|
||||||||||||
|
July 7, 2006
I had the pleasure of doing a photo shoot with Jay last month (see photos below) and I can tell you that Jay is in the finest shape of his life. I am even more pleased to let you know that his internal shape has also been re-defined. Armstrong has endured a year of “demons” in post Katrina New Orleans and has reemerged like the Phoenix rising out of the ashes in Greek mythology. His body is sculpted like a Greek Statue and his current state of being is one of a great Greek Scholar. The following story was written by Jay Armstrong after a year of angst, self torture, turmoil, drugs, and despair. This journey is one that many of us can identify with and learn from. I applaud Jay for sharing this rare glimpse into the dark side of misery and the re-awaking of ones self being. ***NOTE*** This story is lengthy, but well worth the read!
A Year to the Day: A Porn Star’s Manifesto In Post-Katrina New Orleans By: JAY ARMSTRONG
It was about this time last year that I moved home to New Orleans from Miami, hoping to carve out my niche in a place where I had gone largely unnoticed some years before. Without question, much about me had inevitably changed for the better physically. Therefore, in a mad act of defiance and--dare I say-- empowerment, I had become a porn star and stripper, sporting a body that I had been carefully turning into one of the most beautiful on earth, and I planned on taking the city by storm as a “gay celebrity,” to borrow a reference made of me by Kate Seldman, the assistant editor of Men Magazine. From this, one might gather that I am either completely self-absorbed or disillusioned. To the contrary, I’m neither. After all, down in Miami I was hanging with some of the most beautiful people alive and making a mint just for being one of them. When all is said and done, NOBODY shoves $100 bills in your jock-strap for being ugly.
So on July 2, 2005 I boarded a plane bound for Louis Armstrong International. Most of my friends begged the question, “What are you thinking? “ Okay, there were many occasions leading up to that day when I asked myself the same thing… But in the end, I felt my reasoning to be sound and for the first two days after my arrival I stuck to my guns, shuffling back and forth between New Orleans and Lafayette to handle a lot of stuff for school. No doubt, my momma would have been proud, until, that is, I got sidetracked by my inner diva. That’s why, in a fashion which might only be described as both “look at me now” and in your FUCKING face, on the third day I rose again, on the bar. A boy has got to earn a living and avenge the geek he once was. Flashback: My entry into world of adult entertainment began something like this… While I was living in Jacksonville, Florida I decided to do something that at the time I though to be a very brave thing and post a few shirtless photos of me on an internet profile. After a few attempts at setting the self-timer I found a pose and a white sheet backdrop that seemed to work for me. A couple of weeks later a friend of mine in Orlando called to inquire about whether I was a patron of the bath-house there. I’d never been and when I asked him why he wanted to know, he replied, “Well, you’re featured in their ad.” Apparently my photos were making the rounds. Then it happened again. About a month later, when I was visiting Fort Lauderdale and using the bathroom at a bar, I caught another glimpse of myself on the wall facing my urinal--this time I was the featured background to the bar’s daily drink specials. Well, I got to thinking, if these people are making money off of me for something that I had not intended to produce revenue, with a little marketing; I might be onto something big… And once I had talked it over with a few close friends, it was decided that dancing was the perfect way to guage whether I had what it took to make a living off my body. Besides, it couldn’t be all that hard. For years I’d been perfecting my moves, standing in the mirror and fantasizing about what it would be like to take someone’s cab fare just because I could… and just about the first thing I did when I went to my first gay bar was tip a stripper. I’d been watching them for years. They were often my inspiration when I started working out, if not so much because I wanted to be them; I did in fact want to look like one. Getting booked wasn’t all that hard either. One or two calls and I was on my way to the Full Moon Saloon in Orlando, having lied my way into a gig by telling the booking agent that I had lots of experience dancing in New Orleans, the birth place of Jazz and, to some degree, dick-dancing too. Now it took a lot of alcohol to loosen up. But once I got up there and men began unloading their wallets, I felt liberated, validated and… wasn’t I the hottest fucker in the whole fucking bar??? Oddly enough, when I got home and went to bed, I kept waking up in cold sweats the whole night long; the nightmares were unbearable and I can only assume that my conscience was catching up to me. All at once and for the last time, I felt pretty bad about the fact that I was essentially playing men for money, telling them what they wanted to hear so that I could get the very last dollar they had to their names, following to the “T” the dancer’s creed to all customers and guest: you’ll get fucked but you won’t get laid. Well, I shouldn’t say that my sense of decency never caught up with me again. Perhaps that’s what kept me from really ever achieving stripper and porn star nirvana… something I can only guess that you have to lose your soul to do.
You see, there is a dark side to being worshipped. In the beginning, there is nothing more satisfying than having a man want you because you are hot, and, face it, so long as one stays in control, there is nothing that makes a gay guy feel more powerful. Still, when it comes right down to it, all you are is a piece of meat. Nothing else. Nobody cares about your character, personality or intelligence--the things inside. The only thing that matters is how you look. Even worse, how you get there and stay there is not important, just so long as you always look flawless and better than everybody else… To be sure, the lengths I went and continue to go to mean very little to anybody. That said, all the while I am being cut to pieces by this double edged sword. Bear in mind, my body is my livelihood, so I have to constantly be told how perfect it is or else I start to question the fact but yet I detest being told how beautiful I am when there is so much more to me than just big guns, six pack abs and a bubble butt. Just once I’d like to be a whole person, not some one dimensional cartoon of a man. Just once… It’s at this point that porn stars, or for that matter, rock stars and models and actors, start to go to that dark place, where vice seems to be a means to an end or an end all together. And my journey there began right after that first weekend at Oz. For this reason, I completely get someone like Marilyn Monroe. I know the path and where it takes you--a bottle of pills in hand and all. At some point all she wanted to do was learn how to cook chicken soup, just to please her husband, just to be like everyone else and not be a sex goddess. Think pimp and ho here, but like a lot people in the entertainment industry who start the downward spiral, I sought out one person with whom I thought I could be happy, who could make me happy by giving me the attention I needed and validating my inner-nerd because he filled a void, and in my case, was essentially who I aspired to be. At first, the sex was enough. My being with him had to mean something and it did, but as time went on, that wasn’t enough. I needed more… and the funny thing is that people like me must seek out people who in truth can’t give us what we really want. Looking back, I should have known there was going to be trouble because all kinds of bells were going off. Anybody who will let you fist them on your first date CANNOT be good for you. Still, New Orleans seemed to fit like an old shoe. And it was home, despite all the shortcomings and things that people bitched about. Yes, the city is not particularly clean. And yes, nothing gets done quite the way you’d expect because, after all, the city is teeming with drama. Furthermore, unless you are attracted to guys who drink and party way more than average, some of whom have not seen the sunlight in years and who have turned into bitter energy vampires to compensate, you may have nothing in common with a large portion of the gay community. In reality, degeneracy is a big part of the city’s undeniable charm, which is at its core nothing more than gathering ground for the hopeless and as anybody can tell you, the first thing you’ve got to master when you live there is a little apathy and indifference. Time and time again, this has turned out to be the only thing which saves me since taking a Sunday stroll through the picturesque French Quarter is like walking through a freak show at the circus. And these are just my friends. Where-else can you leave one of the sleaziest gay bars in the world at 6am any day of the week, walk a block down the road and light candles at the only Basilica in North America? It would seem that seeking forgiveness of one’s sins is never a problem, especially those that involve lots of dirty and often diseased flesh. And on the subject of malady, I think New Orleans is one of the few places where having an STD is a sort of right of passage. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that STD’s are just so rampant. But before living there, I’d never known for people to take their minor lapses in good judgment so lightly as to make jokes about what they have and haven‘t had. To be very honest, I’m amazed by the fact that I have managed to live in a place where vaccines have been made and broke and remain free of the stuff that takes two or three shots to cure or worse. On some level, I think this has less to do with very good genetics and more to do with the fact that I’m up front with the guys I chose to take the plunge for, so to speak, even when I‘m wasted and really horny. For that matter, there’s nothing wrong with going home alone and jacking off when the alternative may not be all that pleasing. Beyond the economic and sexual bliss that New Orleans offered me early on, I could never really grasp how the city kept from descending into a fiery hell of doom and despair. For example, how much jaundice and cirrhosis can any one society take before the bottom gives out? Perhaps the best way I can describe what I observed is to say that it was like a 24 hour a day circuit party for the "As I Lay Dying" crowd. There actually came a point when I noted to myself that it was only a matter of time before this modern Sodom and Gomorrah was swallowed up by the marsh... That was about two weeks before August 29th, 2005, upon an entertaining visit to an upscale tanning salon, where I watched in disbelief as three hairy, fat men in see-through mesh thongs walked back and forth between their booths, stroking their hard-ons. Not that the city didn't have its moments. New Orleans could still rock when it wanted to. Reflecting on it now, my second to last weekend in the city before the storm was probably one of the most memorable of my life. I had taken off work because I would be dancing two weeks straight all the way through Southern Decadence. My plan was to party like it was the end of the world and through a cloud of sweat and humidity; I took to a box on the dance floor at Oz, feeling like I owned the place. For lack of explanation, there were a lot more beautiful people out that weekend than normal. And at about 2am Tommy, the club manager, approached me with the news that my bad influence was looking for me. There, amid an ocean of shirtless guys and across the packed club I finally spotted him, looking way hotter than usual himself. Yet regardless of how perfect he told me I was that night, he went home with someone else, which didn't really bother me because I was doing my own thing too. The irony? Around 5am I got the call, "Hey, where you at?" By the time I arrived at his place he'd obviously already been fucked a lot because the smell of lube was pretty distinct coming from around his asshole, but this only made him more desirable--hey, I'm a pig. And we connected that night in a way that I had never connected with anyone sexually. It went on for hours and the next day we parted at the doors to Oz, where it all began two months prior. As for myself, I was tired and needed to get some sleep. He was still reeling on Meth, so I gave him a kiss and said goodbye... For a while thereafter, I would replay that moment over and over again in slow motion, treasuring the look in his eyes at the very instant he opened them up again, because that was the last time I saw him for three months. From that moment on though, my heart belonged to him. If nothing else, I needed the kind of torment he ultimately could provide me. And given my predisposition to self-destruct at any moment when the variables were lined up ever so precisely, I can take a certain comfort in the fact that my return to New Orleans might well have been poetic justice, allowing me to become the living version of my literary equivalent, Blanche Du Bois. Over the next few days I fell apart--something about wishing and wanting and waiting, or maybe it was the understanding that I was in love and very alone at the same time. All the while these news reports were coming out saying how this little hurricane was forming and that it was heading for the gulf. At the laundry mat, at the convenience store, everywhere there was a little black and white television, the word Katrina began to emerge for the first time in our vocabulary. Not yet a threat though... just a little blip on the radar. By the weekend, things were starting to look a little different. A few businesses had already boarded up, but the show, at least for me and the rest of the crew at Oz, had to go on. We didn't really speak of it. When mentioned, the reference was only about how bad it was making the tips. People were staying home and packing up... Fortunately, there was still Decadence, and a mutual agreement was reached that it would help us recover any losses we faced then. Saturday: the dancer who was staying with me decided to leave before his shift. He lived outside Austin and didn't want to get stuck in the traffic I would face the following day. Katrina was now a category 4 storm. But like a lot of people who were out that night, we tried to stay optimistic. In 300 years, the city had never been hit head on by a storm. Why then? So being the trooper I was, I danced. I entertained. I told people who were out that everything was going to be okay. And then about thirty minutes before my shift let out, the music stopped at Oz. What an eerie silence. This was the one place on earth where the music was always playing. The next few hours felt like something out of a war movie, where chaos inevitably ensues during the exodus of refugees fleeing a city under siege. To put it bluntly, it was exactly that too. My original plans of evacuation were scratched in the frenzy for reasons that to this day I have a hard time talking about, and on Sunday morning I found myself stranded in the French Quarter, scrambling to evacuate, frightened that I wouldn't and buying as much food and supplies as I could find in an already stretched to the limits type of environment. Around 10am, my phone rang. I managed to secure another way out of New Orleans... A car ride that took some thirteen hours along a stretch of road that generally can be traveled in about two. As if I even need to explain the rest, anyone who lived through the storm can fill in my story here because our experiences are sort of meshed and common even when the incredible details of how, what, when and where differ immensely. Whether we packed for a couple of days or a couple of weeks; whether we stayed awake or slept that night the storm came ashore; gathered with friends in their homes or huddled down in hotels alone, rejoiced at the news that the worse had passed over the city of New Orleans or cried for the people of Biloxi, who got hit head on, the people of New Orleans will always share a brutal and tragic reality, one that was only magnified when word got out that the levies were breaking. I spent about a week in Lafayette before giving up hope of returning to New Orleans within a reasonable amount of time. Rather than waiting around in Louisiana, I gathered the few things I had and went to Florida for what I could probably call an extended vacation. Obvious question: how does one deal with the fact that they have lost everything? How does one endure being separated from family and friends and cope with not being able to speak with them because communications have been shattered? Forget about independence; the kindness of strangers was all a lot of people had. Forget about the really petty stuff in life too, the material and even personal, because there were so many big things to take on, like homelessness and unemployment. So how does one get by? For me, that was an easy one. I left hell for paradise. My own personal joke was that I had evacuated up and it was the honest to God truth. With all due respect to those who took me in, (my “two mothers”) who were my agent, Howard Andrew and his life partner John, I went from the armpit of the south to the playground of the ultra-rich. Since I had to leave, I figured I might as well go where I could be and do what I couldn't back home. Right off the bat, it would not be an exaggeration to say that I became the world’s biggest slut. I started lining them up the very day I arrived, dildos and all. The gesture, if I am correct, was my personal attempt at washing the torment away. Whatever it took I guess. Go ahead, say it: how porn star of me, drowning my sorrows with nothing more than an ample supply of beautiful men. There was a Russian soccer player, a German exchange student… and the list goes on… This is not to say that I had it completely easy, regardless of my serving up infinite ass to Florida‘s finest. The strange thing is, I actually missed New Orleans almost from the very instant I arrived in Fort Lauderdale. No amount of dick or GHB seemed to really numb the fact that I longed for the shit-hole I called home. Maybe it had something to do with Monday’s, when everybody eats red beans and rice. Or was it the beignets at Café Du Monde that I really craved? Well, I’d be lying if I said it had nothing to do with HIM--you know…the bad influence. Almost methodically, over the eight weeks or so that I stayed in Florida, I managed to push him out of my thoughts. But every now and then, he emerged with a vengeance, polluting my focus, taunting me to where this place I called Heaven just seemed so empty. The evil little fucker. All right, how low would I actually go? To tell the truth, where my pride is of no immediate concern and if onto itself unrequited love weren’t enough, I even started carrying sex toys around in my car in the event that I met someone who reminded me of him, because it was my bad influence who introduced me to the concept of “larger than life” in the first place. At any rate, I had to resist the urges that summoned me to leave and go back, way before it was a real option to do so. In resolution, although I continued to grow more and more discontent with the distance between us, I made up my mind not to leave. And were it any more vague, in actuality, I wasn’t really sure where he was, if he planned to return to New Orleans or set up shop somewhere else, like so many other people were doing. I’d tried to contact him once or twice, but I rarely got through and when I did, the stress he was obviously under spilled over into our conversations. It made me feel very guilty because here I was in this great place, surrounded by beautiful things and endless sun so I just let it go… And then one day he wrote me a letter and it was enough. How funny it is. Ask anyone about their first dining experience in New Orleans after the storm and their return, and they can always tell you with precision not only where, but what they had and who they were with. Simply put, in a city renown for its food and restaurants, very few were open and those that were often had nothing to serve. To answer the above question for myself: The Clover Grill; a cheese burger and I was with my friend Scott, who informed me when I asked about getting a menu that there were none. It was hamburgers or nothing. For people who as a collective had managed to turn fine dining into a past-time, like woodworking or mountain biking, these were the worst of times and the advent of MRE’s signaled a new era in New Orleans’ haut cuisine. Bottom line: this was a city that would take some getting used to. Everything from the curfews to the constant presence of soldiers carrying semi-automatic weapons made it feel more like a war zone than the home of Mardi Gras and all things decadent. But you want to believe that you can handle it. On the surface, coming back was in itself the easy part and the only easy thing about my return. Truthfully, I hadn’t lost too much, unless you take school into account, which didn‘t re-open come the Spring like it was supposed to because there weren‘t enough students. And unlike so many, I still had a place to live--however dilapidated. Okay, my delusional, bipolar optimism aside, the living conditions I returned to were pretty dire. When it rained, water seeped into my apartment because the roof had been badly damaged. As a result, the ceiling collapsed under the weight of the water and covered everything in wet sheet rock and white powder. Holidays, which seem to come faster than usual in the wake of Katrina, were the hardest. There was just too much sadness to be truly celebratory, not to mention the fact that my bad influence had shacked up with a Nellie, frail and repulsively ugly hair-dresser, dealing a blow to my self-esteem that made any sort of recovery during the months that fell between October and January almost impossible. At my lowest point, I would sit for hours in complete darkness and do nothing but contemplate whether or not my life was really worth living. More oft than not, I walked to the very edge… that place where any solution will do. But from time to time, I’d get up out my chair and walk to a little window in my living room to watch nuns play basketball in the schoolyard that was adjacent to my apartment building. Such optimism. What took me back, to this day, I wonder. Strong will? Nah, it was probably just the will to wait a little longer, maybe to suffer only a little more. To top it off, I was starting to have a serious identity crisis. Things like dancing and making porn just seemed so self-serving and irrelevant. In post-Katrina New Orleans, neither mattered much to me anymore, not when there were so many valuable and productive things I could have been doing with my time to help rebuild the city and inevitably redeem myself. Herein lies the reason behind my fist effort at porn retirement. I was going to do the nine-to-five route if it killed me. Jay Armstrong was put to rest and his replacement was nothing more than a humble servant of the people, receiving gratification through good deeds and charity. Don’t laugh, but I even started going to church. How I didn’t burst into flames every time I walked through the door is still a mystery. But if only for an instant, I got better. Of course, people were even more shocked by my attempt to go straight than when I told them I wasn't going to do porn. Predictions on how long this phase would last were obviously short, at least not as long as I could still make a fortune in the adult trades. They were right. Even though I was never completely unhappy with being a responsible, hard working American male, the appeal of my former life took a heavy toll on my ability to do anything other than return to my wanton ways, especially when I was still a very hot guy. Obviously, when it comes to falling off the virtue wagon, for better or worse, timing is everything… And I have my bad influence to thank for ultimately giving me the confidence to reclaim my rightful title: Jay Armstrong, power bottom to the hot and well endowed. As it were, my depression began to mount again while I struggled to reach a balance in this boring new life of mine, a life that by then included my doing maintenance work for a prestigious law firm, and I frequently found myself seeking his approval to help compensate for all my insecurities. To a greater and greater extent, he essentially became the complete means by which I measured my own self-worth and happiness. I’d take whatever he’d give me on whatever terms he set down. To this end, he rarely provided the sort of fix I needed, given that he is himself pretty fucked up in the head. And since I obviously pick my abusers based on how inferior I feel in comparison, New Orleans gave me few alternatives because I was like royalty there, leaving me trapped in an endless cycle of misery loves company, where the more he disrespected me--often without him even knowing it, the more I needed his approval. Add to this a rather difficult living situation which I had entered into immediately following the new year for all the wrong reasons, and you had the recipe for disaster that was my life. If it must be known, I was doing my own little dance with the devil, selling the shell that was my soul for one last shot at the good life. By playing boyfriend to a man who quickly became overbearing, possessive and obsessively jealous--and I don’t need to tell you how bad of an actor I am, I came close to losing what little bit of myself I had left. After a matter of only weeks, having all my freedoms slowly and meticulously stripped away, it no longer even registered that he was giving me things I wouldn’t have otherwise, like a swanky pad and ride. I was being suffocated over and over again. He had isolated me from everyone, including his own friends. People avoided me because they were afraid of how he would react. Weekends were by far the worst and I usually ended up staying home because any exchange that I had while we were out that went beyond “hello” was interpreted in some manic way as flirting. To compensate, he fed me a continuous and never ending supply of cocaine, ecstasy and crystal, which I began to flat out refuse as a sort of rebellion, seeing as how he gave it to me in hopes that I would be too fucked to notice my disconnection. And except for maybe my bad influence, there were very few people with whom I had any contact at all. I needed out. In turn, for two days I wondered around aimlessly. High on Meth and more than a little out of my mind, I left the big house with nothing but the clothes on my back. In retrospect, I’m not even sure I let the Devil know I was leaving. Blame it on the drugs. It just happened. Over the course of one particularly bad weekend, one which included someone’s desperate attempt at raping me, I had reached the breaking point. Too much bad stuff spread out over too little an amount of time. Not even my bad influence stayed around, and that says a lot about how bad things had gotten. Even when I was at my most out of control, I could always depend on my bad influence for sex, and it, like every other pleasure in my life, had seized… Once the Meth wore off and reality set in, I realized that things were about as fucked up as things could be. But I managed, falling back on the thing that seemed to carry me through life more and more, way too much even: my body. In spite of whatever flaws they may poses, hot guys are never homeless, at least not for very long. And in one of his rare moments of unselfishness, after I can only assume he finally realized the true scope of my predicament, I actually have my bad influence to thank for ultimately finding me a new place to live. No, we didn’t finally set up house together and live happily ever after, but it worked out pretty well… I was only about six blocks away from him, being a sort of live-in repairman at a rental property for his boss. Unfortunately, the niceties seemed to end there. And while we began to have killer sex once or twice a week again, he was obviously entering his own dark place, the terms of which I couldn’t comprehend because he kept me at bay or lied about everything going on in his life all together. In the process, he quietly outdid me, on my worst of dark days, becoming more and more self-destructive in his own very dangerous way. I was forced to reevaluate my feelings for him, deciding that nothing was worth the kind of pain and turmoil he caused me. For one, to hear from an almost complete stranger that my bad influence was engaging in unprotected sex with openly HIV positive guys left me speechless. He wasn’t simply disrespecting himself anymore; still, what brought me the most discomfort was not that he took me into his own personal hell, but that in allowing himself to be degraded and humiliated, and by this I’m referring to the types of guys for which he’ll typically break out Lucas--the name he gave his favorite toy, I was ultimately the butt of a very embarrassing joke. Even his close friends were making fun of him, so I can only imagine what they were thinking about me. Remember, around those parts, I was still the hottest thing in shoe leather.
Our relationship ended with a bang. Picture it, me, standing on his doorstep waiting for him to come home so I could kick his ass; my bad influence, threatening to blow my head off and renting a vehicle so I wouldn’t recognize him while he spied on me. Stop here. If I am forced to confess, that was actually the first time in months I felt alive. My blood was pumping. My heart was racing… Could I have become any more ready for the Jerry Springer Show? I was a special episode waiting happen, as if I couldn’t already lip-synch to his greatest hits, which was when I knew I had to step back and figure out what was fucking wrong with me. Better yet, how could I continue to experience the rush that was our split without ending up in jail? Stripping and porn: I had come full-circle. From stardom to boredom, I realized the limelight was probably exactly what I needed. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m more Anna Nicole than Marilyn Monroe. On certain occasions, the white trash bitch in me cries out for a tube top and Daisy Dukes cut way up to my crotch and this is turning out to be one of those times. Rather than fight it, going to church and playing innocent, I know now that it’s probably better if I just give in. So here I am, about to embark on my comeback, which has me starring in two upcoming films for Falcon and stripping again. Who knows, I might even stick around long enough this time to actually get my own fan club. Like it or not, whatever happens though, I can say that my experiences of late have been shaped in some way by my moving home to New Orleans, by my bad influence, who was there on my very first day back, and by the little hurricane that could. Perhaps there will even come a point when I will say “it was for the best.” Right now, I just know that it was probably all part of God’s master plan to turn me into the best damn porn star that ever was. Everything happens for a reason, so the next time you see me throw open the doors to my brand new manufactured home and run out naked, dousing myself with the water hose, its not because the air conditioner went out again. To somebody, I’m a star, if only in my trailer park. |
||||||||||||
