Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Rich Merritt
everyone would know I had written it. Bob Jones Academy might seem weird to the rest of the world, but for me, it was ideal.
Unfortunately, writing a play was a big undertaking and, without Bobby, the entire responsibility was mine. I suppose I could have asked someone for help, but only Bobby was a match for the level of talent at which I perceived myself to be.
I locked myself in my room with my manual Royal typewriter and got to work. We were too poor to afford a sleek electric IBM Selectric but that didn’t stop me. I pounded away until the script was complete. The play began as a spoof of Macbeth. What it ended up as was a very campy modern upper-class version of West Side Story.
The adviser ran it by the higher-ups and brought me the news.
“They like your play…so do I,” she said. I sensed doubt, however, and didn’t say anything.
“But…I’m a little confused. I know this was going to be Macbeth…but this is okay. But is it Romeo and Juliet, or is it West Side Story or the War of the Roses…it’s just not entirely clear…” she was shaking her head.
“Well…yes, yes and yes,” I said smartly. “Except I see them as wearing carnations, not roses, the Rockefellers will wear red and the Vanderbilts will wear white…”
“The staging has to be inexpensive,” she said.
“I don’t see how it can be inexpensive,’ I said. I envisioned elaborate gold decorations and velvet curtains and antique furniture…
“It has to be inexpensive. And Richie…you have to change one thing.”
I didn’t like the sound of this.
“There can’t be any murders.”
I was stunned. My play required three murders. The higher-ups had all gone completely mad. “They wanted me to do Macbeth. How was I supposed to do a spoof of Macbeth without any murders? So what were they expecting? I can’t have a play without the three…”
“There can’t be any murders.”
“Okay, okay, then, here’s what we’ll do. Ben and Greg will just receive serious injuries but they’ll live. But Ronnie Rockefeller must be killed…”
“How many times to do I have to say it, Richie? No murders!”
Bob Jones was not known for compromise. My play would be no exception. I thought about going on strike…but I wasn’t getting paid anything anyway.
“Okay, no murders.” I had no idea how this was going to work.
Behind the fortress fences, realities began setting in. Our twelfth grade year they expelled a girl who had gotten pregnant. Her dad kicked her out of her house and she had an abortion. The boy who had impregnated the girl, Lee, was the son of poor, low-level Bob Jones cafeteria workers who depended on Bob Jones for their housing and meals. Bob Jones told them that their sixteen-year-old son could not live on campus. The men in the administration knew the boy’s parents could not afford to live anywhere else and support their other three children, one of whom was disabled and had special—and expensive—needs. The parents were forced to kick their wayward son into the streets. “Tough love.” So much for forgiveness.
But we believed, we believed, we believed. We were good! We were righteous! Some of us went to New York City to preach on the streets to all the sinners there. As godly as I considered myself, it made me uncomfortable to be seen on street corners in this strange, new and exciting place while my Bible class teacher shouted to the sinners through a megaphone.
I was curious about life beyond the walls that had sealed me away for so long. I sneaked away from the group and peered into the windows or talked to strangers in the parks. I met some fascinating people. One man in Brooklyn had never visited Manhattan in all of his fifty years. I just couldn’t imagine staring across the water at the magnificent skyline and never buying a subway token to go over there. A woman sitting on a park bench wrapped in an old deep-red wool coat with cigarette burns on it told me she was from a former planet that was now the asteroid belt and had escaped to earth a million years ago just before her planet was pulverized.
We went to the top of the World Trade Center and saw the whole city. What a place! The world was enormous and my little slice of it seemed smaller and smaller.
I lost an election for student body vice president. I had been favored to win but was defeated by a little-known tenth grader. It hit me hard and embittered me against the system. Sources had told me that the student body adviser, Mr. Panache, didn’t care for me and had forbidden me from running for student body president. Some people might think I was just paranoid, but in reality, when it came to my teachers, I was the opposite of paranoid. I assumed all teachers liked me. So I was distraught when my friend Dana Jordan told me Mr. Panache had labeled me “power hungry.”
Mr. Panache was an extremely overweight, red-faced science teacher with a high-pitched voice and effeminate mannerisms. I sat at the front table in the class next to the outcast Julian’s handsome older brother, Evan. Because Mr. Panache was so overweight, he had the annoying habit of constantly pulling up his double-knit polyester slacks. When he would do this, it presented the class with the disturbing image of the outline of his strangely small genitalia. Second period for me was a perpetual contrast between the sexual allure of Evan’s post–gym class sweaty manliness and Mr. Panache’s distressing androgynous asexuality.
My friends on the student body committee protested and he compromised by allowing me to run for VP. Knowing that my defeat delighted him burned me up inside. What could I do to get back at him? The system? The world? Myself?
I bought a pack of cigarettes at the gas station. Fuck them. I wanted to see what it was like to sin. Smoking seemed an easy way to find out. I gagged but it felt great to know I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to do. I had done everything right and still lost the election. Smoking was a thrill.
In a pattern that would repeat itself throughout my life, days later I felt extremely guilty for doing something that I had been taught was wrong. I turned myself in to my Bible teacher and told him I had been smoking. It was a minor scandal and the drama appealed to me. I might have lost the election, but I was getting attention. Plus it felt good to get forgiveness.
People find it hard to believe that I didn’t masturbate. Didn’t really have overt crushes. Never entertained a conscious sexual thought and did all I could to kill the homosexual thoughts that seeped into my unwilling consciousness.
There was a lot of talk about masturbation at Bob Jones Academy. The nighttime study hall monitor talked to the boys about the evils of playing with oneself. I wasn’t quite sure what masturbation was, but I knew it involved hands and penises. I didn’t do it myself; I just had a lot of wild dreams instead. All about guys. I’d wake up with stains on the sheets. We weren’t responsible for our dreams, though, at least that’s what Mr. Panache had told us in science, so I never felt compelled to ask forgiveness for having wicked dreams.
The art teacher, Mr. Delaney, only let boys take his mechanical drawing class. Frequently he opened classes with a little talk about the sin of masturbation. Mr. Delaney was a bachelor and was a resident dormitory supervisor. I heard that he left the school years later under what may have been questionable circumstances. His best friends seemed to be the two spinster upper-level high school English teachers.
I adored our twelfth grade English teacher, Miss Denham. She openly praised my writing ability and was pleased that I always met the deadlines for getting articles in to the school newspaper. She and I kept in touch for many years and I sent her trinkets from the exotic places I visited while in the service.
When I transferred to Southern California, Miss Denham wrote: “I’m glad you like your new home. A young man was visiting Mr. Delaney from northern California this weekend. He was telling him how pretty the coast is in that area.”
Mr. Delaney was also the adviser for the school yearbook, the Academian. Now that I was not going to be a student body officer, perhaps I could be the yearbook editor. My ego and I were starving for some