Today's Blind Items - The Dancing Boy - The Long Shadow Of Abuse

What I didn't say in my previous email was that the near miss was preceded by years by an event that would shadow me for the rest of my childhood.

I was young at the time, still going to a school where you have the same teacher all day. The man - a trusted friend of the family - was a network exec. (My father also worked in the business.) You wouldn't know his name, as with the exception of certain CEOs most of these men are fairly anonymous cogs who by virtue of hard work or connections have risen to high levels. They're not without influence though, or access. Fittingly, this man was once the Santa for that annual entertainment-linked LA holiday parade.

It happened at a party hosted by the man and his wife. The adults were all out by the pool, wasted and joking, and the kids were indoors playing video games, and watching "Jaws" on the big screen tv. When the man came to get me - I was with the boys at the game console - I thought I had done something wrong. But he assured me it would be okay and held my hand as we went upstairs. I was taken into the master bedroom where I was told that you were supposed to shower after swimming and had I done that? I shook my head no. The man, who reeked of liquor, and also smelled like skunk (something I didn't understand at the time), took off my swim trunks, and his. After showing me a nudist magazine from the 70s (or so I surmised, from the hairstyles), he pulled me into the shower with him. And if there's anything we learned from that Division I school scandal a few years back, it's that there's probably no good reason for a grown man to be showering with a young boy.

(Earlier, at one of these parties, I had fallen into the pool and nearly drowned - it was before I could swim. All the adults were either drunk or high, or otherwise not paying attention to the kids in their midst. I basically had to save myself.)

Gifts and opportunities followed, mostly access (back stage passes to network shows and events, that kind of thing), and swag. The man, along I guess with other network people, also had a stake in a production company that produced medical/educational films and videos. My first role? The "drowning boy" in a film about pool safety. Of course, in it, the trouble is not negligent adults, but that I'm "mischievous" and manage to get into the pool area despite being told not to. Over multiple takes, I had to fall into the pool, only to be pulled out by my "dad," and "resuscitated." (One thing you learn, apart from that adults may have sinister intentions, is that wet clothes weigh a lot. A few more takes and I may have actually been the drowning boy.) Next, naturally, I played "abused boy," and had to share my story of being inappropriately touched by my swim coach (I'm an aspiring youth competitive swimmer in this one) to the hospital shrink after acting out at school and at home. These were followed by medical/educational "stardom." I got to play "tonsillectomy boy" and later "appendectomy boy." As it happened, my own medical emergency coincided with the filming of the former, and the shot of me being put under - the look of fear in my eyes - was really a shot of me being put under. (Apparently this was not considered unethical back in the day.) So, I don't know, a nod (or at least on the list) maybe for best performance in a medical/educational film?
As with many other kids to whom stuff happened, there did come to be acting out. I was telling the truth in the last email that at the time of the events described I had never used drugs, and had maybe only had a baby sip or two of my dad's wine. I did get help, eventually, too, as I suggested, but it was not right away. It started with pot, of course, provided by a now industry union man and habitual social media virtue signaler (who also happens to be a serial philanderer and harasser of women, and who not to be outdone once exposed himself to me - I mention all this not because he's known but sometimes these are the kind of people who turn previously clean but vulnerable kids onto drugs). Acid and other hallucinogens followed, provided first by a classmate and son of a certain left coast dairy/ice cream fortune heiress. You should've seen the high school graduation party at the family pad in that beach town - straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel (yes Virginia they really do have a police department in Malibu), although he went to another school of the same type (we used to play them at sports) in the same topographical feature. The son is now a trustee of the school. (Analogously, I attended the same type of college as BEE but in a different state. He mentions the college unflatteringly in one of his novels - the friend goes there. A movie was made of it not starring the super hero actor.) Next came coke, speed, benzos, and more unusually heroin (I never liked the throwing up). It took an overdose of some very sketchy SF meth, and an intervention by the attending ER doc and male nurse (this all took place in the Bay Area) before I got clean. The worst part was having to tell my father - something you'll hear a lot from addicts (a friend of mine said the same thing when he was about to do his first stint in rehab). To this day, I suffer from chronic insomnia resulting from the drug abuse, and o/d. (If there was anything I was good at in childhood, it was sleep.)

What was the other way I acted out? What is that line of work that 3/4 of teens (my shrink told me this) doing it were sexually abused as children? Yes, that, and on the San Francisco street that is or at least was associated with the sex-specific version of it. (I had run off to SF after a romance, my first, ended badly, and some of these issues were coming up; I was nineteen.) I have haunting memories of it all, from the "nice" middle aged man in the sweater vest - a doppelganger for my abuser - who tried to kidnap me, to the boy - no older than 14 and clearly out of his mind on meth - playing chicken with oncoming cars on a bmx bike. I was probably fortunate not to end up HIV+ (or with some other STI), in jail, or dead.

So, all that. And: the itinerant backers of the feature project I mentioned, including a French born billionaire/head of a vc firm, want a proof of concept short for it. The flick, whose working title is "the Man from Mars," is slated to be shot later this year, and is a variation of some of the feature material. It's about a kid actor hired to do a tv docudrama for one of those pulpy but still feel good networks about boy hustlers in San Francisco. (In this sense, it's kind of a "reboot" of those 70s tv movies of the week, with the transitioning dad or girl turned streetwalker.) His character is picked up by a well meaning undercover cop who gives him a choice: the hospital/rehab or jail. The boy gets the help he needs, and the cop becomes his foster father. Only, late into shooting, the actor finds out about an additional scene - one not to be included in the airing. The cop, in this secret version, becomes a predator, and he becomes his kept boy. Fearing his imminent assault, the boy flees the set, only to find himself hitchhiking home on a street where young male hitchhikers aren't really doing that. His part becomes his life.