Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (57 page)

Ah, what a liberating thought! It’s really not about me, is it?

“Vote Danny Verdin for South Carolina State Senate,” exhorted the campaign commercial over my truck’s radio as I drove from Georgia into my native Palmetto State.

Holy Shit!
I thought.
I know that guy.
I “googled” the politician’s name on my mom’s computer. Sure enough, there he was, my fellow Bob Jones Academy student. He was an incumbent State Senator seeking reelection. Danny’s sister and I had been classmates and friends for twelve years. Danny had been an Academy senior when I was a freshman and both us had been band officers. He and I had been friends and I had followed in his footsteps by joining the same literary society, Alpha Omega Delta, at Bob Jones University. We were frat brothers.

From the information on his website, Danny was the kind of politician I had grown to despise over the last decade. Republican and very religious, the sort of “red state” resume that makes my “blue state” friends roll their eyes. Danny even had “Sons of Confederate Veterans” listed. My assumption of course was that he is also a homophobic religious bigot.

But I knew Danny. I recalled the times I had visited his family farm for hayrides or when we had both been involved in after-school band officer sessions or concert rehearsals and other extracurricular activities such as student body practice sessions. He had been hot-tempered and impulsive, but in an endearing sort of way. Once I made the mistake of referring to the “Civil War” in front of him. Although my comment was pro-Southern, Danny corrected me.

“It’s not the ‘Civil War’,” he said. “It was the War of Northern Aggression.” I laughed and agreed. Because most Bob Jones students were from the North or the Midwest, on the issue of Southern heritage, Danny Verdin and I had been staunch allies.

He looked the same on his website, just a little older. He still had that same “Opie Taylor” aw-shucks friendly face. I wondered how his sister was doing. Like the Biblical Walls of Jericho, the great wall between my sharply segregated worlds was beginning to come tumbling down.

“I remember his sister,” my mom said after I told her about Danny Verdin, “she seemed like a very sweet girl. Your school-mates are Senators already? You sure are gettin’ old, son!”

Later during that visit my mom warned me, “I’m going to watch Bush’s acceptance speech at the republican convention, just so you know, in case you want to go into the other room.”

“No, I don’t need to go into the other room. Unless you’re going to do cartwheels and lead cheers,” I joked.

“Hmph. I don’t like him that much,” she said.

Amazingly, my mom and I sat there calmly. There were no shouting matches, nothing was thrown across the room and we even had an intelligent conversation about tort reform during the speech. I think we both impressed ourselves. My mother and me, behaving like two adults. God does still perform miracles.

Early in the fall my mom and I signed our family up for a walk-a-thon to raise money for the ALS organization that would be helping us as my dad’s condition worsened. The nearest event was in Decatur, Georgia, just east of Atlanta. Although two hours was a bit of a haul for my dad, it would be good for him and my mom to get out of the house and take a trip somewhere. Plus, it would be good for his spirits to see others in his condition in someplace other than a hospital. And I knew my friends would be generous.

“How much do you think we should set as our goal?” my mom asked as I was creating the Web site to use for soliciting donations and raising awareness about the disease.

“How about a thousand dollars?” I proposed.

“A thousand dollars? How many people do you know?” she exclaimed.

Sometimes it frustrated me how my mom never inquired about my personal life. As a result, she had no knowledge about the wonderful quality of the people I had befriended over the previous twelve years. But then again, I had also chosen not to include her and my dad in that life. The choice had been mine to put up these walls as much as it had been hers. I couldn’t blame her because I had decided to keep so many things about myself a secret.

After I glanced at the “to” list of addressees, I said, “Why don’t we make it twenty-five hundred?” and I entered that amount underneath the fund-raising “thermometer” symbol.

“I don’t know about that…” she said, trailing off and shaking her head as she stepped into the kitchen.

Within minutes after sending the e-mail, donations began streaming in. The little thermometer on the site displayed the names of the donors. My aunt, uncle, and cousin donated the largest amounts, but an even greater total was given in smaller contributions from my friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in a year or more. I’m sure it wasn’t lost on my mom as she checked the site that a few of the donations were from couples identified as Jennifer and Stephanie, or Bill and David.

Within a week we had exceeded our goal. Members of her church and some of the people my dad worked with donated. My mom asked me about one of the donors.

“Who’s this Robert Jones?”

“That’s Bobby.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize he went by…oh well, I guess there’s already a Bob Jones, so that would make sense.”

At this point it occurred to me that as much as I bitched, moaned and whined about Bob Jones University and fundamentalism, look at what I had gotten out of it. A close friendship with this wonderful, amazing, and generous person. I had to admit that with a kid like this, the parents couldn’t be all bad.

“Don’t forget about me,” Melanie said, “and Mother. We’d never have been friends with you if we hadn’t gone there.”

“That’s not true. We met at Tabernacle kindergarten, remember?”

“Oh Lord, don’t remind me about that place. And please don’t remind me that we’re old enough to have been friends for over thirty years!”

One morning about seven-thirty, as I was driving to work, my cell phone rang. It was my mom.

Too many times over the last year a call from my mom at an odd hour had meant horrible news. “This is it,” I thought. “The call I’ve been dreading.”

I braced myself for the news I expected to hear. “Hey,” I said.

“Richie,” she began, “have…has Amy called you this morning?”

That was weird. I was stopped at a traffic light about to make a left turn. “No, she hasn’t.”

“Where are you?” she asked, her voice noticeably shaking.

The green turn arrow lit up and I turned the wheel as I answered. “I’m on my way to work.”

“Can you pull over?” she asked.

Fuck.
My dad was dead. This was it, I knew it. But wait a minute…why had she asked if Amy had called?

I pulled into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant.
Oh my God! Something horrible has happened to one of Colin and Amy’s girls!
That was too much to think about.

“I’ve pulled over, Momma, what is it?”

“I…I don’t think I can…can tell you this,” she was crying now.

The suspense made me angry. “Just tell me what it is!” I said loudly.

She inhaled. “Gary was killed last night in a jet crash. Mrs. Fullerton called Colin and Amy and told them just now.”

I couldn’t breathe. It felt exactly as if something had kicked me in the stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I leaned forward and almost vomited my breakfast.

“Are you okay? I knew you weren’t expecting that…but I didn’t know…”

“I’m going to have to call you back. I’ll call you back in a little bit, okay Momma?” I pressed “end” and closed the phone.

My cell phone then indicated I had messages.

“Hi, Rich,” said a woman’s voice in a thick Scottish accent which I instantly recognized. “This is Norah. Can you give me a call? Okay, Rich?” Gary’s mom sounded like a zombie. The two of them had been as close as any mother and son I knew.

This can’t be happening,
I thought.
It just can’t be.

The second voicemail was Amy’s. Somehow I had missed them both that morning.

I called Russ to share what had just happened. “You never even got to meet him,” I said. “I wanted you to meet him. He was going to make it to Atlanta next month or September.” That’s when I started crying a little bit. I thanked God more than ever that I had Russ in my life. Someone I could turn to. But I knew my pattern. The heaviest tears would come much later. Right now there was business to take care of. Necessary business that served the dual purpose of distracting me from the pain.

By the time I arrived at my office, Amy, ever the epitome of efficiency, had contacted my secretary, another epitome of efficiency. Amy had informed her that Gary and I had been close friends for seventeen years and that I would need some time off. My secretary had already informed the partners I worked for.

Once again, I was in the right place at the right time and felt someone was watching out for me. Everyone at my new firm was sympathetic and told me to take as much time as I needed to take.

But why wasn’t someone watching out for Gary?
In intense pain, I wondered why his time had come up so soon. He loved life as much as anyone I’d ever known. Now his was gone.

Amy filled me in on some of the details. Gary had been wrapping up his two-week reserve commitment. Two F/A-18s had collided over Oregon and Washington’s eastern border the night before.

I called Norah. Her voice sounded like she was still in a state of shock.

“I just saw it on the news,” she said. “They said one of the pilots ejected safely. You don’t suppose they could be mistaken, and Gary got out, do you Rich?”

I choked back the tears that wanted to come rushing out. How desperately I wanted to believe that there had been a mistake. That the Marines in dress blues who had visited Gary’s parents the night before had gotten it all horribly wrong. But I knew better.

So did Norah. “No, I know that if Gary had made it out, he would have called by now.”

I told Norah I would call people who would want to know and that I planned to fly to California the following day. Gary would be buried at the military cemetery at Fort Rosecrans, on the tip of Point Loma in San Diego. Despite the military’s best intentions, I knew all too well from my time as the General’s aide how complicated matters become when federal laws, state officials, shocked military units and grieving families all got involved. There were duties I could carry out here to help prevent a tragic situation from also becoming a logistical or administrative nightmare.

First, I called Brandon. It was only 5:30 a.m. in Los Angeles, but I knew he got up early to go to work. He and Gary had been fond of each other and of course he was shocked to hear the news. I accepted Brandon’s invitation to stay at his place for a couple of nights while I was visiting in LA. I called Hedy. As expected, she was in a complete state of shock. I told her I’d be there in two days.

After calling other mutual friends, there was one person I knew would want to know about this. By calling information, I obtained the home phone number of Tami, Gary’s high school and college girlfriend, the friend who had flown out to Camp Pendleton twice to play the role of my “beard” eleven years earlier. Tami was married now with two kids but her devotion to Gary had been intense. I had spoken to her only a couple of times in ten years but I had to call her now.

Fortunately Tami wasn’t there, but her mother was at the house, babysitting. Tami’s mom and I had met on many occasions when we had been in college and I had a tremendous amount of admiration for her. She was stunned by the news but said she would inform Tami in a half hour or so.

The trip to California was surreal. Coincidentally, the day of Gary’s burial was also the Friday of Gay and Lesbian Pride weekend. I tried to visit as many friends as possible, but it’s difficult to be around people when you and they are in opposite moods. I had hoped the festivities would take my mind off of the tragedy, but my mind insisted on grieving, and, if I had learned nothing else over the past years, it was that when my mind needed to experience a genuine emotion, the best I could do was let it.

Tami decided to fly out for the funeral, along with a half dozen of our old gang from Clemson, including Colin and Donnie. Seeing all these guys, so many years later, in Pacific Beach and on Point Loma was a visual demolition of the barriers I had carefully constructed between my worlds. Gary had been one of the few people who I had allowed to cross those barriers, and now all these other people were doing it. On many levels, the whole experience was extreme emotional overload.

But it was all very real. Too real. The pain was so intense. I feared to guess how much worse it would have been without the antidepressant medication I was taking. The meds didn’t stop the pain; they just put a floor under it. I was still feeling it, big time.

At the visitation the evening before the burial, Tami said to Norah, “He was my first love. I will never forget that. What I learned from the years I spent with him is what has allowed me to become a loving wife and mother now.”

Norah hugged Tami then turned to greet other visitors. Tami leaned over and whispered to me, “And I know you loved him as much as I did.”

Tears welled up faster than I could wipe them away. “You don’t know how good it feels to hear someone acknowledge that.”

I arrived at the cemetery an hour before the service was scheduled to begin. Point Loma is a long, narrow peninsula that juts southward to the west of San Diego. The tip of the peninsula, where the Fort Rosecrans military burial site is, forms the natural barrier protecting the harbor and the city from the onslaught of whatever forces lurk out over the Pacific. The grave plots, with their little headstones, are aligned across the rolling hilltops overlooking both the city and the bay on one side, and the Pacific Ocean on the other. They form perfect rows and columns of white against the beautiful green landscape. It’s as if these veterans continued to watch over the country from the southwest corner of the forty-eight contiguous states.

It was ironic, but when Matt Mahurin, the photographer for the
New York Times Magazine
, had photographed me for the cover six years ago, one of the first places I brought him was to the Cabrillo National Monument at the end of the Point Loma. The scenic views from Cabrillo are spectacular, but the views of the Pacific and of San Diego had not impressed Matt nearly as much as the presence of this military cemetery.