A Year Before Meth: Some of My Best Friends on Tour Were Straight

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 2 Part 3

“How hot do you want ’em?”

“Make us cry,” Dexter told the waitress.

A short time later, Dexter, Jason, Roger, and I were chewing and puffing and grunting , slurping down beers as we ate some of the spiciest hot wings any of us had ever had.

We were on the national tour of The Scarlet Pimpernel. We could have been in Kansas or Iowa or Pennsylvania, in a place with a name like Joe’s Wings Bar and Grill crowned in neon flames on a sign out front.

The wings had all four of us sweating, but we refused to cry uncle. This was no small challenge in part because these were no small wings. They weren’t the little nuggets usually served as appetizers with sides of blue cheese dressing and celery garnish. These were full size chicken wings.

We ate and laughed and sucked air through our teeth to cool our burning mouths.

“You doin’ alright there, Dex?” Jason asked.

“Oh yeah,” Dexter said, putting on an air of just another day at the office, “just enjoying my meal like a man.”

“Ya sure? Cause you’re kind of dripping all over your man meal, Brother.” Roger gestured with his beer toward Dexter where the sweat running down his face was dripping onto his wings.

Dexter picked up a napkin to relieve his face of the evidence. “I’m just giving it more man spice.”

We laughed and continued chewing and drinking and breathing through our mouths on fire.

Then, “Oh, shit!” Dexter stopped wiping his face. “Shit. Shit! Guys, don’t rub your eyes. Don’t rub your eyes! Don’t rub your eyes!!” Dexter had taken up what we would come to call the “scared chicken,” fanning his watering eyes with frantic jazz hands. We all laughed, including Dexter, as he blinked through tears, desperately trying to find a way to cleanse his eyes of this devil fire without touching them again.

Then it was my turn. After returning from the bathroom, “Oh. Oh, fuck. Guys? Shit. Guys. wash your hands first. Jesus Christ, wash your hands first!” Another round of laughter and another round of beers.

“Fuck,” I said, still laughing and wincing, “I think I burned my dick off.”

“Wouldn’t be the third time,” Jason said.

Jason and I were best friends. Standing well over six feet tall, he was a big guy and character actor like John Goodman. Our dynamic together was like a Saint Bernard and Jack Terrier.

We had been roommates on my second tour, Funny Girl, and now again on Pimpernel. The very first night we shared a hotel room I told him, “So, just so you know, I snore, but I also sleep like the dead. If my snoring is keeping you up just whack me with a pillow and I should stop.”

I had given this advice to previous roommates, but they had been too nice to take me up on it.

Not Jason.

That very first night I was awakened by a whack. I opened my eyes to see Jason placing his pillow back under his head and rolling over. “Atta boy,” I said before falling right back to sleep. We’ve been friends ever since.

Dexter was a handsome, bearded leading man in a very Tom Wopat “just a good ol’ boy, never meanin’ no harm” kind of way. He was a son of the working class Midwest, more at home in flannel and worn jeans, yet, like so many of us, he fell in love with the theater and followed his passions east.

Dexter was our dreamer. He had a hunger for knowledge and the need to create. While the rest of us spent our day-long bus trips knitting Gryffindor scarves or sleeping off a hangover, Dexter would be buried in some book on history or working on a draft of a new musical.

Roger was our charmer. Clean shaven and broad shouldered with a head of dirty blond hair, he was good looking and cool in a “frat boy but does musical theater” kind of way. The eternal optimist, he always had a positive take on things, and no patience for people who were mean or rude for no damn reason.

During one travel day — they were all travel days — we were watching Joe Versus the Volcano on the bus TVs. When Tom Hanks boarded a sailboat, Jason and Dexter, who were sitting together in front of Roger and me, were both like, “Yes! That’s the thing. That’s the life goal.”

“What is,” I asked looking up from my Anne Rice novel.

“The sailboat. Can you imagine, just taking your sailboat and sailing around the world?”

“Yeah, I’m more of a yacht guy,” Roger said.

“I’d rather have a speedboat,” I added.

“Or a speedboat,” Roger agreed.

“Of course you would,” Jason said. We could see their heads turn toward each other. A vague sense of superiority flowed back over the seats.

“What,” Roger and I asked in unison.

“Well, it’s about maturity,” Dexter explained in a somewhat patronizing way, Jason nodding in agreement. “Like, there’s nothing wrong with speedboats, but that’s something you grow out of.”

To be clear, Jason and Dexter were 26 and 27 where Roger and I were 24 and 23. Not exactly a generational difference.

While Jason and Dexter basked in their proud maturity, Roger and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. “We’ll take the speedboat,” Roger said, a playful “go fuck yourselves” implied. I concurred and returned to my vampires.

It was not lost on me that my three closest friends were all straight. It wasn’t intentional, but, truth be told, I didn’t know how to be friends with other gay men, especially other gay men in musical theater.

In NYC, I felt I didn’t know how to be gay. Back in Montana, I hadn’t needed to know. My one year at the University of Montana I was one of maybe four out people in the theater department. I was the gay. At AMDA, nearly every guy was gay, and fiercely gay at that, and if they weren’t gay, they were “gay by May.” I didn’t know how to process this tsunami of queerness. I didn’t know how to relate. I was hyper, not flamboyant. I was awkward, not clever.

I also wasn’t sexually mature. Having been around so few queer people growing up, I didn’t have the tools or awareness to know if someone liked me or how to let someone know I liked them. I honestly couldn’t tell when guys were flirting with me let alone flirt myself. This made it hard to befriend other gay men, because every interaction held an undercurrent of “what if they think I want to have sex” or “what if they want to have sex with me and I don’t.” I felt like a foreign exchange student who didn’t speak the language.

Perhaps this is why it was easier to befriend straight guys.

Everyone felt the bus lean as it took a turn.

“Quick, Chunky Monkey, get to the other side of the bus or we’ll tip over!”

It was our leading man who played Percy in the show. He was tall and slender with dark eyes, blond hair that hung halfway down his face, and a Hollywood smile that suited him perfectly for his swashbuckling role. He had a silvery baritone voice that made everything he said seem somewhat charming, that is, if you didn’t listen to a lot of the things he said.

“Chunky, why aren’t you moving?” Percy exclaimed when Paul didn’t move. “We’re gonna die!” Percy scrambled, limbs akimbo, as if he was in a Saturday Night Live skit, bracing himself against the seat in front of him pretending the bus was about to crash.

“Oh, come on, stop being so mean,” one actress said, smiling, not really meaning it. A few cast members chuckled.

Paul looked like he was trying to smile but it came off more as a grimace. He shook his head as if to say “Whaddya gonna do.”

Honestly, Paul wasn’t that heavy. He was thick, but no one would have looked at him and said he was overweight.

But that didn’t matter with Percy.

When the bus stopped leaning, “Oh thank god! Guys. Guy! We’re ok. We survived,” shooting a sideways look at Paul, “this time.”

Percy’s fat-shaming of Paul was an almost daily occurrence, though he was far from the only target. As Percy held court in the back of the bus, his insult comedy got many of the cast through the long hours of our daily bus ride. No one stood up to him or said anything, perhaps afraid of being labeled too “sensitive” or “not able to take a joke.” So they laughed along.

The four of us didn’t. We sat in the front as far away from “court” as possible.

We had started the tour feeling bad for Percy. This was either his first job or close to it and, as the lead, he carried the weight of the show. This was made painfully clear to him during tech. The production team worked him to physical and vocal exhaustion, injuring any confidence he had coming out of rehearsals. Even worse, in front of everyone, they told his understudy Dexter to be ready to go on.

It was a dick move and shitty way to start the tour, and we empathized with him. But that empathy went away as he transitioned from overworked leading man to a back-of-the-bus bully. For a great portion of the tour we regarded him as a two dimensional douche, and it was the negative atmosphere that he created that led the four of us to wall ourselves off.

Then came a performance late in the run that added that third dimension back to his character.

In the dark backstage I was waiting to make my entrance just upstage of the proscenium curtain. We were half way through the 2nd act when Percy dashed offstage to make his quick-change.

Then he doubled over…and started crying. He was weeping.

The onstage action continued, but those of us backstage stood frozen in our 18th-century costumes and pompadour wigs, taken aback by this sudden display of vulnerability, Percy gasping for breath between strangled sobs.

The dresser hesitated, “are you…?”

“I’m fine,” he spit. “Help me, I have to get back on stage!”

After a flurry of costumes, Percy stood up, quickly wiped the tears from his face, and ran back onstage.

We all stood frozen for a moment, unsure of what had happened, before falling back into the flow of the show.

It turned out that his family was in the audience, and they were less than supportive. It didn’t matter how hard he was working on stage. It didn’t matter that he was the lead. Theater wasn’t a real job and they weren’t going to pretend that it was. Percy was never going to be good enough for them no matter how hard he worked, no matter how hard he tried.

It was from that well of deep pain that his mean-spirited humor arose.

Percy made the four of us appreciate how lucky we were. Not just that we had come from loving supportive homes and families, but also in the friends we had come to be for each other. We were more interested in lifting each other up than tearing each other down. We didn’t want to laugh at each other. We wanted to laugh with each other through hot-sauce tears.

Over beers after our shows, we would talk in raised voices and excited gestures — I would spill my beer far more than once — about how awesome it would be to start our own theater company and what shows we would do if we could cast ourselves and “wouldn’t it be awesome we did Of Mice and Men with Jason as George and me and Lenny?” It started as a fun idea, but the more we talked about it, the more it seemed like it was possible.

Over three months I grew to have a comradery with these three men unlike anything I’d had before. I felt like I was part of a chosen family. When Dexter got engaged shortly after the tour ended, he asked the three of us to be groomsmen. We hadn’t even known each other for a year, and yet, we were brothers.

It was Jason and Dexter, along Dexter’s fiancée Laura, who I sent out the door that evening when Danny arrived with Jerry and his meth. They witnessed the final moments of who I was before I took my first hit, though they wouldn’t know that for months to come.

It would be Jason, Dexter, Roger, and Laura who would eventually give me the support and friendship I needed to find my way out of the rabbit hole.

We had no way of knowing it then, but those animated post-how beers at Applebee’s, imagining our own theater company, would lead to the very thing that would end up saving my life.

Next Chapter

Chapter Guide

A lot of heart, time, and work goes into each piece. One way you can support me is by signing up for a $5/month Medium Membership. Use this like and I’ll get a percentage of your subscription fee. Huzzah for supporting artists!

If the spirit moves you, another way you can support me is by leaving me a tip. Thank you for reading!