Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (43 page)

It began to bother me that I had to call people to get drugs for me. I thought it would be much easier if I could just get them for myself—the amount I wanted, when I wanted. A friend gave me a number for a drug dealer. Another major step down the ladder. The first time I went to his house to buy some on my own, I was terrified. I walked down the block, looking around, probably making myself ten times more suspicious by being so paranoid. I went in and placed my order. The dealer asked me if I wanted to try some “blow.” That’s another step down, when you start learning all the street names for the various drugs. I said, “Sure.” There I was doing cocaine at a drug dealer’s place. The fear turned to excitement. I wasn’t looking at the reality of doing cocaine at a dealer’s house. It was more like,
Wow, isn’t this strange and exciting?
It was as if my life was a movie, I was the director, star, and rapt spectator.

I would buy drugs, ostensibly for the next big party weekend, but Brandon would go to sleep on a Thursday night and I would stay up and do cocaine because I didn’t have any classes the next day and, well, why not start the weekend a little early? Sitting around my house doing cocaine by myself seems pathetic to me now, but I remember one night I did some and then some more, and some more. This was just a couple of months after I tried it for the first time. I realized I wanted to go to bed. But then I would do more cocaine. My conscience and my willpower were at war with each other.

No, I want to go to bed.

No, I want to do more cocaine
.

That’s when the breath of enlightenment blew across my brain.
Maybe this is a problem.
At four in the morning my willpower finally won out. I had a small amount of cocaine left and I went down to the Dumpster and threw it away. In a dramatic moment of morality, I swore I’d never do cocaine again. Of course I’d fallen before and I fell again. My vow lasted until the party weekend. This pattern started repeating itself over and over. I would do it. I would hide it from Brandon. I would promise to myself it was the last time. And then I’d begin again.

Another White Party came around. There’s always another White Party. We were at the weekend closing party, and I wasn’t feeling anything from the vast amount of Ketamine I’d already ingested. I kept doing more and more. Suddenly I lost complete touch with reality. My mind convinced itself nothing there was real. That I had imagined all of existence. As a result, my mind began searching for another reality

Finally, Brandon had to take me out off the dance floor and put me up against the wall. When I came to, he was saying, “Rich, what’s wrong?” I had gone into what is called a K-hole. I wasn’t in the real world for fifteen or twenty minutes. The film,
Vanilla Sky
, with Tom Cruise is a good portrayal of what a K-hole is like. After a while you don’t know what is real and what’s imagined. To anyone looking at me I was a zombie. In my mind, I was looking for another existence. Another good example of the feeling is the movie,
Being John Malkovich
. It’s as if you go through a window and suddenly you are in a concert hall. Then you walk through that and you’re back in a meadow. That’s what a K-hole is like. Everybody’s K-hole is different. Your mind does what it wants to—but it’s always the same K-hole. You go into it again and again.

If I was becoming unglued because of the drugs, I simply found ways of pasting myself back together. At the next circuit party when that feeling of “unreality” would come over me—if I felt myself falling headfirst into a K-hole—I would run out into fresh air, taking deep breaths until I returned to earth. Or I would just grab onto Brandon and he would be my anchor to reality.

I went to Pensacola, Florida, for Memorial Day weekend. That might seem an unlikely place, but gays and lesbians come to the beach from all over the Southeast for that weekend. I had never seen anything like it—and to think it was in the South!

“I never knew there were so many gay men in the South!” I exclaimed, looking at the thousands and thousands of people on the beach one afternoon. Of course, I hadn’t been “gay” when I had lived in the South and I had never visited areas where gays and lesbians lived.

“Well, we live in
Atlanta
,” said one guy. “That’s a little bit different from the
South
.”

I partied hard for three days, and I learned a valuable lesson—cocaine and Ecstasy don’t mix. I studied up on it later. Cocaine works by trapping dopamine in the synapse between brain cells. High levels of cocaine also block the transmission of serotonin. In order for Ecstasy to work properly, mega-high doses of serotonin must travel across the synapse simultaneously.

You think somebody would have told me this before I spent all this time and money!

Despite the adverse drug interactions, I had a good weekend. But I paid for it dearly on the Tuesday after Memorial Day, which also happened to be the first day of my job as a summer associate.

That night, Rob Jones was in LA on a story for the 2000 presidential race. After making it through my first miserable day on my new job, I met him for dinner in Marina del Rey. I was so embarrassed by my drug-induced “coming down” demeanor. I was paranoid that he could tell and that he was judging me. If he was, he didn’t let on.

It might seem crazy that I would start a new job just coming off a party weekend, but I wasn’t worried. I knew all it would take for me to land a permanent position there was to do an admirable job that summer. In the summer of 2000, law firms were going bonkers. They couldn’t hire enough of us and I had had more offers than I knew what to do with. Salaries for first-year associates were going through the roof. It felt like I was set. I could coast. I quit concentrating on school as much as I had been. My grades stayed pretty good but not as stellar as they had been the previous year. In entering the legal profession, you can’t let yourself slip even a little bit. But I was confident—cocky, even—about getting an offer for full-time employment after the bar exam.

But something happened in the summer that was a clear indication that something wasn’t right in my head. It wasn’t just the drugs. I imagine there are many people—perhaps most people—who try drugs, who use drugs, and never have a problem. I was not one of those people. Rather than use once in a while for a little fun, I became obsessed with drugs. It’s all I could think about. But addiction is only a symptom of a deeper underlying problem. That summer, it started becoming clear to me that something had gone seriously wrong inside my head.

I was in the middle of my summer internship with my firm. One early evening, I went to a salsa dance event at a club that Jennifer Lopez owned over on Wilshire Boulevard. I was hanging out with a gay associate from the firm. No drugs, I just had a few beers—okay, a few
large
beers on an empty stomach. At one point I was taking some salsa dance lessons, which was part of the event. I was my usual clumsy self on the dance floor but, hey, I felt like I was being a good sport. I was feeling pretty good. When I stopped dancing I went over to my friend and started talking about the work I had been doing at the firm. “I’m definitely expecting to get an offer for a permanent position,” I said with all the confidence in the world.

“Oh, you’ll never get an offer,” he chuckled. “I’ve seen the way you dance.”

It was a funny, joking, harmless comment. But it rubbed me the wrong way. It infuriated me and, before I could stop myself, I walked out. It wasn’t the comment itself that drove me to this state, but rather the comment triggered a whole bunch of other things inside my head. Once that downward spiral began, as always, I was helpless to stop it. The alcohol didn’t help.

I had a strong buzz going on from the beer and as I drove away I was growing madder and madder, stewing in my own humiliation and anger. I went to a Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood to meet some friends. By the time I got there I was livid. I wanted to quit the firm. I wanted to give up law school. I wanted to quit the practice. All of these thoughts were racing through my head in a maddening jumble.

Seeing the state I was in, my friends wouldn’t let me drive back to my home in Long Beach. That night I crashed on a friend’s couch. The next day, I woke up and I was still thinking these irrational thoughts. I wanted to quit. Everything. And it was all because a friend had made a silly, little quip about my dancing. Suddenly I just knew that, although I was in the game, I wasn’t playing with a full deck.

I said to myself,
Something is wrong with me. My head isn’t right
.

That was the first time I had ever admitted that. It was like the time I looked in the mirror and admitted to myself that I was a homosexual. Now I told myself,
There’s something wrong with you. You need help.

Over the next few days the intense irrational feeling of anger that had started during the salsa event stayed with me and I knew I needed to find a way to deal with it. I had recently befriended a guy who was the first person who had spoken openly to me about seeing a therapist. I called him and got the number of his therapist and made an appointment.

The day of the appointment, I was supposed to leave work early but it was one of those days that I was feeling fine and, as the hour approached to leave, I decided I really didn’t need any help. I had simply overreacted. I was being a drama queen. Certainly I didn’t need to see a therapist.

Then fate stepped in. It was almost funny, because right as I was about to pick up the phone to cancel, the phone rang. It was my mother. She was calling about some issues with my dad’s parents and other issues with her brother. The usual family melodrama that had been going on for years and years, but it upset me in that special way that only my mother’s complaining could. I hung up the phone up and made a beeline to the therapist’s office.

It was my intention to discuss the unreasonable anxiety attack triggered by the comment my friend made regarding my salsa dancing. But right away my floodgates opened and I started talking about the porn,
The Advocate
, Bob Jones, the situation with my family, and the scarily accelerating rate of my drug use. All of this poured out in a steady stream of agitated consciousness. The thing is, the therapist didn’t tell me to quit doing the drugs. At that point I don’t think I would have, but looking back I don’t understand a therapist not addressing his patient’s drinking and drug-taking. I also brought up the subject of my relationship with Brandon.

Brandon and I had started to have problems because I began viewing him as someone holding me back: I was now this party animal and he was keeping me from doing what I wanted to do.
Why does he have to get on to me for doing too many drugs over the weekend?

When I went to a party weekend, I wanted to do drugs from beginning to end. My attitude was,
I’m an adult—I should be able to do what I want.
That aspect of our relationship got worse. I viewed him as trying to control me and dictate to me, just as my parents had done, just as Bob Jones had done, just as the Marines had done. He was growing more and more frustrated with my behavior. At one point I seriously thought about leaving him, but I had already mailed out invitations to our fifth anniversary party, which I was planning as a huge surprise for him.

I figured I would wait until after that. I’d see how things progressed by the time of the party, and I’d make a decision then. During the planning stage I had to sneak away a lot, seeing caterers, meeting with the bartender, buying supplies, things like that. Brandon thought I was having an affair. Ironically, at this point I wasn’t.

After the fifth anniversary party things seemed better between us. Brandon was ecstatic that I had planned the party and kept it a surprise for him. The party went well and I was thrilled that all of my friends, from so many disparate parts of my life, showed up. Jim was there with his new boyfriend. John, his ex-boyfriend, was there, but since they were getting along very well, that wasn’t a problem. Gary and Hedy arrived, as well as Gary’s ex-girlfriend, Angie. It was awkward because this was the first time Hedy and Angie had met. I had also hired Bossy’s ex-boyfriend as the bartender and several of Bossy’s exes were my friends. Naturally they were our guests.

“What’s with Rich inviting all our exes?” I overheard Bossy ask Gary.

“That’s Rich,” replied Gary. “He can’t stand to lose touch with anybody.”

Our fifth anniversary coincidentally fell on San Diego’s Gay Pride weekend. I partied Friday night, I partied Saturday. Sunday afternoon we were going to another Zoo Party. Some of the guys I’d met in Pensacola had flown in for the weekend from Atlanta and I ran into a lot of the guys I was getting to know from the parties around the country.

By Sunday I was noticeably dragging.

“Want some ‘Tina’?” asked a friend.

By now I knew that “Tina” was slang for crystal methamphetamine. I made sure Brandon was not in sight. “Sure,” I said and snorted some of the bitter powder. It felt like someone had kicked me in the face or that my head was going to explode.

Within minutes I felt like a new person again. I was ready to go. Which I did. I went to the Zoo Party and the After Party, moving with non-stop energy for the next fourteen hours.

The following Thursday, I was severely depressed and had to close the door of my office and cry for a half-hour. Still, I didn’t relate it to the crystal. That was my first—-what they call—“black Tuesday,” when you have a major depressive episode after one of those weekends. That’s what I was having; only mine hit on Tuesday and worsened until Thursday.

Soon after that I went to see the therapist again, but I didn’t even tell him about my crying fit in my office. At my first session, I had mentioned to him about the big party I had been planning for Brandon. On this visit he asked, “How was it?”

I started talking about seeing all my friends and then at the end of describing how wonderful it was, he said, “Do you realize you haven’t mentioned Brandon once? Didn’t you have the fifth anniversary party for him?” It was as if he hit me over the head with a sledgehammer.