Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (42 page)

Not everything was so upbeat that night. I ran into one of my friends; he was drinking his water and chewing his gum but he wasn’t having a good time. I was thinking,
How could you not be having a good time on this drug?
He’d been taking this drug for a few years. This would be my future if I kept doing this. He’d paid his money. He’d done his drugs. But it wasn’t working. Yet I didn’t worry about that. I was just busy experiencing the present.

“Oh my God, there’s Cher!” screamed a circuit boy standing nearby.

I spun around as I heard a Cher-like voice singing her newly released “All or Nothing.” I looked on the stage across the convention center.
Oh my God, it IS Cher!
Days later, Cher reportedly denied to an E! channel reporter that she had been at the White Party but said she would certainly be disappointed if there were ever a White Party without at least one Cher sighting. For me, that was good enough. Back in the moment, I had been in the presence of Cher.

Eventually I came off the high as the party ended. I was fine. There was no negative side effect; there was no hangover. Everyone kept saying, “You’ll never be able to sleep.” Ha! I went right to bed, slept for four or five hours, got up, and felt great. This was infinitely better than alcohol, which I hadn’t been enjoying as much as I used to anyway.

The next day, I was ready to start the whole thing over. I hadn’t planned on doing Ecstasy—“X” as I was now calling it—again, but the tea dance was that afternoon and I got a hookup for more. That was another omen. Here I was, I just did one hit and I wanted to do it again right away, that very same weekend. The experience was similar the next night, but not quite as good. I didn’t expect it to be. But it was still very nice. I went back home after that weekend thinking I had discovered a new way of living. As if I had single-handedly unlocked a secret, a mystery.

My friend Jim had just moved to Palm Springs. He couldn’t wait to tell me this story. While shopping at the local Gay-mart, one in a chain of small retail stores catering to gay men, he got into a conversation with Billy about porn videos. Billy was a retiree who worked part-time as a store clerk.

“But my favorite porn star of all time,” said Billy, “is a real Marine…named Danny Orlis.” Jim informed him that we were friends and that I would be coming to Palm Springs soon.

Jim took me to the Gay-mart and introduced me to Billy. As Billy and I were shaking hands, he told me, “So good to meet you…you don’t know how many hours of pleasure you’ve given me!”

His comment made me realize I was no doubt shaking the hand that had also brought him hours of pleasure. Not wanting to appear rude to my number one fan, I didn’t reflexively jerk my hand away, but I washed it immediately afterward. But Billy was a very sweet man. He even gave me a dubbed video where he had copied my scenes from each of my videos onto one tape. I still have that today. Thank you, Billy!

Melanie was going to be in DC on business, so she and I arranged a visit with Rob Jones. I had told Melanie about the porn knowing that she wouldn’t care, but Rob was a different story. I knew I had to tell him, but I had no idea how he’d take it.

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad
you
told
me
; I didn’t know how to bring it up. I told a lot of friends about you when you were in the
New York Times
and one of them showed me
The Advocate.
Honestly, Rich, from the standpoint of a journalist, knowing this just makes you all that more exciting of a person. From the standpoint of a friend, it just makes you more real. No, it doesn’t bother me at all.”

I was glad that my friendship with Rob was intact. Others, though, I wasn’t so sure about. Lieutenant Reyes was pissed. Apparently, as you could imagine, the news story was circulated around the Corps. Reyes sent me an e-mail from Okinawa.

“I actually believed you and had sympathy for you when you said that ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ made your life hell, that you had to live in fear. Doing porn isn’t living in fear!”

I explained to him that I had done the porn years before and that being in a relationship with Brandon had helped bring me to my senses. I think he understood and we stayed in touch for several more years. But I could tell it was definitely a barrier.

The friendship that worried me the most, however, was Gary’s.

“Hey, Rich,” he said the next time we were together. “Been on the cover of any magazines lately?”

I felt a jolt of electricity run up and down my spinal chord.
Why is he asking me this? Does he know? Of course he knows. But he’s smiling…he can’t know.
I decided not to test it, and just assume that Gary joking. “No,” I said. I felt guilty about lying to Gary. We had been friends for twelve years at this point and were close, yet, I felt that gay porn was pushing the limit of what he could accept.

If I were left to my own devices I probably would have blossomed into a full-fledged drug addict in a matter of weeks, if not days, but Brandon kept me in check. I’ve always had an addictive personality about everything and I should have seen it coming. I’ve never been able to eat just one cookie out of the Chips Ahoy bag. Once I open it, the whole bag is usually gone by the end of the evening. With Chips Ahoy, the only real danger was to my waistline; with mind-altering drugs, it was a different story.

Brandon was the voice of reason in my newly drug-obsessed mind and it was he who made sure I did everything in moderation, as best he could. But what he couldn’t understand is that, for some of us,
there is no such thing as moderation.

In spite of temptation, I actually didn’t do any drugs again until well into the summer. Even when we went to London that June—and saw every drug imaginable being sold on the streets of Soho—Brandon wouldn’t let me risk buying anything there. Very savvy of him considering the trouble I could have gotten into buying drugs in a foreign country. Yet, I remember it as being a discovery that recreational drug use wasn’t something exclusive to the gay community in southern California. Everyone in the world was into partying and having a good time. Sometimes I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do.

But thanks to Brandon, and my budding law career, I didn’t get out of control right away. Over the next year, I did Ecstasy only about four times. After all, I was a second-year law student and I was busy interviewing for jobs. One of those times was at what had always been my favorite party, the Zoo Party of San Diego pride weekend.

The Zoo Party was on Sunday afternoon, it was outdoors and best of all, it was at the San Diego Zoo. I loved walking around the zoo at the beginning of the party seeing the animals, grabbing a quick meal at the tree house café with the free meal voucher that came with the party ticket and then going to the dance and having beers with my friends. Many partygoers wore animal-like outfits. It was a trip, even sober. If it had been so much fun with alcohol, I couldn’t wait to try it on Ecstasy.

I had the time of my life. As my X was wearing off, I headed to the bar to get a drink. My friend Jim was there leaning against the bar, sipping a beer.

“Yep, the bar’s getting crowded, everyone’s Ecstasy must be wearing off,” he remarked.

Without thinking, I said, “Yeah, why do you think I’m here?”

Jim glared at me and said, “Not you, too, Rich.” He turned his back to me and started talking to someone else. I felt awful. I didn’t know whether I was mad at Jim, or mad at myself. I was still a little bit high. I’d think it through tomorrow.

I had applied to a number of law firms to work as summer associate. I recently had received my first year grades and they were excellent. I knew that I’d be able to get a good job over the summer and I began interviewing with various firms.

Escaping into drugs would have been particularly easy because this was a stressful period—mixed in with the acceptance letters, there were always a few rejections. I couldn’t understand that.
How could any firm reject me
? Never mind that for every rejection letter I received two offers. As usual, it was only the rejections that struck me and made any real impact.

I called my friend Alan Gurd for advice. He had just started practicing law at a firm in downtown LA. In law school I had gotten into the habit of running everything by him. Now I would discuss the different law firms I’d been accepted to with him.

After I had narrowed it down to two, I called Alan and left him a message naming the different firms and asking which one he recommended. Soon after, I received a strange message back from him: a voice mail saying, “Rich, the best piece of advice I could give you is, ‘Don’t do it.’” And there the message ended. At the time, it didn’t strike me as being particularly cryptic. Sure, I thought it was a somewhat unusual message, but I didn’t look for hidden meaning in Alan’s words.

Later that night the phone rang. I thought it might be Alan calling back to explain what he meant. Instead, I heard a woman’s voice.

“Hi, Rich. This is Hedy.” She sounded like she was crying.
Oh my God, had something happened to Gary?
Ever since Gary had started flying, I always worried about him, even though I knew he was a supersafe pilot.

“Hedy, what is it?” I asked.

“We’re getting married! Gary just proposed to me on the beach, right after the Marine Corps ball!” She paused to catch her breath. “I said ‘yes’ and I…well, I just had to call you right away!”

I looked at the calendar. November 10. Gary’s squadron must have been celebrating the Marine Corps ball on North Island in San Diego. This was just like Gary. Propose to his future wife at the Marine Corps ball. I was glad that Hedy seemed to understand that, for Gary, this was the most special way in the world he could have asked her to marry him. And the location was amazing; few places were more beautiful than the beach just across the bay from downtown San Diego.

“Oh my God, Gary, what the fuck have you done?” I asked when he got on the line. “This is awesome. Congratulations!”

About two weeks later I got a call from a classmate. He said Alan’s roommate, Dena, came home to their apartment and found him dead. “He killed himself,” my friend said. I just went totally numb. It was like someone telling me, “Oh, it’s raining outside.” I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t deal with it. There was no last visit. No good-bye. How could someone so alive, so important to me, suddenly be so…gone!
And by his own choice. He chose to die rather to see me again.
My obsessive egocentric mind saw Alan’s death that way. I recalled his last phone message:

The best advice I could give you is, “Don’t do it.”

I went up to Alan’s apartment the next day hoping to find something,
feel
something. Maybe there was some sort of clue that others had overlooked. I had hoped Dena would be there but she was out. Ever since I heard the news of Alan’s suicide my insides felt as if they had turned to stone. I just stood and looked in thinking,
that’s where he killed himself. Why am I not feeling anything
?

A couple of days later I went to the funeral and, if I was looking for some sort of feeling, I found it there. It was particularly disconcerting that one of the mourners was Alan’s twin brother, whom I had never met. An identical twin. When you go to a funeral for someone, you don’t expect to see his likeness walking around.

Alan had been dating Dan Pallotta, the tall, dark, handsome president of Palotta Teamworks, the company that put on the AIDS rides. Dan gave the most moving eulogy that I’d ever heard. I didn’t realize it but this was another thing to push me further downward in this spiral of depression.

It was a couple of weeks after Alan’s funeral that I decided to try a new drug. Was it related to my mourning process? Who knows? All I can say is, I was in a bad space and Ecstasy wasn’t doing it for me anymore. The high just didn’t feel the same. Then, at one of the dance parties, I observed people snorting something. I asked my friend what it was. He said it was called Ketamine.

I asked him to describe the high. He said, “It makes your X last longer.” Oh good! That’s what I wanted—a longer lasting ecstasy. I immediately wanted to try it.

At my request, this friend of mine got me some Ketamine. Addicts looking back over their drug use see similar patterns. There are little steps you take climbing further and further down the ladder towards addiction. When you start learning about the preparation and paraphernalia that goes along with particular drugs, you’ve taken another step down. You also start using the right street slang. I’d laugh when I read news articles state that users often refer to Ketamine as “Special K.” Although everyone knew that “Special K” meant Ketamine, I never heard anyone on a dance floor say “Hey, you want a bump of ‘Special K’?” It was always just “K” or maybe “Kitty” because the drug was actually a cat tranquilizer.

My friend showed me how you have to bake it and cut it up to powder and put it in this little bullet that you keep in your pocket and sniff a little bit at a time. It’s a hallucinogenic. My first time using it, it took me out of my head. The Ecstasy gave me the euphoria but the Ketamine transported me to another planet. It was terrific. I kept thinking that it was even further escapism, which was exactly the cure I was looking for. To assuage my guilt, I just kept reminding myself that there was nothing wrong with this, there is nothing wrong with having a good time, as long as no one is getting hurt. And it didn’t seem like anyone was getting hurt.

I was at a party, hanging out, and somebody pulled out some cocaine. Always on the lookout for a new thrill, I tried it and immediately loved it. Obviously the drugs had taken over and I wasn’t thinking clearly. They would ask me if I wanted more and I would say yes. And I kept saying yes. At 5:00 a.m., the normal thing to do is say no and go to bed. But that’s not the nature of cocaine.

Brandon had gone to bed by that time and I didn’t tell him until the next morning that I’d been up—busy and wired—doing cocaine all night. That was kind of the beginning of his being in bed asleep while I stayed awake doing drugs. In the future it would happen more and more.