Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (52 page)

“Well,” he said, signing off, “good luck.”

“You sure do move a lot,” my mom said, responding to my news. Considering she had lived in two houses less than five miles apart in fifty-eight years, my twelve moves in twelve years probably did seem a little excessive.

“This is going to be it. I’ve always loved San Diego and it’s where I plan to stay a while.”

She didn’t respond and over the telephone I couldn’t tell why. Grandma was doing better since her heart attack; I had made it a point to call my parents several times a month.

“Your daddy’s not doing too well,” she finally said, revealing the cause of her distraction. “You know how he’s been treated for rheumatoid arthritis for three years; well, it looks like he don’t have that at all. It’s most likely arthritic spurs in his back. These doctors, they don’t know anything.”

I recalled my dad’s appearance when I had been home six months earlier, hunched over slightly and walking so slowly. But that wasn’t what had concerned me the most. How could I bring this up?

“Momma,” I said softly, “I think you need to take Daddy to see a neurologist.”

“I know,” she said sadly. “I’ve thought about Alzheimer’s too. But I just don’t think I could take it right now, not with your Grandma Merritt the way she is.”

The move to San Diego was easy. Within a couple of weeks I found a job, an apartment and a roommate. My new roommate was Mick Frasca, a law school grad whom I admired for never having made the mistake of going into practice. Instead, he followed his passion and founded his own Web site, www. nakedfrathouse.com. We had an endless stream of aspiring porn stars through our townhouse in Hillcrest. Mick’s Rottweiler, Diesel, and I hit it off instantly. Old friends started appearing out of nowhere and I felt totally at ease around new ones. My new friends and acquaintances knew me only as the sober, relatively in shape person I was now.

I was out getting coffee with a new friend, when someone came up to me and said, “You’re Rich Merritt. I know you from years ago. I met you at the El Toro Air Show and you were shit-faced drunk. Do you even remember it? I remembered you because it wasn’t long after that I read about…about your…notoriety.”

My friend looked at me and said, “I can’t imagine you being drunk.”

I barely noticed the stranger or his comment. I was too focused on my new friend, a person who was very important to me, who couldn’t even imagine me drunk or high out of my mind. For once, I was speechless…and happy. Knowing how messy I had become in recent years, hearing a friend make this comment was like angelic music.

The job wasn’t the greatest and it didn’t pay that much, but it would do for now. Considering the shape of the economy that summer and the fact that San Diego was a notoriously bad job market for general litigation attorneys, I knew just how fortunate was to have something.

San Diego Gay and Lesbian Pride weekend was the last weekend in July. In the past, San Diego’s Pride festivities had been my favorite, but I had missed it the year before because I had been too depressed over my breakup with Brandon to leave the house. I barely remembered the Pride weekend from two years ago because I had been too high celebrating the completion of the bar exam. I was a little nervous about going through the weekend sober, but I was in such a good mood overall, I didn’t worry about it.

It turned out to be one of the best Pride weekends ever. I had rediscovered what Pride weekend was about. True, there was always going to be a lot of drinking and other celebrating—that’s what comes with “liberation”—but for most people, that’s okay. For me, it wasn’t, but I had a good time anyway, without really even being tempted.

Brandon was there and it was good to see him again, along with our other friends from Long Beach.

“In my next lifetime, I’m going to ask that all my friends live in the same county,” I said when I greeted my old friend John.

“Don’t forget, in this lifetime you’re supposed to make millions of dollars so I can be your pool boy,” John laughed. “Well, I’m still waiting.”

John’s boyfriend, Mickey, was nearby, but did not appear to be enjoying the party. Mickey had been having stomach problems on and off since he had missed his fortieth birthday party in January. Unfortunately one of his episodes happened to hit on Pride weekend.

Six weeks later the telephone rang. It was John. He sounded very somber.

“We don’t know yet how bad it is,” he began, “but Mickey’s got stomach cancer.”

Cancer. But Mickey was only forty. He didn’t smoke, he worked out, he took such good care of himself. What the fuck? I didn’t know anything about cancer. Like most gay men, I was familiar with HIV and AIDS and knew a good bit about the fairly complex science behind the virus and the disease. Cancer was just something I always heard about. My parents were always telling me about someone they knew who had it. Grandpa Merritt eventually died from it. But other than Grandpa, I didn’t know anyone who had it.

I read everything I could on the Internet and learned that this wasn’t good. I assumed John and Mickey had read the same things. Stomach cancer was one of the worst kinds a person could get. And almost no one as young as forty ever got it. This was too much.

Mickey underwent surgery almost immediately. His operation was at the nearby Scripps Hospital in La Jolla. I hadn’t known Mickey long, but had liked him the minute I met him. He was kind and sincere and best of all he made my friend John happier than I had ever seen him. This was just too awful to be happening.

Brandon and some of our other friends came to the hospital. We all arrived early to wish Mickey well as he went into the operating room. I returned to my office in downtown San Diego while the others waited at Scripps. A couple of hours later my phone rang.

“He’s got three to six months,” Brandon said.

Over the next week, I visited Mickey in the hospital almost every night. I knew that once he returned to Long Beach, I wouldn’t be able to see him that much. John stayed in the hospital with him while he was in La Jolla.

The elation I had felt just weeks before over finding a new job and moving to San Diego was now gone, replaced with the realization that I was truly back in the tough world where bad things happen for no reason to good people, people that I loved very much.

Depression wasn’t a part of what I felt, now, though. Maybe it was the meds, or the therapy, or the sobriety. Probably a combination of all three. But it was more than that. The previous year had been a rough one for me internally, but I had come through it. Now I really felt stronger than I had before going through those things. And I could be here for my friends, for whatever they needed from me.

On my way from work to the hospital one evening, I called my parents. I told my mom what had happened to Mickey.

“Well, God put you in his life so that you can tell him about the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that he can have a chance to be saved before he dies,” my mom stated.

I almost drove my car into the guard rail that prevented northbound I-5 traffic from falling onto Interstate 8 below. I was speechless. I was in pain, my friend was dying, and this was all she had to say to comfort me.

I wanted to scream into the phone, “Why can’t you be a mother to me just once in my life?”

Why do you still need her to be?
asked the voice.
I thought you said you were over that?

No!
I thought.
I’m in pain, dammit! I need someone to…
Then I stopped and reconsidered my thought. That was my problem. I needed someone to make me feel better, and because they weren’t doing it, I was turning into a victim again. A victim of someone else’s thoughtlessness and neglect. Poor me.
Fuck
. It was Mickey who was in the hospital, dying, according to the surgeon. And I’m feeling pity for myself.

“Well, Momma, I need to get off the phone before I wreck my car. I shouldn’t even be talking on a cell phone while I’m driving,” was my response. I hoped I didn’t sound angry or hurt. But I couldn’t keep talking to her right now. I had to save my emotional energy for Mickey and John.

“You’re my fifth therapist,” I said to the stranger sitting in front of me. “And that’s not even counting the couple’s therapist that Brandon and I saw, or the three psychiatrists I’ve seen since I got out of the nuthouse. I’m beginning to feel like a California cliché.”

I gave a brief synopsis of my history, from Bob Jones University to the Marine Corps to the porn to the magazines to drug abuse to sobriety. Then I dove right into telling him about Mickey’s recent prognosis and my mom’s comment.

“I’ll be thirty-six next week,” I said in a tone that could only be called whiny. “Every time I think I’ve gotten past letting her get to me, she says or does something else that just…pisses me off! Why does my mother’s comment like this still get such a reaction from me?”

He chuckled, “I’ve got news for you, Rich, many men…and women, much older than thirty-six, still get reactions like that from things their mothers say to them. It’s not your mother’s voice, though, that does it to you. Ultimately it’s your own. As you say, though, you’re ‘therapy-savvy’ enough by now to know this.

“But this notion of hell…you’ve heard that your entire life. Not just from your parents, but from Bob Jones. It sounds like it’s created in your own mind a very punitive self. Like you still punish yourself daily just for being who you are, despite, as you say, five therapists and three psychiatrists. It’s not surprising. Being gay in the Marines was just like being born with a sinful human nature at Bob Jones. You’ve had a lifetime of external emotional and psychological torture. It’s called ‘spiritual abuse.’ It doesn’t get talked about much, but it’s an interesting theory.”

He recommended some books about the concept of people who use God the way addicts use drugs. It all began to make a lot of sense. We all needed something to help us deal with the pain, and some people use their external God the way an addict uses an external chemical. It keeps us from feeling what we don’t want to feel. The problem in both circumstances, of course, is that the source of the pain remains.

In my case, the source of the pain had always been the intense self-loathing I had developed early on in fundamentalism and had reinforced in the Marines. God couldn’t take it away and neither could Marine Corps discipline. The excitement and risky daring of making porno films had felt good for a while. Then I had turned to the love of my life to make me feel better, and that worked for a little, but there’s no way one person is going to make you feel good about yourself for very long if you don’t love yourself. The excitement and validation that came from attraction from and sex with other men besides Brandon were the next step in this pattern. Then there was sensory overload provided by the circuit. But ultimately that didn’t make the pain that comes from self-hatred disappear, and Ecstasy, crystal, and alcohol sure as hell only made it worse.

What I felt was finally sinking in was that my parents, my extended family, and even Bob Jones and his fundamentalist crowd, were doing exactly what I was doing now—believing what they had to in order to get through life. I didn’t know how much stock I put in this theory of “spiritual abuse,” but right now God was not my poison. He was
their
problem.

“No matter what else, just give yourself credit for staying sober,” he said at some point in each session. So I did.

It was two weeks after Mickey had been given the terrible news from the surgeon. I stepped out of my office and walked across the street to the Starbucks next to the trolley stop downtown. I forgot to take my cell phone with me and when I returned to my office the indicator was on signaling that I had a voice mail. It was from my mom. I recalled that my dad’s neurology appointment had been this afternoon.

Bracing for the news I expected, that my dad had Alzheimer’s, I returned the call.

“Three to five years,” my mom said. I was shocked by the numbness in her voice, no emotion, no sadness, no cheerfulness. My mom wore her emotions on a badge just as I did. For the first time, I didn’t sense any emotion in her. I was frightened.

Then the substance of her message began to sink in.

What did she mean by three to five years?
Our family was learning from our experience with Grandma Merritt that Alzheimer’s lasted a lot longer than…

“He’s got Lou Gehrig’s disease,” my mom said. “There’s no cure. Almost everyone dies within three to five years. Some people live longer, but not very many.”

“ALS?” I asked. That was the extent of my knowledge about Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s scientific acronym was ALS. I had no idea that ALS stood for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but I immediately began searching for it on the Web on my office computer.

“We went to your daddy’s uncle’s funeral this afternoon. I don’t know why we did that. That was a huge mistake. As soon as your daddy saw the casket, he started crying and broke down saying ‘I’m gonna’ be next.’ Now everyone will know…”

“Momma, there’s no point in keeping something like this a secret,” I said. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

Within seconds of searching the Web, I began to realize how horrible this diagnosis was. While I listened to my mom, I read that ALS destroys the motor neurons that connect the brain to the muscles, slowly rendering the person immobile. It affected the feet and legs and hands and arms but it also affected breathing and swallowing. Very soon my dad would become a quadriplegic requiring a breathing device and a feeding tube. For someone who wasn’t even yet sixty, who had lived life to the fullest by water skiing, working out, jogging and cycling, this seemed worse than death.

I told my mom I would call her back later that evening, but right now I needed to get out of the office. I felt like I was suffocating. I called a friend who worked across the street and he met me downstairs. What was different now was that I was not at all afraid to reach out for help when I needed it, and more than anything in my life, this fit that description.