Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (46 page)

I looked through the
American Lawyer
magazine and I discovered one of the most successful partners of the firm had R. J. Reynolds as his top client. I started thinking of the firm as evil.
They’re tobacco lawyers
!
Yet I’m not good enough to be here
.

My therapist informed me that I had caught myself in a vise.
I’m too good for this place. On the other hand I’m not good enough to be here
. And the vise started squeezing in tighter and tighter on my head.

Brandon’s birthday party was coming up. I had told myself I wasn’t going to drink. True to form, I was sloshed before the party started. I had not had a drink for four weeks and suddenly I totally blew that period of dryness.

I was coherent enough, though, to offer a very sweet toast. I said “When it’s my turn to hit forty—in about eleven years—it won’t be so bad…because growing old ain’t so bad when you’ve found the person you want to grow old with.”

After the party we went out dancing. I did some coke that night too. After that came that old familiar guilt.
I’m doing it again! I’m drinking. I’m doing drugs. I’m hiding
.
This year is going to be just like the last.

By February, I was taking two Ambien a night without letting Brandon know about it. I mean, he thought I was occasionally taking something to help me sleep, but he had no idea of the extent of my reliance on the drug. It was easy to hide it from him because the firm had started sending me away to Santa Barbara often for work. But I was taking the Ambien at about 8:00 p.m. so it would knock me out until morning. I didn’t want to have to deal with the pain of being away, of being alone. That took care of the evenings but I started to feel as if I needed something to help me make it through the day. I had a friend whose boyfriend was a doctor. He would write out prescriptions for her, for instance for birth control and so forth. I asked her if he could get me some Xanax. She said, “Sure,” and she got me some.

While I continued to slide into despair, I felt an overpowering need to find out about the truth behind my friend Alan’s suicide. Dena had been his roommate at the time of his death and was as close to him as anyone. Now she was a professor at a law school near my office. I called her saying, “Dena, I need to talk to you about Alan. About why he died. Why he did this.”

We made an appointment to have lunch that Thursday.

I braced myself for what I was about to hear. Over lunch Dena told me that on his last day, Alan went to work as usual, but once there he just couldn’t complete an assignment. He couldn’t finish a memo he had been asked to write. He was so ashamed. That was the last straw. He didn’t want to be a lawyer. He wanted to be a triathlete but had blown out his knee years before. He just couldn’t deal with it. After discovering that he could not finish this memo, he left work, came home, drank a lot of alcohol, took a bunch of pills, and tied a bag over his head. Dena came home and found him like that. She said he had had problems in the past. I took it to mean he had tried it before. “But,” she added, “we thought he was over it. That he was out of the darkness.”

She went on to say that Alan had been in the midst of changing medications. I thought about the Paxil I was taking. Not through a psychiatrist, but through the general practitioner who had given me the Ambien. I told Dena that.

“Alan was changing medication on his own,” Dena said. “That was when he killed himself. We didn’t know that till after the fact.” Dena also said he couldn’t deal with being gay and being Christian. That much I had suspected.

I thought back about the Alan I had known. I met him my first day of law school. He was so handsome and wonderful and outgoing. I viewed Alan not only as a friend but a role model, a teacher. Yet, I had begun to suspect that he might have something wrong with him. We would make plans and then he would cancel at the last minute or he wouldn’t show up at all. I could have just written him off as another southern California flake, but I knew he was not. He came from an Irish-Protestant family. Very rigid. Very structured. Both of his parents were doctors—superdemanding and professional. He was very much a guy who kept appointments on time. So I knew that wasn’t quite it, but I just didn’t analyze it.

It was absolutely crazy, sitting across from Dena, hearing her describe the reasons why one of my best friends killed himself, while almost everything she was saying was parallel to the exact place I was in my life. Just like Alan, I couldn’t finish my own work. I was sitting in my office all day hating it. I came from a rigid Christian family and I had never reconciled that. But here I was, having lunch, and outwardly telling Dena, “It’s so good to hear this because I’m finally coming to terms with it. I’m going through this process and getting closure on it.” That’s not what was happening at all.

That Friday night I took a bunch of work home with me, trying to catch up, and I started popping the Xanax as if it were candy. I must have slept about twelve hours that night. I woke up on Saturday and Brandon looked at me and asked “How many Ambien did you take last night?”

“One,” I lied. My mind had once again started its unrelenting campaign of torment:
I’m lying to him. I’ve always lied to him. I’ve always cheated on him. I’ve always hidden things from him. I’m never going to stop that. Never!

It was still early in the day, but I had already taken a number of Xanax, plus some remained in my bloodstream from the night before. I sluggishly sat down at my desk to continue with the work I had brought home and I just couldn’t touch it. I didn’t like the work. I didn’t like the firm. I had passed the bar exam at this point and had been sworn in as an attorney. As I was sitting there, with a pile of work in front of me, I was looking at my future and absolutely hating it. But I had no idea what to do.
What can I do now? I’m deep in debt. I spent all this money and all this time on my career and I didn’t know what else I could do now.
All these voices were racing through my head. I tried to quiet them down with medication.

Obviously the idea of getting any work done in this state was out of the question. I thought, if I could be productive—get things moving—without taxing myself too much, at least I’d get the feeling of some type of accomplishment for the day. I decided to answer e-mails. I had been putting that off. Amid the growing list in my “un-read” mailbox someone had forwarded me
The Advocate
for that week—on the cover was Dan Pallotta. It was an article slamming Dan over the funding issues behind the AIDS rides. I thought of Dan’s dead lover—my friend Alan.

The irony was overwhelming because I had been to lunch with Dena on Thursday and on Saturday someone forwarded me this e-mail with Dan on the cover and I just…well…I just hated my job. I hated my work. No one in my family spoke to me anymore. My own parents wouldn’t even come to my law school graduation. Jimmy and I weren’t speaking to each other after our fight in Anapolis. I hated my life. I was stuck. And here was
The Advocate
. They were doing it again. Alan’s voice popped into my head, “This is what’s wrong. This is why gay people will never get ahead. Look how they treat each other.”

And I said, “I’m going to join you.”

I had thought about suicide over the last year or two anyway. Thoughts like,
If I were to kill myself, how would I do it
? Hypothetically speaking. This day I told myself,
I’m going to do it.

Over the previous years, one thing that had stopped me from thinking about suicide was what the Bob Jones people would think or say about me. Ironically, in all my therapy, I had really worked through that. I honestly no longer cared what those people thought of me. I heard a wise saying and took it to heart: “What you think of me is none of my business.”

But the downside of that was, I no longer cared if they used me as their example of the wayward young man who had ended his life. All the barriers were gone.

I decided that after Brandon went to bed that night I was going to commit suicide by asphyxiating myself in my car. I would take Brandon’s car out of the garage and pull in my car, because he loved his BMW too much—I didn’t want to ruin it for him. That was the way my mind was working at the time. I was sitting at my desk planning my demise when I thought,
What if the gaps around the edge of the garage door are too big and the carbon monoxide escapes?
I didn’t want to fuck this up.

Well, the solution came to me very quickly. I’m Southern. Anything can be fixed with duct tape. I went to the kitchen drawer where I knew Brandon kept things like that, and sure enough there was a big roll of duct tape. The sensation of unwavering uncertainty was now lifted. Taking an affirmative step like that toward suicide is monumental. I can’t describe it but, just sitting still thinking about it is one thing, even thinking you’re going to do it is one thing, but when you actually physically do something as part of your plan, you’re entering into an entirely different frame of mind. You break a barrier, a barrier that you can never rebuild.

I sat back down and I felt so calm, so serene, and so peaceful. The only time in my life I had ever felt this peaceful was when I had been certain I was going to die in the back of the helicopter General McCorkle was piloting on our way to Yuma. I thought,
Wow. Maybe Alan discovered this. This is a way to eternity. Death is really the only path to complete serenity.

The rest of the day I kept popping Xanax while I was answering the overdue e-mails. As if, you know, nothing was wrong. Finally about 4:00 p.m. I was so sleepy from all the Xanax, I passed out in bed. About five thirty Brandon woke me up. He was angry again. “Let’s go eat!” He was saying, “What are you doing sleeping again? You slept twelve hours last night! What’s wrong with you?”

I shook myself awake. “Fine,” I mumbled, “let’s go eat.”

We went to BJ’s Pizzeria. I had three big beers to wash down my pizza. The whole time I was thinking,
When I get home I’m going to go through with this
. I was feeling really good at this point from a combination of the Xanax, the alcohol, and the setting of my plan in motion.

When we got home I drove my car to the station to fill it up with gas. I would hate to start killing myself and run out of gas in the middle of it. At the gas station I bought a six-pack. Well, I hadn’t been drinking at home since I promised Brandon I wouldn’t. It was one of the few vows I had kept.

I brought the beer into the house while drinking one. Brandon saw me and became furious. He snatched the rest of the beers from me and poured them down the sink. While he was doing that I sat down and started writing a note. But I was so out of it at this point I couldn’t even write. I was acting as if I were angry. I
was
angry. Everything was getting hazy but I executed my plan with surprising discernment. I went to the bathroom cabinet and grabbed the Ambien and the Xanax, and then I got the duct tape. I had already switched the cars when I came back from the gas station. I made sure there was a bottle of water in the garage so I could swallow all the pills. See, even though I was groggy, I was so damned determined.

Because Brandon was mad at me, it made my plot all the more easy. He was not talking or paying any attention to me at all by this point. He went into the bedroom and lay on the bed as if he were going to watch TV. It was nine thirty or ten. We always had to get up really early. We always went to bed early. I thought he’d just go to sleep. I made it look like I was storming out to go somewhere.

I went down to the garage, opened the door, went in, started the car, and closed the garage door.
How simple
, I thought.
How incredibly simple the answer is!
I got the bottle of water. Reached for the pills. Swallowed a bunch of them. Hazily, I started to duct tape the gaps in the garage door. Then I blacked.

The next thing I remember is a feeling of intense rage.

At some point Brandon had come to the garage looking for me. I recall clutching the bottle of pills and Brandon prying my fingers to get the bottle away from me. But it was all happening in a fog.

The next thing I remember is coming to in an emergency room. I had a hospital gown on and I seemed to be attached to a lot of wires. I had black stuff all over me—which I later learned was charcoal. Instead of pumping my stomach they had given me charcoal to induce vomiting to get the pills out of my system. I opened my eyes a little more.

Brandon looked at me with hurt in his deep blue eyes and said, “So much for growing old together, huh?” His tone was sarcastic and bitter.

“We are going to grow old together,” I replied, gently. That was my first coherent thought.

Then I realized where I was and I fell back into my haze—where it was safe. The rest is a jumble of thoughts. At some point I fought violently with a nurse. They carried me in an ambulance from the emergency room to another hospital. I was still groggy, yet I had taken a class in mental health law and somewhere in my brain I realized what was happening.

“Absolutely not!” I declared. “I’m not going into the loony bin for three days.” They sent in a psychiatrist in to see me. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I have depositions to take this week.”

She looked at me with her dark eyes and said with an Indian accent, “Well, you did not care about your depositions when you tried to kill yourself.”

I thought,
Don’t use logic with me, you bitch.

I was involuntarily committed. I refused to sign, thinking that I would get out sooner. They put me in the high security area—with the c
razy
people. Of which, of course, I was one. Everything was so cloudy. I went back to sleep. When I woke up it was Sunday afternoon. I looked around and began quivering with humiliation. They had made sure I couldn’t try any funny business again. I didn’t have a belt. I didn’t have any laces in my shoes. There were no razors, no scissors; the glass was not breakable. There were mental patients all around me. This wasn’t a movie. This was real life. My life. I took a shower, cleaned myself up. That night quite a few friends visited me. Brandon came of course, and five other friends; all these guys were there for me; it was really terrific, to discover so many people cared for me. That it mattered to them if I lived or died. I hadn’t felt that before. Which is ridiculous because all these people always had been in my life with just as much care and love, but because of depression and substance abuse, I wasn’t able to see that.