Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (25 page)

I wanted to smooth things over with Darrin. In early December, I invited him out for drinks to a bar near his apartment in Carlsbad. If we were going to be working together the following year, I didn’t want to begin with hostile feelings between us.

We drank several beers and discussed our dispute and finally reached an agreement. At first, I didn’t think Darrin was all that attractive. But you know what? As the night wore on and the beers kept flowing, the guy started looking better and better. I thought he was thinking the same thing about me. Maybe I was mistaken, but it seemed that he was getting overly chummy with me. After a few more beers, he said that he was getting tired and wanted to go home. “You’ve had too much to drink,” he said, “feel free to crash at my house.”

I had been in San Diego almost a year and had met so many gay military people by this point, I had changed my presumption. Instead of assuming that a military person was straight until I knew otherwise, I began to assume they were gay, or at least could be had, until I found out they were straight. I was convinced by now Darrin was inviting me over for sex. More than I had bargained for in attempting to smooth things over, but I accepted his offer.

I followed closely behind him on the short drive from Hennessy’s to his apartment. I could barely see the road, I was so intoxicated, but I managed to make it in one piece. Once inside, he methodically set up a place for me to sleep on the sofa and went to bed. I was confused. Maybe this was part of his seduction routine? I decided he was going to come down in a few minutes and invite me up. I waited. Finally, he did come down, but to get a glass of water. He returned to his bedroom and shut the door.

I was furious, horny, and felt like I was sobering up. I decided to go home where I could beat off and sleep in my own bed. I left his apartment and started the drive to my place in neighboring Oceanside.

The shortest route meant I would be on the I-5 for about a quarter of a mile. I wouldn’t even have to change lanes, I could hug the right side of the freeway until my exit. As I merged onto the freeway, however, there was a car in front of me going very slowly. I was pissed. I was in a hurry to get home and I was angry because I had misjudged Darrin’s intentions. This car was just one more thing getting in my way. I wouldn’t have it!

I floored the gas pedal of my little red MR2 and swerved left around the car. As soon as I passed it, I made a quick right just in time to make the exit. HA! I was now in front.

The joke, as it turned out, was on me. Less than thirty seconds later, I saw the lights and I swear my heart stopped for a moment. As a child, I had fantasized about Eric Estrada playing “Ponch” of the California Highway Patrol. Now, the “Chips” were about to become my worst nightmare.

Instantly, my mind sobered up completely. Unfortunately, my breath, my blood, and my urine didn’t. I became very submissive and did exactly what the cops told me to do. I passed all the field sobriety tests, or so I thought. Years later I would learn from my criminal law professor that no one passes those tests. They are specifically designed so that everyone fails them, giving probable cause for the inevitable drunk-driving arrest.

I didn’t have that information at the time, however, and momentarily held out the faint hope that my stellar performance on the tests would exonerate me.

“Sir,” said one of the CHP officers, “lean down on the trunk of the patrol car and put your right hand behind your back.”

Call me overly dramatic but, as I leaned on the patrol car and felt the cold metal of the tight handcuffs against my wrists I felt that, perhaps, something in my performance had led these officers to believe that I had failed the field sobriety tests.

They were being decent about it, I suppose. They moved my car behind a store and told me I could pick it up the following day. Because I was being so “cooperative,” they wouldn’t have it towed, which, they explained, would save me a lot of money on an impound lot. Fortunately, the jail wasn’t far away and I didn’t have to endure a very long ride in the back of a CHP car with my arms in pain behind my back and my wrists chafing in handcuffs.

At the station, they asked whether I wanted my blood alcohol test taken by blood, breath, or urine. Convinced I was sober, I said, “Blood.” I felt that the most accurate test would prove once and for all I was sober. Later, my lawyer would tell me that I was right, blood is the most accurate test. That made it all the more difficult for him to argue against my .016 BAC and get a reduced sentence.

I was taken into a brightly lit cell with dirty white walls. The odor was horrific. The antiseptic smell of whatever chemical they used to clean the holding cell failed to mask the alcohol, urine and other body odors. I closed my eyes. There was little to do but enjoy my night in jail. I heard one guy on the phone calling a bail bondsman. He said, “Yeah, it’s me. Remember you got me out twice last month?”

Another guy in there was reenacting that day’s episode of Rush Limbaugh. He saw me staring at him and asked, “Are you a conservative?”

Without hesitation, I responded, “I was before I got arrested.” Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe the liberals with their sympathy for the criminal weren’t such bad people after all. I had abandoned my religion, had “come out” regarding my sexual orientation. Why not change political affiliation? A jailhouse conversion?

It was about five or six more hours before they let me out. I didn’t sleep. I tried very hard not to think. I managed to numb myself mentally and emotionally to what was happening. I would survive this, I kept saying over and over.

The next day, I knew I had to tell my commanding officer. There was more politics about whether I still belonged to my old battalion or whether I belonged to the squadron commander on ship. My shipboard captain kept promising he’d take care of me, if I could just get myself administratively attached to his unit. He didn’t understand why I had told the Marine Corps anyway. The reason was simple, if the Corps found out and I
had not
said anything, I would probably go to jail. But I suspect that quite a few officers have gotten away with it.

Most of my peers were sympathetic, at least to my face. They said things like, “Hey, we’ve all done it, even if we all haven’t gotten caught” which I have to say, is no consolation to someone who has just received a DUI.

Through a loophole in the system, because I had a South Carolina driver’s license, technically CHP couldn’t take it away. Later, California DMV would deny me permission to drive in California, which I managed to ignore successfully for several years. As I drove down the hill from my office to my apartment that afternoon, after having told my Captain and my Lieutenant Colonel, and knowing I would have to go to El Toro and tell my colonel the following week, I sank into a despair that I had never known before.

My career was over. I would never be promoted to captain; I would never augment into the regulars; I would never get the funded law program. And I knew it had all happened because, in a drunken stupor, I was horny for someone I didn’t like in the first place. I berated myself to the point where I began to wonder whether life was worth it. I hadn’t had suicidal thoughts since I was in high school, but suddenly they were back in full force. I started crying. I was so ashamed for the choices I had made, to drink, to drive, and ultimately it came back to being gay. I had chosen to live life as a homosexual rather than trust God to “cure” me and this was the price I would pay. I felt there was no hope. The urge to end it all grew stronger and stronger. How would I do it?

I had heard about other officers who had killed themselves. It was simple. They went to their unit’s armory, checked out their pistol, bought some ammunition out in town, went home, called 9-1-1, and pulled the trigger. Easy.

It terrified me that I was so serious about killing myself, that I was actually thinking of a plan. I cried even harder. Then I decided, no, I was not going to kill myself. If I killed myself, think of what all the Bob Jones people would say. My suicide would give them justification to think that they were correct in their beliefs. My lifestyle choices led to nowhere but destruction. There was no way that in death I would allow myself to be their example of failure to future generations of young people.

“
Let’s tell you the story of one young man who once had a bright future serving the Lord. But rather than trust Jesus to rid himself of these evil, sodomite thoughts, he gave in to them. And he killed himself, because, young people, once you remove yourself from God’s grace, there is nowhere to go but the road to destruction.
”

No way! They would never say that about me. My staying alive was my way of saying “
Fuck you!
” to everyone who had ever condemned me for straying from their way of thinking.

Less than a month before I got my DUI, a Marine who worked in the office with me, ironically another former Bob Jones University student, had gotten a DUI on his motorcycle. He confided to me that he had been debating over whether or not he should tell his parents.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said, with a pronounced Boston accent, “would you tell your parents?”

The question had me stumped. I honestly didn’t know.

That was then. Now I felt the need to tell my parents. I’m not sure why exactly, but I called on Saturday morning. My mother answered the phone. I asked her if my father were there. That was unusual, I almost always spoke exclusively to my mother. She knew something was wrong.

“Why?” she asked. I recognized the tone of fear in her voice.

I blurted it out as quickly as I could.

“How could you do this?” Her fear had immediately turned to rage.

I was stunned. “It’s not like I planned…”

“Yes, you did.” I knew what she meant. I had chosen to drink, which was against everything I had been taught as a child to begin with. Then I chose to get behind the wheel of my car. I had made two very wrong choices and was now being punished. In her world, it was that simple. Hell, I guess in anybody’s world it’s that simple.

“Do you know what this does to me?” She was crying now. I was speechless. What had I done to her? I was the one who would pay the consequences for this. Not her.

“Your daddy will call you when he gets back from your Grandma and Grandpa Merritt’s.” Fortunately, that would be soon, because they lived next door.

I hung the phone up, realizing my mistake. I should have done what I had been doing for years. Pretend. I should have pretended nothing was wrong and chatted cheerily for a while, then nonchalantly asked whether my dad was home. Instead, she would have to deal with this news at home by herself for a while. She wasn’t good at that.

When my dad called, he immediately expressed his relief that I was okay and that I hadn’t injured myself or anyone else. We then went into the details, like where I could find a lawyer, what the penalties in California were. From now on, whenever I had bad or shocking news for my folks, I was going to make sure I told my dad first.

Within weeks my mom was over her initial shock and revulsion. I told her part of my “sentence” was that I would have to pick up trash along the freeways for four Saturdays as part of my work-release program. She joked and said that she might arrange to have a photograph taken of me doing that. As highly as I considered myself, she said, the thought of me wearing an orange vest and picking up trash with a crew of other derelicts would be a good and humbling experience for me.

I called to pick a crew to join. The woman listed the locations and asked which was nearest me. I said, “
No, ma’am
. I want the location as far from here as I can get.” I chose a spot close to the border with Mexico.

At the beginning of the new year I was finally able to remove a major stressor in my life. I had been living with a straight officer and had felt compelled to cover everything about my gay life. A friend from Okinawa, Raul, transferred to Camp Pendleton and he and I found an awesome deal on a beachfront condo. Although Raul was straight, he had grown up in Manhattan and I knew from previous conversations that he had a very open-minded attitude about homosexuality. Philip had been one of Raul’s flight instructors at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. Unfortunately for Raul, he had failed out of the flight program and was now a military air traffic controller and we became friends when he joined my Air Group at the Futenma Air Station on the Rock. Raul had pegged Philip as gay within seconds when they first met in Pensacola.

“We were at the officers’ club one Friday afternoon, and Philip was drunk, and he was hanging all over some brand new student aviator. I couldn’t believe it! I was like, ‘Man, you need to cover your ass a little better than that.’ But no one said anything. I thought it was funny that no one else seemed to even notice.”

When I came out to Raul, he simply shrugged his shoulders.

“At least you’re aware of it. So many of these Marines are gay but they don’t even know it,” he said. “Just don’t be doin’ it in front of me, okay?”

“As long as you don’t do whatever is you do in front of me,” I said, laughing.

“Deal,” Raul replied as we shook hands.

I was finally living the California dream, or at least I was closer to it than before. I had a place on the beach, a little red sports car and with Raul as a roommate, able to live a little more freely.

The “TED” Dana had referred to in our first meeting, the one who had befriended Philip, returned from Okinawa in January 1994, soon after the Northridge earthquake. Wesley turned out to be something of an earthquake himself. Small and cute, with piercing eyes and a perpetual mischievous grin, Wesley attracted a lot of guys at the bars. His natural shyness only added to his magnetism. He was the type of guy every man wanted as their little buddy.

“See that guy over there,” Wesley said one Saturday night at West Coast. “Don’t you think he’s hot?”

I looked across the bar. Sure enough, Wesley’s target was a short, muscular guy leaning against the railing overlooking the dance floor.