Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (50 page)

It was a warm Presidents’ Day weekend and the place was packed. My local friends, who I had come to regard over the years as my true family, had met there after weeks of being cooped up after the holidays. The early summerlike weather added to the already festive mood we were in.

“Damn, Rich, you’re getting cruised all over the place!” said Cory.

Cory was right. This was the first time I had been out in a very long time and it was nice to draw attention. I looked great and felt great and felt like I looked great.

“Hey, there’s a nice guy who’s been looking this way. Why don’t you let me introduce you to him?”

As nervous as I felt, I wasn’t about to say no. Cory’s acquaintance was cute. I had to get back into “the scene” soon enough.

Cory introduced me to Doug. “Rich, Doug is from North Carolina, too.”

“Well,” I corrected sheepishly, “actually I’m from
South
Carolina, but that’s a common mistake.”

Doug laughed. “Actually, I just moved here from Kentucky…and
that’s
not a common mistake.”

“Wait. Is that where they have the Kentucky Derby?” said Cory, sipping his third margarita of the afternoon, “I knew it was someplace like that.” Cory walked back to the group, having done his deed for the day.

“Okay,” I said to Doug, “what we’re having right now is known in Laguna is known as a ‘Cory’ moment.”

“He’s one of the first people I met when I moved here a few weeks ago. Good thing he’s pretty. But he should be blond instead of me.”

I laughed in agreement and slurped the last of my Diet Coke through my straw.

“I’m going to have a margarita. You want one?” Doug offered.

I’m feeling great, I thought, I’ve almost met my fitness goals.
Sure
, I thought,
why not? What the hell.
The phrase from hell. Instead of ignoring the red flag, I charged directly into it, just like a crazed bull.

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll have one.”

Just like that, my “sobriety” period was up after three months. All because of a cute guy.

Doug and I went out a couple of nights later. To say I was nervous would be an understatement.

“I’m sorry if I seem so tense,” I said.

“No problem,” he said. “I understand. I think it’s kind of cute.”

I should have left well enough alone. “It’s just that, the last time I went on a date with a guy, I spent the next seven years with him.”

Not a good thing to say on the first date, I learned. Oh well, at least I was back in “the scene.” That felt good.

Not everything about my new life was tranquil. The very nature of litigation is contentious and stressful. As my depression lessened and I began to see my life more clearly, it was becoming undeniable that my personality was antithetical to what was required of a good litigator. I crave harmony and resolution; a trial practice is perpetual warfare. Great attorneys love this kind of life; good ones, like I was becoming, learn to tolerate it while doing a job well. But I didn’t love the work.

I did love the environment we worked in and that’s what made me want to keep things like they were. We all felt that way. The four of us at Derrick’s firm believed that there was nothing better in life than to spend all day with people who care for each other, and to spend it in a beautiful place. So we worked hard to keep it going. Also, part of me still missed Brandon and, by pouring myself into my work, I could forget about him. It was an old strategy for me, and once again it seemed to do the trick.

We had a trial coming up in March that we expected to be difficult, but, if we were successful, we had the potential to get a large amount of punitive damages. Because Derrick took cases on a contingency basis, if we were victorious, we got a percentage of the amount we won for our client. If we lost—and I couldn’t even think about that—we essentially worked our asses off for free.

Our clients owned a building that had been damaged in an accident. However, their insurance company refused to pay to have it repaired. We sued the insurance company for what is known as “bad faith” denial of a claim. If the jury decided for our client, which I believed they would, we could win—big time. I was letting my imagination run away with me. The more I poured myself into this lawsuit, into this case, the more I started thinking,
Wow, Derrick could really make a lot of money here. And I trust him to take care of me. Because if he makes a lot of money we wouldn’t have to work as much. We could take cases that we want to take. If we win a whole lot of punitive damages maybe he’ll give me a huge bonus. And I’ll be comfortable and I could pay off my debts
. All these thoughts were tempting me and I was trying to clamp down on them. During the trial I was attempting to hold back the thoughts and fantasies but I let them go wild.

They’re called “trials” for a reason. It was grueling. Every day the other side threw something at us. We thought the judge was on our side, then he’d come up with some ruling against us that we didn’t even see coming. We had juror misconduct: A juror in another courtroom overheard our jurors discussing the case in the courthouse cafeteria, a major violation of the rules. Our judge called the other juror in before the lawyers and asked him what he had overheard our jurors say. He said, “One of the women said that she never looks at Mr. Merritt because Mr. Merritt is just Mr. Schwartz’s sidekick, and all he is there to do is gauge our reactions.”

The judge laughed and said that if that is all they were talking about, that didn’t constitute misconduct. For the rest of the trial, I was known as Derrick’s “sidekick.”

We were almost at the end of the trial and jurors were starting to snipe at each other. Tensions arose. It was obvious that there was a huge disagreement among the jurors how our case should go. Jurors started going to the bailiff saying that other jurors were calling home and talking about the case on their cell phones. The judge wouldn’t hear of it. There was a threat that the whole thing might end in a mistrial and it was just awful, awful, awful. But I kept thinking if we made a lot of money, I wouldn’t have to deal with all of this.

After the trial was over the jury deliberated for five days. They came back with a decision in favor of us. But they awarded only a very small amount in damages. It would have taken fifty times that amount just for our clients and Derrick to break even. So essentially we lost. This is what is meant by a Pyrrhic victory. You win…but so what?

That was a Thursday afternoon, just before Easter weekend. I had already decided I was going to the White Party’s Sunday afternoon tea dance. Once again I declared myself well enough. The White Party tea dance was still a couple of days away. I didn’t want to wait that long to feel good. I was angry, bitter, and fearful for our future. Derrick had sunk a lot of money into that case. I had serious doubts about whether he could keep me employed.

After the verdict we drove back to Laguna. I wanted to get drunk. I felt I deserved to get drunk. It’s funny now, to remember I said, “I deserve to get drunk.” Getting drunk is a bad thing! But then I was thinking that this was something good I had earned.

We went to Woody’s and I got shit-faced drunk with Derrick and Manuel and a bunch of the other guys. A group of our friends were there to cheer us up. After two or three hours of drinking, I remembered that I had ordered some Ecstasy for the weekend. I asked myself,
Why don’t I just go get it now?
I told a friend who had met us at the bar that I knew where to get some Ecstasy. He was all for it, so we set off to get it. We got it, took it, and were ready to party. I hadn’t taken Ecstasy in over a year so it felt like the first time again.

We wanted to find a happening bar. We went to the Boom Boom Room, a block from Woody’s. It was dead. We went to Fire Island Bar, in Long Beach. It was dead. We went to the Faultline in LA, in Silverlake. Dead. Finally I said, “Let’s cut through this bullshit, let’s go to the Hollywood Spa,” which is a bathhouse in Los Angeles, the same one I had been to ten years earlier when I had first arrived in southern California.

And finally, after a long evening of searching out excitement, we ended up at the Hollywood Spa. It was an awesome, awesome night, well, at least while I was in it. I had a new body, since I had been working out a lot in Laguna, and guys were hot for it. They had some drugs, and I added more to my already buzzing system.

After the first encounter, I was about ready to leave. I was starting to come down. Then this really cute guy said, “Come on in.” Enough never being enough, I went back to his room and we smoked some crystal. He had GHB and I took that as well. Everyone seemed to be with someone and this guy had a really good-looking, older friend with him. And I let the guy fuck me without a condom—in a bathhouse. He also had another guy in there named Daniel who I was really into. After a little orgy, Daniel and I took off and went into his room. There we had sex and he fucked me without a condom too. The most attractive thing about Daniel was that he was really into me.

“Oh my God, you’re the hottest guy,” he kept saying.

After our intense sex session, I said, “I’m going home.”

“Where do you live?”

“Laguna.”

“Well, I’m going to be there,” he said. “I’m going to Laguna.”

I was, like,
Oh my God, somebody thinks I’m hot
. I gave him my address and I went back to Laguna. On Friday afternoon this guy showed up at my door and he had crystal. We did crystal and had sex all afternoon. It was incredible. The best sex I ever had. At least that’s what I was thinking at the time. We went to Woody’s and had some dinner. There I started drinking. I got absolutely polluted. After dinner we took off to the Boom and I blacked out. I started mumbling about how much I missed Brandon. I went into this major depressive downward spiral.

We arrived back to my apartment and I remember him saying, “I’m leaving. You’re a freak!”

Suddenly I was alone. I was drunk. I was coming down from crystal. And once again those old familiar feelings of self-hatred bubbled up to the surface.

During the trial I had started taking Xanax again to relieve the extreme stress I had been feeling. Of course, I had taken double the prescribed dose. I had only three left in the bottle. I took all three of them and tied a bag around my head, just as Alan had done. Thank God I was too drunk to do that securely because it had a hole in it.

I came to the next morning. Still alive. That didn’t dissuade me. Saturday I was incredibly depressed over the fact that this guy I met at a bathhouse thought I was a freak and that it had made me suicidal. I wrote him a long, sobby letter, telling him how sorry I was. I had gotten enough information from him to find out where he lived using the online research services available to attorneys. It was a freakish thing to do. I was in a freakish state of mind.

Gary Fullerton was coming down Saturday afternoon to visit me. I was a mess and I was so ashamed of how I looked and how I was. What would Gary think of me now? Gary had been my first new friend after I was banished from Bob Jones University and ostracized by everyone I’d known. Gary had encouraged me to get in shape when we were at Clemson, had motivated me to finish Officer Candidate School, and had been accepting of me when I “came out” to him ten years before. I was real proud of myself today, that’s for certain! I sure looked like a fine specimen of a former Marine captain, all tweaked out and bleary-eyed.

It was a beautiful afternoon and we took a walk along the top of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. I wasn’t the only one out of sorts today. Gary wasn’t his usually confident and upbeat self. He listened as I told my story and expressed his concern over my unhealthy activities. But I could tell something was really bothering him.

“It’s Hedy, isn’t it?” I asked.

Gary’s own relationship was headed south and he didn’t know what to do. For a guy who was so accustomed to being completely in control, his fiery but erratic wife was a mystery to him. I pointed out that all the women he had dated had the same full-of-life but unpredictable personality. What was it about him that attracted him to them, yet confused him so much?

I could tell he loved Hedy the most. But he was clueless about how he was supposed to be around her. Things weren’t going well.

It was difficult to see Gary so out of sorts. When we were in college, he had been my anchor, stabilizing me in the middle of my own wild mood swings. He had always listened to me, but now it was I who was listening to him. Despite my own self-directed ego at the moment, it felt good that he wanted my advice, like I was returning the favor after so many years. I offered some advice, based on my many sessions in therapy.

One of the times when Gary had broken up with Tami I had been angry over the way he had done it. I recalled a part of the angry conversation he and I had had about that.

“Do you remember that time when you said, ‘I don’t have needs! I don’t need anything! The only things I need are food, water, and air’?”

He smiled and even laughed a little bit. Nodding, he said something Gary Fullerton rarely said: “I think I might have been wrong about that.”

“You’re a human being. A pretty damn strong one, but all humans have needs. Besides food, air and water. It’s clear you have a real need to have a vibrant, crazy, wild, and exciting woman in your life.”

The other thing that was troubling him was that he had just been grounded from flying the F/A-18 in the reserves. He could still fly jets for FedEx, but not his beloved F/A-18. He had a medical problem that was affecting his balance.

“You know, Gary,” I said, “maybe it’s time we quit this whole game of trying to see how tough we can be. We should accept being human and not keep trying to be supermen all the time. I mean, I chose the Marines and then I chose litigation because I think I’m not tough enough and I wanted to prove I was. Well, I’ve proven it, you know? Maybe it’s time you and I quit driving ourselves so hard with this constant macho bullshit. You wanted to fly F/A-18s and you have for many years. You’ve taken out targets in Iraq, you’ve seen the world, you’ve made the rank of Major. Why do you need to keep doing it?”