Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
me? I was left to wonder. “Richie is studious and smart and plays the piano. But Jimmy’s definitely boyish.”
Everyone started telling me how much I reminded them of my mother. I took after her side of the family and looked like her. The similarities weren’t just in how we looked, though. I was starting to develop a very strong, controlling side of my own. And because I couldn’t exhibit that control in my relationship with my mother, I took it out on poor Jimmy. The little guy essentially had two mothers, two very controlling, domineering mothers! No wonder he was so desperate to stake out his own turf.
Jimmy and I slept together in an old queen-sized bed made of wood that was painted white. It had a fancy design carved into the headboard. Before I’d go to sleep I would pick my nose and put the boogers on the back of this headboard. When I was eight, our parents bought us a nice new set of bedroom furniture with bunk beds. We thought that was really cool.
We fought a lot, mainly because Jimmy wouldn’t do what I would tell him to. This was probably normal brother stuff at this age, although sometimes it might have gotten out of hand. On one summer evening, we were sitting outside at our grandparents’ house next door with our aunt and uncles and cousins, eating watermelon and waiting on someone to make some homemade ice cream.
I was rolling in the grass about halfway down the hill. Jimmy was seated on the back steps of the house with Grandpa Merritt, holding medium-sized set of hedge trimmers. All I can plead now is temporary insanity, but I decided to dare my younger brother.
“Hey, Jimmy! I dare you to throw those at me. I bet you won’t do it.” He was only four years old. How far could he throw them?
In a nanosecond, all I saw was a pair of hedge trimmers flying through the air in my direction. I froze as they hit the ground, but bounced up, continuing their assault. I felt an intense pain course through my body as the metal blade hit my upper lip. I screamed and started running. I ran around to the front of our grandparents’ house, across the front of our house and back to the rear of our own house. I was moaning and wailing and blood was spurting out of my face. I thought I was going to die.
Momma came running out of the house to tend to me and Daddy gave Jimmy a pretty fierce spanking. Luckily, the cut wasn’t that bad, although I have a scar above my upper lip today. At the time we were angry with Jimmy, but now the only remark anyone makes is, “Boy, you sure were stupid to dare Jimmy to do something like that!”
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