream then tomorrow in an explosion or next year of a disease or at any moment of despair?

But here, in the middle of my first cheerleading practice, I found, miraculously, another choice, and it was: to be safe. Once they had thrown me in the air, Andy and Gian quickly crouched down and brought their hands together, creating a cushion for me to land on. And I have never loved anyone as much as I loved them in that moment, when I plummeted from what felt like infinite heights, eyes squeezed shut, not knowing whether there would be anything to keep me from slamming into the floor, and they caught me and cradled me as if my price were above rubies.

They bounced up and gently deposited me on the floor, and the rest of the squad, which had been hollering encouragement the whole time, exploded into cheers mixed with the occasional “You go, girl!” Walking home after practice I passed by a small flock of pigeons picking at crumbs on the sidewalk, and as I approached them they scattered and took wing.
That’s me,
I thought with a smile, and decided that if I could go to cheerleading practice every day I would never need therapy again.

I was wrong, of course.

Oh, it was all fine to begin with. I was still enjoying myself a great deal when we performed for the Team New York awards ceremony, in a cramped but convivial room at the LGBT Community Center, and I continued to learn the flyer parts, ultimately mastering the half extension (with my eyes open, thank you) and the wolf wall. I also started taking gymnastics classes for the first time since the age of six and eventually produced a passable round-off back handspring, which we immediately added to our choreographed routine. We started cheering for the Sharks, New York’s team in the Independent Women’s Football League. This was a sight to behold: hordes of massive helmeted women tackling one another on the field while two dozen fey men cheered “O-O-O-Offense!” before realizing that our team was actually playing defense, at which point we switched to “D-D-D-Defense!” until we heard the unmistakable tinkling of the ice-cream truck around the corner and all sprinted to get Oreo Bars.

But gradually the nurturing quality of the group interactions was eclipsed by the fact that they were group interactions. The outpouring of love I had felt at XL was no match for my deadly fear of others, which, having left me alone for a time, now began to reassert itself. I started skipping squad outings to bars when I could, and when I couldn’t I stood around for fifteen minutes nursing a Diet Coke while not talking to anybody and then ran away. Princess started berating me one day for not coming to the bar after the Sharks’ most recent victory and in order to make him stop I told him I had a drinking problem. I felt increasingly alienated from the other squad members, because they had the body of Hercules or the grace of Midori Ito or the social life of Paris Hilton. True, I did finally get the Spirit Stick after months of hoping the people who received it instead of me would plummet from full extensions to their deaths on the gym floor. And at the season’s-end dinner I was, bafflingly, given the Personality Award; I was so unprepared for this that when I opened my mouth to make an acceptance speech what came out was, “Ha! I’ve fooled you all!” which only confused people.

But then there were also things like the ski trip six of us took one February weekend to Horace’s parents’ house in the Poconos. It rained on Saturday, which meant that we couldn’t ski; we were all relieved, the obligation to ski having been the only downside to the ski trip. So instead we went shopping at the outlet mall and I ate popcorn and bought a really cute bag. After such a successful day, though, I had to go and ruin everything by accompanying the other cheerleaders to a gay bar. Even there things started out promisingly downstairs, where my virgin karaoke performance (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from
Jesus Christ Superstar
) was a smashing success despite the song’s being totally in the wrong key for me. Then I went upstairs to the bar and smiled at the handsome, shirtless bartender, who smiled back. Maybe my life wasn’t a cruel joke the Fates had decided to play on me, I thought. Then cheerleader Robbie saw the handsome, shirtless bartender smiling at me and patted my shoulder condescendingly. “Oh, he does that to everybody,” he said, and my soul shriveled into a little ball of self-hatred and despair. Robbie walked away, came back three minutes later, and said, “He asked me to meet him after close.” I said, “Oh,” and went into the bathroom and tried not to cry.

The evening got worse from there. Robbie, Mark, Steven, and Phil all got roaring drunk (Horace and I weren’t drinking—I because I don’t, he because he had to drive), and Mark and Robbie started dancing shirtless in the go-go cage, clearly having more fun doing so than all the fun I had ever had in my entire life put together. I watched them in agony for a time, torn between my desperate desire to join them and actually enjoy myself for one second and my mortal terror of joining them and making myself a laughingstock. Eventually the former impulse won out; I bravely took my shirt off and joined them in the go-go cage, where I felt like an idiot because there wasn’t enough room for three people and I moved as gracefully as a Parkinsonian C-3PO.

I gyrated halfheartedly for two minutes, during which time I was so miserable I wanted to put my eyes out with a carving fork, and then I got out of the go-go cage. Eventually the four drunk cheerleaders played out an intensely annoying drama about who was taking which strangers home and who was avoiding taking which strangers home, and in the end nobody took any strangers home. I puttered around the house briefly before going up to my room only to find Phil there giving Mark a blow job. I took this as my cue to find somewhere else to sleep and made up the air mattress downstairs. Then I puttered around for a while longer, helping Horace clean and rolling my eyes with him at the drunken behavior of the other four. I was grateful for the shared moment with somebody I liked and respected. Our bond was already infinitely deeper than the shallow fun the drunk cheerleaders were having, and it deepened further when Horace loaned me his copy of
Emma
as bedtime reading.

Then I woke up the next morning to learn that after I’d fallen asleep he’d gone upstairs to fuck Steven for an hour and a half.

Events like this took their toll on my cheerleading. At Pride appearances and Sharks games I grinned and clapped and round-off back handsprang as maniacally as ever, but home felt farther and farther away. No one ever dropped me from a half extension (though I did give Tommy a black eye once during a twist-down) but the rapture of trusting in the hands of others to support me became ever more elusive. I couldn’t understand: I was doing everything right, yet the promise of that bright Thanksgiving morning was growing emptier week by week.

Nonetheless, I might still have been okay if it hadn’t been for the transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Anything resembling a complete history of the decline and fall of my mental health would quickly become so soporific as to send a meth addict into a coma. Suffice it to say that I was more or less all right until the age of twenty, at which point my multifarious anxiety disorders broke free from the chains that had bound them and began to ruin my life.

I can’t stand it when people laughingly say things like, “I got all OCD about filling out that form” when what they mean is, “I filled out that form more punctiliously than necessary.” Obsessive-compulsive disorder is something completely different (not to mention being a noun rather than an adjective). When people have OCD, their minds are filled with intrusive, irrational, repetitive thoughts often so frightening as to render them incapable of concentrating on anything else, and they end up performing rituals to ward off whatever those thoughts make them afraid of, even though they are perfectly aware their fears are groundless. One of the most common obsessions, for example, is a fear that everything around you is contaminated. This is usually paired with a compulsion to wash your hands. People who feel this compulsion strongly can wash their hands until they bleed, and keep on washing—knowing all the while that what they are doing makes absolutely no sense.

Another disorder on the OCD spectrum, rarer but just as fun, is Tourette’s syndrome. Among other things, this can cause people to call out random words (often obscenities) with no apparent stimulus.

I have neither classical obsessive-compulsive disorder nor classical Tourette’s syndrome, but an ambiguous combination of the two. Instead of obsessing about germs and compulsively washing my hands, or shouting “motherfucker!” every three seconds, when I am under stress I am mentally assailed by hate slurs—racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic, any other -ist or -ic you care to name.

There’s a reason they call OCD the waking nightmare. I grew up with parents who had devoted their lives to the cause of civil rights; my favorite person to spend time with as a child was our neighbor Septima Clark, who had trained Rosa Parks in tactics of nonviolent protest. And in my worst periods it’s as if the Ku Klux Klan had erected a burning cross not on my lawn but in my mind. If I can see a photograph of Leontyne Price, the most glorious opera singer the world has ever known, whose debut at the Metropolitan Opera earned her a standing ovation that lasted
forty-two minutes,
whose voice in concert has made me hyperventilate and whose artistry has been an inspiration to me since before I can remember, and be powerless to prevent the words “nigger bitch” from battering my consciousness over and over and over and over and over and over and over until they level every thought in my head, not just every idea about bills I have to pay or lunch I have to eat but in the end every understanding of hope and love and belief my body can contain—well, then, it would be better to be dead; it would be better to be dead and in hell.

Thankfully, my worst periods are few and very far between—only two or three in the last fifteen years—but when you start with the fact that, upon occasion, seeing Harvey Fierstein in a movie causes the phrase “faggot kike” to seize control of my brain, and add 1) a crippling social phobia that renders me incapable of asking drugstore clerks where the protein bars are for fear they will snort at me in derision and mock me after I leave the store, and 2) a generalized anxiety that means the last time I felt completely relaxed was for about twenty minutes on the morning of February 6, 2001, as well as 3) a need to take sips from water fountains in multiples of four or go mad with discomfort—four sets of nine sips is best but if there are people behind me I don’t want to risk angering them and so I can make do with four sets of five or, in extraordinary cases, four sets of three, though any lower than that and I have to do two sets of four sets of sips—what you end up with is a person who is sometimes not in such great shape.

Medication worked wonders for a time but eventually lost its efficacy and, since standing at the edge of the subway platform in case I realized as the train was coming that I needed to jump was not my idea of a good time, I decided to investigate other possible treatments. Unfortunately, homeopathic remedies did nothing; acupuncture did nothing; a faith healer did nothing (shut up, I was desperate). I ran across credible reports suggesting that psychedelic mushrooms have anti-OCD properties, and so, despite the fact that the eighth-grade assembly on drug addiction had frightened me so much I had never even smoked a cigarette, I decided to grow some shrooms. Sadly, the attempt coincided with a mouse infestation in my building, and the mice ate the shrooms before I could harvest them, which meant that I had OCD
and
an apartment full of tripping mice.