Bleated Rivalry

It is the week between Christmas and New Year, seven straight days of 3:30 PM. The rain has stopped and so has Heated Rivalry. My life now divided pre and post-Heated Rivalry. Give us this day our daily hockey fuckin’ and forgive us our inability to move on. I don’t need your forgiveness, though because I don’t want to move on. I want more. More of Ilya and Shane and their weird, shadowy, ecstatic lust — lust that marinated over a decade and turned into something real: slow-burner Canadian love. Let’s hear it for our sister to the North. Thank you to the tax-payers; your money was well spent. Sometimes the government works, and when it works, it gives us Heated Rivalry. It gives us hockey gays and hockey bisexuals and a Texan pretending to be Russian. It gives us a season finale that doesn’t end with a bang, but with contentment. Faggy contentment. Momentary ease.

Two guys driving off in into the Ottawa magic hour —pastoral sunlight flickering through the windshield. They’re excited; one set of their parents now know about their horny love and it was fine. It worked out. They survived. Now all they have to do is drive back to a house to fuck more. Relief-weep. They’ll deal with everything else later. They’re going to be good for a little while and that’s all we need to know. How about that? It’s not neat, but it’s not messy. We’re used to gay mess. And that’s not to say these two didn’t veer into early stage mess. But the mess usually came from the outside. Distance. Schedules. The people around them. Hockey things. Their years-long cum volley was mostly functional and sweet. It evolved how it needed to evolve and eventually they were in a car, as a couple. Boyfriends. These handsome young men in love and dating!

“Oh, you kids!” I want to shout from the backseat after watching them kiss each other’s hands. They’d turn around and ask me who I was, and how I got there. The car would swerve and gently drive into a rolled bale of hay on the side of the country road. This is based on the assumption rural Ottawa has bales of hay everywhere.

This show is a phenom in the time of mergers and slop and barely-there democracy. It is a light. It’s giving people what we want to see: hot people being kind to each other and having butt sex. It’s not that complicated. It’s transcending orientation, too. Yes, it’s for us, but it’s also for everyone else. It is igniting tenderness, earnestness, in the best and most uncanny ways.

Just a few days ago on Christmas Eve, when my husband and I were doing last minute grocery shopping for dinner at his parents’ house, I approached him from behind in the produce section and briefly embraced him.

“Aw,” we heard.

We both looked over and there was a woman standing maybe three feet away from us, smiling, apparently moved by our embrace. As soon as she realized we were looking back, she quickly turned her head, and I could almost hear her thinking, ‘Did I just Aw at them out loud?’ It was strange, yes, but I’d take that over whatever else she could have said; over what has been said by someone driving by us in a car as we held hands on the sidewalk. In LA, no less!

Minutes later, when I was ordering a pound of shrimp for shrimp cocktail, before I read that shrimp had been recalled earlier this week for radioactive contamination, I wondered if the ‘Aw’ had to do with Heated Rivalry. Maybe she, too, was overcome with Iyla and Shane and Scott Hunter and sweet, gentle Kip Smoothie. Yes! His name is Kip! Kip! Will there be a boom in children named Kip? Or Smoothie? I hope so. Maybe this lady at the grocery store was so touched by these pretend men that when she saw two real life homosexuals hugging by the onions, she had no choice but to ‘Aw.’ And in these times? Let’s celebrate that! Aw away, diva. People are sick of trying to determine in a photo of our president using a walker is AI and ready to watch gay butt sex. Women watch gay sex. After all, we have a woman to thank for dreaming up these smut-jocks. Thank you to Rachel Reid. And thank you, Jacob Tierney, and Ilya and Shane and Canada. Merci beaucoup, Canada! À la santé du Québec!

I don’t play hockey or speak Russian. And I don’t look like Ilya and Shane. But I do have love. I love my husband and his quiet steeliness and mystery and silliness. I love his mouth and the shape of his head and his eyes and his hands. I love that he lets me cry and lets me ask him questions about things I know the answer to. I think about being 14-years-old and not knowing that in 20 years, I’d marry a man in his parents’ backyard. And that my dad would officiate. I remember driving away after my husband and my parents met for the first time — the first time my parents met any man I was dating. I was relieved that they got along. That it was easy. That my parents laid down their walls about my gayness and let him see them.

Simon and I drove away from a restaurant suggested to me on the East Side that we all agreed was bad, and I felt good. Truly good for the first time since I came out, and even before that. It felt good. Normal. Later my parents told me it was the first time that gay made sense to them; the first time they’d seen me at ease. Aw. Sometimes, for better or worse, it takes someone else to make it all fit together. Seeing “gay” as a pair is easier to digest for some parents. I still can be petulant and wish it had just taking me telling them I liked guys for them to digest it, but I am an adult.

We didn’t talk about releasing press statements or trading to hockey teams or brand deals. I never played hockey. I never played football — except for a one-week residency during recess where I attempted to make contact with the boys in my class by joining them on the football field.

HUMAN I wrote on a whiteboard, holding it up for them to see.

The first time the football was thrown to me, I threw it back instead of running with it. To their credit, they didn’t laugh at me, too much. I tried soccer and basketball, too, and little league. My mom and sister did the wave once from the bleachers when I got walked to first base. Aw.

I was a swimmer. I swam from the age of 4 until I was 20, when I decided to quit my junior year of college to devote more time to smoking cigs and having Skype Sex with guys I met online. I was a good swimmer. I was great at it, actually. Until I wasn’t. I peaked at 14, when I was at my most dissociative and wiry. Perfect for distance freestyle. I could go inside myself, deeper than I already was able to, and go on autopilot. I’d maintain an even pace and cruise. It felt safe. I was in control. I had the most control when I wasn’t in my own body. I’d cry underwater when there was pain, but it felt better than what I was feeling on land. I was invisible on land, and every moment of every day, I could feel the low vibration of a mountain falling down on me from out of the sky. It would take years, but I knew it was there, I knew it was coming. I could bide my time and swim and swim and pretend it wasn’t there, but in quiet moments, few and far between —often when I was facedown, staring at the bottom of a pool — I would hear it, faint and fleeting. Phantom ringing, like my gayness was tinnitus.

At 15, I felt burned out with swimming; from practices each week day and on the weekends and before school and choking before races and fearing my coaches. I sometimes think how much further I could have gone if I had allowed myself to stay on cruise control and continue to hollow out. I think I could have gone far. I had the natural ability and talent, I just didn’t have the heart. I started drinking around 15. I started trying to be straight. These were bigger priorities.

I had always been able to fit in with the boys better at swimming than at school. On my swim team, my social worth was based on my ability. I was fast, so I coasted through. But as we got into high school, the divide began. Gradually at first, then all at once. By my freshman year of high school, I started skipping post-practice showers in the locker room —where for most of grade school and middle school, I forged my deepest male friendships. We recapped and gossiped. Our knitting circle.

By our teen years, the showers became a chamber of masculinity. Talk about sex and blowjobs and titties and fingering. Wrestling on the tile floor, against the walls. Fight clubs. I wasn’t officially excluded, it was understood. I rushed by the showers and changed quickly, careful to avert my gaze. Then I’d wait upstairs for my older sister to drive us home. There was some bullying, too. Nothing unique. I was called ‘pussy’ a lot. Shocking. One guy in particular got creative with it. During practice, each time I pushed off the wall between sets, he would call out from the next lane “Carey’s a pussy!” He did that once for the entire two hours. It was an exhaustive effort, and aside from feeling humiliated, I remember being impressed by his commitment.

I transferred to an all boys high school in Philadelphia for my junior and senior years because my parents thought it would help with my depression. It didn’t not help. Shockingly, I fit in better at an all boys school than I ever did with boys before. Probably because I had new kid credibility and was good at hiding my personality. With my teammates on the swim team there, though, I was myself. Mostly. Maybe because 1/3 of us ended up coming out in college, but it felt like a cheat. A corrective foray into masculinity. A Dead Poets Society ass swim team. I was even one of the captains my senior year. We were fast and had sleepovers and I had a best friend on the team and I took showers with everyone after practice and I didn’t look away quickly for their benefit.

Watching my hockey gays filled me with regret, too. Regret that I never had a big secret romance with another swimmer. I had opportunities. I realize that now, in retrospect. I never could have allowed myself, though. Even when I felt like I was on fire, sleeping on the floor next to the bed of a boy I swam with my sophomore year, and he asked me if I wanted to sleep in his bed with him; the two of us spent hours on the phone with each other.

“Let’s talk till we fall asleep,” he said one time.

And we did. Nothing ever happened physically, but I used to dream about him. I used to try and reinvent his body in my head when I wasn’t with him. When he’d walk out onto the pool deck there were times when I wanted to gasp. A few others seemed to notice it. I think some even mentioned it to him. I started getting weird and clingy with him. I knew it was over — whatever it was — even before he started pulling away from me. We stopped talking after that.

There was a guy my senior year — ironically a swimmer at a rival high school — who I spent nights talking with over Facebook message, sometimes drunk, carefully pressing my index fingers into the keyboard like a toddler on a typewriter. We talked about music and movies and sent 2007 YouTube links to each other. He was shorter than me but looked like he could throw me into the sky. Muscular and confident. The rumor was he was “openly bi” but I never asked him. We never talked about that stuff. We talked about everything but what I wanted. He had pouty lips and brown eyes and I chatted with him briefly at swim meets, almost stammering. Humiliated that I was ever born. But he was nice. And funny. And seemed wiser than me.

Later, towards the end of the school year, I was the student leader on a clandestine religious retreat, and one of the guys I was leading came to my room in the large and strange Catholic vacation house in rural Pennsylvania we were staying at and asked me if I liked this rival swimmer. It turned out, they were friends, and this guy was tasked with asking me. I hesitated and fused to my chair and had a flash of us fucking in his or my car and on a couch in his family’s finished basement, which I didn’t even know if they had one or not, and visiting in each other in college and going to concerts together and doing nitrous balloons in the parking lot before Dave Matthews Band even though I didn’t even listen to that music.

But I said no. I told his friend — a very good and loyal friend who probably would have been completely cool to me if I told him yes, desperately yes, please, please tell him yes — that I was straight. I apologized for giving any mixed messages.

“Please tell him that,” I said.

After the retreat, and until graduation, I was paranoid someone would find out. But the shoe never dropped. No one knew. No rumors. No Lottery-style stoning. We chatted on Facebook more — mostly with my initiating when I would come home drunk from a party on the weekend. To his credit, he always wrote back, but it became less and less focused over time. More obligatory. This hot bisexual who was punk as fuck and living out loud in the Philadelphia Catholic school bubble doing a closet case a favor by replying to his one am drunken Facebook message about an emo band. I was, in fact, a pussy.

We stopped chatting altogether by the time college came. There were times at the Jersey Shore that summer when I’d disappear from whatever party I was at and go look for him, like somehow he’d appear on the sidewalk in front of me. I ended up at the beach once or twice and thought about walking into the ocean and going missing and letting the riptide take me to a new country. I didn’t need to go to college. College is stupid. Fuck college.

If I could do it all over, I would. Maybe I’d skip college and get a job as a waiter at a restaurant in the Philadelphia gayborhood and get into the local theater scene and get an industrial bar in my ear and date a well-adjusted 35-year-old who worked for a bank and taught me about boundaries. Or I would’ve just told that kid on my gay ass Catholic retreat to go tell his gay ass friend that Yes, I liked him back, and that yes, I was ready to suck his Catholic cock in my Jeep Cherokee parked in Fairmount Park. How gorgeous. My Heated Rivalry that never was. Giving a toothy blowjob to guy in a in a maroon jeep on the outskirts of Philly. It would have been the worst head in history, but I would have been proud of it. Bad head that could have saved my soul and maybe spared me almost a decade of scalding agony and near-death. Hard to say. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. But Canada got me thinking.