Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
the limp-wristed motion with his hand calling, “Hey, Richie.” I knew he was making fun of me and I locked eyes with him and then looked quickly away, not breaking my stride. Yet, I felt this intense heat inside of me and I knew my face was red. Because he knew he had gotten to me at that point, he pumped up his name-calling.
At first I was so shocked I couldn’t even process it. As I got farther away I wanted to cry. When I got in the car to go home I was very upset, very disturbed. I couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t tell my mom what had just happened. I couldn’t tell her that the other boys thought I was a sissy.
After that happened then I thought back wondering, Wow, if this is what I’m seeing now what did people say up until this point?”
After that, the two eighth graders made fun of me every day. They mimicked the way I walked and they made limp-wrist motions whenever they saw me. I cried at night about this but during the day I paid strict attention to how I walked and tried to butch it up, a phrase I wouldn’t learn about for years.
By high school my voice sounded manlier and no one called me “Missus Merritt,” on the phone, so that was one less thing to worry about in a growing list of concerns. And I liked the freedom in high school as opposed to junior high and got into the swing of things with band, debate, student government, theater and drama, and of course, chorus. I discovered that within certain circles I could be popular.
Things were generally okay, but not always. At night alone in my room I’d cry for no reason I could think of. Gradually, it got worse and worse. There was nothing I could tie it to. I just wasn’t happy sometimes. I didn’t have a girlfriend, but that didn’t bother me. I was friends with some of the best-looking and most athletic guys in the class. But…something was wrong. I just knew it, but I didn’t know what that “something” was.
Today it would be diagnosed as clinical depression. But this was before Prozac and Paxil and in South Carolina, no one had sympathy for anyone who “suffered” from depression. You just quit whining and got over it.
The depression worsened but I didn’t know it had a name. I was just very, very sad, and pretty soon I was sad all the time.
One night I decided to end it all. I was sixteen.
Like most Southern families, our house had several guns. We had rifles and shotguns and one pistol. Daddy kept the bullets for the pistol in a drawer and I got one out. I went to look for the gun but it wasn’t in its usual place. I looked everywhere, but couldn’t find it. I would have to settle for stabbing myself with a knife. The thought of using the rifle seemed awkward. Using the shotgun was out of the question.
I wrote a note telling my folks I couldn’t take the overwhelming sadness anymore. Suddenly, Momma and Daddy came home early from wherever they’d been. I stuffed the note in my desk where I had also placed the hunting knife as Momma opened my bedroom door. I was crying. She begged me to tell her why, but I couldn’t.
Later, Momma told her sister that she had hidden the pistol in our house when I was fourteen because she was afraid I might kill myself. But I never saw a counselor or therapist of any kind. People who believed in God were supposed to be happy; to be sad was a sign that maybe you weren’t all that close to God. That’s how we interpreted it, anyway. So no way would I, or my mother, admit that I wasn’t happy.
Life went on, of course, and things got better. I learned to deal with the chemical changes in my adolescent body and mind.
My friends were good looking, but Bobby the Fourth befriended one of the handsomest boys in school, Julian. He was from San Diego, California, automatically making him the most intriguing kid in Greenville, South Carolina. We were taught that people from California were strange and rebellious. The land of the fruits and nuts. It was as if he was an alien we all feared and secretly admired. Bobby was the only one confident enough to reach out to him.
Julian was a bad influence on Bobby. Bobby displayed a rebellious attitude. At any other high school it would have been considered normal teen behavior, but not at Bob Jones. Any deviation from what was accepted could brand a person a “reprobate.” While Bobby wasn’t a full-fledged “reprobate,” he wasn’t being the gung-ho champion of his namesake school.
In the tenth grade, Julian was expelled from Bob Jones Academy. A lot of our classmates were expelled, or “shipped” that year. I thought of getting shipped the same way I thought of executions. It was terrifying and it would never happen to me because I kept to all the rules.
Shockingly, in the eleventh grade, it happened to Bobby. Julian had returned to Greenville to spend Christmas with his mother. Dr. Bob Jones III had forbidden Bobby from socializing with Julian, but Dr. Bob was out of town and Bobby disobeyed. Julian bought Bobby some beer and Bobby got caught drinking alcohol!
There was a rumor that some men in the university administration didn’t like Bobby and were going to make sure that he never followed his father to the presidency. This was their opportunity and they took it. It was so medieval. While the king was away, the henchmen removed his first-born son. The palace coup was successful, and such was the scandal of a teenager caught drinking beer that the prince was exiled to live with relatives. In Indiana.
Bobby’s expulsion had both an emotional and a practical impact on me. Although our relationship was rooted in rivalry, over the years we had developed a fond admiration for the other’s many appreciable talents. In recent years, I was neither cool nor popular enough to exist in Bobby’s orb but we still considered ourselves friends. I would miss him. Besides, if they could expel Bob Jones IV, they could expel anyone, especially a poor kid from Piedmont with no connections.
I would also miss Bobby for a practical reason. The junior class advisor had asked Bobby and me to co-author a play. This wasn’t just any play—it was the play that would he performed at the end-of-the-year junior-senior banquet.
Bob Jones Academy did not have a prom. A prom would have meant dancing and, because dancing was evil, we had a junior-senior play and banquet instead.
“Mr. Rasmussen,” I said, drawing the attention of a new student teacher in our eleventh-grade Bible class. Those of us who had attended Bob Jones for eleven years knew all the traps for these unwitting hapless novices. “Why aren’t we allowed to dance?”
“Because that would be against God’s teaching in the Bible,” he said. “We are not to give in to the desires of the flesh. Dancing is just that…it’s inappropriate for a Christian to engage in such activities.”
“Hmmm. I see.” This guy was such a dweeb. He had ugly thick brown glasses and we could see dandruff all over the shoulders of his cheap polyester suit. Lots of it. “What about Ecclesiastes 3:4 then? Don’t we have to obey that?”
Mr. Rasmussen looked perplexed. He almost tripped, stepping back to the lectern where he had left his Bible. “I’m sorry, what…what was the reference again?” He began flipping the pages.
I said, “Ecclesiastes…Chapter 3…Verse 4…. Do you want me to read it to you?” Without waiting, I quoted, “‘a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…’ Aren’t we supposed to dance? I mean, the Bible says there’s a time to dance. Why can’t we have a prom, then?”
I stopped listening. I knew Mr. Rasumussen would give the standard party-line answer…something about Old Testament dispensation, whatever that meant. God never changed, or so we were taught. Yet the same God that allowed Solomon and David to have as many wives as they pleased had somehow changed that traditional notion of marriage to mean that in the new era a man could only have one wife, not many as he had been able to have before.
Yet we were supposed to follow Old Testament laws about a lot of other things. No one had ever explained which laws were to be obeyed or why those laws and not others, but I didn’t ask many questions. Asking too many questions branded a person a reprobate. I might ask these pitiful student-teachers smart-ass questions when the real teacher wasn’t within earshot, but in front of my real teachers, I put on a cooperative face. I was such an ass-kisser.
The truth was that