Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (15 page)

Of course I’d go to Grandpa’s funeral. Some sergeant, who was also a Bob Jones student, tried to keep me from going, something about a rule that said you could only miss training to go to a grandparent’s funeral if they had actually raised you. “In loco parentis,” he kept saying, like any of us knew Latin. An officer overrode him and I caught a red-eye from LAX back to the South by myself.

Burying Grandpa Schrader that summer was symbolic for me. He had epitomized religion to me and now I found myself standing at his grave. I made a definite decision. I would transfer to Clemson. It was too late for the fall semester, but maybe for the spring semester. I was tired of the sanctimonious and pompous religious attitudes at Bob Jones. The dogmatic idea that things were only as fundamentalists said they were didn’t work for me anymore. I couldn’t believe it. I had seen too much of the world and there were too many ideas and too many different people for the exclusivity that Bob Jones demanded.

Unfortunately, once I decided to transfer to Clemson, in my mind, I already had even though I still had a semester left at BJU. I spent the rest of the summer working at Swensen’s and partying with friends who had been expelled from Bob Jones. That was a flagrant violation of the rules. Obviously I was walking a tightrope with the ultimate objective of falling off—Clemson being my safety net. I wanted out and started doing everything in my power to ensure my freedom.

But it wasn’t an easy transition. I got shit-faced drunk for the first time and the next morning, wracked with guilt, swore that would never happen again. I woke up on someone’s sofa and my parents were furious because I hadn’t called. I was nineteen, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t have to call anymore. Then I remembered, yes sir, as long as I lived my parents’ house I needed to explain myself.

The more I experienced the life of a “real” teenager, the more curious I became to explore further. Things started happening fast. I went to a nightclub! It was a little honky-tonk called Kixx. There I met a girl who was a “prayer captain” in the women’s dormitory at Bob Jones, a position of spiritual responsibility. Well, at least I wasn’t the only Bob Jones student who was led astray. We laughed at the fact that we were both at this club and we had a good time until I got caught drinking a beer. I was underage, and they threw me out.
Fuck
, I thought,
Richie Merritt getting thrown out of a bar! What was happening to me?
Maybe things were happening too fast.

But it was like I had taken a bite out of the forbidden fruit, saw that I was naked, and now there was no turning back. I could only try reining myself in a little. I went back to the same club with some friends after the fall semester started to celebrate my birthday, only this time I decided not to drink. But a girl I worked with recognized me. We danced. What I remember most about her is big, frizzy red hair (big even for the eighties) and her crooked teeth, stained yellow with nicotine. Not the most attractive partner, but she was having a ball and so was I.

Soberly dancing with a homely girl at a small club on my birthday isn’t exactly lewd and lascivious behavior, but in the Bob Jones orb, this was an A1 topic of scandal and gossip. At work the following week, a female friend I had graduated from Bob Jones Academy with had a warning for me. The redheaded girl had sent out a red alert to everyone at Swensen’s about what a good time she had dancing with me. She was surprised, she told anyone who would listen, that virtuous little Richie Merritt went to dance clubs. Two of the people she blabbed to were Stephen Jones, younger son of Dr. Bob Jones III, and his friend Greg, a notorious tattletale. A few days later, my friend reported that someone from the administration had called her asking questions about me.

“Fuck! My days are numbered,” I said aloud. But was “fuck” really the right word? Hadn’t I been courting this throughout the summer? Maybe I should have shouted, “Hooray!”

Sure enough, I got called in to see an assistant dean of men. He didn’t have any specific allegations against me, but asked me questions about my “spirituality.”

He paused, leaned across the desk and said, “What kind of example have you been for your younger brother? We know your parents haven’t gone to church in a long time. Are you bitter because your parents aren’t right with God?”

My brother? My parents? What the hell did they have to do with anything? Who the fuck was he? Fuck this place! I’m outta here.

My mounting disgust with the university must have been pretty apparent. The assistant dean of men didn’t expel me right away, but a week later I had to see the dreaded dean of students, Mr. Berg. Face to face with him I discovered that his rude and arrogant behavior wasn’t reserved just for speaking to large crowds. He directed a megadose of it in my direction.

He smirked. “You know you’re making a really big deal out of this.”

I wasn’t sure what Mr. Berg meant by this comment then, and I’m even more confused about it today. Maybe my future didn’t seem like a big deal to him, but it did to me.

He informed me in no uncertain terms that they knew I had been cussing, listening to rock music, and had gone to Kixx. That equaled 150 demerits, the magic number for expulsion. He then told me I could leave the school if I signed a form admitting to the guilt of my sins and waiving my right to appear before the discipline committee.

There were too many emotions overloading my circuits. Almost in a zombielike state, I signed the form and handed him my Bob Jones University identification card. This meant I couldn’t set foot on the campus again unless, after a year, I chose to meet with the dean again. If the dean decided I was truly repentant, I could return to the good graces of Bob Jones University.

I walked down the steps from his office in the lobby of the administration building. The large paintings of the three Dr. Bob Joneses and their wives loomed large over the two-story room, just as they had loomed over my life. Then it hit me. I had been shipped. Shipped was BJU slang for getting expelled. Richie Merritt. Teachers’ pet. Spelling-bee winner. Model student. Officer material. Expelled. It seemed like everything that had once been so important to me had just been washed down the drain in one fell swoop.

Yet, I drove off the campus with a growing feeling of liberation and exhilaration. I rolled down my windows and blasted the radio to the local pop rock station. Belinda Carlisle was blissfully singing, “Ooh baby…heaven is a place on earth!”

T
he feeling was an odd mixture of freedom and a sense of “what the fuck do I do now?” I could now say “fuck” as loud as I wanted to without consequence, but what else was I going to do? I mean, what was the reason to get out of bed in the morning? It was October 12, 1987. For the first time in my life, I at last had some free will, but I needed to figure out what to do with it.

Not just yet, though. I had to tell my parents what had happened. Surprisingly, they weren’t as upset as I had expected them to be. They had grown increasingly angry at the way BJU dictated the lives of its people and they knew I had become very unhappy there. Also, I reassured them that I’d graduate from Clemson as soon as possible.

Although I was free of BJU, I was still living under my parents’ scrutiny. They had never laid the ground rules with me as they had with Jimmy. For example, my parents never checked my homework yet, with Jimmy, my mom would practically stand over him every night with a whip to make him finish it and then she would check it to make sure it was right. She never had to make me practice the piano, but she set her baking timer for Jimmy and wouldn’t let him slide off the piano bench until he’d been practicing a set amount of time. And if the piano were silent for too long, she wouldn’t count those minutes. Jimmy always had a strict curfew; for the most part, I never really did. My mom used to say to people, jokingly, “If Jimmy had come along first, Rich would never have been born.” Oddly, she would say that right in front of Jimmy.

When I had graduated from high school, Jimmy started ninth grade at Bob Jones Academy, a place where I had been an over-achiever to the tenth power: class president, part of the debate team, participating in the school plays, officer in the band, baritone in the vocal ensemble, volunteer at the Salvation Army Boys Club, etc. My brother had to follow that. It was the “Jan Brady syndrome,” with me in the role of Marcia. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for my little brother. I remember this guy came up to me and said, “Rich, I was working registration—and this kid comes to me and I see his name is Jimmy Merritt, so I asked, ‘Oh, are you Richie Merritt’s brother?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Oh come on, man. Give me a break!’”

Jimmy hated coming after me because he wasn’t going to get good grades. He wasn’t going to be class president. That just wasn’t who he was. But they had all these expectations of him because he was my brother. They wanted him to be just like me, I suppose; at least back then that’s what they wanted. He did not like Bob Jones Academy at all and at the end of ninth grade my mom and dad took him out and enrolled him in Southside Christian School. That year, he and some friends trashed the principal’s office. He was expelled from Southside and had to go to Wren high school, which was the public high school out in the country—the redneck school I’d always been afraid of. My fear had been, if something happened to me at Bob Jones, I would have to go to Wren and I knew I’d get my preppy ass kicked there on a daily basis. Jimmy, on the other hand, did well there and ended up graduating from Wren.

Several years later, Jimmy enlisted and joined the same Marine Corps reserve unit I had joined. So in that sense, he voluntarily chose to do something where’d he continue to follow in my footsteps. I still don’t know what that was about. I thought he hated following in my footsteps, but here he did something in adulthood that meant he would be doing exactly what I had done. But even in the Marines we were different. After the reserves, I became an officer, went on active duty, and made the rank of captain. He didn’t care for the reserves and couldn’t wait to get out after his first enlistment was up.

If there’s such a thing as “family roles,” being the bad kid was the only part for Jimmy. I completely filled the good-kid role. I did everything my mom said to try to make her happy, and then Jimmy came along. His position was to upset that. He would do things to antagonize my mother, like locking her out of the house while she was working in the garden. One time he opened the dryer and took this squirt can of oil and just squirted it all over my mom’s linens. He unplugged the freezer and all the meat my mom had frozen thawed and spoiled. He used a hammer to smash the guts out of a frog in our driveway. I heard a rumor he smeared Vaseline all over a cat one time, but I never saw this in person. I was, however, a little bit frightened of my kid brother.

Jimmy was totally rebellious. And yet, if I was my mom’s favorite, I know my dad liked Jimmy better than he did me. He liked the fact that Jimmy was mischievous, that Jimmy was a typical boy. My dad never said so but I sensed it. Jimmy did, too. He knew he was making my dad happy, even if he was driving my mom nuts.

By the time I was seventeen and Jimmy was fourteen, we were about as different as two brothers had ever been. Neither of us understood the other very much. We didn’t dislike each other…well, he may have disliked me, and I wouldn’t have blamed him. It was during one of my sanctimonious spasms that I told Jimmy if he continued to listen to rock music, I was going to turn him in to the school. I never did it, and I honestly never intended to do it, but I felt that by making the threat, I was doing what was right for his soul.

This sounds totally contradictory, but to us, being brothers meant that even though we didn’t “get” the other, we also knew that no one else in this world would ever quite understand us the way the other did. I mean, I didn’t understand Jimmy, but because I had grown up in the same house and place and in the same crazy family as he had, I knew
why
he was like he was. That probably makes no sense, but I know Jimmy understands what I mean. We loved each other and still do, we were and are proud of each other’s many accomplishments, and I think we developed the confidence to know that if one of us ever really needed the other, we’d be there. But we knew we’d never hang out with or call each other a whole lot, and we shared almost none of the same interests. Early on, we had a silent understanding that this was okay.

I had always been the good son, the one who kept all the rules without having to be told what they were. But I no longer wanted to keep those “understood” rules.

I had started taking my first steps toward independence and, like many teenagers, I was expressing myself by being rebellious. Technically, I had just turned twenty, but I was a late bloomer. Along with occasionally drinking alcohol, I started smoking, too, even though I knew that if I came home and had beer on my breath or smelled of cigarette smoke, there would be hell to pay.

Music was also a major issue. We weren’t allowed to listen to pop or rock music of any kind. My brother was into heavy metal and listened to it a lot. One summer while I was away at camp working, my mother had found a bunch of his cassettes, like “Quiet Riot,” “Dokken,” and “Metallica,” and she had made him break those tapes. That wasn’t uncommon. I heard about mothers doing that to guys all the time. But by now I had started listening to pop music regularly. Even though Madonna wasn’t Def Leppard, I still couldn’t play it in the house. I knew it would be better to not even push that button.

I longed for my own life, to be accountable to no one. “Where have you been? Who are you seeing? What are you doing?” were questions that I didn’t want to answer. I wanted to do as I pleased, and that would mean having to move out.

I also felt ashamed. As angry as I was at Bob Jones University, I still had a nagging feeling that I might be wrong about things. What if the school was right? What if I had violated God’s will? I would have to think about that later; at the moment I had practical considerations to attend to, like, where was I going to live, how was I going to support myself, what was I going to do about the Marine Corps and Officer Candidate School and, most important, what was I going to do about finishing college?

I was still working part time at Swensen’s restaurant, the one less than a mile from BJU. The owner’s son had been an assistant manager, but I knew he was about to get fired. I called the general manager and she confirmed that later that day, the owner was going to fire her son for being lackadaisical. I got his job. Problem number one was solved.

Next, I called the officer selection officer, the “OSO,” for the Marines. He was familiar with BJU’s draconian rules and told me that getting expelled from a school like BJU was not necessarily a problem, but that I would need to enroll somewhere else immediately in order to stay in the officer candidate program. Marine officers are required to have a bachelor’s degree; because of that requirement, officer candidates are required to be actively pursuing one. Problem number two was solved as long as I found a college.

Because it was October and every four-year college in the area was in mid-semester, the only place left where I could take college classes was Greenville Technical College, the local junior college. I would have to become a “tech neck.” My friends and I had always looked down on “tech necks” as the bottom students of each high school class who were neither bright enough to get into a real college nor diligent enough to get a decent post-high school job. I was now one of
them
.

I told the OSO that my plan was to transfer to nearby Clemson University, one of the few colleges in the nation that accepted transfer credits from the unaccredited Bob Jones University. He put me in touch with the two Clemson students I had met that summer, Gary Fullerton and Colin Steiner. Gary, Colin, and I would be going to officer candidate school together the following summer. I got in touch with them so that we would have a friend when we went to Quantico for OCS and to get the scoop from them about what life was like at Clemson. But I would have to wait until the following August before going to Clemson. For now, Greenville Tech would have to do.

I took a class in speech. This speech teacher was a refreshing introduction to the world of secular education. This was my first non-BJU educational experience since kindergarten. She was nonjudgmental and allowed us to express ourselves, something I had never felt free to do before. We could say anything and it was okay. We didn’t begin class with a word of prayer. At Bob Jones, the bell would ring signaling it was time to begin and either the teacher would say a prayer or they would ask a student to do that. Suddenly I was in a class with no opening bell. We just went right into the lesson. It felt so funny to me. Something was missing. Something was not right. But I liked it.

As far as religion went, I hadn’t thrown out the baby with the bath water but I was thinking about it. I had definitely thrown out the bath water. Bob Jones University had instilled my whole concept of religion. Now it was as if God turned against me. To whom was I going to pray? I had a difficult time praying. I stopped reading my Bible. I stopped going to church. I so closely associated that rigidity, that dogmatic teaching, with the horrible God of BJU. I was beginning to form the idea that maybe God wasn’t good. And if that’s the case what do we do? Do we just exist and hope for the best? I had no answers. I concentrated on my classes.

My speech instructor gave us an assignment to prepare a persuasive speech. I don’t recall my topic, but when I was through, she asked, “Have you ever considered becoming a lawyer?”

Yes, I had secretly thought about it, but I had never mentioned it to anyone. I knew of no one at BJU who had been encouraged to go into the legal profession. The legal profession was incompatible with fundamentalism: too many compromises, too much pragmatism. I had also never considered myself smart enough to become an attorney. I was afraid to mention it because someone might tell me that I wasn’t intelligent enough. Becoming a lawyer had been my secret fantasy, and now this woman had brought it out into the open. I was flattered. Maybe it was a possibility. Why not?

I had heard that the Marines had their own lawyers. I checked into it and not only were there lawyers who were active-duty Marine officers, there was a program where the Corps paid for officers with good records to go to law school. My plan was set. I would become a judge advocate in the Marines. All I had to do was transfer to Clemson and graduate, build a stellar record as an officer for a few years, and get into a good law school. After that, I could return to South Carolina and become a Republican politician, marry Strom Thurmond’s daughter—his daughter, Nancy, who was my age (this was before the existence of his illegitimate African-American daughter was common knowledge), and maybe even take old Strom’s place in the Senate if he could just hold on that long. And maybe, just maybe…naw, that was too much to even think about.

I now once again had a steady course to follow.

I found an apartment near Swensen’s. Late one night, without telling my folks, I moved all my stuff out of the house. Everything I owned could fit into the back of my 1980 Chevy Citation. Not the usual way the typical teenager leaves home for the first time, but it felt right to me. Everyone had gone to bed and I managed to sneak everything out the back, put the stuff in my car, and leave. When my parents awoke the following morning, my childhood room was empty.

I knew my mom would be really upset. I knew she would cry. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want to hear her objections. I didn’t want to deal with her emotions anymore. I had enough of my own. If I had talked to her about moving out, I was afraid I would give in and stay. I wouldn’t be able to stand seeing her so upset. It would be easier, once I was out of there, to put up the resistance to all her arguments.

The power my mother exercised over me still wasn’t overt. It was strongly with me precisely because it was so subtle. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe it was me, wanting so badly to please her. But her talent for manipulating me had sharpened through the years. So my defenses to her had to be stronger as well.

For instance, if I had an idea about something—a painting on the wall—I would say, “I really like that painting.”

My mom would say, “No, you don’t. That’s an ugly painting. How could you like it?”

I would say, “I like cubism.”

“No, you don’t. You’re just saying that to upset me.”