Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (7 page)

Another time I hit him in the face with a horseshoe and he hit me in the back with a brick. Jimmy shot one of our cousins with a BB gun. Twice before he was even four years old he managed to put our dad’s Falcon into neutral, release the emergency brake, and roll the car down the hill toward the river. Both times the car stopped in the garden before going further down the hill into the water.

In our mother’s eyes, we were about as opposite as we could be. We both loved her we just demonstrated it different ways. I showed mine by wanting to please her most of the time. Sometimes, though, the resentment I felt for our mutual reliance on each other would come to the surface. The smarter I got, the dumber she seemed. Her grammar wasn’t very good and her accent was thick. At some point, our roles reversed and I started correcting her grammar. This hurt her. And yet, I’d do it anyway.

I’m sure Momma had a lot of pent-up rage. Animals were never allowed inside the house. She had grown up on a dairy farm and Momma had milked cows at 4:30 a.m. and gathered eggs from underneath the chickens, sticking her little hands in chicken shit every morning of her childhood. For a woman who spent her childhood on a farm, the thought of letting a filthy animal—and to her all animals were filthy—into the house was absurd. Only crazy city folks and white trash allowed such things.

We had outdoor cats as pets. We spent hard-earned money on cat food. My job every night was to fill the cat food bowl and set it outside for the cat. Momma noticed the cat getting skinny but saw that I was doing my duty every night. After careful surveillance, she learned the cause.

A stray dog was sneaking onto our property and eating the cat’s food. In her mind she also thought the beast also might be disease-ridden and bite one of her children. She did what she felt necessary. She grabbed a shotgun and shot the dog. The image of my hypersensitive Momma firing a gun at a defenseless animal startled me and stayed with me. Today, when I tell this story, my friends stare at me in disbelief. I know it seems shocking and cruel. I’ve come to look at it this way: my mother didn’t have control of the people in her life. She didn’t have control over the still-limited role women were allowed to play in the South. She didn’t have control of her appetite. This was a way of her exercising some power.

I like to think she only shot
at
the dog. I don’t know if she actually hit the dog or not. I never saw the dog again, but maybe it had learned its lesson and stayed away from the Merritt’s from then on. It did show a side of my mother that she couldn’t often express. When she absolutely felt the need to get her way, when something was intruding on the way she felt her life should be going, when she was up against the wall, she’d find a way of dealing with it. I learned my lesson.

Don’t fuck with Momma.

I was nine when I found out I would be getting a baby brother or sister. Momma and Daddy had always wanted a daughter. I had the feeling that they had wanted Jimmy to be a girl. Momma’s fascination with my hair undoubtedly stemmed from her desire for a daughter whom she could teach how to style her hair. So when Momma became pregnant again—they didn’t have sonograms then—they didn’t know for sure it would be a girl. However, we all had reasons why we thought it was going to be a girl. My mom was the same age that her mother was when she gave birth to her so it was just natural that it would be a girl. So said the logic of a nine-year-old.

Momma carried the baby full term but it died just before or during delivery. They named the dead infant Elizabeth. We had a funeral for Elizabeth and buried her in a little casket at the cemetery. Momma and Daddy had their own names and dates of birth affixed to the same grave plot. There was a blank spot for the other dates.

We all felt an incredible sense of loss. This was something the whole family had been looking forward to. After the baby was stillborn, especially when it was a girl, it was all that much more of God twisting the dagger and thrusting it into their hearts. It was devastating. She had been God’s little gift to us and He took her away and we didn’t understand why. She was going to make our family complete. I know in my mind I was planning all the things I was going to do with her over the years. I was going to be her big brother. I was going to take her to her piano recitals. Just encourage her. All the things I hadn’t done with Jimmy.

I had hoped that a new member in the family would help relieve some of the feelings of loneliness I had. These feelings had grown more intense as I had moved up in grade school, because I still hadn’t been able to make friends. Jimmy and I had such different interests and completely incongruent personalities that I’m not sure either of us had begun to feel the mythic “brotherly connection” that people talk about. I read books; Jimmy tinkered with motors for the go-cart and minibikes. I wasn’t a complete sissy—I still enjoyed riding these things, I was just clueless about how they worked.

Many nights before I would drift off to sleep, I would ask God to give me one really close friend. A boy who liked to do the same things I did—watch movies like
The Sound of Music
and
West Side Story
and read the same books—not play ball or fight. I’d also pray for magic powers like Samantha on
Bewitched.
That way, if God forgot to give me anything I wanted, I could just get it on my own.

A baby sister would have relieved those lonely feelings. By the time she started school, I would have my driver’s license and could take her to school and walk her inside and introduce her to the same teachers I had had nine years earlier. I would let her in on all the secrets that no one told you about at first but that you had to waste so much time figuring out. Things like why a candy bar that a sign said costs thirty cents would really cost thirty-two cents. Stuff like that. Jimmy never listened to me and I began to think he really didn’t like me all that much; Elizabeth would have clung to every word I said and she would have adored me.

It’s a traumatic event in any woman’s life to carry a baby to full term and then lose it. Momma cried a lot and, for once, there was nothing I could do to take the pain away. That crushed me. The death crushed me and then her anguish crushed me again. Our relationship had been about me making her happy before Elizabeth’s death; after that I wanted more than anything to make up for the loss.

One of the things that came out early in the therapy I would undergo years later was, “Where was your dad at this time? Why isn’t your mom getting this support and encouragement from your dad?” I don’t know. I never thought that she wasn’t getting emotional assistance from him, but looking back she wasn’t. At least not that I could see. By emotional assistance I mean, ordinarily a man and wife fill each other’s needs and my dad never met my mother’s emotional needs. Or maybe she just had too many for any one person to meet. I should know; my dad always said I was like my mother’s twin brother.

In defense of my father, I think lot of times a “true man” in the South doesn’t show his emotions so much. That might be one of the reasons why my mother was closer to me. I was more sensitive and I showed my feelings for her more. That’s why she confided in me; she told me things that my father wouldn’t have related to, or cared about, or have been sensitive to.

Daddy blamed God for Elizabeth’s death and became sullen and even quieter than ever. No one talked to anyone very much anymore. The loss had overwhelmed our little family. We were never the same after that.

The older I got, the more I learned about Momma’s attitudes about masculinity. I went with her to get her hair done. My aunt had recommended one of the men in her hair stylist class as the best hairdresser she’d ever met. Momma’s hair looked great but she was visibly disturbed about something. “I just couldn’t stand for that sissified Paul to touch my hair!” she exclaimed.

Twenty years later when I was at sea off the coast of Somalia and I still wasn’t out to her or my dad, in one of her letters to me she wrote,
“I watched
Philadelphia
last night by myself. It was a very moving movie and I did some crying. I still say AIDS is a behavior problem thus there is a way of avoiding that disease. Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks did some great acting. The whole movie was done good. But, those people make me sick to my stomach. I have to do a lots of talking to me & the Lord about my attitude toward them. But they are very nauseating.”

Reading her letter then made me feel very icy and remote at first, like I was reading a book about someone else. Then I grew angry and cried alone for a few hours. It was my own fault. I hadn’t come out to her. I couldn’t blame her for hating me; she didn’t know that I was one of the people that she found so nauseating.

No, I
was
mad at her. I had planned to be with her for her fiftieth birthday after my return from being at sea. Those plans would entail a lot of complicated maneuverings, but I was willing to do that for her.
Fuck that
, I thought. If I made her nauseous, she could turn fifty without me.

After Elizabeth’s death, I turned to elementary school as a means of escape. My fourth grade teacher had taken a liking to me. I wasn’t imagining it. She moved my desk next to hers and even when she’d switch everyone else’s desks around, she’d leave mine right beside her own. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with this arrangement, especially after Momma’s miscarriage. My teacher comforted me and made my lunches for me for several days. The other kids called me “teacher’s pet.” Looking back, they were right. My relationship with her was a little weird, beyond student and teacher. She wanted a good son of her own and that was a role I felt most comfortable in.

My identity was being formed by now. In the third grade I had been exceptionally proud of my status as “Student of the Month.” The following year I liked being the “teacher’s pet.” In the fifth grade, I was in the top of my class. The top three in my class included: My friend from kindergarten, Melanie Runyan; the son of the president of the university, Bobby Jones IV, who was becoming my archrival; and me. My specialty was spelling. I won most of the spelling bees. When I didn’t, I’d automatically cry. I was ashamed of crying and I was ashamed of losing. So I learned the best way to avoid those shameful feelings was to win. At the end of the fifth grade I won the schoolwide spelling bee.

My winning word—“I-g-n-o-r-a-n-t.”

At the end of the sixth grade I was the odds-on favorite to win the schoolwide spelling bee again. I got cocky. I won the preliminary rounds from my class, but in front of the entire school, I made a complete idiot of myself.

My losing word—“N-e-c-e-c-a-r-i-l-l-y.” Even today I have to look it up.

One reason that I was such a good speller was that, in my spare time, when I wasn’t practicing the piano, I was reading books. My teacher turned everything into a contest, including spelling and reading. Mrs. Langston was my favorite teacher of all time and I was fortunate to have her in both the fifth and sixth grades. Before those years, the only things that seemed to matter to kids competitively were sports and popularity and I royally sucked at both. Now, however, I learned that I could be a winner in the things that were important to me. I won the fifth grade reading contest hands down and narrowly lost in the sixth grade to the new student, Leah Woods. Although Leah was a friend, I cursed her and her offspring for four generations.

Unfortunately, excelling in academics did not exempt me from Mrs. Langston’s desire that I be a well-rounded student. She was in her late twenties, attractive and in good shape herself, and she believed that her students should also be mentally, physically, and spiritually fit. In addition to our regular recess and gym time, occasionally she took us outside on nice days for games that she directed.

I dreaded these days. Once again I was the lonely kid on the playground. One time she spotted me lurking along the edge of the field, counting the minutes until we could go back inside and begin learning useful stuff again.

“Richie!” she shouted sternly in my direction. “All the boys are supposed to be playing soccer. Get over here now!” She pointed to a spot where she actually expected me to play a position on a team.

Almost frozen with fright, I slowly carried myself to my assigned location next to her. I could hear an audible groan from my “teammates.” I was angry with her. How could she, who I adored so much, be doing this me? This was worse than anything Mrs. Hand had ever done!

“Now, you can’t leave the field until you’ve kicked the ball at least three times!”

THREE TIMES?! Had the woman lost her mind? I looked around and saw that my nearest opponents were none other than Chuck Suthers and Gerald Porter, two of the best soccer players in the class. I could see their bared fangs through their wicked smiles and I could have sworn they were salivating. I was toast. The only reason I didn’t cry on the spot was because the intense terror had dried out my tear ducts.

The game resumed and as luck would have it the ball slowly rolled my way. To my complete shock, instinctively I moved my leg and foot and kicked the ball between a stunned Chuck and Gerald to an open teammate about fifteen feet away. He was able to run with it and put it in the goal.

Everyone cheered and gave me high-fives and patted me on the back.
This felt awesome!
If this is what it felt like to be the hero, I could get used to this.

“Very good, Richie!” exclaimed Mrs. Langston. “See, you can do it! Now just two more times and you can go back inside…unless you decide you want to stay.” Her smile was warm and genuine.

Of course I wanted to stay! Guys were grinning at me and nodding their heads and I was starting to feel…well, accepted. Not all the guys were happy, though. Chuck and Gerald were glaring and pacing back and forth like lions ready to pounce.

Mrs. Langston blew the whistle to restart the game and I was determined that the same thing would happen. My teammate to the left shouted, “Mine! Mine!” but I was oblivious to his communication. I saw the ball and raced toward it. I wanted that feeling again, and I was going to…