Sincero + Kusner SF 2009

 

A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent CLEANED UP

A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent

 

PROLOGUE

(1,495 words)

 

It’s coming up on 12:30 a.m., and we’re still figuring out the beginning of this book.
Me and my buddy Hope.
We don’t have a fucking clue.
Just now, we were laughing about my friend, D.J., wanting us to clean up the language.
And wanting me to say that I’ve given up doing any more movies. That I’m a student. Or a carpenter now. And that everything is just peachy keen. That my life is bowl of cherries and cream.
I wish I could.
I’d love to tell D.J. and all my fans and everybody else that everything’s fine now. 
But I can’t.

Because it’s not.
I’ve been more miserable in the last five years than I’ve ever been in my life.
I live in Hollywood in a ratty, beat-up apartment.
I have one couch, one TV and a bed.
I have no bank account, no car, no security of any kind; and I’m 37 years old.
I’m one fucked up son-of-a-bitch, struggling to get my life into some kind of order just so I can live another day.
It sounds like a horrifying situation but — to tell the truth — to me, it’s really not that horrifying.
Either I’ve gotten used to it, or I’m just numb to the whole situation.
I numb the pain with my girlfriend, Shiva.
Shiva: the Goddess of Destruction.
Shiva’s been my girlfriend for five years now; and she’s been the best damn girl I’ve ever had.
Or so I would like to think.
She’s been very jealous.
She only allowed me to have a girlfriend up until the third year of our “relationship.”
As our relationship went on, she showed her face.
She showed her face to my family, to my friends and even to my enemies.
She wouldn’t even allow me to have sex after three years of being committed to her — not even with myself.
She was my girl — my only girl.
And I’ve been trying to break up with her for two years.
Every day, I concentrate on getting rid of the bitch. 

But she just won’t go.
Shiva even introduced herself to my mother, which could have been her downfall. 
Because when she met my mother, she met her match.
I can hide my relationship with her from anybody — except my mother.
My mother can look me in my eyes for a fraction of a second, and she knows Shiva’s there.
My mother’s the only one, so far, who has fought Shiva and not me.
Shiva has me by the throat. And she won’t let me go.
She’s a real bitch.
As I said, love from my mother, love from a couple of other friends, and the love of the Lord Jesus Christ may just set me free.
If I’m lucky!
I have no choice in the matter at this point.
This is not just another drug that I choose to do.
This is the drug that everyone with a 25-year-old alcohol-and-dope habit like mine ends up doing.
This is the drug that takes everything you have and gives you back nothing.
In the end, it doesn’t even get you high anymore; it just stops you from puking and shivering.
This is the drug that kills.
In the last five years, I’ve almost died from overdoses 18 times.
Three times, I was so far gone, they shot me up with Narcan.
That’s the drug they use to bring half-dead junkies back to life.
I went to Cedar Sinai Hospital so often that on my last O.D., one of the paramedics looked down at me when I came to, and he laughed and said: “I know you! You’ve ridden with us before, haven’t you?”
It’s one of my most humiliating memories.
Welcome to... The World of Heroin!
The worst thing I could ever wish on anybody is to be hooked on heroin.
I wish that for no one in this world.
Before getting into opiates, I was drinking heavily and shooting cocaine.
For the last 15 or 20 years, I’ve been constantly drunk or high on coke or pills or weed.
I never gave myself a choice or a chance to turn my life over to the care of God.
I never gave myself a chance to find out who I really am.
I want that.
I want to find out who I really am inside.
Right now, I’m nobody.
I’m just some evil monster who gulps down drugs like nobody else can.
I don’t want to be like this anymore.
I want to do work for God.
I want to be a soldier for God.
If I can get clean and sober, I want to help other people.
I know I can do some good in this world — if I can just pull it together.
Everyone in Hollywood, everyone everywhere, thinks I’m going to die any day now.
David Forest wrote an article with a bunch of bad stuff about me, but I have nothing bad to say about him.
So much bad stuff has been said my adding to it won’t make it any better.
I hope he comes to terms with his bad feelings about me.
At this point, for people who dislike me or even hate me, I’m sorry they feel that way.
Hopefully, they’ll all come to cope with their feelings about me.
I don’t want any more animosity or problems with anyone.
I intend to have a positive attitude from now on; because if I can’t get of this shit, then what everybody believes already will come true.
I’ll be dead.
And I don’t want to die, because I’ll go straight to Hell.
I know that for a fact.
I’ve done nothing good in my life; nothing good for myself or for anybody else.
AlI can do is pray that I make it out of this hole.
I’m 37 years old, and my life is my addiction.
Period.
People can’t believe I’m still alive.
David Forest wrote in his article: “I don’t expect he’ll live too much longer.”
He’s right.
I’ve been on heroin for five years but — in this last year — the addiction has really taken its toll.
It’s taken everything from me.
My arms are black-and-blue.
The black-tar of the heroin has stained the inside of my veins, the inside of my skin.
I’m gonna need plastic surgery on my arms just to get them to look normal again.
I never thought that this would happen to me.
Never in a million years did I ever think that I would be a broken-down junkie with tracks up and down my arms!
I don’t even have any veins in my arms anymore.
They’ve collapsed!
I lost a lot of things to heroin before but now, it’s even taken away my veins!
This last bout with heroin has just torn me up.
It’s like that old saying: I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.
When I think about what that saying means to me, it scares the hell out of me.
If I don’t make it through this, I want my family to know that they’ve been great.
My mom is just the best.
My little brother too.
And my son has dealt with my heroin addiction in an incredible way.
I have to hand it to him for keeping his head above water and his spirits up.
I just wish I could be another type of father for him.
But… I am what I am, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
The only thing I can do is change.
I want to start being honest with myself, with God, with everyone, in this book.
Lord, forgive me if I offend or harm anyone by telling the truth in this manuscript, because that’s not my intention.
Just the opposite.
I want it to help people.
Writing this book is almost like doing the fifth step: Taking a moral inventory of my life.
Actually, that’s the fourth step....
The fifth step is telling it to you — except, instead of telling a few people at a meeting, I’m telling everybody.
I was going to name the book “The Fifth Step,” but I couldn’t.
I can’t talk about the fifth step when I’m not even clean and sober yet.
Hopefully, when you read this, I will be.
So now that I’ve told you a little bit about where I’m at right now, let me go back 37 years ago to where it all started.
I guess the only way to get started is to start.
By the way, my friend Hope here is no know-it-all Hollywood writer.
She’s just my friend, helping me put my life story into words as best she can.
She’s also the smartest person I know, so I figure why not have her help me do this?
So this is Jon Vickers Vincent Jeffrey James.
The whole package.

CHAPTER I
(5,575 words)

I was born on Dec 17, 1962, in New Orleans.
I was born at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning.
I’m a Sagittarius, if that matters; and my name is Jeffrey James Vickers.
I am the first-born of two kids: me and my little brother.
I don’t remember much about my childhood.
I think the first memory I ever had was getting a dog —a poodle.
I named her Bootsie.
I guess I was three or four years old.
She was a sweet dog, a sweet memory.
In fact, that was probably the only good wholesome memory I had as a small child.
After that, my memories are horrifying.
We lived in New Orleans until I was about two-and-a-half years old.
Then we moved to Baton Rouge.
My father was a truck driver — a teamster.
He started his career driving for Trailways.
That was like Greyhound.
After we moved to Baton Rouge, my father started driving an 18-wheeler.
I can vividly remember times my mom would have to drive to meet my father to bring him a change of clothes and stuff on the road.
My dad was pretty rowdy.
My dad was a real-real hardcore redneck.
And a big fighter.
Sometimes his temper was out of control.
I remember seeing him run this car off the road one time in his truck.
Then he jumped out, pulled the other guy out of the car and beat the shit out of him.
I guess driving a truck like that the road rage must have been pretty high.
That’s the first vivid memory I have of my father.
I was close to my father’s parents as a child.
My grandfather and grandmother were stern people, good people.
He had a brother and a sister.
I never met my aunt, but I met my uncle.
Unfortunately.
He was also a real redneck and a real son-of-a-bitch.
I remember being seriously disciplined by my father as a child.
By my uncle, too.
Whenever we were bad, we had to go cut the switch of the tree for them to whip us with.
To this day, I hate my uncle for the way he used to beat the shit out of me and my cousin.
He’d whip us with a switch across the back until we bled.
I remember when my father had to discipline me once at my grandfather’s house.
My uncle was there and he kept saying: “Let me whip him. I’ll whip him first!”

Real hideous bullshit!
Those two fucking rednecks…
I forgive my father for it.
I love my father.
God bless his heart; he was a good man.
He thought he was doing the right thing, but the way we were disciplined was barbaric.
It built a lot of fear inside of me.
My uncle was a different story.
He was a jerk.
He was always trying to boss people around.
He bossed me around until I was about 15.
That’s when I told him if he touched me again, I was gonna kick his fucking ass.
That was the last time me and him had any confrontation of any sort.
I guess he figured I was a lost cause after that — to say something like that to his face.
Maybe some of it had to do with the fact that my uncle and his wife weren’t really all that fond of my mother, and it showed.
Actually, my father’s whole side of the family never liked my mother.
They knew she was heavy into gambling.
She was addicted to it — big time.
She even worked part time for a bookie; and they just didn’t understand or approve of her lifestyle.
Of course, my mother never liked them either, and they could tell.
When I was a young child, my family was pretty dysfunctional.
My parents were almost never at home.
My mom worked as an executive secretary, but even on her days off, she was never home.
She was always going up to New Orleans.
She had a friend and business partner there named Donny.
Sometimes, she took me with her.
Donny was a real high roller.
A mobster actually.
He was a cool guy.
He treated me like a son.
He bought me anything I wanted.
He even let me give pool parties for the neighborhood kids at his house.
He spoiled me fucking rotten.
He was like another father to me.
It was really confusing for me sometimes.
I’d think: But what about my dad?
My real dad stayed home of course.
He spent most of his free time hanging out with his friend, D.W.
They’d go out every night drinking in the bars.
I’d be left at home with my nanny, Mildred.
She was a black lady between 45 and 50
I think about her all the time.
She took care of me from the time I was four until I was around seven years old.
So my mom was always in New Orleans at the horse track, and my father was always out in the clubs.
They never knew what was really going on with me.
They did make friends with people in the neighborhood though.
One of them was a guy named George.
He was my parents’ houseboy.
I remember him as a tall, thin geek with a blond crew-cut.
He was 21, maybe 22 years old.
His father was a chemical engineer, but he was never home either.
George didn’t work — at least not that I ever saw — except for my parents.
He ran errands for them and did work for them around our place — all free of charge.
He was always sucking up to them.
They thought he was OK.
They were wrong.
George was the monster lurking in the neighborhood that my parents never knew about.
George would take me across the street to his house during the weekdays when I came home from school.
He’d take me to his room and take my clothes off and make me play with his dick.
He enticed me with toys and gifts.
I didn’t know any better.
Eventually, he laid me on my stomach and told me to lay really still.
Then he got on top of me, and I could feel something sliding up and down the crack of my ass.
He whispered: “This is Bootsie’s paw going into your ass.”
I thought: What is my dog’s paw doing going into my ass?
Obviously, it was George trying to fuck me, but I was too little, and he couldn’t get it in.
Every fucking day this would happen!
At times, I would scream and cry out for my life because it hurt so bad.
Eventually, he penetrated me and tore me so bad inside that I bled.
I remember the third time he molested me, he totally raped me, and it hurt so bad.
He took me to the store afterward and he bought me a Slip ’n’ Slide, and a truck and a model airplane.
He did it all the time after that.
Total penetration, I mean.
I was only about five years old, and he regularly, brutally raped me.
I never said anything about it, even though it hurt so bad, there were times I could hardly walk at home.
My mom would ask: "What’s wrong? Why are you limping?"
I’d say: "I don’t know. I hurt my foot."
I don’t know why I never told.
I don’t know what kept me from trying to explain to them that I was being brutally raped.
These were really hardcore rape-sessions, and they went on everyday.
I don’t mean the penetration went on everyday, but everyday, I had to do something with him — suck his dick or something.
I went for it, I guess, because I loved getting stuff from him.
I didn’t know it was wrong.
I just went on doing it everyday for at least three years.
The funny thing is, I found out that one of my best friends across the street was being raped by him too.
One day, when my friend Joe and I were playing hide and go seek at George’s house, I caught Joe sucking George’s dick in the closet.
Joe whispered to me: “Don’t tell nobody. I have to do that all the time.”
I realized then that both of us were being molested by this guy.
He was doing it to several kids in the neighborhood.
Still, I never told.
George was pure evil.
He used to make Joe and me fistfight in the backyard and beat the shit out of each other just so he could watch.
But the rape was the worst, of course, because I was so young.
I thought it was the right thing to do.
I was just a kid, but I got to be so sexual.
Joe and I used to do stuff with each other all the time.
We were always playing doctor.
We would suck each other’s dicks.
It was terrible.
But again, because of George, we thought it was the thing to do.
One night, I was sleeping over at my dad’s friend, D.W.’s house.
D. W. and I were the only ones there.
His wife was my mom’s best friend.
She used to hang out with my mom and go to New Orleans with her.
So, I was sleeping in the bed with D.W., and in the middle of the night, I woke up and grabbed his dick and started sucking him off.
And he didn’t do a thing!
He didn’t even try to stop me.
I’m sure he was freaking out at what I did, but the motherfucker should have stopped me and called my parents.
They probably would have figured out then that something awful was happening to me, and they could have done something.
Instead, the son of a bitch just laid there and let me suck his dick.
I was six years old.
Today, D.W. is gay.
He probably was back then too; he just didn’t know it.
About five years after that, D.W. tried to make a move on my father.
My old man beat the shit out of him!
He beat him so bad, they had to take him to the hospital.
Like I said, my dad was a hardcore redneck.
My parents never had a clue about George’s child molesting, but they picked up on another of his bad habits.
The guy was an habitual liar.
It took them two years to get sick of his lies.
One evening, when he brought me home, they told him they needed to have a serious talk with him.
I didn’t hear what they said to him, but it ended his job as my babysitter and also his opportunities for molesting me.
I was seven years old.
He never came near me again.
Thank God that happened, because otherwise I would have continued to be raped over and over again — probably all through the rest of my childhood.
After George was removed from the scene, we moved to another house down the street.
Once we were settled there, my parents decided they needed to get me into some kind of sports.
That’s when my life really began.
We used to go up to the park and watch the teams playing baseball, and my mom got all excited about getting me into Little League.
I was around eight years old.
As a young child, nothing was really happening to me except being raped.
My parents were never anywhere around.
When I started playing baseball, they started spending more time with me.
Actually, my dad always spent time with me — as much as he could anyway.
But now, my mother would come back from New Orleans just to watch me play baseball.
She came to all my games in Little League, and for the first time, I saw both my parents getting involved in my life.
I was a terrible ball player!
I was a fat little kid, and I sat the bench.
God knows, I tried to be good, but I sat the bench every fucking game.
Finally, my dad said: “Let’s get our own team going here.”
Which he did.
It was a crummy team, but I didn’t care.
I had a blast, because I finally got to play!
It was wonderful!
My father continued to get teams so I could keep playing.
My parents really wanted me to become a good baseball player.
I guess they wanted me to be good at something.
Still, life around the house was fucked up, because I didn’t really want to go to baseball practice all the time.
My parents had other ideas.
They said: “Either you play or you’ll be punished!”
Hell, after school I wanted to go fuck off with my friends.
I didn’t want to have to go to baseball practice everyday.
It was like a job.
It was a bummer, because I always had to catch batting practice.
No matter who you were, if you were a catcher, you had to catch batting practice.
I was getting burnt out on it, but when I didn’t play, my parents punished the shit out of me.
They cut my allowance; they grounded me.
If I had a bad game, they punished me.
So I played.
I got to be good at it, too.
Baseball was the only thing I was good at.
I sucked in school.
I got all Ds and Fs.
A couple of times, I tried to fix my report card; but it never really mattered, because my parents expected me to get Fs.
I wish now they had done some of that punishment for my education instead of just for baseball, but they never did.
My bad grades weren’t the only thing that made me hate school.
School was not a fun thing for me.
I had no self esteem.
All my friends had their little girlfriends that they hung around with, but not me.
I couldn’t even get close to a girl, because I was fat and ugly.
Well, I was fat — not ugly.
I was also crude and obnoxious.
I used to sit in class and fart so the teacher would send me home!
I was lonely.
Plus, school was a frightening place!
Everyday, I got beat up by bullies.
They used to throw me down and hold my head and make me kiss the ends of pencils.
Then, they’d beat the shit out of me anyway!
Of course, I was a bad kid myself.
I was pretty disruptive.
I wasn’t exactly a bully, but I did weird things.
Like, when I was six years old, I hit my little girl cousin in the head with a baseball bat.
I almost knocked her brains out.
I was whipped severely for that one.
I remember it was the longest fucking walk to go cut that switch, and a longer walk back.
When I was seven, I got caught trying to fuck a little neighbor girl.
Her mother caught us out in her garage.
I was teaching her about sex.
I was trying to stick my dick in her, but it wouldn’t go in, and I couldn’t understand why.
Her mother sent me home immediately and never let me come back over.
Then, she called my parents and told them what I’d done, and I was of to cut another switch and get my ass beat again.
There was one other sexual incident that happened.
I got caught playing doctor with another little girl.
This incident happened at my grandparents’ house, and it was a little more serious than playing doctor.
I was in the bedroom trying to fuck her with a big hard dick, and my grandmother walked in.
She took one look at us and ran out of the room screaming for my grandfather.
My grandparents were French people, and the funniest thing I ever heard was the two of them screaming in French about fucking!
Both us kids felt very shameful.
I was eight years old, and the girl was about seven.
Me and her had been friends for a long time, and I’d been trying to get down her pants since I was six.
I fucked her all up!
Ever since then, I think my grandparents had an idea about what had really happened to me.
That I had been molested.
They told my parents what happened, but I don’t think my parents were well-educated enough to understand what was going on.
They never connected any of my craziness with George.
The child molesting thing is a pretty new issue.
People didn’t understand it back then.
People didn’t know the long-term effects of being violated.
So school was screwed up, and so was I.
Finally, I got tired of it; and I started to go after baseball in a serious way.
I’d wake up at six o’clock every morning, and I’d take a bucket of baseballs out into the middle of a football field and get down on my knees and throw the balls as far as I could.
I’d throw them on my knees — not on my feet.
I was only 12 years old, but it made my arm cock-fucking strong!
Plus, all those years of catching batting practice had made me a pretty good ball player.
When I was thirteen, my parents bought me a pitching machine.
They bought a giant fishnet to make me a batting cage.
I had my own professional setup in the back yard.
They even sent me one summer to Sho-Me Baseball School in Missouri.
I was becoming really good in baseball.
In school, I never even played junior-varsity.
I played varsity for three years straight.
By the time I got to ninth grade, I was a star baseball player.
By 10th grade, the baseball scouts were watching me.
Now, I got every girl in the world!
I kicked every fucking bully’s ass who ever beat me up in school, and I became the bully.
That summer, a scout took me to the Atlanta Braves training camp.
I was 16 years old, and I was hitting batting practice with the pros.
I was being molded to go on up and become a professional baseball player.
I found my redemption, my acceptance through baseball.
It gave me what I never had in my whole life: respect.
Of course, things were still dysfunctional at home.
When I was 14, my mom and her friend, Donny, had some sort of misunderstanding.
She stopped going to New Orleans so often and started spending more time with my dad.
Donny had always been in love with my mother.
This was never stated out loud, but it was pretty obvious.
At one point, she told him she wasn’t with my father anymore.
I guess she wanted to make him believe he had a real chance with her.
Anyway, Donny started driving from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to visit her.
Sometimes, he’d catch my father at home, and he’d say: "What is this?"
So my father would hide from him.
It was so fucking sad for me to see that.
So fucking terrible to see my father trying to hide from this man so my mother’s cover wouldn’t be blown.
It was terrible for me, as a kid, to see that.
I was only nine or 10 years old.
My mother and Donny eventually went their separate ways after three or four years.
In time, Donny became just another acquaintance.
Still, he always helped me out when I needed it.
When I was 13, my mother met a couple who lived in Baton Rouge.
They had a daughter; and about three weeks later, we went on this fishing trip to Grand Isle with them.
We all had a great time.
One day, I came home and overheard my father getting on my mother’s case, because he thought she was having an affair with the guy: Mr P.
Mr. P. wasn’t a mobster.
He owned a chain of restaurants.
But, like Donny, he was a wealthy guy, and you could tell he had the hots for my mom — big time.
He was also a gambling addict — just like my mom.
My dad didn’t like any of it one bit.
I remember him screaming at my mother once: "I saw you kissing him in the parking lot!"
I didn’t hear what Mama said, but I’m sure she sat him down and said something like: "Listen, we need some money. I’m making a lot of money being in business with this guy!"
Of course, my father accepted it all — again.
My little brother saw this situation.
He was born when I was five years old, so he didn’t see the first situation with Donny, but he saw this one.
That’s why my father didn’t leave my mother: because of me and my little brother.
He couldn’t stand to see the family torn apart like that.
He did everything he could to keep us together.
I guess my father was the most courageous man I’ve ever known in my life to stick with us like he did.
Soon after that, we all got split up anyway.
My mother would come home sometimes in the afternoon from work or whatever she was doing.
One day, when she came home, there was a strange black man there — a burglar.
He pointed a gun at her in the doorway and made her go into the house.
He took her into a room, threw her down on the floor, and shot her in the head.
The bullet ricocheted off her forehead and went into the wall.
It sprayed blood all over the wall.
It looked like the bullet went into her head, because when the guy shot her, she was trying to get up and haul ass.
But, thank the Lord, the bullet ricocheted.
I remember getting the news at school.
I raced to the hospital.
My father was already there.
They caught the guy about a week later.
That’s when my mother moved out and went to live in a condo Mr. P. had just bought.
She told my dad it was part of the business deals they had together.
She took my little brother with her.
Then, there was just my father and me in that big house.
Life went on.
And baseball went on.
My mom and dad were still heavily into my baseball career.
No matter what else happened, what always counted for them both was my baseball career.
My dad would practice with me on the pitching machine in the back yard.
And I had practice everyday after school.
Of course, I smoked weed at baseball practice.
I’d unscrew a pen and take the ink cartridge out.
Then, I’d put a couple of joints into the pen and stick the pen into the ground.
Everyday, me and my friend from next door would have this ritual: getting stoned at batting practice.
I smoked weed every day before school, too.
I smoked weed everyday during school.
I was seriously into marijuana.
It was the answer for me at the time.
At least, that’s what I thought.
I was 14 years old when I finally discovered marijuana.
I’d been getting drunk before that.
Not often — here and there — maybe once or twice a year.
But I loved marijuana!
On the weekends, I’d see my mother, and she’d give me $40.
That was a lot of money for a kid back then, and I’d go spend it immediately on weed.
I got away with it for about a year, before anybody found out I was smoking it.
Of course, that couldn’t last forever.
With just me and my father living in that big fucking house, he knew I was smoking pot.
Sometimes, he’d go out of town or out drinking with his buddies, and I’d try to have parties with my friends.
Then, he’d sneak back home and catch us.
He’d bust into the room with a shotgun screaming: "Where’re all your dope-head friends?! I know they’re here! Get these fucking dope-heads out of my house!"
My dad became famous for chasing my friends around with a shotgun.
Everybody knew I was a stoner.
All my friends who didn’t smoke pot watched me become a weed head.
Eventually, all my friends were stoners.
That’s the story of my life.
I’ve never had any clean and sober friends.
The coach knew I partied.
He was a good coach, a good man.
He made me the baseball player I became.
I wasn’t actually stoned when I played, but he knew I was a stoner by the people I hung around with.
He sat all the other dope heads on the bench, but not me.
I was really good.
I had long hair and shit, but it didn’t matter.
Everybody knew I smoked dope al the time.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
The scouts; everybody.
It didn’t matter.
I still had about 10 scouts at every game.
I had about 15 scholarships guaranteed when graduated.
I was going straight to the pros.
If I acted right.
I’ve always admired people who can drink and do drugs and not become addicts.
But then, if you really think about it, what is there to be admired?
They’re simply NOT ADDICTS.
Or another way to put it is this: I have a disease called "addiction."
They don’t.
In fact, there are only two kinds of people in the world: addicts and non-addicts.
We addicts call the non-addicts "normies."
I had the disease already, even way back then; I just didn’t know it yet.
It was already gaining on me.
Fifteen was the black-magic year for me.
Everything happened at 15.
I was already a pot head at 15.
I started drinking a lot at 15.
I took at my first Quaaludes at 15.
Snorted my first coke at 15.
At 15, the craziness started; and I was off and running, just fucking my life up.
For example, my father bought a 30-aught-six high-powered rifle.
One day, for no reason that I can remember, I took it and shot the water tower across the street.
The country club water tower.
Shot it twice!
I didn’t think anymore about it.
Then, a week later, when I was on my way to school, I saw two giant streams of water coming out.
I thought I was finished!
I knew I was dead meat; but somehow, I never got caught.
Even though I had the biggest mouth in school, and everybody knew I did it, I never got caught.
Another time, I took my pitching machine and put each wheel on a hundred miles an hour and shot the balls into the air.
No telling where they came down.
Thank God they didn’t brain somebody!
My mom’s gambling addiction was getting worse every day, but at least she was winning.
She made major amounts of money, and we bought a fifty-foot Carver — a cruiser.
It had two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room, and it cost about $300,000.
My dad had to go to Tampa Bay to pick it up.
I went with him, along with my little brother, and this guy named Tommy who was a serious drug-addict friend of mine.
We had to make a lot of stops.
The first night my dad tried to pull up to a barge to ask directions.
He was drunk as hell.
The anchor was sticking out, and somehow, it hooked into the door of the barge and pulled the whole fucking house off the barge.
My old man was shittin’ all over the place.
The guy’s house was floating in the water!
The other dude pulled out a gun and yelled: "You stop that fucking boat right now!"
I guess we should have put the boat on a big truck and had it shipped back!
The first time I ever did cocaine was with Tommy on the boat trip, and I loved it!
My old man had gone ashore with my little brother for something.
Me and Tommy were supposed to wait for them at the pier, but instead, we got high and picked up these girls and took the boat back out to impress them.
I ran up on an oyster bar and got stuck there.
We called the Coast Guard, but they couldn’t do anything until 5 a.m..
So, I tried to get off the oyster bar myself, and I mangled the boat’s pair of $2,000 propellers.
Of course, all the girls were stuck on the boat, and even worse, we found out they were all under eighteen.
When we finally got back, my mom was crying.
My old man just about had a stroke!
It was gonna cost $5,000 to repair all the damage, because we had to hire scuba divers to go under the boat and fix the props.
That was my first drugs-at-sea disaster.
The second took place my senior year in high school.
My dad said I could take the boat out on the river but not out into the Gulf.
I planned a big party, and I invited about 20 couples.
I took this real pretty girl named Sandy.
She was the finest girl in school.
Mr. P. had supplied my mom with tons of food.
We had tons of steak and shrimp.
And everybody was fucking!
That boat was one big sex party!
I also had some Roche 2s.
I’d never taken them before, but I knew what they were: pure Morphine.
I crossed the lake to New Orleans, and we docked at a bar called Auggie’s where we picked up 28 more cases of beer.
I took the Roche 2s at Auggie’s.
Immediately, I got so fucked up I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going with the fucking boat.
I wound up in the Gulf of Mexico.
I couldn’t find the shore!
Everybody was fucking everybody and having a good time.
They didn’t give a shit we were lost.
They were like: "Oh, it’s OK. You’ll find the shore tomorrow."
Then, this storm came up, and the boat started rocking, and things went way downhill.
We stayed out in the Gulf of Mexico for three days!
They had the Coast Guard looking for us.
We were on the six o’clock news!
They were calling us "the senior class that went out on a boat trip and never came back."
Plus, all this happened at exam time.
We had our exams that next Monday, and we missed them.
We just sat there in the fucking Gulf for three-and-a-half days until this barge finally came by and pulled us into the marina.
There was a real scene waiting for me when we pulled into the marina.
Everybody’s parents were there, along with the police!
As I was backing the boat into the slot, my dad came on board and popped me in the face in front of everybody.
One of the other fathers tried to grab me.
He would have kicked the shit out of me, I guess, but the cops held him back.
The cops really had to control the crowd.
It was a nightmare.
And the worst was yet to come!
I didn’t know it, but my date, Sandy, the most beautiful girl in school, had herpes!
Three weeks later, half the people on board came down with herpes.
My old man sold the boat a week after that.
People forgot and forgave me eventually — mostly because I could play baseball.
Because I played baseball, I could do no wrong.
Well, I did wrong, but everybody just let it slide.
That was the problem, I guess.
One day, when I was in 11th grade, this girl I knew named Paula came up to me in class and told me her friend had a crush on me and wanted to meet me.
I met her friend and took her out.
Her name was T., and she and I soon became lovers.
She became my high school sweetheart.
When I met her, her parents had kicked her out of the house, because she’d ODed on Valium.
But that was just a mistake.
T.’s a normie.
Today, she doesn’t do drugs at all.
She really has her shit together.
I fell in love with T. because she was such a sweet girl, a really good person.
She was my first love.
In senior year, I got her pregnant.
That was funny, because my mom always used to be paranoid that that was going to happen.
She’d say: "I’d better not hear about T. getting pregnant!"
Anyway, we got married right after graduation.
I had fifteen scholarships to fifteen different colleges and universities.
My grades were so bad, I couldn’t go to a four-year college, so I went to the best junior college in the world for baseball: George C. Wallace Junior College in Alabama.
They were the first in the nation, and I was going to catch for them!
I was 18 years old.
I had my whole life ahead of me; and it seemed like I already had everything: a wife I loved, a baby on the way, and a career as a professional athlete all set up and waiting for me.
All I had to do was just step up to the plate and claim it.

CHAPTER II
(1,810 words)

I didn’t even make it halfway through my freshman year.
I’d brought T. with me to Alabama.
The other guys on the team took one look at me and my pregnant wife, and they threw me out of the clubhouse.
We had to get our own apartment.
We were miserable there.
All we did was fight all day, every day.
I was drinking a lot, and T. was having a real rough pregnancy.
She was sick a lot; plus, she was homesick and lonely.
Worst of all, we were in Dothan, Alabama, which was the most boring place anybody could ever be.
Finally, T. left and went home to her parents.
I moved in with my coach.
That was another disaster.
Coach had this girlfriend, a real pretty redhead.
She was a lot younger than he was; in fact, she was closer to our age than his.
One night, I took three other baseball players over to Coach’s trailer.
Coach wasn’t home, but his girlfriend was.
We got the poor bitch drunk and fucked the shit out of her.
When Coach came back and found out about it, he kicked me off the team.
I had to go home in disgrace.
The worst problem with alcohol and drugs is people don’t realize how serious this disease is.
If only I could have understood how serious this disease was way back then, before it got such a bite on me…
None of the shit in my life would have ever gone down.
I was a great baseball player; and God gave me every opportunity in the world to prove it.
I had so many chances to make it.
So many chances.
Back home in Louisiana, I went to Delgado Junior College for a while.
It was O. K., but the best thing about being home was that I got back together with T.
In January, 1982, our son was born.
He was — is — a miracle to me.
He’s the one purely and truly good thing I ever did in my whole life.
The next year, Palm Beach Junior College wanted me to come there.
I started playing for them.
Me and T. were back together, and we had a beautiful little boy.
Things should have gone great in Palm Beach, but they didn’t.
I was drunk all the time.
Worse, I met and made friends with T.’s brother B.
B. was a good enough guy, but, unfortunately, he was a jockey.
I say "unfortunately" because almost all jockeys are major fucking cocaine addicts.
B. wasn’t a coke-head, but most of the other jockeys I met hanging around at the racetrack were.
I made friends with this one guy in particular named Luke.
He was also a major cocaine addict, and that motherfucker brought me right down with him.
He fucked my career all up.
I started hanging out with him and getting high with him: cocaine and Quaaludes nonstop.
I was never at home.
When I wasn’t at practice, I was down at the track with Luke.
Finally, I got so fucked up, my wife packed up and left me one day while I was out with Luke getting loaded.
I came home from the track, and she was gone.
I freaked out.
I didn’t know what to do.
I cried.
I knew she was gone for good.
It just about killed me.
I got wild after that.
It was 1982.
All the scouts were still waiting for me to do well.
I was the best baseball player on the team; but my life off the field wasn’t as good as my life on the field.
Not even close!
I actually became a beach bum for a while.
I was hanging out with all the dopers on the beach.
I became a major alcoholic.
I was getting drunk every day and smoking a lot of weed.
It was the most out-of-control time in my life.
Until now.
About this time, I had my first adult gay experience.
One night, right at the end of the Palm Beach trip, I went to a video store.
I wanted to check out the whole peepshow thing.
I was stoned, of course.
Anyway, this gay guy kept cruising me.
Finally, he came up to me and said: "Do you want me to suck you off?"
I thought: "Why not?"
And I let him do it.
I felt so trashy afterwards.
I couldn’t deal with it.
He sucked my dick, and I shot a load in his mouth.
I was so fucking horny, I kind of wanted to suck his dick, too.
Good thing I didn’t; I probably would have killed myself!
Having T. leave me and then going to a fag in some porn-hole.
That was how I thought of it back then.
I felt guilty for weeks!
I also had my first interaction with God in Palm Beach.
It happened in my apartment after T. left.
One night, I did acid with a friend of mine.
Me and my friend were tripping and reading the Bible when this guy who lived upstairs walked past our open door.
We started talking to him, and I invited him in.
I asked him if he was a Christian, and he said: "Yes. As a matter of fact, I’m a preacher."
The preacher’s name was Perry.
I told him I was going to read the Bible and try to be a good person.
Later on, I decided to go upstairs and wake him up at about 1:30 a.m. to tell him I’d found Jesus Christ while I was on acid.
He didn’t throw me out.
He talked to me about God and religion for the rest of the night — even though I was tripping my brains out and probably made no sense.
He was a real good guy.
He got me closer to God.
I guess I really did find Jesus that night on acid.
I actually started to live the Christian life for a while.
I started going to church regularly and studying the Bible.
I even got baptized!
I was raised a Catholic.
I had to go to catechism like all the other Catholic kids.
I always thought of God as a punishing God.
I thought of Him as someone who was going to punish me and hurt me.
That’s the way I was brought up — with that fear.
I got baptized in Palm Beach, because I was more into the whole Baptist religion thing of listening to a preacher than telling a priest my sins.
The Baptist religion was more exciting to me than the Catholic religion.
I know now that I can’t talk good or bad about any religion, because I have so little religious experience.
Until I have some true spirituality, I have no right to talk about religion, because I don’t know what I’m talking about.
The funny thing is, now, I’m in a real struggle to make a spiritual connection.
So much more than I was back then — or any other time in my life.
My spiritual life is very weak right now.
I need to make positive spiritual contact with God more than ever.
I actually made that contact for a while, with Perry’s help.
Me and him became good friends.
Funny, his wife never liked me.
She was scared to death of me, because she thought I was crazy.
Which I was.
Perry brought me to this work program where all the guys were alcoholics.
A lot of them were homeless — living on the beach or camping out in the woods.
I made some good friends.
I was a beach bum and a pothead; and, hell, I was an alcoholic more than anything, so I guess I fit right in!
The work they got us was day labor.
The pay was $25 a day.
Pretty soon, I became friends with the boss, and I manipulated him into getting me a regular steady job doing landscaping.
I worked for a little while.
Then, I got fucked up and didn’t show up for work, and I got thrown out.
I think that gig with the preacher was the first time I ever had a real job.
And, of course, I let him down.
Then, the worst thing happened.
I made friends with this kid, Cord.
I had an apartment, but I was a month behind with the rent.
They were going to evict me.
My parents didn’t want me to come home
They were pissed at me, because I’d quit baseball.
So, this Cord kid moved in and became my roommate.
He was a good guy.
He was like a young surfer dude.
He liked me and looked up to me.
Then, this terrible tragedy happened.
Cord got killed in a car wreck.
Somebody broadsided him.
I knew his girlfriend real well, and I took her t o his funeral.
Everybody at the funeral was looking at me funny like I was fucking her — which I was.
It was terrible.
It was the most awful thing in the world!
Poor Cord gets killed; and I take his girlfriend to his funeral; and then I take her home and fuck her.
I felt like such trash.
I knew right then it was time to leave.
Before I left, I dropped by to visit this other good friend of mine.
He had this marijuana plant that was the biggest, most awesome looking thing In the world.
So I decided to steal it the day I left.
I just stuck that fucker in the back of the truck and took off for Louisiana.
I called up another friend of mine right after I left, and he said: "Yeah, he had a bunch of guys — about eight or nine guys out looking for you to beat the shit out of you, because you
stole his weed plant!"
And that was the last I saw of Lakeworth, Florida.
That’s where I lived.
I broke his marijuana plant up and put it into baggies and smoked it all the way home.
That shows how much of a sleazy motherfucker I really was.
I was one careless son-of-a-bitch.
My wife should have left me!
Alcohol and drugs.
They were already running me.
But not as heavy as they were gonna be later on.
I went back home.
I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go.
I didn’t stay there long.
I tried to get back together with T., but I could see it wasn’t going to work.
She just wasn’t interested.
I guess she’d given up on me.
She was seeing somebody else.
Plus, my son was getting older, and I never had got to know him very well ’cause I wasn’t around him very much.
At this point, I said: "Fuck baseball!"
And everything else.
And I headed out to Houston, Texas.

CHAPTER III
(5,127 words)

Today, I’m three days clean and sober!
I’m weaning myself off of heroin with Methadone.
Three days ago, I started taking 50 milligrams of Methadone.
Yesterday, I took 40; today, 30.
But today, I’m in such pain that I think I’m going to have to go back up to 40, even though I’m supposed to taper of down to 25 and so on.
That’s how I’ve always done it.
Thank God I have Methadone around!
If I were to get thrown into jail right now…
God, I don’t know what I’d do if I had to detox without help!
Methadone is the pussy way out, but so be it.
Any way out is good enough for me.
Methadone is the easy way.
If there is an easy way.
Another way is Clonadine.
And yet another way to get off heroin is to do crystal.
I’ve tried them all.
They all work.
I got off heroin using all of them; but I didn’t stay off.
Getting off and staying off are two different things.
At this point, though, if I don’t stay off, I’ll be dead.
I’m sure of it.
I moved out of my apartment in Hollywood.
Actually, I got thrown out.
My friend, P., didn’t pay the last month’s rent.
He had to pay a couple of months on my apartment since I’ve had it these last seven months.
My nasty-ass, junkie apartment in Hollywood…
God, that place really fucked me up!
P. did the smart thing by not paying my rent.
That put me on the street, and it landed me here staying with friends on the beach — homeless again.
I can’t blame P.
I can only blame myself.
All I ever did in that fucking rat-hole was jobs and Heroin.
I was calling up this chick I knew, this dealer’s wife, and she was delivering heroin to me every day.
I’m lucky I got thrown out.
I’ve come to the realization that this stuff has almost killed me.
It’s turned me into a monster.
I have actually become a monster.
I’m sure when people hear my name, they must think of this crazy individual.
That’s the way people think of me right now.
It’s terrible to know what people think of me, to know how they feel.
I know they think I’m an animal right now.
That’s what I’ve become on this damned heroin.
It’s not like I haven’t been trying to quit because I have.
I’ve been battling this fucking Shiva so hard.
And I’m just now coming to the realization that this is very serious.
That, chances are, I’m not going to make it.
That there are a lot of things I have to do to straighten up.
I talk a lot about my drug problem, I know.
It’s the main thing I want to talk about in this book.
That’s because it’s the main thing in my life right now.
It always was.
My cousin Larry didn’t do drugs.
He was a "normie."
I don’t think he ever took a drink even — except on New Year’s Eve, and maybe on his birthday.
That’s the main reason I went to live with him in Houston.
Not because I wanted to be normal, but because I thought it would look good to my mom and dad.
Larry was heavy into bodybuilding, and he turned me on to it too.
He thought it would be good for me.
Which it was.
I loved it!
First time I picked up a weight, I was hooked!
Cousin Larry took me to his gym where I met The C. Brothers.
They were young kids — only a few years older than me, but they had their shit together.
E. C., the owner of the gym, was 24.
He was a major bodybuilder.
His brother T. was a pro football player.
He was 27.
There was also this security guard named Phil who trained there and hung around a lot.
He was a major steroid dealer.
I got to be good friends with The C. Brothers, and they let me move in with them.
I started training hard.
Phil supplied us with steroids, and I got really big on them too.
Houston was the first time I took steroids.
Eventually, I would get hooked on them just like I got hooked on everything else.
After a while, I got my own apartment.
My roommate was a guy named Dave who’d won his weight class in the Mr. Teenage USA contest.
Dave was a little nelly.
Everybody called him "Miss Dave" behind his back.
He was a true bottom, but I didn’t know it at the time.
I didn’t even know he was gay!
All the time he and I were roommates, he wanted me to fuck him, and I never caught on.
I treated him just like I treated all my straight friends.
He’d go out with me and The C. Brothers to this bar called Cooters, and we’d all get pussy except Dave.
Dave would go home by himself every night, and I couldn’t understand it.
He was so good looking!
He’d show up at the bar in this tight sweater that he wore almost every day, and everybody would joke: "Here comes Dave and his sweater again!"
He was a real nice guy, and I felt bad for him.
We lived right next door to the gym, and it was Dave who really taught me to body-build.
He also taught me how to take steroids.
I became a great bodybuilder in Houston.
Dave and The C. Brothers were good friends for a while until Dave won the Teenage USA, and The Cs got jealous.
The guys In Houston were the kind of people who were all really happy to be your friends until they got tired of you; and then they’d spit you out and cut your down and treat you like
shit.
They were like a lot of people, I guess.
They even got that way with me in the end.
Finally, I got tired of the whole scene, and I went back to school.
But not before I’d turned a major corner in my life.
I mean a major turning point that would affect the rest of my life more than almost anything else.
Except drugs.
As time went on, The C. Brothers kept saying to me: "You’ve got to meet Uncle Zack.
So, one night, I went with them to this bar called Confetti’s.
There was this older man sitting at a table, and there were nothing but beautiful women with him.
I had no idea who he was.
I didn’t care.
I was in hog heaven; I’d never had so many gorgeous girls around me.
While I was sitting there, the man wrote a note on a napkin and handed it to me.
It said: "Fuck Superman, Honey! It’s J. J. V. for me!"
I thought: "Oh my God! This is Uncle Zack!"
I caught on to the scene right away!
The next night, I went over to Zack’s house.
He sucked me off, and he gave me $50.
My life as a prostitute started right then.
Zack owned a radio station.
His best friend was another rich guy around his age named Gary D.
The two of them had a lot of friends.
Between them, they must have known every rich queen in Texas — maybe the world!
They knew a lot of young guys too: college athletes, bodybuilders.
Gary sometimes kept as many as a dozen boys up at his mansion in the Houston suburbs.
It got to be so famous, they started calling it Dr. D.’s Finishing School.
I don’t know where that doctor shit came from.
Gary D. was no more a doctor than I am.
He owned a furniture company.
Zack and Dr. D. tricked with some major athletes.
Guys that you would never think had had any kind of gay sex in their lives would line up at The Finishing School every Friday and Saturday night to get their cocks sucked.
They did it to get money for their dates.
Gary had a lot of their pictures on the walls.
Sometimes guys would turn pro after that, and their pictures would still be up there on Gary’s wall.
Major pro-football players!
One night, I walked into Uncle Zack’s, and I saw a pro-football player from Dallas sitting on the couch with three, huge motherfuckers from his team.
It was unreal.
One day, at The Finishing School, I pulled some clothes out of the dryer and dropped them on the floor.
Gary ran into the room and started screaming at me: "You son-of-a-bitch! You stupid, irresponsible motherfucker!"
In front of all my friends!
All the football players were there.
That’s the way he was.
He bitched about everything.
He was just an irate fucking queen.
I ignored him, and I picked the clothes up and started putting them on the shelves above the dryer.
My friend, Stan, was helping me.
Stan lived at The Finishing School.
He was a good person.
God rest his soul.
He died of AIDS, poor guy.
Anyway, while we were putting the clothes away, I knocked this book off the shelf.
I picked it up, and we started going through it.
When Gary saw what we were looking at, he really went off!
There were pictures — dozens of them — of this major pro-quarterback.
Obviously, I can’t say his name.
I couldn’t believe it!
I could not fucking believe my eyes!
He was naked, in 69 position, in every fucking position, having every kind of sex you could think of with Gary!
When I saw those pictures, I freaked out!
This famous, famous football star!
There he was, sucking dick and bending over getting fucked!
Gary was screaming and yelling.
Everybody just looked at him and got real quiet.
They were pissed at him for going off like that, because they knew he was just an irate queen.
Plus, it was his own fault we saw the pictures.
He was the one who left the book out.
I knew right then what a scumbag he was for keeping pictures like that around where anybody could find them.
Those pictures blew my brain right out of my head.
My whole world changed right there.
I thought: "This cannot be true!"
But it was.
I understood then how all these big-time college sports stars fell into turning tricks with gay men.
They saw their heroes — real professional sports stars — doing it; so they thought it must be O. K. to do it.
Plus, the money was unbelievable!
When Uncle Zack offered to set me up with one of his friends for a $1,000, I jumped all over it.
I thought I’d have no problem with it, because everybody did it.
Not just people like Stan and the C. Brothers, but real star athletes.
World-famous professional athletes — the kind of men that I’d looked up to all my life — were doing the same thing!
Anyway, I got into it.
Because I met The C. Brothers and Uncle Zack and the candy maker; because I went to live at The Finishing School, I became a major fucking prostitute!
My first experience was terrible.
I had to suck dick.
I felt dirty and low-down.
He was a nice enough guy, a banker from Cincinnati named George.
He’d fly into Houston all the time with his friend, Marty, who owned a big cosmetics corporation.
George and Marty.
I’ll never forget them.
Every other weekend, they’d show up at the Finishing School to check out Dr. D’s new boys.
The first time I met George, I went to his hotel, and I sucked his dick for hours.
He gave me $1,000.
I was so stoked!
I could hardly believe my eyes!
That was the first $1,000 in cash I’d ever seen in my life!
Ten one-hundred-dollar bills!
Of course, that $1,000 was gone in no time with cocaine and booze and girls.
It lasted less than a week.
So, I became one of George’s boys.
George liked to tell me I was his first boy.
That was a fucking lie.
His 10th or 15th boy was more like it.
Still, he loved me to death.
He took good care of me.
I went to see him and sucked his dick every time he blew into town.
In between, I’d talk to him every day on the phone and tell him how I needed money; and he’d send it to me Western Union.
Then, the baseball people called my parents and told them they wanted me back.
They were willing to send me to Missouri to play for Missouri Southern College.
It was another chance to straighten myself and my life out.
But, before I left Houston, there was something I really wanted to do.
Something I felt I had to check out.
I wanted to go to L.A. and work for an agency.
My friend, Stan, had told me about hustling in L.A.
He worked for a big agency, and he said if I came out there, he’d introduce me to the pimp.
He said if I wanted to turn tricks in L. A., I could make a lot of cash.
That was all I needed to hear.
I was all for It.
I had no way to get there; so I hitchhiked.
Sure enough, two queens picked me up and took me all the way to L. A., sucking my dick in the back seat all the way.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
They gave me a ride all the way to Covina, and they were only going to Denver!
Funniest thing, these two queens had this fuzz buster, this radar detector.
I thought it was the neatest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
I mention it because, when I went back out to L. A., the second time, with my friend, C., we stopped and set them up.
We called them and had them come meet us at this bar; then we busted their window out and stole their fuzz-buster radar-detector.
Anyway, in Covina, I called Stan who came and picked me up. L. A. was a trip.
I’d never seen such a place as L. A. when I got there the first time!
Stan lived in West Hollywood; and the first place he brought me was down Sunset Boulevard.
I was just amazed!
I felt on top of the world! I was so happy!
I’d never seen anything like it !
The billboards, the mountains, everything! L. A. was it!
I was happy just to be able to check it out!
Stan introduced me to the pimp.
He was a short, fat guy — not very impressive looking.
He took me into his room, and the first thing he did was shove a line of coke under my nose.
Then, he said: "Let me suck your dick."
I was kind of nervous.
I didn’t know what to do at that point.
Later on, he told people that the first time we met, I wanted him to fuck me!
That was such a fucking joke!
He tells people so much bullshit about people having sex.
He lied about my story.
I never wanted him to fuck me!
I didn’t really even want him to suck my dick!
Anyway, the routine was this: we told Stan to take a fucking hike, and I moved in with the pimp.
I lived with him, and he drove me to all my jobs.
Most of my jobs were pretty ordinary.
To tell the truth, I only remember two of them: the first and the last.
The first trick I ever turned in L. A. was a spanking queen.
It just seemed so weird to me.
The guy actually put me over his knee and spanked me.
The last trick I turned in L. A. requires a little more background.
In Houston, I knew this guy named Harold.
Harold was a young bodybuilder who lived for a while at The Finishing School.
Now, he lived with this doctor — a real one — in West Hollywood.
I went over there one night to check them out.
It was good to see Harold again, but I didn’t realize what a coke-smoking motherfucker he was.
Maybe he didn’t smoke coke in Houston.
Who knows?
He sure smoked it in L. A!
He had this queen down the street who cooked it up and brought it over to him.
The queen’s name was Franz, and he was hot after my ass.
So, I went with Harold one night to Franz’s house, and that’s where I took my first hit off a crack pipe.
I got so fucking horny!
I didn’t know what to do with myself.
I was sitting there smoking the crack pipe with my dick hard as a fucking rock!
Then, the pimp paged me.
I had a trick!
I remember before I did the trick, I went around the side of his house and jacked off.
I was that horny!
I didn’t want a trick touching my dick when I was all horny and high like that.
Then, I knocked on his door and went in and turned the trick with him.
I remember he was the fifth or sixth trick I did.
All this happened in less than a week.
I didn’t go back to the pimp’s house afterwards to pay him his commission.
I took all the cash.
I went back to Franz’s house and sat around smoking coke for two or three days straight.
After that, I just wanted to go home.
Franz gave me a ride to the airport, and I caught a flight to Louisiana.
On that first trip to L. A., I saw that the very important people in hustling were the porn stars.
Leo and Lance were the big thing then.
Leo was working for the pimp.
And I remember Lance.
He’d come to the pimp’s house when he’d finished doing a movie, and he’d have all this money on him; and he’d go into the bathroom and shoot up coke and come out.
Real drug addict shit.
I remember thinking: "God, how can somebody do porn?"
Later, I went to Numbers Bar and saw the men catching sight of some porn stars.
I heard them whisper: "Look! There’s the porn stars over there. Look! Look!"
And they would treat these porn stars like they were gods or something!
It was ridiculous!
I remember thinking: "I could never do that. I’d never do movies!"
I couldn’t understand how someone could do porno movies, especially gay porno movies.
I mean filming yourself having gay sex.
That was just bizarre!
So, within a week, I was introduced to the pimp, Numbers and the world of gay porn stars.
Then, I ripped off the pimp and went home.
That was my first trip to L. A.
It’s Thursday morning.
I don’t know the date.
It’s 5:46 a.m.
Today is my second day off of heroin.
Whatever I said the first day — yesterday.
Hope, you know what the truth is.
It’s now 5:47 a.m., and I can’t sleep.
I’m sure I won’t sleep for the next 20 to 30 days.
Last time I detoxed off of heroin, it was about 31 days before I got to sleep.
That was at the Rancho L’abri.
It’s a small rehab center just outside San Diego.
I smuggled in over twenty Valium when I was admitted.
The first night I couldn’t sleep, I took 18 of them.
Eighteen 10-milligram Valiums!
And throughout that whole night, I did not sleep a wink.
That’s the God’s honest truth!
So that tells you: DON’T FUCK WITH HEROIN!!!
I became a truly great ballplayer after bodybuilding in Houston and taking steroids.
At 21, I was awesome.
I got super strong.
My release time, for example, was almost unbelievable.
Release time is when someone is stealing second base.
When the ball hits the catcher’s mitt, that’s when they start the stop watch.
The stopwatch stops when the ball hits the second-baseman’s mitt.
So, it basically from the time the catcher catches the ball to the time he throws it to the second baseman.
Johnny Bench’s average release time was 1.4-seconds.
Mine was 1.6.
Plus, I was cranking out home-runs right and left.
But the scouts weren’t ready for me yet.
They wanted to see how I’d do in school one more year.
So, they sent me to Missouri Southern College.
It was the first college I went to where I lived the real regular college life — or tried to.
I lived in a dorm for the first time.
All the other colleges I went to, I had to get an apartment.
Or live in a house with other members of the team, which never worked for me of course, because I always had a pregnant wife or wife and child along with me.
The Kansas City Royals were watching me and taking care of me.
They paid for my school and everything.
They wanted to help me straighten up.
I played great.
I held the home-run record in college.
I tried to live up to what everybody expected of me; but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.
I had an asshole coach.
I thought he was an asshole.
Looking back on it now, he was just a tough coach.
Everything by the book, you know?
Still, I ended up manipulating him.
I had a bunch of steroids with me, and I told Coach about them.
I manipulated him so bad, I actually had him telling the players: "Look, I have these pills. And if you take them, you’ll get big and play great and go straight to the top."
He knew they were steroids.
He just didn’t know the seriousness of them.
Nobody did back then.
So I manipulated him into giving the whole team steroids, and they got huge!
Then, I would tell all the other baseball players: "Listen man, there’s this Calvin Klein magazine. And there are these dudes in Houston. They own modeling agencies, and they can get
you any kind of clothes you want; they just want you to model them for the magazine. You can pick out any clothes you want, and they’re yours!"
They all fell for it.
One weekend, I took five of the best looking guys on the team to Houston to The Finishing School to hang out with the queens.
And, of course, the queens ended up manipulating the players.
And all the players wound up getting their dicks sucked.
There’s no telling what they did, but they all went back to school happy, because they all had $1,000 a piece.
The queens were so happy, they told me: "Each player you send us, you’ll get $500 a head!"
That was all I needed to hear.
I ended up having the whole fucking baseball team turning tricks!
It’s amazing what people will do for money!
And it was unreal how I manipulated everybody.
I didn’t realize the influence I had with people back then.
I feel really rotten now that I manipulated all those people and caused any of this to ever occur.
Of course, things got real sticky at the end.
Coach started to get suspicious.
He’d say: "Vickers, them motherfuckers ain’t modeling! Why are they coming home with all this money? What the hell’s going on, Vickers?"
I stuck to my story.
Of course, the players wouldn’t tell; they kept saying they were modeling.
Coach knew something shady was going on; he just didn’t know what it was.
Whatever he thought it was, he blamed me for it.
He hated me, and he started treating me like shit.
Then the shit really hit the fan!
The queens started coming to Missouri!
It was a catastrophe.
They’d fly into town and rent suites at the Holiday Inn and invite the players over for these wild-ass parties.
Sure enough, pretty soon, the whole town found out about it.
Everybody knew — including the players’ parents!
Coach finally came to his senses about the steroids too; and I ended up getting officially kicked off yet another team.
Everybody was pissed off at me by that time: the coach, the players, their parents, my parents — even the queens!
That’s when I had to cruise: when it all got too hot.
So I moved in with this girl I met in a bar.
I liked her because she was petite and blonde, and she was a year younger than me.
Her name was Nancy, and she had a little two-year-old son named Ole.
At this point, I had no money, and I had no way to make any.
So I did a real bad thing.
I went back to Gary D.’s one weekend, and I ripped him off for something like $1,500.
I just went into his wallet and stole it while he was in the bathroom.
I was desperate.
I couldn’t get tricks or nothing.
Not in Missouri, that’s for sure.
Not even in Houston.
Gary D. was mad at me at this point anyway, because I didn’t do things right.
I got him in trouble with the coach and all the parents in Missouri.
That was the last time I saw Gary, and I ripped him off.
Karma came back and bit me in the ass on that one though.
I bought a pound of weed with that $1,500 and tried to sell it; and I got ripped off!
I lost all that money — the whole $1,500, every penny.
Once again, it was time to boogie.
So, I called up my old friend C. and told him to quit his job.
I told Nancy me and C. were going to L. A.
I’ve known C. for more than 25 years.
I met him in fifth grade, and I grew up with him.
We became friends and hung out together even though — in the beginning — we were totally different.
He was a hippie, and I was a jock.
He was my best friend.
Just like all the other straight guys who became my friends, C. ended up doing gay sex acts for money.
As soon as we got to L. A., I started making money right and left.
All the time C. was driving me around out in L. A., he had no idea what I did for a living.
He just didn’t have a clue.
I told him I was making all that money dancing for old ladies through an escort service!
He believed it!
He didn’t know any better.
When he finally caught on, he said he wanted to do it, too.
So, we stayed out there for a while.
And we wound up meeting this queen who had a base pipe.
We went to his place, and we smoked coke for days, maybe weeks — who knows?
Finally, we got so depressed from smoking all that crack, that we just packed up one morning and drove all the way back to Louisiana.
We made one important stop on the way.
In Houston, I met with Phil; and he fronted me about $3,000 worth of steroids.
I took them back to my mom’s house, and I threw them all out on the floor.
My mom said: "What’s all this stuff?"
I told her they were steroids, and that I’d sold $500 worth just driving into Baton Rouge!
My mom’s eyes lit up, boy!
She could hardly believe it.
She knew the steroids were a good thing from the very beginning.
Still, no matter how bad I kept fucking things up, somebody up there was looking out for me.
Baseball was over for me in Missouri, but there were scouts who remembered me and still wanted to help me.
The Kansas City Royals threw a tryout for me at Henderson State University in Arkansas.
The Henderson State coach liked me so much, he said: "Come play for us this year, and we’ll try to get you back into baseball!"
Even stoned and crazy as I was, I knew it was my last chance.
The coach got me and Nancy and Little Ole a house at Henderson State, and it looked like I was all set to get back into normal life again.
Nancy and I got married.
I even got a straight job selling cars at Jack Roche Cadillac.
I was good at it, too.
I’m a great bullshitter, so I made really good money selling cars.
As it turned out (after all that), I took the wrong class at Missouri Southern the year before, so I was ineligible to play.
Kansas City got word, they said they’d give me a try out in Florida.
They were really gung-ho for me.
They were ready to go.
I had about three weeks to practice before my trial.
So, I ended up leaving Nancy alone after marrying her, and I took off to Florida so I could spend every minute of those three weeks partying.
Poor Nancy.
She kept trying to get me to come home and get ready the right way.
I bought her a cubic zirconia ring for a wedding present, and I’d bullshitted her and told her it was a real diamond.
Every time I called her up, she threatened me: "I’m gonna bring this ring back and sell it if you don’t come home or at least send some money!"
So I just never called her again.
It was terrible.
I was so fucked up in the head.
I wasn’t ready to be married again after my first marriage.
Anyway, after three weeks of non-stop drinking and snorting, I somehow made it to Sarasota to the tryouts.
I would have made the team, but they drug-tested us.
I had cocaine in my system, and that was the end of that.
Of course, I fucked the whole thing up way before the urine test.
I remember during the interview, the head scout asked each of us why we wanted to play for Kansas City, what the opportunity meant to us--you know, trying to get to know us a little
bit.
There were about 180 players there from all over the country.
When he asked me that question, like a fucking idiot, I said: "Man, I’m just here to party my ass off and have a good time!"
I’ll never forget the look on that man’s face.
He looked at me like I was a fucking asshole.
Which is exactly what I was.
Right then and there was when they stopped taking me seriously or even considering me at all.
Even without the failed urine test, it was all over.
I never played baseball again.
I was 22 years old.

CHAPTER IV
(5,611 words)

It’s been over two weeks since I dictated anything to Hope or made any tapes for her to type.
I haven’t worked on the book, because I took off and went to San Francisco.
I called up this old friend of mine, and he ran an ad for me.
It was a stupid thing to do, because the first thing I did when I got there was I slipped.
I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
That I could be in San Francisco hustling and making money and hanging around my old drug addict friends and stay clean and sober?
That I could chip?
What a joke!
There are no chippers in this world.
There’s no such thing as a chipper.
Everybody I’ve ever seen get a good taste of heroin turned into a heroin addict.
Then, they either died or they barely made It back.
There’s no doubt about it: one good taste of heroin, and you’re gone!
I’ve slipped at least 10 times since I’ve been writing this book.
And I’m really trying!
I’m doing the best I can.
I’m giving it all I’ve got to stay sober.
But heroin has turned into a necessity for me.
When I do a shot these days, it’s not to get high.
It’s because I need the heroin.
The drug has taken me over.
There are people who are born into the world destined never to make it back from heroin addiction.
These are the people who just have to have their opiates.
The most freakish thing I ever experienced was to go to a Methadone clinic.
I went there to detox; and there, for the first time, I saw maintenance-Methadone-addicts.
For a long time, I thought these maintenance-addicts were pussies who just couldn’t get off the dope.
Their usual excuse was that they had a job or shit of some sort going on in their lives where they didn’t have time to detox.
That’s the one and only excuse you ever hear from them.
I now believe — or rather, I know now for a fact that these maintenance people actually cannot live without opiates.
There is no other excuse except admitting the defeat of simply not wanting to deal with a horrifying detox.
Of course, some detoxes are less horrible than others.
And some are unreal.
My detoxes were so horrible that it’s been two years since I tried, seriously, to get clean.
And I don’t even have a job!
Some people’s detoxes must be unbearable!
When I was in London two years ago and I wasn’t able to score, I went through a detox that taught me what cold turkey was all about.
Those had to be the worst two nights of my life.
I was lava-lamping two grams of black-tar heroin a day, and I had to quit cold turkey.
Believe me, going from two grams a day to nothing — especially when you’re on the road — is a hellish experience.
Still, I know I’m not one of those people.
I can detox.
I’ve done it before.
Too many times.
The last time I tried to write a book about my life, I was in New York City.
That was two years ago.
I went to a clinic and got a rapid-detox procedure done.
It was horrible.
It didn’t really work.
I mean it took the heroin out of my blood, I suppose, but it didn’t stop my cravings.
Nothing stops the cravings.
But it was horrible enough to straighten me up, and I was clean and sober for three months.
That’s the longest I’ve ever been clean and sober in my life.
Ninety days.
Like I said, addiction is serious business.
There’s a lot of ways to get off of heroin.
I know.
I’ve tried them all.
But no matter how bad the detox is, the punishment your body goes through on a heroin binge like the one I just came off of in San Francisco is a hundred-times — a thousand-times
— worse!
It almost kills you!
I was six days clean and sober when I left.
I felt like shit, but if I’d stayed here, at the beach where I have my friend G. to go to meetings with and I have support behind me, I’d be over the worst of it by now.
Instead, I’m back at square one, lying here on the couch at six o’clock in the morning, talking into this tape recorder, feeling barely alive.
It’s been two days since I got back.
Two days clean and sober.
All I can do now is pray that when the sun comes up and I get up off this couch, I can stay clean and sober.
I pray to God that this time I can keep it together and not put any more heroin in my arms.
I wish I could pinpoint what goes through my drug addict’s brain just before I slip.
Just before I do something stupid like taking off to San Francisco instead of going to a meeting and at least trying to talk about whatever it is that’s bothering me.
If I could do that, then maybe I could stop myself.
It’s not really the physical pain of withdrawal that makes me slip, because I have medication to help me.
Maybe it’s the depression.
Maybe it’s just needing the heroin.
Of course, then, everything becomes an excuse to use.
That’s the way it is with Shiva.
Like steroids.
Many, many times, I slipped because people would say to me: "Well, you’re still doing steroids so you’re not really clean and sober."
Then, I’d say: "Well, then fuck it! If I’m not really clean and sober, I may as wel do drugs."
Any excuse.
Of course, like I said, I was addicted to steroids just like I was addicted to everything else.
Me and the juice go way back.
In 1984, baseball was finished for me — for good.
My second marriage was annulled, which didn’t surprise me since I ran out on Nancy less than two months after we got married.
My parents wouldn’t speak to me — except to tell me how they never wanted to see me again.
I’d been thrown out of every college I ever went to .
And, I’d had it with hustling — for a while at least.
Back then, I was just crazy.
All I cared about was partying.
So, I went for what I thought would be the big time.
I decided to become a steroid dealer.
A brilliant idea considering the disaster I had selling grass with the money I stole from Gary D.
I didn’t learn my lesson from that fiasco either.
This time, the first thing I did wrong was pick the wrong business partner.
One night I walked into a club called Hullabaloo, and I saw this little queen sitting at a table.
There were cards on the table in a holder that said: RESERVED FOR MR. J. S.; which was bullshit, because I’d seen the guy at this other club called 2001.
Me and my friend C. used to go there all the time.
Anyway, this little queen acted like he owned Hullabaloo, which he didn’t.
He was just the manager.
In fact, Hullabaloo was later shut down because J. S. got busted.
What for, I don’t know.
Probably fraud or embezzlement — something stupid.
Anyway, he beckoned me over to the table and said: "Hi! You’re Jeff Vickers. I see you in 2001 all the time with C."
I had a few drinks with him, and when the bar was about to close, he asked me if I wanted to go home with him.
I said: "Go home with you? What the fuck are you talking about?"
I knew J. S. was gay, of course, but he always tried to make everybody believe he was straight.
Both Hullabaloo’s and 2001 were straight clubs.
He said: "Why don’t you spend the night at my house, and then I’ll give you a ride to the gym in the morning!"
I agreed.
I was drunk of course, and I got even drunker at his place.
I let him suck my dick, and I drilled him.
The only thing on my mind was to manipulate him, because I thought he had a lot of money; and, at that point, he did.
After that, I couldn’t get rid of him.
He followed me around like a whipped dog.
He just had to be with me all the time.
J. S. was a bad person.
I hate to say that about him, because I don’t hate him or anything.
I do care for him.
But he was.
He was acquainted with con artists and thieves and all kinds of weird people.
I ignored all that, of course, as long as the money kept coming in.
He became obsessed with me.
He started hanging out all the time with me and C., and he started giving me all kinds of money.
So, I brought him into the steroid business me and C. were doing.
I introduced J. S. to the steroid business long before I told anybody else anything about it, and we fucked it all up.
He’d give me money to buy steroids, and then, I’d sell the steroids and never pay him his money back.
Finally, when he ran out of money, I told him I didn’t want to hang around him anymore.
That’s when he told me and C. that we should go to Florida.
So we went.
To Fort Walton, Florida.
And we got busted there with major amounts of steroids.
I had $10,000 worth of steroids on me.
I was selling them in this gym, and of course, wouldn’t you know half the guys working out there were Christian bodybuilders?
By that, I mean they were natural, drug-free bodybuilders; or so they claimed.
At least one of them really was drug-free, because somebody called the cops.
Which was a joke; because the fucking Fort Walton police didn’t even know what steroids were!
Steroids weren’t a felony yet.
They were only a misdemeanor.
I had some heavy-duty steroids too.
I had Equipoise and Winstrol V.
The cops said: "Hey; we’ve got a big one here! He’s even got stuff for horses! You’re gonna go down big time for this one, boy! Big time!"
Then, they looked in the law books.
The only law against steroids back then was "illegal possession of pharmaceuticals."
I had unprescribed prescription drugs!
That was all they could charge me with; and it was just a $250-fine!
I laughed like hell at all those stupid rednecks when I left.
I said: "You can keep the steroids, but I don’t give a shit! I’m free, you stupid, redneck fucks!"
That’s just what I told them.
Of course, if I were to get busted with that amount of steroids today, I’d do 20 years In prison.
Thank God, the law was different back then!
Of course, the cops took my advice.
They kept all the steroids.
I lost 25 boxes of Decadurabolin, and a bunch of Testosterone Cypionate.
I even had Esiclene back then.
That’s the drug you shoot directly into the muscle right before contest time.
It’s pretty hot stuff, and it’s very expensive and not hard to get.
With that much juice we could have made about $10,000 profit.
Instead, we lost $4,000.
We lost all the money, and we were scared shitless, because we had to go back and face this six foot-something, 300-pound motherfucker and tell him that we didn’t have any money
or steroids left.
We did, and he told us that he would give us small amounts of steroids to sell to make the money back.
We did that for a little while.
Then, the heat started leaning on us, so J. S. took out a loan at the bank.
It was a loan against his car.
He actually had the bank call me at my house!
He told them I was a loan officer with GMAC, and I was supposed to tell them that his car was paid off.
That way, they would give him a $4,000 loan on it.
This was fraud of course; and, at that time, J. S. had already been to jail.
Still, I pretended to be Mr. Jones or who ever from the bank, and J. S. got the loan.
Of course, it was never going to be paid back.
J. S. was hungry for dick, dick, and more dick; and I was hungry for pussy and cash.
So, even though we could have used that money to get a good business going, there was no chance of us actually pulling it off.
That’s where these "friends" of mine came in.
They were really good friends of mine.
I can’t say their names, but these people were really close to me.
Almost like family!
One day, they asked me for Phil’s phone number — just casually.
They said: "We’d sure like to meet this Phil guy."
The rest was history.
They drove to Houston, and they made best friends with Phil; and they started turning over a lot of fucking steroids.
They took the business away from me.
And they cut me out of it.
Completely!
I have no idea how much money they made.
Probably a lot.
They were really smart people when it came to making money.
It made me sick to my stomach.
There they were making a sweep, kicking ass ni the ’roid business, and I’m sitting there, broke, with this stupid fucking queen.
J. S. pulled off a series of petty crimes after that.
I didn’t know where he was getting all his money from.
I was just living like a big hog off the fat of the land.
Then we made a big mistake.
We went back to Florida!
On the way, J. S. told a Mercedes dealer that he wanted to test drive a car, and he kept the fucking thing!
All these different charges were accumulating, and I was riding around with this criminal!
In Florida, I called C., and I said: "Man, there’s all these girls here! Come on down!"
At first, it was great.
It was one big party.
Me and C. were fucking three to four girls a day.
Then, J. S. started trying to keep the girls out.
For somebody who pretended to be so straight, he acted like such a fag!
Everybody knew what he was.
So me and C. would lock him in the closet and leave him there for three or four hours a day.
Every day!
In fact, the meanest thing I ever did to a gay man was to J. S.
Me and C. got mad at him, because he told all the girls we were gay.
We really liked these girls, and when J. S. found out we were going to go back to Detroit with them, he just went crazy.
He told this girl I really liked that he and I were lovers.
That C. and I were gay.
That C. and I were lovers!
He hit C. in the head with a lamp one night, because we told him we were leaving.
He was that pissed off at us!
So we tied him down with duct tape in the hotel room, and I shoved a butt plug up his asshole and taped it to his ass cheeks and left him there for the maids to find in the morning.
The maids called the police when they found him.
They took him to the hospital and everything.
They thought some psychos had kidnapped him and left him there or something!
This was either the Holiday Inn or the Ramada Inn in Panama City.
I can’t remember which.
Finally, J. S. ran out of money again, and we told him we were leaving.
He said: "No, no, I still have some money!"
And he did.
Suddenly, we had all this money, and we were taking all the girls out to eat.
And J. S. was being really nice.
It was great!
But me and C. had no idea where all the money came from.
We found out.
Our last day in Florida, we came back to our room, and the cops were waiting for us.
They wanted to know if we knew a man named J. S.
We had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Meanwhile, J. S. was in the background shaking his head going: "No, no! You don’t know me!"
Like an idiot, I said: "No."
I should have said: "Yes. There’s the scumbag hiding in the fucking closet!"
But I didn’t.
We packed our stuff and checked out.
Halfway down the street, they stopped us, and took us to jail and interrogated us all night.
J. S. had broken into the hotel room next door and stolen a bunch of credit cards.
There was nothing to do but call Ejai.
Me and Ejai weren’t married then.
We were just going together.
In fact, we’d only gone out together three or four times.
I’d left her sitting in the tanning salon weeks before.
I told her I’d be back in a couple of hours; and instead, I took off and went to Florida.
I never told her a thing about it.
I never even called her back.
But she loved me so much, she drove all the way to Florida and bailed me and C. out of jail.
The cops didn’t really have anything on me and C.
We never signed any credit card slips.
We were living off the money from the credit cards, but we never knew where the money was coming from.
J. S. stayed in jail.
I’ll never forget him, standing there holding the bars in the Panama City Jail, crying: "Jeff, please don’t leave me!"
I said: "Fuck you, Motherfucker! You’re a bad person!"
And I left.
And I’ve never seen him since.
J. S. did 10 months of a two-year sentence in Florida State Penitentiary.
Later, he told my friend, Brian Hart: "I went to jail for Jeff Vickers! I did time for that fucker!"
A few months ago, I heard J. S. had died in New Orleans.
His roommate stabbed him to death.
I was sorry to hear that.
He didn’t deserve to go out like that.
Nobody does.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
He didn’t deserve what I did to him either.
He was a cheap crook, but he wasn’t really an evil person.
He was just a sick man who fell crazy in love with me.
And I led him on, and that made him even sicker.
See, it’s a funny thing about this disease of addiction.
It doesn’t hurt just me.
It fucks up all the people who come into my life and get close to me.
Like Shiva.
She doesn’t like any of my friends.
She doesn’t like anybody that comes into my life — especially the hand that feeds me.
That seems to be the one that I destroy every time.
People do a lot of bad things to each other in this world, but you should see what happens to someone who gets caught up in my drug addiction.
It’s nothing I’m proud of!
I’m talking about ruining people’s lives.
There are five major people in my life.
These were people who either loved me or were in love with me or both.
These five people were really affected by my disease and took a nosedive.
J. S. wasn’t the first.
Sad to say, he wouldn’t be the last either.
Sometimes, I would even tell these individuals that I was going to break them if they didn’t watch themselves around me.
But it never helped any of them.
Once they got involved with me, they were already too far gone to even hear what I said.
After J. S. went to jail, I went back home.
At least, I tried to.
My parents wouldn’t let me live at home, so I moved in with Ejai in an apartment in Baton Rouge.
My parents said: "Ejai’s cool, so we’ll help them out with a little money!"
Later, me and Ejai went to work for my friends in what was now their steroid business — driving back and forth to Houston with the steroids in Ejai’s car.
My friends were doing the steroid business full time at this point.
They were running the business right out of their house.
They had every college athlete, every fucking football player from L.S.U., every kid from Southeast University, from U.N.O., from Tulane University — all of them were coming there and
buying steroids.
They had every gym in Louisiana covered.
We had all these bodybuilders selling steroids out of the gyms for us, too; and they got their steroids for free.
That was the deal.
We had over 50 dealers working for us.
We’d go make our pick-ups on Friday.
We’d go pick up our money.
Then reload.
I don’t know how much money my friends were making, but it had to be a lot.
They were getting a great deal from Phil.
We were getting Deca for like $2 a bottle.
A lot of steroid dealers didn’t like us, because we had better stuff.
Plus, we were selling everything cheaper than they were, so we were real competition.
I was selling the best Deca-durabolin for fucking $15 a vial cheaper than they were!
They didn’t have a chance.
My friends were buying thousands of dollars worth of steroids at a time while these guys were still trying to turn over their little $2,000 orders.
One day, they told me and C: "We need you to move to Lafayette."
There were some big gyms in Lafayette.
That’s why they stationed us there.
Life in Lafayette was Ike vacation time.
It was just party after party.
I had a queen in Lafayette who was taking care of me.
He owned a real estate company.
He loved me, and I worked him for a motorcycle.
Не со-signed for it, but I never paid a dime.
It didn’t matter, because he had to pay for it.
He paid the rent on our house, too.
I was selling steroids making beaucoup cash, but that didn’t matter.
My real-estate queen still covered all the bills.
C. was my right-hand-man; he did everything for me.
He even went to jail for me.
Several times.
And Ejai was my driver.
We all lived together running the steroid business out this big house for at least a year-and-a-half.
Me and C. were big bodybuilders then.
We were fucking women right and left.
Of course, Ejai was jealous.
She would come down and hang out at the house with all these fucking girls, and she was just miserable.
She was becoming obsessed.
We hung with some crazy people in Lafayette.
L. V. was crazy.
Me and C. grew up with him.
He was the big bully in our school.
He used to beat the shit out of us and take our lunch money and shit.
It’s funny, because some time later, when we were all out in California, C. and L. V. were in the front seat of my car.
C. was driving.
I was in the backseat.
Suddenly, L. V., the big bully, says to C: "Hey C., I’m gay now. Look!"
And he dives down and starts sucking C.’s dick.
C. starts freaking out, and he yells back to me: "Vic! He’s sucking me off!"
That was so fucking funny!
Here was the neighborhood bully who used to beat us up every day of our lives, and he suddenly tells C. he’s gay and starts going down on him!
Of course, C. didn’t want to push his head away, because L. V. might get mad and beat him up or something!
So all he could think of to do was yell back at me: "God, Vic! He’s sucking my cock!"
J. G. was another friend we hung out with.
He was crazy, too.
Plus, he was a serious drug addict.
I guess you could say Lafayette is where I became a serious drug addict.
It’s where I first started shooting up.
Cocaine — not heroin.
Not yet.
J. G. taught me how.
Of course, even a non-stop party like Lafayette couldn’t go on forever.
My friends were still running the steroid business, but things were different.
The laws were changing.
By late 1986, possession of steroids wasn’t just a $250-misdemeanor anymore; and selling steroids was a Class-A felony.
My mother warned me to get out of the steroid business.
She had a feeling that the shit was about to hit the fan, and my friends were going to get busted.
She’s always been very chic at realizing when the police are coming; so, if she felt it was getting hot, that was good enough for me.
Ejai had a car, so I pulled the same thing with her as I did with C.
We hit the road and just took off.
We left the steroids and everything else behind.
A week after we left, the biggest steroid bust in American history went down.
My friends got rid of the ’roids just in time.
The FBI raided their house and came up with nothing.
Of course, poor old Phil, the dealer back in Houston, wasn’t so smart — or so lucky.
He got busted, and he lost everything: his house, his cars, his investments — even his stock in McDonald’s.
For a while, I was worried about my friends, but they were survivors.
They both got really good, legit jobs, and they did OK.
While all this was going on, me and Ejai were in California.
We took her mom’s Sears credit card and bought camping equipment, and we lived at Azuma Beach in a tent.
And we got a dog — a little Rottweiler puppy named Roc.
Finally, Ejai had to quit staying on the beach, because the bees almost ate her up.
We went to live in a motel in Topanga Canyon — the Topanga Ranch Motel, and we thought we were living high off the hog.
We were partying a lot, and we were always behind with the rent.
I was making more than enough money to cover rent, but we were still behind.
We spent it on booze and cocaine and partying like anybody else would do.
I would leave her alone all night and go turn tricks.
I told her I was dancing for old ladies, but I was turning tricks with men.
I don’t know what she was thinking.
I don’t think she really cared much about anything except the money.
The money was the main thing.
And I was making big money from the agencies.
I started working for this pimp.
There were a few pimps in town, but this pimp was a maggot.
I don’t need to say this guy’s name because he was a fucking maggot.
If I just call him The Maggot, people will know who I’m talking about.
He was the same pimp my friend, Stan, introduced me to when I hitchhiked out to California the first time in ’83.
He was a little scary to me, but I worked for him anyway.
The motherfucker was always shoving coke up my nose left and right.
He was really into a lot of drugs.
So were a lot of the other pimps too.
It was funny, all the pimps in L.A. hated each other.
None of them could stand each other.
I can understand why they hated The Maggot.
Never in my life have I met such a heartless piece of shit.
I’ve known this guy for 15 years, and I’ve tried to make friends with him countless times.
I’m from the South; and I’m a good guy.
I really am.
Drugs make me a bad person; I know that.
But altogether, I have a good heart and I try.
But, with this guy, every time I tried to be nice to him, and it seemed as if he was being nice to me, he’d turn into some kind of fucking rooster.
"You’re old and you’re burnt out!" he used to tell me.
The funny thing was, I was never old or burnt out.
I’ve been in the business 15 years.
I think it’s only now that I’m finally burning out, and that’s because of heroin.
Back then, every time he’d get on my case about being old and burnt, I’d shoot right back to the top.
I’d make him put my name right back at the top of the fucking list.
And he would, too!
Eventually, I started making a lot of money through this pimp.
I was making between $400-$500 a night.
Then I met this guy named Brett.
I think that was when Ejai finally caught on to what I was really into.
Brett was the manager of a major department store, and he was heavy into bodybuilders.
He happened to be sponsoring one of my best friends from Louisiana — the Colt model Teddy Garr.
That ended and he was looking for another guy, and he found me.
I met Brett through The Maggot.
First thing he said to me was: "You need to drop this Maggot character."
Next thing I knew, he was picking me and my wife up in his Cadillac and moving us down to Irvine to live with him.
That was a major mistake!
Brett was a nice guy and all.
He got us an apartment and everything, but Irvine has to be the most boring place in the world.
I’m sorry, all you Irvine people out there, but it is!
Everything shuts down at around 9 p.m.
I had to drive the car up to L.A. every day to do jobs.
My wife hated it.
She was going crazy.
I was going crazy.
Roc was going crazy.
He’d get pissed off, and he’d eat all the pillows off the couch every time we left the apartment.
We had no couch left after Roc got bored.
He ate about a pillow a day.
We stayed there for about three or four months until we got sick of it.
Finally, we just said: "Fuck it!" and we moved to L.A.
Well, it’s coming up on 7 a.m.
I can smell all the crystal I did up in San Francisco oozing out of the pores of my hands.
My fucked up liver can barely break down the chemicals any more, so it comes out of me just as it is.
It smells like sulfur.
I’m waiting for my friend, G. to come pick me up.
We’re going to an N. A. meeting at the Log Cabin.
G. is one of the few clean and sober friends I’ve ever had in my life.
I met him right before Thanksgiving at Gold’s Gym Hollywood — in the parking lot, but it wasn’t a situation where some guy was cruising me.
He overhead me talking about how my wife left me, and he said his wife had just left him too.
I invited him over to my house; and when he discovered that I did heroin, he got all excited.
I asked if he wanted me to put some on his cigarette.
He smoked so much, he got too stoned to drive.
I got really sick after that, and G. stayed with me; and we got to be really good friends.
G. always smoked heroin.
He never shot anything in his life.
But I would shoot even into the sides of my knees.
I remember spending days in my shit-hole apartment doing nothing but shooting up and searching for new veins.
Soon, I was shooting so much I was actually getting ready to die.
G. saw that.
One day, he said to me: "Let me shoot it with you. Let me die with you."
So, he shot up for the first time just to help me.
It sounds like a sick thing, but it worked.
He said he wanted to join me; and then he’d get sober, and he’d pull me out of it.
G. never wanted to shoot dope.
He did it for me.
Then he O.D.’ed!
I thought: Fuck! I just turned this poor guy into a junkie!
Everyone was finding out about it, and I was going to get the blame.
So, one day, I said: "Hey, let’s go to a meeting!"
Of course, we did a lot of drugs before we got to that first meeting.
Almost right away, I slipped.
In fact, I got stoned right after the meeting.
That’s why, even before I went to San Francisco, he had 15 days, and I had only eight.
Eventually, it started to come together, and I got sober.
Now, here I am going to meetings with him, and we’re getting clean and sober together.
I’ve had many opportunities to make clean and sober friends by going to meetings.
I used to hate those meetings.
I guess I still do, but I thank God for them now.
I thank God that He has blessed us in this day and age with Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
The 12-Step Program.
Without that, I would just be shit-on-a-stick.
Worse shit than I am now.
At least with the program, I have a chance to clean my life up.
I’m so tired of the negative world I live in.
Tired of hurting and being hurt.
I guess I was just never really ready to get sober before.
Now, I’m finally ready to help myself.
Then, I want to help other people.
I want to work for God.

CHAPTER V
(2,096 words)

I’ve been on the phone all day talking to Brian Hart about old times.
It helps to pass the detox time.
I love Brian so much!
He’s the only friend I’ve ever had that I could relate to.
You may know him from movies like Super Hunks — jack-off movies.
We did a movie together called Blue Collar White Heat.
He’s a little Italian kid with a big dick.
He’s the one who did Ejai.
But that’s another story.
Me and Ejai went to live in an apartment in Heliotrope after we moved from Irvine.
It was only $400 a month.
It was a shitty apartment, but it was our apartment.
We were doing pretty good — just living with the dog and having a good time.
We partied a lot, but it didn’t matter.
We — or rather — I was making $5,000-$6,000 a month.
We were comfortable.
We were putting $4,000 a month into the bank.
That’s about the most money I had ever made doing anything besides dealing steroids.
Of course, I went back to work for The Maggot.
He forgives and forgets.
Nothing is more important to him than the dollar bill.
He’s such a pickle head coke-head!
He’s like: "O.K. I forgive you. Now, let’s make money again."
He’d let your mother die before he’d fuck up a business deal for himself.
One thing I’ll say for The Maggot is: he’s a great agent.
He’s one of the best in the world.
A lot of people dislike him, because he’s straight up.
He wants his money right off the top — which is his right.
But then, his greed gets the best of him, and right and wrong fall by the wayside.
He loses all sense of fairness or compassion.
I’ve seen him get beat up two or three times because he went to somebody’s house to collect his money.
He had a bad habit of just showing up at the door, demanding his payment.
Real uncool shit.
He treated everybody like shit.
Still, he protects his clients.
I’ll give him that.
The reason people pay $400 is because he protects the clients.
People from out of town want him to take care of all the shit for them so nothing can go wrong.
So they don’t get robbed or beat up or whatever.
The Maggot didn’t allow drugs in his models.
Nobody did drugs with him.
Except coke, of course.
I wasn’t a junkie when I worked for The Maggot.
Back then, no way!
It would have been nice if he had cared as much about his models!
But, he never gave a fuck about anybody who worked for him.
All he cared about was a dollar.
He used his boys up and spit them out.
Then, he did more coke and recruited new boys.
Younger ones.
I was one of the oldest survivors, because as I got older, I actually got more calls.
That was the role I always played: Daddy.
The Maggot was such a good agent because he used to be a real manager of rock bands.
He was pretty good at it, too.
He managed some really famous ’70s and ’80s rock bands.
Names you would recognize if I could say them.
In 1989, he moved in with a rock star roommate because he thought he was going to go back to managing rock ’n’ roll bands.
He had the bottom of the rock star’s house.
One night, when I went over there to pay The Maggot my commission, the police opened the door.
They pulled me in and handcuffed me and threw me on the couch next to the rock star and The Maggot’s little lover, J. J.
I remember the cops kept asking K. — the rock star — about religion and rock ’n’ roll.
They kept asking if he believed in Jesus, if he read the Bible.
I couldn’t believe my ears!
I remember K. yelling at the cop: "Fuck the Bible and fuck you too, Bitch!"
K. was a pretty mean-tempered dude.
He actually got in my face a couple of times, and I had to put him in his place.
Anyway, when The Maggot finally showed up, the cops surrounded him and read him his rights.
He fell to his knees and started squealing like a little girl: "Oh, God! Oh, God! Please help me!"
They took his ass to jail anyway.
They let me, and K. and J. J. go.
I actually felt sorry for him.
The charge was possession of cocaine.
Funny, he used to sell coke to his clients that he set up with prostitutes.
He made a lot of money like that.
Like I said, he’s a great businessman.
But he got busted for it in 1985.
So he quit selling to clients, but he still kept it around, and he just did it himself.
The cops got something like five ounces of coke out of his safe, but they didn’t get it all.
After the cops dragged The Maggot away, his lover and I went in there to "clean up."
There was coke all over the bottom of the safe, all over the floor.
Within minutes, we were snorting that spilled coke up off the floor.
About 15minutes later, The Maggot comes waltzing in the front door.
He must have been good fucking friends with the fucking cops!
Fifteen minutes is a pretty light sentence for five-ounces of coke!
K. was pissed off at The Maggot even though he didn’t answer any of the cops’ questions.
K. thought he probably ratted on somebody.
I thought so, too.
All his charges were dropped; completely!
No bail.
Nothing.
"How can you be home?" I asked him.
"He’s a fucking snitch, that’s how!" K. screamed.
"You’re outta my fucking house, motherfucker! Get out now, you fucking rat!"
The Maggot never said a word.
He just packed up what was left of his shit and moved.
I met a lot of interesting people working for The Maggot.
Me and Nick Cougar are best friends.
The Maggot really had his hands full when he hooked up with us — two rowdy alcoholics.
We used to have a ball running his boy-business behind his back.
Me and Brian Hart became best friends, too.
Brian even lived with The Maggot for awhile until he finally saw the light and said: "Fuck this motherfucker!" and moved on.
And I’m good friends with Ryan Idol.
He’s cool.
It’s funny, Ryan Idol and I are supposed to be the two worst people who ever worked for The Maggot.
Yeah, right!
The Maggot got fucked up when he met Ryan Idol.
He fell in love with Ryan Idol, and Ryan treated him like shit.
I loved that!
I loved hearing Ryan say to The Maggot: "I’m going out to get some pussy, and I don’t want your faggot ass following me around! Go sit in the fucking car and walt til I get back."
And he’d do it!
If I said something like that to The Maggot, he’d tell me I was out on my ass; but Ryan Idol had him in a kind of trance.
The Maggot just didn’t know what to think!
I met a lot of stars through The Maggot.
Movie stars.
They weren’t usually big stars, but they were stars.
There were a couple of big ones.
I almost got to meet Elton John one time.
I showed up at a party after the Academy Awards, and I was supposed to go out with him and his friends later that night.
Unfortunately, I showed up so drunk, he gave his bodyguard, Jim Morris, $500 just to get rid of me.
I never even got to shake his hand.
The stars I actually saw, I can’t say their names of course.
That’s good in a way.
Hollywood is such a vicious circle, and I respect all the actors and actresses for what they have to go through to make it.
When people start talking about all the famous people they know, it’s like they’re trying to take a ride: and I’m not trying to take a ride off anybody.
Come to think of it, most of the stars I saw, I never really did anything with them.
I was that way with a lot of people.
I’d be over at The Maggot’s place with some famous guy, and I’d do so much coke I couldn’t get hard; and I’d make a big deal of putting the rubber on, and then I’d fake it like I was
sticking it in.
And the guy would go: "Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah, Kid! That’s it! That’s hot! Give it to me!"
I was never really fucking anybody.
It was like a pretend scene.
My dick was so shriveled up from coke, I couldn’t fuck anybody.
I think The Maggot knew I wasn’t fucking them.
I never spent more than 15 minutes with an L.A. trick.
I’d rush myself in and out. I’m famous for putting the condom on and sticking my dick in.
And then pulling it out and saying: "Well, I’m leaving."
One night, I did a job for The Maggot at the Bel Age Hotel.
I was so drunk, I passed out on the guy’s bed, and when I woke up the next morning, he wasn’t there.
He’d packed his bags and left.
I never did anything with him.
I was too drunk.
The Maggot always used to say: "You know, Babe, you should spend more time in there. These people are paying big dollars… Ya know?"
He used to give me a bunch of shit.
But I just thought: Fuck it.
I never cared about him very much.
I was already seeing people behind his back.
At one point, he was putting Ryan Idol’s name ahead of mine in the ads, and I got on his case about it.
So, he took Ryan’s name and put it at the bottom in big capital letters: "AND RYAN IDOL!"
I never really gave a fuck anyway.
I was just yanking his chain.
By that time, I was running my own ad with a picture with my head cut off.
Nobody knew It was me.
I don’t know why I didn’t just work on my own from the very beginning.
In all fairness, I guess The Maggot was no worse than any other pimp or agent or whatever.
He was way better than some.
If you could trust him, he was definitely the best man for the job; but, basically, nobody liked him.
I won’t say he was untrustworthy, because he was in some ways; but when he started trying to take 50-percent of my bookings, I quit him flat.
I went over to Daniel Holt.
By that time, I was making movies, of course.
The Maggot never booked my movies except the first ones.
After the first two, I did it myself.
I wasn’t going to pay anyone a percentage of my films.
Fuck that shit!
Fuck everybody!
That was like selling my soul!
It was The Maggot who got me into porn, though.
That figures.
Like I said, he’s a heartless motherfucker.
Maybe prison will straighten him out.
I doubt it.
The first movie I ever did was a dance movie.
With Nick Cougar.
It wasn’t even porn really — just a naked dance-movie.
It was kind of funny because me and Nick Cougar were both married.
We both had our wives with us on the set.
They met each other through us, and they became great friends.
The first real porno-movie I did was The Switch Is On with Stryker for Catalina.
The Maggot told me I could make a quick $1,500 for just one scene in a hardcore film; so I told my wife about it.
I told her it was a bisexual movie, and she said: "OK."
I don’t know if she really understood what was going on.
I don’t think she really cared what I did at that time.
She was young, and she just wanted to make the money and have fun.
She’d never seen that much money in her life.
I want to say this about my wife.
Ejai was a hell of a good woman — too good for me.
She was the best.
She did everything a woman should do for her husband.
She stuck by my side; she was loyal; she never did anything wrong — at least not until the very end.
She never fucked around on me or left me until I left her first.
For heroin.

CHAPTER VI
(2,954 words)

It’s the middle of the night.
I don’t know what time it is.
Hope is asleep.
Even my friend G. has finally gone to sleep.
I’m awake, of course.
I’m six days clean and sober, and I feel like shit.
Today was the hardest day.
This is bullshit!
I can’t fucking sleep!
It’s four or five o’clock in the fucking morning, and I’m awake and hurting; and I’ve got no one to talk to.
I feel like getting the fuck out of here and going downtown.
When you’re detoxing off of heroin, insomnia is the number one enemy.
It’s nothing like normal insomnia.
It is powerful!
You would think you could take sleeping pills to solve the problem.
Well, like I said, I once took over a dozen 10mg Valiums, and they didn’t even make me drowsy.
It was unbelievable!
I took four, flipped and flopped around the bed for about an hour; took two more, and didn’t even feel drowsy.
Then, I doubled the dose to 12, and I realized I was in deep shit.
If I couldn’t sleep on 12 Valiums, I knew I was going to be awake for a long time.
That was my first detox, and I was very uneducated about all the methods.
This detox my last one — I’m very educated.
Now they have a pill called Clonapin.
The funny thing is that the most valuable lesson I’ve learned from all my studying and preparation for detoxing is that there are no short cuts.
When you detox from heroin, you’re going to be awake for 20 to 30 days no matter what you do.
If you take Clonapin or some other prescription drug specially designed to combat detox-related insomnia, you will only be able to sleep as long as you take the drug.
By taking these powerful sleep medications, you only prolong the process.
I have some Clonapin somewhere, but I’m trying not to use it.
I don’t want to prolong this detox.
I did that enough already by going to San Francisco.
So, I guess I should just get used to being awake for awhile — like until the end of the month.
Last night, my friend Brian Hart and I were discussing what a tremendous battle this is just to stay alive.
We keep talking about getting sober.
And that’s all we do.
We talk about it.
Brian was supposed to be in a clinic to detox from Methadone and Xanax bars five Thursdays ago.
Every Thursday, he fails to show up.
Maybe this Thursday, he’ll make it.
I hope so.
By the way, Xanax bars are not nightclubs where they sell Xanax.
Instead of Xanax pills, they’re Xanax in stick form.
They must be really potent because when I talk to Brian on the phone, I can tell that shit really has a bite on him.
He’s in slow motion.
This porno business all started off great.
L. A. was great, too.
But look where we are now.
Ten years later, we’re struggling to stay alive.
Before I get into my porn life story, I want to say that the porno industry no doubt hates my guts; and deservedly so.
They should, considering the way I treated them in my drunk years.
One good thing I can say about Shiva is that I’ve drunk liquor no more than five or six times in five years.
She took the alcohol addiction right away from me.
Thank God!
Never again do I want to treat anyone on a porn set like I treated Chi Chi LaRue, or Bob Leone and his lover Ken, the owners of In Hand Video.
God knows, they didn’t deserve that.
Alcohol and drug abuse is the reason I’ve made only 30-or-so films, compared to everyone else’s 100 or 150.
Ironically, my disease is one of the reasons I’m not a big burned-out porn star.
The other reason is Chi Chi LaRue.
She let everybody know what a wild drunk I was.
So I was lucky to make one movie every two years with whoever got the courage to work with me.
I’m sincerely grateful to Chi Chi for that.
On the other hand, the porno industry has gone too far in the way they’ve treated me — especially in the gay press.
Like, when they wrote in Unzipped about the Top 20 porn stars and what each contributed to porn.
I was annoyed but not surprised that I wasn’t in that Top 20.
I knew what they all thought of me then.
That’s OK.
I have a shit load of fans out there who know better.
After all, who invented verbal porn?!
You tell me!
Fuck, they didn’t even put me in the Adams Gay Video Guide!
I don’t know why.
They must really despise me.
I don’t give a shit!
Whoever hates me in the industry, it’s better for me.
I feed on that shit.
If they go to that much trouble to let me know they don’t like me, they must be thinking about me.
The Switch is On…
I felt so weird in that first movie.
I was scared.
I remember I sucked dick in the first scene.
I felt pretty trashy afterwards.
I never thought I’d end up sucking dick on film.
A couple of other things about that film stand out in my mind.
That’s not true for all of them.
Some of my movies — I don’t even remember making them!
Sorry, all you fans out there, but it’s true.
I know I was in them, but I have no memory at all of actually being there.
PAY ATTENTION!
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS!
Anyway, one of the things I remember about The Switch Is On is the girl I did the scene with.
She was Cuban, and she was a pretty smart girl — a college student.
I was impressed with that.
I remember the guy in the scene.
His name was Jeff, too — Jeff… something or other.
He died of AIDS.
I remember all of us sitting around eating after we did this long horrendous session with John Travis — who is a great filmmaker.
It was John Travis who started Jeff Stryker in his career.
I felt like just so much trash, sitting around like that — eating pizza with these people I’d just been fucking and who had just watched me fucking and filmed me fucking.
I felt scared.
A funny thing: there was this stunt dick they brought in to eat the girl’s pussy.
The other guy really couldn’t eat her pussy; he just wasn’t into it.
The stunt dick was a smart-ass motherfucker.
He thought he was so cool.
He’d been running his fucking mouth all day long all over the set.
Anyway, when we finally did the scene, he was down there eating her pussy.
All you could see was the top of his head.
I was butt-fucking the hell out of her while he ate her pussy; and when I pulled my dick out of her asshole, she shit all over his face!
It was one of the funniest and most embarrassing times in porn.
She’d douched for the scene, and when I pulled my dick out, she just automatically took a big old dump on his face!
So much for Mr. Cool!
He was gagging; he was turning green; and everybody was laughing like a motherfucker.
I felt sorry for the girl, though.
She was embarrassed as hell.
My second film was also just one scene — a shower scene in a wrestling movie called Down For the Count.
That movie was a nightmare!
The star was an Italian kid, and he did a lot of crystal.
Come to think of it, all the actors in that movie were on crystal — including me.
I learned on that film what hard work is.
I learned what it’s like to have to get a scene over with on drugs.
It wasn’t pretty; mainly because the director was Bob MacD.
Bob MacD is the biggest, fattest, ugliest cunt in porn.
He is the definition of u-g-l-y.
He’s so ugly none of us could get a hard-on with him on the set.
Me, Kurt Bauer, and this Italian kid jacked off watching straight porn trying to get our dicks hard for eight hours on that one fucking scene!
We were there from 7 a.m. until five in the afternoon.
Every 10 or 15 minutes, Bob MacD would stick his fat, ugly, gray head around the corner and yell: "Are y’all hard yet? Y’all gettin’ hard?"
Our dicks would go right down.
He was the worst person I ever had to work for.
He was a fat, ugly, old queen, and I think he took it personally that we had to watch straight porn to get hard.
Every time the fat fuck would stick his head around the corner, our dicks would just die.
We were more worried about him looking at our dicks than we were about watching the porn and getting hard.
Finally, he gave up and decided to try again the next day.
Me and Kurt Bauer and the Italian guy talked about how we didn’t want to be seen on the box cover or have our names put on the box cover or in the ads.
That’s how bad it was!
Of course, for me, it didn’t really matter.
There was no Jon Vincent back then.
I did those first two pornos under a different name.
I think I called myself Brad Phillips.
Then, In Hand Video "discovered" me and wanted me to be their star.
The name of their movie was Heavenly.
At that time, there were two big agencies in L. A.
One was The Maggot’s agency.
The other was Bi-Coastal Studs.
That was owned by Daniel Holt — the porn star who died.
He’d been up doing crystal for five days; then, he decided to take a hot bath, and he had a heart attack.
I tell people about that all the time.
If you stay awake for three or four days doing drugs, do NOT take a hot bath or shower.
Better yet, do NOT do the drugs in the first place!
Anyway, The Maggot started ripping me off.
He was supposed to take 30-percent, and he started taking 40.
Then 50.
He took so much money from me on those first two movies, that I only made $800 for the both of them.
I don’t know what I was thinking!
He was ripping my friend, Nick Cougar, off too.
So, we started scamming him on every single job.
The Maggot would set us up with tricks, and we’d make friends with them and see them outside his place and cut him right out.
That was our big thing.
Finally, we got so pissed off at him, we decided we’d switch agencies.
At that time, Daniel Holt’s agency was pretty good size.
Daniel Holt put a special ad in for us that said: "Bi-Coastal Studs now has the buddies Nick Cougar and Brad Phillips."
Later, it became Nick Cougar and Jon Vincent.
The Maggot had a fucking cow!
He actually almost had to go to the hospital because he had no models then.
No good ones anyway.
Danny Holt never thought much of the two films The Maggot booked for me.
He said he could tell me how to do real porn, because he was a real porn star.
Which he was.
He had been anyway.
He said: "Look, if you wanna do porn, I’m gonna teach you to do it right!"
One day, he introduced me to two porn producers, Bob Leone and Ken.
I can’t remember Ken’s last name, but he and Bob were lovers, and they’d been together for a long time.
They even had a couple of adopted Mexican kids.
Bob and Ken had just started a production company called In Hand Video.
They had money to make a feature, and they wanted to find a new star.
At that time, I was using the name Danny in my ads for Bi-Costal Studs.
Daniel Holt was throwing that up in The Maggot’s face.
To star in my first feature, I needed a new name.
I picked the name Jon Vincent, because my real name has the same initials.
I also liked the movie star Jon Michael Vincent.
Also, I liked the name Jon Vincent, because it seemed like a simple, regular name.
Plus, Vincent was Italian — although I’m not Italian.
I’m a coon-ass: French.
Anyway, next thing I knew, I was on my way up to Big Bear to take my first star turn in a film.
It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve been back from San Francisco for 10 days.
If I hadn’t gone to San Francisco, I’d have 40 days today.
My friend, G., has 50.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Believe me, I feel it.
The sleep patterns are the weirdest thing when you’re detoxing.
Of course, every time I detox, I’m a know-it-all.
And then, the detox shows me that I know squat.
This time, I said I would be sleeping within 12 days.
Not the case!
I get one hour’s sleep a day, and it’s not even at the same time every day.
You could go fucking crazy having inconsistent one-hour sleep sessions.
You see, sleep is so important that whenever I know I can pass out, I make sure I do.
Yesterday, it was in my friend’s car.
The day before that, it was at a beach cafe.
When my body is ready to sleep, I have about a two-minute countdown to find a place to lie down and do it.
Otherwise, the physiological opportunity passes, and I won’t be able to sleep again for another 24 hours.
Imagine being a healthy young athlete.
It’s one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, and you’ve slept all night and half the day.
A normal person would go crazy lying in bed that long.
That feeling where your body just won’t let you lie there any more.
It’s almost a ticklish feeling.
Your nerve endings feel like they’re pricking you.
Intensify that feeling a hundred times.
That’s how I feel practically all night long.
When you’re detoxing, and you’re trying to lie very still, your nerves almost tickle you to death.
This causes you to toss and turn.
You get out of bed to get rid of that feeling, and soon you feel groggy, as if you could sleep for sure.
Then you lie down again, and the same shit happens again.
And it’s toss and turn, up and down, and all around, going fucking crazy.
When I’m lying in bed flipping and flopping around, I almost wish I could get drunk and pass out.
No such luck.
The days when I could get drunk and fall asleep are gone forever.
Big Bear was the first time I got drunk on a movie set.
I’d never snow skied in my life.
I was terrified!
I went all the way to the top of the hill, drunk, and I came flying down!
I was doing 50- or 60-miles-an-hour coming down that hill, and I was screaming for my life!
I really did hurt my leg.
They had to carry me off on that stretcher!
They put us up in a beautiful cabin at Big Bear.
It was a beautiful house.
They told everybody we were making a college film.
It’s funny, but I think that really made me feel like a star.
Then, the filming started.
Unfortunately, Bob and Ken weren’t the most experienced directors in the world.
They just turned the camera on and said: OK! Let’s go!"
I did an acting scene, and the acting was so normal.
I was just sitting there, drunk, talking to this guy, pretending to have a broken leg.
Then Ken yelled: "OK! Let’s get it on!"
I just started fucking the guy in the ass!
I was so drunk, it felt natural to me!
I wasn’t even paying attention to the camera or thinking that this was a movie.
I was just fucking him in the ass, and I started talking dirty to him.
I said whatever popped into my head.
I didn’t realize what it sounded like until the next morning.
I was awakened by my own voice coming from downstairs, and I thought: Is that me?
Suddenly I was terrified!
For the first time in my life, I heard myself, drunk.
Not just drunk!
I was fucking this guy in the ass, and I was yelling at him: "I’m gonna fuck you like a dog, Boy!"
I thought: Oh, my God, that’s me!
And I felt so low.
So low.
That was me!
I couldn’t believe my ears!
I was fucking this guy and treating him like a dog.
People were laughing listening to me.
I ran downstairs to Bob and Ken, and I said: "Oh, my God, this is terrible!"
But they loved it!
I really couldn’t believe that!
Bob said: "No, no! Relax! This is great. This is beautiful! You’re going to be a big star!"
Heavenly was the first movie In Hand Video ever made, and for some reason, it turned out to be a great movie.
I guess it’s because I was so drunk and irate.
That’s what made it so different.
People had never heard anybody like that before.
Stryker talked a lot, but not like me.
I just took over and took the show as far as it would go when it came to verbal.
I took it to the limits.
Then, it was over, and we packed up and went home.
I got paid $3,500 in cash.

CHAPTER VII
(7,106 words)

Filming Heavenly was intense, and it made me feel like trash.
It also it made me a star.
Instantly.
It was so successful, Bob and Ken decided to do posters.
They made these giant posters of me sitting in front of a fireplace in my underwear.
Those went over so well that, even after the nightmare of working with me drunk and coked, they wanted me to make a second film for In Hand Video.
It was called Ride The Swell.
Ken and Bob were ready for me on the set of Ride The Swell.
They actually thought they could keep me from drinking.
Ken was like the mother hen.
He said: "You’re not gonna drink!"
He was exactly like my mother in fact.
He actually hid the vodka!
Then, when they saw I couldn’t perform worth a shit without alcohol, Bob said: "OK! Break out the vodka!"
At the time, that was OK with me, because I did some good acting and some good fucking.
But, of course, it wasn’t OK at all, because I was getting more and more fucked up every day.
Actually, doing films was pretty easy work, but It was work.
It wasn’t anything else.
And it was boring work at that.
The reason I drank and did drugs on the set is because I was bored.
There was nothing else to do except get drunk and smoke pot.
A word of warning: You should never do cocaine or crystal on the set like I did on Down For The Count because you might have Bob MacD. sticking his gross, gray head around the
corner scaring you to death.
Seriously, sitting around waiting to do my scenes bored me and made me feel uptight.
Plus, I had so many unexplained feelings in me that made me drink.
Feelings about who I was and what I was doing.
Feeling like shit.
I’d brought my wife with me up to Big Bear, and, of course, she didn’t give a shit what happened.
Just as long as I made money, and she didn’t have to see what I did or hear about it, she didn’t give a shit.
I had a lot of fucked up feelings about that too.
I couldn’t deal with any of it, so I drank.
Drinking helped loosen me up.
In addition to making me mean, it loosened me up.
I was drunk and coked out of my mind on every movie I ever did.
Heavenly was just the beginning.
I had no problem with doing my scenes when I drank.
The problem was with my life.
I wasn’t the only one.
I felt sad on the set of Ride The Swell because they got some college kid from UCLA who’d just turned 18 to do the sauna scene with me.
His name was Chris.
He needed money really bad for something.
This was his first time doing a movie.
I think it was his first time period.
This kid was tight!
He’d never taken a dick in his life.
No doubt about it.
He was so tight, he had to be a virgin.
Finally, I broke him in.
He was definitely a virgin, and I fucked the hell out of him in that sauna.
It was terrible because they’d just shaved his ass, and you could see it.
There were tears in his eyes, and you could see that, too.
And I said to Ken and Bob: "He’s hurting. This kid’s hurting."
They didn’t give a shit.
They just kept the cameras rolling.
And he was gritting his teeth, and I had to stop and say: Are you OK?"
He said: "Yeah! I’m OK."
But he wasn’t.
Не was panting and sweating, and he was shitting all over the place.
I’d pull my dick out, and shit would come out all over.
He felt bad about that, and I tried to tell him that he was the only one who noticed.
I felt really bad for him.
I could tell it was sucking this poor kid’s mind up.
He pretended like it didn’t bother him, but it was fucking his mind up.
The $500 they gave him wasn’t worth the damage all this was doing to his head.
I don’t know what happened to him afterwards.
I never saw him again.
I was so blind back then to what was happening in porn.
I was so blind getting into it that I never really saw the consequences of any of it.
A perfect example is AIDS.
When I did Down For The Count at Catalina, that fat fuck of a director told us: "You don’t need condoms. You won’t get AIDS. Just use some of this nonoxynol 9!"
Unbelievable.
Actually, it wasn’t so unbelievable considering the gross asshole we were dealing with.
Then, on the set of Heavenly, they put a bunch of rubbers in a box in a corner of the room, but they never said anything to us about using the rubbers.
They didn’t really want us to wear condoms.
So, I didn’t use one.
I fucked this guy in the ass without a rubber, and he died of AIDS four years later.
I went back to those motherfuckers, and I was so pissed, because in the rest of my movies, I used condoms.
They said: "Oh, we had a box of condoms over there waiting for you!"
"Yeah, right!" I said.
"You never told me that."
They acted surprised: "But we thought you knew! We had them. You could have used them if you’d wanted to!"
Fucking assholes!
Most of the people involved in making porn — except the actors and actresses — are a bunch of brutal fucking animals!
They are heartless, Satanic pieces of shit!
Believe me, there will be no gateway to Heaven for any of these fucks, unless they beg for forgiveness to You Know Who.
They don’t give a fuck about the models.
Once they use you up and the new guy comes in, you’re out of there.
You’re history.
Nobody’s even gonna think about you anymore.
That Boogie Nights shit is real.
It couldn’t be more real than that.
Ironically, that sauna scene with poor Chris turned out to be one of the hottest things I’ve ever done in porn.
Nothing’s ever come close to it.
There’s another scene that really stands out in my mind from Ride The Swell, because we had such a crazy, difficult time doing it.
We had to get up at 5 a.m. to go to the public beach.
We brought all the cameras, and we had to drill holes through the walls in the public bathroom.
Ken and Bob brought walkie-talkies.
You could hear the fucking drills for miles off, and, every once in a while, you could see the Coast Guard driving down the beach in their yellow trucks.
At one point, they stopped the truck, and we thought it was to take a piss.
We shut the lights off, and they passed by.
Then, they stopped to pick up some shit off the beach.
One guy was freaking out.
He kept whispering: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! They’re coming! They’re coming!"
We were scared shitless.
Finally, they got back in their trucks and eft.
We got the holes drilled and got to work on the scene.
Sparky O’Toole was sucking my dick through the glory holes.
We could barely see sunlight.
We had to get the scene done before the sun came up or the Coast Guard would catch us for sure in the bathrooms.
Sparky O’Toole sucked my dick forever, but when I tried to do my come shot, only a drop came out; and we had to resort to the old fake cum-shot.
I hope this doesn’t disillusion a lot of my fans out there, but I never had a real cum shot in any of my films.
I think when I couldn’t do the cum shots, the bottoms got mad because I couldn’t shoot a load.
They thought I wasn’t getting off on them.
Which was true most of the time!
So I invented the fake cum-shot!
Chi Chi LaRue wouldn’t let me do my own fake cum-shots for some reason.
He’d make me put a lot of lube in my hand and then shake it around until it squished out between my fingers.
It looked stupid.
What I do is I mix Ivory Liquid with two egg- whites in a little douche bottle.
Then, I rig the douche bottle to a plastic tube that’s attached to a pump — like the kind they use in aquariums.
When I shake up the egg whites and the Ivory Liquid, it’s perfect for a cum shot.
Then I run the line under my hand, under my dick and under my fingers so you can’t see it.
When it’s time for the cum shot, I grab my dick and moan: "Ahhhhh, I’m coming!"
Then I squirt it.
Actually, someone was always behind me squirting it from behind my butt.
It looked like I had the biggest cum shots since Peter North.
Anyway, about the time I had to pull my dick out, I said to Sparky: "I’m gonna cum!"
Sparky cried: "Cum in my face!"
So my friend behind me squirted that shit through the hole, and I heard this high pitched scream.
It was Sparky!
The poor guy was screaming in pain.
The Coast Guard was driving down the beach at the same time my friend was pulling on the tube, and he was so scared, he pulled it too hard.
Sparky didn’t realize it was Ivory Liquid, so he didn’t bother to close his eyes; and my friend filled his eyes up with Ivory Liquid!
He screamed for 15 minutes!
He couldn’t see out of his eyes for two hours!
We were freaking out trying to get him to shut up because the Coast Guard was driving back down the beach.
I had to take my shirt and stuff it in his mouth.
When we saw it on film, it looked like fucking Mount Rushmore on his face.
The Coast Guard left, and we escaped — just barely.
It was a miracle we got out of there without being busted.
If we’d been busted, we’d have gone to jail for sure — probably for a long time.
We pulled the scene off, and they cut out the part where Sparky was screaming.
That’s the kind of weird shit that happened while we were making Ride The Swell.
To top it all off, they put me out there on a surf board.
It was like the skis in Heavenly.
Worse.
After Ride the Swell, Bob and Ken wanted to make a video to show off my baseball talent.
I went for it!
I really thought this would be my chance to show my true talent to the world for the very first time.
Which shows how fucked up on alcohol and drugs I was.
Imagine: finally playing baseball before the world in a porno video!
The movie was called Hard Ball.
Bob Leone didn’t show up much on the set of Hard Ball.
He and Ken had been having problems as far back as Ride The Swell.
Ken was so jealous on the set of Ride The Swell, because Bob was fucking this other guy.
His name was Jack.
I don’t remember his last name, but he was a famous, famous porn star.
He was the guy who played bottom to me in the swimming pool.
Anyway, Bob fell in love with Jack, and he walked out on Ken.
Ken had the two kids.
He never got over it.
Finally, he just went insane and rammed his car into a tree and paralyzed himself.
I don’t know what happened to their kids.
I met Tim Lowe for the first time on the set of Hard Ball.
He was a real cool guy — just a pleasure to work with.
I really enjoyed it.
He was able to get into everything immediately and get the scene going and get shit done.
He was one of the coolest fucking people I’ve ever met.
No fucking around with him!
He was on top of things!
I heard he got into trouble later in San Francisco for supposedly killing someone, but I never believed it for a minute!
I said there was no way he’d kill anybody.
I knew it had to be an accident.
Poor Tim!
All the hell he had to go through all over a trick.
I know people very well.
I’m a good judge of character, and Tim Lowe is a good man.
It was a great pleasure to work with him.
I can’t say that for most of the other bottoms I ever worked with — especially on Hard Ball.
Each time I did a porno — from Heavenly on — I’d take the models out and build a little rapport with them, a little relationship so I could have my way with them.
I’d meet them at the film site, and we’d talk and shit beforehand.
I’d say: "Let’s go have a drink while these other guys do their scene."
We’d go out drinking; and I’d try to make friends with them and get to know them so they’d feel comfortable with me.
That’s how I’d get them into mental shape to be able to handle my drunkenness.
I knew they were gonna be uptight with me on the set so I made it like a party.
There’s nothing worse than being in a film with a bottom with an attitude.
It makes it a lot better if everybody’s loose and happy.
Some of them were pretty cool: some of them were just walking zombies.
Dead pinheads.
When I was working with In Hand, they had the ugliest fucking models.
Come to think of it, almost all my bottoms were ugly!
In every movie I ever did, I had ugly fucking bottoms!
No offense to them, but they just were not the prettiest things in the world.
Ken and Bob didn’t care.
They were cheap to use, and they knew I was the main thing in the movies.
I made the fucking movie; plus they figured I was going to abuse the bottoms anyway, so they might as well just pick up anything off the street.
That’s when I started getting abusive.
When they actually started getting bottoms off of Santa Monica Boulevard!
They were street guys!
They’d show up talking a bunch of shit.
It was like sending that poor bottom to prison, because I’d end up holding him down and giving him the quick entry.
I used to just love the quick entry — filled with pain and all.
I’d just ram my cock in them and rape them.
That’s what I did to this one bottom in Hard Ball.
I just dropped down there, and I abused the shit out of him.
He didn’t deserve to be pampered.
He was a piece of shit.
All he talked about was how much crystal he was doing and how much he could get.
Most of those street bottoms probably had AIDS.
It used to piss me off, and I’d just take over.
Ken didn’t care.
He didn’t care about much of anything ay that time.
He’d say: "OK! Go ahead! Just go!"
It got kind of bad at the end, because I couldn’t get hard.
All the little queens were getting mad at me, because I had Ejai in there naked and spread eagled.
I’d run into the other room and look at her and shove a big black dildo up her and get hard; and then I’d run back onto the set and stick my dick into the bottom.
He didn’t like that too much.
He felt degraded.
I felt kind of bad about it myself, but that’s what it took.
I was kind of burned out from fucking the other guy, because he was so ugly.
It took me a long time, and I had to have all kinds of fantasies to get hard for this motherfucker!
Everybody took it too personally.
At that time, I just needed to look at some pussy.
The whole time I was doing porn, I had to look at straight porn and straight pictures.
Hard Ball was the last movie I did for In Hand.
It was hard to get that movie done, what with me unable to get it up, and Ken’s head all fucked up because of Bob, and Bob always off somewhere with his new lover from the other
movie…
It’s a miracle we got it done at all, but we did it.
It was a trashy movie, but then all their movies were trashy movies.
It had a cool box cover though.
I had Brian Hart with me on the box cover.
He just sat back there behind me wearing a catcher’s mask and took a picture like an idiot, and didn’t get paid for it.
I don’t know if most people even knew that was him, but they will now.
By this time, Daniel Holt was doing a lot of downers, and he was falling apart.
His agency was going to hell.
After I did that first gig for In Hand, I didn’t want him to help me anyway.
He would get me any kind of work.
It didn’t matter what it was.
If he could get a part for me, he’d do it.
After Heavenly, he started running after me all the time, telling me: "I’ve got a scene for you!"
I didn’t want to do scenes.
I wanted to be the star.
If I’d listened to him, I’d have become a burnt-out porn queen just like him.
My point of view was that I wanted to be the best in everything Idid, and I wanted to be the star of everything I did.
I thought: if I’m gonna do this stuff, I may as well do it right.
Before Heavenly, I wasn’t on any box covers.
After Heavenly, I did only movies with me on the box covers.
I liked that, because I got paid $3,500 for each movie, and that was a lot of money for me.
The reason I only did three movies in three years is because I had such a bad reputation.
I had the reputation of being difficult to work with.
Which I was.
I’d get so drunk, nobody would work with me more than once a year!
Bob and Ken would get so fed up with me after doing each film that they couldn’t deal with me again for another year.
I was fortunate to be a drunk.
It was good for me because I didn’t make too many films like everybody else did.
Being a porn star is different from being a Hollywood actor.
If a porn star makes too many movies, he’s history.
Nobody wants to see him anymore.
His price goes down.
Like I said, I’m glad Chi Chi LaRue told everybody not to work with me.
My bad reputation as a drunk made me a rare commodity.
And that’s where I am now.
You may not have heard of me, but I’m pretty big-time in gay porn.
Because I never got burnt out.
I’m the most durable guy in porn.
Everybody says so.
"Jon Vincent takes a lickin’ and keeps on dickin’!"
He disappears for a week.
He crawls out of some hole, and he’s all fucked up.
Then, he comes back three weeks later, and he looks like Superman."
That’s why I’ve always been scared I’d get the lifetime achievement award in porn — if there is such a thing.
I’ve been around forever.
This little cycle has happened about 10 times in my porn career.
I get drugged up and go down to like a 190 pounds.
My arms shrink up.
I look like a potato with toothpicks stuck in it.
My stomach’s big; my limbs are small; my face looks like a Sharpei.
Like the pictures I did for the cover and pictorial in Advocate Men a couple of years ago.
I’d just had a fight with D. J., and I had a black eye.
I was so heroin’d down that my face was all wrinkled.
People see this shit, and then, three weeks later, I come back and I’m built like a motherfucker.
Well, that’s from shooting steroids, and my liver has taken a beating from all those steroids.
The Maggot said one true thing about me.
He said: "He’s just a big steroid freak!"
Yeah, I’m a steroid freak.
But, you don’t just take steroids and grow.
You also have to train.
At least I’m not shaped like you, Maggot — a butterball with bleeding tits!
Now that I was a big name, The Maggot wanted me to come back and work for him.
Like I said: He forgives and forgets.
It was fucked because The Maggot was charging $400 a job, and I was making $250.
I was ripping everybody off, because I only stayed 30 minutes.
Sometimes not even that.
I was drunk out of my mind, and I was burning everybody.
All this porn and tricking just escalated my drinking and my cocaine use.
Sometimes, I’d go out with my porn friends and not come home for three or four days, and my wife would freak out.
She wasn’t hardly drinking at all at that time.
My life was just turning in on me; and the porn and the hustling and the notoriety of it all weren’t helping any.
But I was putting $10,000 a month into the bank.
Unbelievable as it seems now, I really loved doing porno in a way.
I loved the attention.
I loved being the obnoxious star that I was.
Like dealing with my parents…
I was so stoked on making all that money and being a star that I actually thought my mom and dad would be proud of me, proud to see me doing so well.
I was so fucked up on alcohol and drugs, I didn’t know any different.
So I brought my mom and dad out to Vegas to the adult video convention.
I had a booth, and I was signing autographs — playing the star.
I brought my dad to the back of the video store, and I showed him all these posters and shit not even remembering that on the back of the box, I was drilling some guy in the ass.
I threw all this shit in my old man’s face, and he never said a word.
He just said: "Well, I hope you’re getting paid well for this."
I wasn’t even thinking that my parents would be thinking "gay."
How stupid of me!
Of course, that’s what they were going to think!
What else?
But my parents are so liberal and so cool.
God bless them.
All they said was: "Well, if this is what you want to do, go for it."
I brought my little brother out to Vegas along with them.
I even had him helping me out at the booth, rolling posters with me.
Thank God there were girls at the booths next to us.
I got him pussy, too!
He got laid three times.
He was in hog heaven.
My old man flipped out.
He kept saying: "Don’t be setting him up with those porn girls! There’s AIDS out there!!"
My old man was pissed, but my little brother had a good old time.
He loved It, and that took the whole gay thing right out of the picture.
For a while.
In the end, it was all for nothing.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
Those girls and I were signing autographs right next to each other, but my little brother still knew that I was doing gay porn.
Not straight porn.
I think he figured it out right away, but it took a little white for it to hit him.
It got to where he wouldn’t even talk to me.
A few months later, my parents saw the Donahue show where all these gay porn stars were up there lying about how much money they had, claiming they made millions of dollars a
year.
My father called me and said: "Aren’t you going to make that kind of money?"
I said: "No, Daddy. Those guys are full of shit."
Even though he didn’t say anything, I could tell my old man was wondering why the hell I’d be doing something like gay porn if I wasn’t getting rich like those morons on Donahue
claimed to be.
So, if porno is such a bad life why did I do it?
I can tell you the real reason in just three words: money for drugs.
I made a lot of drug money hustling too, but it wasn’t the same.
I guess I did porn because it was a lump sum of money.
It was $1,500, $3,500, $5,000 — all at once.
Sad to say, that was its strongest attraction.
I didn’t do porno because I wanted to have a great hustling life.
I didn’t do it to make a famous name for myself so I could go on tour.
When I first started out, I had no idea how people could make money with a porn name.
I had no idea about going dancing on the road.
I had no idea about any of it.
I did porno for the simple reason that I needed money for my fix!
I needed money for my drugs; I needed money for my rent after I spent the rent money on drugs.
I had a major need for quick cash.
Porn was quick cash.
That was my sole reason for doing it.
It wasn’t about any kind of future plans.
It was about instant money.
In large amounts.
It was stupid.
It was one of the dumb decisions I made in my life — probably the dumbest.
Of course, after it was over and done, I thought: Why not be the best at it?
Why not do it like nobody else in the world?
Which I did. I did gay porn, because my wife wouldn’t let me do straight porn.
She used to say she didn’t care what I did just as long as I didn’t do with women.
That’s the way it was with her.
I could kill the bitch, now, for doing that to me.
I did a lot of drugs before I got into porn.
I did even more after, because it took a toll on me that I didn’t see coming.
Because I could never go home and see my friends again.
All that built up, and it urned me into a full-fledged heroin addict.
Porn did this to me.
I have no idea what it does to other people.
I do know that some people get into a short period of glamour — the star’s life.
Joey Stefano was known for that.
For having all that money and having a great time for a short time; then when it ran out, he’d be depressed as hell.
When I started doing porn, I should have known that I could never go home again.
It was such a stupid thing to do.
I can’t believe it.
I didn’t think the hustling was too much.
I’d always done that all my life, so I didn’t think there was any impact on me.
I just turned the tricks and got paid; it didn’t brand me in any way.
At least, that’s what I thought.
That’s what I told myself.
When I did porn, that finalized it all.
It told me what I really was in life.
It let me know where I stood.
I’ve tricked all my life, and I never labeled myself a hustler; never called myself a whore.
But, all the time, that’s all I was.
Porn put a label on it.
It put a label on me, and it finally let me see it.
It had such impact.
People don’t see you tricking.
But, when you do it on camera, everybody sees it.
Everybody knows.
What’s on film is there forever.
When I go home, I’m scared and worried about who I’m gonna see.
When I see people I used to know, I know they’re thinking: "How can you do gay porn, you big fag?!"
Hopefully, people can see now what happened to me, can see the error of the choices I made and what terrible consequences I’ve had to pay for them.
To this day, I don’t know if Ejai’s parents know about me or not.
They must.
They came out to visit us a couple of times, and they must have seen the posters.
In fucking Hollywood, they must have passed a porno video store and seen the box covers!
I don’t know if anybody’s ever actually come up to them and said: "Hey do you know your son-in-law’s a major gay porn star?"
It’s possible.
When I talk to Ejai’s mom, she looks at me like she wondering: Are you gonna be ok?
People have actually come up to me when I was with my mother-in-law and told me I did good work.
One day, at the supermarket, somebody came up to me and said: "Hey, Jon! How’s Henry?"
I don’t know if my mother-in-law knows today or not.
I’m sure she does.
She can’t be that stupid.
These are smart people.
She’s from Louisiana; and all Louisiana people are open-minded.
They’re open-minded, but they’re very much hypocrites, too.
Like L.V. showing people my films.
When I first did porn, I came straight from professional baseball.
I was a hero in my home town of Baton Rouge.
I went from being a baseball star to being a porno star as it were.
L.V. — the big bully that used to beat the hell out of me and my friends — was living with some queen up in the Hollywood Hills sucking his dick every night.
One day, out of nowhere, this motherfucker tracked me down and said: "Hey, I saw your movies! People back home are gonna trip! You were sucking dick!"
I sucked dick in two gigs, maybe three — but this shithead couldn’t wait to get home and go to one of the major parties in Baton Rouge and play my tape.
And there I am for everyone to see!
I had my ex-wife at home.
My son’s at home.
L.V. just couldn’t wait.
I heard hat all the girls started crying, they were so terrified when they saw me fucking some guy in he ass.
It’s not like everybody was laughing.
Everybody was shocked; and I think more than anything, they were let down.
Their hero, their baseball hero, doing gay porn in front of their very eyes.
I think it seriously scarred a bunch of people.
But how did my "friend" L.V. look?
Не looked like the biggest queen in the world trying to show them gay porn!
He’s a vicious person.
A really revengeful, vicious person.
He’s in Baton Rouge today.
Nobody will see him.
He works at the C. S. gas station.
He’s nothing.
He’s scum.
I didn’t know the impact porn would have on me until after I did it, and it was a major impact.
It destroyed the possibility of going to Baton Rouge and doing what I used to do, having fun with all my friends.
It’s cut all that out for me.
I can’t go into certain places.
I went home last year to see my son for the first time in a long time.
I saw two people I knew; and when they came up to me and asked me how I’d been, I knew what they were thinking.
They’d seen my movies, and they were thinking : Oh, he did gay porn!
So, I came right out and asked them: "So, did you see my movies?"
They said: "Yeah, bro."
And they laughed.
But, you know, they’re actually scared of me now; they think I’m a freak or something.
They won’t say nothing ’cause I’m twice their size, and they’re scared I’ll beat the shit out of them, but they’re al uncomfortable around me.
I can feel it.
I worry about my son now.
I wonder, now, if he knows.
He and I had a great time when we were together.
We discussed what he’s doing.
I didn’t have a chance to be with my son when he was growing up because my ex-wife said: "You’re not gonna be here with him, so I want my husband to adopt him!
Hell, back then I didn’t know any better.
So I did it.
Now he’s got the guy’s last name, and it’s killing me.
I asked him why he didn’t get his name changed back; and he said he would.
I want him to.
I want him to be proud of me.
I don’t know what this gay film-business is gonna do to him if he doesn’t already know.
I have no idea.
He looks exactly like me.
I cherish the ground he walks on.
I’ll do anything for him, and I hope and pray he makes it through this struggle.
I think about it all the time.
I want to tell him the truth, and just say: "Son, I’m a drug addict. That’s why I did porn."
But he wouldn’t understand that.
The whole impact on the families around me…
It’s hidden; it’s quiet.
But it’s real.
It’s there; but nobody says anything about it.
My first wife, T., who has my son, doesn’t want to hear about it.
I think she feels like: "I love him, but he’s done porno, but still, I can’t kick him out of my life forever. So what can I do? "
Everybody does something bad in their lives; I’m sure mine was the worst fuckup.
I’m sure that was the worst thing that anybody could ever do was doing porn.
The impact was rough.
I always worry that I won’t be able to get a job later on in my life.
I worry that people are going to know who am.
It really bothers me if I go somewhere and people recognize me.
Lately, people have stopped recognizing me.
I don’t know why.
Maybe I’m getting too old.
In New York, they’ll never quit recognizing me, but New York’s New York.
It’s not Louisiana.
All the time I lived in L.A., I lived a life of seclusion.
I lived in L.A. to hide after what happened.
After what I did.
I used to wonder — as recently as two years ago — if it would put a damper on my bodybuilding.
I always thought I had it in me to be a pro bodybuilder.
I used to wonder if they’d let me go out on the stage and compete after doing porno.
After all, I know pros who’ve turned porn star, but I’ve never known any porn stars who turned pro.
Today, I just wonder if porn will follow me forever.
If I can ever have a normal life — even after I get completely clean and sober.
I went to a lot of school in my life when I played baseball.
I’ve only got a year-and-a-half in school left for a bachelor’s degree in business, but I’ve been too occupied with drugs in my life to finish.
I want to finish school and just do something different.
Once you get into this hustling thing, it’s the worst thing anyone can do.
Time just passes by.
A year will seem like a week.
Before you know it, you’re too stupid to do anything else because you’ve been out of school for so long.
You’ve gone so far away from the normal life that other people live.
I just wonder if I can ever find my way back.
Doing porn lowered my self-esteem.
Not just the way I think other people think about me but the way I think about myself.
It put a hardcore damper on my life.
Basically, going into it, I was straight.
I was a married man.
So you can see how hard it just jerked me to the other side.
From there, all the way to the other side.
This whole business is one long, bad trip.
Imagine: all of a sudden, I wasn’t a pro baseball player like I’d been brought up to be.
I was a gay porn-star for Christ’s sake!
That’s really when I hit bottom.
Way before I ever shot a hit of heroin!
Because, when you do this shit, something has gone wrong in your mind.
I don’t care who you are.
I don’t care how famous you are.
That’s when you’ve totally given up.
I can understand when gays do porn.
That’s different.
God bless them, it’s like a notorious thing for them.
For a truly gay person to do porn is a heroic thing, because the gay man is expressing his true sexuality, and in a way, he’s establishing his right to be who he is.
That’s fine.
But Christ!
I’m not gay!
I’m bisexual.
I guess you could say I’m bisexual.
My dick gets hard.
I’m not going to lie about it.
I love fucking guys in the ass when I’m fucked up.
It’s like Chi Chi La Rue once said: "Jon’s not gay — unless he’s high."
When men like me do gay porn, men who have wives and families, it means something has snapped in their heads.
They’ve lost their fucking minds.
They have gone wacko.
And there are more straight guys in gay porn than people think — especially today.
Ryan Idol’s not gay.
Jeff Stryker’s not gay.
Gay-for-pay, yes; but not truly gay.
Gay people and straight people can believe what they want, but that’s the way it is.
Gays love to think that everybody is gay.
Let’s ALL be gay!
The truth is this: sure, my dick has gotten hard doing gay acts.
And I’ve gotten fucked.
I’ve gotten fucked up and gotten fucked.
I’ve done it all, and I’ve enjoyed it.
But you would never catch me asking a man out to go on a date.
You’d never catch me living the gay lifestyle.
Not a chance!
No way.
I’d be miserable.
I’d kill myself for sure.
That’s why I’ve done all the drugs I’ve done.
Because I’ve gotten stuck in the rut.
When me and my wife split up in 1996, I had to move in with a gay man, and it just fucking tore me up.
The only decent relationship I ever had with a gay man I lived with was with M. who I fucked over and fucked up with.
Living gay-for-pay will kill you.
Sticking your hand in the gay man’s cookie-jar will fuck you up.
I’m not saying anything against gay people.
Gay people — except for the ones who have molested me or fucked me over — have treated me better than any other people ever treated me.
Gay people are cool.
Homosexuality is a normal thing — if it’s the person’s true nature.
If it’s not, then it becomes a truly fucked-up matter.
If you’re a homosexual, that’s fine.
If you’re not, don’t play at being one.
Don’t act like one.
Don’t try to take a gay man’s money.
Don’t put your hand in his cookie jar.
Get away from him.
Leave him alone.
Because the lifestyle will sting you.
It’ll pull the fucking guts and the soul right out of you.
This book is to let people — young kids who want to do porn — know what can happen.
This is not necessarily what will happen to them, but I’m sure nothing good will come of it.
Pornography is an awful thing.
It’s fun for people to watch, but it’s not fun for the person who makes it and has to live with himself afterwards.
Believe me.
It’s been a rough road.
I was supposed of be one of these "normal" people with a family; a married man with a kid.
Imagine being from a good family and being an athlete, a man who had nothing to do with gay people; and then, suddenly, I’m doing gay porn, hustling, sticking my hand in the gay
man’s cookie-jar.
I don’t belong in hustling, and I don’t belong in porn; and, believe me, it’s kicked my ass.
It wasn’t the right choice for me.
We all make choices in life, and the worst choice I ever made was to come to California and make an easy living by hustling and doing films.
I can see now what it’s done to me.
I am a pig drug-addict because I had a job — pornography and prostitution — where I could get all the drugs I wanted.
The money was so fast and so easy, that I just kept on doing the drugs.
I thought: Why not?
There was no reason for me to try to stop, because I thought the quick cash would be there forever.
Now, even that has come back on me and bitten me in the ass.
Recently, I’ve started doing $40 tricks.
That’s what dope has brought me to.
$40 jobs!
Just with friends I know who give me $40 bucks, and I let them suck my dick or whatever.
But even so; $40!
I’m 37 years old.
I’m a heroin addict.
I’m divorced; and my mother will barely speak to me.
I don’t really have any friends anymore.
Friends are hard to come by.
I realize now that the people I used to call my friends were just acquaintances, and I don’t even have them anymore.
It’s weird.
I’d sit in my apartment and my phone wouldn’t ring for three or four days.
And when it did, it was always my mother or my ex-wife.
I’ve lost… everybody.
I’m at the point where nobody wants to have anything to do with me.
I have a couple of friends that I’ve made recently — G., Ron.
They understand where I’m at, but if I don’t get sober, I guess I won’t have them around either.
I have a hustling ad in Frontiers.
Those are the only calls or pages I get, and even they’re getting low.
Everyone knows I’m a heroin addict at this point.
Everyone.
All the friends I thought I had — they were never friends.
People can be really evil.
Hell, I should know.
I’m one of them.
I’m one of those evil people.

CHAPTER VIII
(7,720 words)

I slipped.
I can’t believe it.
I had 11 days of sobriety after fucking up in San Francisco, and I fucked it all up by going out and doing the same thing here.
I did a job the other night.
Nobody will give me any money.
Hope doesn’t have money anymore, and even if she did, she knows better than to give me any.
My friends, G. and Ron, will take me out to dinner or lend me money for a gym membership, but they won’t give me any cash.
I got tired of being broke.
Tired of not having more than $4 or $5 in my fucking wallet.
So I went to Santa Monica and did a job.
Hope tried to get me to stay home and work on the book with her instead, but I went anyway.
As soon as I got done, I called Camille and scored.
Hope knew I was high when I came home at fucking 5 a.m.
She didn’t say anything, but she knew.
G. stopped by this afternoon on his way to a meeting, and the first thing he said was: "You’re high. "
I felt so bad.
It’s embarrassing when people know you’re high, and you don’t think they do.
I felt ashamed.
I let them down.
Worse, I let myself down.
One more time G. told me not to be depressed about slipping.
Just get right back into going to meetings and start over immediately.
That’s all I can do, I guess.
I can’t give up.
No matter how bad things get, I can’t give up because then everyone else will give up on me, too, and I’l have no one.
I’ll be alone.
One of the people closest to me has already given up on me: my friend, P.
P. has been extraordinary to me.
He’s been more than a friend.
He’s been one of the greatest people I’ve ver had in my life, and I thank God I had him as long as I did.
Otherwise, I’d be dead now for sure.
P. has never enabled me.
Never!
He’s been too smart.
He’s watched me everyday since I’ve been on drugs.
I was the one fooling myself by thinking was getting over on him.
I wasn’t getting over on him or anybody else.
Everybody knew I was stoned.
But P. has not enabled me in any way.
And if he thinks he has, he has to put a stop to it.
He cut me off once before, and, now, he’s cut me off again.
I think this is going to be the last time too.
I don’t think I’ll see P. again.
This is going to be it or him.
He’s loved me with all his heart.
He must have.
To have given me this much leeway, the man has to just all-out care for me; and I’ve done nothing but shit on him and on every opportunity that he’s given me to live a good life and to
be a good person.
I pray that, one day, I’ll be able to be a clean and sober friend for him.
I pray that, one day, I’ll be able to be clean and sober — period.
Me and P. go way back.
After Hard Ball, a year went by without me making any more films.
Like I said, nobody was brave enough or stupid enough to want to work with me and my drunkenness.
So, when I met P., I was, once again, tricking through The Maggot.
But that’s not how I met him.
I met him at the gym, which — as it turned out — he owned.
As it also turned out, he really liked Jon Vincent.
In fact, he was one of the original Jon Vincent fans.
P. owned a record company, a water purifying company, and, best of all for me, he owned a bunch of gyms.
I’d been kept a couple of times, but I never liked being kept.
I did OK just by doing tricks.
P. was the first relationship I ever went into with a man.
He wasn’t much older than me.
He was a pretty young guy.
I respect this man to this day, more than I do anyone in the world.
He helped me unconditionally.
He loved me, truly loved me, and he gave me a chance in life which I fucked up royally.
He was the kindest man in the world; yet, on the other hand, if provoked, he could be the scariest person on earth.
He truly was straight up with me when we first started this relationship.
Sex with this man was kind of hard.
It was my first time being with a man.
I mean actually living with a man away from my wife.
It was so cool.
Him and the wife never fucked with each other.
She didn’t fuck with him, and he didn’t fuck with her.
He even got her a house in Beverly Hills.
A little two-bedroom house, just so we could keep her and the dog there.
Which was cool, because I was living with him right down the street.
Brian Hart, the porn star, moved in with me and P., and it was a pretty cool situation.
P. bought us a motorcycle so we’d have something to ride around on.
His record company was right across the street, and everyone could look down from the building and see us.
It was obvious who we were.
We looked like P.’s two little fag-boys taking off in front of all the girls who worked for him.
We lived in a real cool house.
There was security, so if we ever got coked up, we could look the cameras and see who was there.
That was good, cause me and Brian were a couple of partying motherfuckers.
We didn’t party super hard, but hard enough to irritate the shit out of P.
Now that I think about it, we did some pretty wild shit.
Like one night, me and Brian Hart were hanging out with Nick Cougar, and we were all three of us drunk as hell.
Me and Brian just wanted to have some fun, but Nick really wanted to fuck.
There was this bag lady with a shopping cart the alley behind the La Brea Motel.
She was so fucked up and crazy, she was drooling.
Seriously.
There was actually drool running out of her mouth!
But we took her home and fucked the shit out of er anyway.
Unbelievable, huh?!
Nick Cougar as a raunchy motherfucker!
What fucked things up with P. was a trip I took to Louisiana with my best friend, C.
P. gave me an American Express credit card with no credit limit.
The name on the card was Jon Vincent.
I was grateful, but instead of being responsible, I showed my fucked-up self.
On the drive back home, I lost and started spending money like it was tap water.
By the time we got home, I’d spent $36,000 in five days.
It seems impossible.
I know.
But leave it to me to fuck up big-time.
Before the trip even started, I spent money on C.’s Cutlass which was a piece-of-shit Diesel.
I dropped $1,200 into his transmission and another $500 into the motor.
It had a shitty sound system, so I spent $2,000 for a new one — just so I’d have was music to listen to on the way back to L.A.
Anything that popped into my cocaine head, I just charged it on that fucking credit card.
Our first stop was Houston, Texas.
We knew a couple of chicks there, so we stayed with them.
Of course, we took them out to dinner at the fanciest restaurant and drank with them in the hottest clubs.
And, of course, I had to be the big shot and buy drinks and food for everybody in the place.
The next night, we went to San Antonio.
We stopped at a mall.
I bought four or five new suits for each of us and a couple of nice watches.
Then, we rented a beautiful hotel suite at the Marriott.
We hired four whores and called room service for a lot of Dom Pérignon (which was a real mistake because C. is a bigger drunk than I am).
Next morning, we continued our trip.
Of course, on the way, I had to stop and buy a brand new Honda V-65 Magna Motorcycle.
I bought a trailer for it too, because it was so fucking cold, I couldn’t ride it home.
Maybe I just needed to be comfortable on the ride back, because I knew we were headed home to face P.’s wrath for all the money I’d just spent.
Back in L. A., I walked into P.’s house, and Brian Hart was there in the living room, smiling, when we walked in.
He said: "Ah, Jonny boy! You really outdid yourself this time!"
I introduced C. to P. and to Brian.
It wasn’t exactly the best way for them to meet.
P. wasn’t too happy with C.
He said to me: "Your friend is lucky if he doesn’t get a bullet in his head before the end of the week."
(P. was just kidding of course, but C. got so fucking scared, he hauled ass two days later back to Louisiana!)
I said: "P., I’m sorry I got carried away with our credit card."
He wasn’t exactly thrilled with me either.
He said: "Before you say anything, I want to show you something."
It was Christmas Eve.
P. took me to the garage and showed me a brand new black Corvette convertible.
It was beautiful!
It even had a personalized license plate: JFRY-JMS which stood or Jeffrey James.
He said: "Jeff, this car costs exactly the same amount as you spent on the edit card. And the only reason I care about the credit card is because you didn’t tell me first. It hurts me to
have to take this back now."
Of course, it hurt me a lot worse than it hurt him!
I cried.
I just sat down and put my head between my knees and cried.
Not just because I lost the Corvette, but because I’d been such an asshole to someone who’d been so good to me.
P. wasn’t really mad.
This guy would not have given a shit how much I spent if I had just asked him.
He was just disappointed that I’d be such a loser, and one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to do in my life was having to look into his eyes after I’d fucked up.
He felt bad about it too.
It wasn’t like he gloated or anything.
He said: "There’s no problem affording it. The problem is how you did this. I can’t help you."
It was really wrong what I did with the credit card.
There was love there, and I felt so bad that I disappointed him, that I let him down so bad.
I really hurt him.
He’d give me anything I wanted anyway, and I had to do some shit like that.
The man was incredible.
He had so much class.
You don’t have to try to respect him; you just do.
P. moved away for a while, because he had to go to jail.
He’s a lawyer like his father.
He comes from a family of Italian lawyers.
I didn’t know he was in jail, because he dropped me after the credit-card incident.
He called me when he got out.
He was working at one of his gyms, and me and Ejai went to see him.
Like I said, he never had any feelings of jealousy at all about my wife.
He was no threat to her, and she was no threat to him.
This is how cool this man was.
He knew that she had always wanted breasts.
And he was so nice, he said: "If you guys pay me back, I’ll swing it with my best friend. He’s a plastic surgeon."
I said: "Of course, I’ll pay you back. No problem."
So P. got Ejai the surgery with his friend.
She was all happy; everything was fucking cool.
Time went on.
Things started getting bad.
I was partying way too much, and my wife was drinking like a fucking fish.
So, of course, we never paid P. back a penny.
That was me and Ejai’s routine at that point.
I didn’t give a fuck about who helped us; we just shit on them.
Well, you could do that with all these other people, but you just didn’t do that with P.
He told me that if I didn’t pay him back, he’d never speak to me again.
I didn’t think about how crucial a thing it would be to have somebody close to me that I loved just disappear.
Which he did.
Without a word.
No way to get in touch with him.
His other friends could get in touch with him, and I knew it.
Not me.
He cut me off so big time, it made my head spin.
It was the biggest impact on my life having a person that had proven himself to be a good friend to me just shut he off.
He set me straight in a way that I cannot explain.
Quiet… Mystery… Gone.
I didn’t know where he was.
It hurt me, and it changed me.
He couldn’t speak a word to me from 1995 to just last year.
The first thing I’m gonna do, when I get clean and sober, is pay for Ejai’s breasts.
That’s the only request he ever made.
He never asked for any of the other money back; and, believe me, there was a lot of it!
Hell, he didn’t need the money!
It was the principle of the matter.
He’d call me sometimes, and I’d just put him off or pretend I never got his pages.
Finally, I just blew off completely with P.
I just forgot about him.
I decided I didn’t want to let anybody keep me.
I wanted to just do one-on-one jobs, because it’s too hard for me to live with someone.
I liked living with my wife.
My wife was like a comfort zone.
A dangerous comfort zone.
Today, I’m three days clean and sober.
Again.
God, this is like a merry-go-round: a few days sober — slip! — a few days sober —slip!
Three days isn’t much.
I know.
I’ve had three days so many times before.
I’ve said this before too, but I don’t think I can say it too many times.
Do not fuck with heroin!
Please!
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
Do not fuck with other drugs like coke and crystal that will eventually lead you to fuck with heroin!
Look at me.
Heroin tore my veins right out of my arms.
It tore my soul out of my heart.
Eventually, me and my wife moved from Mexican Town to Hollywood, which was fun for a while.
Then we moved to Hollywood Boulevard and Franklin.
One day, the manager of our building quit, and Ejai took over his job — if you can believe that.
She turned out to be a great manager.
The problem was that she had a fucking crazy, porn-star husband.
It was the funniest situation.
Her running the building and me partying with all the people inside.
I made great friends with the people in the building.
I’d be downstairs smoking a joint with some of the guys, and she’d come tearing in saying: "OK, you motherfuckers! You got the rent!?"
And of course they didn’t; and she’d say: "OK! I’m serving you three with a three-day notice! And you with the back-rent owed, you’re out of here!"
I didn’t know what to say.
These were people that I was hanging out with.
But, like I said, she got to be one of their best managers.
It’s funny, I still wasn’t really in love with Ejai then.
It was still all for the car.
I didn’t fall in love with her until later on.
I know that sounds funny, but it’s true.
So, time went on.
I was making big bucks doing jobs, and Ejai was just living off of me, and life was one big party.
We partied a lot, Ejai and me.
We’d do coke together.
The first time she ever smoked crack was with me when we were living at the Topanga Ranch Motel.
I fell in love with her — truly in love with her — after five or six years of being with her.
That would have been around ’90 or ’91.
I used to truly love watching my wife, who I was now in love with, getting fucked by one of my friends when I was on coke.
It was sick.
I know.
But watching her do it with somebody else made me fucking crazy.
I remember when me and her went to New York so I could hustle.
I’d go dance places like the Show Palace and The Gaiety, and she’d go with me.
This one time, me and Ejai and my friend, Brian Hart, were sharing a room.
We got drunk together, and Brian started kissing her.
I was going: "Yeah, bro! Kiss her!"
My dick was already getting hard, because I was figuring out how we were going to do this.
We went back to the hotel room, and he kept on making out with her.
Finally, she took her clothes off, and he started slammin’ her.
And then, she told me to get out of the fucking room!
I went around the corner and watched, and I came like three times in two or three minutes!
Really.
I came once a minute!
That was the first time I’d ever done that.
It was the most erotic experience of my life!
Afterwards, I figured she was so drunk, she’d never remember what she did.
Brian had pulled out and shot a huge load of cum all over her just before she passed out, so I figured I’d clean her up.
So that when she woke up, she wouldn’t be all fucked up with come on her.
I washed her up and dressed her.
When she woke up in the morning, I was thinking she wouldn’t even know what hit her.
I mean she knows what he’s doing while she’s drunk, but then, she blacks out afterwards and forgets everything.
This time, she didn’t have a real blackout.
She woke up in the morning and said: "I can’t believe we did that."
I said: "It’s OK. Don’t worry about it. Life goes on."
It didn’t really bother me.
Of course, living in L.A. and doing coke all the time with me, she wound up doing stuff like that a few more times.
That was cool.
I was always there watching or listening and getting off on it.
In fact, I was always the instigator of it all.
It was all a big turn-on for me.
That’s how I thought of it.
But, when I fucked around on her later on in San Francisco and she got a boyfriend, I woke up real quick.
When I didn’t give her permission to do something, and she did it anyway, it stung me like nothing else.
I didn’t know what to do.
It hurt so bad.
I guess I got what I deserved for sharing her like that.
For putting her up to doing that kind of porno shit in the first place.
A year or so went by, and Jim West contacted me and asked me to do a movie called Paradise Beach.
In that movie, I finally got a big muscle boy to work over, and boy, did I work him over!
I whipped his ass and had brutal sex with him.
I had him down on his knees, and I just fucked the shit out of him.
He took it well; I’ll say that for him.
He took it like a man.
He was loving it.
Everybody else thought I was killing him, but I wasn’t.
I was just having some great sex.
I liked doing Paradise Beach, because I really liked working with Jim West.
He made me feel really comfortable, because he told me to just go ahead and do my thing.
I like directors who just let me be me.
I know that all the while I was doing movies, I had a problem with drinking, and all the directors had a problem with my drinking problem.
But if you just show me that you like me and let me like you, then we can make a great film.
When the director gave me free rein, I’d turn it into a story — a fantasy.
That’s what I did in Hard Knocks.
I did Hard Knocks well, because I had a good drunk-buzz on, and I was ruling a whole group of people, telling them what to do.
I got into it, and I did it right.
Like, when Jim Clark was sucking my dick, and I looked at him and said: "You can’t suck dick! I’m gonna use somebody else!"
I did that to show off, and I think I hurt the poor guy’s feelings.
If you read this today, Jim, I’m really sorry.
You were a sexy man, and you really can suck dick.
As for my other movies, there were a few other directors that I respected and enjoyed working with.
Just a few.
I really liked working with Jim Steel on Blue Collar/White Heat.
Even though he was more of a directing director, (not the kind who just tells me to go for it), he was still a pleasure to work with.
He’s a super-cool director.
I would work with him again any day.
He’s one of the few directors I could probably work for and not have to get high, because he really makes things cool on the set both before and after the scene.
He’s just a super guy!
He makes friends with everybody.
He made personal friends with me and Brian Hart.
He had such good energy on the set, it was contagious.
He put everybody at ease.
In Blue Collar/White Heat, I knocked the bottom out of Danny Sommers who is a great guy.
Today, he’s clean and sober three or four years.
That’s a real accomplishment! I admire him a lot.
He’s done a great job of surviving porn, and I’m really proud of him for that.
Gino Colbert is a good director to work for.
In terms of how they make movies, he’s probably the best director in porn — besides Matt Sterling and John Travis.
When I first met Gino, I didn’t think he was capable.
That was more than 12 years ago.
Back then, it was all old men directing porn.
I thought he was just too young and inexperienced to know what he was doing; but he ended up being a true director.
By "true," I mean that if something ain’t good, he’ll say it ain’t good no matter whose feelings he hurts.
If I did a shitty scene, he told me so — flat out.
I always respected him for that.
His work is his work, and that’s the way you need to be to be a director.
He’s really a cool guy.
He got real close to me and Ejai — especially at the Gay Video Awards.
The problem was he was straight up, and I wasn’t.
I did Musclemen 2 with Gino, and I think he got the worst end of my drunk shit on the sets.
He handled it as best he could, though.
He pulled through, and then, he bit his tongue and got rid of me — just like everybody else did.
Which I understood.
I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing when I was drinking.
You know what being drunk is like: you don’t know you’re drunk.
I didn’t even know what happened.
I’d just wake up in the morning, and everybody would tell me about all the wild shit I did.
I really fucked up with Gino with my drinking.
He’s definitely the smartest director in porn and the smartest person period as far as knowing when you’re all fucked up.
Gino was a little bit like Chi Chi LaRue — as far as knowing how a model’s life gets fucked up.
They’re real rough on themselves when somebody fucks up .
They were concerned about someone going crazy — or worse.
They’d think it was their fault.
They care.
They’re not like The Maggot — the pimp who’d cut your head off as soon as look at you.
Gino used to play dumb on the set.
He never said much, but I knew he was thinking: "Oh God! Is he gonna get through this scene? Is he gonna live through this shoot?"
It’s funny, Gino always had this fantasy about me and some big black man taking me down.
I believe that thinking about me getting stretched by some black man actually gets him off more than any boyfriend’s ever gotten him off.
Anyway, Gino is a great director — one of the best.
Chi Chi La Rue is also one of the best when he puts his mind to a film.
I say that because sometimes you’ll find him wanting to just get a movie over with, because he figures it’s trash, and it won’t work anyway.
The Bite is a good example.
That was the worst film I did with Chi Chi.
It was one of my worst films — period.
I’d had my rough times with Chi Chi before, so I just sleepwalked through it and did what Chi Chi told me to do.
That was such a stupid movie!
Walking around with my teeth hanging out!
I was so fucking out of it.
One reviewer said I was so stoned that when I called somebody "the Devil’s concubine," it sounded like I said: "He’s the Devil’s porcupine."
Hell, that may be what I said!
Who knows?
The best film I did with Chi Chi LaRue was Hard Knocks.
I felt comfortable with Chi Chi.
That might sound strange, because me and Chi Chi had a sort of negative history.
Of course, a lot of that was played up by the gay press.
Like I said, those fuckers loved to exaggerate everything about me.
Like my first Gay Video Awards.
I was supposed to be a host, and I went to the buffet like everybody else.
The next day, I read in the gay trades: "Jon Vincent was acting like a drunken slob at the buffet with a ton of food all over his plate."
I wasn’t even drunk at that one!
I was drunk as hell at the next one though!
That’s the one where I won Best Actor.
For some reason, Chi Chi La Rue called out: "Get ’em, boy!"
I yelled back: "Shut up, Fat Boy!"
In front of everybody!
I still can’t believe I did that.
That was so tasteless.
I was drunk as hell on stage.
In my acceptance speech, I said: "I don’t know why I got the Best Actor Award.
Well, yes.
I do know why.
It’s because I got drunk before each scene so I wouldn’t have to feel anything; so I could fucking act and be gay and merry and all that shit.
I’ve never been sober in any movie I ever made.
I do all my scenes high. ’Fat Boy’ there will tell you that!"
Chi Chi replied: "Well, Jon Vincent’s not gay unless he’s high."
He was the first one to say that.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that’s true for.
That’s the problem.
Later, when I got to know Chi Chi better, I realized he wasn’t just perceptive, he was truly caring.
I believe he sincerely cared about me not dying, and I was really touched that he cared.
I finally got that picture straight in my head years later by talking to him on the phone at Sharon Kane’s house.
He kept saying: "No, no, I don’t want to be responsible."
He was concerned.
He felt like the movies were making me drink more and do more drugs, and they were sending me on my way out the door.
He was afraid to work with me, because he’d seen the path Joey Stefano took, and he felt like I was taking the same self-destructive path.
Which I was.
Porn was a such a self-destructive lifestyle for me.
The whole sex industry was bad for me.
I think Chi Chi was trying to get me out of it in the only way he could, which was to quietly bad mouth me out of it.
He saw me self-destructing, so he started telling everybody: "Don’t hire him! Don’t work with him. He’s difficult; he’s trouble. Yadda-yadda...."
Today, I love him for it, because I know, now, that none of it was said out of dislike for me.
It was all good.
He did what he did out of fear for my life.
He sincerely did not want me to lose my life.
He wanted me to quit porn and live.
I respect the shit out of him today or that.
Crystal Crawford was a good director, but the major problem is she has a major mouth.
She was really nice to me.
I always thought I could trust her.
She’s a sweetheart; I love her to death.
I also like what she stands for.
Her and Chi Chi in drag — it’s all cool.
They’re not afraid to be who they are.
I admire that.
It’s like when I was staying over at Crystal’s house, every 10 minutes or so, Chi Chi would call; and then every 10 minutes, Crystal would call Chi Chi; and then every 20 minutes,
Sharon Kane would call.
These are people who should have been born with common body parts!
I think Chi Chi and Sharon are the two little leaders of the group, and then Crystal is a little dog that follows behind.
I never saw Crystal as being that way.
I thought he was a real intelligent and independent guy, but what do I know?
I know Crystal from doing a trick with him.
That’s about it.
I tried to do a movie with Crystal once, and I wound up getting really pissed off.
I was getting ready to do a scene, and I was shaving my hairs at the base of my cock.
I got a little nick in it, a little cut at the base of my cock.
Crystal looked at it and said: "You have to put a condom on!"
Which was fine.
I did.
But, I was the only motherfucker wearing a condom in the whole fucking scene, so I looked like I had AIDS!
Altogether though, I think Crystal Crawford is a pretty good guy.
Whoever hires Dave Babbitt will get a good director who is seriously into his work.
I only got to work with him once, on one of the last movies I made: Rassle, for All Worlds Video.
Before I get into the story behind Rassle, I’d like to point out another fucking idiot in porn: Rick Ford the guy who owns All Worlds Video.
He’s the biggest geek I’ve ever met.
I consider him "the Goofy" of porno.
He’s just a horny, perverted old man, and he doesn’t have a clue about what he’s doing — as far as film making is concerned.
Although, at least he had the sense to hire Dave Babbitt, so I guess he’s not totally senile.
Anyway, I ended up doing a good movie because of Dave Babbitt.
He is an awesome director!
One of the best I’ve ever worked with!
Although, I don’t think I was as good for him as he was for me.
It was funny because I did the hottest scene in Rassle with Steve Gibson, who is a good friend of mine today.
Back then, I hated him!
I could not stand him!
I came on the set and saw him and thought: "Oh, no! I have to work with this fucking asshole!"
The whole thing worked out pretty well except in the last scene when me and him had to wrestle each other.
We started wrestling, and right away, he started trying to choke me!
When he choked me and tried to overpower me, it pissed me off so much, I just slammed his fucking ass down on the mat.
We got into this major fight; and the director just kept rolling the cameras!
The whole wrestling scene in Rassle is real!
It’s a true, real fight!
There was nothing fake in it.
Steve kept trying to choke me, and I said: "You wanna choke me, you motherfucker?!"
I grabbed him, and I threw him on his back; and I started dominating him and swinging him around and throwing him all over the place!
It was kind of like the nude wrestling scene in that movie — "Women in Love."
We really and truly hated each other, and, at that moment, we probably truly wanted to kill each other.
I was on steroids, and I just lost my fucking mind.
After I slammed his face into the mat about four times, he was crying.
Then, we were supposed to go into the sex scene.
Imagine, this guy hated my guts, and I had to fuck him!
Still, nobody said a word, so we went right into the fuck scene.
We started getting after it, and he was not letting me stick my dick into him!
He was so rebellious to the whole thing!
Still, nobody said anything!
Finally, when I stuck my dick in him, he screamed.
A real scream!
Like: "Don’t do that to me!"
That’s what the scream sounded like!
I just said: "Fuck it!"
I got hard; and I just held him down and started fucking him.
He hated it!
It was the worst fucking scene he ever did, and it was probably the most perverted scene I ever did.
Somehow, it turned out to be one of the hottest sex scenes around, so people tell me.
If they knew how real it was, I don’t know what they’d think.
Me and Steve are friends now.
Today, he’s totally different.
He used to be such an asshole; but today, he’s clean and sober, and he’s just a wonderful guy.
I see him sometimes in A.A.
Today, anytime, he could be my friend.
Seeing somebody after they get clean like that; it’s amazing to see how their lives change.
Today, Steve Gibson is a phenomenal, phenomenal — let me repeat it three times — phenomenal human being!
He is truly a good guy, and it’s a pleasure to be around him.
For someone who was so hard core and looked like such a mean guy, he’s done a total 360°.
He’s still built like an animal, and I’m sure he can still be just as mean if you get him mad, but otherwise he’s a gentle giant, and I respect the ground he walks on.
If Steve Gibson is an example of what the program does, you can see why I’m trying so hard to do it.
Ditto for Alec Stone.
(Alec Stone is the guy who got his dick sucked by Jeff Stryker.)
I never worked with him.
He’s just a friend of mine.
We used to get wasted together; now, he’s also clean and sober in the program, and he’s one of the coolest people I know.
Jack Knight was a good director.
Actually, I don’t know if he was a good director or not.
I’m including him here anyway, because he was one of the nicest directors I talked with on the phone.
By the time I hooked up with him, I was a major heroin addict.
The first time I was supposed to go meet him, I hadn’t got my morning fix yet.
The scene was at nine o’clock in the morning, and I wound up waiting until eight o’clock to go downtown and score.
I was so late they told me they’d already decided to use somebody else.
I told him that I got lost, which was a lie.
He tried to use me again not too long after that in a film for Vivid.
On that film, I walked off the set before we even got started.
The reason I didn’t do the film for Vivid (nobody knew about this; but they will now!) is because when I got to the set, there was this tight-assed muscle queen sitting in the chair
getting his eye makeup done.
When I walked in, I was real nice to him, and I said hello.
He just looked at me with that sick, queen look.
That was it.
I said: "Fuck this!"
I turned around and left.
I just left the whole fucking scene right there.
You couldn’t pay me enough to work with a queen with attitude!
Anyway, that’s probably the end of my porn career right there.
I’m sorry I had to do it in that fashion.
I was sorry for Mr. Knight, but I just couldn’t pull myself together to do that snooty muscle queen act.
That little sawed-off short shit had an attitude, and I just didn’t want to put up with it.
If I do more porn in the future, it’ll probably be straight porn because Ejai’s not around so much now.
John Travis is one of the hardest directors I ever worked for.
It takes ten hours to get one scene done.
But hell.
I don’t know if all those 10 hours really meant anything, because all my other movies were way better than the ones he made.
Still, he’s a great director who knows his craft.
He just never gave me the kind of freedom I need on the set to do the best job.
On a movie directed by John Travis, there was no way to just let go and have a ball.
So, those are the directors I like.
Or at least have some respect for.
Like I said, there aren’t many.
Most porn directors — both gay and straight — are a bunch of assholes.
They’re a bunch of women.
They all talk a bunch of shit all the time about everyone, about each other, just like a bunch of women.
All of them.
God made a major mistake when he pulled these people out as men.
They’re women in men’s bodies.
They’re all perverts, too.
Every director I know is a perverted son-of-a bitch.
In fact, I’d say Crystal Crawford and Chi Chi LaRue are probably the most normal.
The directors I had the most problems with almost always worked for Falcon.
I won’t even say their names.
They’re a bunch of pricks!
They tried to make me be somebody I wasn’t in Revenge.
They made me be timid and passive, which was OK.
It was the way they went about it that pissed me off.
No respect.
No communication.
At least I was smart enough to take my bottoms out and get them drunk and have a good time with them and build a rapport with them, so we could make a good scene.
Revenge was the third and the last movie I ever did or ever would do with Scott Steubenville — the director for Falcon.
(I guess I will say one of their names after all.)
He was a heartless motherfucker, in my opinion.
He was a great director, but he just didn’t care for some people including myself.
He was missing the one thing that all truly great directors have, which is a compassionate heart for the performers.
It’s not easy to make a gay movie, and most of these directors do a good job, but they’re incapable of caring about the performers.
They put money first.
In porn, most directors care about nothing else.
If model has even average intelligence, he picks up on the fact that the director is exploiting the hell out of him.
Trying to talk him into doing sexual acts that he’s never done before is a good example.
(In my case, it made me very angry and obnoxious.
Like, when the cameraman would shoot from an angle going straight up my ass on a bad hemorrhoid day!)
Soon, the model gets a negative attitude about the whole situation.
Then, of course, the director can’t get what he wants and needs out of the model.
A model needs to be treated with respect.
If the director can’t respect — or at least be civil to the model — he should try to fake it at least.
That way, the model can fantasize.
In a good atmosphere — where the director is trying so keep the morale high — you can loosen up.
And you can do what it takes to do a good scene.
Usually, what it takes is a lot of fantasizing to keep your dick hard.
When you’re doing a scene with a model, who doesn’t turn you on, you need to be able to fantasize a lot, so the atmosphere must be cheerful and positive.
At least, that’s the way it is for me; I like to be friendly with everybody on the set.
With those Falcon fuckers, that was impossible.
As for porn performers — except for the ones I already mentioned — I got along with most of them O.K.
A few stand out in my mind.
Ryan Idol is cool.
When I first met him, I thought he was a joke, running up to Jeff Stryker at the Gay Video Awards saying: "I’m gonna be like you! I’m gonna be like you!"
But it wasn’t his fault.
It was just the drugs getting to his brain.
What fucked him up, really, was meeting The Maggot.
That’s when he started doing tremendous amounts of coke.
Ryan Idol is a talented guy, and I sincerely hope he gets sober.
I hope he survives porn.
Jeff Styker is one of the coolest guys in the world.
Stryker has no controversy with anybody.
I admire that so much.
I’ve had my times with Jeff Stryker.
I was drunk around him, and I’m sorry I was.
I was just a bully, and if I offended him, I’m very sorry.
He knows I’m a rowdy fucker when I get drunk.
He laughs at me, and I laugh with him.
God bless him, he’s one of the people in porn who’s more or less normal; he treats it like a business and goes with the flow.
You don’t hear about any catastrophes with Stryker; and it’s good to have people in porn who aren’t always at the center of some catastrophe.
(The only reason you don’t hear of catastrophes involving me is because I’m a survivor. I should have been dead years ago. I’ve OD-ed so many times on heroin, but I always made it
back.
I’m the guy with 20 lives!)
Jeff Stryker is a legend.
Truly.
A lot of people are jealous of him, but fuck them.
They haven’t met him.
I have, and I know what kind of guy he really is.
He’s a good person, and that’s rare these days.
I never worked with Chris Duffy, but I met him in San Francisco when I was staying there with my lady friend.
He was a good, good guy.
Friendly, down to earth, and a great bodybuilder.
Drugs eventually got the best of him.
Sad.
He was one of the nicest, friendliest people I ever met in my life.
He just had a drug problem.
Like the rest of us.
I never did much straight or bi porn because my wife told me she’d divorce me if I did.
She didn’t care about gay porn or about anything I did with men.
I guess it was because she felt guys were no threat to her.
I hooked up with Sharon Kane after was separated from my wife, but that’s another story.
Even before that though, I always had a crush on Sharon Kane.
Joey used to be with her, and that’s how I met her the first time.
I always adored her.
I thought she had pretty eyes and a beautiful pussy.
A lot of people talk about how great Sharon Kane is, and they’re pretty much right.
She’s an incredible chick.
What I respect most about her is her spirituality and the fact that she’s nice to everyone.
She’s a good soul.
Hopefully some of her rubs off on Chi Chi.
I can’t say the same about Samantha Strong!
I met her when I did Switch Hitters #3 for Entropics.
Me and her got into a big fight on the set.
She was the star of the show, and I was the muscle guy; and she actually told the director: "He’s gonna have to wear five condoms to fuck me!"
So the gay guy fucked her; and he shot a big load in her eye!
When he pulled his dick out of her, he just exploded and popped her right in the face.
I might have felt sorry for her if she hadn’t been such a bitch!
Then, I started fucking him and doing my dirty talk: "I’m gonna bend you over and drill you deep, boy!" and she couldn’t stop laughing.
The fucking bitch laughed all through my scene!
I said: "Bitch, I wouldn’t fist you!"
Obviously, me and her never worked together again.
Porn performers are like everybody else when it comes down to it.
Some are good people.
Some are bad news.
A lot of them, like me, have major drug problems.
A few, believe it or not, are actually normal.
But....
Out of all the porn stars I met or knew or worked with, the only one I ever really cared about was Joey.

CHAPTER IX
(4,202 words)

And Nicky — that was his real name — Nick really loved me.
He cared for me, and he showed it a lot.
I never told anybody about our relationship, because I was ashamed of the whole gay thing.
It was a real secret thing.
Not being your typical gay person, Joey really made the gay come out in me more than anybody.
I’m fucked up sexually, I know.
But I’m more straight than anything.
Me and Nick were secretly involved with each other, and I made sure he kept it secret, because I didn’t want anybody to think I was really queer.
Me and him had so many nights together partying.
We used to have a lot of hot sex together.
We fucked great on film; and we fucked great off of film.
Sometimes, we’d go fuck for five or six hours straight.
I’d fuck him vigorously.
It was some of the best ass I ever had.
It was the first time I ever really got into it with a guy.
I guess he was the first guy I actually became gay for.
Nobody ever knew about it.
He always thought I was ashamed of him.
I wasn’t.
I was ashamed of me.
Nicky didn’t want anybody to know about us either.
He was even more paranoid than I was about somebody finding out — but for different reasons.
Every time we’d get together to party, he’d say: "I don’t want Larry — that’s Chi Chi LaRue — to know anything. Don’t tell Sharon or anybody!"
He always thought I told other porn people what we did, but I never told anybody shit.
I don’t think they even knew we got together.
Maybe they did.
Who knows?
I never told them.
He used to say: "We gotta be cool, because I don’t want Larry to know you’re over here. If he knows you’re here, he’ll know for sure we’re gettin’ fucked up."
And we were!
We were fucking and getting fucked up as motherfuckers!
I didn’t want Chi Chi to find out that I was partying with Nicky either, because I was afraid he would badmouth me so bad in the industry, and then I’d never be able to get any work.
As it turned out, it didn’t really matter because Chi Chi and a few other people had already assured the industry that I was almost too difficult to work with.
My bad rep was already established; partying with Nicky wouldn’t have made much difference one way or another.
Still we tried to keep it really quiet.
People knew I was really hardcore, and Joey Stefano also had a reputation as a hard core partier, so we figured things would go easier for both of us if we kept it quiet.
Of course, we did porno well together.
I showed Joey Stefano special attention in the movies.
That’s because doing a movie with him was just pure pleasure.
Real, true pleasure.
It must have been obvious to anybody who really watched them.
It must have come through.
He was the most beautiful model I ever had to work with.
He was a notoriously great bottom.
The best in the business.
I am proud to say that I got to be with him — intimately — and to be part of his life.
When I first met him, we were doing a movie for Falcon called Revenge.
When I showed up on the set, I saw this beautiful kid with dark hair and blue eyes.
I could see he was a little sassy and had a little attitude, but he had the hottest ass I’ve ever seen in my life, a beautiful bubble ass.
At first, he seemed a little shy and unfriendly until I opened up to him and did my regular routine that I would do with any bottom.
I get as close as I can with the bottoms, and I’m as friendly as I can be with them so they’ll go along with whatever I’m doing, so there’s no trouble.
As you know, I love to be dominant — very, very dominant — with anyone I’m fucking.
As I talked to him and he started opening up to me, the first thing he asked was if I knew his friend, Larry — Chi Chi LaRue.
I said: "Yeah, sort of. I don’t know her well. I’ve met her a couple of times."
He couldn’t shut up about Larry.
"Larry this, Larry that! Larry’s gonna take me here and there in the business. Larry’s really showing me the ropes of the business."
Later, he introduced me to Chi Chi, and I could see she was all over him 24/7 like a fucking hovering hawk.
I could tell it was Chi Chi who made most of the business decisions for him — which was O.K.; but I thought he was taking all that "business" shit a little too seriously.
There really is no "business" in porn.
You do a film; you make some money; and, if you have any brains, you get out.
Nicky was trying to make it his life’s career, like a Hollywood actor, and he was sounding really stupid.
Anyway, we got each other’s phone numbers; and after the shoot, I went over to his house.
Him and Tony Davis were roommates at that time.
I knew Tony from the set of Heavenly.
When I got to Nicky’s place, the first thing I noticed was that he was smoking the coke.
Of course, I loved that!
I was at the height of my cocaine career when I was hanging out with Joey.
So, I indulged with him, and we smoked coke together.
That happened a few times, and we kept getting together again and again.
We’d go hang at his apartment and smoke coke together and have sex.
Eventually, we began to share our deepest secrets with each other.
One night, I asked him if he’d shot up before.
He said he had.
That was all I needed to hear.
I remember all I had at the time were these big steroid needles.
Those things will really open up your fucking veins.
We bled like pigs!
It was nasty.
When Nicky found out I’d shoot up with him, that’s when we became special friends.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
We became prime junkie buddies.
He was very close to me in a way that was not a real healthy relationship.
Still, it was a pretty good one.
We had a good working relationship — not just on screen, but also later on, when I went on tour dancing with him.
And like I said, we had great sex.
Our relationship was casual, but intense at the same time.
That was partly because of me and my attitude about the gay thing.
He’d always tell me: "You’re always so full of shit! You tell me you’re gonna do something, and you don’t do shit! You say you’re gonna be here, and you don’t show up!"
He was always bitching at me.
That movie we did called Revenge was the perfect portrayal of how things really were with me and Joey.
Can you believe it?
When we fucked, I dominated him, but in life, he bossed me around.
And I NEVER let anybody do that.
But Joey was different.
He was delicate.
He needed someone like me to boss around. I could see that; and I just let it happen.
As for drugs, they were a major part of it all.
What can I say?
We’d hide out together.
I’d hide from my wife, and he’d hide from everybody he knew; and we’d go get a hotel room and get fucked up out of our minds.
We’d get so high we’d pass out.
When we’d wake up the next afternoon, we’d look at each other, and we’d both say: "Oh, Shit!" and then we’d go our separate ways.
We shot up together many nights.
We shot cocaine.
We never shot heroin together.
I never did that with him.
Not like I’m doing it now.
It’s ironic.
He died of that and Special K and a bunch of other things put together.
I guess it doesn’t matter what substance we were using.
We were using.
Period.
Big time.
I’d hit him up; he’d hit me up.
We were both good at it, so we weren’t afraid to let each other do each other.
The whole while I was partying with Nicky, it was so strange because it was the first time in m y life, I could really see myself; I could see what addiction was doing to me.
We were both sick addicts, and the sickest thing was neither one of us gave a shit.
Or maybe, we just didn’t realize how far gone we were.
I think I really came to the reality that it was sick when I partied with Nicky; but at the time, I thought I had to be cool.
So me and him just got closer and closer as junky buddies.
It was a sick relationship in a way, but it was a relationship no matter how you looked at it — sick or not sick.
At one point, we got really pissed off at each other.
Nicky had an attitude, and I can’t really remember what I did to piss him off except badmouth him — which I did.
It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it now; but I did.
I don’t think he ever badmouthed me.
Certainly not as much as I badmouthed him.
We did some hair-raising shit together.
One night, we got a room at this really tacky Hollywood motel.
I won’t say the name, but the place was a real sleazebag dump.
As far as I know, it still is.
I remember the lady behind the desk pissed me off so bad.
She thought Joey and I were a little too wild to stay there.
She started banging on the door and screaming: "You must go! Go now!"
When we were collecting our clothes to check out, Nicky saw me bending over in a corner.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he asked.
I told him I was taking a dump on the floor — for spite.
What did it look like ?
Nick said: "You’re fucking disgusting! This is too much for me. I’m outta here!"
I guess it seemed like a harsh thing to do, but that lady had been building up to that for a long time.
She’d had it in for me and Nicky for a while.
Of course, those were the kinds of things I did back then when I was in a bad mood and hung over.
We did some of the wildest porn together.
It’s too bad they can’t show everything in the final cut.
One time, he was sucking my dick, and I shot a big load in his mouth.
It was one of the few times I shot a genuine big cum-shot.
Anyway, he fucking took the load, and then, he turned around and spat it out right in my face.
I don’t blame him.
I shouldn’t have done that.
I tried to pull out in time, but I was just too fucking horny.
It was Nicky who actually talked me into going to New York to dance.
He used to do it all the time.
When you have a porn career, you build a name for yourself.
You can use this name to hustle and do strip shows.
The first destination in my career was San Francisco.
I first went to San Francisco when Joey was there.
I was scheduled to dance at this two-bit joint called The Nob Hill Cinema.
The Nob Hill is probably the best cinema its kind; so that gives you some idea of what the others must be like.
In these gay theaters, porn stars dance three times a day.
Each session lasts five to seven minutes.
At that time, the Nob Hill was owned by a real asshole.
He required that the stars shoot a cum shot each show.
So right there, me and him didn’t get along.
I really couldn’t dance, but on enough liquor, I could strip.
So it as pretty difficult working at this place — especially since the owner treated us all like pieces of meat.
He actually used to say: "All the so-called stars are just meat, honey! Slabs of meat, no good for anything else."
I hated his guts.
The great thing about all this was that you could run your ad with the local pimp while you were dancing.
The main pimp in town was this Spanish guy.
He was a fair pimp — not a scumbag like The Maggot in L.A.
So, for a week, you could make between $10,000 ten and $15,000 dollars.
In my case, I know I usually made at least $10,000, but I would only bring home $1,200 to $1,500 because of cocaine and alcohol.
And also because of trying to be the big shot "star" that I thought I was.
It was in San Francisco where I first saw Joey Stefano leave his trail of love dust.
He had the pimp in love with him; he had all the tricks in love with him; almost everyone I saw was in love with him.
All the porn stars worked the Nob Hill at that time — Chance Caldwell, Jack Dillon…
But there was nobody like Joey.
He was a pure professional.
I’m a top, and I could only fuck so much, but he could get fucked all day and all night long.
Which is what he did.
He’d dance, and then he’d turn tricks in the back.
He could have sex a lot longer than me.
I didn’t have the stamina that he had.
When it came to hustling, he really knew what he was doing.
He really had it.
It was funny how he would get credit cards from people.
He’d have a pocketful of credit cards from three or four different tricks.
He’d be using the hell out of those credit cards too!
Buying up the fucking town.
He impressed even me!
He was the best.
He was even more popular in New York.
There, the big theater was The Gaiety.
He was always after me to go dance there with him.
"We gotta go dance in New York!" he’d say.
He’d be all excited about it.
I did go there with him one time.
He introduced me to the lady in charge upstairs at The Gaiety.
Some foreign lady.
She took one look at me and said: "You Jon Vincent?"
"Yes."
"You have to follow rules!"
When she said that about following rules, I wondered if everybody thought of me as some crazy motherfucker.
Nicky cleaned house at The Gaiety.
He usually made around $8,000-to-$10,000 a week just at the theater.
That’s not even counting the tricks he turned from his escort ad!
It was unreal.
Some weeks, he must have made over $20,000!
Nicky and I got crazy in New York together.
At night, we’d go out to the clubs like the Men’s Factory.
Me and Brian Hart used to go there, too.
Me and Nicky smoked a lot of rock together in New York.
I had a few places where we would go and score rock.
I can’t say where we went to score because everybody will know who it is, and I don’t want to hurt that person.
The last gig me and Nicky danced together was at The Black Party in New York.
There must have been 4,000 or 5,000 people at the Roseland Auditorium — a shitload of people.
There was a little stage right up in the top corner where the whole crowd could see.
It was me, Nick, and a couple of other porn stars — I can’t recall who they were.
I told everybody to get off the stage except for Nicky and me.
Of course, after throwing everybody off the stage, I knew I better perform.
So I’m standing there in front of Nicky trying to get my dick hard.
Nick was sucking me off, and my dick just wouldn’t get hard.
I battled it and battled it, and nothing happened.
I could see all those eyes just staring at me.
In my mind, I had the delusion that everybody was thinking: "Get that dick hard!"
Of course, at this point, there was no way I was gonna get it up with the music playing and nobody saying anything and all those angry, staring eyes.
So Nick had a plan.
There was this bench-press on the stage, and he bent over the bench and said: "Finger my ass."
Normally, fingering his ass would have worked, but that night — nothing!
Then I had an idea.
I shoved my whole fucking fist up his ass.
People started screaming at me: "HEY, YOU GOTTA PUT A GLOVE ON!"
When I pulled my fist out, it was a little nasty, and I made a mistake by trying to shake it on the ground.
I ended up hitting three or four bald-headed leather queens behind me right in the face!
I could hear them scream practically in unison: "YOU BASTARD!!!"
So me and Nick just left the stage.
There was nothing else for us to do.
I remember Nick looked up at me and said: "Well, I guess I ain’t gettin’ no dates tonight!"
I felt really bad.
I was embarrassed for him as well as for me.
I said: "Oh, man. I’m sorry!"
Nicky said: "It’s that fucking Sharon Kane. She’s been feeding me all those vegetables!"
That incident in New York really put a damper on our relationship.
It was fucked up, and it hurt us.
I regretted it many nights, because he didn’t like me much after that.
We never did another movie after that.
I never meant to hurt him.
I wished I could have told him how sorry I was about that.
I never got to tell him.
Each time I saw him after that, we were friendly with each other, but things were never the same.
My friend, Nick — God rest his soul — was one of the sweetest, most kind-hearted people in the world.
Joey Stefano, on the other hand, had a little ego problem — especially early in his career.
He was really stuck up with people.
He had his nose way up in the air.
He gave off these vibes that said: "Get the fuck away from me. I’m a star. You know?"
He was not a very nice guy at that point.
I was the nice guy back then.
That’s why a lot of people didn’t get close to him.
I saw it from a distance.
People got pissed off at him.
Then — when he got into drugs later in his life — he turned into a really nice kid again.
But by that time, it was too late.
Nicky needed to talk to someone, but he never got to talk to the right people in his life; and that’s what took him down to the bottom.
He needed counseling.
I was going to rehab after rehab while he was just sitting out there doing drugs.
Rehab saved my life — many times.
Nicky didn’t get rehab.
Maybe he went once or twice, but don’t think he ever did.
He’d clam up and not talk to anybody.
Sometimes, he’d call me up, and I’d go over and talk to him.
And hell, it wasn’t more than 45 minutes after, we’d get into a long sob-session and cry that we’d say: "OK. Now let’s go out and score."
We’d talk about how quit drugs.
And then we’d go get some.
Late in his career, I could tell how society had taken its toll on him, because he suddenly got real quiet.
He changed at the end.
He got lonely.
Like I have.
I could see him being nicer to people, to everybody — even to me.
He always mouthed off at me a lot.
That attitude.
The last night I saw him was about eight months before he died.
I walked into some club or other in New York.
He stopped me, smiling at me, and asked me how I was doing.
Funny, that was the first time I’d ever heard him sincerely ask me how I was.
It was usually: "So what are you doing?" with a smirk on his face.
He always had attitude with me.
A lot…
Anyway, I loved him.
Now that he’s gone, I really miss him.
I wish I could have done more things with him, spent more time with him.
There are so many things I never told him.
The sex industry used both of us up like dirt.
We shared that together.
We talked about how we got used up, how people just used and abused us, but I don’t know if he really understood the full impact it all had on him.
He was the longest-lasting bottom in porn history.
Danny Sommers was great, but he just burned out, really.
Nicky never burned out.
People always wanted to see Joey Stefano getting fucked by somebody different.
It was his sex appeal.
Still, he never felt that way.
He thought he was burning out fast.
One day, he asked me: "Jeff, do you think I’ve still got it for the business?"
I said: "Man, you’ll always have it for the business. Don’t worry about it, bro!"
"Man, it’s just getting hard on me. I just can’t function as well as I used to!"
"Nicky," I told him, "it’s all the fucking drugs you’re doing, man. Both of us are just shoveling drugs down because we’re trying to kill the pain."
He got pissed.
"No, no. It’s not the drugs. That’s bullshit, it’s not the drugs!"
He didn’t believe me.
He was always trying to deny it.
He denied it to the end.
He was high on the hog when he started in the business.
He always had a thing for calling it "the business" — "We’re in the business; the business this; the business that; Larry got me into the business; me and Larry and the business."
This was when he first started out.
I could tell a big difference between when he first started and what happened later on right before it all came to an end.
I sat back, and I watched the whole thing fall apart right in front of my eyes — how he changed, how I changed, and basically what happens to almost everybody that gets into the
business.
He was very kind and very sweet, and he changed into being just a major stuck-up little brat.
But even I didn’t realize how bad "the business" would take its toll on him.
Partly, because all the time I watched it happen to him, it was happening to me the same way.
I watched him become lonely; I watched him become scared and full of fear.
I watched him build a major wall around himself, his own prison built exclusively for him.
It was a prison that he locked himself into, and he stayed there.
He never escaped from the prison that he built for himself.
He stayed there forever, right up until he passed away.
I watched him die slowly.
Today, I’m doing the same thing.
It’s very sad to see someone so sweet and so lovable and innocent just taken away.
By the business.
He thought we were gonna run the business.
Of course, it was just the opposite.
The business ran us.
It ran our asses right down to the fucking bottom.
I watched it happen to Nicky; not knowing that it was happening to me, too.
I just didn’t want to see it.
I watched him change personalities.
He got to a point where hardly anyone would speak to him because they thought he was so stuck up.
This was very familiar and lonely to me.
I knew just what he was going through.
During his last couple of years in the business, he became so lonely, it made him open up to people and start being nice again.
But, it was too late. I didn’t really party with him at the end.
I just talked to him on the phone.
I remember the last time I talked to him. I think he was over at Karen Dior’s house.
He told me he couldn’t handle it anymore.
We talked about it.
It was so fucking sad.
That we had so much in common.
That we were being used up by this industry that was so heartless and tasteless and was run by a group of mean-ass motherfuckers.
And they know who they are.
Me and Joey fell into the same trap, the same quicksand; and I’m sinking in it today.
Anyway, God be with you, Nicky.
Rest well.

CHAPTER X
(7,198 words)

For a guy who didn’t know shit about the whole gay dance-circuit, I did a lot of fucking touring!
It got to the point where I did dancing for The Maggot strictly.
He loved that!
He would follow all us models around acting like he was still some sort of big-time Hollywood agent.
I worked for The Maggot for a long time.
I got out of the whoring part of the business, and then he stuck me into the dancing part of it.
Actually, I never decided to stop tricking; I just decided to use Jon Vincent’s name to dance.
After my last dancing tour, The Maggot got busted and sent to prison.
But I quit him long before that.
I just decided it was over.
I didn’t want to do it anymore.
I traveled to a lot of different cities dancing — even to Europe once, to Dusseldorf, Germany, which is a pretty kinky town.
The coolest city I danced in was the first one — San Francisco.
The Nob Hill Cinema, which I already mentioned, and The Campus Theater are the two big-time gay cinemas to dance in.
They’ve both been around for years.
Whatever you may think of those establishments or their management, one thing is for sure.
You clean house dancing at these theaters!
And why not?
You’re a star.
Even stars have to do three shows a day at the Campus, and two at the Nob Hill.
That’s not bad really.
It’s five shows a day in New York.
Like I said, the only bad thing is that at the Nob Hill, they require you to shoot a load each time.
That’s really taxing.
You have to lie on the stage and jack off with 50 to 75 people sitting there in the audience staring at you.
Talk about pressure!
When I used to dance, I was the wildest motherfucker.
I used to jump on people’s seats and stick my dick in their faces.
One time, I saw this man sitting alone in the front row.
I stuck my toe in his mouth, and I said: "Suck it!"
I could tell this poor man was the kind of person who would never have done something like that in public, but I manipulated him into sucking my toe in front of everybody.
I yelled at him: "You keep that toe in your mouth, boy!"
The guy was frightened to death.
I felt bad.
I said: "Man, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to."
He said: "You made me do it."
I never made anybody do anything.
Both these theaters paid around $2,000 a week to porn-stars to come in and dance — hustling through the local pimps or, better yet, through your own ad in the Bay Area Reporter,
the local gay newspaper, you make $4,000 or $5,000.
So, realistically, you can make $7,000 to $10,000 in a week of dancing.
That’s a pretty good week.
More than you’d make doing a movie; more than you’d make hustling at home in L.A.
Of course, the problem was hanging onto the money in a place like San Francisco.
Or anywhere else for that matter.
When you go on tour dancing year after year, before long, all the different cities start to look alike, and everything becomes one big blur.
The only thing that seems real is the money.
No, that’s a lie.
The only thing that’s real after a while is the booze and the drugs the money buys.
My drinking really escalated when I went to dance.
I’d drink so much when I had to go onstage, because I couldn’t dance.
I could strip a little bit.
But I couldn’t carry on the footwork to do a real dance.
There were little bitty moves I’d do — mostly dick moves, hip action, kind of like bumping and grinding but more subtle.
The, I’d resort to going into the crowd to grab people and bring them up onstage and embarrass them and shit.
I’d actually make the audience a part of my act!
I guess it worked because, even though I couldn’t dance worth shit, I was one of the highest-paid porn stars on the circuit.
Me and Ryan Idol were the highest-paid strippers out there.
Me, him and Katt.
Me and Ryan Idol made more than Katt did.
We were making $2,500 a night.
Of course, The Maggot got paid his percentage right off the top.
They would pay me my $1,700 in cash.
Unfortunately, a lot of my dance gigs were fucking disasters.
Sometimes, when the night was over, I’d wind up doing only one song.
Plus, I would really shake the place up wherever I went.
I remember being on 10-day tours where I was arrested three nights out of 10 for taking my clothes off in the wrong places.
I’d get so drunk, I’d forget where I was!
I’d forget I wasn’t supposed to take my fucking clothes off in that state.
I got arrested in Ann Arbor, Michigan; I got arrested in Kentucky; and I got arrested at The Velvet in Atlanta.
Each one of those nights, I was so fucking drunk.
Some nights, I would do a great show; some nights it would be just a disaster.
I was so drunk one night in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I ripped my G-string off and wrapped it around some dyke’s head.
Three girls attacked me on the floor.
So I went to jail.
That was 1993.
With shit like that happening in some cities, I was under a lot of pressure to put on a good show in other places.
The way I handled that pressure was to drink more alcohol.
I had major stage fright!
Every gig I did — all through my dance career — I had to force myself to get up there and perform.
Dancing live on stage is the most terrifying experience.
I don’t feel comfortable, because it’s not like being in a group of chorus dancers.
There’s just one guy: me, solo — out there naked in front of everybody.
It scares the shit out of me.
I got to the point where I just couldn’t go on stage.
I’d drink a whole bottle of vodka before I had to go on.
I’d make it through the performance somehow; and then the partying would really begin.
All these people would come to party with me after the dance.
I’d buy ounces of cocaine and cases of booze for everybody, and I’d have everybody dancing.
It was unbelievable.
A total fuck-up.
I’d stumble to my room at four or five in the morning and pass out.
Then I’d wake up a few hours later, and my clothes would be scattered everywhere.
I’d have a plane to catch in 20 minutes, and I’d be a total mess.
I’d barely get my clothes together and get on the plane to the next town.
I remember this one tour I did in 1993, I must have made around $18,000, and I came home with less than $5,000.
By the time I got off the plane in L. A., I looked like I had a dreadful disease from drinking, shooting coke and not sleeping.
Catastrophe.
One of the advantages of going on tour was that I was away from my wife, and I was free to fuck around with strange pussy.
I thought it was an advantage.
In my fucked up way of thinking back then, I didn’t even stop to consider how wrong it was to cheat on her.
I just loved to go out and hunt pussy.
I loved the feeling of romance.
Every time I’d meet a girl, I have to have a whole agenda of shit to be able to tell her so I would be accepted.
Obviously, I couldn’t say to a chick I was interested in: "Hi! My name is Jeff. What’s your name? Blah, blah, blah. What do I do for a living? Well, I used to be a baseball player. I was a
construction worker for a while, then a bodybuilder. Currently, I’m a gay porn star and a prostitute."
What girl in this world is going to like you or even talk to you after she hears that?!
So I’d just say: "I’m. a dancer."
Which was way more acceptable.
And it was true.
I found that it was always the easiest way to open women up to my crazy ass.
I’ve had a lot of women in my porn career.
Most all of them, as long as they knew me for at least six months, had no problem accepting the fact that I was a gay porn-star.
At least 70-percent.
Most women are pretty open-minded when it comes down to it.
But in the beginning, I always used the "dancer" routine.
Anyway, one night I was in The Stud — a bar in San Francisco, with my friend, Jack Dillon.
San Francisco is totally mixed, so even though The Stud is considered a gay bar, it’s always full of straight women.
I met this beautiful blond named G.B.
She was on vacation from Knoxville, Tennessee.
I didn’t know when we first met that she was traveling with a gay boyfriend.
I started shooting all kinds of shit to her.
I told her how I used to play baseball, and that I now worked as a dancer.
After a while, I noticed she was staring at me with a big smile on her face.
I knew right then she’d heard I was Jon Vincent, the porn star.
It just so happened that her friend had met some guy on the dance floor, and both of them knew who I was!
So, right away, I said to her straight up: "You like guys with big dicks, don’t you?"
"I’m sure you have one," she said.
I asked her if we could go someplace a little less crowded.
We did; and soon, I had her in bed sitting on my face and sucking my cock.
The rest I’ll leave to your imagination.
Eventually, I became pretty close to this girl.
Now realize, she knew I was Jon Vincent, but she had no idea what Jon Vincent was all about.
One time, when I was on the road back East dancing, I called her up and asked her to come meet me in Cleveland, Ohio.
Boy, if I’d known how rough the queens were in Cleveland, I would never have invited her to the show!
I was scheduled to dance at around 10:30 p.m. that night at this bar.
I met her at the airport and took her partying with me in Cleveland, and then I took her to my show.
By this time, I was shit-face drunk.
Like always.
Those of you who’ve seen my strip shows know there’s no room at them for some intellectual, little yuppie bitch.
This was another catastrophe waiting to happen.
When we got to the club, I told her to go have a drink at the bar while I got ready to do my set.
Of course, I immediately went to my dressing room and got even drunker.
Then they called me out on stage.
The first thing I did was grab this big drag queen in the front row, and I threw her down on her back on the stage.
I told the drag queen to stay where she was, while I took off all my clothes.
I had the M.C. throw me some baby oil, and I sprayed it al over this poor drag queen’s beautiful outfit.
Then I got on top of her and started dry fucking her and sliding all over her.
I was so drunk, I’d completely forgotten that this chick, G.B. was there.
When I looked at her, she looked like somebody had just killed her mom and dad.
The queens were going wild, and G.B. was almost in tears.
She was very frightened, and I couldn’t understand what was tripping her out.
I think every queen in the bar knew I had this girl there.
After a while, they didn’t like it.
You could tell, because when I walked up to her to ask if she was alright, the whole bar went silent.
So, I grabbed the microphone and yelled: "WHAT THE HELL’S WRONG WITH YOU DEAD FUCKING QUEENS?!"
The, I got hit in the head with a bottle!
All of a sudden, they were throwing all kinds of objects at me!
I got the bitch, my money; and we got the fuck out of there!
She told me to bring her to the airport.
That was all she said.
I didn’t say a single word.
I pointed to a cab, threw her in the back seat, paid the cabbie, and said: "Airport!"
Then I turned around and went my way.
The last time I danced was in Chicago in 1999.
It was the first time I’d done it in more than five years.
By that time, I was a major heroin addict.
I was so strung out, I showed up in Chicago with terrible, dirty tennis shoes with holes in them, a pair of blue jeans, my leather jacket, and nothing else.
Thank God, my doctor-friend from New York flew there to meet me so he could at least give me cab fare to get back to my hotel.
He also bought me some shorts to wear.
If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have made it!
That whole first night I had to go out looking for heroin, because I was too sick to go onstage.
I finally found some and snorted it before I went onstage, and I felt better.
It was amazing!
I actually had to get up there and dance sick as a dog from detoxing.
I wish I’d never gone.
I was there for a week, and every night, I’d have to take taxis to go out and try to score.
I’d never been to Chicago before, so I had no idea where to go to get Shiva.
Finally, I found this girl one night on the street.
I picked her up, and she came with me and scored for me.
I knew that was the end of my dance-career right there.
My heroin addiction was so bad, it was time to quit.
You can’t go traveling around the fucking country doing live performances when you’re a heroin addict.
You can’t live any kind of a life when you’re a heroin addict.
Your whole life is just being a junkie.
It’s been eight days now since I slipped.
Things are getting much clearer.
I’m learning that I can stay sober.
I can stay clean.
It’s not impossible.
I’m trying to straighten up.
I have a lot of people who want to talk to me now.
Who want to know how I’m feeling, what I’m planning on doing with my future.
We have some intense conversations.
I get a lot of response from people on all the manipulation I’ve done in my life, on how I manipulate people to my power advantage.
It’s so weird talking about it.
And for the first time, too.
I’ve never really talked about that aspect of my life before.
For a long time, when I would do jobs, I didn’t do just the one-hour deal and then leave; I went after the gusto.
When I found somebody with money — and there were a lot of people who had a lot of money — I found myself getting involved with them.
Pulling my games.
Making them believe that I really cared — just long enough for them to get enmeshed with me.
Enmeshed enough where I could control them and eventually ruin them.
This wasn’t a chosen style of work.
It’s just the way I did it.
And I was doing this while I was living with people!
I always wished I could just do a trick for one hour and just get paid and leave.
Because you catch so much bullshit when you’re living with somebody and trying to pull the game.
There’s just a lot of grief!
Imagine living with someone full-time and manipulating his emotions!
To you, it’s all a game to get money, but to him, it’s all real!
It’s love!
What could be more heartless?
What could be more cruel?
Sure, you get the dude’s bank account, but you pay!
You’d better be prepared to deal with someone having a complete mental breakdown.
You’d better be prepared to watch someone else’s pain while knowing you’re the cause of it.
Believe me, that’s almost as bad as being in pain yourself.
Baseball player; construction worker; bodybuilder.
I found these were reputable things to do in life.
But having sex for money is something that has been pretty common for me since I was about 16 years old.
In my gigolo career, I’ve had two women and about 50,000 queens.
Both the women took major nosedives.
Before I got heavily into baseball, I found this fine sugar-mama from Lafayette, Louisiana.
She used to love to watch me play baseball.
This fine lady was around 38 years old.
She was a divorced mother of three girls, aged 13, 17 and 19.
The whole clan was finer than a broke-dicked dog.
I wanted to fuck her two oldest daughters so bad, but I knew that wasn’t possible.
This was the first real nosedive someone took because of their involvement with me.
This lady would spend incredible amounts of money on me.
Within three years time, I broke her for a quarter-of-million-dollars.
After she went broke, I even made her give me her wedding band so I could pawn it for drug money.
I can hardly believe all that now; that I was so cruel at such a young age.
I didn’t have a clue that I was already so full of evil.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
This is really where my hardcore prostitution began.
About 10 years ago, I met a lady at the Hot Tubs on VanNess Avenue in San Francisco.
She’d seen my picture in the Bay Area Reporter newspaper, and she was very intrigued.
She wanted to fuck me.
Now, this bitch was loaded.
She was also very classy and well-educated.
There must have been a dark star over this lady’s head that day.
It was the unluckiest day of her life.
She fell desperately in love with me.
I made this lady so crazy in the head, that she would do whatever I said.
If I had told her to jump off the Empire State Building, she’d have asked me: "What kind of dive should I do?"
My lady friend owned a phone sex service.
I’m not sure exactly how much she made.
Several grand a month at least.
Whatever the exact amount was, it was a salary I was very comfortable with.
She gave me whatever I wanted.
Anything I wanted.
If I needed $1,000, it was there in a heartbeat.
I was very needy.
I needed a new Rolex; I needed a Corvette.
I was so needy that I ended up taking her for $350,000 in a little over two years.
Eventually, I came to love this lady for who she was.
When someone really cares for you that much, you can’t help but begin to feel the same way.
Then I began to get very paranoid that something bad would happen to me.
I knew I wasn’t supposed to do this to people.
Nothing bad happened instantly.
But if you read this book, you can see the slow, agonizing punishment God has inflicted on me over the long term.
Out of the $5million I made in 12 years of hustling, I’ve bought myself nothing but misery.
Anyone who has ever learned anything about money knows that it doesn’t buy happiness.
My lady friend got to the point where she couldn’t go a day without me, and I couldn’t be without her.
We were co-dependently hooked on each other.
She became the biggest co-dependent of my life besides my wife.
I dragged her around with me everywhere, and we did some hair-raising shit together.
The stories about us are chilling.
I’m going to share only a couple of the most cheerful ones.
She would come down to L. A. and rent a suite on Sunset Boulevard at The Mondrian Hotel.
These days, The Mondrian is very picky about who they rent their rooms to.
That’s because me and my lady friend ripped the fucking roof off the place many times over.
We’d rent the suite for five or six days straight.
Sometimes, I’d invite my friend C. to stay with us.
After about the second day, me and C. would be too stoned to fuck her anymore; so I’d call in reinforcements.
I’d have a guy come over — usually from Frontiers Magazine — to service her; and I’d slip him a $100 out of her purse.
My lady friend wasn’t much into those Frontiers guys, but, like I said, she’d do whatever I told her to.
Most of the models in Frontiers are pretentious-faggot assholes who act like they’re straight, but all they really want is a big dick up their asses.
For instance, I have a good friend named Diego, who is a masseur and model in Frontiers.
That’s how I met him.
In fact, I taught him how to work out.
I decided to get Diego to fuck my lady friend.
I called another hustler out of Frontiers who also claimed to be straight so that Diego wouldn’t be all alone with her.
I gave them the low-down on the situation.
I told them what they were supposed to do and not to waste any time.
I brought them into the bedroom to meet her, then I left discretely, closing the door behind me like a good host.
I wanted to get back to hitting the crack pipe with C.
After a couple of minutes, C. said: "Vic, why don’t I hear her screaming?"
I went to the door to listen.
I opened the door slightly, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
My two troops were kneeling over my lady friend with their hands on each others dicks and tits, and my lady friend was laying there staring up at the ceiling with a bored look on her
face.
I said: "What the fuck is this?"
My friend Diego turned abruptly and said in his thick Spanish accent: "You get out of here, Jeff!!"
Between hits on the crack pipe, C. called from the other room:
"I think he’s tryin’ to prove somethin,’ Vic!"
C. is such a genius.
I was so disappointed, I made both of them leave without payment.
Over the years, I made San Francisco my second home.
I liked it partly because my lady friend lived right across the Bay in Berkeley.
I moved in with her, and — like I said — I went through her life savings in a couple of years.
I even moved my old friend, C. into her house.
He was supposed to stay there to body-build and to get clean and sober.
I had her get him a gym membership and rent him a car.
Of course, he spent most of his time doing jobs and going to San Francisco to score coke and crystal.
When I’d get into town, I’d go right along with him.
I had some of the wildest times of my life in Frisco.
The wildest tricks I ever did were there, too.
Realize this is a small-town compared to New York and L.A., but it’s intense.
By this time, I’d had it with working through pimps.
My experiences with The Maggot had soured me on pimps forever — even fair ones.
So when I went up to the Bay Area to live with my lady friend, I ran my own ad in the Bay Area Reporter.
You do jobs for a $100 in San Francisco.
In L.A., it’s $200 or $150.
Anybody who says they’re getting more is just full of bullshit.
The going rate is the going rate; and if you try to charge more, you won’t get hired.
At a $100 in San Francisco, you can do eight or nine tricks a day.
I loved doing in-calls, because I didn’t run into any bullshit.
When I’d go to people’s houses on out-calls, I’d run into a lot of freaks.
Real kinky shit.
These tricks would have black leather dungeons in their houses with chains and restraints hanging from the walls; and the smell was a greasy smell — like Hell itself.
Thank God, I’m a top in these jobs.
I feel sorry as hell for the bottoms.
When you’re a dominant top, you have it pretty easy.
You don’t get hit; you don’t get spanked; you don’t get beat up.
Nothing happens to the top.
If anyone gets hit, it’s the person on the bottom.
I was famous for bending people over for 15 minutes and rocking the shit out of them, then doing a fake cum shot, and going "Ahhhhh!.. I’m coming!"
Then: Boom!
I’m out of there!
I don’t think I’ve ever really had the patience to stay in a trick longer than 15 or 20 minutes.
For a $100, 15 or 20 minutes is the right amount of time.
You always say you’ll stay an hour, but you always lie.
I’ve been in some of the most elite leather-rooms imaginable in San Francisco, where there are three or four harnesses hanging from the ceiling, different whips lined up all around the
walls; racks and whipping posts and 10-foot-high wooden crosses covered with black leather — every kind of torture device you can think of.
I knew this was true S&M.
I could never pull S&M tricks real well until I realized that the guy I was beating the shit out of really wanted to be beaten.
I used to hold back when I had to whip or spank somebody, and they would get upset.
Now, I can turn that one-hour S&M job into five or 10 minutes of making that poor bastard beg for his life.
This is a case of him getting what he didn’t really want.
Once I was calloused up emotionally, these S&M people really brought out the anger in me.
I’ve done some nasty tricks in San Francisco.
I drove a two-foot long, 30-pound dildo up some guy’s ass.
I got about a foot in.
When he was finished cumming, and I pulled it out of him, and I saw his bloody guts on the end of that dildo, it changed me forever.
Another time, my friend, Nick Cougar, and I were at this guy’s house, and he wanted to spank us.
This guy was a real mean bastard.
He whipped us severely.
He beat the shit out of us far beyond what he led us to expect.
So my friend Nick said: "Let’s tie this motherfucker up and beat the shit out of him!"
We told him we wanted to do a role-reversal scene.
We’d switch for just a little while, and then he could really punish the shit out of us for spanking his ass.
Like a fool, he fell for it!
He even told us where the duct tape was so we could tie him up right!
This guy was married to a beautiful wife.
At least her pictures looked beautiful.
They were all over the house.
So we tied the stupid fucker to the bed.
Then we got really drunk and out of control; we shoved a dildo up his ass and taped it with duct tape and left him there on his stomach for his wife to come home and find him.
I actually wanted to untie the guy before we left, but Nick said: "Fuck him!"
We got into some trouble for that one.
I lost a lot of business after that.
A lot of guys didn’t want any part of me.
But, hey, it was Nick that did it.
I thought we should have freed the man, you know.
I didn’t think it was right to leave him there for his poor wife to have to take that dildo out of his ass.
But Nick Cougar would do anything.
He was one raunchy, crystal-addict motherfucker back then.
He used to carry a loaded .45 with him all the time.
I heard he got into trouble for that one time and went to jail, because he actually shot at somebody.
He used to abuse the shit out of The Maggot, as I recall.
Of course, I was all for that!
I remember this one trick we used to do who called himself The Bitch.
He was a movie-theater owner.
He was a pretty-easy trick — considering.
All he wanted to do was crawl around on the floor and kiss your boots.
Then he’d dress up in stockings and high heels and strut around saying: "I’m a bitch! I’m a fucking bitch! And I’m gonna get on the back of your motorcycle."
He was a really sweet guy.
In fact, he bought my wife a car.
He’d always pay for two or three tops at once, and he always had a lot of straight porno movies and magazines for us to look at while we were there.
It was pretty cool.
Well, one time, me and Nick Cougar and Brian Hart were over at The Bitch’s house.
We were drunk and coked out of our minds and having a great time.
I left for a while, at one point, to go score some more coke.
When I got back, the party was still going on except The Bitch was sitting in a corner crying and holding his cheek which was all swollen.
When I asked what the hell happened, Brian said: "Nick was sitting on the couch looking at some straight porno, jacking off and enjoying himself, and when The Bitch crawled over to
him and started licking his boots, he said: "Get the fuck away from me!" and kicked him across the room. He just about kicked his fucking face in."
Like I said, Nick Cougar would do anything.
Another hustler who thought he could do anything was my old friend Mike White.
He was this big bodybuilder from New York, and he thought he was the king of the hustlers.
"I can handle any scene!" he used to say.
"I can out-hustle anybody!"
Yeah, right.
One night, I took Mike to see one of my best San Francisco regulars — a guy named George.
He was originally from L.A., so he was a $200 regular, which is rare in a Francisco.
George was a real Jon Vincent fan.
He was also really into pain.
Anyhow, I took Mike White over there, and we started getting a little kinky.
And when I say "kinky," that’s exactly what I mean.
George was already high on ecstasy when we got to his place.
Then we all got fucked up on Jack Daniels.
Then George said: "I want you to pierce my balls."
So I’m sitting here sticking needles into George’s nuts, and I noticed Mike White had this strange expression on his face.
Then for some reason, I stopped putting he needles through the skin of George’s balls, and took a nail and a pair of pliers, and I stuck the all through the head of his dick.
He let out this high pitched scream: "Eeeeeee!"
It was a small, really sharp nail; I didn’t pull it out, because I knew was gonna bleed.
Mike White was holding onto the wall, and he was sort of trembling.
He said: "What are you gonna do now?"
I yanked the nail out.
It wasn’t a large nail.
It was sharp though.
I swear they’re the worst.
George bled like a motherfucker.
Then, I handed Mike a nail — a slightly larger one, and he threw up all over George’s expensive Persian carpet!
He really lost it!
George screamed: "Oh, my God!"
I said: "Just get the fuck out of here, man!"
Mike said: "I’m gettin’ out! I’m gettin’ out of here forever!"
Then George turned over to get up, and Mike saw "JON VINCENT" on his ass.
I’d taken a pin one night and heated it up and dipped it in ink and tattooed his ass.
That was it.
That did it.
Mike White, this big tough bodybuilder, started screaming like a virgin schoolgirl: "Man, I can’t handle this! I just can’t!"
He ran out of the house still screaming!
It was too funny!
For some reason, that "JON VINCENT" tattoo on George’s ass freaked him out big time.
Anyway, you’ve probably got the message by now that San Francisco is a place where people are real naughty.
They’re so naughty, they’ll share everything they own with you, including their diseases.
I’ve been in the most obnoxious grease-holes in San Francisco and I’ve seen some of the most hair-raising shit.
Everything else in this book is a cakewalk by comparison.
Now, I’m not talking about the leather rooms, the S &M dungeons.
I’m talking about the real grease-pits — the crystal holes full of disease.
Hell, they invited disease.
People in these hellholes were always asking me: "Do you fuck bareback?"
I swear to God, they would actually ask me that!
I knew those people were insane!
It was easy to go insane in such a sick environment.
I’ve stayed in apartments there shooting crystal for like five or six days straight thinking all the while: "What the fuck am I doing here? I’ve got to get out of here!"
But still, I stayed there shooting more poison into my veins.
Sometimes, I’d stay in some greasy dive for so long and get so high on crystal, I’d feel like I couldn’t leave on my own, and I’d call my lady friend to come and get me.
I’d feel that depressed and crazy!
Crystal is a dirty, disgusting drug.
In some ways, it’s worse than heroin.
And, if you’re not careful, it’ll lead your ass to heroin real quick.
Not to mention other things.
Especially in San Francisco.
You can feel the AIDS in San Francisco.
You can fucking smell it!
There are some gays out there — and I don’t just mean in San Francisco; I mean in the fucking world — who are very cruel.
They wish death upon you.
If they’re HIV positive — or they’re dying of AIDS — they want to take you with them.
They have no conscience about giving you HIV.
I guess they feel like they’ve got nothing to lose.
Of course, that’s not the majority of people with AIDS.
Not at all.
But there are people like that out there; I’ve met them in the grease pits.
I don’t want to be hasty, but I just want to say — on the record — that I am HIV-negative.
I don’t know what people think, but I do not have AIDS.
I was tested for HIV recently, and I tested negative.
I don’t really know how that is, but it is.
And I’m very grateful.
It seems like a miracle, but it’s true.
My liver is bad from all the booze and steroids, but I’m HIV negative.
That’s a fact of life; and, hopefully — knock on wood — I’ll stay that way.
Ever since I first moved to California, I always had the paranoia that I had AIDS, because I got my dick sucked, and I sucked dick on jobs.
After Heavenly, I always wore condoms in my movies.
But then, Don Moore, the guy I fucked in the front of the fireplace in Heavenly, died of AIDS four years after we did the movie.
I was so scared, I wanted to get tested then.
At the same time, I was so terrified by his death, that I wouldn’t get tested then.
On top of my own fear, I felt the fear of giving it to my wife.
I thought I couldn’t fuck her now.
I ate her pussy and jacked off, and she started getting curious.
I think she picked it up.
She realized that I might have contracted HIV, so she let me wear condoms and all that.
Through all that, I wouldn’t get tested for anything in the world.
I was running scared for four years.
It was amazing.
It’s amazing that people today won’t get tested because they’re scared.
Believe me, getting tested is a lot less scary than not knowing for years and always wondering if you do have it.
It’s a lot better than being in the dark.
I always thought I had it.
Everybody thought I had it.
Everybody thought they had it.
Once I got tested, I found out I was negative, and it all worked out well.
It was such a relief.
Still, I always ended up doing something dangerous.
So even after I got tested, I always had to face another three or six or 12 months of paranoia.
I’d go do something stupid like shooting up with used needles.
Even though I cleaned the needles with bleach and alcohol, I still had the paranoia.
Or like fucking whores.
I never fuck a woman with a condom!
I’d get coked up and go get some rank-ass whore.
She’d be dirty as hell, but I’d pull the condom off anyway, and that would scare the hell out of me.
And I’d go through another couple of months of paranoia.
Eventually, I’d get up the courage to go get re-tested, and I’d be negative.
This went on all the time I was in California.
I’d be paranoid, and I’d go get tested.
I’d test negative; I’d go do something stupid; and then I’d go get tested again for the eighth, 10th, 15th time.
Somehow, thank God, I was always negative.
Of course, I never fucked without condoms on jobs.
Never!
Not once!
I never do unsafe sex anymore.
I quit sucking dick a long time ago on jobs.
I only sucked dick on jobs for the first three years I was doing them, but the drugs made me paranoid.
By the time I got hooked on heroin, I shot only with new needles.
It was funny, because when I was on crystal or cocaine, I was always dying to get that needle in my arm so I could chase that high.
When there were other people around shooting up, it could get dangerous.
Heroin, you shoot once, and you’re off and flying for 12 hours.
I’ve never used a needle twice on heroin.
I’m very safe with that.
It’s hard to talk about how I’m negative when so many people are positive.
It’s inconsiderate in a way.
People don’t want to hear how you’re negative when they might be positive.
I have compassion for those people.
AIDS doesn’t scare me anymore.
When me and my wife split up in 1995, I lived with a guy — who was positive — off and on for almost three years.
We always had safe sex.
I thought it was so unfair that some people actually held AIDS against him.
People thought I was crazy for living with this guy, but I knew I could avoid contracting HIV by being careful.
Today, this man is closer to me than almost anyone in the world.
He’s like my father now.
He ended up being probably the best example of my life, and I pray God never takes him, because he’s a wonderful person.
He’s a gay person who’s very gay, and he never could understand me hustling, and he could never understand me being straight.
But, he’s finally come to the conclusion that I am straight, and he won’t have sex with me.
He doesn’t want to have sex with me, because he’s so militantly gay.
He’s into gay rights, and he wants a lover who will treat him good, which he deserves.
He also happens to be clean and sober — for 10 years now; and he lives for me to be clean and sober.
He’s totally into me growing up and getting my life going.
It sounds funny — considering my circumstances and my drug addiction and everything.
But in that one way, I’m the luckiest man on Earth.
If anyone should have ever got the disease, it should have been me.
One of the last times I got tested, I was with my friend, D. J., the man who has AIDS.
Me and him went to this place on Venice Boulevard where porno stars go.
They do 10-minute testing there.
The funny thing was, I was the one who should have been positive.
Everyone thought that.
Especially D.J.
He got upset that I was negative.
He said, "It’s just not fair."
I didn’t get mad at him.
I shared his feelings with him.
It wasn’t jealousy.
It was an injured feeling.
He knows how crazy and careless I am.
He’s not like that at all.
He had this one experience, and it got him.
That’s why he felt like that.
He felt like — if I was negative — then he sure as hell should have been.
Actually, it’s not fair.
It’s not logical anyway.
I asked him if he was mad because I didn’t have AIDS.
He said no.
But that he believed that some people just couldn’t get it.
I said: "That’s not true. I’m not as careless as you think I am. I’m a top. I never get fucked."
The truth is I used to love getting fucked, but I don’t anymore.
I quit liking to get fucked when I was 18 years old.
Another reason I stayed negative is I was married for 10 years.
I never really fucked around very much except with jobs, and with jobs, I wear condoms.
So the most careless thing I ever did was shooting up — which is probably the most careless and most dangerous thing anybody ever could do.
I look at it another way.
I think God has something for me to do on this Earth that’s very important.
I think I’m here because of some divine purpose.
I’ve OD-ed 18 times.
And I didn’t die.
So God must be keeping me here for a reason.
I just have to get myself sober and stay that way, so I can get my life together and find out what it is.
Anyway, I’d been going to San Francisco pretty regularly for over a year before getting hooked on heroin.
Which was pretty remarkable.
Because San Francisco is definitely the heroin capital of the United States.
I had no way of knowing it.
But I was about to learn a major life lesson.
A lesson about two girls.
One was Shiva.
The other was my wife.

CHAPTER XI
(6,862 words)

I’ve probably done every drug there is at one time other another.
Cocaine, crystal, weed, pills (my favorites were Valium, Xanax, Percodans, Phenobarbitals, Seconals); I’ve done them all, and, at the time, I thought I was enjoying them all.
But if I had to sum up my life of addiction, it would be this: I was a drunk, and then I finally found the drug heroin.
I guess it was inevitable.
Maybe, it was karma.
It was 1995.
I was in San Francisco, bodybuilding at my lady friend’s place in Berkeley.
I was a big motherfucker then.
Bigger than I ever was in any of my movies.
My lady friend was helping me get ready to compete in the N. P. C. Ironman contest.
I weighed 250 pounds, and I was ripped!
I had a 30-inch waist.
At over 250 pounds!
Guys just don’t look like that these days — unless they’re professional bodybuilders.
I always get real big like that when I train seriously.
Then, like I said, I get back into drugs, and I go down to a 190 pounds real quick.
My lady friend was trying hard to keep me sober.
She thought the competition would keep me occupied and away from drugs.
It would give me a positive goal to work for.
My poor lady friend.
She loved me so much.
She was already going broke, but she did everything she could to help me get ready to compete.
She got me a gym membership, got me a car.
She let C. move back into her house, and she got him a gym membership just so I could have a training partner; she even hired me a fucking posing coach.
She believed in me.
She really wanted me to get myself together.
She thought I could have a future as a professional bodybuilder.
I could have too, but just like all the other times in my life when I had a chance to turn myself around, something happened.
I got off tracked.
The whole time I was married, I never fucked around on my wife until the very end.
No, that’s a lie.
At 260, I attracted all kinds of women.
In the clubs, I had pussy hanging all over me.
I was fucking women right and left.
I’m not proud of it now, but I did.
The first time I cheated on Ejai was when me and C. took that trip to Louisiana and spent all that money on P.’s credit card.
I met this bitch who was so fine, I told myself I just couldn’t help myself.
Kind of the same way I like to think bout drugs.
Anyway, my wife got her feelings hurt so bad, it was truly a sad situation.
I was a real motherfucker back then.
My wife was hurt so bad, she didn’t know how to fucking react.
She didn’t know whether to leave me or stick it out.
Seeing my wife hurt so badly hurt me too.
So I dropped the other woman flat, and me and the wife went on as though nothing happened.
Except, we both knew something had happened.
Something had changed forever.
The last time I fucked around on Ejai was when my friend, Mike Marino, came and picked me up one night at my lady friend’s place in Berkeley with this gorgeous blonde who drove a
Mercedes.
Of course, there were plenty of bitches in between.
Like I said, I’m not proud of it now.
It just the way I used to be.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
That first girl’s name was Gwendolyn, and she was the finest bitch in Tucson.
In fact, she’d been the first runner-up for Miss Arizona.
Like I said, P. got my wife a house in Beverly Hills so she could live there and not bother us.
So this entire time, I was just fucking around on her right and left.
I’d stay away for days and nights on end, and Ejai thought I was with P.
Gwendolyn became a big problem.
Right from the start, really.
I spent over $300,000 on her just trying to get to fuck her; and I didn’t even get to fuck her until the following week when she came down to L.A!
She worked the shit out of me.
She hustled me more than I ever hustled anyone in my whole life.
It was very, very humiliating.
She got me good.
Even today, it’s humiliating.
P. always threw it in my face how she hustled me.
Most of what P. said about everything turned out to be true.
I just didn’t listen to him.
When me and C. drove into Tucson, our first stop there was an elite men’s clothing store.
I was checking out the merchandise when C. ran up to me all excited and said: "Vic, there’s this fine chick working here!"
I turned and saw the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life.
I took one look at her, and I said to C: "I’m going to go to no ends to get that bush."
I bought a few suits from her; then I asked her If she wanted to come show my friend and me around the town.
She said: "I’d love to."
I picked her up at seven, and all thoughts of Ejai were completely absent from my mind.
This chick was so fine.
I wanted to fuck her so bad.
The next day, I bought her a pair of expensive gold coin earrings at a jewelry store owned by a friend of hers.
At this time, all she knew about me was that I was a baseball player and a dancer.
With my luck, of course, her friend turned out to be a big queen who just loved my movies.
The next night when I picked her up, there it was again.
She had that big smile on her face.
I knew exactly what had happened.
Whenever I see a girl smiling that sort of secret little smile at me, I always know that he’s found out my true background; and I feel like he’s going to tell me it’s not going to work out.
So I switched gears — fast.
I said: "Listen, I love to eat pussy. So why don’t you just let me give you some good cunnilingus."
She laughed at me for about five minutes.
Then she went back to my hotel with me.
Of course, I had the platinum American Express card in my porno name that M. gave me., and it had no credit limit.
That’s enough to impress any pussy.
I learned a big life-lesson from this.
It doesn’t matter what you do in life.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
If you’ve got money, you’ve got pussy.
So I ate her pussy, and she sucked my cock all night long.
We didn’t actually fuck though, because she wouldn’t let me do it without a rubber.
The funniest thing happened that night.
I had to get up to go to the bathroom, and I caught C. in he hallway listening at our bedroom door and jacking his dick.
He was so embarrassed; I promised him I wouldn’t tell.
Meanwhile, I told Gwendolyn I’d fly her out to .L A., which I later did.
Of course, by that time, I’d already met somebody else.
Yolanda was a Cuban girl who lived in Long Beach.
Unlike most of the women I fucked around with, she knew who I was before I even saw her, because she was kind of a fag hag.
She had a lot of gay friends.
Yolanda was the most beautiful Spanish girl I’ve ever seen in my life.
Beautiful face, long black hair down to her butt.
Her only downfall was that she had a bush the size of a forest.
Spanish women don’t really like to shave, I guess; and a big bush is like a source of pride.
I learned to deal with that.
What I couldn’t deal with was the way she smelled.
I took Yolanda home the first night I met her and fucked her; and her bush smelled so bad that even after I took a shower the next day, you could still smell it all over me.
Now, of course, I had to make a modification with her at this point.
I said: "Baby, you’re really beautiful, but you’re definitely going to have to start taking baths instead of showers."
She understood what I meant, and she didn’t argue with me.
After she made the modification in her hygiene, she and I became great sex partners.
However, the next morning when I had to go to Vegas with P., I still had the smell of her pussy all over me, even though I’d showered — twice.
Someone sitting next to us on the plane told me I needed to go take a shower.
When I told him I’d already showered, he replied: "Then you need to go get another girlfriend!"
P. was pissed!
He kept saying: "That bitch’s smell is all over you!"
The smell didn’t come off my fingers for three days.
Thank God my wife was In Louisiana when I fucked this girl!
These girls knew I was married.
The first one didn’t care about my wife.
Yolanda did.
She knew was in love with my wife — not with her.
I didn’t understand how much me being married bothered her until the night me and C. came back from our trip.
I told P. I was going to take C. over to Yolanda’s house.
Which I did.
Then, I went back to P.’s place to make it up with him.
Still, I hadn’t learned my lesson after everything hat happened in Arizona.
I went back to Long Beach the next evening.
I let myself in.
When Yolanda came downstairs from the bedroom, I was sitting on the couch, coked up and horny.
She knew I wanted to fuck.
So I stuck my dick in her on the couch and started fucking her.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my friend C. was in her bed upstairs in the loft.
I wondered why he was staring at me as I was fucking her.
Yolanda stopped me from fucking her, and she said: "Listen, I know you don’t really care about me, and I really like your friend."
I was flabbergasted!
I had fucked all of C.’s girlfriends!
I took away every single good-looking girlfriend he had since high school.
So, right there, I understood.
That look on his face meant: "I got you back, Motherfucker!"
It really bothered me to lose this girl, but it was my best friend taking her, so I didn’t mind as much as I would have if she had left me for a stranger.
Plus, I had my Arizona romance on my mind.
With my reluctant blessing, C. moved in with Yolanda.
I could never understand how he pulled it off until one day, much later, me and my wife drove with C. and Yolanda to Napa Valley.
I figured it all out when I saw Yolanda sucking C.’s dick in the back seat and listening to her gurgle on his giant load.
It grossed my wife out!
She said: "Nothing could be more fucking disgusting than that!"
I knew C. could shoot loads like Peter North.
Sometimes even more!
And I knew then that Yolanda was one cum-eating bitch.
She would have dropped me for any big-shooter, because I could only come a drop.
I could never really come much.
I don’t know why, but I’ve never shot big loads.
As I said, I believe I invented the fake cum-shot.
At any rate, C. and Yolanda became a couple, but they didn’t last too long because of C.’s drug abuse.
It hurt me to lose Yolanda, but at least I was losing her to a friend, so that made it easier to take.
Plus, I was all excited about seeing Gwendolyn again.
Sure enough, about a week after I introduced C. to Yolanda, Gwendolyn flew into L.A.
By this time, P. had given me a Diners Club credit card.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
The way it worked was, the bank would call him whenever I reached the limit.
I picked Gwendolyn up at the airport, and we stayed at the Long Beach Sheraton.
I invited C. and Yolanda and all my friends over, and we had a wild fucking party.
I reached that credit limit real quick.
At this point, P. wasn’t putting up with any shit. he made a phone call to my wife and told her the room number at the hotel.
She called me, and asked: "Jeff, are you fucking around on me? Don’t you love me any more? Please… just tell me. I’ll go home and I’ll never come back out here again."
That was it.
The party was over.
I don’t care how fine the bitches were or how good they could fuck.
My little girl was calling me home, and I went immediately.
I had to go home and talk to Ejai for about four hours to convince her that what she’d heard about me and Gwendolyn wasn’t true.
Of course, that didn’t stop me from going back to the Sheraton that morning at about four o’clock.
I still hadn’t fucked Gwendolyn.
I’d spent all this money on her, and I still hadn’t fucked her!
I had to make sure this happened!
By the time I got back to the hotel, I felt sick.
Not sick with guilt — physically sick, like I was coming down with the flu.
I was; and so was Gwendolyn.
We both lay in bed with high temperatures.
There’s something about having a high fever; you get real horny.
Either that, or she was just making me horny.
Nothing could be hotter than a beautiful girl’s pussy when she’s got a fever.
Hot in every way!
I was so fucking rock hard when I stuck my dick in her, and she was as wet as Niagara Falls.
I busted the bottom out of that motherfucker!
Never in my life had sex been so hot and so great!
This girl wasn’t used to big dicks, and that made it all the more exciting – for her and for me.
When I took her to the airport the next morning, she could barely walk onto the plane, she was so sick.
We were supposed to say goodbye forever then and there, but the shit with Gwendolyn lingered on for awhile, and it took its toll on my marriage.
Like a fool, I kept in touch with her, and about three months later, I visited her in Tucson at her mom’s house.
I fucked the shit out of her for about 20 minutes (her mother wasn’t home!), and I noticed something strange about her pussy.
She seemed real soft inside.
I pulled out and saw that her pussy was swollen like a baseball!
I didn’t know what the fuck was wrong.
I brought her to the doctor, and we found out that I’d given her the old herp!
The wicked thing about all this is that I wasn’t even broken out!
I always know when I have sores.
I learned from that experience that it’s possible to give a girl herpes even when you don’t have a single visible blister.
The weirdest thing is Ejai has never had it; and I’ve fucked her when I was broken out and everything.
Other girls get it by me barely breathing on them.
Anyway, when Gwendolyn found out she had herpes, she asked me if I was happy.
She said: "So, are you happy now?"
I guess she was a little upset.
I said: "Well, look at it this way: we don’t ever have to use condoms again."
That didn’t go over too well.
Actually, I was as surprised as she was, and I didn’t really know what to say.
So, back to the airport I went.
These fucking airport scenes were getting depressing time, we really said goodbye.
Especially since, this life went on.
Unfortunately, so did my fucking around on my wife.
Like I said, finding out about Gwendolyn the way she did changed her.
She became real jealous after that.
She didn’t trust me anymore.
And really why should she?
There were some ugly incidents.
Like the one at P.J.’s place.
P.J. was a regular client of mine.
He also died of AIDS.
God rest his soul, too; he was another great person.
One night, me and Nick Cougar went to the Hard Rock Café, and we picked up these two fine chicks.
Somehow, I got lucky, and I got the pretty one.
I took her to a hotel and banged her.
The next night, me and Nick and Brian Hart were all over at P.J.’s house.
Nick and Brian and P.J. were inside, and I was out on the porch talking to the girl I met the night before.
Suddenly, my wife pulled up driving Nick’s truck, with Nick’s wife and baby in the front seat with her.
She was screaming: "Who the fuck is that bitch?!"
I thought: Oh no! I started walking up to P.J.’s house, and the girl took of in her car.
Ejai floored the truck and took off after her and chased her all the way down to La Cienega.
Nick’s wife was holding onto the baby for dear life; you could hear the truck practically coming apart.
Ejai finally caught up with the girl at a red light down at the Beverly Center and pulled her out of the car by her hair and beat the shit out of her.
Meanwhile Nick’s wife was holding onto the baby screaming: "Stop! Stop! You’ll kill her!"
But Ejai just kept pounding the shit out of the poor girl.
Then, she came flying up the street to P.J.’s house.
She barged in the door; she didn’t knock or kick or anything.
Poor P.J. looked up and asked: "What’s all this?"
Ejai just marched straight to the kitchen and grabbed a 12-inch kitchen knife and started chasing him up the stairs.
He was running from her screaming: "Everybody clear out! She’s gonna kill somebody!"
And everybody started running because she was drunk, and they knew she meant business!
She was halfway up the fucking stairs after P.J., and he was running and falling and screaming for his life!
I ran and caught her from behind and held her.
I had to hold her for like 30 minutes; she was just going nuts!
I told her the girl was just a friend of mine, and, of course, that was all bullshit.
She knew better.
Just like she knew better about Gwendolyn and maybe even Yolanda.
She just made herself believe what she wanted to believe.
That put a big strain on my relationship.
Living with that pretense.
I’m sure that’s where it all started.
Fucking life with Ejai.
She really cared about me so much; and I just totally shit on her.
When I think about it today, from where I am today, I can hardly believe it.
I never showed any regard for any love I ever had from anybody.
I’m really upset about that today.
I’m so upset at how I fucked my whole life up with heroin.
I look back and think of all the things I did; how I hurt people and didn’t care about the ones who loved me .
It was truly pathetic behavior.
Pathetic!
Today, I’m starting to wake up a little bit, and I think: My God, what have I done?
I don’t have a wife anymore.
I’m living in somebody’s house who just lets me live here.
My friend G., God bless his soul.
And my friend, Hope, God bless her soul — for letting me live with her.
And here I am just shuttling back and forth between these two places on the beach.
And I don’t have a place to live because of heroin.
Again!
Because of heroin!
P. offered me a car to use.
He got me a credit card and a cell phone.
And, of course, I abused it.
I fucked him on the credit card.
I fucked him on the cell phone.
I fucked him by lying to him, telling him I was clean and sober.
He knew I wasn’t.
He knew all about that Camellia chick bringing heroin over to me every fucking night.
Three times a day and night!
That’s how P. busted me.
I was stupid enough to call the heroin dealer from my cell phone, and when P. paid the bill, he found her number in the call log.
God.
No respect.
No respect for anyone.
Not even myself.
Hell, maybe for myself least of all.
The last bitch I fucked around with on my wife was the charm.
That one was a real disaster.
Her name was Finesse.
Sounds like a French streetwalker, doesn’t it?
Well, she wasn’t much better than that.
Only I didn’t know it then.
I thought I was the luckiest man in the world.
I thought I had me some kind of angel.
This girl picked me up out of a magazine.
Or rather, she picked my picture out of a magazine.
Mike Marino picked her up at Johnny Love’s — the most popular pussy hang-out in San Francisco.
For you people out there who don’t know who Mike Marino is, he’s a really big bodybuilder.
He’s this tall, really good-looking Italian guy, about six-foot-five, around 230 pounds.
He gets a lot of women, and he brought her home and fucked her.
He told her what he did for a living, and he showed her a copy of the magazine he advertised in — The Bay Area Reporter.
I had an ad in the B.A.R. myself.
At the time, I outweighed Mike Marino by about 38 pounds.
Like I said, I weighed almost 260, and I was solid as a rock.
When I was in that kind of shape, the world was a pretty glamorous place for me, too.
The women were easy.
My picture automatically caught her eye, and she asked Mike if he knew me.
He said: "That’s my best friend."
The next night, they drove to Berkeley and picked me up.
Finesse took us back to her place in San Carlos, and I was nervous because I didn’t know what was going on.: Both of them were acting mighty loose.
Still, Finesse really caught my eye with her beauty, sex appeal, and opulent lifestyle.
She walked in the door of this beautiful condo, sat down on the couch, waited for us to sit down opposite her, looked at me, and said: "I hope you don’t mind. This is what you’re here
for."
Then, she took off her blouse.
I started to laugh.
I said to Mike: "Man, it’s not my birthday!"
I thought she was some kind of birthday stripper or something, and I couldn’t understand what the occasion was.
He whispered in my ear: "She just wants to fuck you, man."
I later learned that these two were on Seconals.
That was okay with me, because she was going to need the Seconals to go through with what I was going to give her.
I fucked her for about four minutes.
Then, I asked Mike to hold her legs up real high, and I went right up her ass like Satan!
No rubber; no nothing!
I busted the bottom out of that motherfucker!
Then, something terrible happened.
Me and her started liking each other.
That’s where my family nightmare began.
I was like the character in "Harlem Nights" who thinks he’s fallen in love, telephones his wife and tells her he won’t be home.
Ever!
That’s exactly what I did.
I called Ejai and told her I wouldn’t be home for a while.
When she asked me why, I said: "I’m working out! I’m going to enter this bodybuilding contest. I have a posing coach here."
All that was true, but, of course, it had nothing to do with me not going home.
In fact, I was spending so much time with Finesse, I pretty much forgot all about the competition.
Of course, Ejai figured it out real fast.
"You found a girl didn’t you?’
"No, no. I’m workin’ out real hard! I want to turn pro. I’m going for it."
She didn’t buy a single word of it.
Anyway, I moved in with this bitch, and for a week, I thought I was in heaven with the girl loved.
Seven days later, I began to miss the real love I’d left in L.A.
My wife!
But it was too late.
By the time I decided to dump Finesse and go home, she’d found a guy.
She moved the motherfucker in, and she told me not to come back anymore.
I sat in Finesse’s bedroom and cried for an hour straight.
The old lesson: "Beauty’s only skin deep" hit me like a ton of bricks.
Because this girl’s true face came out quick; and it sure wasn’t beautiful!
Blond and pretty as she was, she was a crystal addict — big time.
That was just what I needed to be around!
And when it all came down to it, I wanted Ejai’s box.
She had this box that I grew up with.
That box is my box, and I didn’t want anybody else touching my box unless I gave her permission.
That’s just the way it was.
Finesse would be at work, and I’d be crying on the phone: "Oh, Ejai, please let me come home! Please!"
I squealed like a baby.
"Please I wanna come home!!!"
And she’d say: "No, I’ve moved Randy in. I’M WITH HIM NOW!"
She stuck me so hard.
I thought the world had come to a fucking end.
I was stuck out on the fucking road.
I lost my home.
I lost everything in one lust-moment.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to me in my whole life.
That one piece of pussy that I had to come clean to my wife about.
One piece of pussy ruined my whole fucking life!
You think drugs had a bearing?
This had a big bearing, too.
This made me start doing heroin right there.
This is the main thing that made me get started.
So there I was stuck in the Bay Area.
Now at this time, I was doing a LOT of steroids.
I didn’t really give a shit about the contest anymore, which freaked my lady friend out.
I talked a good game about competing, but actually, I just wanted to keep that look going.
My image at this time was a bigger drug to me than my cocaine and alcohol use, and it was taking a serious toll on my liver.
I got to the point where I couldn’t drink anymore, because my liver was in such bad shape.
In fact, the steroid dealer told my lady friend that if I was gonna drink alcohol while I was doing so much juice, I should just put a fucking gun to my head and get it over with.
In my drug addict way of thinking, I decided it was better for my liver to take Percodans or Percosets, because they made me feel like I was drunk on alcohol.
That was my first opiate fixation.
That was also when C. found Jeremy.
Jeremy was the straightest-looking motherfucker in the world.
He looked like an eagle scout.
He was anything but!
He was only 19 or 20 years old, but he was a major crystal dealer, and in the Tenderloin no less.
In San Francisco’s Tenderloin, you can get any drug, anything you want.
I had Jeremy get me pharmaceuticals, because I could have the same feeling with them as I got from booze without hurting my liver.
One day, Jeremy told me he couldn’t get my pills anymore.
He said he just wanted to deal crystal.
I told him I wasn’t interested in cock-shrinking crystal.
I wanted pills.
At first, he refused.
He said: "I ain’t runnin’ all over the fuckin’ City lookin’ for Percodans and Vicodin."
So I threatened him.
That’s how bad I wanted it.
That’s how far gone I was already, and I didn’t even know it.
It was terrible.
I got violent.
I grabbed him, and I said: "Look, scumbag, if you’re gonna get crystal for C., then you’re gonna get me my Percodans or I will beat the fucking shit out of you!"
I knew Jeremy was the only one who could go down to Jones and Eddy Streets and score from all the hoodlums down there and get me the pills, so I threatened to hurt him.
I actually threatened to beat up a drug dealer to make him go get me drugs.
It came back on me too — big time.
Of course, the threats worked; he went.
One day— this was about the fourth or fifth delivery he made — he couldn’t get the Percodans; but he was scared to come back empty-handed, so he brought me back some K-4
Dilaudids.
I’d never done a K-4 before.
In high school, I took Roche 2s when I took off with my parents’ yacht.
Of course, I wound up getting lost out in the fucking Gulf of Mexico, as a result; and, of course, I didn’t learn a lesson from it.
So I took , took Jeremies’ Dilaudids.
They were the same thing as the Roche 2s, except they were four milligrams.
I ate one, and I threw up all over myself.
That was typical.
Usually, no one enjoys heroin the first few times they do it.
Everybody gets sick the first three or four times.
There are, no exceptions to this rule.
Many people get hooked because they have to come down off of some other drug like speed or cocaine.
Therefore, they’re less likely to get sick; so they get addicted much more quickly, because they experience the great ride sooner than the person who just tries heroin without any other
drugs in their system.
As it happened, the next day, I went on a three-day speed binge; after which I got this brilliant idea.
I cooked up a K-4 and shot it; and I fell in love.
This was my real entry into the world of heroin.
I fell in love; and I forgot all about my problems with Ejai, and I was gone forever.
Meanwhile, things weren’t working out with Finesse.
This girl was beautiful on the outside, and that was it.
She was possessive as hell, and she had no class.
We’d go out somewhere, and she would grab other girls and push them aside when she thought they were hitting on me.
Girls are vicious!
Really, bitches are ruthless.
You think guys are jealous?
You’ve never seen a cat fight!
Bitches will go after each other.
Finesse would go after girls on the dance floor screaming: "Get away from my boyfriend! Don’t fuck with him!"
She was one tasteless cunt!
She was always fighting with everybody in the clubs.
But the girls didn’t care!
They knew she was a whore.
So, they’d just go after me that much harder!
Me and Finesse went to the bodybuilding contest.
I was supposed to enter it, but I was too chicken-shit to get up on the stage.
The sad thing I would have won it too; I was the biggest dude round.
The other really sad thing is I hurt my lady friend so bad — not just by chickening out of the competition, but by ditching her at the last minute in the hotel room and going with
Finesse.
I wanted to go with Finesse, because she was beautiful, and she fit what I thought was my image.
Terrible.
Anyway, a funny thing happened.
The contest was held in L.A., and while we were there, Finesse wanted to go to a Hollywood party.
So I took her to one.
As soon as we got there, she saw this movie star that she loved, and before she sat down, I said: "Let’s all take our clothes off."
This party was at a famous Hollywood agent’s house, and he always used to love that about me.
I get things going fast!
The agent grabbed a big-strap on dildo and handed it to Finesse.
She stared at the thing like she’d never seen one before.
I said: "Put it on, Baby."
The agent said: "Yeah, go over there and drill him, Honey."
I said: "Go ahead, Finesse."
This agent was one of the top agents in Hollywood, and this was one of his top stars.
So Finesse went over and stuck the dildo in the big star’s asshole and fucked the shit out of him.
Then he took her upstairs and fucked her for a while.
I let him do it because he’d been humiliated so much, he deserved some pussy.
Plus, he was her ultimate fantasy; she really wanted to fuck him.
So I was a good guy — even though I still thought I was in love with her at this point, and I was all jealous and shit.
The agent kept saying to me: "Leave them alone, kid."
They fucked upstairs for an hour.
Afterward, me and Finesse went back to our hotel.
She was all Quaaluded out, and she passed out immediately.
I was still detoxing from booze and cocaine, so I slept, too.
(Unbelievable as it sounds, I was clean and sober through all this! I remember the agent kept telling me: "Kid, you’re great like this! You should stay like this, kid!")
Next morning, we went to Denny’s, and she was totally silent.
When I tried to have a conversation with her, she said: "Oh, Jeff. I can’t talk right now."
The bitch didn’t say a word for two days.
Two days!
It totally fucked her head up.
Hey, she wanted to go to a Hollywood party.
She hates me for that to this day.
By that time, I didn’t give a shit.
All I wanted was my wife back.
Finally, everything worked out.
I got to see my wife in L.A.
I dumped Finesse.
Ejai and her boyfriend broke up.
I moved back home for a while, but then Ejai lost her job.
She still worked as an apartment manager, and when she lost her job, she lost the apartment along with it.
So me and her moved into my lady friend’s house in Berkeley.
Of course, my wife didn’t know this was my girlfriend, too.
She thought we were just friends.
Or maybe that’s just what she pretended to think.
Who knows?
Like I used to say, it was real Jerry Springer material.
I was pretty well hooked on K-4s at this time, but no one knew it except me and the dealer, Jeremy.
And, of course, C.
He knew because he as shooting them too, although he never got strung out on them the way I did.
I don’t know why.
C. didn’t become addicted to opiates until years later — when he came to stay with me and my doctor friend in New York.
That’s when he became a heroin addict.
After about eight weeks in Berkeley, me and Ejai decided to move back to L.A.
Of course, I couldn’t get Dilaudids in L.A.
Jeremy, the drug dealer, had gotten hooked on Dilaudids along with me, so I told him he could move in with me in L.A., and we’d dry out together.
Of course, this was just more drug-addict thinking!
And, of course, I convinced myself it would really work.
So, we took the drug dealer, and we went to L.A.
It was me, my wife, Jeremy, and Bruiser, the Rottweiler my lady friend bought me, in a one-bedroom apartment with me and Jeremy trying to kick Morphine.
I spent five days clean and sober rolling around on my bed like a flopping fish.
Jeremy was sick too.
It was really bad.
That’s the sickest I’ve ever been I think — besides now.
Jeremy went back to San Francisco before the end of the first week.
I didn’t last much longer.
After five days of withdrawal, five days clean and sober, I walked Into Barney’s Beanery to sit around with my wife while she drank.
There was a disabled man with a cane sitting next to us.
I figured he must have had some Dilaudids to kill the pain of his injuries.
I was right; he did.
I said: "Man, I bet you’ve got some great pain killers, with all the pain you must be in.
I’ll give you a $250 for just one K-4 pill."
He replied: "No, man, I’ll just give you one."
I went home and shot it, and I was right back where I started from.
I was making good money hustling, so I started flying back and forth to San Francisco three times a week to buy Dilaudids.
That got old quick.
The whole thing got so hectic.
It was the summer of 1995; I was pretty much at the end of my hardcore tricking days.
At this time, I met a man in West Hollywood named D.J.
He’s the man with AIDS I mentioned earlier.
Like I said, D.J. was a cool guy.
He’s a good person.
Unfortunately, he’s also one of the five people whose lives took a nosedive, because they loved me and wanted to help me.
When me and D.J. first met, he was one of the top agents in Hollywood.
After two years with me, he was unemployed and deep in debt.
Anyway, D.J. fell in love with me, and I started living with him off and on.
He was clean and sober nine years, and he tried hard to help me get that way, too.
But of course, nothing he did seemed to work.
I wound up manipulating him into giving me cash, which I used to go score Dilaudids.
By fall, I was starting to break him.
I was also breaking my lady friend.
She was now paying for me to go back and forth between L.A. and San Francisco.
She was a sweetheart.
She tried to help me get sober too; and when she couldn’t, she just took care of me.
She did that as long she could, but my drug habit wiped her out.
Then I found what, in my sick drug-addict’s brain, seemed like the solution to all my problems.
On my last trip to San Francisco before things ot too crazy with my wife, I hooked up with a hopeless junkie friend of mine named Kim.
He was known on the street in the Tenderloin as The Methadone Queen, because he used to resell his methadone that he got from the clinic every morning and use the money to buy
heroin.
Because he had AIDS, he also got prescriptions for Dilaudids which he also sold.
When I told Kim bout my desperate situation, he said: "Man, you don’t have to try to find Dilaudids in L. A.! You an get tar heroin real easy! And it’s cheaper!"
At this time, I didn’t realize how many different forms of opiates there are.
They all have the same effect.
So my friend Kim went and scored $40 worth of heroin on the street in San Francisco.
I watched him cook it up, and it made me very excited.
I’d been really sick, and this was he answer to my dilemma.
I shot just a little bit with him.
Instantly, I was physically well, and I felt no emotional pain.
It’s true that heroin places you in a protective bubble.
So true.
Right after I hot up that first hit of heroin, you could have told me my mother had just died, my wife had just left me, and my son wasn’t going to speak to me ever gain, and none of it
would have mattered.
You feel no pain when you’re in the bubble — emotional or physical.
So that’s how it happened.
That’s how I made the switch.
If only I’d known then where that first hit of Shiva would lead me.
To where I am now: homeless; career-less, wife-less, almost life-less.
Hell, I should have known.
I should have run like hell out of that scumbag Tenderloin hotel room and got myself some help way back then.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t even think about it.
As far as I can remember, all I was thinking was how good it felt, and how come I hadn’t thought of making the switch much sooner.

CHAPTER XII
(5,469 words)

I guess what all of you who are still with me are wondering at this point is:
Has Jeff stayed sober all the while he’s been working on the last couple of chapters?
I’d like to say: "Yes," but I can’t.
I slipped last week.
Just once.
I didn’t do heroin.
I smoked some weed.
No, that’s a lie.
I got some money, and I called Camellia.
I should have almost a month’s sobriety at this point, but I don’t.
I’m back to three days.
But, hey, I’m still here; I’m still trying.
I’ve decided that if I can’t make it this time, I’m going to just bite my lip and go back into rehab.
Of course, rehab never really helped me before, but who knows?
Maybe this time will be different.
People think the reason I don’t go into rehab for the long haul is because I just want to keep on using.
They think I’m afraid to make that long commitment.
Maybe they’re right — partly right anyway.
The real reason I don’t want to make that commitment is because I’ve been in rehab plenty of times, and I never got sober there even once.
I detoxed, but I never stayed sober.
Hell, most of the time, I never even completed the programs.
Except once; and that was because I had to.
I completed a 30-day program at Rancho L’abri near San Diego, and then I did 60 days in a halfway house in Century City.
The reason I stuck with that was because it was either complete the program or go to jail.
Of course, I wasn’t really sober those 90 days either.
Even at Rancho L’abri, out in the middle of fucking
MISSING TWO PAGES
at a time, the dealers would cut you a discount.
Of course, I told myself I was going up there to hang out at my lady friend’s house where I could detox in peace and quiet and privacy.
Where I could kick the Shiva habit for good.
I could have too if I’d stayed put in Berkeley 24 hours day.
Of course, there wasn’t much chance of that when I was only half an hour across the Bay from San Francisco — fucking Heroin City, U.S.A.
The true-heroin-addicts who live on the street in San Francisco say that shooting speed for five or six days is the best way to come off of heroin.
They claim it’s foolproof.
I admit it works pretty well, for a while.
Crystal throws your whole body into a time warp.
When you’re living life in dog ears, you’re too high to feel sick from heroin withdrawal.
You can be de-toxing from a four- or five-gram a day habit; you can be sick as a fucking dog, and you won’t even feel it.
You won’t give a hit.
You’re just out there.
Of course, what they don’t mention is that after you detox from the heroin, you have to come down from the crystal, and then detox from that, too.
Believe me, detoxing from crystal may not be as bad as heroin withdrawal, but it’s not pretty either.
Listen up!
DETOXING IS NOT FUN, WHETHER IT’S FROM HEROIN OR ALCOHOL OR EVEN STEROIDS.
IF YOU’RE DUMB ENOUGH TO FUCK AROUND WITH DRUGS FOR A LONG TIME, LIKE I DID, AND THEN YOU TRY TO STOP DOING THEM, THEYR’ E GONNA BITE YOU IN THE
ASS!
THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE!
In fact, if the bums in San Francisco know so much about getting off of heroin, how come they’re bums?
More important, how come they’re still junkies?
Anyway, the last time I shot speed for five days, I had to go to court.
I got busted with my friend, C., in of all places, Bakersfield.
In order to understand how this happened, I have to give you some background on C.
C. is this big French guy, about 6’1", hairy chest, blown; but he’s a big pussy.
He also has a little dick.
He’s also not the brightest guy in the world.
C. was my best friend.
I’ve know him since fifth grade.
Basically, he’s a good guy, but, over the years, the drugs got to him, and he turned into a leech and a scumbag.
In L.A. and San Francisco, everybody has their C. story.
Like this one time me and C. and my lady friend were staying in this hotel in San Francisco.
It was before she started to go broke, so we had a beautiful suite.
I was passed out in the bedroom, when all of a sudden, I heard my lady friend screaming in the other room:
"Get her out of here! You can’t have her in here! Are you crazy?!"
Fucking C. had gone out to score some crack, and he’d picked up this 12- or 13-year-old black crack-whore and brought her back to fuck her in my lady friend’s hotel suite!
I don’t know how the hell he got her past security downstairs.
My lady friend was wigging!
She kept screaming: "Get that kid out of here! ! Have you lost your fucking mind?! That’s a child! We could all go to prison, you idiot!"
So C. got rid of her.
He gave her some money for her trouble, and he sneaked her down the backstairs, I think.
The funniest thing was before they left, the girl apologized to my lady friend.
I remember, she said real politely: "I’m sorry I upset you, ma’am."
Another time, me and C. were in a hotel somewhere, and we picked up several whores.
Four or five of them — all over 18 this time.
C. got so drunk, he made a total ass of himself.
I was in the bedroom fucking one girl, and the entire time I was fucking her, I could hear somebody banging on our door.
I didn’t stop to see what was happening; I figured C. could take care of it.
Unfortunately, C. couldn’t take care of it because it was C. doing the banging.
The whores had played a trick on him.
They’d asked him to go get some ice or something, and then, they’d locked his ass outside in the hall.
He was yelling and cursing his head off!
"Open the door, you fucking bitches!!!"
I laughed so hard.
I didn’t have to ask the girls what happened.
I knew.
C. was just being his usual drunk self: loud, redneck and obnoxious.
Just like me, C. had a serious drug problem.
Like I said, he lost Yolanda because of his drug abuse not to mention every other decent girlfriend he ever had — and he didn’t get many.
For some reason, he never could handle downers.
One time, me and C. got a job doing a straight porno-movie in Las Vegas.
They were going to pay us $400 dollars apiece to fuck these two beautiful girls — one Thai, one French.
By the time we showed up at the Tropicana Hotel for the shoot, fucking C. was high as a kite on Seconals.
The producers introduced us to the girls.
They were beautiful!
Especially the Thai girl.
She was immaculate.
I went first.
I was drunk, and I could tell this girl didn’t want to fuck me, but she had to.
So I fucked her and blew a load on her face, and then, I passed out all over the couch.
I woke up to hear C. screaming and throwing furniture around the fucking room.
He was freaking out and tearing the place apart.
He couldn’t get his dick hard because he was too stoned on the Seconals, and he was taking it out on the room.
The girls were terrified.
The guy who hired us threw some money at us and said: "You will leave now, please!"
I couldn’t believe he paid us the $800 anyway just to get rid of us.
Actually, considering the way C. was acting, I do believe it.
C. always got weird on Seconals.
One time in San Francisco, he tried to make a phone call to his mother.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
Me and him were staying with Finesse in some motel in the Castro.
He talked gibberish to his mother for about 10 or 15 minutes, and finally, she said: "I can’t understand you. You’re slurring your words."
Then, she hung up on him.
C. was pissed.
He screamed: "YOU FUCKING BITCH!"
To his mother!
And, once again, he started tearing up the fucking room.
I remember he actually ripped the front door off its hinges.
Nails and splinters of wood and shit were sticking out of the door frames.
We had to go get some tools and put the fucking place back together so they wouldn’t charge the damage to Finesse’s credit card!
My favorite C. story is the time me and C. and my wife were staying in this hotel.
All three of us were high on Seconals, and Ejai got so high she passed out on C.’s bed.
C. thought it was his chance to finally get some pussy.
He said: "I always wanted to just smell it, Vic. Let me get down there and just smell it."
Ejai was buck naked, and unconscious on the bed, and C. got down on his knees with his face down there smelling her pussy and jacking off.
All of a sudden, Ejai woke up and grabbed C. by the hair.
He only had a little hair left; most of it was long gone from taking steroids.
Anyway, she grabbed him by what little hair he had and started popping him in the head with her fist.
Poor C!
She pulled out what little hair he had left, because she kept jerking his head back to hit him again and again!
I guess I should have tried to do something or say something, but I was too busy laughing!
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.
C. is no genius.
So genius that I am, I chose C. to drive me up to my lady friend’s place in Berkeley to detox.
He wasn’t even on Seconals on that particular occasion.
He was high on crystal though.
And like an idiot high on crystal, he rigged the damn tail lights up to the Jetski wrong, so we had no rear lights driving on the freeway in the middle of the night.
It’s a miracle we didn’t get stopped long before Bakersfield.
Anyway, the highway patrol finally noticed us and pulled us over.
Imagine C. was driving kind of funny, too.
The cops could see we were fucked up, so they searched the car.
I had about $2,000 worth of steroids in my gym bag.
Luckily, I didn’t have any heroin on me.
It was already in my veins.
C. had bunch of crystal on him that I didn’t even know bout.
They busted us for possession.
I called my lady friend, and she borrowed money against her house, God bless her, and got me an attorney and bailed me out.
I hadn’t started to get too sick yet on withdrawal, because I was so high on the crystal.
Thank God for that anyway.
If it hadn’t been for the crystal, I’d have gone through a bad detox right there in the Kern County Jail, because by that time I was shooting about four grams of tar heroin a day.
Anyhow, I got bailed out.
It’s funny, we got busted at around three o’clock in the morning.
By the time I got out, it was late afternoon the next day.
I’d come down from the crystal by then, and I was starting to feel like hell.
I needed a fix, so I manipulated the bail bondsman into driving me downtown in Bakersfield to score some Shiva.
Even my lady friend was impressed by that.
How I was able to get the bail bondsman to do that for me.
He was a straight up straight man, too — a big, bald-headed biker.
C. didn’t get bailed out.
He went to court the next Monday, and he ended up staying in jail for three months.
My lady friend got me a ticket on the last flight to San Francisco, but I was busy scoring heroin, and I missed it.
I called her and told her the paper work took longer than we thought.
I don’t know if she guessed the truth or not.
Anyway, she got me a hotel room on her credit card, and I went straight there and shot up.
The next day, I went to the airport, but I didn’t go to San Francisco.
I went back to L.A.
There was something I’d left behind, and, before I went to Berkeley, I had to go pick it up.
It was a hit of Shiva.
The only reason I went back to the apartment on Palm Drive was because I knew I had some heroin in the bathroom.
When I went home to get it, I walked right in on my wife fucking this other guy.
I didn’t give a shit.
I went straight to the bathroom and started cooking up my shot.
I could hear Ejai in the bedroom next door just fucking away.
I didn’t care.
I was so happy just laid back sittin’ on the toilet seat with the needle still in my arm.
When Ejai found out I was in the bathroom the whole time she was fucking the other guy, she went nuts!
She started screaming: "You bastard! You don’t even give a fuck!"
I didn’t!
At this point, I didn’t care about her or her boyfriend or anything else in the world!
Heroin was number one with me by this time.
I’d just got out of jail, and the only thing I cared about was getting a hit.
I got it, and I left.
I went back, and knocked on the door, because I’d forgotten my keys in the bathroom.
This time, when Ejai came to the door, she was crying.
I think she was crying more about me not caring than about getting caught or feeling guilty or anything else.
Either way, like I said, I didn’t care.
Anyway, I went back to Berkeley to my lady friend’s, because I had to get ready for court in a month.
Once again, I really thought I’d detox and that by the time my court date rolled around, I’d have a month of sobriety behind me.
I went to maybe two meetings the entire time I was there.
I even enrolled in the Haight-Ashbury Methadone program as an out patient.
I lasted a couple of days.
In fact, I met this guy waiting in line at the clinic who had a great Shiva connection.
Do you believe it?
He scored me the strongest fucking tar-heroin I’ve ever had in my life.
It was like China White.
I spent the month running off to San Francisco every night to hustle up the money to score, and then shooting up and passing out at my lady friend’s all day.
One night, I went up to my friend M.G.’s to buy some clean syringes and to shoot up the Shiva I’d just bought.
M.G. was an elderly guy.
He was a crystal addict, plus he was HIV-positive.
I don’t know how he could be all three and still be alive, but he was.
He got some kind of pension plus free food and financial aid from the AIDS Foundation.
M.G. sold clean needles, and for a couple of bucks more, he’d let you shoot up in his place.
Anyway, I walked into M.G.’s apartment, and there was my old friend Jeremy.
Unbelievable as it seemed, Jeremy wasn’t addicted to morphine or heroin anymore!
When I asked him how he did it, he said: "Go fast."
Meaning crystal.
Obviously, he wasn’t clean and sober, but at least, he wasn’t a junkie.
He claimed the secret was to keep shooting as much crystal as possible, to never crash, never come down — even a little bit, until you were completely detoxed from the Shiva.
That meant shooting crystal non-stop for a week at least — if not longer.
Fucked up as I was, it sounded good to me.
I bought like $400 worth of the stuff from Jeremy, and started my detox.
For the next six days, I forgot all about my girlfriend, Shiva.
I didn’t shoot any heroin.
I didn’t score any heroin.
I didn’t think about any heroin.
I didn’t even miss it.
I didn’t feel any pain or sickness of withdrawal either.
Instead, I lost my fucking mind.
I couldn’t sleep of course.
I didn’t expect to.
That was cool, because if I’d been withdrawing the regular way, I couldn’t have slept either, plus I’d have been sick and in pain
Kind of like now.
What I didn’t count on was the fucking crystal making me so paranoid that I actually started to have hallucinations.
Some of those six days I don’t remember.
What I do remember I wish I didn’t — not because I did anything really bad, but because the crazy way I was acting was so embarrassing, the second night of my "detox," I was sitting
up my lady friend’s bed.
She was fast asleep.
My friend, Sergio, who was renting the downstairs bedroom in her house at that point, was also fast sleep.
I was wide awake of course, and I was so paranoid I started to imagine that someone was breaking into the house.
Understand, my lady friend’s house had a security burglar alarm that should have gone off like a fucking fire engine if anyone even tapped on a window.
Still, I thought there were commandos on the roof!
I had no idea who they were.
But, I was convinced there was a a small army on the roof of her house, and that they ad come there to kill me.
I thought they’d brought a kid with them to get in through one of the little bathroom windows.
I even hallucinated that I saw him on the roof.
He was about 12 years old.
He had dark hair, and he was dressed in combat fatigues decorated with bunches of bananas.
I was gone!
I woke my lady friend and told her our lives were in danger.
We had to get out of there!
She tried to calm me down, but I wouldn’t listen.
I said: "For God’s sake, go downstairs and wake Sergio up!! We’ve got to get the fuck out of here!"
She could see that I was out of my mind.
She wanted to take me to the emergency room!
She was scared, because she thought I was having some kind of weird reaction to the crystal.
I guess you could say that.
Anyway, no way was I going to any fucking hospital.
I flew into a rage and would have started screaming at her if I hadn’t been so scared of the guys on the roof!
Finally, she gave up and went downstairs and got Sergio out of bed.
I insisted he drive us to the city.
I remember the pure fucking terror I felt going out to his car.
At the last minute, Sergio went back in the house.
He said he forgot something.
He was a nurse, and even though it was Saturday, he had to go to work; and here was the poor guy driving my crazy ass to the city at four o’clock in the morning!
While he and my lady friend were in the house, I freaked!
I thought the commandoes had got them for sure.
I took off up the hill and ran for cover.
My lady friend and Sergio found me about 15 minutes later hiding behind a dumpster about six blocks away in a neighbor’s yard.
Like I said, I was gone.
It’s a miracle somebody didn’t call the police.
Once we got a couple of miles away from the house, I made my lady friend call the police!
She was so tired and freaked out and pissed off by this time, she didn’t even try to reason with me.
She just went to a phone booth and pretended to call the cops.
She even made up a name of the officer she talked to.
She told me the cops said they’d go over and check it out.
I breathed a little easier, but I was still scared.
What if they followed us?
What if they got the license number of Steve’s car?
The rest of that weekend was more nightmare paranoia.
I told everybody in San Francisco that my girlfriend’s house had been burglarized.
My lady friend said that for weeks after that, she kept running into people who asked her if the cops had caught the guys who broke into her house.
Even in the city, I was still so paranoid, I insisted that we switch hotels three times.
When we finally got to a place I felt safe in, I checked all the closets and windows, under the bed and in the bathtub, before I’d even sit down.
Of course, all this craziness would have been worth it if it had really detoxed me from heroin.
It didn’t.
After four or five days, I was so wired and crazy that the only way I could come down and get back a little sanity was to do a shot of Shiva!
I almost did go to the emergency room.
I was so crazed, I couldn’t do any jobs.
My lady friend wouldn’t give me any cash.
She was afraid I’d OD after being off heroin for a week.
I left her in a hotel on Market Street and called an old regular of mine to take me to score.
The man took one look at me and decided I was going to the hospital or else.
I was coming down hard from the crystal at this point.
I felt like shit.
I almost agreed to go to the hospital.
I figured, in the hospital, they’d give me 50 milligrams of Methadone at least and some Chloral Hydrate to help me sleep.
Of course, when we pulled up to the emergency room door, I changed my mind real fast.
I bolted out of the car and ran like hell.
I don’t think I stopped until I got to the Tenderloin.
Finally, I scored on my own, and after another three or four days of shooting up — heroin this time, I decided San Francisco wasn’t the place for me.
There was just too many temptations there.
I had to meet the judge in two months, and I had to be ready.
I called D.J., and he sent me a plane ticket home.
Of course, I didn’t have a home any more.
For the first time in my life, heroin had made me homeless.
My wife had blown me off completely and she was now living with her boyfriend.
I couldn’t remember how long it had been since anybody had bothered to pay the rent at the apartment on Palm Drive.
The owners had started eviction proceedings.
I had no place to go.
I lived with D.J. for a while, but my heroin use was driving him crazy.
After a few weeks, he was ready to kick me out.
I lived with my old friend Milton off and on, but I was breaking him.
It was at this point that I met Sharon Kane.
Like I said, I’d always had a crush on Sharon Kane ever since I first met her with Joey in the old porn days.
Now that the wife was gone, I had Crystal Crawford introduce me to her.
He gave me her number, and she met me at the gym.
She was one nice lady.
And she wasn’t into drugs.
She did crystal sometimes, but very seldom.
So I moved in with her for a little while; and it turned out to be a nightmare!
Trying to go to alcohol and drug diversion school and keep up with Sharon Kane!
I was doing heroin the whole time I was with her, and she knew it.
There was nothing she could do to stop me or help me.
She tried.
Sharon is a very, very spiritual person, and she tried to get me into religion.
She brought me to see this friend of hers one time.
Some Indian guy.
He tried to hypnotize me.
Past-life regression, I think it’s called.
Anyway, he kept trying to turn me on to his religion, and I just kept talking about Jesus Christ and pissing him off.
Then before we left, he wanted me to give him $300!
I couldn’t believe it!
He was trying to get me into this religion or get me to remember past-lives or whatever, and then he tried to hit me up for $300 walking out the door.
He kept saying: "I can see you’ve had some bad life experiences."
I said: "Yeah, I guess. One time, I wanted to fuck my aunt."
He freaked out!
He just stopped and hesitated for a while.
He didn’t say a word for what had to be 10 minutes.
He knew right then he was dealing with the devil.
Anyway, I lived with Sharon Kane for about three weeks.
Sharon is a truly good person.
Although she’s definitely the biggest fag hag I’ve ever met in my life.
When I lived there, two million fucking people a day were calling her, and they were all gay.
Both her husbands were gay, and they were bottoms to boot.
Well, whatever turns her on!
One of the problems I had with her was that I farted her out of the house.
She met me when I was on steroids and taking lots of protein supplements; plus heroin doesn’t make your stomach too cool either.
I just farted her out of the house.
Even worse, after a while I just couldn’t fuck her anymore.
When I first moved in with her, she had me fucking consistently!
I used to fuck Sharon Kane deep.
I used to actually abuse her in bed.
I’d fucking hold her down with her legs straight up in the air, and I used to pop that shit so hard her fucking head would be hitting the wall.
I used to just smash her.
I don’t know fi she loved it more or if I loved it more.
Whatever.
She took it like a champion.
We were so fucking sexual!
In the beginning, there was hardly a minute when was with her when I didn’t have my hand on her pussy.
Of course, that didn’t last forever.
I think she got a little pissed off when my dick wouldn’t get hard anymore because I was on so much heroin.
As long as that dick was working, everything was fine.
When the dick stopped working, she threw me out.
The last straw for me and Sharon was really her pet pig.
I fed it beer one time.
That little pig lapped up that beer like a motherfucker.
Then turned around and bit me!
It was drunk; and didn’t like me anyway, and I didn’t like it.
It actually bit me!
So I had to leave.
Funny thing is I saw that pig about a year later, and the thing remembered me, and it still didn’t like me.
I hear Sharon’s completely clean and sober now.
God bless her.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer girl.
Needless to say, I never got clean and sober that summer.
At least not for more than a couple of days.
I fucked up my drug diversion.
I didn’t show up half the time, and the times I did show up I was high.
Sometimes my lady friend would come down to L.A. to try to get me to stick with the drug diversion.
I’d always lie and tell her I was going.
One time, she wanted to come pick me up after class.
I gave her a phony address.
It was hair styling salon!
Hell, I was so out of it, I don’t think I ever knew where the real classes were held.
My attorney was wigging, too.
She’d worked hard to get me drug diversion, and she couldn’t believe how badly I was fucking up.
When my day in court finally came, the judge refused to drop the charges.
That didn’t come as a surprise to anybody.
What shocked the hell out of me was that he didn’t send my ass to jail then and there.
Instead, he gave me a choice: either go to rehab or do time.
I chose rehab.
Once again, the Lord saved my ass.
Once again, He gave me another chance.

CHAPTER XIII
(5,431 words)

In a lot of ways, Rancho L’abri was the perfect rehab center.
First of all, it was out in the middle of fucking no where, way out in the desert south of San Diego, close to the Mexican border.
It was so far away from everything that cellphones and pagers didn’t work there.
It was almost impossible to get to and even harder to get out of.
It was in the town of Dulzura, which couldn’t even be called town really.
It was just a bunch of trailers with some broken down pick up trucks parked outside.
There was no train station, no Greyhound station, no local bus service of any kind; and the San Diego airport was a fucking $100 cab-ride away.
It was a hike from hell just to walk up to the freeway to try to hitch a ride — especially if you were detoxing.
Plus, cars and trucks — even up on the main highway — were few and far between.
You’d think that in a place like that, even a seriously sick drug addict like me would have to get clean and sober.
You’d be wrong.
Like I said, I even OD’ed there.
I have nothing but good things to say about the people at Ranch L’abri.
They were real professionals, and they tried their best to help me.
Unfortunately, like I said, I still hadn’t learned to take my addiction seriously at that point.
I never tried to walk away from Rancho L’abri like I did from Tarzana.
Not that time, anyway.
I thought about it plenty, but I knew if I did, they’d throw my monkey-ass in jail.
Of course, the whole time I was there, all I thought about was getting out and shooting up.
I bullshitted and manipulated everybody.
After that time I OD’ed at the N.A. meeting, I pretended to be sober.
For a while, I was.
Out of the month I spent there, I was really sober maybe 12 days.
Of course, I blew that as soon as I got out.
The program at Rancho L’abri was 30 days.
They wanted me to stay for another 30, but I refused.
To satisfy the court, I had to spend a total of 90 days in a supervised facility.
So, after Rancho L’abri, I could go to a halfway house and do the rest of my time there.
I told my lady friend I was going to Pathfinder’s in San Diego.
I told her that after I got out of Pathfinders, I wanted to get a straight job and start a new life.
I’d even made friends in Rancho L’abri with a kid whose old man was supposed to give me a job in his San Diego landscaping business.
It was gonna be a whole new beginning.
She was so happy.
She even rented out the rest of her house and came down and got an apartment in San Diego.
My friend D.J. had paid for my stay at Rancho L’abri, which wasn’t cheap.
I told my lady friend to send money for the halfway house.
It wasn’t cheap either.
Of course, I had no intention of going into Pathfinders or anyplace else in fucking San Diego.
I took the money she sent me and booked myself into Liberty House in Century City.
That was all I wanted: to get back to L.A.
Back to San Pedro and Alvarado Streets.
Back to heroin.
It’s about seven in the morning, I think.
It’s almost daylight.
I’m going to an eight o’clock meeting.
Today is my 10th day.
Last night, I almost slipped — again.
I felt so bad, I was just about ready to try to hitch hike downtown to score.
But I didn’t.
Everybody was asleep, and I didn’t have anybody to talk to.
That’s the worst.
Not having anybody to talk to.
So I talked myself out of it.
Of course, not having any money or any out or way to get downtown helped; but if I’d really wanted to, I’m sure I could have found a way.
I didn’t.
I’m proud of myself.
I wanted to do heroin so bad, but I didn’t do it.
The last time me and Hope tried to write down the story of my life, I was in New York.
That was in 1998.
I talked about how I was clean and sober; and for a while, I actually was.
I bragged about how I was through with drugs for good.
How I’d never do heroin again.
That was a big mistake.
I went right back to it.
And when I slipped and got re-addicted, it was worse than it ever was before I got clean.
That’s how opiates are.
Each time you go back and get re-addicted, heroin gets a bigger bite on you.
It’s like your tolerance goes down, but then it increases.
You wind up shooting more than you ever did before.
It’s like after I got out of the halfway house and got re-addicted, I was doing five fucking grams a day.
Not to mention all the coke I was doing with it.
Speedballs.
They were my favorite.
I told myself I shot speedballs because they were safer.
I actually convinced myself that I couldn’t O. D. on the heroin if I had all that cocaine going through my veins at the same time.
What bullshit!
My lady friend used to freak out every time she heard me say that.
She’d say: "Yeah? Well, then how did John Belushi die?"
Which was true.
But I didn’t listen to her.
I never listened to anybody.
Which is why I am where I am and what I am today.
This time, I’m not gonna say: "I’ll never do drugs again; I’ll never slip again; I’ll always be sober."
I can’t say that.
Only God can say that.
All I can do is be grateful and glad that I’m sober today.
And pray that I’ll still be the same way tomorrow.
That’s what one day at a time is all about.
In the halfway house, I had my old manipulative powers going.
I didn’t do heroin, but I drank and I took pills.
Somehow, I convinced everybody that I was clean and sober.
I bullshitted everybody so bad, they actually gave me a gold chain necklace with a little gold "N" on it.
That’s the Narcotics Anonymous symbol for somebody who’s been at least 45 days clean and sober.
What a joke!
I manipulated everybody.
Everybody in Liberty House knew who I was, which was OK.
The funniest thing was, there were a few guys there who didn’t have jobs so I turned them all on to hustling.
New boys.
The queens will hire new boys anytime.
I guess I wasn’t really much of a help to the guys there.
I sometimes wonder if some of them are still turning tricks today.
It can’t have been good for them.
It sure as hell wasn’t gonna help them stay clean and sober.
And it wasn’t their fault.
They were just people that were hanging around me, and they wound up taking the train with me.
Like the college boys and baseball players I brought to meet Gary D. at The Finishing School a long time ago.
It was amazing.
I feel bad for manipulating people that way.
I hope I didn’t do any harm.
I hate it when people get into the sex industry, but they shouldn’t be doing it, and they’re coaxed into it by money or something like that.
That’s a bummer because the person almost always turns out to be scarred for life from the experience.
I see it every day.
And really, does anybody actually belong in hustling, or in porn for that matter?
I don’t think so.
Anyway, I completed my program in Liberty House, and I was released in the fall of 1996.
Before I was officially released, an incident happened that just blew my mind and that should have freaked me out enough to keep me sober.
In the end, it was like all the other negative shit in my life.
It scared me for a while, but Shiva got the best of me and made me forget all about it; and soon I was right back up to five-and-a-half grams a day.
Liberty House gave part time recess from the house if you stayed clean, and I’d built up my stash of recess.
I had to go to court the next day.
So, of course, the day before I was due in court, I went downtown to Alvarado Street and scored.
If that isn’t stupid, I don’t know what is.
But that’s the way drug addicts are.
I went back to D.J.’s house with a whole gram.
Now, at this point I was two months clean and sober — at least as far as heroin was concerned.
I shot that whole gram at 2:30 p.m.
I woke up on the floor at 4:30 p.m.
I’d been unconscious for two hours!
It’s a miracle I woke up at all.
When I got up off that floor, I had the strangest feeling.
I couldn’t figure it out.
I kept walking around the house looking at the windows.
My mind wasn’t right.
I kept thinking I had to call Ejai and tell her that I was going to pick her up and take her to her mother’s just as soon as I was done with my mission of saving the world.
My mind was in such a euphoric state, I really thought I was going to save the world!
I thought I was a CIA agent!
There was this plot to destroy the world.
Only I could stop it, and I had to kill somebody to do it.
I called my wife and said: "Ejai, pack your things right now! We don’t have too much time! Be ready to go!"
She started to cry. "Oh God, you’re high again!"
"What the fuck are you talking about?!" I yelled. "I’m not high! Now get ready!"
I really believed I wasn’t high.
I truly believed that my wife just didn’t understand.
How could she?
I was the only one who knew the secret.
No one else knew about my mission to save the world.
It was my responsibility.
I had this mission from God, and I had to go do it.
No one was going to stop me!
"Get your clothes right now!" I screamed.
"We don’t have time for this shit! We gotta go!"
I was really out there!
I was ready to walk out the door.
In fact, the only reason I wasn’t already gone was that I couldn’t find my gun.
Of course, I didn’t have a gun, but I thought I did.
It’s a good thing I didn’t own one, or I probably would have shot somebody.
I ran into D.J. on my way out.
He said: "I can take one look at you and tell you’ve slipped."
"I don’t have time for this!" I yelled.
"I gotta go!"
I jumped in the Jeep.
Somehow, after a few minutes, my mind began to clear.
I realized: Oh man! Stop, Jeff! Stop it!
I called Ejai back, and she begged me to come home.
Which I did.
She couldn’t understand what happened.
She kept saying: "You sounded so strange! You weren’t you!!"
No, I guess not!
I’d pickled my brain on heroin for so long, it had almost made me go insane.
It was like I had brain damage.
I almost became the crazy diamond in Pink Floyd.
I’ve never told that story to anybody
The biggest story of my life, and I never tell it because I’ve been on heroin so long it’s become like just another drug story to me.
Big deal that OD’ed again last week!
Big deal that I almost died again two months ago!
Big deal that I almost permanently lost my mind!
It came back to me though.
Gradually (and it was gradual!), I realized that I wasn’t the savior of the world and that nothing had almost come to an end — except my loose grip on reality.
I made it to court the next morning.
I brought a Visine bottle, and I made my sponsor go into the men’s room and piss in it just in case the judge made me piss in a cup to see if I was sober.
Liberty House wrote a good letter of recommendation for me.
I’d completed my treatment so, thank God, they didn’t ask me for a urine specimen; I would have failed.
Thank you, Lord.
I appreciate You saving my ass that day.
He’s always been with me.
For whatever reason of His own, the Lord has always been in my corner, and He’s saved my ass a bunch of times.
Over and over again, He’s saved my life.
I don’t understand why, but I am so grateful.
Like I said, I believe He has something for me to do — something important.
Otherwise, how could I still be alive?
I’ve OD’ed on heroin 18 times.
A drug counselor told my lady friend one time that most junkies don’t survive the third OD.
After that, she prayed every time I shot up.
I guess her prayers were answered, too, because I’ve survived 15 more overdoses beyond that.
I’m like that famous rock star who once said: "As long as heroin’s here, I’ll be here."
Just kidding.
The sad thing is I used to say stuff like that and mean it.
Real drug-addict shit like that.
Now I know the only reason I’m still here in spite of heroin is because God is still watching over me.
The last few times I went out, I just sort of woke up on my own, you know.
God brought me back to life.
Even the drug dealers will tell you: you don’t hear about people just coming back like that.
So, He must be saving me for something.
The dear Lord has got something special for me to do on earth.
Hopefully, I’ll find out what it is soon, because I’m going crazy trying to find out what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.
That time I OD’ed at the N.A. meeting at Rancho L’abri was one of my more dramatic ones, but I had some other loo-loos, not to mention a couple of other close calls.
It sounds funny, but you can almost chart my life over the past five years by the times I’ve overdosed.
I’ve stopped breathing during heroin overdoses more than half a dozen times.
Scary shit.
And the scariest part is, I’m only just now, after five years, beginning to realize how frightening it really is.
Of course, there’s OD’ing and there’s OD’ing.
I always say there’ve been times when I actually OD’ed and times when I just went out.
When I say "go out," I mean I fall unconscious, and 20 or 30 minutes later, I come to. I just wake up.
That first time at the apartment on Palm Drive was a real O. D.
Like I said, I’d have died if nobody’d been there.
The second time I OD’ed, I was in the Ramada Inn on Santa Monica Boulevard with Hope and some friend of ours.
I can’t remember exactly who now.
Some little blond guy.
Anyway, Hope went to the bathroom, and I sat down at the desk and shot up.
When she came back, I was slumped over in the chair.
Once again, I just went out.
Of course, they didn’t know that, and they, freaked and called an ambulance.
I remember the exact date of that one.
It was December 17, 1995.
My birthday.
I remember when the paramedics brought me around, one of them said: "Pretty exciting way to celebrate your birthday, huh, Jeff?"
Some of these fucking paramedics think they’re real comedians.
I was so embarrassed.
Hope and our friend told me later that the last thing I said before she went into the bathroom was something totally stupid and tasteless like: "Let’s order some food from Room Service
just as soon as I O. D. on this shot of heroin!"
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
So I guess I got what I deserved.
Also, I was on methadone at that time, and that’s a sure fire way to OD.
Take 40 or 50 milligrams o f Methadone and then go shoot heroin, and you’ll b e lucky if you don’t wake up in Hell.
Of course, like everything else, I had to learn that the hard way.
My third OD was, once again, at the apartment on Palm Drive.
That was in the spring of 1996 — right after I got evicted.
I left something in the apartment, and the manager gave me the key so I could run up and get it.
When he came back for his keys a few minutes later, he found me out like a fucking light — laying on the kitchen floor.
They called the ambulance again.
One of the scariest times I OD’ed was in San Francisco in 1997.
I’m not sure what month it was.
October, November…
Sometime before Christmas.
I actually lived on the street in San Francisco for a while that summer.
On the street in the Tenderloin with all the other fucking bums.
And that’s where I OD’ed: on the street.
In the parking lot actually: at 4:30 a.m. in the parking lot of Burger King on Van Ness Avenue.
That Burger King parking lot was notorious.
So was the alley behind it.
Every fucking bum from the Tenderloin probably hung out there at one time or another.
Wherever you see a bunch of homeless men hanging on the same street corner day after day, year after year, you’ll find heroin.
I don’t mean the people who fall on hard times for whatever reason and are forced to be homeless for a while.
Those people eventually move to shelters or whatever and eventually get their lives back together and move on.
I mean the real bums.
The guys who have been out there for years, and are probably gonna be out there for the rest of their lives.
They have names like "Red," and "Sarge," "Sparky" and "Dreadlocks."
Most of these guys are hardcore heroin addicts.
They support their habits partly by panhandling but mostly by scoring for other people.
The black guy that I paid $60 to go score me $40 worth of Heroin that first time I OD’ed was a good example.
These guys aren’t dealers.
They’re not "together" enough for that.
They’re almost as important, though — maybe more important for someone like me.
They act as links between the dealers and the people who come down to the slums to buy heroin but who don’t know where to go, or how to go about it.
Maybe they know where to go, but they’re too chicken shit.
Or maybe they look too straight for the dealers to deal with.
Most dealers won’t sell to just anybody who walks up to them on the street and asks them.
Some street dealers in San Francisco will sell only to the bums.
They used to think I was a cop all the time until they got to know me.
I’d get turned down all the time.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer."
Of course, that was in the first year I was an addict when my arms were still clean.
Now all I have to do is show them my infected track marks, and they’ll sell me anything I want in any fucking city in the world.
There’s an unwritten law on the street in San Francisco.
Heroin Capital or not, you cannot buy heroin on the streets of San Francisco between 10:30 p.m. at night and 4:00 a.m.
I don’t know why, but there are no exceptions.
It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to score in the Tenderloin, the Mission or wherever.
No street dealers will talk to you or even speak to you — even, if they know you well.
No higher class dealer will send a runner out to meet you.
If you haven’t got your fix by 10:30 p.m., you’re up shit creek.
Literally.
You just have to suffer until 4:30 a.m.
I adapted real well to that schedule.
I woke up every day at 4 a.m.with the bums, just in time to meet the Mexican drug dealers at 4:15 a.m. for the big Shiva showdown.
Just from going out that night tricking, I’d have $500 or $600 dollars in my pocket.
The bums would be struggling to get just $10.
"I just need a little bit more for the $10 piece!"
Fuck, I was buying four or five grams at a time!
It’s funny, I used to think I liked it.
That street life!
The Shiva chase, the big adventure at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.!
Now I don’t even know what I thought I liked about it.
It must have been the adrenaline.
Go to my lady friend’s, sleep all fucking day, and then head out that night to the city in the rental car.
Hang out and shoot up with the bums in the alleyways; sleep some more in the rental car; and then get ready to do it all over again before sunrise.
On this particular occasion, I fucked up. I had some guy go score for me.
It was funny; he wasn’t one of my regular bums.
I’d seen him around, but I didn’t know him very well.
I was sitting between two cars, and I loaded the needle up.
I had a big steroid needle, not the small insulin syringe, and I shot up the whole fucking thing.
I remember the street guy said to me: "Man, you are a real pro."
I said: "Yeah, I’m a pro."
The next thing I knew the paramedics were over me again.
I guess I wasn’t as much of a "pro" as I thought.
That time, I had a big tube up my nose.
I don’t know how I they got that thing down me.
Later, in the ambulance, I heard one of the paramedics say: "Man, I shoved that tube up his nose, and he didn’t even flinch!"
Damn right I didn’t flinch!
I was out cold!
Hope wigged out when she heard about that one.
MISSING SOMETHING
Unfortunately, I soon realized that all I’done was move back in with a ferocious fucking drunk.
I thought: Hey, this wasn’t such a good idea!
But I stayed anyway.
Sure enough, a few months later, I was back on heroin.
I’d just been chipping up to that time.
After I got back together with Ejai, I became re-addicted.
The big problem was, I’d have to go out to the bars with her and sit there and babysit her while she drank.
At this point, her life was going downhill, and she drank like a fish.
The only way I could have the patience to sit there, bored out of my mind, for hours while she turned into a sloppy drunk was to go score some heroin.
Which I did.
So, I got re-hooked on heroin; and me and her went to shit; and she was about to get fired from her job at the apartment complex for being an alcoholic.
It was not a pretty picture.
Before she got fired, she asked me to help her.
Help her?
I couldn’t even help myself at this point, but I had an idea.
I called up this rehab center that I’d been in.
Not Rancho L’abri.
This was a place with state funding that would take you even if you had no money.
They’d put you on a waiting list, and you could pay them in installments after you got out.
I’d been in there four times, and they’d kicked me out each time for smuggling drugs in.
So they were real surprised to hear from me!
Anyway, I got her into rehab where their sole purpose was to get her away from me.
And that was exactly what happened.
Unlike me, she stuck with the program, and after she completed it, she went into a women’s halfway house.
I was left home alone and stuck on heroin.
I have to hand it to Ejai.
During her treatment, she came to realize she was partly responsible for me being re-addicted to heroin.
Not her — her drinking.
So when she was released from the halfway house, and she was sober, she wanted to get back together and try to help me get off it.
For a while, she’d been switching back and forth between me and her boyfriend.
He was a bum.
He was an illegal alien from Canada.
Plus, he lived with a gay guy.
I always thought he hustled gays in the first place.
He just wasn’t any good at it.
Anyway, she kicked him out and moved me back in and tried to help me get clean again.
Of course, that was impossible.
I was too far gone at that point.
I’d not only built up to my old tolerance, I’d gone past it.
One day, she dropped a bomb on me.
She told me she was pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby!
She said: "I don’t ever want to see him again anyway. So, why don’t you just stay here and be the father of the baby?"
I agreed.
Hell, I was shooting $400 worth of heroin a day.
I would have agreed to anything.
I just didn’t give a shit.
Plus, Ejai really needed my help.
My whole family thought I was an idiot for even speaking to her after that.
They thought I should just bar her from my life and get her the hell away from me.
But I couldn’t do that.
I felt sorry for her.
She was my friend.
She had no body else.
She was going to go back to Louisiana, because I wasn’t going to take care of her.
No one was.
So I stayed with her.
But not for long.
Ejai had this car, this brand new car.
Her parents had bought it for her as a reward for getting and staying sober.
I used to drive that thing downtown to the middle of fucking Dopeland every single day while she was at work and score heroin in it.
If I’d ever been busted, the cop would have confiscated it.
As it happened, I didn’t get busted; I wrecked the thing.
A brand new car; and I totaled it.
I’d gone downtown to Camille’s house to eat dinner.
Camille and her husband Dino were my major L.A. heroin connection.
They were a weird pair.
They were this Mexican couple who had kids, and a house, and a normal life — except that they were major drug dealers.
They were like a regular family.
Regular people.
They didn’t use at all, but damn, did they deal!
The whole family.
Dino, Camille, the grandparents.
It was fucked, actually.
They’d have people coming by the house all day and all night (this was L.A.) to score, and their kids would be playing in the yard.
Anyway, I was there for dinner, and when Dino came home, my wife’s car was in the driveway.
Dino walked in and said: "Hey man, you gotta come move your car."
I still don’t know what went wrong.
I’d shot up a whole gram in the bathroom right before we sat down at the table, and nothing happened.
At least not right away.
I walked down the driveway just fine.
I felt fine.
I have no idea what the problem was.
Anyway, I got in the car; I put the car in reverse; and that’s the last thing I remember.
Next thing I knew, people were trying to pull me out of the car.
I looked behind me, and there was a bunch of blacks screaming at me.
I had passed out, and I had totaled a brand new T-Bird!
I could have killed somebody!
I thank the Lord.
He was with me.
He had to be with me, because there were little kids everywhere.
Little children playing In the street!
I could have killed one!
I got out of the car, and everybody was yelling at me: "You just totaled this brand new T-Bird!"
I said: "No, I didn’t!"
I really didn’t think I’d done anything wrong!
I’d blacked out, and I was still so out of it, I didn’t even know where the fuck I was.
I straightened up fast when the cops came!
I told them I’d driven all the way from San Francisco non-stop, and I was so tired, I fell asleep at the wheel.
I don’t know if they believed me or not.
They wrote me a ticket for not having a driver’s license, and that was it.
I think they just didn’t want to deal with the whole thing because it was raining, and they didn’t feel like standing around in the bad weather.
Also, this was a Black and Mexican neighborhood in downtown L.A.; so — let’s face it — they just didn’t give a shit.
I really got off easy on that one.
But not really.
My wife left me for wrecking the car.
It was the third time she left me.
And it was the last.
It’s a funny thing about me and my wife.
Our story, our whole life together, began because of a car, and it ended because of a car.
I still talk to her, of course, even though we’re finally, truly, legally divorced.
She’s still my friend.
We’ll always be friends, but I don’t see us ever getting back together.
That’s done.
I hope she finds another man someday.
Someone who can be a father to her son and give her the kind of stability she needs in life.
The kind of stability everybody needs.
Including me.
I’ll never forget the night that I was sitting In the bathroom in my scumbag apartment in Hollywood.
It was only five or six months ago, but it seems like years.
The shower was running, but I wasn’t taking a shower.
I’d just bought some $300-a-gram China White, and I just had to do it, because I hadn’t done any dope that strong since I left New York.
All you can get in California is mostly that Mexican-tar shit.
I loaded the syringe and searched for a vein.
At that time, I still had some decent veins.
I jabbed the needle in, and I drew back.
I saw the blood come back up; there was drool coming out of my mouth, and it dripped like water onto my shirt.
It looked like a lava lamp inside the syringe, and the drool was just running out of my mouth like a fucking waterfall; and that was the biggest turn on in the world to me because I
was about to get off.
As I was getting off, I heard: "How does it feel, Motherfucker?"
I looked up, and there was Ejai in the doorway holding the baby.
I slammed the door shut.
I didn’t know what to think.
Of course, the high sheltered me from the emotions like it always does.
That was the last time Ejai saw me shoot up.
And that was the last time I saw Ejai.
If you read this, Ejai, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, baby.
For I did not know what I was doing.
Maybe that apology’s too late, but those were the cards I was dealt, and I had to deal with them.
Today, I’m 10 days clean and sober.
And I wish I had you back.
On the other hand, I’m excited about the new life I’m going to live.
Free of drugs.
And also, free of you; because you were the biggest codependent I ever had.
 

CHAPTER XIV

(4,948 words)

 

When me and the wife split up for good, I had no place to live.

Again.
I moved back in with D J., but I knew that was only temporary.
He was a wonderful man, and I’d been living with him of and on for two years, but my heroin addiction always ended up driving him crazy.
I moved in with my old friend Milton in Hollywood for a little while, but ditto for him and the heroin habit.
He never threw me out, but I always knew when I’d overstayed my welcome.
Finally, as a last resort, I called my lady friend and had her come down from the Bay Area to take care of me.
It was the beginning of summer, 1997, and me and my lady friend hit the road.
Which means she came down to L.A., and we stayed in a bunch of cheap-ass motels in Hollywood.
We rented a rent-a-wreck car, which I used to do the few jobs that would still see me and to go downtown and score heroin.
She prayed and complained while I shot more and more heroin, and she brought me back to life a couple of times when I went out on her.
And that’s how we spent our summer.
It was a fucking nightmare.
We had to switch motels every other night because people knew I was so fucked up.
I remember this one place on Sunset.
It was a dive, but not too bad.
It was cheap, because my lady friend was stone broke by this time.
The days when she would rent a luxury suite at The Mondrian or The BelAge or even the West Hollywood Ramada Inn were long gone at this point.
She was in debt big-time, and she was just borrowing money against her house to take care of me.
Anyway, I had a bad habit of throwing syringes down the toilets in these motels, and sometimes, the plumbing would back up.
She told me not to do that in this motel, because we’d already been warned once about the toilet overflowing.
Also, the number of motels where we were still tolerated was getting smaller and smaller.
Soon we’d run out of places to go.
I was so fucked up, I ignored her.
Every time I finished with a rig, I’d flush it right down the fucking john.
At about midnight, the thing just exploded!
Water was everywhere!
The whole room was flooded!
The manager came running upstairs screaming at my lady friend.
"That’s the second time she’s made the toilet over flow! You’ve both got to get out! She’s ruined the plumbing!!"
I don’t know why he thought it was her fault.
Anyway, we had to hightail it out of there before the needles started coming up.
It was insane.
I found this kid named Sylvester who would deliver heroin to me at the motels.
He sold really strong, really expensive shit — not China White, but almost as good.
My poor lady friend.
She used to pray every time I shot up.
Sylvester’s shit was so strong that sometimes, she’d actually have to hold me up and help me stumble around the room to keep me from going out.
One time, I went out on her in the middle of a sentence.
I said something to her about her pussy, about drilling her or something — although by this time, I wasn’t too sexual anymore.
The Shiva took care of that.
Anyway, I just collapsed on the floor in the middle of the sentence.
By this time, my lady friend was an expert in dealing with Jeff and his ODs.
I made her promise me one time never to call an ambulance unless I stopped breathing.
So she brought me back to life.
One of the things she did while I was out, in addition to giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, was pour ice water on me and put ice cubes on my crotch, temples, throat and
armpits.
Some dope dealer told her to do that.
In fact, I think it was Jeremy.
D.J.used to do it, too.
When I woke up 45 minutes later, wondered why I was soaking wet.
I didn’t even know I’d gone out.
I thought I just fell asleep for a few minutes. I said: "Why don’t you turn on the air conditioning? I’m sweating like a fucking pigl"
God, the look on her face!
Everyday, I’d wake up and promise to go to a meeting or down to the BAART Clinic on Hollywood Boulevard to sign up for the Methadone out-patient program.
Instead, I’d call Sylvester.
After a month of this, I’d never once set foot in the Methadone clinic.
But Sylvester was dropping by the motels so much, he and my lady friend were becoming pals.
They used to watch Oprah together while he waited for me to get back with the money.
When I couldn’t afford Sylvester’s prices, I’d go downtown and score on the street.
In some ways, it’s a lot easier to score Shiva on the street in L.A. than it is in San Francisco.
Even though heroin in L.A. is nowhere near as pure or as plentiful, the dealers are nowhere near as paranoid.
If you know the general area where it’s sold and you have the cash to buy, the dealers will deal with you.
There used to be a building at the corner of San Pedro and Alvarado Streets where you’d go up to the window to make your buy.
It was a real professional setup.
You had to be able to show them your tracks though, or they wouldn’t even open the window and talk to you.
It’s funny; even with all their precautions, they got busted anyway.
They were so careful; I never could never figure it out.
Meanwhile, out on the street, it was like: "Anything goes!"
I never figured that out either, because in downtown L. A., the fucking cops are everywhere!
The L. A. P. D. even kept a mobile substation parked right in front of the fucking drug mini-mart at Westlake and Alvarado; but that didn’t seem to scare the dealers.
Business went on as usual.
The drug minimart was intense.
It was basically a shopping mall for drugs operating right out in the open parking lot of a real minimart near Alvarado and Westlake.
The real minimart had a laundromat and a bakery and some kind of convenience store.
I can’t remember what the other businesses were.
It didn’t matter.
The real action was outside.
A bunch of dealers were there all the time.
Each one had his own spot and his own drug.
You could buy anything there: coke, crystal, Shiva.
I don’t know why the owners of the legitimate businesses never complained to the cops.
Maybe they were scared.
Maybe the dealers were gang members.
Who knows?
They had some kind of connections, because they never seemed to get busted.
Hell, they’d be out there selling heroin right in front of the fucking substation while the cops were busy booking people they’d just arrested not 10 feet away on the street!
It was weird.
In San Francisco, you hardly ever saw a cop — not in the Mission or the Tenderloin, but the dealers were paranoid as hell.
Go figure.
Of course, downtown L.A. is no cotton candy cakewalk.
My lady friend used to say San Pedro and Alvarado made the Tenderloin look like the Champs-Élysées.
She used to hold her breath every time we went downtown.
Not just because the whole atmosphere freaked her out.
After all, I’d dragged her all over the fucking Tenderloin with me scoring, so she wasn’t that easily shocked anymore.
What scared her and pissed her off was that after I scored, I’d shoot up in the car.
I was so crazy, I couldn’t wait to get that fucking poison into my blood.
Like I said, I loved speedballs.
I’d score some coke at the drug minimart.
Then I’d head around the corner to the Mexican street dealers and get my heroin.
Sometimes, I’d shoot up the coke on the way to get the heroin because the coke didn’t have to be cooked.
One day, we were heading into The Alley, and I was filling up a big syringe full of cocaine.
I’d just stuck the thing in my arm when we heard the police megaphone: "Pull over to the curb and stop the car!"
I thought my lady friend was gonna have a coronary.
They didn’t mean us, but she thought they did.
She started having an asthma attack, she got so scared.
She was also scared I’d O.D. — really O.D. — in the car in some fucked up place, like, in a traffic jam on the freeway; and she wouldn’t be able to get me an ambulance if I needed it or
even try to revive me properly.
It used to really freak her out.
What freaked her out worst of all though was The Alley.
She hated it.
She almost cried every time we went there.
She’d moan: "Oh God, not The Alley!"
I’d just laugh.
At the time, I thought it was funny as shit.
The Alley was a fucked-up place, alright.
She was right about that.
In San Francisco, the Mission and the Tenderloin are slums for sure, but they didn’t compare with The Alley.
It’s funny; I can’t remember now exactly what streets The Alley ran between.
I’m pretty sure one of them was Westlake, because if wasn’t far from the drug minimart.
We’d pull out of the parking lot after I scored and head straight for The Alley.
It was only a block long, maybe two at most, but it was gruesome.
The dealers and gofers at the drug minimart and on the street were mostly Hispanic with a few blacks here and there; but there were all kinds of people in The Alley — all races, ages
and sexes.
I remember this old white lady who lived in a cardboard box propped up by three shopping carts.
There was a curtain across the front.
Her husband was a heroin addict.
He used to sell his Methadone — just like Kim a.k.a. The Methadone Queen in Francisco.
He got busted halfway through the summer.
After that, his wife only sold syringes.
There was an elderly black lady who used to sell them, too.
Her and her son.
I think they were Jamaicans.
That’s why I went into The Alley.
That’s the only reason anybody ever went into The Alley — to buy needles.
You could get new ones for $5 and used ones for $3.
Of course, some of those Alley scumbags weren’t above charging you more if they saw you were really suffering and really needed your fix.
Then again, there were others who would give you a needle for a dollar or even .50¢ if they saw you were really sick.
The first time I took my lady friend into The Alley and bought used needles, she had such a horrified look on her face, I thought she was having some kind of seizure!
After that, she kept a shopping bag with bleach and detergent and fabric softener in it in the car.
The bleach was so I could clean the used needles, and she kept the other stuff in the bag so if we got stopped by the cops, l wouldn’t look like some kind of junkie kit.
It would just look like she’d been shopping.
Of course, the used needles were supposed to have already been bleached, but who knows?
Like I said, it’s miracle of God that I don’t have HIV.
Probably the most famous character in The Alley was this old Chinese guy called Toyota.
He was an old heroin addict.
I mean old.
That fucker must have been 75 or 80 if he was a day.
Toyota was a bum, and he was a gofer for every fucking dealer on the street.
Poor Toyota.
He was so crippled, he could barely walk.
He couldn’t even straighten up.
They say he used to make beaucoup bucks panhandling.
Sometimes as much as a couple hundred-dollars a day.
I believe it.
A lot of people must have taken one look at him and felt real sorry for him.
I used to wonder if they would have given him any money at all if they’d known what he used it for.
I used to wonder that about all the bums.
I was wrong when I said the only reason to go into The Alley was to buy syringes.
Believe it or not, there were whores there.
They were all heroin addicts, of course; and they all worked the streets.
Mostly, they turned tricks in cars, although I’ve actually seen guys in suits pull into The Alley and go into a doorway with one of those girls.
Unbelievable.
These girls did strictly blowjobs.
I heard they did pretty well, and they probably did.
If you do 10 or 15 $20-blowjobs a night, you’ll make enough for your fix plus living expenses, too.
I mean how much could it cost to live in the fucking Alley?
The whores weren’t homeless like the needle dealers.
Some of them were, I guess, but most of them lived in the fleabag hotel that was the only building in The Alley that hadn’t been condemned yet.
Actually, the whores were probably the most together people in The Alley.
Which gives you some idea of what a hellhole it really was.
I remember one night, I was driving down The Alley in Ejai’s car, and I passed one of the whores on her way up to the corner.
She was all dressed up to go to work in this tight, white Spandex dress.
It had just rained, and there was this big old mud puddle almost all the way down the length of the fucking Alley.
I drove right through it and splashed mud all over her white dress.
She cried like a baby.
I remember, she barely had any teeth.
I felt so bad for her.
I happened to have a lot of money on me at the time, and I gave her a $100.
She was so happy.
She couldn’t believe it.
It would have taken her five tricks to make that $100 on the street.
Of course, she wouldn’t have made shit in a fucked up, dirty dress.
And by the time she got cleaned up and changed, she’d have been too sick to work.
Everybody in The Alley cheered and applauded.
That night, I was their hero.
After about six weeks or so, my lady friend gave up trying to get me to go to the BAART Clinic.
She never mentioned it anymore.
So life went on one night, I was sitting at the desk shooting up in one of our crummy Sunset motels.
The air conditioning was fucked up, so we’d left the door open.
After a while, we noticed some guy sitting on the steps just a few feet from the open door of our room.
When my lady friend went out to go to the store, she freaked.
The motel and the entire street were crawling with cops.
They weren’t narcs; they were vice.
This was Sunset Boulevard after all, and they were doing some kind of sting to arrest hookers and tricks.
They even had policewomen dressed as whores walking up and down the street in front of our motel.
It had nothing to do with me, of course, but right after that, something really scary happened.
The rent-a-wreck had gone to shit, and they couldn’t have another car ready for us until the next day.
I didn’t have enough money to call Sylvester, so I took the bus downtown to score.
Two cops stopped me as I was wandering around looking for my favorite street dealers.
I had a story all prepared.
In fact, I’d even made my lady friend memorize it in case she was ever stopped while she was waiting for me or coming to pick me up.
I told the cops I was looking for the Olivera Hotel, where my friend Carlos Rodriguez was staying.
I even had the address written down.
The cops knew I was full of shit.
They searched me but — thank God — I hadn’t scored yet.
Still, they knew that’s what I was there for.
They saw my tracks, for one thing.
There was no such hotel for another, and when they searched me, all I had in my wallet was $40 — the street price of half-a-gram of tar.
They couldn’t charge me with anything, but they decided to fuck with me anyway.
Just for the hell of it.
I guess they were bored and had nothing better to do.
They said: "We’ll help you find your friend’s hotel. We’ll take you there when we get off duty."
Yeah, right!
So they made me stand around for the next four or five hours until I started to get sick.
Then they took my $40 and told me not to come back down there any more.
That was the last straw for my lady friend.
Even she’d finally had enough.
Trying to take care of me plus the stress of going broke was getting to her.
She was scared all the time: scared of going bankrupt; scared of getting busted; scared of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with me.
Most of all, she was scared she’d have to see me die someday.
It was bad enough that every day she had to watch me dying by degrees.
One day, she just got on a Greyhound Bus and went back to Berkeley.
I moved back in with D.J.
I made it through another day!
I can hardly believe it.
After slipping all those times, I’m 12 days clean and sober.
I feel awful.
I’m not so sick anymore, but I still feel like shit.
Like I said, the insomnia is the worst thing.
And the depression.
In some ways, the insomnia is almost a good thing, because when I do manage to sleep a couple of hours or more — like a couple of fucking minutes really — I have the most
horrifying dreams.
Awful nightmares.
Of course, that’s what being a junkie is.
A bad fucking dream.
Maybe if I’m lucky — this time — after five years, I’ll finally wake up.
When you’re a heroin addict, you live your life in total isolation.
In the end, it’s just you and the drug.
The friends you thought you had are mostly nothing but junkie buddies — like I said.
If it hadn’t been for the drug, you probably never would have had anything to do with most of them.
When I was with my wife, I had a lot of friends, but they weren’t really "friends."
They were two-faced, most of them.
"Professional leeches," my lady friend used to call them.
We never had anything in common except getting high.
For five years now, it’s been just me and Shiva.
Shiva and me.
It’s only now — after five years, 18 overdoses and God only knows how many detoxes or attempted detoxes, it’s only now that I’m starting to understand that.
The reason it’s so hard for me to get sober is because all I’ve got, at this point, is Shiva.
And much as I hate her, I’m scared shitless to let her go.
Getting jacked up by the L.A.P.D. shook me up.
Going downtown to score was no cakewalk.
And when I couldn’t afford Sylvester, which was most of the time, I had no choice.
I wasn’t making much money tricking any more.
I guess the word had got around that I was a heroin addict.
I can’t blame the tricks.
Who the hell wants to hire a hustler who might O.D. and die in your place?
So I learned to live sick that summer.
Which means I’d make a half-assed effort to detox for a day or two because I just plain couldn’t get any dope, and then I’d get some money from somebody someplace and go score.
I was glad my lady friend wasn’t around to see that.
She’d have been praying like crazy.
A week after she left, I had to turn in the rental car.
Her credit card was maxed out, and since I was doing so few jobs, I couldn’t afford to go pay for it in cash up front every day.
Cash up front meant only one thing to me, and it wasn’t a damned rental car.
Without transportation, it was hard to get downtown.
Sometimes I’d manipulate D.J. into driving me, or I’d get some friend or trick to take me.
Sometimes I’d luck out and get a couple of $200 jobs back to back.
There were still a lot of Jon Vincent fans in the world.
Then I’d buy myself enough to last for a little while.
At least that’s what I told myself.
Who the fuck did I think I was kidding?
Not even myself anymore.
No heroin addict ever saves up or holds on to heroin!
It’s not possible.
If the heroin is there, you’ll do it.
Period.
That’s the nature of the disease.
Most of the time, that wasn’t a problem because I had so little cash.
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
D.J. was going almost as broke as my lady friend.
Sometimes I’d talk a dealer into giving me credit for just one fix.
Sylvester would do it once in a while — me being such a good customer and all.
But believe it or not, I didn’t want to make a habit of that.
The one thing you don’t ever want to do if you’re a heroin addict is get in debt big-time to a dealer.
I learned that the hard way last year in New York.
Of course, with my luck I ended up running afoul of a dealer anyway.
Not a heroin dealer.
This guy was a coke-dealer in Hollywood.
He was also a cocaine addict, and crazy as a fucking bedbug.
I decided I didn’t want to hang around L.A. with this guy mad at me.
So I called my lady friend and, once again, I moved back north.
I’d become like a ping-pong ball going back and forth between northern and southern California.
It’s a good thing, too.
The week after I left, the coke dealer shot somebody!
He had guns all over his place.
Handguns, rifles, nine-millimeters.
I used to think the crazy bastard kept all that shit in case he had to shoot it out with the cops someday!
I’m not sure what really happened.
I heard he shot one of his regular customers, and then sat there and smoked coke while the guy almost bled to death on his carpet.
Finally, the poor bastard crawled outside somehow, and the neighbors called the police.
That could have been me!
The streets of the Tenderloin never looked so good to me as they did that summer!
Anyway, like I said, I spent the rest of that summer living partly with my lady friend in Berkeley and partly on the street in San Francisco.
I still got jobs in San Francisco.
I had some good regulars there, and some good friends.
Paul was a good friend of mine from the Jon Vincent dance-tour days.
He was a sweet, sweet man who loved me very much and was very good to me.
I remember he once bought me a motorcycle, which I later sold.
I ripped him off, of course.
I never paid him back a cent.
When I get completely clean and sober, I’m going to pay him back even if I have to do it a little at a time.
Then there was Sergio — the guy who used to live downstairs at my lady friend’s.
Sergio was a sweet guy who cared for me and tried to help me.
He loved me, too.
He named one of his pet birds after me.
Basically, San Francisco was a replay of L.A.
Even the cast of characters was the same: bums, dealers, tricks, paramedics, my lady friend and me.
And, of course, the real star of the show: Shiva.
The only things missing were the sleaze-bag motels and The Alley.
And, of course, the bums had different names.
San Francisco bums served the same purpose as their counterparts in L. A., but they were a lot more interesting.
Or maybe not.
Maybe I only thought so because I lived part time on the street with them, so I got to know them a whole lot better.
Sarge was a good example.
He’d been a heroin addict for more than 30 years.
He got addicted in Vietnam, where Shiva was cheap and plentiful.
He claimed the Vietcong used to leave bags of it out in the jungle for them so they’d get fucked up and not be able to fight.
Of course, it was a different story when he got back to the States.
Heroin was plentiful in San Francisco too, but it sure as hell wasn’t cheap.
Plus, Sarge was used to the pure stuff.
The real-deal, undiluted Shiva just one generation removed from the poppy.
You don’t get that kind of dope in the U. S.
Not even China White is that good!
Poor Sarge!
Here he could shoot three or four grams of the strongest Mexican-tar and not even get off!
Sometimes it didn’t even get him well.
Still, Sarge was probably the most together bum on the street.
Of course, that’s not saying too much, but still….
He worked hard at supporting his habit: panhandling, scoring for other people, washing windshields in traffic.
He’d even tap dance and do mime shows in traffic jams for spare change.
They say sometimes, he made so much money, he even had enough left over for a hotel room.
The most amazing thing about Sarge was how young he looked.
I remember, my lady friend didn’t believe him when he told us he was 61.
She demanded to see his I.D.
He looked around 40.
He thought the Shiva kept him looking young.
He used to say: "Heroin is a great preservative. It’s like being in suspended animation."
From the looks of him, maybe he was right.
Then there was Cobb.
He was the opposite of Sarge in a lot of ways.
He was a young guy: younger than me.
He was only 28 years old, but he looked 50!
Cobb had full-blown AIDS.
He was a for-real junkie, hardcore.
He must have detoxed 100 times — mostly cold turkey in the San Francisco County Jail.
It never took.
The minute he hit the streets, he was back on heroin.
Cobb told my lady friend that he’d once had a wife and child, but they both died in a car crash.
That was how he became homeless.
It might have been true.
Or it might have been a lie to manipulate her into giving him some spare change for Shiva.
Who knows?
I tried to help Cobb once.
I actually brought him home with me one night to my lady friend’s house.
He took a long hot shower, ate decent food, and I even gave him some of my clothes.
When I saw him three days later, he looked the same as he always had.
I don’t know what he did with the clothes.
He probably found a way to trade them for drugs.
I don’t know why I tried to help Cobb.
I didn’t even like him very much.
He was a sneaky bastard, and he wasn’t above ripping me off when he went to score for me.
He’d stop and shave off a little piece of tar for himself out of each balloon and then blame it on the Mexicans.
My lady friend thought it was because I wanted to create some good karma for myself.
I let her believe that, but it was bullshit.
The truth was, Cobb scared me.
When I looked at him, it was like looking at myself in my nightmares — five maybe even three years down the road.
Cobb had hit bottom a long time ago.
He’d hit bottom and he knew it, and he didn’t give a shit.
The only thing still alive in him was Shiva.
He’d just given up on life.
I don’t ever want to do that.
Of course, I tried to help him, and I failed.
Just like all the people who’ve tried to help me failed.
It wasn’t their fault.
I want all of you — if you read this — to know it wasn’t your fault.
Whether you’re a drunk or a heroin addict, no one can "get you sober."
No one can help you stay that way.
You have to help yourself.
It’s hard for me to believe now, but most of the people I hung with that summer were homeless heroin addicts.
Except for my tricks, the couple of friends I mentioned and my lady friend, they were all bums.
That shows right there how far I’d fallen, how close I was to the fucking bottom of the pit; and still, I didn’t even know it.

CHAPTER XV
(5,505 words)

So life went on.
Or I guess I should say Shiva went on and dragged me along with her.
By fall, I was shooting five-and-a-half grams of tar heroin day!
Then I met a man who tried to help me get clean and sober.
Of course, he failed just like everybody else in my life who’d ever tried to battle my disease.
In fact, he became the fifth and last of those people I mentioned whose lives took major nosedives because they cared for me.
Y. is a wonderful person.
He’s Latin, a young guy my age; and he’s a doctor.
It’s funny, he’d been looking for me for a long time — four or five years, and he never could figure out how to get in touch with me.
I’d been living with my lady friend in Berkeley on and off forever.
I wasn’t running ads as Jon Vincent any more; I was using different names, so there was no way to find me.
My lady friend was kind of smart; she wouldn’t tell him how to reach me.
She’d just tell him I wasn’t around because, basically, he was just like another trick to her; and she thought I didn’t need to be turning tricks.
Which was true, actually.
Finally, though, she realized how cool he was, and she gave him my pager number.
He had to fly out to L.A. on business that October; and he flew me down to meet him.
Just like my lady friend — that was the unluckiest day of his life!
The worst thing he could have ever done was meet me.
If I could do anything in the world now, I would reverse it.
This poor guy put his life on the line for me, tried to get me clean and sober, loved me.
He tried so hard to help me kick heroin.
But he ended up turning into a heroin addict, too, and he lost his medical license.
And I’m responsible.
People say: "You’re not responsible for that."
But I am responsible.
I am responsible for ruining his life.
Anyway, me and Y. hit it off right away.
He came back out to visit me a couple more times.
I flew back to New York with him right after Christmas, 1997; then off to Europe on New Year’s Day.
That turned out to be the vacation from hell.
Especially London.
In London, we saw some real hardcore shit.
I’ll never forget my first night in London.
I wish I could.
We were in this beautiful hotel suite, and I was lying in the bathtub dying.
I’d brought 16 balloons of heroin with me when I left New York on Friday morning, and I used them all up in less than 24 hours.
By Saturday night, I was sick.
Y. and his friend were at a play, and they didn’t get home until after 1 a.m.
By that time, I was real sick.
I told Y. I had to get some help.
He took me to a hospital, but they almost had us arrested.
So we thought we’d try to get into a Methadone clinic.
By this time, it was about 4 a.m.
I remember sitting slumped over in the train station trying not to puke.
A policeman came over and asked me if I was all right.
I don’t remember what I told him.
About that time, Y. came running back saying he’d found the clinic.
After all the effort it took me to crawl in there, they said: "We’re sorry. We’re not serving right now!"
It was time to change gears.
I saw this couple sitting in a corner.
They were obvious heroin addicts.
I went over and introduced myself, and I told them I’d buy them all the heroin they wanted if they’d just show me where I could get some.
So the four of us took off to someplace north of London, where we scored some brown powder.
We went back to their apartment, and I remember telling Y. how impressed I was with their place.
This junkie couple had a gorgeous fucking apartment!
They even had a nice car!
Then I shot up.
Next thing I knew, I opened my eyes, and I saw everybody crying and hugging each other.
I was lying on the floor, and I had no idea what was going on.
Someone knocked on the door.
It was the social worker who provided this couple with their apartment and car.
I stood up and shook his hand, and we left.
Y. told me he’d just saved my life; which he had.
The brown powder I’d bought was about three times stronger than China White!
This stuff was so strong that later that night we gave the dildo we’d brought with us — his name was Phil, I think — just one tenth of a cc; and out he went!
And there went poor Y. again to bring Phil back to life!
It was a truly hellish night.
The next day, we went to Paris which was mercifully uneventful.
We flew back to New York the night after that, and I checked into Beth Israel for detox the next day.
Of course, I didn’t stay long.
Y. couldn’t believe it.
He really thought rehab was the answer for me.
He was new to the game, poor guy.
The overdose in London was my 10th O.D!
Y. had known me less than six months, and already, he’d almost seen me die.
I remember me and him having this terrible fight one night after I walked out of Beth Israel.
I’d called my connection, and I was on my way downstairs to get my dope, and Y. tried to stop me.
He actually got behind me and tried to physically hold me back!
Which was ridiculous.
There was no way!
The next day, I decided it was time to get away from New York and Y. for a while.
I flew back to L.A.
In A.A., they call it the Geographical Theory of Sobriety.
That’s where an addict believes that going someplace else will help him get sober.
Sort of like: the grass is always greener.
It wasn’t.
I wasn’t about to get sober in L.A., New York, San Francisco, London, or any place else.
I put on a good show, though.
Much more for myself than for the people around me.
Like I said, I only thought I was fooling them.
They all knew I was stoned.
I even signed up at the BAART Clinic.
I’d been to the on in San Francisco enough times that I had their schedule down.
I knew exactly how many days in a row I could miss (two) without being thrown out of the program.
So I’d show up for a couple of days, then I’d get high for a couple of days.
It was crazy.
I was on the run.
It was at this point, that I connected with Dino and Camille, and they became my favorite dealers.
After a while, I bought heroin only from them.
They sold good dope (they sold coke too); they’d deliver if I bought a few grams at a time; and when I was desperate, they gave me credit.
Plus, unlike most dealers, they’d let me hang around and shoot up in their house.
Most dealers won’t do that for anybody!
The last thing a drug dealer needs is having somebody O.D. and die in their place!
Funny thing is, I did O.D. on Camille’s couch once.
It was my 11th O.D. I think — maybe my 12th.
She couldn’t wake me up, and she sure as hell couldn’t call 911!
She didn’t know how to reach D.J; he was at work.
So she called my lady friend in Berkeley.
My face had turned blue, but I was still breathing — barely.
My lady friend talked her through giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and she finally brought me around.
In February, I decided I may as well make some money from my Jon Vincent name without turning tricks.
So I booked myself into a week of dancing at the Fusion Theater in Chicago.
I figured I could make a couple $1,000 and get myself a car and maybe even my own apartment.
Of course, that was just me bullshitting myself.
It was my disease wanting to make a bunch of money for Shiva.
And, of course, it all turned into a total fiasco.
Like I said before, if Y. hadn’t been there to help me through it, I don’t know what would have happened.
I’d have either got sued for being too sick to dance; or I’d have got busted or killed trying to score heroin on the streets of Chicago by myself.
Maybe both.
It’s funny; that experience of being sick and stranded in Chicago and having to go onstage was so horrifying, it did something that jail, rehab, homelessness, divorce and 12 (at that
point) O.D.s had never been able to do.
It actually made me want to get sober.
I’d been a heroin addict for three years straight at this point.
I just didn’t want to do it anymore.
When I got back from Chicago, I went back to visit my old friends at Rancho L’abri.
The place hadn’t changed much.
Maybe that was the problem.
It was my 11th O.D. I think — maybe my 12th.
She couldn’t wake me up, and she sure as hell couldn’t call 911!
She didn’t know how to reach D.J; he was at work.
So she called my lady friend in Berkeley.
My face had turned blue, but I was still breathing — barely.
My lady friend talked her through giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and she finally brought me around.
In February, I decided I may as well make some money from my Jon Vincent name without turning tricks.
So I booked myself into a week of dancing at the Fusion Theater in Chicago.
I figured I could make a couple $1,000 and get myself a car and maybe even my own apartment.
Of course, that was just me bullshitting myself.
It was my disease wanting to make a bunch of money for Shiva.
And, of course, it all turned into a total fiasco.
Like I said before, if Y. hadn’t been there to help me through it, I don’t know what would have happened.
I’d have either got sued for being too sick to dance; or I’d have got busted or killed trying to score heroin on the streets of Chicago by myself.
Maybe both.
It’s funny; that experience of being sick and stranded in Chicago and having to go onstage was so horrifying, it did something that jail, rehab, homelessness, divorce and 12 (at that
point) O.D.s had never been able to do.
It actually made me want to get sober.
I’d been a heroin addict for three years straight at this point.
I just didn’t want to do it anymore.
When I got back from Chicago, I went back to visit my old friends at Rancho L’abri.
The place hadn’t changed much.
Maybe that was the problem.
It didn’t get me sober the first time.
No rehab ever had.
That first time, I was under orders from the court to complete my program.
This time, I knew — or rather, my disease knew — that there was nothing to really make me stay there and detox.
So I didn’t.
I felt bad because both Y. and my mother lost the money they’d put up for my two-week stay.
Rehab doesn’t give refunds.
It doesn’t guarantee results either.
I’m living proof of that.
I just couldn’t hack it.
Part of it was because of all the medication they were giving me.
They wanted me to take large doses of Methadone, which I’ve never wanted to do.
Trading one opiate addiction for another has to be the dumbest thing in the world!
Plus, they were giving me Haldol for some reason.
It’s really strong — sort of like Thorazine.
It made me feel like a zombie.
A detoxing zombie.
In the first week, I busted out of the place a half-a-dozen times.
The last time turned into a real adventure.
Sick and spaced out as I was, I made it up to the highway and hitched a ride to what I thought was San Diego.
I was so out of it, I didn’t realize until it was too late that I’d been hitchhiking on the wrong side of the road.
The trucker who picked me up took me straight into Tecate, Mexico.
I hadn’t planned it that way, but I thought: Cool. I can probably get some strong-ass Shiva on this side of the border!
I mean, that’s why they call it Mexican Tar, right?
Unfortunately, the federales had other ideas.
They took one look at me and decided I was an undesirable.
(You can’t say they weren’t doing their jobs.)
Anyway, they arrested me, confiscated my cash, and made me go right back across the border.
I called my lady friend to come and get me, but she said she couldn’t.
She was too broke, she said; plus, I guess she’d had enough of my craziness in her life.
Somehow, I made it back to L.A.
I called my lady friend and asked her to wire me some cash Western Union.
She knew I was headed straight downtown to Heroinville, and she begged me to go back to Rancho L’abri and at least try to finish my program.
I said: "No fucking way!"
So she reserved a bus ticket for me to come to Berkeley.
I sold that fucker and headed straight for Alvarado Street.
Later that night, I O.D.’ed at a crystal dealer’s house somewhere near UCLA.
The crystal dealer freaked out and called my lady friend who called D.J., who came and picked me up.
I stayed at his place for a couple of days, but I could see he had just about reached the end.
Ejai came by one morning and talked me into going back to Rancho L’abri.
I let her drive me back there, but I knew I wasn’t going to stay.
I also knew something had to be done.
I was O.D.ing at a rate of about once every three days!
I was totally out of control at this point.
I was an airplane going down in flames.
It was at this point that Y. told me about the seven-hour rapid-detox procedure, which was a new way of getting off Heroin.
It was supposed to remove the opiates from your blood and organs without any of the suffering you go through in withdrawal.
Plus, it didn’t leave you addicted to Methadone.
Y. said he’d pay for it.
I agreed.
On April 1, 1998, I checked into Cedar Sinai Hospital and did their seven-hour detox.
I chose the perfect day for it.
April Fool’s Day.
The people at Cedar Sinai told me it would be painless and pleasant.
They said I’d be given mild sedatives, which would relax me, and then, I’d be put under general anesthesia for the actual detox.
They said I’d wake up feeling peaceful, with only mild discomfort — no more than a slight headache — if that.
They were lying sacks of shit!
It was pure hell!
In the three years of doing heroin up to that point, I thought I’d hit bottom a couple of times, but I never knew what bottom was until I did the rapid detox.
That operation ripped my fucking balls off!
I had a catheter down my dick.
I had a windpipe down my throat.
And I had this big fucking bull-dyke nurse.
I remember I actually called her a dyke.
I guess she was offended by that because she kept pulling me up on the operating table.
That bitch wrestled me all over the fucking bed!
As if I wasn’t uncomfortable enough with all the shit they were doing to me.
The rapid detox is kind of like what rock stars used to do to get off of heroin.
They had their blood changed.
Well, in this procedure, they didn’t change my blood.
They just pumped a lot of nasty fucking drugs into it to cleanse it of all the heroin.
I remember this white milk coming down the tube into my arm, and when it hit me, I went out.
Only I wasn’t totally out.
I could hear stuff in the background.
I heard someone saying: "Oh my God!"
I’d shit all over myself!
They stuck so many chemicals in my veins, all my shit let go!
It was the most humiliating time of my life.
Worst of all, it didn’t work!
I was released from the hospital the next day but for a week afterwards, I was too sick to travel.
Y. got us hotel room in Hollywood and took care of me.
Then I went back to New York — still sick as fucking dog.
I remember lying there suffering but thanking God that the operation woke me up after being hooked on heroin for three years.
The truth is, the operation punished me physically more than anything.
It punished me and scared me, but It didn’t detox me one bit.
I went to sleep for five hours while they shot me up with a lot of powerful anti-opiate drugs.
Then I laid up in bed in New York for 20 days straight detoxing the regular way anyway — not sleeping and shit.
I could have just done that on my own without having all that nasty shit done to me.
For anyone out there who’s thinking of doing it, believe me, that one-day detox is one big joke.
It’s the biggest ripoff operation in the world.
In a way, I was glad I went through with it.
I thought the procedure brought all the hard part out of me.
I thought it was God’s ass-whipping to me, which is what it was.
I truly thought in my heart that this time I’d stay sober.
I’d said I was going to get sober so many times in my life.
And I’d said I was going to stay that way.
You’d think that — if nearly dying all those times didn’t scare my monkey ass into staying sober — something as horrifying as that fucking rapid-detox would have.
It should have.
It probably would have with anybody else, but I had to be the stupid, fucking hard-headed exception to the rule.
I have been sober many times in my life.
But, you know, I always slipped.
My "new life" in New York was no exception.
And like all the other times in my life, when I fucked up, I fucked up big time.
Ninety days after the procedure, I was back on heroin.
I told people I was clean and sober for four months, six months.
It was all bullshit.
In fact, the only reason I stayed sober the first 30 of those 90 days was because I was such a wreck physically from the operation that I couldn’t get out of bed, let alone go uptown and
score.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t even clean and sober for the whole 90 days.
I wasn’t doing heroin.
That was the truth.
So I guess — in a way — I was clean.
But I sure as hell wasn’t sober.
I drank.
The day me and Y. flew back to New York, I got shit-faced in the airport bar even before I got on the plane.
Plus I did shit loads of coke.
Which is how I got back into doing heroin.
It never fails.
Once you’ve been a heroin addict, you cannot do drugs of any kind, because they will cause you to get re-addicted to heroin.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
If you think you’re the exception, then you’re as big a fool as I was.
Any drugs, all drugs — weed, pills, crystal; booze, coke, even steroids — all drugs will lead you back to Shiva.
I’m the living proof!
I stayed in New York for about six months after that.
I lived most of that time at Y.’s.
He had a fine apartment in midtown Manhattan; and eventually, I brought al my junkie buddies there just like I’d done at my lady friend’s house in Berkeley and at D.J.’s house in
L.A.
My friend, Brian Hart, used to hang out there all the time.
We tried hard to keep each other sober, but we ended up getting high together.
About this same time, I met this guy at the gym.
He was a big bodybuilder named Chad.
Me and him started training together.
Then, I found out he did cocaine; and we ended up becoming junkie buddies.
I turned him on to hustling; and for a while, I became his roommate, and we both turned tricks out of his apartment.
Eventually, Chad made the switch from cocaine to heroin.
Later, after I went back to California, he got busted and sent to prison.
It sounds harsh, but that’s probably the best place for him.
He’ll have to get sober there at least; and I hope that when he gets out, he’ll stay that way.
Even my old friend C. got into the act.
C. went back to Louisiana to live with his parents a few months after he got out of jail in Bakersfield.
He was still there, working for his dad.
I invited him to New York for a visit, and, of course, he just never left.
Eventually, he also became a Heroin addict, which kind of surprised me because he never liked heroin.
He always said it didn’t do anything for him.
I remember him trying it one time even before I got heavy into it.
We were in a motel in San Francisco with Finesse.
Poor C!
Leave it to him to O.D. the first time he shot up heroin.
He went out like a light.
He liked it a lot better in New York.
He never got as addicted as me, but he was addicted.
Maybe it was just the general atmosphere.
Or maybe it was because the heroin in New York is so much stronger than in California.
In New York, there’s nothing but the strongest, purest China White.
Of course, I got into some pretty bad habits myself in New York.
As if any habit could get any worse than the $300-to-$500-a-day one I’d had for four fucking years.
Still it was in New York that I learned to dissolve rock in a spoonful of lemon juice so I could cook it up and shoot it.
It’s funny; I’ve never been much of a crackhead.
The pipe is something I’ve always been able to take or leave, but I loved shooting crack with heroin.
It makes a special kind of speedball.
The crack takes me up instantly, and then before I have a chance to crash, the Heroin hits me and mellows me right down.
I learned to cook and shoot up Methadone, too.
It wasn’t much different from shooting K-2s and K-4s.
I don’t know why I never thought of it before.
Probably because I never liked Methadone much — not as a cure for heroin and definitely not as a high.
Of course, I liked it a lot better when I shot it.
That’s one thing they say about junkies that’s true.
Heroin addicts are just as addicted to the act of shooting up as we are to heroin.
It’s sick but true.
Of course, with all this shooting up going on, I was tricking heavy again.
I had some intense regulars in New York.
Some of them were old friends from my Jon Vincent dance-tour days.
Some of them I met through ads in the major gay papers in New York.
One who stands out in my mind is this casting director.
He was an old regular of mine.
He’s a good guy; I’ve known him for years.
He wants you to go without taking a bath for about a week before you come over to his house.
He wants you to be stinky!
And then he loves to smell your armpits.
Me and Brian Hart went over there one time, and he told us we weren’t stinky enough.
He told us to go outside and do some pushups.
We did; and, when we came back, we were rank!
He said: "Well, that’s better!"
Then, he got down on his knees in front of us and started smelling everything: armpits, crotches, assholes.
He gave us $1,000 a piece.
This guy loved hair, too.
He loved to shave it.
One time, a long time ago, he pulled out his movie camera and offered us a bunch of money to film us shaving each other.
At the time, Brian and I both needed the money bad.
So we shaved each other’s shit all off.
We looked like two gross, plucked, skinned chickens when we got done.
Skinny skinned chickens, too!
I weighed about 160 pounds at that point, and I think Brian weighed maybe 120.
We were starving, crazed cocaine addicts.
Do you believe it?
We got that strung out and skinny on cocaine!
He put all our pubic hair in a plastic bag and saved it.
I don’t know what happened to the "skinless chicken" movie.
He probably still has it in his collection.
I’d love to see that movie now.
Actually, maybe I wouldn’t.
Then, there was the dance queen.
We used to see him in L.A., too — before his TV show moved back to New York.
This guy was one sick-fuck.
The major desert on his diet-plate was shit.
Seriously.
He actually ate it!
We’d have to get up on the bathtub with him and shit in his mouth while he lay there screaming: "Drop it! Drop it!"
He always used to say: "If you don’t hit the roof of my mouth, you don’t get paid!"
One time, I had the runs, and I shit all over his face, and he started screaming: "Eeeee-ew!"
But he still laid there and lapped it up.
Ugh.
It makes me sick now just to remember him.
He used to get into it heavy with me and Nick Cougar in L.A.
That guy was a hard bargain!
New York has some raunchy motherfuckers!
One of my old friends in New York that I reconnected with was a woman named Darcie.
I met her years ago.
She reminds me a little bit of Sharon Kane.
She’s a real fag hag.
I don’t know what it is that makes a woman a fag hag.
Loneliness, I guess.
Or men doing them wrong at some point in their lives.
Sharon, for example, was pretty enough to get any man she wanted, but for some reason, she liked gay guys.
I never understood it.
Anyway, Darcie came to visit me in my apartment in L.A. not too long ago before I moved out.
She came into town with her friend, Ric — a real nice guy.
He brought Ejai some roses one time.
They’d just flown in from Brazil.
She was expecting me to be clean and sober and, of course, she got a rude awakening.
She started trying to tell me what to do and shit, and I said: "You’ve gotta get the fuck outta here now, bitch. Because I gotta do some heroin and you’re just getting in my way!! Shiva
comes before you!"
Poor Darcie.
She’s been sober a long time.
Somehow, she got to the point where she could drink wine and champagne again.
I don’t know how.
I guess, for her, there really is such a thing as chipping.
Anyway, I figured since she was gonna sit there drinking wine, I might as well bust out the needle.
She had no idea. I just got up and went into the bedroom, and when I came back, she freaked. She said: "What the hell happened? You’re completely different!"
I said: "What’s the matter, Baby? What are you talking about?"
"Something happened!" she said.
"You’re not you! All of a sudden!"
A Thousand and One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent
"Oh, Baby. I just took a hit of a joint. That’s all."
But she wasn’t buying it.
She said: "No. That ain’t weed. Something happened!"
Then, she saw the blood running down my arm, and she started screaming.
"Oh, God! You’re doing heroin! Still!"
I said: "Yep! Five years now! I haven’t quit yet!"
She totally freaked!
I told her I was leaving, and she said she was staying there.
I guess she didn’t want to be seen in public with me while I was high on heroin.
I didn’t come back the whole night, and she was still there waiting for me in the morning, drinking her coffee and smoking her cigarettes.
She was really pissed.
She said: "I’ll never come to see you again!!"
I just said: "OK. Whatever. I guess I’ll see you later."
And I thought to myself that she was crazy if she thought heroin was going to take a back seat to her.
I barely let my mother get in the way of heroin.
That’s just the way it is.
It’s like that song by The Velvet Underground: "Heroin — it’s my wife! And it’s my life!"
If Darcie really thought she was gonna get in the way of my drug habit, she was out of her fucking mind!
Poor Darcie.
She was alright.
She was a good woman, a good person.
I respect her more than any woman alive.
She had a hard life.
She used to work as a make-up artist for practically nothing.
Now she’s a great makeup artist.
She’s really good.
I don’t know what her experiences with men have been.
Pretty bad, I guess.
They turned her into a fag hag and all.
She’s always been real leery of me; always bitching at me for drinking and using drugs — which she had no right to do, since I already had a fucking bitch on my back all the time.
There’s no place like New York for hustling.
I was charging $250 a job and still doing two to seven jobs a day.
Some weekends, I’d make over $4,000.
It all went into my arms, of course.
Or into my friends’ arms.
I can hardly believe, now, how much money I’ve spent in my life on heroin.
Of course, I have nothing.
Not even the clothes on my back.
My mother bought me those.
Shiva took it all away from me, even faster than I made it.
Maybe that was my punishment.
I did my own nosedive.
Speaking of nosedives, somewhere in the middle of all this sickness, Y. started sneaking a snort or two of Shiva.
Just to relax and sleep a little.
From there, he went to smoking.
Then to shooting up — just like the rest of us.
Soon, he was a full-blown, hardcore heroin addict just like the rest of us.
Maybe it was inevitable.
I mean, he lived in a house full of junkies.
I don’t know how it happened; but I know what happened afterwards.
He started fucking up at the hospital, and when they found out why, they took his medical license.
Then he went into rehab.
I talk to him on the phone regularly.
He says he’s clean and sober now.
I pray to God it’s true.
Me and C. stayed on at his apartment for a while after he went into rehab.
Then we got into trouble with some scumbag drug dealers, and we had to haul ass back to California.
We stayed with my lady friend in Berkeley for a while.
She was busy fixing up her house.
She’d taken out as many loans on it as she could; and she was fixing it up to rent it out and move to L.A.
It was the only way she could survive financially.
Me and C. went to L.A. with her, and we all stayed in a motel in Hollywood for a few weeks while she looked for an apartment.
But she started to get pissed off because C. wasn’t paying her anything toward the rent even though he was doing jobs there.
That’s C. all over.
When she went back to Berkeley to start moving what was left of her stuff, my friend P. got me my apartment in Hollywood, which I later turned into the nightmare junkie flophouse
from hell.
C. went to live with a crystal addict he met one night on Sunset.

CHAPTER XVI
(975 words)

So that’s it.
My life so far.
Like I said, it’s not strawberries and cream, but I’ve tried to tell the truth — to all of you and to myself; and that’s about all I can do at this point.
Tell the truth about the past, and, like my friend Hope says, try not to repeat it.
There are some discrepancies in the story, I know.
I apologize for those.
Most of them are because my memory is just plain fucked up from so much heroin, cocaine and alcohol.
Others are just plain lies — either deliberate or unconscious on my part.
Looking back over the manuscript, even I’m not sure sometimes which was which.
Whatever the reasons were for the lies at the time, I prayed to God.
And He gave me the strength to set the record straight.
The main thing I want to set straight is about something The Maggot said about me.
That when me and him first met, I wanted him to fuck me.
I called him a liar.
I want to say here that he was telling the truth.
I did let him fuck me.
That shows how bad my drug and alcohol addiction was even back then when I first came to California!
I was desperate to be loved by anyone, anytime, in any way I could.
I hate it when people talk about me getting fucked.
There’s a friend of mine from New York who goes around telling people: "Yes. I fucked Jeff."
How ridiculous!
Nobody wants to hear about somebody fucking my nasty ass!
The truth is I loved it when I was younger.
I was a real little whore.
It’s something I don’t do anymore; it was a symptom of my sickness.
A dangerous symptom.
But if I really and truly enjoyed it now, I would.
Enough said.
Which brings me and Hope just about back to where we started.
How do we end the book?
We’re not sure of that either.
When I started writing down my life story, I actually expected to be a lot further along in my sobriety at this point.
I expected to be able to end the book by saying I was now four or five months clean and sober, or at least 90 days.
No such luck.
It’s 6:22 a.m., and I haven’t slept for more than an hour a night for the past nine days.
I know what you’re thinking.
He slipped again, and he didn’t tell us about it!
Well, you’re right!
When I slipped, I felt so bad and so depressed, I didn’t want to admit that I’d fucked up again — not even to the fucking tape recorder.
Then, like a typical drug addict, I thought: Fuck it!
If I can’t end the book with me being sober,
I’ll end it with me being stoned.
I’ll end it with me crawling around on the floor with a fucking needle hanging out of my arm, fucked up on black-tar and cocaine.
Shooting speedballs — my old favorite.
I even joked about it with my friend, G. I said: "I’m gonna call the last chapter ’A Night Like Every Other Night.'"
I figured people could find out — later on — that I got clean and sober.
Or I figured I’d wait and write an article or something after I got a few months of sobriety under my belt.
But I don’t want to do that now.
That’s not the truth either.
And anything that’s not the truth is just more drug-addict bullshit.
The truth is: I can’t remember how many times I’ve slipped since I started working on this book.
It’s been a lot.
But I’m still here.
I may be only nine days sober at this point, but I’m not giving up!
If people out there who are struggling with heroin addiction read this book, maybe they’ll feel better about themselves — even if they have slipped a couple of times, and they’ll know
that if I can do even this much, then they can do it, too.
Maybe, with God’s help, they can do even better.
I’m getting a new perspective on life today.
I feel happy.
There are things that bother me, but I’m dealing with them.
I’m actually dealing with them!
Ordinarily, at nine days sober, I wouldn’t even try to deal with whatever upset me.
I’d go get high over it.
But not now.
Lately, I’ve been going to meetings.
I’ve been talking to people.
I’ve been working on the book.
Maybe taking this moral inventory of my life and telling it to all of you has really helped me!
I don’t want to slip anymore.
I don’t want to O.D. anymore.
And I don’t want any more Shiva!
I want to be able to talk to people, and I want people to talk to me and be able to understand me.
I’m tired of being alone and dead inside.
I want to live again.
So, I’m nine days clean and sober!
I’m on my way!
People who think I’m gonna fuck up can just fuck off.
People who have a problem with me for whatever reason and want me to fuck up can go right along with them.
I joined Powerhouse Gym today.
It was hard to work out again — sober, without much sleep, and without any steroids; but I did it.
In fact, I’ve decided not to take any more steroids.
I want a completely drug-free life — all the way.
I think things are going to get really good from now on.
AUTHOR’S EPILOGUE
(1,232 words)
I knew Jeff Vickers for nearly 10 years, all of which were marred by serious problems of chemical dependency.
The last five were defined by his struggle against heroin addiction.
During the first half of the new millennium, he and I worked closely on the manuscript which became A Thousand and One Night Stands — a project conceived and begun in the late
summer of 1998.
Jeff intended A Thousand and One Night Stands to be more than merely the story of his life, more than the chronicling of the career of the porn star known as Jon Vincent.
It was his intention, indeed his dream, that this account of the events of his life — both public and private — would stand as both a powerful anti-drug polemic, and as a warning,
particularly to young people of both genders and all sexual orientations, about the intrinsically insidious nature of the porno industry with its "easy" money, spurious glamour and,
most of all, what Jeff considered its direct causal connection to hard drugs use and its links to big-city illegal drug-culture.
Jeff wanted, ultimately, to become a drug counselor, using the often tragic experiences of his lifelong battle against chemical dependency to help others with the same affliction.
Just as he was able to tell many people the story of his life and career through this book, he hoped to be able to reach out to other troubled individuals on a wider yet more personal
level by lecturing to young people about the evils of drugs in general and about the dangers of drugs and alcohol when combined with the pressures of the porno and "escort"
businesses in particular.
Tragically, Jeff was fated never to accomplish his ambitions.
In early April, 2000, he decided — in his typically precipitous fashion — to take a trip to New York to visit his friend, Y.
It was a hasty decision to say the least.
I remember going to the gym late one afternoon.
I returned less than two hours later to find Jeff packing his bags and confirming his plane reservations.
He said he wanted to return temporarily to escort-work in Manhattan to earn money for a new car.
Y., now clean and sober, would be a perfect role model.
Through Y. and his friends, Jeff assured me, he would have a ready-made clean and sober support group.
He would continue going to meetings in New York, and he would return with an additional month’s sobriety under his belt.
I was to continue working on the book in his absence.
He would be in daily contact with me and with his recovering friend G. by phone.
What could go wrong?
The answer was, unfortunately, everything.
I remember an intense feeling of dismay as he waved to me from the window of his taxi bound for L.A. International Airport.
Dismay coupled with a vague yet unshakable uneasiness.
It was hardly anything as morbid or as concrete as fearing that I would never see him again.
Even after almost 10 years of dealing with Jeff and his multiple chemical addictions (the last five of them spent watching him fight his losing battle against heroin), I was as yet
incapable of wrapping my consciousness around that horrifically probable possibility.
Yet, we all felt it.
All of us who cared about him felt uneasy about that trip.
It was unnecessary.
Jeff needed a new car much like the proverbial fish needed a bicycle.
It was illogical.
Jeff constantly proclaimed to almost anyone who would listen that escort work exacerbated his drug use.
The trip to New York was simply more "drug-addict thinking:" the Geographical Theory of Sobriety, denial done up to look like greener pastures 3,000 miles away.
In New York, earning hundreds of dollars per day through hustling, he would undoubtedly slip — immediately and often.
To preserve his own sobriety, Y. would be forced to send him packing.
At best, he would continue his present pattern of slipping, chipping and temporarily "sobering up."
At worst, he would return to California with a more expensive, even more voracious habit than he had before.
Either way, he would have to endure the physical pain and psychological torment of detoxing all over again.
The vicious cycle would continue.
Only his friend G. dared voice the fear that lurked at the back of all our minds.
"Jeff can’t bullshit me," G. said grimly when he heard of Jeff’s departure.
"I’ve been a junkie for 32 years. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter. He’s not going to stay sober in New York. He’s going there to use. And he’ll keep on using until he dies."
On May 3, 2000, I got The Call.
It was The Call I had been expecting for many years, but when it finally came, I could only stammer in disbelief.
Jeff was dead.
Poor Y. had returned to his apartment earlier that evening to find his lifeless body on the floor.
It was apparent to Y. — a physician — that Jeff had been dead for several hours.
He was 37 years old.
Thus, what Jeff originally conceived of as a "moral inventory of his life, told to the whole world," turned out to be his epitaph.
He often joked, grimly and — as it turned out — prophetically that if he failed to sober up, someone else would have to write his story’s ending.
Sadly, he was right.
And sadly, that task has fallen to me.
There has been a great deal of speculation about the circumstances of his death.
Apparently, it struck many people as unlikely that a man who had used drugs intravenously for more than a decade, a man who had survived 18 overdoses, would succumb
accidentally to an dose of heroin "inappropriately administered."
The traces of Valium in his system at the time of his death led many people to assume the worst.
From internet chatrooms to headlines in the gay press, the question was: "Did Jon Vincent commit suicide?"
Those of us who knew him knew better.
Those who read this book can only come to the same, logical conclusion.
Jeff Vickers a.k.a. Jon Vincent died at a time when he wanted very much to live.
He died at a time when he was trying not only to break free of his addiction but also to reconnect with the sense of spirituality that he felt he had experienced, albeit all too briefly, in
his youth.
Although he lived what may have seemed in many ways a suicidal life, I do not believe that his death was in any way deliberate.
The Valium in his bloodstream and the needle in his neck notwithstanding, I believe his death was accidental.
Jeff ran out of veins; then he ran out of luck; the end.
His hopes, his regrets, his life speak to readers from the pages of this book just as his work as a gay-porn icon speaks to filmgoers from the screen.
We can only hope that he is, at last, at peace.
Goodbye, Jeffie.
Rest well.

Hope A Carson, age 75, North Las Vegas, NV | Locations: Las Vegas NV, Venice CA, Santa Monica CA

 

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