I Had to Say Something (5 page)

Russ beat up a lot of other kids, not just me. When I got to high school, I found out how bad his reputation was. He used to beat up guys for no reason at all, and when you do that, people become suspicious of your whole family. I certainly had no interest in beating up anyone, but going into high school with his legacy preceding me was tough.

Back then, comic books and advertisers talked all the time
about the ninety-eight-pound weakling who couldn't defend himself. The solution was to start lifting weights and build muscle and become “a man.” Knowing there was a weight-lifting class at my junior high school, I figured I'd give it a try.

I can only imagine what the weight-lifting coaches thought of me when I first approached them. I clearly did not have a muscular build. I would like to think that I won them over with my spirit and my attitude. The truth was that I was stronger than I looked.

I was about thirteen when I first lay on a bench and attempted to bench press. From the first day, the gym teachers were impressed. I was a natural. Without any instruction, my form was good and my strength, especially for a preteen, amazed them. All the gym instructors noticed my ability. That led to more personal attention from them, and I ate it up. I'd never had personal attention or tutoring in any subject before.

I dove into the sport. I bought every muscle magazine I could, and when I had saved up enough money, I bought supplements like protein powder and tablets of amino acids. This was a big change for me. I was used to being afraid all the time because of my older brother. I was used to hating myself. I considered myself ugly, and I certainly wasn't popular. Weight lifting gave me a chance to stand out. It worked for me for two important reasons: I was good at it, and I could do it alone. I didn't have to be a team player, and I didn't have to have friends to do it well.

By the time I entered high school, I had developed enough muscle and skill to compete in power-lifting competitions. I weighed about 165 pounds in 1973, when I entered my junior year. I could bench press two hundred pounds, do a squat with five hundred pounds, and a dead lift with six hundred pounds. For a sixteen-year-old, that was considered excellent.
I was taking first place in my division at almost every meet I competed in, and I was feeling great. For the first time in my life, I felt like a winner. Even though I was still shy and pimply, I was gaining self-confidence. I was even being noticed by fellow classmates, who had simply ignored me in the past.

Everything was going great. Only one thing was missing. My parents never came to my meets. Unlike other boys, I had no family member in the bleachers enjoying my achievements. Oh, sure, when I brought the trophies home, I heard nothing but congratulations and praise, but it was only after the fact. I think my parents did not understand that weight lifting was a sport, just like baseball and football. I probably won twenty or more weight lifting trophies, but mine got buried among all the trophies Russ had won for other sports.

Even so, my place in the world did start to change once my muscles developed. To meet the personal bodybuilding goals I set for myself at such a young age took a lot of hard and dangerous work. When I competed, I would start by trying to bulk up to 190 pounds and then put myself on a very strict diet high in protein and low in carbohydrates. Then I'd cut back significantly on my food intake while at the same time increasing my cardio workouts. If I started training with 12 percent body fat, my goal would be to get down to about 5 or 6 percent body fat. I did that by basically starving myself. But given the response I was getting, I saw no reason to stop.

Years later, I saw the willingness of older men to pay me for sex as the payoff for that effort. I admit I was flattered by all the attention. Normally, men would say something like “God, you've got a hot body” and then start rubbing my arms or my chest. My face wasn't bad either, but my muscles seemed to be my biggest attraction.

Until I took off my pants.

When I was fooling around with other boys as a kid, it was obvious that I was better endowed than most guys. As an adult, I always made sure to wear shorts or pants that showed off my assets. Due to all the weight lifting and exercise, I also developed a nice butt.

But as I turned twenty, I still wasn't sure what I was doing. I was getting paid for sex, that much I knew. It seemed like all I had to do was walk into a bar, and within a short time, someone would approach me with an offer of money. I had no idea if this was normal or not. In the 1970s, homosexuality wasn't talked about much, so how could I know what was normal? Someone back then called me an escort, and that term seemed to stick, though I had no idea why. I was savvy enough to stay out of trouble, but I wasn't smart enough to figure out what I was doing. If I had been, I might have done something different.

For all the success I had selling myself, my ability to make and keep friends was lagging. I didn't develop friendships with the people I got together with sexually. I was barely nineteen when I stopped taking off my pants unless someone was paying me. I wanted to draw a clear line between business and pleasure. Then, in my early twenties, I became friends with two clients.

One was a nice-looking man in his late fifties named Alan who'd been one of my very first clients. He was about six-foot two with a slender build and was just coming out. He was a professor and a divorced father of two.

One of my haunts was this gay country-western bar. After the success I had with my first few escorting ventures, I figured that if I put a little effort into it, I might attract more and better clients. My outfit of choice for this bar included a pair of cowboy boots, button-fly Levi's, and a form-fitting tank
top or T-shirt to show off my muscles. I never wore jewelry, though I will admit to wearing Jovan Musk Oil or Ralph Lauren's Polo on occasion. This was about 1982, so I even put a little pouf in my hair, and I made sure that the middle button on my Levi's was undone. At the edge of the dance floor, I stood with one cowboy boot carefully positioned in front of the other and my thumbs hanging inside my pockets.

The night we met, Alan was looking for a hot young man, and I was looking for business. Without saying a word, each of us knew where the other was coming from.

“Hi, how are you?” Alan said to me.

“Hello,” I replied. Ever since high school, I could tell what a man's story was just by looking in his eyes. Alan's eyes appeared to be sincere.

“You sure are hot!” he said. “Would you like to dance?” I said sure, and we danced to a few songs.

Alan then asked, “How would you like to get together?”

“It starts at two hundred dollars,” I told him. Confidence, kid, confidence. Next thing you know, Alan said, “It's a deal.” He grabbed my hand, and off we went to dance some more.

Back then I didn't limit an encounter to just one hour. In fact, I would often let a client stay all night and sometimes let him buy me breakfast. Alan came over to my apartment, mostly because I did not care to go to a strange house. We got naked, had sex, and then fell asleep in each other's arms. In the morning, he got up, put on his urban cowboy clothes without taking a shower, paid me my money, and left.

Over the course of a year, Alan became my first regular client. He was fun to be with. He liked to dance to country-western music, and he really enjoyed lying in bed and talking. His money and his business were good, so I didn't mind having someone like him around.

I would learn over time that while it's good to have clients see you as a friend, you don't want to get too chummy with them because it will affect your judgment, and your business will suffer as a result. I learned to draw a distinct line between business and pleasure, as I did with Art, but in my early years I had no idea how to do that, and I sometimes wound up making friends instead of income.

After awhile, I started to see Alan in a nonsexual way. I stopped charging him and he stopped trying to get into my pants, and that was the start of a beautiful friendship. We would spend a lot of time together talking or watching movies. I was happy that things with him turned out the way they did. But once I started mixing business and friendship, as I did with Alan, my feelings about getting paid for getting laid got even more confused than they already were.

When you're young and horny all you want to do is have sex, so the fact that men seemed willing to line up to get naked with me was great. I can't think of a young man out there who wouldn't have liked that. But at the same time, I couldn't decide whether what I was doing was right or wrong—or even exactly what it was that I was doing. Was I going out looking for sex, or was I going out trying to make money? I was doing both, but I was confused about it. About the only thing I could be sure about was that the money I was making turning tricks was much better and easier than working as a busboy or an apprentice somewhere.

Another one of my first clients also wound up becoming a friend. Father Thomas was a Roman Catholic priest and still is to this day. Of course, I'm not using his real name. The archdiocese would fire him in a heartbeat—and then hit him up for my phone number.

I was working as a bartender at a 3.2 club, a nightclub for
the eighteen to twenty-one crowd who could only drink beer that had 3.2 percent alcohol. This good-looking man came in and sat down right in front of me, drinking a beer while staring intently at my crotch, my ass, my biceps, and my face.

He was infatuated from the start, but it was all based on my looks. When he asked me out, I told him I didn't do it for free. He said, “Fine, what's your price?” I told him, “It starts at two hundred dollars.” Before long we had an appointment for Friday night.

He came back that Friday and waited patiently for me until I was done closing the bar. We went to my place and got frisky, and then, in the afterglow, he decided to tell me that he was a Roman Catholic priest.

I didn't grow up Catholic, but coming from a civic-minded family, I learned to have a lot of respect for men of the cloth. He told me to relax and treat him like I would any other man, but throughout our friendship, I found that hard to do. Here was a religious man, a man who was supposed to know more than most and be a role model, and we just got done doing the big nasty in my water bed. I admit I enjoyed the seediness of it all, but I wondered if this was the sin that would send me straight to hell.

He came to see me several more times. Back then, I wasn't charging by the hour, so he'd stay in my bed all night. I soon learned that he lived in a house with seven other priests, and he was the one in charge. By staying with me, he could have sex and get away from the parish for a while. He fell asleep so quickly after sex, it was probably also the only decent sleep he could get.

“You know, Jones, you're a great kid,” he always told me. He was older and worldly, and I've always been attracted to
that in men. I was young and, I guess, naïve, and for a care-giver like him, I was the perfect companion.

Sometimes we'd go to the rectory and be intimate right there in his bedroom, as Jesus on the cross watched over us. I wasn't tripped out about that as much as I was concerned that one of the other priests would say something. They all apparently knew we were having sex and that I was staying the night.

One time, while we walked, I figured I'd ask him a question that had been on my mind for some time: “Why is it that when good things happen, people thank God, but when bad things happen, they never blame him?” I told Thomas that my parents weren't religious, but that I had always heard many people praise Jesus for their good fortune. Yet when someone died or was the victim of crime, I never once heard God being cursed.

Thomas smiled at me, stopping momentarily. “I don't have an answer for you,” he said softly. “I could make up an answer, but your question is valid, and I don't want to blow it off by dreaming up something to say.”

One year, he asked if he could spend Christmas with me. I told him I was going to my grandmother's house, but I'd ask her if I could bring a friend. Always the hostess, she said of course. When I mentioned that my friend was a Catholic priest, I almost immediately regretted telling her what Thomas did for a living.

Come Christmas dinner, my grandmother was very nervous. She was trying so hard to get the place to look perfect, you'd think the pope was visiting. To her surprise, Thomas showed up wearing jeans and a polo shirt—not a priest's collar. Once she saw him, my grandmother became more relaxed. We had a great time.

After about six months, we stopped having sex but still enjoyed sharing afternoons or evenings. Our friendship came with some very nice perks. One time, he flew me to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and we had a great time. Then there was the time I went to Rome, and he arranged for me to take a private tour of the Vatican. I soon learned that his name was almost as good as the pope's for unlocking doors.

Yet as time went on, it became apparent how much of an alcohol problem he had. He could put away vast quantities of beer and anything else that was around. I figured he drank a lot because he was lonely and kept such a busy schedule. I could only imagine what the demands on his time were: meetings with the bishop, masses every morning, visiting the sick, lecturing the novices, and then back home to read the Holy Book. Or maybe he was dealing with the fact that, according to the Vatican, he was considered “objectively disordered.” If I had to deal with all that, I'd need a release, too.

I kept seeing Father Thomas until he was transferred out of the Denver area. We still talk by phone at least once every few months, two of those dates being my birthday and Christmas.

 

By the time I turned twenty-one and became a legal adult, I'd begun to piece together a better understanding of what I was doing. Altogether, the pieces amounted to nothing short of a revelation as far as I was concerned: in just three years, I'd been paid more than a hundred times to get naked with another man. Almost all of my clients had a need to be with someone like me, to make a connection that they'd always wanted but for some reason couldn't find. True to the American spirit, these men decided that the best way to get what they desired was to buy it. When they did, they felt better. If they felt better, that usually meant life was better. It was all
pretty simple, really. I provided a much-needed service, and I was paid fair market value.