Welcome to My World

by Johnny Weir

  Paris and my ears perked up right away, sensing we could get something out of this guy. I didn’t know what Paris was thinking—probably keys to a secret roof deck. But I was thinking about a job for my new roommate. We couldn’t move up here together without him finding a job, or his parents would make him move back to Atlanta. I remembered that in one of the many career paths Paris had pranced down, he had earned a real estate license from Delaware.

  After finding a great apartment that Paris and I agreed to take, I batted my lashes at the agent.

  “You know, Paris has his real estate license. And he really needs a job,” I said while Paris was in the other room, checking to see if the tub had a Jacuzzi feature.

  “Have him send in a résumé and I’ll see what I can do. He has to be legitimately able to do this job,” the agent said with stars in his eyes. “But I don’t see a problem with my helping him.”

  Paris and I practically skipped out of the complex. This crazy scheme for our lives was going to work out after all. Paris turned to me before getting in the car and made a serious face.

  “Nicky, you know you’re going to have to sleep with him for me to get the job,” he teased.

  “For you, Paris,” I said. “Anything.”

  Telling Priscilla was going to be even harder than finding Paris gainful employment. But time was running out. I had already been selected for the Grand Prix events in China and Russia, two powerhouse places to compete, and it was getting close to the point in the season where a skater has to decide choreographers, music, costumes, and the rest.

  On every break from the tour, she tracked me down.

  “Johnny, I need you to come over to the house for a little bit tonight. We have to discuss the plan.”

  I kept dodging her, finding any and every excuse to get out of a meeting. As the weeks rolled by, her stress level and messages on my voice mail increased.

  “I have a very good plan for us.”

  “Johnny, we need to talk about what we’re going to do. Call me back!”

  Finally I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. I was on the cusp of moving to New Jersey and had to cut ties with Priscilla once and for all. I called her on a random Wednesday morning in the middle of touring with Champions on Ice and said my mom and I would be over that afternoon to talk. I knew that she thought it would be about the upcoming season and didn’t disabuse her of the notion. My mother and I had agreed that she would be the one to break the news. “I hired her,” my mom said. “It’s my job to fire her.” I didn’t say no. I wasn’t sure I would be able to walk through the door without crying, let alone let go of Priscilla. Although we had an unworkable relationship on the ice by this point, I loved Priscilla like a second mother. She had been with me almost every day since the age of thirteen. This was going to be incredibly sad.

  When we arrived at her door, we could see in her clear, open expression that she didn’t suspect a thing. No sooner had my mother and I sat down awkwardly on the couch than Priscilla, perched on an adjacent love seat, began going a mile a minute about the upcoming season.

  “I read this book . . .”

  “I have a list . . .”

  “You’ll watch this video . . .”

  All the ideas she had been so eager to tell me about spilled out of her in a frantic jumble. Perhaps on some level she knew what was coming and wanted to push through it with plans for progress. She seemed as manic as we were uncomfortable. Finally my mom interjected with her typical blunt force.

  “Priscilla, it’s come to a point where we really need a change. And it’s not personal; it’s not you; it’s not us. It’s just, for Johnny to achieve everything he wants to in skating, we have to make a change. He’s not improving anymore, and we need somebody that can light a fire under him and make him improve.”

  “Okay,” Priscilla responded, almost like she didn’t believe it. “I want you to watch this video before you go.”

  Completely stone-faced, she stood up and took out a DVD based on the book The Secret that she had wanted me to watch in order to wish a medal into reality. As she pressed play, my mother and I shot each other a quick look, like, What’s happening?

  What happened is that Mom, Priscilla, and I spent the next hour watching a video about making our greatest desires happen using ancient mystical secrets by way of various inspirational-speaking palm readers with a dash of psychology and self-help thrown in for good measure. My mom and I didn’t know where to go with this. We didn’t need to see The Secret; we needed to get the hell out of there.

  After the movie ended, my mom tried to get us back on the track of firing Priscilla. “We found someplace to go. Johnny is going to leave at the end of the month. And Priscilla, really, this isn’t about you. We support you in anything you want to do. Johnny will never have a bad word for you because you guys have had an amazing relationship.”

  I nodded like a fool because I wasn’t going to be able to talk and not cry. Still on her love seat, Priscilla began to slowly comprehend the reality unfolding from my mother’s words. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  My mom and I got up from the couch and started to leave. While walking us to the door, Priscilla began crying.

  “Priscilla, I would never be what I am, or who I am, without you,” I said. “You’ve been everything to me. You’ve given me my life. I mean, I can’t ever repay you. And I’m so sorry that this had to happen.”

  My heart was breaking. I knew Priscilla well enough to know that this was the end of our relationship as coach and student, as well as friends. It was like getting a divorce from your parents or having someone die, awful and ugly and sad. I kept telling myself that I had an objective, no matter how much it hurt her or me. I didn’t have a lot of time to achieve what I wanted to achieve. This is the right decision I said over and over in my head.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Just promise me,” she said before closing the door. “No matter what, you’ll do everything you can to win.”

  12

  From Russia with Love

  (and an Iron Fist)

  “I’m here to see Galina,” I said to the teenage boys working the front desk at my new rink in New Jersey.

  “Who are you?” one asked.

  Oh, lord.

  “I’m Johnny Weir. I just moved here to take from Galina.”

  They looked at me blankly, like they would any other student at the rink. This was not helping my nerves. While driving there I had become more and more anxious. I knew with a judgmental woman like Galina, I would never be able to overcome a bad first impression (I had even practiced the drive over the weekend to make sure I wouldn’t get lost and be late). For so long I had been training at the same place with the same people that my routine had become as fixed as stone. Now it crumbled in front of these lanky, pimply boys.

  “Well, where do I go?” I asked.

  “For what?”

  “To change.”

  “Just go anywhere. Everyone usually sits up in the snack bar.”

  To change?

  “Is there a locker room? I have to get undressed to change.”

  “You can use the bathroom, I guess.”

  I was starting to get irritated. Then the woman who owned the rink came around the corner to say she had a key to a locker room for me but added, “Don’t tell anyone that you’re sitting in a locker room.” In Delaware, I could have said, “Will you set off an atomic bomb in my locker room, please?” And they would have done it. But I decided not to freak out, not on my first day at least. “I just need a place to sit that’s not a toilet or a snack bar,” I said.

  I saw Galina on the ice teaching, but I didn’t want to interrupt her so I went directly to the locker room to change and stretch. In the musty, cinder-block box, I took solace in the familiar warm-ups and rituals that I had done back in Delaware, tying my skates extra tight and lingering over my hamstring stretches. I got so comfortable that by the time I looked up at the clock, it alarmingly read three minutes
past the hour—three minutes late.

  With my skates already on, I dashed out of the locker room and onto the ice. Galina looked at me with a completely straight face—no smile, no hug, no nothing—and I bowed to her as a sign of respect.

  “You’re late,” she said in heavily accented English.

  I didn’t know where to go with that. With Priscilla, if I had been late three minutes, she would have said nothing and stayed an extra hour.

  “Okay, get to work,” she said.

  I was dying. Three minutes in, I had screwed myself.

  Viktor Petrenko and his wife, Nina, were in Russia shooting a TV show, which meant that it was just Galina and I on the ice alone. I started skating around on very stiff legs, doing edges and different footwork passes when she cut me off.

  “That’s all bullshit; you don’t need any of that. We are going to jump right away.”

  I expected her to be hard on me, but in the first minute? Galina was there to push me, so I did what she said and started jumping. But I had years of experience with warming up for thirty minutes to get my body moving, and then jumping. Completely off-kilter, both mentally and physically, I fell all over the place while trying to dodge a group of kids in hockey camp. Galina just stood silently watching me.

  “Viktor showed me videos,” she said after what seemed like my hundredth tumble. “Your triple axel, everything you do wrong.”

  Um, maybe something had been lost in translation. People had always revered my triple axel as one of the best in the world because of how fast I rotated, how high I went, and how smooth the ride out and landings were. And she was telling me that I was doing it wrong? I was under the impression that she was here to push me, not change everything about me.

  That wasn’t even the worst part. Galina speaking in English was kind of like a teakettle about to explode with steam. Whenever she tried to talk, she was bursting at the seams to get the words out. I knew there was so much she wanted to tell me, and she couldn’t do it quickly enough. I understood Russian, even if I didn’t speak it fluently, but I was too overwhelmed and intimidated to stop the lesson and tell her that.

  “Zees jumps vizout contrrrrol,” she said, getting more and more frustrated. “Zees teknik. It doesn’t vork.”

  Galina started waving her arms, stopped speaking in midsentence, picked up again, stopped—meanwhile I was doing my jumps the only way I knew how as she became angrier. Finally, thank God, she switched into Russian and the details started flowing. She picked apart my jump from the entrance to the landing, breaking it down with a technocrat’s precision. She didn’t realize at first that she was speaking Russian, but after I followed a few of her uncomfortable commands (falling even harder now) she said, “You can understand me?”

  I nodded, already feeling the soreness creep up the mess that would later be my muscles.

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me that earlier?” she barked.

  From the very first day with Galina, I had to change not only my training routine and completely overhaul my technique, but I also had to switch my official language from English to Russian (or at the very least, Englissian). It was a lot to get used to right away—especially considering I was also adjusting to living on my own for the first time.

  Saying good-bye to my mother had been a particularly painful part of the transition. While helping me move in a few weeks earlier, she worried about my being alone in a strange place, especially since Paris wouldn’t be arriving for several days. When it was time to go, my dad and I walked her out to the jeep while she sobbed. It took everything inside of me not to cry, but I wanted her to have that moment.

  That first night, alone in my big bedroom, my courage went right out the window. Even though I was in the most secure building on the safest street, I convinced myself someone was going to come in and kill me and nobody would be around to care or find my body. Terrified, I slept with three knives next to the bed.

  But the next day the sun was shining and I quickly found my touchstones—Whole Foods and the Container Store (there are no words for me and the Container Store). I set about stocking the fridge with healthy food and organizing every inch of the apartment.

  When Paris arrived not long after, he immediately reversed all my hard work. It was like a tornado descended on the apartment—within minutes he had lost his keys and a $100 bill in the rental truck, put a bag of his clothes in the wrong closet and left a water mark on my new coffee table. He brought all-out madness into my serene new arrangement.

  I hadn’t been to New York City since I’d arrived, but Paris insisted we leave all his stuff in the car and go right away. So we hopped on a train and in twenty minutes arrived in Penn Station. It was a strange feeling of accomplishment. I mean, anyone can move to northern New Jersey. But there I was on my own, an adult, in the big city. We went directly to Pastis, a French brasserie in the meatpacking district, and had a great meal. It was no accident that the restaurant was right around the corner from one of my favorite stores—Balenciaga. That first day in the city, I bought two of my signature Work Bags in red and green as a welcome gift to myself.

  After a few skirmishes with Paris over his housekeeping habits, I acclimated to my new life (the bags helped). But the biggest culture shock by far was working with Galina.

  The first few weeks of training together were the most frustrating of my entire skating career. Following Galina’s instructions, I no longer could land a single jump consistently. All I did was fall without understanding why. “It’s because I’m changing everything,” Galina said. “Just be with me. Deal with it. And do what I tell you. You’re going to fall for a little bit.” She didn’t give me the opportunity not to trust her.

  Before meeting Galina, I had a very free entrance to my triple axel. Relying on my natural talent, I would kind of wing it and fly into it, which was what made it exciting. But she wanted a very strict pattern for success on the jumps. She wouldn’t let me skip a step. First position, second position, third position . . . fall. First position, second position, third position . . . fall.

  My body started to scream. With Priscilla, I hadn’t jumped that much because I worried about stressing my body. Galina pounded, pounded, pounded the jumps and the footwork and the on-ice running. My ankles swelled up and my body ached in places I didn’t even know existed.

  As I started to fall apart, the flip side to Galina’s harsh taskmaster emerged in the form of a caring grandmother, who drove me in her white Mercedes to her massage therapist and cooked me chicken cutlets. She brought in weird Russian machines to stimulate my stiff hip and creams that smelled like tires. Galina dove right into the role that she wanted for herself: to control every aspect of my life. If my jumps were wrong, she’d fix them; if I was injured, she had the cure; if I were hungry, she would feed me; if I wanted to go shopping, she would take me.

  When Viktor and Nina returned from Russia a few weeks after my first lesson, they were amazed by the bond that had quickly developed between Galina and me. Even more than that, they were startled by the difference they noticed in Galina. I had been so busy falling that I hadn’t picked up on it, but Nina and Viktor pointed out that Galina had traded her trademark upscale sweatsuits for proper pants and jackets. She had also lost a little weight and wore her diamonds and best designer bags to the rink every day. I love a dolled-up lady, but, more important, those observations helped me realize Galina was excited about working with me. “She whistles while she’s doing her makeup,” Nina laughed.

  Viktor, who had convinced Galina to take me on, was thrilled things were working out. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had hesitated because of preconceived notions about my personality based on rumors she had heard. Like many others, she expected me to be a diva bitch, crazy and full of myself.

  She was also uncomfortable with my being gay. Galina didn’t know if she would have to work with me like she would with a woman or a man. Could she yell at me, or would I be really emotional and cry? Her fears were allayed when
she understood that not all of us are drama queens like on TV and that I took my falls like a man.

  What took Galina longer to adjust to was my celebrity. Not only did I still have a camera crew following me around to shoot my documentary, which she did not approve of at first, but people arrived at the rink wanting interviews and details of how life with Galina was going. In an article published early into our relationship, a reporter described her as a “Bolshevik,” which enraged her. How dare they call her that, Galina ranted, she had an American passport. She started to feel the sting of being associated with me.

  “Galina, I’m sorry. But with me, people are going to pick you apart,” I said. “That’s just what we have to deal with. It makes us stronger.”

  Among the members of Team USA, Galina and I stood out like black sheep—or perhaps more accurately, black Russian bears.

  For our first competition, less than a month and a half after we began working together, Galina had told me I needed to wear my American jacket. The event in Shin-Yokohama, Japan, called International Counter Match Figure Skating Competition USA. vs. Japan, was very team oriented. Every team official, such as our president, chairman, and the rest of the U.S. Figure Skating Association’s muckety-mucks, were present. She wanted me to make a good impression.

  “I don’t have one,” I told her.

  “How come?” she asked, surprised since she had seen me wearing the Russian team uniform to practice many times.

  “I shrunk it in the wash.”

  She shook her head and laughed.

  “Please don’t wear your Russian uniform, at least.”

  I listened to her and wore black for the official practice, but the two of us still made quite an impression in the sea of red, white, and blue tracksuits. For the occasion, Galina had decked herself out with a new dye job, diamonds, and big fur coat, despite the fact that it’s still warm in Japan in September.

  Galina—whose most recent competitive pupils represented countries like Israel, Japan, Ukraine, and Georgia—hadn’t been exposed to the U.S. Figure Skating Association for a long time. She had worked with Scott Davis, a high-level U.S. skater, in the late ’90s when I’d just started skating, but this was a whole new federation and I was a completely different story than Scott.