Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (45 page)

In the middle of this chaos, it came time to study for the California bar exam. Of course I promised myself that while I was studying I wouldn’t drink or do drugs. Well, that went out the window the first day. Because of Brandon’s lockup plan, I couldn’t get to the drugs, so I had started drinking a lot of wine to calm down.

Meanwhile, back in reality land, I took the bar exam. It wasn’t all that bad. I mean, it was three days of torture but the three months studying for it were much worse. I would go back to boot camp before I would study for the California bar exam again.

After any period of hard work or stress, I needed a release. We had booked a gay cruise in the Mediterranean several weeks down the line. That seemed too far off. Coincidentally, the weekend following the exam was San Diego Gay Pride. We drove there and, as per usual I wanted to do drugs right away but this time Brandon wouldn’t let me. He took them from me. How dare he! “Give them to me!” I shouted. He refused. I screamed and screamed at him for not letting me do what I wanted to, but he wouldn’t budge, not at least until it was time for the party. And even then he rationed them out to me.

A week later, I was just hanging out at the house waiting to go on our cruise. Brandon went to bed. I was flipping channels on television but nothing caught my attention enough to distract me from myself. I was agitated and I was drinking—always a bad combination. Drugs were on my mind. Finally I put down the remote and got up to find some bolt cutters. After I found a pair, I broke open the locked case that Brandon kept my drugs in. I was very proud of myself for being so smart. Now I could stay up all night doing drugs.

The next day, aside from a splitting headache and a major post drug-induced comedown depression, I was feeling so guilty, I told Brandon about what I had done the night before. “Really, I swear,” I said, “I never want this to happen again.” He had heard it all before and this time he was really furious with me. That night was pretty bad. His anger was completely justified. I realized I was pushing it further and further with him and with myself. I pleaded with him to forgive me. To show him how serious I was, I came up with a plan. The way for me to stop the craziness of doing drugs in the middle of the night, tearing up the place, and cutting through locks, was to simply stop drinking in the house. Period. It made sense because I noticed that this was a pattern. I would drink until I was inebriated, then I got the craving to do drugs and, by then, my judgment would be off and somehow, some way, I would find a way to get to the drugs. For that reason, I quit drinking in the house. It wasn’t a cure but it was a patch on the symptom that worked for a long time.

I had a couple of months off before I started work at my firm. And the time came for Brandon and me to go on our gay cruise in the Mediterranean. We flew to Barcelona about three days before the ship left.

Brandon and I went on our Mediterranean cruise. I was assuming this was going to be just a wild sexual orgy on the boat. We didn’t talk about it. I just took it for granted. I had taken some drugs on the boat with me, which I wanted to start doing right away. Out of the two thousand guys on this boat, there was a small core of party boys. Naturally those were the guys I gravitated to. I would get wild and crazy at the late night deck dances, doing things like playing with a guy’s dick on the dance floor. One guy asked to give me a blow job and I primly replied, “You have to ask my boyfriend.” Brandon hesitantly said, “Well, I guess.” That was the entire conversation, and Brandon didn’t sound too convincing, but I bulldozed through his reservations (and my own) and, two minutes later, this guy was leading me to one of the rest rooms near the deck where he blew me.

Then there was another guy who wanted to have sex with us. Brandon wasn’t into him and left the room. With Brandon out of the picture I kind of didn’t want to go through with it. I tried to kick the guy out of the room but he wouldn’t go. Then he told me he wanted to fuck me. Well, I have to admit that sounded appealing. I wanted to be fucked so I let him. Before we started he had the decency to tell me he was HIV positive. At least I was in the frame of mind to have him use a condom.

The last night of the cruise was a white “gods and goddesses” party. For our costumes we chose to wear radiant, white, boxer briefs. I was on G and Ecstasy, and before I even knew what was happening, this guy was giving me a blow job out in the open, with the deck crew standing right behind us. The blatancy of my actions is astonishing, yet I was feeling there was nothing wrong with it, as if this was a perfectly natural thing to do. It was absurd, but that’s how those drugs make you feel. Your judgment is just gone.

Here I am, relaying all these wild and crazed sexual escapades but the truth of the matter is, I didn’t really have a good time on that cruise. I don’t think Brandon did, either. There was all this unspoken confusion going on between us—yet we never talked about anything.

For the weekend after September 11 happened, I had made plans to meet my parents at Lake Tahoe. Well, that was the first day planes were flying. Somehow, however, we all managed to get up there. I spent a few days with them. This is when I first realized my dad had gone way downhill. It was such a shock. His mother was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s and he seemed to be following suit. My dad and I would have a conversation and then five minutes later he would ask me something about what we had just talked about, as if he had never heard it. Something seemed to be wrong with him physically, too. I realized my mother was in denial. Other than that, the trip was relatively uneventful. I was there with my parents, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I just sat at the blackjack tables and got shit-faced drunk. I couldn’t deal with my dad’s deteriorating health and, by getting drunk, I didn’t have to.

I had a lot of fear about this new job and career I had chosen. I realized that I would be thrown in with all these people who went to Harvard and Yale and Stanford Law Schools. I knew it was going to be a high-pressure environment and I was expected to bill a lot of hours in my first year.

The first day, they gave me my assignment, which the partner over the new associates, Margaret, informed me would be a week-long, nonbillable job. Well, that’s telling a brand-new, first-year associate that he would be working his first week for free. I didn’t know how to respond, what to say. Margaret explained that I’d be assisting a major partner at the firm, helping him with a book he was writing.

“If there’s a problem,” Margaret added, “you let me know.” Well, right off the bat, it was a problem for me, yet I chose not to let her know. On my very first day, this assignment added an immense amount of stress to an already high-pressure job. I asked someone exactly what it meant to be given a nonbillable assignment. I thought perhaps they’d give me some grace time, but he said, “No, your billable hour requirement starts today.”

Okay, we just spent four hours in a fucking meeting discussing how important billing was. I wanted to get started with work.
Give me some billable assignments!
I wanted to scream. It was just that type of place. Yet, there I was, the good little boy, the good Christian, the good Marine, who simply does what he’s told.
I’ll do my duty
, I reasoned with myself.
This firm’s paying me all this money—a six-figure entry-level salary my first year out of law school—I’ll do what I have to do
.

The chapter of the book I was working on with the partner was about the implications of the False Claims Act on the construction industry. Very dry. Not exactly exciting stuff. A week went by and the chapter still wasn’t good enough for him. He kept asking me to rewrite it and add to it. I felt as if I shouldn’t be doing this. This was a project for a fifth- or sixth-year associate. I would sit at my desk and start freaking out.
How am I going to meet my billables?
Yet I didn’t go back to Margaret to tell her that it was turning into a problem. I couldn’t admit defeat. I just continued to work for him—writing away my time, unable to complete my first assignment. I ended up spending my first five weeks not billing a single hour.

At my law firm, all the new associates from the firm’s offices all over the world gathered the first week of November in Washington, DC, for new associates’ orientation. Of course, this was nonbillable time also, but as aspiring leaders in the global legal community, we weren’t supposed to care about stuff like that.

The firm had arranged for us to attend a professional basketball game while in Washington.

“Oh my God,” squealed my good friend, Britney. Britney had been in the same section in law school; we had studied for the bar exam together and now worked together at the same firm. We had grown very close over the previous years.

“Michael Jordan’s going to be playing for the Washington Wizards and we’re going to get to watch him play next week at orientation!”

Britney was so cute; I almost hated to burst her bubble. Actually, she was always in such a good mood I didn’t think that was possible.

“
Ich verstehe nicht, was du sagst. Verwendest du bitte eine Sprache, die ich verstehen kann.
”

“Rich, what are you saying? You know I don’t speak German, or whatever that is. Don’t you want to see Jordan play for the Wizards?”

“Britney, we’ve had this conversation before. I’d honestly rather watch pigs fuck. The best thing for me about coming out of the closet was that I no longer feel the need to pretend that I give a damn about watching stupid straight guys throw a ball around.”

“But I know gay guys who like sports.”

“So do I, including many of my closest friends. I, however, am a much more traditional fag. Offer to sell me a ticket to a Cher concert and I’d sell you, my mom, and Mother Teresa’s bones into white slavery to pay for it. Sports…I’m sorry but I’m just missing that gene.”

“Okay, then, can you explain Cher to me?”

“No. If Cher has to be explained to you, then you wouldn’t understand her,” I said. “Besides, I’m going to visit my brother and aunt and uncle that night. They live in Anapolis and I’m going to rent a car and drive up there for the night.”

Jimmy had moved to Anapolis to work for my aunt’s swimming pool construction company a year earlier. He hadn’t been able to make it to Lake Tahoe with my parents, so this would be a good chance for me to see him on the firm’s dime.

My evening with Jimmy and my aunt and uncle started off well. My uncle, the same uncle who had confronted me about being gay three years earlier, was direct about telling me how much he loved me and that Brandon would always be welcome in his home.

“But you’d have to sleep in separate bedrooms,” he said, “because that’s the same way I treat my daughter and son. No bedroom sharing unless you’re married.”

“That’s so typical of you Republicans,” I said, a little perturbed…and getting drunk off the expensive red wine. “First you make it illegal for us to marry, then you say that, because we can’t marry, you’re going to hold us to the standard of unmarried couples. Well, Brandon and I have been together over six years. As far as I’m concerned, we’re married!”

“Okay, calm down, I see your point.” I calmed down and we talked about some pretty deep topics into the night. When my uncle opened the third or fourth bottle of wine, after a dinner out with plenty of margaritas, my aunt grew angry and went to bed. So did my cousin. Only Jimmy, my uncle, and I remained awake.

I started sharing about how I’d been in therapy and had learned all the ways my mom had used me for emotional support because she wasn’t getting it anywhere else. How that had put too much pressure on me as a child.

Suddenly, Jimmy blew up at me. I don’t recall much about the incident because I was way too intoxicated, but I recall that he was tired of hearing me blame my problems on my parents. I took his anger to mean that he didn’t accept me being gay. I became hysterical and was going to drive back to Washington, but my uncle refused to let me. We called a cab and I took a taxi from Annapolis to DC, a very expensive trip.

Back at the hotel, it was past midnight, but I called Britney. She came and sat with me until I went to sleep. The next day all the associates flew back to their respective cities. I had stayed to spend time with my relatives, but I called Rob Jones instead. He drove me to Anapolis to get my rental car.

“This is really bad,” said my therapist. He shook his head.

I didn’t say anything, but inside, I was thinking,
No shit. I just had a fight with my brother, my only sibling, and all you can say is ‘this is bad’?

All the nonbillable hours had set me back at the firm, obviously, and when the end of the year rolled around, I had decided that in 2002 I wasn’t going to drink or do drugs. I was just going to work at getting my billables back up.

At the start of the year, I felt I was doing okay. Brandon was turning forty, and I was going to throw him a huge party, cater it, and have it at some friends’ house in LA, where we would soon be moving. I told my doctor I wanted an antidepressant, so he prescribed me Paxil. Yet even without the illegal drugs and alcohol, and even with the Paxil, my anxiety didn’t go away. I could not sleep. In desperation, I got a prescription for Ambien. I began taking Ambien every night. But I didn’t consider Ambien “drugs” so I was proud of myself in that respect. I had stopped using drugs.

At the same time,
American Lawyer
magazine came out, with my law firm on the cover, ranking it the top litigation firm in America. Of course, my firm was making a big deal about this. The very day I saw the magazine I got called into Margaret’s office. My billables were low, she said. “In fact,” Margaret told me, “You’ve dug quite a hole for yourself.”

I was shocked. “I was given this assignment,” I said, incredulously.

“Well,” she replied, “You could have come to me. Now, my advice to you is don’t take anymore nonbillable work. Just get your hours back up because this is going to be a problem.”

I walked out of that office, shaking my head, completely dumbfounded.
Why was I given a nonbillable job for my first assignment? Why didn’t I go to Margaret when the assignment was prolonged? How was I going to rectify my situation?
I was cursing myself, feeling as if I already failed at this high-profile, high-stakes career.