by Johnny Weir
For the short program, we chose a remix of “Palladio” for me to skate like a chess piece, moving deliberately backward, forward, and sideways. Very strong and assertive. Very manly. But for the long program, I wanted to do something with a hot and sultry Middle Eastern vibe. Marina didn’t like that idea at all. It smacked of my old fluffy ways. So she came up with a compromise: I would portray the story of Jesus, a strong male figure who also happened to be Middle Eastern. I wasn’t exactly looking for geographical accuracy in my program, but I didn’t argue after I heard the mysterious, exotic music she composed with Maxime Rodriguez. Plus, after what I had been through at the Olympics, martyrdom did have a certain resonance.
I quickly realized that working with Marina would be a lot tougher than dining or shopping with her. We found some private ice time on our tour stop in Kansas City for our first day of working on the long Jesus program. By now it had been a few months since I had really pushed myself on the ice (not to mention drinking and eating like a civilian). On the ice, I felt like a waddling penguin. Marina only exacerbated my frustration level. Every single time I started a movement—any movement, from lifting my chin to doing a triple axel—she almost immediately yelled at me to stop. Whether it was in French, Russian, or English, she made herself clear.
“No more swan, Johnny. No more swan!”
“You have to be masculine.”
“Be a power player!”
“No pretty fingers!”
In that moment I wished I really was Jesus and could send a lightning bolt to torch Marina. No matter what I did, I couldn’t skate in a way that she liked. In fact, I could hardly skate at all since she spent most of the time screaming at me to stop. I knew she was trying to get the best out of me, but doing a complete aesthetic overhaul of an established athlete is no easy feat. Marina wanted me to be raw, but for me pretty is my comfort zone. I hated practicing a style that I didn’t do well.
Marina’s quest for me to man up didn’t end at my skating style. She also insisted that my costumes be masculine as well—black and white for the chess piece and brown for Jesus. Brown? Yuck. I wasn’t allowed to wear even one rhinestone. God was definitely testing me.
By August, it had been a very, very long tour, one that proved hard on everyone’s moods and livers. It was also hard on my relationship with Alex, which had been deteriorating for a while. Because we hardly got the chance to see each other in person, we weren’t able to solve problems or light that essential spark. Ours had become a phone relationship, and that’s never good. When we talked, we were either in a deep depression or angry, the classic poles of the long-distance love affair.
I wanted so badly to make it work that right after the Olympics I talked with Alex about moving to New England. As naive as it might seem now, I wanted our relationship to be one that would last forever and ever, like many do with their first loves. I thought perhaps a change of scenery might just be the necessary ingredient, not only for Alex and me, but also for my skating career. Hoping to marry my professional and personal life, I looked for apartments and had a meeting with Alex’s coach right before the tour began.
Alex was really into the idea of me moving. My never being around because of competitions, publicity events, and now the endless tour certainly had put a huge strain on our relationship. But there were issues other than our happiness to factor into the equation. Living in Alex’s area would have been expensive and meant I couldn’t help out my family financially at a time when my father was dealing with work-related disability issues. In addition, Alex’s coach just wasn’t good enough for my level of competition.
When the tour hit Colorado I knew I needed to tell Alex the truth: I wasn’t moving to be with him. It wasn’t a commitment thing. I knew that if I moved up there, we would have become stronger and better—and I wanted that just as much, if not more, than he did. But I couldn’t put my family or career in jeopardy. As much as I loved Alex, the Weirs and skating came first and always would.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” I said on the cell phone. “You know my family’s situation. I can’t move. I just can’t financially do it.”
He was pretty short with me about it.
“Okay,” he said, and then moved on to other things.
Alex folded his WASP wings around himself in avoidance, and while I usually agitated for a confrontation, I wasn’t going to make an issue out of a disappointment on my part.
Rolling into San Francisco, about a week before the blessed end of this road trip, my castmates and I sat glumly in the silent bus, looking out the windows like inmates about to be dropped off at prison. I was homesick as well as upset from my overwrought work with Marina on the Jesus program. Plus I hated California. It was all bad. Even drinking and eating had lost their allure.
The only thing good about San Francisco, as far as I was concerned, was the shopping. Marina and I put aside our skating differences and made big plans to get matching Chanel bags and be very cute. That was a goal I could get behind. If the tour had been hell, the money was heaven. My car was paid off and I didn’t really have any bills, aside from my parents’ to pay for, so I felt a little luxury was in order.
Around five o’clock the day of our big shopping spree, we sat down for a bite at a little sushi place, happy with our many purchases and ready for silky fish and soothing sake. Pouring some of the fiery liquid into my little cup, Marina started to talk about the plan for after the tour. We had the skeletons of my programs and now just needed to polish them before the season began in less than a month. The thought of it made my stomach turn.
The waiter placed a couple pieces of yellowtail sushi in front of me when my phone began to vibrate. It was Alex. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. We had a nighttime calls schedule and he was calling two hours early. I left my fish and Marina at the table to answer his call outside the restaurant.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
We started to have a normal conversation but not in a normal way. It was like we were talking in slow motion. Then he said it: the worst sentence in the English language.
“I think we should take a break.”
I’m not a believer in breaks. They are a pit stop on the way to breaking up. So I didn’t accept it.
“Well, I don’t do breaks, and you know that about me. So you either break up with me now, or we’re still together.”
Alex never gave into any of my bullshit, and he wasn’t about to now while on the verge of a break from me.
“No,” he said. “We’re taking a break.”
“Okay. Well, then, just know that I consider us broken up,” I said.
“Okay. We’re taking a break,” he said.
I hung up on him, furious that he had one-upped me. After waiting a few moments to see if he’d call or text back, which he didn’t, I returned to the restaurant, Marina, and my forgotten raw fish. I sat down at the table and started to sob quietly, tears running down my face from behind my sunglasses.
“What’s wrong?” Marina asked with motherly concern.
I told her that Alex had broken up with me and her maternal instinct, turned into Russian wrath.
“Alex is not good enough for you anyway,” she said, echoing a sentiment shared by all the Russian ladies in my life who think they know the best person for me to marry.
The love of my life was cutting me loose, but I wouldn’t get any sympathy from Marina. So I suggested an alternative, that we go to a bar to get very, very drunk. We ended the night in our beautiful hotel, the Clift, sitting in the stark lobby and flirting with everyone that passed through.
“Oh, you’re really going to enjoy your stay,” I said as I winked at a couple checking in. “The desserts on the room service menu are amazing.”
Drunk hospitality was fun while it, and my buzz, lasted. But the next morning, when I didn’t get the usual wake-up text from Alex, the realization of the break hit me hard. His absence festered throughout the day, and there were many times I wanted to pick up the
phone to scream, yell, beg, or anything else to make a connection. But I held back, thinking if he was going to come back, it would have to be on his terms.
That day of not speaking turned into several more until I found myself in Bakersfield on one of the very last tour dates. By then I was a shell of my former self, and the song “My Way” had become a dirge. Right before my performance, in my full costume and makeup, I stood in the alley behind the building that housed the rink and indulged in my depression. I put “Ghost” by the Indigo Girls on my iPod and let myself feel the full ache of loneliness while men carted in lights and other stage equipment. Bawling like a maimed cow, I lay down on the ground in a tragic tableau of smeared mascara and rhinestones against concrete.
Having been alerted to my predicament by some other skaters, Marina came running out of the building to find me lying in the alley. She picked me up, dusted me off, and brought me back inside. “You need vitamin C,” she pronounced, and, stealing several oranges from catering, made me on-the-spot freshly squeezed juice. “Drink it,” she said. I downed the juice, cleaned myself up, and did my performance, crying the whole way through the show.
A week later, after the tour was officially over, I was driving to pick Marina up for a practice at my rink with Priscilla when my phone rang. I picked up the phone. Alex! I thought. Let’s see what this bastard has to say.
“How was your week?” I asked.
“Fine. How was your week?”
“It’s been busy.”
“Well,” Alex said, “did you learn anything this week?”
“No. What do you want me to learn?”
I was getting really agitated.
“I’m really sad to hear that you didn’t learn anything,” he continued. “I learned something . . . I want to break up with you.”
That’s not at all what I had been expecting him to say. I’m young. I’m beautiful. I’m successful. I love him. He’s never going to find anyone else that loves him the way I do. He’ll come to his senses—the typical thought patterns of the desperate.
“I want to break up with you,” he repeated. “You’re not the same person you were when we started dating. You don’t treat me like you used to.”
It was nothing he hadn’t said to me before but the finality of his tone left me breathless. We had been together for two and a half years, always faithful and in love, and now it was simply over? His mom loved me, and I loved her. I loved his whole family—Alex’s dad had even invited me to his second wedding. Having wanted happily-ever-after, I was at a complete loss for words. “I’m really sorry that it came to this,” I said, crying. “I hope I didn’t waste your time. Good luck in your life.”
Having made Marina and Priscilla wait for an hour and a half while I talked to Alex, I finally found the courage to peel myself off Priscilla’s tarmac driveway and gather my girls for practice. Aware of what the last couple of hours had meant to my life and my happiness, Priscilla looked at me with the pity only a mother could have. Meanwhile, Marina had a far different reaction. “I thought this already happened!” she yelled in Russian.
After two hours on the ice, I drove myself home in a cried-out coma, eyes glazed over, lashes sopping wet, a broken heart.
He was the first love of my life, and there’s never one like that again. It makes you crazier than any other love you’ll ever have. I didn’t know what my life would be like after Alex, or if I could ever love someone again. It had been a depressing summer of too much touring, drinking, and burying my head in the sand. Already August, I had to contemplate getting back into the competitive season after my crushing defeat at the Olympics and my wrecked relationship. I had always thought if I wanted something, I could make it happen. But at twenty-one, I was no longer sure what I wanted or was capable of achieving.
11
Growing Pains
Spokane, Washington, was burning with hatred when I arrived for the National Championships in January of 2007. Pastor Fred Phelps and his insane followers from the Westboro Baptist Church had decided to use the skating competition as a peg for an antihomosexual rally. The group—the same one that threatened to protest the funerals of Amish schoolchildren killed in a shooting rampage because they weren’t the right kind of Christians—brandished signs outside the official hotel that read “Fags Burn in Hell” and screamed even more offensive epithets. For once, the rage wasn’t directed at me personally. Even someone as out of touch with reality as Phelps knew competitive skating was filled with gays, no matter what the U.S. Figure Skating Association tried to promote. Still, my mom worried about my safety. “Stay inside,” she said. “Make sure you don’t go anywhere.”
Phelps and his band of traveling haters were the least of my worries. In the event, where I was shooting for my fourth national title in a row, all the press focused on how Evan was finally going to knock me off my throne. It was true that I hadn’t been skating well. My disastrous Grand Prix season leading up to the Nationals had been capped off with my withdrawal from the final after injuring myself during the short program (and after embarrassingly trash-talking Evan for withdrawing earlier because of his own injury).
The federation, understandably pissed that both Americans had taken themselves out of the Grand Prix final, had already started their campaign to make Evan the favorite a year before. The big difference going into the Nationals was that the press had finally gotten onboard. It was almost like the peasants were plotting the fall of the queen. I had been the star. And now I wasn’t. In the quest for me to go down hard in punishment for my disappointment at the Olympics, the skating press held up my pop culture moments as proof of how unfocused and undeserving I had become. I was no longer portrayed as an athlete but rather a diva who needed to be put in his place—last place.
The nadir of this new trend came right before the Nationals on Nancy Kerrigan’s World of Skating, a weekly cable television program hosted by the skating star. She had a few analysts discuss the senior men at the National Championships (basically Evan and me) and they ran me into the ground. Mark Lund, the openly gay founder of International Figure Skating magazine, led the charge, calling my swan program tantamount to a big flag shouting “I’m Gay!” “I can’t wrap my head around how overly out he is without saying he’s out,” Lund said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think he’s a representative of the community I want to be a part of. . . . And who designs these outfits?” Then he went on to praise Evan as having “a classical elegance and masculinity on the ice I think we need to see in male figure skating. I’m saying I don’t need to see a prima ballerina on the ice.” He had a right to his skating opinion, but for him to go off on my sexuality was unacceptable. By letting him run his mouth like that, Nancy, a huge force in skating, lent his opinions an air of outrageous legitimacy.
I couldn’t outskate the negativity following me into the competition. Although I performed a perfect short program, which three years before would have put me ahead of the pack by a mile, Evan beat me by three tenths of a point. We were basically tied going into the long program, but I knew I didn’t have a chance in hell of winning, especially since my long program had been my weak point all season. It seemed nobody liked Jesus. First of all, brown looks terrible on the ice. I tried to change the costume a few times, from brown to gray and then with a pseudocorset-rope belt, but nothing could change the fact that people just didn’t want to see the Jesus story portrayed on ice. I couldn’t really blame them.
Evan added to my inevitable defeat by giving the performance of his life when he landed a quad toe. I had my own quad toe planned, which I two-footed during my long program—just one in a series of jumps that disappointingly popped. Disconnected from the music and my drive to compete, I imploded in humiliating fashion, living up to the predictions by the press.
Not only did I lose to Evan but I placed third behind Ryan Bradley, a skater who should have never beaten me. Third place meant that I would still make it on the World Championship team going to Tokyo that spring, but all I coul
d think about was one more competition to get through before I could finally say good-bye to this hateful season.
Athletes often talk about post-Olympic depression. You have this giant foe that you’re trying to go up against for so long, and once it’s over, once it’s defeated (or it’s defeated you), there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go on. After that National Championship, I was just so over it. I had faced uncertainty about whether I should continue my skating career in the past. But this time was different. I felt an incredible ennui. Simply put, I had stopped caring. It was the ultimate defeat.
This depression turned everything in and around skating black, spurring me to look for diversions, albeit brief, from the outside. Right after the Nationals, I was asked to walk in a fashion show for Heatherette, a rock ’n’ roll line designed by Richie Rich and Traver Rains. This would be my second time walking in one of their shows for Fashion Week (the designers had invited me to walk the previous year after I met them at an event). The trip to New York would have to be quick since I needed to keep to my training schedule, no matter how lackluster. But I said yes, desperate to get away from home, the rink, and everyone.
Backstage at the Bryant Park tent where the show was held, I was a bundle of nerves. Walking in a fashion show, when there are tons of celebrities in the first row, is one of the most petrifying experiences, especially when you’re surrounded by professional, and gorgeous, models. This year, I had been told, I was kicking off the show. I had better look good.
When an assistant shoved my outfit at me (everyone’s always in a hideous rush at these things), at first I thought it was a joke. In my hands was a white bodysuit with glow sticks hanging off every inch of it. After finally catching and stopping another one of the assistants, she explained that I was walking in a special section of the show, without lights, wearing glow-in-the-dark clothes and leading a glow-in-the-dark dance troupe.