The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (28 page)

Would this in any way prepare her for my death? “She’ll always be with you in your heart and in your memory. You’ll never forget her,” I whispered.

Later that night, I spoke to my resilient eighty-three-year-old mother. As we were speaking, I realized that I’d begun to replace the familiar raging aggression I’d been harboring with a newfound quiet affection. She was not, she said in her own words, “ready to go.”

I had many unresolved puzzles with my mother, who was on her fourth marriage, to a shyster who was part Billy Graham and part Buffalo Bill. He was possessed of the unlikely name of Eugene Trousdale, and his manipulation of her (and what money she had intended for my brother and me) was the stuff of soap operas. Not only did he keep her boozed up, but they made religious musical recordings together in a storefront church that he purchased after taking out a second mortgage on her house. It was grotesquely funny but had begun to make me sadder than angry and amused.

After a respectful mourning period devoted to our beloved kitty, Tia began to ask questions about a cemetery we had driven by dozens upon dozens of times. I explained how people visit the graves of their loved ones, bringing them flowers and saying prayers. While trying not to scare her, I didn’t sugarcoat the realities. I told her that I had friends who were buried there, one friend who died when he was a very young man and the other who died when he was seventy years old.

“How did the young one die?” she asked.

“He died of a disease, honey, which doctors haven’t been able to cure.”

“Like Elvis?” she asked.

“No, not like Elvis. He died from drugs.”

“My mommy didn’t die from drugs,” Tia pointed out.

“That’s right, Tia, you’re mommy was sick from drugs but she hasn’t died.”

There was a very, very long pause. I reached into the backseat, where she sat, and caressed her hand, a gesture that I’d made from the time she was a baby. I couldn’t believe how her silken hand had grown; how lucky I was to have lived long enough to experience her at this very moment.

“Maybe,” she suggested, “we should visit your friends and take them flowers.”

“What a great idea, Tia,” I said, bursting with pride, knowing that she had a clear sense of what was right and important and good.

A week or so later, we visited Victor’s grave site. Wearing one of her elaborate outfits, including sunglasses and a black Charlie Chaplain bowler hat, Tia had drawn a picture for Victor, primarily of purple and red hearts, which we placed on the grave with the flowers we purchased at the grocery store. The wind was blowing gently, exactly like it would be if we were in a movie, so we made sure Tia’s picture was weighted by the orange and blue and pink flowers. We saved a few flowers to decorate Charles Pierce’s crypt.

Tia was ready to move on to our next adventure. And, feeling all at once melancholy, grateful, scared, exhilarated and joyous, so was I.

The AARP ads that appeared were a bit overwhelming. They chose photos without Tia, which disappointed me since she was so gorgeous in the test shots we’d done. There was a kinda cool photo of me, looking every minute of fifty years: my head thrown back, laughing broadly. The copy read: “Michael Kearns, 50, First-Time Adoptive Dad, AARP Member.” I received a lot of calls from people I hadn’t heard from in a long time, many of whom were surprised I was alive, let alone a dad.

Several weeks after the campaign was launched, I received a phone message from someone at AARP who was insane with worry. Seems they’d received a troubling phone call from an informant in the hinterlands who asked them if they knew that “Michael Kearns was a porno star.” This individual said that he was going to the
New York Times
with this bit of information and that he had a copy of the movie to send along with the AARP ad.

CHAPTER 53
               

Until that phone call, I really hadn’t even considered that they had avoided identifying me as gay. That would prove to be a clue to their overreaction.

“Do you really think the
New York Times
cares?” I asked when I got this stuttering young lady in publicity on the phone.

“Well, it just wouldn’t be g-g-g-good for the c-c-campaign. Is it true? Were you a p-p-p-porn star?”

“I did a porno movie twenty-odd years ago. I have also done dozens of appearances on network television and a few movies as well. I’m not, however, a star of anything.”

She’d get back to me. I refused to be intimidated or ashamed. Nobody asked me if I was Porn Free.

She eventually called back, asking me to send her a list of my “legitimate c-c-credits” just in case they needed to combat this homophobic fruit who had turned me in. I complied and they shut up.

The homophobe didn’t contact the
Times
(perhaps AARP paid him off), but I did learn more about AARP’s internal homophobia. Someone from AARP’s offices contacted me by e-mail, begging me to not reveal his identity and unloaded the dish on the brewing controversy. Seems that the powers that be freaked out when they were given the dirt about my past. In addition to the ads and some posters that were pulled immediately, there were notepads with my image on them. Employees were ordered to immediately remove them from their desks. I found that detail hilarious, like my image on a notepad might contaminate their pristinely heterosexual offices.

They knew I was a gay dude and they were willing to exploit that for their means (without actually revealing that I was a homo), but they demonized me when they found out there was documentation of my gayness. Wonder what AARP would do if they knew that I had tested positive for hepatitis C?

One of my regular sex buds had called me from the Florida hospital where he was recovering from a dangerous bout of hep C. “I almost died,” he said. “You should get tested.”

The only reference I had for hepatitis C was country western doyenne Naomi Judd, who had given Tia a Judd ink pen in an airport years before. I honestly didn’t know how it was transmitted.

“Blood,” my doctor said. He also explained that the virus could be dormant in one’s system for years without erupting. In other words, since I had never been tested for hep C, I could have been a carrier for some time. The “how did I get it?” routine gets tiresome and the possibilities were innumerable.

I was still somewhat shocked to learn the results. Unlike with HIV, I had no context for this potential killer. “It is not uncommon among people with HIV,” my doctor said. We would monitor the disease’s progress in the same way that HIV is tracked: the viral load. Trying to avoid any self-pity, I did realize that I now had not one, but two, potentially fatal diseases coursing through my body. Temporarily, at least, I would ignore it.

“Turn on the TV,” my friend Cronin said, sputtering out the words, “the Twin Towers in New York have been hit.” Even in the 6:33 a.m. grip of grogginess, I could feel my heartbeat accelerate as I jabbed at the remote. The horror became immediately real, or should I say surreal?

It was Tia’s first day of first grade, I reminded myself as I watched the television screen in a stupor. Before she awakened, the second tower had imploded, almost like a fantastic cartoon building collapsing.

En route to school, I noted that the freeway traffic seemed considerably quieter than usual as I attempted to explain the word “terrorist” to Tia. “They should go to Judge Judy,” she said.

I attempted to help her comprehend something that I couldn’t grasp. Words needed to be defined, “hatred” being one of them.

At school, moms and dads juggled the juxtaposition of an international tragedy with what should have been a private day of joy for our back-toschoolers. Although we had met at many getting-to-know-you gatherings, I realized it was the first time I’d looked some of these parents directly in the eye.

With Tia safe in her sunny classroom, I walked away, bereft of her spirit, which always uplifted me, even at deeply dark times.

What could I do? I’ll donate blood, I thought, realizing there was a Red Cross right across the street from my kid’s school. Then, a stunning realization hit, going off like a siren in my head: “No one wants your bad blood.”

What could I do?
Giving money wasn’t as intimate, wasn’t as pure; it was not as heartfelt as giving blood. I found myself walking in the direction of the Red Cross, determined to check it out. “They’re taking names,” a stranger with a lopsided smile offered. As I neared the building, a woman within a few feet of me asked, “Taking names for blood donors?” They are lucky, I thought, to be blessed with healthy blood.

The scent of trees—what was that smell?—hit me, like some kind of wake-up call. I had an idea: I’d gather the details and make them available to the parents and staff at Tia’s school. I’d be a vessel for getting blood to anemic New York, even if I couldn’t do it myself.

I felt all at once powerful and powerless. Being merely mortal is both disquieting and emboldening. After twenty years of the ravages of AIDS, I had traversed through anger, fear, denial, acceptance, etcetera, creating a vicarious linkage to the victims in New York. The exhilaration of vulnerability.

As evening unraveled, I found myself squeezing my daughter a bit more tightly, and I compulsively replaced her tattered bedspread with a brand-new purple one. The majestic color was more vibrant than I had remembered. When she awakened me in the middle of the night, I was less irritated than usual at the idea of losing sleep.

And yet I lay awake, obsessing about that moment of separation from my child. Would I die of AIDS sooner rather than later, leaving a daughter behind? Had daughters lost their fathers in the terrorist attack? Had fathers lost their daughters?

How much time do any of us have to appreciate one another? I must tell friends that I love them, hug tighter, and be of service. That, I was convinced, was the only immediate solution. After getting in touch with Judge Judy, of course.

I began working as a volunteer for Lamp Community, a social services agency on Skid Row that endeavors to provide solace to the mentally ill homeless population. I’m not sure if this was a direct result of 9/11, but it certainly seemed to be the right choice. This was not the first time I connected with the plight of the homeless, but it was my first voyage into the trenches.

CHAPTER 54
               

Known as “the Mother Teresa of Skid Row,” Mollie Lowery, previously the executive director at Lamp Community, commissioned me to write a piece based on the true-life stories of some Lamp folks and have it performed for their annual fund-raising event.

The result was
Barriers
, a piece comprised of overlapping monologues that sprang from the suicide of one of Lamp’s members, a young boy who hung himself. I remembered my childhood friend Rick, who hung himself when we were both kids. I often found myself literally out of breath as I drove away from Lamp, unable to avoid looking at the circus of street life surrounding me, knowing that very little separated them from me.

In another area of L.A., news that Richard Chamberlain had come out of the closet was grabbing industry attention. Stop the fuckin’ presses. Who would be the next big celeb to kick down that confining closet door? Richard Simmons?

As a teenager, I remembered Chamberlain playing the title role in
Dr. Kildare
. To the best of my knowledge, most people knew he was gay then and that was forty years ago. Ben Casey wasn’t, but Dr. K. was.

“Actors have a certain obligation to their public,” Chamberlain said, explaining his decision to hold off the big shocker, which—surprise, surprise—coincided with a book tour. “For instance, playing leading men, well, don’t mess with that image. A lot of people thought they were in love with me, you know, women all over the place. They were really in love with an image and I didn’t want to mess with that image.”

One could conclude from that bit of Hollywoodspeak that an actor playing a murderer should knock off a few people on his way to the set to make certain his killer character is believable in the eyes of audience members. Playing a prostitute? Turn a few tricks before you pull onto the Paramount lot for hair and makeup.

What Chamberlain failed to acknowledge was any “obligation” to the thousands upon thousands of gays and lesbians whose lives were destroyed by homophobia while he catered to the fantasies of delusional lovesick housewives who thought his bedside manner might include them. Every time an individual comes out—whether a television star, a garage mechanic, or a sports figure—lives are potentially saved. Chamberlain’s obligation was to himself, possibly to the network(s) he worked for, and almost certainly to his representatives.

In fact, several years ago when I did an independent film with Chamberlain (in which he played a man dying of AIDS), he was certainly not officially out (unless you believed that interview he granted to a gay paper in Spain that was subsequently retracted by his “people”).

Does potential career risk exist for an actor, gay or straight, to play gay? Oh, c’mon. This town is the home of Bruce Vilanch, David Geffen, that actor from
Will & Grace
. What’s his name? You know the one—not Will; the other one. Oh, damn, he’s not a good example, since he adamantly refused to acknowledge he’s gay. What about that handsome actor who was in
Jeffrey
and did an action TV series? Darn, he’s in the closet, too. And there’s always that Academy Award winner who everyone knows is gay but—shit, he’s not out either. And don’t forget those Scientology “boys” in the back of the closet.

Speaking of Oscar-worthy material, Tia’s behavior was undergoing a decided transformation, never more obvious than when she made her stage debut as Duffy in
Annie
, followed by her more featured turn as Rum Tug Tugger in
Cats
. Onstage and off, she was gaining confidence and poise, and a certain gentleness began to replace the sometimes rambunctious willfulness.

She had to sing a solo in
Cats
and she was required to go to a vocal coach to work on the number. There were two coaches, a husband-and-wife team, and they were not fooling around. I sat on the sidelines, determined to be quietly supportive.