Like Me (10 page)

I did get hired back by Opryland to be in the Red Cast, the group of performers whose contracts were longer and a bit more secure. I threw myself into rehearsals, juggling my schedule with Sport Seasons, my classes, and hiding. My cast that year was composed mostly of the same folks from the Purple Cast, plus a few new faces. The three-week rehearsals that led up to opening day at the park were grueling. We were all excited because we knew we had an especially great cast and a well-written show to perform over the next nine months.

Opening day was always a big deal. Friends and family usually came out to watch our first couple of shows, and since I had no family that lived near, Brenda asked if she could come. I was nervous about her showing up. I didn’t want anyone to ask me questions about who she was, but I wanted her to see my show. She did come to the debut of the show, and I was pleased that no one asked me much about her. She continued to come to the performances on occasion, and when she did, I worked extra hard at making sure my cast mates knew that I was ambivalent about her showing up. I tried to hide my smiles when I saw her. I did my best to avoid hugging her hello or good-bye.

L
iving with Brenda was relatively easy. She was a busy student at MTSU and a full-time employee of Sport Seasons. We didn’t have great amounts of time together, but we did get into our routine as a couple. I was the leaseholder of the apartment, so she paid her rent and utilities to me each month. One evening while I was doing the bills, we started talking about things. I told her again that I didn’t think I was gay. (I knew I was; I just didn’t want to be.) I offered that she wasn’t either. When I had asked her six months ago if she’d ever had any kind of sexual relationship
with a girl before me, her answer had been “no.” That night, while I was writing checks for the rent and the electric bill, I suggested that perhaps we were both normal girls and that this thing had nothing to do with homosexuality. We were attracted to each other …but we weren’t gay.

Then she admitted that she had had a girlfriend before and that she lied to me because she didn’t want to scare me off. She told me her story of two beautiful young girls in high school who fell in love. By the time the whole love affair unraveled, it had become ugly. She shared the sordid details of parents getting involved, fighting with one another about who had started the relationship, demands from a father shouting threats from a front porch daring one girl to take one more step toward his baby girl, and religious beliefs that Brenda and her girlfriend would burn in hell for what they were doing.

I was angry with Brenda for having lied to me and for telling me that I was the first girl she’d ever been attracted to, and I felt tricked. I’d constructed a theory inside my head that said if only I had known she’d been with a girl before, I wouldn’t have gone through with being physical with her. I convinced myself that had she declared that she was a gay girl, I would’ve had my defenses up and would have been able to say no to this homosexual who was pursuing me. I know it was ridiculous, but I was scared and trying to do anything to identify myself as anything other than what I was—a homosexual. I knew deep down that I was lying to her too, though. I knew without a doubt that I was gay. But I continued to tell her otherwise.

I pulled back a little bit from her after she shared that story with me. I began to spend what little social time I had with my fellow performers from Opryland. Our cast decided to take a trip to the beach. I had never seen the ocean before and was excited to drive down to Gulf Shores, Alabama.

A dozen of us went and a few brought wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, or a pal. I didn’t consider inviting Brenda, even though
I knew she would have loved to go. A couple of days before I left for our beach trip, Brenda asked if she could go. I said no.

The next morning, before I headed out to Opryland for a full day of shows, Brenda told me that she was so angry and hurt that she was going to do something and I’d be sorry. She told me that after I parked my car in the employee parking lot that day, she was going to find every car in the lot that belonged to my cast mates and put a flyer on each one saying that I was gay. “By this time tomorrow, all of your friends will know that you’re gay.” I begged her not to do it. She said it was too late, that she’d made up her mind.

One minute I was certain that she was just making idle threats and that she wouldn’t do something like that; the next minute I was convinced that she would.

By the time I left the theater that night, I was preparing myself for the worst. Before the last show, I packed up my hair and makeup kit and all of my personal items so I could get a head start out of there. My plan was to reach the employee parking lot and scan it for cars with flyers under their windshield wipers. There were hundreds of cars in the lot, but I only needed to address sixteen of them. I ran to my car first and put my bags in the passenger seat. I remember specifically finding each of my cast mates’ cars, one by one. No flyers. I saw a tram pull up to the lot and about eight of my friends got off and headed to their cars. I rushed to mine without being noticed, started it, and drove away. I was relieved but still upset. Although Brenda didn’t follow through on her threat, she did inflict a type of revenge. Fear. She knew that I had a big red fear button and she pushed it.

I knew, at that point, that I would carefully take steps to distance myself from her.

From then on, I didn’t sleep in her bedroom and she didn’t sleep in mine. I felt like I was in a movie, a scared wife secretly
planning her escape. She apologized for the threat and for putting me through such worry. She begged me for forgiveness, which I did honestly grant her. I couldn’t forget what she had done, though, and I promised myself that I would never again put myself in that position. But things would get worse before they got better.

I asked Brenda to find another place to live and I assured her that she could take her time. A week or so after she said she would find a new living situation, I asked her how the search was going. She said that she had changed her mind, that she didn’t want to move after all. She suggested that we live together as roommates and have no form of a relationship other than as friends. I knew she didn’t mean that.

We began to argue and I ended up putting some of my things in a duffel bag. I was going to stay at Laura-Grace’s until Brenda moved out. As I was almost to the door of the apartment, I heard her walk to the kitchen. She ran to where I was and got between the door and me. She’d grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said. She made me walk to the end of the hallway, back by the bedrooms, and sit with my back against the wall. We sat there for more than an hour.

I tried to calm her down, explaining to her that we needed to stop this situation; there was nothing good that could come of it. I wanted to call the police, but I wondered what I would tell them if I was even able to call. She got so angry with me that she began to threaten to out me again, to start calling my Opryland cast and to call my bosses at the park too. I stood up in the hallway and tried to walk away, but she grabbed me and pushed me against the wall. The drywall broke where my head hit it. It didn’t knock me out, but it stunned me. I was terrified and I began to cry.

It was then that she realized how out of control she was. She just slid to the floor and cried. I wanted to console her, but I
didn’t. I picked up my duffel bag, walked out the door, and stayed away until she moved out. Within a week I was back in my apartment, alone.

After that I focused on my music. I had my keyboard with me, and I wrote songs anytime I could. During the day, I worked at Opryland and Sport Seasons, mostly at a new store location far from Brenda. I went to my classes at MTSU and spent time trying to get to know songwriters on Nashville’s famed Music Row.

Occasionally I did see Brenda. Once, I even went over to her new apartment. I felt it was important to try and stay friendly with her, and I honestly did miss her friendship. A month after our breakup, she started to see another girl; I was relieved.

“Dear God, please don’t let me be gay,” I would say in the quiet of my apartment. “I promise to be a good person. I promise not to lie. I promise not to steal. I promise to always believe in you. I promise to do all the things you ask me to do. Please take it away. In your name I pray. Amen.”

A few months later, a man asked me out to dinner and a movie. He was nice, handsome, and had a good job. We ate dinners, watched movies, and spent time together for a few months. I felt nothing—absolutely nothing.

For the next three years, I was able to deny myself the affection I craved. From time to time, I dated men, but those relationships were short-lived and faded away.

W
hen Harold Shedd signed me to my first record contract, in 1993, I was naively adamant about certain things. I recall sitting in his office at Mercury Records and discussing my vision of what kind of artist I wanted to be. I was not kidding when I told him that I had no interest in being a video babe. I told him that I wanted to be recognized in country music for my music and that I didn’t want teams of stylists being assigned to me to fix me up and make me fashionable. While I had always enjoyed my femininity, I’d never had a great interest in getting dolled up. I knew, to some extent, that I’d have to be aware of my image, but I didn’t want it to be something that eclipsed what I believed to be my art.

Harold told me that he respected my position in the matter and that he had full intentions of presenting me as a serious musician, but that he couldn’t be held responsible if anyone thought I might be pretty to look at. I was taking myself far too seriously and quickly learned that I should use all of the tools I possessed to help me along the way.

I
t was a new era in country music. Videos were becoming a common part of the promotion of an artist’s music. Many people acknowledged this and attributed the explosion to Garth
Brooks’s phenomenal success at that time. Before Garth’s emergence in country music there were six or seven major country labels out of Nashville. With so much subsequent worldwide attention on country music, major record labels began branching out. There were new divisions, sister labels, and imprint labels. Before long, Nashville’s Music Row would be overflowing with new buildings to house new labels. These labels were signing new artists left and right, and I was one of them. Country music fans weren’t buying only Garth’s records. They would be attracted to the genre because of their love for Garth, but once they decided to give country music a chance, they started buying records from a lot of other artists. Money was flowing in Music City.

I
met the love of my life on April Fool’s Day, 1993. She was working in the music industry, and shortly after I was signed to Mercury Records our paths crossed. She was beautiful, interesting, and funny, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was falling for her. At the time, I was dating a man called Chris. I broke up with him soon after meeting Julia; I knew where my heart was headed. She was recovering from a recent breakup with a longtime boyfriend, but I sensed that the biggest part of her suffering came more from the blow to her ego than from missing him. Nevertheless, we were both single and had no one to answer to but ourselves.

W
e spent all of our free time together, but many months went by before we discussed what we were feeling. When she asked me if I’d ever before had feelings for a woman, I lied. Just like Brenda had lied to me.

Once we did discuss it, we agreed that we shouldn’t act on our attraction; neither one of us thought it was acceptable to be in a gay relationship. She had been raised Catholic, and although I knew very well that my natural instincts were to be with a woman, I just didn’t want it. It was an exciting time in my life. I was writing and recording my first album and all those years of
struggle were finally starting to pay off. I had money in my pocket for meals and could pay my rent with no worry. My life was beginning to take the shape I’d imagined, and falling in love with Julia would complicate things. I was a public person and had to navigate those risky waters, and because she was in the country music industry too, we were very well aware that if we were to be together we’d have to hide.

I think I fell in love with her before our first kiss, but once we began to be sexual with each other, our connection strengthened. Any act of togetherness felt intimate, whether it was holding hands, falling asleep, or waking up together. I knew during those times that if I were asked to make a choice in my lifetime to have only those few acts with her versus a thousand sexual interactions with a man, I would choose hand-holding with Julia.

I was more willing to allow myself to be with her than she was with me during those first few months of our relationship. Every couple of weeks, she’d suggest that we should just be friends. When she made those declarations, I expressed my feelings to the contrary but promised that I’d try to respect her position. A day or two later, she’d break down and say that she’d changed her mind because she didn’t think she could bear to be without me.

We’d been in a good place for a couple of months, without the usual every-other-day meltdown, when she called me on the phone one Friday afternoon. I assumed that she was calling to let me know what time she thought she’d be through with work that evening so we could meet up. At that point in my career, because I was recording and I wasn’t touring, I had my weekends to myself. I enjoyed every minute of that time with Julia.

I answered the phone and I was taken aback by what she told me.

“Do you know that guy Phillip? He’s a singer-songwriter here in town.”

“I’ve heard of him, but I don’t know him. Why?”

“I’m thinking of going on a date with him tonight.”

I listened, trying not to cry, and asked her why she was telling me this. She wanted to let me know before she did it. She called me again within an hour and asked if I wanted to go with them. Even though I knew it was odd for her to invite me, and more bizarre for me to go, I said yes.