My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (13 page)

“Listen, believe it or not, I don’t have the money. I really don’t. And even if I did, I don’t think I would give it to you. I have worked really hard to stay clean and sober for many years now. I’ve worked my ass off. I am more proud of my sobriety than of anything I have accomplished in my whole life. And even though, in some sick way, I will always love you, I am worth more than what you have to give. I wish you the best. I really do.”

Click.

I
ONCE
spent a little time in the Big House with Robert Downey Jr. We were both locked up in the infamous Twin Towers in Los Angeles: section 152, pod A, cell 13. Robert was on top and I was on the bottom. In our bunk beds, of course.

After my disastrous relationship with the cowboy came to its violent end, I was on my own. I had lost or forgotten most of my coping skills, and I took a slide into oblivion. There is no one to blame. I was too far gone.

I will not bore you with my long drunkalogue, but I went to jail too many times to count during my final years of excess. How I managed to keep my career afloat is a mystery to me. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll see a rerun of an old television show from that period in my life. I’m valiantly giving it my comedy best, but my eyes are dead.

Most of my arrests were for driving under the influence. Others were for several indiscretions I’d really rather not discuss right now. But I will say this: I was
not
shoplifting at Saks Fifth Avenue. And as for that tiny fracas involving someone urinating on the walls at a party I attended out in the Simi Valley, I happen to know for a fact the host of that party suffered from severe mental problems and was not to be believed. I mean, after all, would anyone in their right mind want to live out in the Simi Valley?

It is a huge source of shame that I used to drive drunk. When I was four years old, my father’s mother, Aldine; his sister Dorothy; his sweet cousin Peggy; and his aunt Renee were hit head-on by a drunk driver on their way home from Christmas shopping. They were all killed instantly. Four lovely women in the prime of their lives, snatched away from us in an instant. The repercussions of that event reverberated through my family for years and years. This is not something that any drunk driver—including me, when I was one of them—ever thinks about. I drove drunk for years. Sometimes there were moments in the sober morning light when I worried I might kill a family of five and have to live with that the rest of my life, but such moments were few and far between.

All it took to quiet those thoughts was another drink.

Then I started getting caught. Time and time again I would see the lights flash in my rearview mirror.

Well, shit.

Sometimes I got in trouble and sometimes I didn’t. A lot of times, I think they let me go because they recognized me from television. One time the cops asked me to do a very intricate sobriety test on the side of the highway. It involved putting my finger to my nose and then up my butt, all while reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance backwards as I stood on one leg, or something like that. Well, I lost my balance and fell into the bushes.

I yelled, “How about best two out of three?”

They were not amused.

For reasons that made sense only to my alcohol-addled brain, I had moved to the San Fernando Valley, out in Van Nuys, about seven miles from where Christ lost his shoes. Poor Irma had to make three bus changes just to get to work. I was always caught two or three blocks from my house and hauled off to the Van Nuys jail. A sweet, older black woman ran the booking desk there. She would just slowly shake her head as I came walking in the door, handcuffed once again.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she’d cluck. “Why can’t you behave? You need to put a plug in the jug! Or we ain’t gonna see you no more on them funny TV shows. They gonna send your drunk ass up the river.”

And they did.

I was finally sentenced to thirty days for violation of my summary probation for my second DUI. No one in my family had ever been to jail for that long. I was so ashamed I told my mother I was at the Betty Ford Center, drying out.

When the judge first sentenced me, I almost swallowed my tongue. I was handcuffed, shackled, and put on one of those buses with cages to divide the seats. My lawyer stood on the street waving like I was leaving on a cruise. “Goodbye, Mr. Jordan! Make sure you ask for the homo tank! You’ll never make it on the main line! Oh, and Mr. Jordan, take God with you!”

Take God with me? God and box of condoms!

When we got downtown, they handcuffed me to a little bench. There were four big redneck sheriffs down the hall, shooting the shit.

“Excuse me!” I called. “Excuse me!”

I was trying to put my voice in its lower register, but I was so nervous, it came out high and squeaky. I sounded like Richard Simmons encouraging a class of fat ladies, sweating to the oldies.

The sheriffs took one look at me and burst out laughing.

“What do you want, Little Bo Peep?” one of them asked, wiping tears from his eyes. “Did you lose your sheep?”

After all that, I certainly was not going to ask for the homo tank. I was too ashamed and intimidated. So they threw me right in the middle of the main line. Murderers, rapists, and thieves, oh my! It felt like I was back on the playground, where bullies rule. I assessed the situation and decided my chances of survival were slim to none. However, fate dealt me a winning card.

Years earlier, I had appeared in a movie called
Ski Patrol.
I played Murray Tuttle, the head of the ski patrol. In the opening scene, I slip and fall in the snow, and a bulldog waddles over and farts in my face. The dog trainer had rigged some fishing line around the dog’s face, and, when pulled, the line made it look like the dog was smiling. This gives you an idea of the caliber of humor. However, the movie also featured a then-unknown Mexican comedian named George Lopez. Well, George went on to have his own situation comedy and became a real hero to the Mexican people. I decided to use his “out of the barrio” success story to my advantage, since all the Mexicans on my cell block recognized me from
Ski Patrol
.

“Hey look, dude. It’s the little dude from
Ski Patrol
! Ain’t you the little dude from
Ski Patrol
? Hey, what’s George Lopez like? Where my homeboy stay?”

I threw my arms up in the air like Rita Hayworth in
Gilda.

“Gather ’round, boys! George Lopez stories for everyone!”

As I spun my yarns, I had those Mexican boys eating out of my hand. My mama didn’t raise no fool. Nobody was going to bother me with my little posse hanging around. Those boys taught me all kinds of important things. Do you know that if you take a slice of moldy bread, ten packets of sugar, and rotten oranges and hang it all in a garbage sack behind the toilet, eventually it will turn into an alcoholic beverage? It is called perno and is quite tasty. And it packs a real wallop, too.

I have always suffered from a mild case of claustrophobia. Years ago, I used to get a panicked feeling in crowded discos. And I hate riding the subway in New York. I stand at armpit level and it is most unpleasant. On the seventeenth day of my incarceration, it hit me that I would not be leaving that small space for a really long time.

I freaked out and had a panic attack. I thought I was going to start screaming and clawing my face. When I would get really scared as a kid, I would pray. So that’s what I did. I got down on my knees and prayed in my dark jail cell. How dramatic! I felt like Amanda Plummer in
Agnes of God
.

Well, at that moment, the turnkey appeared outside my cell.

“Mr. Jordan, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that we have Robert Downey Jr. downstairs and we have nowhere to put him, so he’s in, and you’re out. The bad news is that because you came in on a drunk driving charge we can’t let you go until the bars close. You ain’t leaving here till two a.m. So you and Mr. Downey will be sharing a cell in the holding tank.”

Well, hallelujah! Robert Downey Jr.! I forgot all about my claustrophobia. I wanted to go over and thank him, but I wasn’t sure it was appropriate. He didn’t look very chipper or like he was feeling chatty, so I left him alone. But I sure did enjoy the few hours we spent together.

Almost four years later, I got a job on
Ally McBeal
. I called my mother with the script in hand to find out which actor played what part, since I never watch television. All my scenes were with a character named Larry Paul.

Mother knew the show well. “That character is played by Robert Downey Jr.”

Dead silence.

“Leslie, are you there?”

“Yes, ma’am. I was once in jail with Robert Downey Jr.”

“Well, I wouldn’t tell anybody,” Mother said.

“I don’t plan on announcing it to the cast. I just wonder if he’ll remember me. I hope it isn’t awkward.”

“Well, just be sweet. And be yourself. I’m sure it will all work out.”

I love my mother.

She is always hoping for the best.

The first day on the set, the assistant director took me into the makeup trailer. It was the first time I had seen makeup being applied with an airbrush. It was the latest thing. It gives a very smooth, matte finish that is perfect for harsh television lighting. Calista Flockhart was leaned back in the chair, having her face hosed. I was fascinated.

The assistant director said, “Leslie, have you met Robert?”

I turned around and there he was.

He took one look at me and asked, “Have we met?”

What was I supposed to say? I just shook his hand and mumbled, “I don’t think so. Pleased to meet you.”

Later on in the day, he came up to me. “I feel like we’ve met.”

I leaned in and whispered, “We were in jail together. We didn’t really meet, but we were in the same holding tank. Actually, I got out because of you. There wasn’t enough room.”

He studied me intently. “You wrote me that letter.”

I had completely forgotten. There was this poor boy in our cell block who was HIV-positive. Besides the fact that it was nearly impossible for him to get his medication, the other prisoners treated him like a pariah. No one would go near him. He was such a sad little creature that I befriended him. The first time I sat down to eat with him, tears welled up in his eyes. I was worried about who was going to watch after him when I left, so I wrote to Robert Downey Jr., asking him to please be kind to my new friend. I thought that maybe the other prisoners would leave him alone if someone like Robert Downey Jr. took an interest.

I wasn’t sure whether he ever got my letter or not. But I gave it a try.

Robert looked me right in the eye. “That letter really meant a lot to me.”

We worked together for two days but had very little time to talk. I kept looking for an opportunity, but it never happened.

I’m not sure who or what ever heard me, but I kept the promise I made in my prayer the night I spent in jail with Robert Downey Jr.

That was December 11, 1997.

I
WAS
greeting people after a performance of my one-man show
Like a Dog on Linoleum
in Atlanta, Georgia, when this woman took my hands and, with tears in her eyes, told me I had a ministry.

Trying to lighten the moment, I laughed and said, “Oh, no, honey. Tammy Faye Bakker has a ministry, not me!”

But she persisted. “But you do, Mr. Jordan. The story you told tonight of your journey into acceptance is so important. It makes so much more sense than anything I’ve ever been taught or led to believe about God.”

This woman had a gay son and had wrestled with her deeply devout belief that he was going to burn in hell. I, too, have struggled with that feeling. I have wrestled with the Devil for half my life. I have been baptized fourteen times! It never did take. The preacher would holler, “Come forward, lost sinner! Walk down the aisle and be saved!” And I would run down the aisle in sheer terror.

Sometimes the preacher would say, “Son, you came forward last week and the week before that,
and
you walked the aisle twice during the revival meeting. You are already saved! Please, remain seated!”

But I couldn’t help it. I certainly did not feel saved. I knew I was a little homo, and I was scared to death of that Lake of Fire. I was a very imaginative kid and I could just picture Beelzebub reigning supreme over a bunch of sinners burning in eternal hellfire. My fear stayed with me well into adulthood. I’ve spent half my life worried about going to hell.

I remember that the first time I took Ecstasy it all came to a head. For anyone not in the know, Ecstasy is a designer drug used to induce a wonderfully euphoric feeling, but it can turn on you like a mother-in-law. It can also cause hallucinatory sights and sounds; you don’t know what the hell is going on. I used to love that feeling. Back then I would swallow anything you handed me.

My little posse and I were tripping our brains out on Ecstasy and we decided to go to the Probe, which was a leather bar. It was hosting a “black party,” an event where leather queens trot out all their finery. I was fresh off the turnip truck—still wearing khaki pants, button-down oxford cloth shirts, and penny loafers with no socks—and I stuck out like a rat turd on rice.

As we walked into the Probe, we looked down upon an enormous dance floor. There were hundreds and hundreds of beautiful gay men in all kinds of decadent attire and in all kinds of drug-induced stupors, dancing and waving their arms in the air. I was transfixed. I watched, deeply fascinated, when all of a sudden, every light on the dance floor turned red, and the whole club seemed to pulse with a trippy red glow.

And I saw it.
I saw the Lake of Fire. I saw it as plain as the nose on my face, and it was a sea of burning cocksuckers.

It scared the shit out of me. Much to the dismay of my friends, I started screaming and took off all the way up Highland Avenue. I turned left on Sunset Boulevard and kept going. The sun came up the next morning and I was still running from the Devil. I made it almost to the Pacific Ocean.

On the long walk home, I came to my senses. I decided I would not waste another minute of my precious time on earth worrying about the Lake of Fire.

My mother was told by a nosy neighbor that I was sneaking out to gay bars at age seventeen, and she sent me to a Christian therapist. There is no one to bless and no one to blame for this. My mother had my best interests at heart. She loved me deeply, and it tears me apart when I think what she must have gone through. She had buried my daddy, the love of her life, and was left with the enormous responsibility of raising his troubled firstborn son. She made the best possible decision given the circumstances.

I unburdened my soul to that Christian therapist. After hearing my story, he told me, and I quote, “When you have these unchristian thoughts, these sexual thoughts about someone of the same sex, it is the voice of the Prince of Darkness that you are hearing.”

What the fuck? Was this the Dark Ages? Do you know when people began depicting Satan as a red man with horns in Bible stories and pictures? Medieval England, that’s when.

I remember thinking,
Well, the Prince of Darkness sure has a loud voice.

I was consumed with sexual thoughts. And so is every other red-blooded seventeen-year-old boy, whether he is heterosexual or homosexual. My goodness gracious, that’s why boys that age wear their shirts untucked, to cover their erections! Their hormones are running amok, and it is perfectly natural. But my thoughts weren’t about girls, and I thought I was the only dirty little queer on the face of this earth. And that was a very scary place to be, especially when I knew deep within my heart that I was born that way. There was no choice.

I am and always will be attracted to people of my own gender. Why? I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me. But I do know that I had no more choice in the matter than I did about how the color of my skin was determined. And it is just as defining. I am flatlined on the homo side of the Kinsey scale. And with all due respect to Mr. Kinsey and the bisexual community, I firmly believe that we are all born predominately heterosexual or homosexual. What you do with it after that is up to you.

A certain evangelist can rail till the cows come home about his “dark side” after getting caught doing drugs and having sex with another man for three years. He can swear that he is not gay. I have news for him: Most straight men, if they are looking for an extramarital affair, do not seek out other men on the Internet for sex. And if they do, they certainly don’t continue the relationship for years and years. He is a homosexual. His God made him that way.

If he wants to consider it his cross to bear, then so be it. Let him go through life fighting all those “dark urges.” Let him squeeze his eyes shut, think about that handsome new man in his congregation butt-naked, and make love to his poor wife. But he will be a homosexual till the day he dies. There is nothing sadder than a man at war with his own nature.

I would never in a million years try to talk intelligently and passionately about the African-American experience, the Latino experience, or what it was like to grow up Asian. I know nothing about those things. But I do know what it means to be gay. I have had over fifty years’ experience. Trust me, I’ve done my research.

I was once invited to a church service where Tammy Faye Bakker was preaching and the legendary Dottie Rambo, the most prolific writer of gospel music in the history of that genre, was performing. I had heard that the service was being held in a church in Hollywood that was known for ministering to gays and lesbians who wanted to “change their sinful ways.”

I invited thirty of my sinful friends—all gay, all men, all recovering Southern Baptists—and off we went to see the show. We planted ourselves in the front pew. The preacher took the stage, and he was by far the most effeminate man I had ever beheld. Next to him, I looked like a Hell’s Angel. He had a tanning booth tan and frosted hair, and he wore skintight black clothes that were more fitting for a disco than for a church service.

He was a real screamer!

His story was that he used to be gay but now, through the miraculous power of Jesus Christ, he wasn’t. He said “my wife” eleven times within the first five minutes, just to make sure we all got it. He cried buckets about how honored he was to have Tammy Faye Bakker and Dottie Rambo in his humble church. He paraded out his sweet, clueless little wife and they sang a duet. She was a lovely soprano, and he was a very high tenor.

Then Dottie Rambo cut loose and brought the house down. She was not in good health, so they’d had to wheel her out in a wheelchair, but boy, there was nothing wrong with that woman’s lungs. The preacher got back up, cried some more, and then out trotted Tammy Faye Bakker.

This was all a few years before Tammy Faye passed away. I once had the honor of opening for her at the Annenberg Theater in Palm Springs, California, when she was touring with her secular one-woman show. As a joke, I came out in full drag. I had on great big fake eyelashes in homage to her. Tammy Faye and I were the same height in our high heels. We sang a lovely unrehearsed version of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The place went ape shit.

There was not a more sincere, loving person on the face of this earth than Tammy Faye Bakker. When I first met her, I was a little dubious about how naïve she seemed. I thought maybe that was her sneaky way of letting the world know she had no idea that her first husband, Jim, was bilking the congregation. But the more time I spent around her, the more I realized how genuine she was. She had the trusting nature of a child, and a heart of gold.

I thought she had been duped, along with Dottie Rambo, to appear at this Hollywood church, because when Tammy Faye began to preach, it was not what anyone expected.

“I am so angry at the Christian church in America today,” she began. “I do not see the teachings of Jesus Christ anywhere. Jesus taught us not to judge. Jesus lay with the lepers, for goodness sakes! You will not find anywhere in the teachings of Jesus the mention of homosexuality. He teaches about thousands of things but never once is homosexuality mentioned.”

I was riveted to her every word.
This,
I thought,
is what a Christian should sound like.
She talked of love and tolerance. She talked about how so many Christians judged her when her world fell apart, people who did not even know her. She talked about the reality show she had appeared in on national television with porn stars and all kinds of supposed riffraff. She had embraced those people and tried not to judge them. She tried to live by example. She got over ten thousand e-mails from all over the country thanking her for showing the world how a Christian woman really should act.

She won us over. You would have thought we were at a tent revival meeting in the Deep South the way we gay boys whooped and hollered. Several of my friends even went forward during the altar call to be saved. Tammy Faye Bakker became one of our biggest cheerleaders, headlining at Gay Pride events. She walked the walk and talked the talk.

Of course, later on we heard that the sissy preacher had resigned amid allegations that he had coerced one or more male congregants into having sex.

I read a quote recently in a magazine that described two types of gay people in America: the fabulous and the fearful. Those of us who live in the big cities surrounded by our tribe are the fabulous ones. But we forget that there are still gay men and women out in our hinterlands who are afraid, especially our gay youth. They are deathly afraid of someone finding out. They are afraid of what might happen.

Gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual youth are three times more likely than their straight counterparts to commit suicide.

I am very involved in an organization called the Trevor Project. It is a national hotline for suicidal gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, and questioning youth. When they plugged in a few years ago, they got fifteen thousand calls within the first few months.

Most of those calls came from the Bible Belt. That breaks my heart. I think telling a child about Satan and the Lake of Fire is spiritual abuse—borderline child abuse. If people choose to believe in the Devil, then so be it. But if they raise their children to fear God, then I think there is something radically wrong with their parenting skills. The idea of God, if one chooses to believe in God, should be a safe haven, a place for a child to go for comfort in times of trial and tribulation.

I do not, for one minute, believe that somewhere out there is a fallen angel named Lucifer, who is tending a lake of fire for sinners. I find the story of Jonah living in the belly of a whale very suspicious, and I definitely do not believe that Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

That is impossible!

Those were fables passed down from generation to generation by men who lived out in the sand. I see the Bible as a wonderful teaching tool filled with amazing, allegorical stories. But do I think that the Bible is the definitive word of God, as I was so lovingly raised to believe? No more so than I believe that the Torah, the Koran, the teachings of the Buddha, the teachings of Muhammad, or the teachings of all the other great spiritual leaders throughout time are the definitive word of God.

There are many paths to God.

I read somewhere that religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell, and spirituality is for people who have already been there. I like that. It makes sense to me. And that is what I am striving for, a spiritual path that makes sense to me.

The arrogance and the stupidity of one group believing that their book is the only book really gripes my ass. As Guru Ma Jaya says, “When they say their way is the only way, run the other way!”

I am not as interested in the separation of church and state as I am in the separation of church and hate. In a wonderful article in the
San Francisco Chronicle,
Deepak Chopra said; “You’d think that someone would stand up and ask a simple question: Who are we to condemn gays if Christ didn’t? In fact, who are we to condemn any sinner, since Christ didn’t?…The reversal of Christianity from a religion of love to a religion of hate is the greatest religious tragedy of our time.”

Actually, the book of Leviticus lists all kinds of things that are punishable by death—from eating shellfish to adultery to rebelling against your parents to screwing your wife while she’s having her period. The handling of pigskin is listed as a big no-no. Whoops! There goes football.