Читать книгу Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star - Rich Merritt - Страница 13

“The American Society of Interior Designers 2004 Strategic Environmental Report observed, ‘Gay activists view the Supreme Court ruling of 2003 overturning state sodomy laws that prohibited a number of sexual acts…as the first step toward the implementation of new, more friendly gay rights laws.’”

Over the years, Melanie tortured me by reading sections from the BJU Review, the alumni newsletter of Bob Jones University, aloud to me over the phone. She had just received the Summer 2004 version and couldn’t wait to share Dr. Bob Jones III’s personal letter, “The President’s Corner.”

“Why the fuck is Bob the Third reading ‘The American Society of Interior Designers’? He’d probably say it’s just for the articles.”

“Good point,” Melanie responded. “I swear Rich, ninety percent of his rants in these articles are against homosexuality! And it gets better. Listen to this. He writes ‘Housing complexes dedicated to gays are springing up all across America. Advertisers of mainstream American products and services are rushing to buy space in the gay press. They are suddenly aware of the cold hard cash represented by the homosexual community. America is headed for an early grave.’ Ooh, he just makes me so mad…”

“Where are these housing complexes and how come I wasn’t aware of them?” I asked. “Dammit, I’m going to fire my realtor!”

“You’ll love this part! ‘God will not allow America to survive the legitimizing and legalizing of sodomy and same-sex marriages. The homosexual community in seeking it, the courts in pandering to it, and the legislators in legalizing it constitute an infantry assault against the God of Heaven…’”

“What the hell does that wuss know about an infantry assault?! And no court has ever pandered to me, that’s for sure.”

“The best part is at the end…‘We appeal to the people for your prayers, financial support, and for the sake of your young people…’”

“Why are you still getting that rag?” I asked. “They haven’t blacklisted you yet? I mean come on, all I do is suck dick, but you—not only are you divorced, you remarried, which you know to them makes you an adulteress because ‘what therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder!’ Remember that? Anyone who gets remarried is committing adultery in God’s eyes! I hope they at least stamp a big scarlet ‘A’ on the address label. Then you go and get another divorce. That would be like me dating a black man. Two strikes all in one!”

“Nope. They let blacks and whites date now.”

“So Bob Jones has finally made it into the sixties. I’ll be damned.”

“Yes, according them, you will be,” Melanie said.

“I’ll save you a spot when I get there.”

“I can’t believe this!” she exclaimed. “They didn’t send it to ‘Melanie Runyan’ they sent it to ‘Mrs. Melanie Runyan Burtner!’”

“‘Mrs.?’ And I didn’t know you had ever taken your second married name.”

“Neither did I. But apparently someone at Bob Jones thinks I should. Just like they insisted on putting my first married name on my university diploma when I specifically told them I wanted it to say ‘Runyan.’”

“I can laugh at all of his fucked up dogma in that letter, Melanie, except for that last part. Those poor kids who don’t know any better. I mean, most of them…fine, they want to be there, let them. But there’s ten percent that are lonely, scared and thinking there’s no one there like them, but their parents or somebody’s forcing them to be there…he’s just poisoning them.”

“Well,” she said, “look at us. We survived.”

“Barely,” I added. “And only by the grace of God. The real God. Not this asshole’s version.”

Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, given the prolificacy of his homophobia, the first time I recall hearing the word “homosexual” was from Dr. Bob Jones III on the university’s Sunday morning television show. We didn’t go to church as much after Elizabeth died so if we stayed home on Sunday morning I watched it. It was called “Show My People” after the verse in the Bible where God commands one of the prophets to “Show my people their transgressions!” That’s what Bob Jones III intended to do. Show the world where it sinned.

One show “Dr. Bob” talked about Anita Bryant—who I knew as “the orange juice lady”—and how he thought she was a courageous woman for taking a stand in Florida against the sodomites. He sneered that you couldn’t call them “sodomites” anymore but had to say the more proper “homosexuals” instead. He talked about how homosexuality was against the Bible and anyone who said otherwise did not understand Scripture. I didn’t know what a sodomite or a homosexual was and there certainly wasn’t anyone in my life I could ask.

Bob Jones the Third’s contempt wasn’t limited to the act of sodomy. For whatever reason, he also detested effeminacy or anything remotely relating to it.

Dr. Jones showed this contempt after the conductor of a nationally acclaimed orchestra displayed wildly flamboyant feminine mannerisms. The conductor and his orchestra had given a special concert one evening on the Bob Jones campus as part of the school’s annual “Artist Series.”

During chapel service the following day, Dr. Bob Jones III said, “Wathn’t he jutht such a thweet fellow?” Dr. Jones exaggerated a lisp and made a limp-wrist motion. The students laughed and laughed. I laughed, too. At least Dr. Bob wasn’t making fun of me. The joke was on Dr. Bob, however, because the guest conductor was in the audience. At least that was the rumor that went around the campus.

Dr. Bob Jones III’s opinions on homosexuality made nationwide news. His grandfather had chosen alcohol as the scourge of the nation and his father had chosen to beat up on Catholicism. For Dr. Bob Jones III, America’s curse was homosexuality. In March 1980, he and other fundamentalist ministers went to the White House to deliver petitions to President Carter opposing extending provisions of the Civil Rights Act to homosexuals.

“I’m sure this will be greatly misquoted,” Dr. Bob said to an Associated Press reporter, “but it would not be a bad idea to bring the swift justice today that was brought in Israel’s day against murder and rape and homosexuality. I guarantee it would solve the problem posthaste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.”

I loved to read anything I could get my hands on. I read so many books the ophthalmologist said that’s why I had to get glasses. The glasses, of course, made me look nerdy and unattractive, which didn’t add to my already low self-esteem. But now I could see further and I began to realize that there was a world that existed beyond a three-foot perimeter surrounding me. Eventually I would have to learn to occupy that world; for now, though, I put on my glasses and buried my face, my mind, and my imagination in my beloved books.

If there were no new books in the house I would read the World Book Encyclopedias my parents had purchased soon after I was born. I especially enjoyed reading the sections on other countries and tried to imagine myself in those places, amidst the people I saw in the photographs doing the things that were described in the narrative about that country. The people looked so happy doing whatever it was they were doing, whether it was fishing in the South China Sea, bathing in the Ganges, or chasing kangaroo in the outback. It never occurred to me that I had grown to detest the things that my own people did, like picking green beans, corn, and okra in the blazing summer heat with bugs attacking our flesh, mowing the huge lawn or cleaning the house. No wonder no one took pictures of us for the World Book Encyclopedia. We were mundane.

I was drawn to the sections on the military, especially the Navy and Marine Corps. I also enjoyed looking at maps and wanted to go to other countries so it became a synergistic fantasy to think of myself standing on the deck of a Navy ship wearing the same crisp white officer’s uniform I saw in the pictures, charting the vessel’s course over the world’s oceans. I would tell the captain how far he needed to turn the wheel to get to whatever port we wanted to visit. The fact that Navy ships no longer had steering wheels was an inconvenient point I overlooked in my fantasy.

But there was something mystical about the Marines. My attraction to the Marine Corps at this age was not easy for me to understand. My vague imagination had me in a group of men just like me. That was so different from where I felt myself now, so emotionally separated from the rest of my extended family and ridiculed by the boys in my class. In my reality, I was lonely, but in my Marine Corps vision, I was happy being one of a group of peers. These Marines wouldn’t scorn me like the boys on the soccer field because I would pass whatever test was necessary to become one of them. They would have to like me then.

My favorite novels were the “Hardy Boys Mystery Series.” I read every one of them and begged my mom to take me to the Kmart whenever a new one was published. The mysteries these teenage boys uncovered were intriguing and their lives seemed infinitely more fascinating than my own. I wondered when Frank and Joe Hardy had time to do their homework.

However, it wasn’t just the boys’ sleuthing that caught my attention. Frank and Joe’s adventures frequently took them to remote destinations in the woods where they had to cross a body of water. Sometimes they swam across a river, other times they might fall into a lake while boating or they might simply find themselves caught in a rainstorm in the middle of a forest. Inevitably, the brothers would strip naked and wait for their clothes to dry. They would use this time to ponder the clues they had uncovered or talk about the next step of their investigation. But I couldn’t get the visual out of my head.

They were naked!

I didn’t recognize this image as something sexual and the fact that they were brothers made it seem okay that they were standing around outside without a stitch of clothing on talking to each other. Their clothes were wet and they had to wait for them to dry and they were detectives discussing a case. It was okay.

But they were naked!

I read and reread those parts. Yum! The idea of dark-haired, eighteen-year-old steady and thoughtful Frank and blond, seventeen-year-old short-tempered and impetuous Joe posing nude in the woods by the river gave me goose bumps. I liked this feeling. I wished that I had a brother I got along with enough to do things like this. Jimmy was just too wild and different. Besides, Joe always did what Frank told him to and Jimmy never did what I told him to. I sighed. This would just have to be my dream.

There was a similar line of Christian adventure books for boys. These books weren’t as interesting as the Hardy Boys books and quite often the “preachiness” of the story overwhelmed any intrigue. These were called the Danny Orlis books.

The Danny Orlis books weren’t as well written as the Hardy Boys books. Frank and Joe seemed so…alive! Danny Orlis wasn’t real. Besides, Frank and Joe had each other. I really liked that part. Danny Orlis was…well, he was alone. Plus, he could be really bitchy sometimes.

Most of all, I started reading the Bible. Not just stories adapted for children from the Holy Scriptures, but the actual text of the King James Version itself. I wanted to know first-hand what God said about things.

My favorite character in the Bible, after Jesus, was David. Not the old David, who, after he became King turned into a sleazy, murderous adulterer. My hero was the young David. Out of all the men in the Promised Land, David was the one handpicked by God to be the next King of Israel. I pictured the young David as tanned and handsome, playing his harp while he watched over his sheep. I imagined that he was shorter than the average man, but muscular, and that he had curly light brown hair with a golden tint caused by constant exposure to the sun. My David had a robust and manly scent, made fresh by a constant outdoor breeze.

I could relate to David. He wrote poetry; I wanted to write stories too. He was musical; I played the piano and the clarinet. He seemed gentle and kind, like me. But he was also a fierce warrior and I got revved up every time I heard the story about how he killed the giant, Goliath, armed only with a slingshot. David was a tender soul, but he was no sissy.

The best part of the David story, though, was his relationship with Jonathan. Jonathan was the son of the reigning monarch, King Saul. King Saul learned that God had anointed David to be his successor instead of his rightful heir so Saul tried to kill David. Jonathan was aware of these facts, but he loved David so much, he didn’t care that David was going to be king instead of him. In several places, God tells us that Jonathan loved David as he loved his own soul.

Because of King Saul’s murderous plot against David, Jonathan and David were forced to meet secretly in hidden places. It was so romantic! Each time they met, they kissed, removed their clothes, wept, or made promises to each other. When David learned that Jonathan had been killed in battle, he tore his clothes, mourned, wept and fasted until evening. David publicly paid special tribute to Jonathan by wailing, “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

I wouldn’t understand the true nature of the relationship between these two young men for several more years. Right now all I knew was that I wanted my very own Jonathan.

As my mind was developing at a fast rate, so was my body. I remember watching a made-for-television movie about the Bible. At the very beginning of the film, as in the book it was based on, God created Adam and Eve. Suddenly Adam was there and was completely naked. Of course, this was network TV; all they were allowed to show was the appearance of nudity, so all you saw was the side of him. Yet you could see his bare ass—not the back of it, and definitely not a full-frontal shot, just his naked side. I noticed he had the most muscular thigh and leg. And he was stooping down as if God was just about to create Eve out of his rib. I remember being so taken with that image. Wow. The first man and he’s so beautiful! He was like a statue.

Soon after, I took a shower. I was hitting puberty. I recall catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, of my bare butt and my bare side. My leg had started to develop. I no longer had just a little boy’s limb; I was starting to get some muscle definition. I remember stooping down like that image of Adam and looking in the mirror and thinking, Wow, this feels good. I like looking like a man. I like looking at this. I wondered how much I had looked like that image on the TV show.

Looking in the mirror, I was attracted to what I saw. So I guess my first sexual attraction was to myself. That’s the type of thing that’s hard for me to admit. It sounds so narcissistic. I’ve heard that homosexuality is the ultimate form of narcissism because by wanting to have sex with someone of the same gender, we are really wanting to have sex with ourselves. Whatever. I just thought I looked hot.

Sometimes my penis would get hard and I didn’t know why. I came up with the theory that grown men’s penises were this big and hard all the time and, that since I was growing up, soon mine would be big and hard like this all the time. That didn’t seem very comfortable but if every man in the world dealt with it, so could I.

I also remember my second sexual attraction. All the boys in my sixth grade class took swimming lessons. I felt a strange sense of excitement inside me about changing clothes in the locker room with them, but I didn’t have a clue what that excitement meant, where it came from, or what it was about.

After a swimming lesson I was in the locker room on the bench getting dressed. I looked up and found my face inches away from the butt of a nineteen-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, buff college swimming coach. He was buck-naked and a hot feeling ran up and down along my backbone and to my chest and down my legs and back to my head. I couldn’t take my eyes away from this man’s butt. I had an urge to reach out and touch it, but of course I didn’t dare. My penis got hard and I covered it with a towel. Maybe there was some connection between the naked man, the tingly feeling inside, and my penis getting hard, but I wasn’t sure. I knew, though, that through no intention of my own, I was attracted to this man’s body.

Slowly, I was learning about the sexual world. One evening while watching the evening news, the anchor talked about something called rape. I had assumed rape was the same as murder, but one night they talked about rape and murder. At the dinner table I asked what the difference was.

Momma gave Daddy a very serious stare and said “Paul, you need to talk to him.”

Daddy called me into his bedroom a few hours later, something he never did. He had an open encyclopedia in his lap. At once, I was frightened and excited. I had long suspected that the world was full of secrets adults hadn’t told me. Now I was about to find out what one of those secrets was.

He pointed to a diagram of a nude male figure and said something about semen and sperm coming out of the penis. Then, he turned to a diagram of a nude female figure and said something about the semen and sperm going into the woman’s opening between her legs. That’s how a baby was made. It was okay for a man and woman to do this if they were married but, if not, they weren’t allowed.

He said that when a man sent the semen and sperm to the woman when she didn’t want it, that was called rape. Daddy explained that when the penis was hard, it couldn’t pee, that that was when the semen and sperm came out. He said that maybe I’d noticed my penis getting hard already when I was around a pretty girl. I nodded even though I hadn’t observed quite that correlation.

I was more puzzled, though, by how the sperm and semen made it from the man’s penis into the opening between the woman’s legs. Daddy had left out a pretty important piece of the puzzle and I was left to my eleven-year-old imagination to fill in the gaps, so to speak. I reached the conclusion that sperm went through the air like hair spray from an aerosol can and found its own way into the woman. What that meant to me was that when my penis got hard, I needed to stay away from the girls.

As I entered puberty, staying away from girls would be the least of my worries.

Considering how many books I read, it’s only natural I would learn the nature of my dad’s omission—“the missing link” of sex—by reading about it. My junior high school history teacher encouraged us to read historical novels to learn history so I found a copy of a book called The Bastard by John Jakes. Probably not the book she had in mind. I became addicted to reading about this strange family of American Revolutionaries. They did wild things. The men took off the women’s clothes and played with their body parts. The women did the same to the men. Finally, one scene used words like “semen” and “thrust his penis into her opening” and later she had a baby. Finally, it all made sense. It sounded gross, but it fit with what Daddy had tried to explain to me.

The second or third book in the series talked about two men on a ship during the War of 1812. One man attacked the other and tried to “thrust” into the man’s butt-hole. The man who was to be the “thrustee” spotted the bulge in the “thruster’s” pants and fended him off before he could execute his sex act. The word “sodomy” was used. I read and reread that part several times. A light dawned and I became further enlightened to these adult secrets.

I campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1980. When he came to the campus of Bob Jones University, I got to hear him speak and, after his speech, I got to shake his hand as well as Nancy’s. I was the happiest twelve-year-old in the world that day.

The late Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., was the former president and, in 1980, the current chancellor of Bob Jones University. We referred to him affectionately as “Junior.” He was world-renowned for being a loose cannon. He was old and didn’t care what came out of his mouth. Quite frequently his comments in our daily chapel service earned him ridicule or condemnation on the national news at night. He called Betty Ford a “slut” and prayed that God strike Al Haig dead. I and the other five thousand students, faculty, and administrators in the building joined him in that prayer.

“Dr. Bob [Junior] will fool you,” reported the Washington Post in the eighties. “He’s not at all what the media has put him up to be. You’d think he was some backward hick who barely knew his English. He’s not like that at all. He’s multifaceted…he’s a fine Shakespearean actor.”

The paper contained a 2,500-word story on the seventy-two-year old Dr. Bob Junior and his passion for the arts. “A painted portrait of the chancellor hangs just outside his office. It shows Bob Jones dressed as Shylock. There is a Bible in the painting—and a statue of the Bard.”

The story was that Dr. Bob Junior had wanted to be a professional Shakespearean actor, but that his father, the fire-and-brimstone turn-of-the-century evangelist, had persuaded his only son to sacrifice his passion for the stage and serve the Lord. While Junior may have not become a professional actor, every year he performed in at least one Shakespeare play and all of the students, staff, and faculty were required to attend. His sermons were also much more of a theatrical monologue than a theological discourse.

At the formal plays and concerts, which were also part of the “Artists Series,” all of the members of the audience showed their respect for the Jones family by standing when the Joneses arrived and took their seats in the special box reserved for the university’s “first family.”

Junior’s talents were not restricted to the stage. He was an avid art collector and today visitors come from all over the world to admire the University’s art collection. The Washington Post story focused primarily on Junior’s taste in paintings.

“Art feeds hunger in the hearts of men,” Dr. Jones Junior is reported to have said.

The Post noted the seeming contradictions presented by Dr. Bob Junior and his artistic preferences. “Protestant fundamentalists, whose wood churches are as spare as white china doorknobs, whose unpretentious hymns are shoveled out four-square, traditionally oppose pubic [sic] ostentation. Yet these Baroque pictures—with their ecstasies of passion, their flesh and writhing limbs—are some of the most sumptuous in the history of art.”

Al Franken had this to say about Dr. Bob Jones Jr.’s art collection in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: “You see, Dr. Bob II had spent some summers in the late 1930s as a tour guide in Rome, Paris and Vienna, and had acquired a taste for fine art. Luckily, when he returned to Europe in the late forties, he was able to acquire quite a bit of it at very reasonable prices.”

The Washington Post story concluded with a revealing tidbit about Jones. Dr. Bob Junior had a personal requirement that all of his paintings feature a Biblically-based subject. However, one painting that was thought to have been about Pharisees was about a “heathen subject” instead.

“I thought [Jones] would be dismayed, but not at all,” said the collector who discovered the mistake. “When I told him they weren’t Pharisees he said, ‘That’s all right. We’ll just call them scribes.’”

Dr. Bob Junior told us about a new disease that only sodomites could get and it was deadly. This was proof that God strikes dead those who mock His name. I thought Junior had finally gone crazy. How could a disease know if someone liked sex with men or women? It turned out Junior was right, sort of. This was how I learned about AIDS.

I had problems of my own. I got pubic hair way before any other guys in my junior high gym class. It embarrassed me. But suddenly I was the third tallest guy in the eighth grade. That was different. My voice also changed, but not in a good way. Instead of becoming deeper and more masculine, at first it had a higher pitch, like a woman with a deep voice, but still a woman’s voice. When I answered the phone at home, no one asked for my mother anymore, they just started in with “Hello, Ruth…” or even worse, “Missus Merritt…” I felt like shit. My voice was changing, but into a woman’s voice!

In the South, any hint of effeminacy in a male was not about to go unnoticed. Randy was a fat, typical bully type and he had his little sidekick Brent. Randy and Brent. One day I was walking and Randy and Brent were standing on the side—which wasn’t allowed—loitering was forbidden, but Randy and Brent were doing it anyway. I was walking toward the area where my Mom was picking me up. My head was lowered and I was thinking my own thoughts, when all of a sudden I realized Randy was focused on me. He was making 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 I was glad we didn’t have a prom. I would have been forced out on a dance floor with the girls. Instead, I got to write a play! It would be fabulous and 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 outward position to validate ourselves. I approached a friend who was a senior and on the current year’s Academian staff.

“Kathy,” I said, cornering her after a class we had together. “I was just wondering…have you heard who the editor is going to be for next year’s Academian?”

Kathy avoided my eyes at first. “Well, yes. That was decided a long time ago, actually. The editor has to take certain classes…”

I was crushed. But…“What about the staff positions? Surely those all haven’t been decided. I mean, Mr. Delaney had to wait to see who was going to get student body positions.”

Kathy sighed and raised her eyes to mine. She was sweet, but direct. “Richie, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me about this…several of us recommended you…but Mr. Delaney said absolutely not.”

I was shocked. “I…I didn’t even think Mr. Delaney knew me that well! What…what…”

“Apparently he thinks you’re too full of yourself. He talks to Mr. Panache, you know. They’re friends.”

It was a conspiracy! I stormed out of the room, too angry and fearful I was about to shed tears over this to continue talking to Kathy. Was I really this big of a…a…jerk?

At least Mr. Monroe liked me. I was still going to be the president of my literary society the following year and reported to him for approving the activities I had planned. He was my German teacher and we got along well. But even he had some news for me…

“Richie,” he began, after calling me in to his office for a serious discussion. “You were the most qualified person on that ballot for any office. Do you know why you didn’t get it?”

I was upset. Where was this headed? “Um, because Mark Parker got more votes than I did?”

“This! This…sarcasm…this know-it-all attitude you have sometimes…is exactly what I’m talking about, Richie! No one likes that, and do you know why?” He paused, but it was clear I was not to say anything. I’m not sure what I would have said at this point to anyone. I was stunned.

“Because you’ve gotten to be too arrogant. You’re a smart aleck. You come across like you think you’re better than everyone else.”

My emotions were like a typhoon. I wanted to throw something, to storm out of the room, to shout and to cry, all at the same time. And this was a teacher who actually liked me!

“I don’t know what to say,” was all I could manage. “I’m…I’m…I’d say it’s the opposite…I really don’t think I’m good enough…as good as everyone else. If that’s what they think, they’re…about as wrong as they could be.”

Without hesitating, I stood up and left the office. Now I did have to go home and cry.

I got talked to a lot by teachers and once even the principal. It wasn’t over the usual high school stuff, like causing trouble, bad grades, or skipping classes. The principal was concerned that I didn’t seem happy, although he didn’t call it depression. The American history teacher was angry with me because she said I demonstrated a lack of respect for other students. My Spanish teacher said I should be getting better grades (I was getting a B+) because she knew my IQ.

Mr. Monroe was also upset because there seemed to be a budget deficit for my literary society. The problem was that I had a let a friend, Lucas, talk me into overspending for soccer uniforms. Our uniforms looked the best, but now we were in the red. And we’d had to forge a signature to get the invoice approval.

How was all this happening? I wondered. High school students weren’t supposed to be worrying about budget deficits and accusations of being “power hungry.” Yet this was my life. I continued battling the sadness, too, but was determined not to let my mind go back to suicide. That just seemed too…too final. And what if…what if…I wasn’t ready to go to heaven? That would suck. Kill myself and then go to hell for eternity. No thanks.

In the face of all of these problems, I turned to God. He would take care of me.

Each year religion became more and more central to my life. I never missed my daily devotional period—a personal time of quiet prayer, Bible reading, and meditation. People began to notice the improvement in my attitude. I was a very good kid and people were starting to have very high expectations of me that I wanted to live up to. That meant being very religious: going to church, going to Sunday school, keeping all the rules. I read the Bible cover-to-cover, Genesis to Revelation five times. I never used bad language. If I had a negative thought I would immediately ask God to forgive me.

I was trying to cleanse myself, to use God’s power to cleanse me, and it was a constant process. Once they get you started on this you pick it up yourself—they teach you that. They tell you everything to believe, but then they add, “We can’t tell you what to believe. You’ve got to do that yourself.” Once that seed gets planted it just grows like wildfire.

Not all my male teachers were against me. Even though I really sucked at almost all sports, Coach Lawrence saw that I had physical potential. Each year I did the most pull-ups in my class and track was the only sport at which I excelled.

“I tell ya, Merritt, I’m going to teach you to have hand-eye coordination yet!” Coach would send the other boys to do basketball drills leaving my jock classmate, Chuck Suthers, in charge. He’d take me aside and try to teach me basketball skills. I knew it was hopeless, but I appreciated his effort.

Coach also had unique insights into gay men.

“Don’t be calling these faggots names, now. They’re not the limp-wristed milquetoasts like they used to be,” said Coach to our gym class of eleventh-grade boys. “No, these queers have been working out! They’re strong and fit and they’ll kill ya if ya call ’em names. No, leave the fags alone.”