Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (47 page)

I still hadn’t begun to deal with the enormous ramifications of what I had done. Right after they left I went back to sleep. Monday morning I woke up and went into the shower and cried and cried and cried.
What is this? How am I here? I’m a decorated Marine officer. I graduated with decent grades from one of the best law schools in the country. Passed the California bar exam my first time. I’m with the top litigation law firm in America. And I’m in a fucking mental hospital!

It helped to recite my résumé to myself, to remind me that while it might seem contradictory to my present situation, I really
had
accomplished all those things. I just needed to figure a way out of the space I was in, both figuratively and literally. After I got all of that out of my system, I figured, I was there, I might as well make the most of it. Then a fraction of a second later I thought,
That’s the same as life! I’m here, I have to just make the most of it. I don’t know a whole lot more than that
.

So I gathered my strength and made up my mind to cooperate. I talked to all the counselors, the therapists, the social workers, and the psychiatrist as much as I could—you only get fifteen minutes a day with the psychiatrist, but the others are usually always around. I watched the other patients closely at the group therapy sessions.

I think the social workers liked talking to me because they said, “Yeah, every once in a while we get someone like you in here.” I thought they meant that they get someone who isn’t seriously mentally ill but who’s on the seventy-two-hour suicide hold for having made a bona fide suicide attempt. Then again, suicidal thoughts constitute a serious mental illness.

All three nights, different friends came by to see me. One evening about six guys were crammed in my room. I had this roommate who collected empty milk cartons and little packets of Sweet ’N Low and sugar. He kept them in the drawer between our beds in his collection. He was a nice guy, a little crazy, of course, but hey, look at where we were. He said, “I’ve never seen someone with so many friends.”

Jake, a good friend who also happens to be a social worker, came to see me all three nights. “What’s going to be different when you get out of here?” he asked.

“I am not going to forget that I have you guys,” I said. “And from now on I’m going to call, I’m going to visit, I’m going to write. I’m going to reach out. Promise.”

That’s what I’ve tried to do since. Nothing happens overnight, though, and like everything else in life, it’s two steps forward, one step back. There would be many major periods of depression ahead, but I couldn’t think about that now. What I learned through all of this is that the love that I have for and from my friends is worth living for, no matter how bad everything else seemed to get. That’s what I had to hold on to as I left the hospital.

I also talked on the phone to Carla back east. She said she had spoken to Brandon a lot. “Rich, I have never seen anyone as shaken up as Brandon is right now.”

But Brandon was there for me. I had been so wrapped up in my own pain I forgot about all the shit that he was going through at the same time. He had been told he would be getting laid off in sixty days. He was selling his condo and we were going to be moving to Los Angeles, where he would have a better chance of getting a job. His whole world was changing and he had just turned forty. And then I tried to kill myself. Obviously, Brandon was shaken. Incredibly shaken. And he internalized everything—he didn’t deal with things outwardly at all. And what I had just put him through had no doubt hurt him more than he had ever been hurt in his life. I had been incredibly, shamefully selfish. His love meant so much to me, yet I was willing to give it up because of my depression.

W
hen I got out of the hospital, I knew things would be different. They
had
to be. There is no way to put a positive spin on a suicide attempt. There’s also no way to keep it a secret.

Not that I’d want to. When Brandon came to pick me up, I felt exhilarated and exhausted at the same time. A lifetime of charades had worn me out. It was one thing to pretend to be a model Christian school student, or even to fake being a heterosexual Marine. It was quite another to try so hard to convince all of your friends that you weren’t suffering from deep and chronic depression. Now they all knew. And most were surprised.

“Damn, Rich, you’re the last person on earth I’d expect to hear this about,” said Manuel, a friend in Laguna Beach. “Now if I’d heard the same thing about Jake Hirsch, I’da said ‘what took him so long?’”

Manuel’s irreverent humor was refreshing at this point. He asked, “What are you tryin’ to do? Take the title of Southern Drama Queen away from me? I think you just might have succeeded!”

Bossy expressed slightly less sympathy. “This is SO like you to try to take all the attention for yourself.”

When my friend Jim asked me how I was doing, as most friends and even casual acquaintances ask each other every day, he didn’t let me get away with a glib “fine.” He grabbed my arm and said “Look at me, Rich. Are you
really
doing fine?”

I wasn’t fine after being released. No one is after what I’d experienced. Unfortunately, I didn’t know of any prescribed plan for straightening out what had gone wrong. I sought help by changing therapists and even went to an alcohol and drug abuse support group meeting a couple of times. As in the past, however, I reasoned my way out of sticking with it.

“I’m not
really
an addict,” I thought, “I just suffer from depression. Once my depression is cured, my problems with drugs and alcohol will disappear.” For a while, I abstained from alcohol and drugs.

I didn’t tell my family about my suicide attempt. My mom and dad had their hands full taking care of both of my grandmothers, one of whom was in the horrible late stages of Alzheimer’s. Grandma Merritt was in a full-time treatment facility, and my parents took care of her affairs and visited her frequently. My mom had also said my dad’s back was giving him major problems and he was having some difficulty walking. He also got tired more quickly than he used to.

“But that’s probably just because he’s getting older,” Momma said.

I suppose the main reason I didn’t tell my parents was that I feared what they might say.

“Well, that’s what happens when you choose to live a life of sin,” I could hear my mom saying. “How can you be happy when you won’t put your faith in God to change this…this
thing
that you call being a homosexual?”

To hear my mom say this would plunge me right back into the pit of depression. So I didn’t tell them that I had tried to kill myself. I also quit calling them at all. Talking to them wasn’t helping me, and I knew that if I didn’t get better, I wasn’t going to be any good to them, or to anyone else.

I told Gary what had happened. He had gotten off active duty although he still flew the F/A-18 in a Marine reserve squadron. He and Hedy had purchased a house together in Burbank, near the studios. For a full-time job, he was flying for FedEx. If he had a day off during the week, he’d take the subway to the station across the street from my office. Very un-LA, but it was convenient. One afternoon, we went to lunch at a British deli called Chesterfield’s.

Gary had been my confidante for many things over the years and I knew I could draw on his strength to recover. Despite being a tough Marine Corps fighter pilot, Gary always seemed to understand me better than I did myself. Not only did I tell him about the suicide attempt, but I also told him about the porn and
The Advocate
. As he had always been in the past, Gary was sympathetic. I don’t guess that he necessarily approved of what I had done, but he was practical: the past was the past and I was his friend. And he was the most loyal of friends.

“It seems like a magazine like
The Advocate
would have been on your side,” he said.

“Don’t get me started,” I replied.

“You know what, Rich,” he said, with the twinkle in his eye he always got when he came up with what he thought was a bright idea, “you should write a book. I think that’d be good for you.”

“Well, I’ve been working on a novel…”

“Fuck the novel!” Gary exclaimed. “Write about your own life. What you’ve just told me is way more exciting than fiction.”

“Yeah, some friends have been trying to get me to do that for a couple of years.”

“Well, listen to your friends,” Gary said. “Make sure you send me copies as you write it.”

An idea popped into my head. “I could call it
I Was a Born-Again Gay Marine Porn Star Mental Patient
!”

“How about
Psycho Lawyer Marine Porn Fudge Packer
?”

We laughed about that, and it felt very good to laugh.

“Just one thing, Rich,” Gary said, giving me a serious stare.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t add anything else to that title. Promise me you’re through with the drama, okay?”

I went back to work the day I got out of the hospital. Except for a few close friends who I confided in, like Britney, the attorneys I worked with at my firm thought I had just been out sick for a few days. Of course, nothing at work had changed. Legal work for first-year associates at a large law firm manages to be both tedious and stressful at the same time. There’s a lot of reviewing of documents, legal research, and more document review. Depression robbed me of the ability to see that this was ever going to change and so my sadness and anxiety at work returned almost immediately.

As expected, Brandon was laid off from his job in Long Beach. That’s the nature with his business and he had had a good run of continuous employment for many years. He was damned good at his job and we fully expected that he would begin a new project in LA, but that wouldn’t be for a couple of months. He sold our house in Long Beach, we packed up everything we owned, and moved to West Hollywood. Buster was getting up there in years, but he enjoyed the backyard at our new house. Brandon had been promising him that his whole life.

I was excited by the move. To me, it represented a clean start, a new home that Brandon and I could build together. Brandon, though, didn’t see it that way. He was now renting a house rather than owning, and he was unemployed. He was also a forty-year-old gay man living in West Hollywood, the land of perpetual youth. He wasn’t happy.

Our roles were reversed. I was now drawing a huge salary and he was drawing unemployment checks. Psychologists say that role reversals put a lot of strain on a relationship. Quite often, they are fatal.

Back at the firm, I worked for a senior associate with whom I had become close, but there was one weekend when I couldn’t finish my assignment. I kept thinking about what Dena had said regarding Alan and his inability to complete a legal memorandum he had been assigned to write. And how that had triggered his suicide. I sat in my office all day Sunday and couldn’t think of a word to write. I felt myself running out of air, as if someone were strangling me. My pulse raced and I felt dizzy. Through all the anxiety, I struggled to churn out four pages of what I knew was crap. I stuffed the assignment underneath the other papers on her desk and prayed the case would settle before anyone read my brief.

The associate called me into her office the next day and reprimanded me for doing such a shitty job. I stiffened with shame. Before I could burst out crying I got up and left, muttering, “I gotta go.” It was like in the fifth grade all over again, when I would lose a spelling bee and I would burst out crying uncontrollably. Only now I was twenty-five years older and my emotions were a real problem.

I went and got Britney and said, “I need to be with somebody right now.” I told her what had happened. She said, “Rich, you need to take some time off.”

Then I went to see my friend Garrett, the associate, the gay guy who I had had the first episode with two years earlier when he made the comment about me not being able to salsa dance. I was in his office crying. I told him the whole story. I said, “Garrett, I tried to kill myself.” He was very helpful. Throughout all of my experiences, I was fortunate in that I was always surrounded by supportive, understanding, and compassionate people. From my battalion commander in the Marines when the
New York Times Magazine
came out, to the partners I worked for at this high-pressure big international law firm, people were kind. Most people, anyway. The fundamentalists at Bob Jones were the exception. They had been unnecessarily harsh.

The firm, with my doctor’s recommendation, gave me three months’ disability leave. I felt a little guilty about being on “welfare,” especially this early in my new career. But I also understood that, if I didn’t get better, I would always be a detriment and burden.

Brandon and I were at a restaurant and bar one night. I wasn’t drinking but I wasn’t feeling very good. He sensed my unhappiness and made a comment, “I need you to hurry up and get better.”

I had been thinking about this a lot recently and was still not sure about how to heal from depression. “Brandon,” I said, “I might not ever get completely better. It might all be a process of getting better. What if this is as good as it gets?” I chuckled, thinking I was being funny, quoting the title and the line from the movie with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt.

But I saw something change in Brandon’s eyes. Something had changed anyway. He wasn’t happy. He was never joyful anymore. He was down all the time now. Because he was unemployed and I was on disability leave, we spent a lot of time together at the house we were renting in West Hollywood. It was not a fun time.

As strange as it seems to me now, though, I felt like I
should
be getting better, so I told my doctors that I
was
getting better. As if I could
will
myself out of depression. They began to wean me off the medication. Looking back, this was a huge mistake.

Finally, in the beginning of June, I couldn’t take the tension anymore. I pressed Brandon to tell me what was wrong.

Without looking at me, he said, “I…I think…let’s just put the relationship on hold.”

BAM! I was in a state of shock.

What the fuck is this
? I thought.
A telephone call?
You don’t just put a relationship on hold! There either
is
a relationship or there
isn’t
.

I wasn’t prepared to accept any kind of sudden, drastic change. “Let’s go to therapy,” I suggested. He agreed to attend some sessions of couple’s therapy. At last Brandon started opening up and voiced a whole lot of things he had been holding back. He told me that something changed between us when he saw me in that hospital bed, helpless and out of it, and then fighting with the nurse.

During my disability leave, I had begun toying with the idea of giving up my law career. That had pushed him over the edge. And I can’t blame him. I was not same person he had fallen in love with.

“After that night in the hospital, I could never look at you the same way again.” he said. Then he asked, “Do you love yourself?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

“Well, it’s impossible to love someone who doesn’t love himself.”

I had to let that sink in, painfully, for a few seconds. “You don’t love me anymore?” I asked in disbelief. He just looked straight ahead, not uttering a single word.

In the middle of all this I had to go on a previously planned trip to Washington, DC, and New York. I had bid on—and won—a lunch with Senator Diane Feinstein, to be held in the Senate dining room inside the Capitol. Even though I wasn’t looking or feeling my best, I didn’t want to cancel that. In the preceding months I had grown fat. I had put on twenty-five pounds, from a combination of things—the medication I was on, eating unhealthily, and not working out. On top of that, I had shaved my head. I was growing a beard. I was going through some weird shit and in some ways taking it out on my appearance.

Brandon and I flew to Washington, DC. We had just broken up and had started seeing a therapist and here we are attending this lunch with Diane Feinstein, as if we were California’s happiest little gay couple ready to take on Washington. The only people included at the lunch were Brandon and me and Feinstein’s chief of staff. Once again, I was trying to be “Mr. Together.”

Senator Feinstein is not exactly the most personable woman to begin with. Still, I tried my best to charm her, just like I had tried to please Mrs. Hand, Momma King, Mrs. Langston, Miss Denham, and all the women in my life, including my mom. But it was obvious her mind was on more pressing matters—like running the country or making policy for her subcommittee on counterterrorism.

I tried to break the ice by complimenting the efficiency of her staff on how well they had handled arranging our visit, but this backfired. She glared at her chief of staff and said, “That’s not the way I want the front office handling phone calls,” she said. “I don’t want the interns screening out constituents. They put the call right through to the scheduling secretary.”

Fuck
, I thought,
I am really not connecting with this woman.

My first memory of Diane Feinstein was like many of my first memories—sitting in chapel at Bob Jones University. It was the early eighties and she had just been reelected mayor of San Francisco. Dr. Bob Jones III had used her as an illustration to make a point in his sermon. “San Francisco has a woman for a mayor,” he chuckled. “When men become feminized and refuse to take their rightful positions of leadership, women are forced to step up to the plate and take those positions, just like this Diane Feinstein has.” He stressed her first name, as if mocking the sound of a woman’s name as mayor of a big city.

I had read several accounts of Senator Feinstein’s rise to power in San Francisco politics in the tumultuous seventies and eighties, and wanted to discuss that with her. Like what it was like to hear gunshots in City Hall and rush over to the mayor’s office, only to find Mayor Moscone and gay supervisor Harvey Milk dead. To face and survive a recall election. To barely lose the governorship to Pete Wilson and then barely beat Michael Huffington, only to find out later he was a closeted homosexual. Did her campaign know that? If not, why not? If they did, why didn’t they use it?