Emotionally Streaking

“I want what every man wants. Breakfast.”

COYOTE UGLY (2000)

There’s an art to the adult slumber party, and no, I’m not talking about the sexual kind (although those also require a unique set of talents). I’m referring to having some friends over for a night of being basic: frozen margaritas, Coyote Ugly, inhaling every last crumb of a charcuterie plate, and gossiping until the sun comes up. The gossip part is where my skills really shine. I’ve been doing that ever since I was a closeted kid in Ohio, embracing the metaphorical tea with whoever was willing to spill it at my local pajama party. It wasn’t always easy to find other kids my age who wanted to chat about living, laughing, and loving in the ’90s, but fortunately there were moms for that, and there’s no one better than a mom.

When I was ten and under, slumber parties meant a movie, some pizza, me wrapped in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sleeping bag by 9:00 p.m., and then waking up early to talk to my friend’s mother before any of the other kids got up. Breakfast with the woman of the household was my favorite part of the experience. This all usually happened at my best friend Bobby’s house, an only child who always had the best snacks. His mom, Deborah, would sit me down in the nook and vent to me about her husband, Rick, and I loved the adultness of it. She didn’t look at me like I was a kid; she treated me like the therapist she should’ve paid good money for. By the time we sat together, Deb often looked defeated, like she needed five more minutes of sleep and two fewer Valiums to properly get ready for her day, but I was able to perk her up just by listening. I always assumed a.m.’s were most difficult for her since she was coming from spending hours alone in a bed with her nightmare husband. Deb would pour me a glass of OJ and tell me about Rick working late and not caring about her thriving herb garden, while I would wonder how anyone could not be enamored by this amazing woman. She would make her coffee, “strong like an ox,” as I sat beside her with a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart, ready to listen to her marital problems. I didn’t have all the answers, but I would remind her that she was “strong like an ox,” just like her coffee. And then, like clockwork, I would spot a lone tear cascading down her cheek before Rick interrupted our chat with some outdated demand, like that she needs to make him breakfast.

“Make your own fucking breakfast, Rick,” I wanted to say. If I could turn back in time, I would take a wrecking ball to the patriarchy of that household. But alas, there is no time-traveling DeLorean for me to hop into (yet).

As adolescence hit, the sleepovers started to get weirder and weirder. The tween years are a strange time for kids, with everyone growing up at different rates and having various degrees of body odor, hair, and hormones. When I was twelve, I still wanted to do the little kid things like play with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers action figures, while the other kids wanted to call up girls from our class and playfully flirt. Why would I want to talk to girls when there were grown moms who were so wise nearby? It was sixth grade, and I was not a boy, not yet a man.

Not everyone is on the same body-changing schedule in the sixth grade, but I remember a thin, dark mustache sprouted within a week that fall, and my voice would fluctuate between Kristin Chenoweth on helium and Bea Arthur with a cold. Hormones were flooding through my body, and blood traveled to my bottom half like a cascading waterfall anytime I saw Brendan Fraser on the George of the Jungle movie poster or walked down the underwear aisle at my local Kmart, but it wasn’t like I was out to anyone.

Speaking of undies, twelve is when I switched from traditional underwear to boxers. I’ll never forget receiving my first pair, which felt like a rite of passage into adulthood. Mom wrapped them up as a birthday gift alongside an art kit, and when I opened them in front of my other family members, I was so embarrassed. I started blushing when I saw that they were boxers, quickly moving on to the next gift. From my reaction, you would’ve thought she gave me a box of dildos, but it was just one pair of cotton underwear adorned with Taz from Looney Tunes. My birthday is in October, and it would be months before I would gather the strength to actually wear those boxers. Each day I would set them out on the bed, look at them for a moment, and then go back to my Hanes tighty-whities I was used to. That winter, I finally put them on, and a whole new world opened, a world where I was unrestrained and running free like Mariah Carey in the “Butterfly” music video or Nicole Kidman after she signed her divorce papers. Those boxers were the catalyst for me discovering my body for the very first time. It wasn’t just me; everyone is trying to figure out their bodies around that age, and that causes some very awkward group slumbers.

Bobby had most of the boys from our class over one night in the spring of sixth grade, well after I had started embracing my boxers and puberty. I had planned to transfer to public school the following year, so this was one of the last group events with my Catholic school buddies. Since there were so many of us, Deb and Rick let all of us sleep in their fancy basement. I felt like Ritchie Rich staying there, because their basement had carpeting and a big-screen television, while the basement I grew up in had a concrete floor, molded wood from a flood that was never properly dealt with, and my dad’s old train set from the 1960s that was also covered in (probably dangerous, possibly deadly) mold. Bobby’s house was suburbia goals.

The girls from our class were all having their own sleepover, so we spent most of the early evening calling them on Bobby’s second phone line. I hate to keep pointing out comparisons, but my family never, ever had a second phone line. Even when we eventually got the internet, we would inevitably get kicked off our Netscape Navigator every time Aunt Joanne called to discuss Erica Kane’s latest All My Children antics with my mom. When Napster came along, it would take weeks to download “Lady Marmalade” because the internet kept getting cut out, so I was always envious of anyone with an extra phone line that allowed them to listen to more than just Mýa’s verse.

Let’s take a little detour…

I loved spending the night at other people’s houses, particularly because they always had the good snacks like Dunkaroos or Gushers or Cheetos. We were an off-brand/generic junk food household, so we had treats with names like Cheezzzy Curlerz or Zandwich Cookiez. Lots of misspellings and “z’s” in the names instead of “s’s,” and the mascots for those foods were always ambiguous animals that looked like they were created by whoever animated Tom Hanks in The Polar Express. Very creepy. I never particularly liked cereal, but none of the brands we had in our pantry even came in a box. Our Crizpy Kookiez were packaged in bags, so by the time those snacks were put together at the warehouse, delivered to the grocery store, put onto shelves, carried home, and opened for breakfast, they were dust. If we were lucky enough to get one of the generics that came with a toy like their name-brand counterparts, it was usually a stale stick of gum or a supposedly temporary tattoo of a basic shape that never washed off. I had a circle on my forearm for the entirety of third grade courtesy of Cruncherz. Anywayz, I alwayz looked forward to staying at friendz becuz they were richer and had the good stuff in their pantriez.

The girls eventually grew tired of talking to us boys on the phone, and with Deborah and Rick seemingly asleep, we had to find something else to occupy our time. If we were fifth graders, we would’ve built a fort out of pillows and then pretended the floor was lava, but now that we were tweens with developing bodies, we looked for something more dangerous to do as a group.

A kid named Wes suggested streaking through the neighborhood. To be clear, my body confidence in the sixth grade wasn’t great (still isn’t). At pool parties I felt like a wet goblin, my T-shirt was firmly on while I was in the deep end, so the idea of taking our blouses off and running around in public was not sitting right with me. I was considered “obese” from ages nine to twelve, only losing the weight earlier that fall, shortly before the aforementioned slumber party. The word obese is often thrown around when it isn’t applicable, but I promise you that I was considered technically obese by my primary care pediatrician. When I went out for football that autumn, I was deemed too overweight to even play on the team. Most people think being heavy is a good thing when it comes to that sport, but the people in charge told me I couldn’t play unless I lost fifteen pounds before the first game. This is when my food issues started, and to be honest, they’ve never gone away. I have a very unhealthy relationship with eating/dieting/body image, and it all stems from this time in my life—when adults analyzed my body and made decisions for me based on what the scale said. I often think about how much more I could get done in a day if my brain weren’t so preoccupied thinking about food and weight.

When the streaking was suggested, I panicked. How could I get undressed in front of them when I wasn’t even comfortable getting undressed by myself? I think the other kids at the sleepover just wanted to see each other naked to confirm that what was going on with their bodies was also going on with other people’s bodies, so streaking at a boy’s night seemed like a great place to figure all that out. It makes sense, but I personally didn’t want to know what everyone’s body looked like at that time; I just wanted to watch a VHS of Brandy and Whitney Houston in Cinderella and then get a good night’s sleep so I could hang with Deb at our breakfast date the next morning.

“Shouldn’t we go to bed? It’s almost eleven,” I pleaded to the group.

“Let’s streak!” everyone countered.

My debate skills weren’t what they are now, so I didn’t have a whole lot of counterarguments. Plus, since it was not even 11:00 p.m., I knew we would have to find something to occupy the time until at least 1:00 a.m. because a slumber party is always considered unsuccessful if everyone goes to bed early. My dear grandma used to say I was “full of nerves,” and that was certainly the case when it came to group hangs. All the other boys seemed so carefree about taking off their tops and running down the road of a northeast Ohio suburban neighborhood, but my eyes went wide, my butt clenched, and I started to sweat by the mere idea of it.

Since we were all stationed in Bobby’s basement, the only direct way outside was through a window near the ceiling that opened to the backyard. In an effort to make this night as dangerous as possible, the group built a ladder made of mostly empty boxes that led to the window, and it was decided that we would each climb up the boxes, through the opening to the outside, where we would then take off our clothes, run to the stop sign and back, and then we would all jump around in the backyard without our clothes on like a bunch of giddy hippies. I can’t remember who decided on this exact itinerary, but everyone agreed that it was the best order of events for a successful night. One by one, the other kids traveled up that box ladder and out the window. Wes, Ryan, and Darnell all went out and disrobed as I sat fearing for my life, with my shirt firmly on. One of the kids, Jimmy, wore a brace that night after breaking his arm playing basketball. You would think he would sit this out, as he had an extra obstacle keeping him from full nakedness. Instead, Jimmy confidently removed his brace and hopped outside for some public nudity without a care in the world. Mad props to Jimmy, but I can’t imagine that’s how his doctor wanted his arm to heal.

Before I knew it, it was just Bobby and me left in the basement, the only two left to get naked and run to the stop sign. Bobby hadn’t hit puberty yet, but it was his house, so he knew he would have to join in even though he clearly didn’t want to take off his clothes either. By waiting until all the other boys went, he figured it reduced how much time they would see his bits. We looked at each other with fear in our eyes, and at that moment, I knew I had no choice but to complete the mission.

I tossed Bobby aside and carefully climbed the box ladder before him, determined not to be the last one left in the basement. As one of the final people to go outside, I noticed the cardboard on the box ladder was starting to give in as I approached the open window that led to the Narnia of preteen nudity. My foot slipped through the top and the cardboard fell to the ground just as I shimmied through the opening and into the outdoors. There was no safely turning back. Once out the window, I courageously removed my clothes and looked at the group of nudists already outside directing me to my stop-sign goalpost. They were all dancing like a scene from Midsommar without the white dresses and flower crowns.

At this point, I decided to give in to the fear. My anxiety slipped away with every article of clothing I tossed to the ground. The last thing to go were the Tasmanian Devil boxers, which signified my loss of innocence as they fell to the cold, wet grass. Endorphins flowed through my body, and the excitement of something daring took hold of my emotions. The adrenaline rush of running outdoors without any fabric clinging to my body was a high I had never experienced before and have been chasing ever since. All my cares were gone as I felt the Ohio spring night breeze floating through every crevice of my newly developed frame.

I sprinted from the backyard to the front, and then the streetlamps lit the way as I reached the open road. At first, I covered my privates with my hands, but I eventually threw caution to the wind and allowed myself to feel something other than nerves for what, at the time, felt like the first time in my entire existence. My smile went wide, I screamed with glee, and flailed my arms about like those inflatables that you find outside a car dealership, all the while laughing maniacally like the Joker. “Why so serious?” I wondered about my previous demeanor. My legs didn’t slow down either, they just kept running, and running, and running. Pretty soon, the excitement wore off, and my limbs started to slow from exhaustion. In my naked delirium, I had forgotten to look for the stop sign that was supposed to signal me to turn back around and rejoin the group in the backyard. I found myself deep into the neighborhood, in the middle of the road, and what felt like miles from where I started, without any clothing.

I looked around and didn’t see any of my friends. I was naked, afraid, cold, tired, and unsure of how to get back. I blacked out for a few seconds, and as I came to, I noticed the house I was standing nervously in front of decided to turn on their porch lights. “Could they see me?” I wondered. Another nearby house opened their garage. I could hear a dog barking from another, and it felt like the entire neighborhood was waking up for a show that I had never intended to sell tickets to.

Maybe I shouldn’t have screamed as I ran down the street at 11:00 p.m. I realized that although I was typically asleep by ten on a normal night, the other neighborhood occupants were likely wide awake and curious about the sounds of a pubescent boy shouting in the street without a blouse on just moments earlier. Before I could even figure out where to go or what to do, I saw a car turning onto the street and driving straight for me. I covered my bottom half as the headlights flashed on my bare skin, but I was still a naked twelve-year-old, frozen with fear. Instead of moving to the sidewalk or behind a bush, I stood motionless, wide-eyed, hoping that I would be invisible if I just didn’t move and allowed the driver to swerve around me. It was a young man behind the wheel, a local high school student, with a teenage girl riding passenger.

“Move, fag!” he yelled out his window as the young lady next to him shot me that look someone makes when they smell a fart. Like a dagger to my heart. Not only was I living a nude nightmare, but now it felt like someone knew my secret. My big, gay secret. Did he know that I got giddy when I saw Tom Cruise’s bare ass for a split second in Jerry Maguire? I was panicked and still naked, wishing I would wake up from this nightmare. More neighborhood dogs started barking, and I knew I had to find my way back before a wild (domestic) animal tracked me down. I ran like hell back from where I came, and when I reached the front yard of Bobby’s house, I slipped on the dewy night grass, scraping my knee on a lone tree branch. As I got up, the motion-censored lights on Bobby’s house caught my movement and turned on instantly. Rick’s voice echoed in the night. “What’s that?” he said to his disassociated wife as he turned on the light on the nightstand. It would’ve been nice for Bobby to warn me not to get caught in front of those motion lights, but sometimes you have to find out the hard way.

Detour

I’m comfortable with my sexuality these days, but that wasn’t always the case. I often look back at my youth and try to find the first signs of my homosexuality. Was I gay at six? How about the first grade? When I celebrated my tenth birthday, was I…I wonder. The answer is always yes, of course, but it wasn’t always clear to me. In 1996, I took my brother’s VHS of Terminator and taped over it with First Wives Club, and in 2000 I burned a CD with a twelve-minute remix of JLo’s “Waiting for Tonight” on it. I’m sorry to stereotype, but I can’t imagine a lot of young, straight boys did the same. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and I always felt a little different than the other kids, but I didn’t quite understand it all at the time. I was enamored by Batman & Robin, and while my contemporaries hated the campiness of it, I told anyone who would listen that Uma Thurman deserved an Oscar for her performance. Chris O’Donnell as Robin? Overwhelming for my eyes. By the time puberty hit, it felt like I was carrying a little secret that no one else knew—not even myself. More on that later…

When I reached the backyard, I expected the rest of the group to be dancing outside in their birthday suits, but instead I found a closed window and my garments missing. I looked through the glass and could see Deborah was already in the basement with the now-fully-clothed group of students, everyone snuggled in their individual sleeping bags and pretending to go to sleep to appease the adults. I wanted to bang on the opening and say, “Let me in and give me my pants!” But I didn’t know what Deb knew. I started to worry that I would have to spend the rest of the night outside, my bared caboose on the wooden swing set. Would Rick find me curled up in a dirty sandbox the next morning? With bated breath, I watched and waited for Deb to turn out the basement lights and head upstairs before I gently tapped on the glass for someone to come and let me in. The boxes were no longer there to climb down, but Bobby quietly came to my rescue, using a broomstick that his cleaning person left behind to crack open the window. I leapt inside like an off-brand Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment. A Kathy Feta-Jimmy if you will.

“Where have you been?” Bobby asked as he handed me my clothes.

“Where have I been? WHERE HAVE I BEEN?! How long was I away?” I wondered. Time was an illusion to me that evening. I couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes, but Bobby acted like I had been streaking for hours. Did I exist on a separate space-time continuum? Or was all this an elaborate prank where they bamboozled me into thinking I was gone for an eternity? I may never know.

“I…don’t know where I was. I just kept running. Did your mom catch everyone naked?” I asked Bobby.

“No, everyone came in after you ran off and they put their clothes on. Mom heard us laughing and came down to tell us to go to bed,” he replied.

“What was everyone laughing about?” I asked.

“Wes and Darnell planned to prank you all along. Once you were gone, they wanted to steal your clothes and lock you out of the house,” Bobby said.

The only word that came to me was wow. Wow. The audacity. They hoodwinked me! I looked at the others, seething with a silent anger. Wes was already snoring, off to dreamland, probably plotting his next move as a suburban child villain, while I got my bearings and hoisted my Looney Tunes boxers back on. Darnell rolled his eyes at my panicked state and turned his head away, while Bobby bragged to me, explaining that he never had to take off a single article of clothing since I went out before him. Apparently, there was never even any discussion about coming to find me; they just wanted to steal my clothes and humiliate me.

“You’re switching schools next year, so Wes thought you had it coming,” Bobby told me.

“Wow, Bobby, wow,” I replied (probably).

Have you ever bought deodorant from the drugstore? You get home, unpack it, and rest it on the bathroom counter. You go about your day, finish some errands, and then hop into the shower. You get out and dry yourself off, put on some lotion, and reach for the deodorant you bought earlier. As you lift off the cap, you instinctively apply to your underarms, and as it’s reaching your body, you notice in the reflection of the mirror that it appears the deodorant has already been used before, but it’s too late to stop yourself from applying. Everything happens so fast. You put it on under both arms, first the right, then the left, and then set down the applicator in confusion. You’re suddenly aware that you never even removed the plastic protection from underneath the cap that signals its first use. Your mind races and the only explanation is that someone used that deodorant before this moment, but it wasn’t you. It was a random at the drugstore. A vagrant wandered in and reached for that same antiperspirant, only they didn’t follow through with a purchase like you did; they simply removed the protective piece and applied. You feel cheated and your body feels dirty. That’s how I felt at that sixth-grade sleepover.

As I saw it, those kids wanted me to freeze to death, my newly frail figure struggling to survive in the cold, Ohio evening. This was all the confirmation I needed regarding my decision to transfer to public school the following year. Just like those mean people on Twitter whose profiles are adorned with Bible verses and cross emojis despite being less-than holy when they @ people, these Catholic kids were on a one-way ticket to hell, and I was ready to party with the atheists and Jewish people in my hometown.

I didn’t sleep the rest of that night. My mind was in overdrive, and I had experienced too much emotion for a twelve-year-old boy to handle. I lay in my faded, Raphael-adorned sleeping bag and stared at the ritzy, non-molded basement ceiling, thinking about my life as the hours slowly passed. Some might have admitted defeat and called their parents to pick them up, but that wasn’t me, because explaining the events of that evening to my mother seemed worse than pretend-sleeping alongside my new archnemeses.

I finally heard footsteps upstairs around 6:00 a.m. It was Deb, my only ally. Knowing that she was awake and that I would have someone to talk to was healing for my overactive brain. She would inevitably tell me her problems and I would forget about my own, a comfort I treasured. I neatly folded up my blankets and tiptoed upstairs. Too much noise would wake up the others, and alone time with a mom was the only thing I had left to live for, so I was quieter than a mouse.

The experience forever changed me. As an adult, I don’t worry about waking up anyone when my friends stay over my place. In fact, I’ll blend some daiquiris and blast Beyoncé for all to hear as soon as my eyes open—just because I can and because I was afraid to back then around my contemporaries. It seems the ghosts of our childhoods are forever with us.

“You’re up early,” Deb said to me that morning as she put an extra sugar cube into an oversized mug that read, This lady is one awesome MOM, complete with an arrow pointing upward. The all-uppercase MOM on her coffee mug told me that this was a generic piece built on an assembly line that made countless others like it. The capitalization also told me the manufacturer simply replaced MOM with whatever noun they needed to use to sell the product. This lady is one awesome AUNT, another probably read. This lady is one awesome TEACHER, likely read another.

Lazy consumers would purchase and give it to unsuspecting loved ones. The basic personalization of Deb’s prized possession made me even angrier at her husband, Rick, and her son, Bobby. I imagined Rick grabbing the mug at a gas station on his way home from an affair with a woman named Rhonda while Deb was tending to her homegrown basil. Or perhaps Bobby gave her the mug one Christmas because it was the cheapest gift he could find at the last minute. I could handle the injustice that they thrust upon me, but not the woman of the house. I wanted to tell Deb to run, to start a new life in a big city, but instead I swallowed my words as I made my way to the breakfast nook.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I told her.

“A lot on your mind?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll pour you some extra orange juice. By the way, does your knee hurt?” Deb asked, pointing to the blades of grass that dried to my cut after my naked fall a few hours earlier.

I had completely forgotten about my scraped knee. Emotional pain has a funny way of making a physical injury seem secondary. The truth is, it did hurt, and I didn’t realize until that moment because it was nothing compared to the emotional turmoil I had suffered.

“I’ll be fine. It’s just a bruise, but I should clean it up,” I assured her as I started to walk toward the main-level restroom for some rubbing alcohol and a Band-Aid.

“If you had pants on when you were running wild, you wouldn’t have scraped it,” she said, finishing her sentence with a wink.

She knew. Although most people would’ve been horrified that someone else had been aware of their late-night streaking session, I felt oddly comforted. I’ll never know if she was eavesdropping on the conversations in the basement the night before or if she actually peaked her head out the window when she heard my naked squeals in the streets of the neighborhood where she built her family. None of that mattered, because I knew her secrets, and now she knew mine. We were equals, and none of my contemporaries who were still asleep in that basement could relate.

Without missing a beat, Deb lifted her right arm, pointing out a faint scar on the tip of her elbow. “When I was ten, I fell on my driveway Hula-Hooping a little too hard,” she said. “Some bruises last a lifetime, but they don’t hurt as badly as time goes by.”

Deb was right.