I Had to Say Something (20 page)

“I don't know, Mike,” he responded. “One day at a time, I guess.”

 

The next day I took Dad to Denver International Airport and put him on a plane back to California. I tried to make his departure as routine and low key as possible, but as we got closer to the departure gates area, we both starting getting emotional.

“You're a wonderful son, Michael,” my father told me, giving me the biggest hug he could muster. “Thank you for all you've done for your mother and me.”

I was about to burst into tears, so I said a quick good-bye and waved to him as he got into the security-check line. Then I turned back toward my car, which was parked in the garage. At first I was walking, but then I began running. I got in my Pontiac and just started bawling. I sat there for about ten minutes, unable to drive.

Checking my phone messages when I got home, there was one from a 719 area code. I froze, but the caller turned out to be someone else from Colorado Springs. The last time I'd seen him, he'd confided in me that he worked for one of the ultra-conservative churches down there.

“I know it's late at night, but can you still see me?” he said on his message. “I'll pay extra.” He sounded desperate, just like Ted Haggard. Last time, he'd paid me in ones and fives. I
couldn't help but think it was money from the collection plate. Where
do
these guys get the money to come see me? Extreme Christianity pays better than you would think.

 

It was coming up on Independence Day, so I decided to throw a party.

When I was a kid in Edgewater, there were all kinds of fireworks shows to celebrate the Fourth of July. The weather was always warm. Mom would prepare chicken, or Dad would barbeque hamburgers. We would sit in our backyard and watch the sky light up in all directions. It was one of my all-American, middle-class memories.

By the time July 4 rolled around in 2006, I had already celebrated my forty-ninth birthday and survived a series of important dates without my mother: Mother's Day, her birthday, and her wedding anniversary. Nothing was going right. Even though it was summertime, it seemed like the days just kept getting shorter and darker. I hoped throwing a party would cheer me up.

My apartment has a great view, and on July 4 there are all kinds of fireworks throughout the city. There must have been about twenty people in my apartment, all celebrating summer and the long weekend. I provided chicken and potato salad and many summer picnic items, followed by pie and cake. I wanted to have fun, and I wanted the people I loved to have fun, too. Perhaps if I could make them happy, it would spark some happiness within me. My mother got the most out of life by making sure others were having a good time. That night, I hoped her life strategy would also work for me.

Yet after a couple of hours of a painted smile and no discussion about what was really going on in my life, I realized that all my efforts to be happy were in vain. Part of it was my
mother, but a bigger part of it was the puzzle of Ted Haggard. I just could not get his smiling face out of my mind. One moment he's smiling with joy over seeing me and the next minute he's got his finger pointed at me and my friends, telling us how immoral we are. In spite of my anger at him, I found it interesting that he could float from one end of the morality scale to the other. My emotions can be like a roller coaster, too, but I always felt that my actions were consistent with my beliefs. With someone like Ted, there was no consistency—and yet he pulled it off so well.

I slipped into my bedroom and started bawling again. How many tears could one person cry? I had done nothing but cry and be sick for almost three months, and I wondered how long I could go on before things collapsed. I could see myself getting sick and going to the emergency room, or worse yet, I imagined that I'd be in public somewhere and I'd go off on someone just because they looked at me the wrong way. I was becoming more volatile.

“Damn you, Ted Haggard!” I said repeatedly, pounding my fist into the bed. I wasn't even trying to be quiet about it, and my carelessness was a sign that I was getting ready to crack. “Because of people like you, my friends out there can't enjoy the rights you take for granted!” I could only imagine what Ted would say about my friends at the party having too much to drink, and that pissed me off even more, knowing that he did meth and thought nothing of it. Maybe he thought it was different because he was doing it out of public view, in front of a nobody like me.

I felt that Ted was laughing at me. I wanted to fight back. “Ted, you should be ashamed of yourself!” I scolded him, but a lot of good that did me.

I'd been in my room almost twenty minutes before I realized
that I had to get back to my party. I wanted to tell someone of my pain, but that night, July 4, was not the time or the place. All I could think of was Mr. Roarke on
Fantasy Island
saying, “Smiles, everyone, smiles.” I wiped my eyes as dry as I could get them, clutched the bedroom doorknob, turned it, and pulled. Charades, anyone?

 

“It's really pretty hard not to like Ted Haggard,” John Stevens, a retired pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs, told a local paper. “You can not like some of the things he does, or some of the things he might say on occasion, but it's pretty hard not to like him personally.”

 

“Aren't these fun?” Ted said as he pulled the cock ring around his scrotum.

He was like a kid in a candy store with all these sex toys. He was having fun, but I was so out of it, my eyes had glazed over. I put my finger inside the cock ring to try to adjust it so his balls wouldn't get pinched.

“I'm so glad you turned me on to all these toys,” he exclaimed, using the same voice of excitement he had used on the Joni Lamb show just months earlier. “I've missed you, Mike.”

I steered my mind to happier thoughts, anything that would get me through our session. Rather than think about what I would like to do to Ted, I imagined him as a hunky schoolteacher who wanted his young student to show him what he had learned in fitness class. That fantasy worked enough to get me to smile, but just a little.

Ted was enjoying it all. I got him off as quickly as I could and almost pushed him into the bathroom so he could change and leave.

God, I couldn't believe I was actually fantasizing about beating up Ted, right there in front of him. The thought scared me. I wanted to beat him up, and at the same time, I didn't want anything bad to happen to him. I just wanted him to know how much pain he was causing me and so many other people, including his family.

I wiped my eyes and waited for him in the living room. He came out of the bathroom fully dressed, handed me my money, kissed me, and left. There was even a big tip for all my efforts and sorrows.

I went back into the massage room to clean up. I started stripping the sheets from the massage table. Angry over everything, I yanked the sheets off and wadded them up furiously. I strangled the ball of sheets and started punching it.

As my hand went right through the sheets and into the massage table, I knew I had been defeated. I just couldn't fight anymore. I collapsed in tears on the floor. Ted had won. He had risen. I had lost and was descending into hell, though it felt like I was already in hell.

I went to my computer, and the Web site for a local television station was staring back at me. I had visited the site earlier to see what was happening locally. Off to the side was a link to a profile of their star investigative reporter. I clicked on it and read it. I read it over and over again.

If I alerted the media, would anyone believe me?
I imagined the questions I would face: “How did you meet him, Mr. Jones? Reverend Haggard paid you for sex, you say? So that means that you're nothing more than a whore?”

 

My friend Lloyd Peltzer's birthday had come and gone, and I hadn't taken him to dinner or done anything special for him. Lloyd lives in the Rocky Mountains and comes to Denver
about once a week. So the next time he called to say when he would be in Denver, I invited him to dinner for his birthday.

Lloyd knew I had been uptight for the last few months, but I told him it was depression related to my mother's death. He told me he wasn't buying it and wanted me to tell him everything. I told him I couldn't, that at some point I would tell him why. He reassured me that I had his complete support, regardless.

At dinner, without naming names, I told him that I had been “seeing someone” (Lloyd didn't know that I was an escort) and that this man was a powerful church leader. I told him that I was not sure what to do with this information.

“Mike, you know what's best,” Lloyd told me. “Do what you feel is right.” Then he asked, “Have you seen a therapist?”

I took another bite of my steak and wondered what to make of his comments.

“Well, have you seen one?” he asked again.

I told him my problems were all inside my head and that I was addressing them as best I could.

CHAPTER 9

On August 4, 2006, at 2:17 p.m., Ted left me the following voice mail:

He had never left such a detailed message before. He was always so careful to disguise anything that might give away his true identity. I listened to his message a couple of times. The desperation in his voice was obvious. He needed some meth, and he needed it right away.

There was no way I was going to get involved. I'd pushed my luck just putting him in touch with Todd in the first place. I hadn't heard from Todd in more than a year, and I wasn't
going to track him down, especially now that I knew Art was really Ted. I was so angry. I was still not sure what I would do, if anything. I really didn't want to see or hear from Ted again.

Rather than erase my voice mail messages like I normally did, something told me not to press seven to erase it. Instead, I pushed nine to save it.

Then my phone rang. It was Ted again. He wanted to know if I could “score” him some “more.” I told him I would see what I could do.

Something about his call left me feeling uncomfortable. I had to turn my thinking around quickly, so I grabbed a pair of dumbbells and started pumping out bicep curls. It's a quick way to burn off some energy and distract yourself. After a couple of sets, I got on the floor and did about forty push-ups. The jolt to my bloodstream made me feel better.

I stepped out to get some groceries, and while I was out Ted called again. He left this voice mail message at 5:10 p.m. on the same day, August 4:

The universe was telling me something. This guy couldn't leave me alone, and he was so desperate that he was leaving me some pretty incriminating voice mails. Once again, I decided to save the message.

A day later, he called again, asking for my mailing address. He'd been to my apartment more than a dozen times, but
apparently he could not remember my exact street address or apartment number. I gave him my address, but my gut was telling me there was something to fear.

I was trying to get back to leading a normal daily life. I was proud that I was making it to the gym every day and that I'd stopped making thrice-daily runs to 7-Eleven. But my mood still hadn't improved. I still felt I had to do something about Ted, but I didn't know what. I still feared him, though I couldn't say why. I kept wishing it would all go away and that Ted would go with it.

A few days later, I received a letter in the mail postmarked Colorado Springs, August 7, 2006. In the upper left-hand corner was the word “Art” written in blue ink and big capital letters.

I took my mail upstairs and sat at my dining room table. The first thing I opened carefully was that envelope. Inside, wrapped in a plain white piece of paper, were two hundred-dollar bills. There was no writing on the paper. I knew the letter came from Ted. I knew that the money was for me to get him some meth. What else could it be? He had never prepaid for sex. On the front of the envelope, “Mike” was written in blue ink, while my last name and address were written in black ink. The letter had a meter stamp on it instead of a regular stamp.