The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (15 page)

The predictable “fuck yous” and “I hate yous” followed, until one of us gave up the battle.

At some point during the P-Town gig, I flew to New York to tape
The Tomorrow Show
, which would probably be the book’s biggest television exposure. The book continued to sell, thanks to the ongoing publicity.

I’d received many offers to hustle and decided it might not be such a bad idea considering how desperately I needed money. If not a case of life mirroring art, taking on the hustler role was surely life mirroring trash.

With only about thirty seconds of my five minutes of fame left, director Jon Landis, aware of my media shenanigans, cast me in
Kentucky Fried Movie
, to be shot in Hollywood. Playing a hetero porn star, I appear in a mock porn movie trailer, wildly fucking a Russ Meyer supervixen (from behind) in a shower. This was not the stardom I’d envisioned.

Playing “myself” in
The Happy Hustler
movie was something I still believed might happen, even though reality dictated otherwise.

Thom and I met with a B-list producer at L.A.’s inferior version of Joe Allen’s to discuss optioning the film rights. The producer said he had connections to Joseph Bottoms (box office material at the time). When it became apparent that Thom was entertaining the idea of another actor playing the role, breaking a promise he’d made to me, I made a scorned-starlet exit worthy of the cheap Hollywood movie my life had become.

A few weeks later, I left Thom. Projecting more depth in this exit, I imagined myself as Nora in
A Doll’s House
. I packed the few possessions that were actually mine and found an apartment a few blocks away. He was out of town for the weekend, so I left a note.

“Dear Thom, I’m leaving. I’m so sad. I feel like we’ve created a monster. Me. I am fucking lost. I don’t want to forget all the love we felt for each other. I’m tired. Michael. Remember Michael? P.S. I love you.”

Even though the move was more symbolic than organic (I did say “a few blocks away”), it was my first step toward rehabilitation.

Or was it reinvention?

CHAPTER 27
               

My descent as a real-life hooker—from no less than $100 a trick plus expenses no more than $20 a trick plus a glass of cheap wine—was swift, exacerbating my alcoholism to staggering depths.

These furtive liaisons took place in sleazy one-bedroom dumps reeking of stale cigarettes and sweet aftershave, not in four-star hotels with chocolates on the pillow. These men were not powerful; they were powerless. The sex was cold and fast, no frills. Give me the lousy twenty; got any drugs?

One guy wanted to fuck me for $20 and I told him to fuck himself instead. Unless maybe he had more money or something I could sell.

“My watch!” he shouted, like he’d discovered gold.

“That will do, daddy,” I said as he handed me the timepiece and then stuck his feeble cock in my butt as I checked what time it was. Less than one minute and he shot. Time flies when you’re having fun.

There were times when I stood outside of these scenarios, like I was watching a bad hard-core porn movie. I couldn’t have spiraled to these depths—not me. Who was that person?

That person was loaded; that’s for sure. For me, the word “alcoholic” carried the same stigma that “depressed” did. Other people, including my mother, were alcoholics. Other people, including my father, were depressed. I saw myself as different, even special (the curse of someone who is depressed and/or alcoholic). I had been drinking hard for a decade, a decade of hangovers, blackouts, promises, recriminations and wrecks. What would it take for me to admit that alcohol had complete control over my life?

As circumstances got bleaker, I was forced to seek work as an office temp. Confined to a windowless room in Hollywood, I didn’t initially pay much attention to my coworker who was perched in an adjacent office. Out of boredom, I began eavesdropping on his personal conversations and ascertained that he was also an out-of-work actor. The more I listened, the more I began to recognize something distinctly familiar in his voice.

Oh, my God, I realized that I was working alongside the actor who played Donald, onstage and on celluloid, in
The Boys in the Band:
Frederick Combs, the one everyone had fallen for.

In many ways, our lives paralleled each other. Prior to
The Boys in the Band
, Frederick appeared on Broadway in
A Taste of Honey
, playing a highly sensitive gay character. Even though the mainstream success of
Boys
, including the leap from stage to film, was undeniable, it typed Frederick as an actor who played gay roles beautifully.

Unlike some of the boys in the band (straight or not), Frederick did not go to any lengths to deny his gayness. He reveled in it, hurling himself into the decadence of the Seventies. His party-boy persona combined with his perceptive gayness equaled career suicide. In this respect, we were “brothers under the skin.”

But there was a significant difference: Frederick had stopped using and had clearly boarded the sobriety train. I was awed by his serene demeanor. Could I ever stop drinking? It was my identification with Frederick that allowed me to even ask myself that question.

After a few weeks, we came up with a plan to rescue ourselves: Frederick would direct me in a stage production of
T-Shirts
, Robert Patrick’s sexy and smart one-act play.

It was successful beyond our looniest expectations. We went to Smitty, owner of the Déjà Vu Coffeehouse, an establishment known for its Bohemian charm and the proprietor’s fabulous coffee drinks. This was the late Seventies, pre-Starbucks. Smitty made a mean cup of coffee and let almost anyone perform at the Déjà Vu, on a makeshift stage lit by sixty-watt lightbulbs in coffee cans (well, it was a coffee shop). It didn’t matter to us—we needed to get back in the theater. Or coffeehouse. Anywhere we could attract an audience.

I played Kink, a character inhabited by every fiber of my body. My ability was no longer in question. Being taken seriously as an actor allowed me to take myself somewhat seriously. And after the
L.A. Times’
glowing review appeared, audiences were attracted. I remember arriving at the theater one night and seeing a line that extended around the block. I couldn’t conceive that those people were in line to see
T-Shirts
.

While there had been a few other gay plays produced in L.A., this was the first one that got the attention of the media as well as the Hollywood crowd. On one night, I remembered looking out into the tiny house, which must have seated about fifty max and I saw Richard Deacon, George Chakiris, Charles Pierce, Elizabeth Montgomery and Robert Foxworth. Feelings of success were extinguished with booze, fueling my need to cast myself as a failure. The applause and the acceptance did not diminish the raging alcoholic who tapped me on the shoulder after every performance and said, “Let’s get smashed.”

Even though I had a taste of legitimacy as an actor and producer, there were relentless forces within me, pulling me into darkness. Perhaps it was my flirtation with the spotlight of success that overexposed my lackluster sense of self. My madness wasn’t confined to drugs and alcohol; I also starred in a series of bad man dramas.

After one fairly inconsequential “date,” I set up housekeeping with an ex-con heroin addict. Pumped up, muscles painted with jailhouse tattoos, he was sexy in an Andy Warholesque sort of way. In many ways, he was a model roommate. A bit of a clean freak, he kept things in order, paid his half of the rent on time, and never shot up in front of me. George had done time—“in a cell next to Charlie Manson,” he claimed—which resulted in a certain militaristic behavior.

My roomie reminded me of my brother, Joe, who had been serving time for an armed robbery conviction, and was about to be released from prison after three years behind bars. Part of my brother’s probation was contingent upon him being released into the custody of his responsible, lawabiding, goody-two-shoes brother.

While Joe and I developed a closeness when he was imprisoned, it was cemented when he came to Los Angeles. Although it was unspoken, we shared not only the blood of our parents but also the same genetically imprinted scars. Prison bars, lifestyle, sexual orientation and miles no longer separated us; we were connected like we never had been before. Brothers at last.

Joe moved into the tiny house with George and me, completing the trio of dwellers united in dysfunctional domesticity. I would soon learn, thanks to the teachings of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, that alkies and addicts seek lower companions. My roommates certainly were testament to that fact.

I took them both to gay bars, where we danced as a threesome to Rod Stewart singing, “Da ya Think I’m Sexy?” Sometimes George would take a break, leaving my brother and me, alone as a couple, illuminated by the sparkly glass reflections of an unsteady disco ball. To suggest that this was romantic doesn’t begin to convey the depth of our connection, a blooddriven coupling that defied the limitations of sexual preference and defined the limitlessness of brotherhood. In the moments on the dance floor, we were neither heterosexual nor homosexual; we were brothers who had been sexualized and had learned the language of sex but not the language of love.

No one knew us better than we knew each other.

The inevitable was delayed for as long as possible, but eventually my brother could not resist the lure of the smack that was under his nose, so to speak. And after he began shooting up, I convinced him that I wanted to try it “just once,” justifying it by saying that behaviors like shooting drugs would imbue me with character. After a bit of resistance, he agreed to indoctrinate me into the world of uncontrollable puking, unstoppable nodding out and unbearable itching.

CHAPTER 28
               

The act of my big brother sticking a needle in my arm was perverse, wrong, right and natural. We already were blood brothers; now we were heroin brothers. I hated the high; tried it a second time and still hated it.

Because of the conditions of his parole, Joe had to get a job and, in a storybook scenario, he met Diane, a cute dyke who was on The Program. He began dabbling in sobriety. Would I?

Diane was not an ordinary human being; her sobriety resulted in a certain unfettered effervescence that I found admirable. In the sea of L.A. fraudulent flotsam, she was at peace being who she was. I wanted what she had. How?

I got a call from Joe Gage of the renowned Gage Brothers, who had achieved a reputation in gay male porn that was distinguished by its nonstereotypical casting. Parts one and two of a trilogy,
Kansas City Trucking Company
and
El Paso Wrecking Company
, were marked by its cast of diverse butch men; no perfectly coifed peroxided blondies, thank-you-very-much. Joe wanted real men.

I was flattered that he asked me to appear in the third installment,
L. A.

Tool & Die
. “Can you send me a script?” I asked, doing my best not to sound like Norma Desmond. Yes, Virginia, the Gage Brothers actually worked from a script.

And a well-written script at that, featuring Jim, the role I was offered, kicking off the movie with a fellatio fest and some hot dirty talk. There also happened to be a straight-man role for my brother. The Redgraves we weren’t.

I honestly didn’t think the movie could do any more damage to my already tarnished reputation. If anyone doubted my gayness,
L. A. Tool & Die
would provide proof. It would also provide, in living color, a document of my drug and alcohol problem. At the time, I did the film because I could; in retrospect, it seems like a radical political act of self-definition. “You don’t like queers? Well, get a load of this!” My closet was not only opened—honey, the door was permanently removed.

The porn stint could also be perceived as yet another act of self-destruction that cemented my outsider status in Hollywood and would eventually be added to the list of Things I Had to Overcome. But let us not ignore the double standard at play here. Everyone from Joan Crawford to Sylvester Stallone was rumored to have done porn—but it was hetero, not homo. Hollywood winked at their indiscretions but judged the queers’.

The odd thing about being in a porn movie (actually, this was my second one, if the truth be known) is that you are immediately labeled a porn “star.” Even after I’d done several television spots, no one ever labeled me a television star. I’ve come to look at
L.A Tool & Die
as a chapter in the body (so to speak) of my work. Nothing more, nothing less.

My drinking was getting increasingly out of control, even though I began making plans to team up again with Frederick, whose mere presence served as a gnawing reminder that I was still unable to stop. The project was
The International Stud
, part one of what would become the highly lauded
Torch Song Trilogy
. At this juncture, the role had been played only by the playwright, Harvey Fierstein. After some negotiation with Harvey’s agent, we secured the rights for me to star in the West Coast premiere of the tour de force one-act, playing Arnold.

We returned to the slightly upgraded Déjà Vu and this time out Smitty built me a dressing room in the alleyway. He hung a mirror and some lights for the main attraction, hoping that theatrical lightning would strike twice. It did. My rendition of Arnold was unlike the gravel-voiced Harvey’s and I didn’t attempt to undertake the character’s Jewish roots.

While I’d reestablished myself as an actor with chops, I continued to booze it up, especially with newfound “fans” after every performance. While my brother Joe was getting sober, I was getting drunker as I conducted auditions for wannabes, whom I would cast as stand-ins for my brother on the dance floor.

After leaving a star-studded party in West Hollywood, traveling north on Doheny, I fell asleep at the wheel and careened into a parked car. After spending the night in jail, I was released in the morning and the first thing I did was buy a newspaper that contained a rave review of my performance in
Stud
. Even in my hungover haze, I could appreciate the irony and knew that I had to do something about my unmanageable life.