The first real sexual encounter I had with another guy happened when I was about 15. At that time, my parents had purchased a computer and before long, we were ONLINE! I logged in hours on America Online. I spent a lot of times in the M4M (male for male) chat rooms, and found myself beginning to talk sexually with other guys. So much for turning my life around, eh? The more I tried to suppress the feelings I had, the more they pushed themselves up. I came up with an online “character” for myself. According to my online profile, I was 16, Latino, ripped with muscles and a huge penis. I found naked pictures that looked like my description online and posted them to my profiles. I talked with hundreds and hundreds of guys, mostly older, and always I found an excuse not to meet them.

Over time, I got braver and braver about revealing things about myself online. I made more accurate descriptions of myself, and posted my real age. I took down the fake pictures, but didn’t replace them with any real ones of myself. I began wandering into the local gay chat rooms. As a tender fifteen-year-old, I got a lot of attention from the older guys. They would hit me up with things like, “oooh, jailbait” or, “do your parents know you’re in here” followed by flirting, followed by cybersex, followed by invitations to meet. Rarely did anyone under the age of eighteen contact me. Most of these guys were in their late twenties to early thirties.

Of course, the last thing I wanted to have happen was to meet someone and have the word get out that I was gay. One afternoon, my parents and I had a fight. I have absolutely no recollection what the fight was about, but I do remember being really angry with them, and I wanted to act out. The only way I knew how to do it was to enter my secret online world. That day, a thirty-five-year-old guy named Chase began to talk with me in the Utah M4M chat room. Chase was in town on business from Canada and was staying at a motel off I-15 in Midvale. We chatted for awhile and he eventually asked to meet me. This was it. I was going for it. I told him to meet me at a nearby mall. I convinced my sister to drop me off at the mall to meet some “friends from school” and hang out. She dropped me off, and I hurried to the other side of the mall where I told Chase to pick me up. After standing outside ZCMI for about ten minutes, Chase pulled up. I was terrified.

Chase didn’t look anything like his description. He looked to be in his mid-forties, was probably close to fifty pounds overweight and was smoking a cigarette. I didn’t know what to do. Like a total idiot, I got in the car with him. The thing I remember most about Chase is he had an Aussie accent. I was too nervous to ask him many questions, but as he drove toward his motel, he started rubbing my leg. I vividly recall the smell of his aftershave or cologne. I probably won’t forget that smell until the day I die.

He tried to make small talk with me the entire way, but I was too scared and shy to talk back. We reached the motel and I followed him to his room. Within seconds, he grabbed me and began kissing me. Sad as this is, this is the first time I had ever kissed anyone. I was pretty grossed out. He started taking his clothes off and taking my clothes off and before I knew what the hell was happening, I was performing oral sex on him.

Keep in mind; this is the very first time I had done anything like this with anyone. I was really disgusted. Here I was, not even sixteen years old, in a motel room with a complete stranger who was probably three times my age, doing things that made me sick to my stomach. He was really overweight and this was the very first time I had ever seen an uncircumcised penis. It horrified me (though that horror has since left the building). A lot of what happened that night I have blocked out, but I do remember being down there doing what I was doing and him farting right in the middle of it. I remember gagging and trying not to throw up and all the while trying to make sure he knew I WASN’T gagging and choking back vomit.

After being there about a half hour, he finished. I didn’t. I asked him to take me back to the mall so my sister could pick me up. We didn’t speak on the drive back. I got out of his car and he drove off. That was the last time I saw or spoke to him.

Words cannot describe how awful I felt. I ran back inside the mall, went straight to the bathroom into a stall and began to cry. What had I done? I was unclean. I had a huge, heavy stone sitting in the pit of my stomach and there was nothing I could do about it. I stayed in the bathroom for probably close to a half hour, then dried my eyes and went to a payphone to call my sister to come get me.

I was sitting on a bench outside the mall when my sister pulled up. I got in the car and immediately she could tell something was wrong. I told her I had just gotten in an argument with one of my friends and that I was okay. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. I tossed and turned and tried to scrub my brain; praying silently that I could erase what had happened, and most of all that God would forgive me. I knew I had done something gravely serious, and knew it would come with equally serious consequences.

For the next two weeks, I fastidiously stayed away from the computer and did my best not to think about what I had done. I spent every evening in my room reading the scriptures and praying that Heavenly Father would make it all better and forgive me. After nearly a month, I felt pretty much back to normal, and continued on with my life, but for probably the next year, I could still smell Chase’s acrid cologne in my nostrils.

Time moved on, as it does, and I became increasingly aware that I probably wasn’t going to change. I had prayed. I had cried. I had done everything I knew how to do to make this “affliction” go away, to absolutely no effect. I continued chatting online, but instead of seeking out random sex partners, I went in search of someone to date. I figured if I focused my brain elsewhere, I wouldn’t be tempted to have sex. Plus, after what I had done, the thought of actually repeating the same mistake kept me in line for awhile. At that point, I had no idea sex could be anything other than smelly, disgusting and wrong. I still had a sex drive, sure. I was an adolescent boy in the height of puberty, after all. But after the horrific Chase experience, I was too scared to try again.

Things on the home front weren’t improving much either. In fact, things were getting drastically worse. By this time, my mom was nearly completely bedridden. Like before, years ago, any light she had in her eyes had gone almost dark. I did everything I knew how to do to help her, but being only a teenage boy my resources were limited. Not to mention the set of problems I was creating for myself without anyone knowing.

Carrying around a secret like that is sheer torture. The weight and taste of it gets so bad, there are times you’re sure you won’t be able to continue walking. But whom could I talk to? Who could I tell? My parents were certainly out of the question. The bishop? Hell, no. I began to feel trapped. I started having a whole slew of suicidal thoughts. Evidently, there was no way out of this except to die. I was tired of fighting to keep my family together, trying to help my mom, worrying about my dad, attempting to keep my brother shielded from the hell of what was going on in our house, all the while grappling with what I thought was an affliction. God had obviously abandoned me. My prayers had gone unanswered. All my cries for help fell on deaf ears.

I never attempted suicide, but there came a point when it was all I ever thought about. My mind became obsessed with thoughts of death. I had my funeral all planned out, right down to what music would be played. The only solace I found was knowing that once I got to the ‘other side’, whatever that was, all these problems I had would cease to exist.

As I said earlier, the specific times and dates get a little muddy, but I was in mid-adolescence when my dad had his first heart attack. He was in his mid-forties at the time. His family had a big history of heart disease; his mother passed away of a heart attack in 1984. I remember the ambulance coming to the house and taking my dad away. It was then that I understood how fiercely I avoid conflict. When the ambulance came, I was hiding up in my room, doing my best to convince myself I was completely aloof. And if I’m brutally honest with myself, I think I was a little desensitized by that time. So many shitty things had happened, this one felt like the proverbial drop in the bucket. In fact, it was eerily funny in some way. It was like, “REALLY? HOW MUCH MORE???”.

Even at her lowest, my mom was fantastic in a crisis. Shades of her old self really came shining through. At a time when it seemed she should have been falling apart, she completely came together and stepped up to the plate. She remained calm with the paramedics, with everyone. She went to the hospital with my dad and arranged for my siblings and me to stay with friends for the night.

Thankfully, the heart attack was minor, and there was little damage. It was painfully clear, however, that my dad needed to reduce the stress in his life. But how? His doctor ended up putting him on a fairly high dose of the antidepressant Zoloft. Unlike with my mom, the drug seemed to do wonders for him. He was much calmer, took things more in stride, and my parents seemed to fight less and less.

A year went by, and disaster struck again. My dad had another heart attack. This time, however, my mom was in no way, shape or form equipped to handle it. She completely shut down. She was taken to the hospital alongside my dad. They admitted both of them to the hospital; my dad to the cardiac ICU, and my mom to the psychiatric unit for observation.

My world was falling apart around my ears, or should I say falling even further apart than it already had. My parents were both in the hospital, I had no idea whether they would live or die. By this time, I had pretty much given up on God. Where the fuck had he been? What had all of us done to deserve having this much shit rain down on our heads?

My dad had dodged a bullet yet again, but this time the treatment was more aggressive. They went in and inserted stents into arteries in his heart to keep the flow of blood going and to help get rid of the blockages. This seemed to help for awhile, and my dad’s health improved.

My mom’s health, however, continued deteriorating. She continued seeing the psychiatrist and his wife, who was a licensed clinical psychologist. It seemed everything that could possibly be done was being done, and yet, nothing was working.

Later that same year, my dad had his third heart attack. This time, he was taken via helicopter to the cardiac trauma unit at St. Mark’s hospital. While en route to the hospital, he was given a shot nicknamed the Artery Blaster, which allowed just enough blood to get through the artery to keep him alive. This was the only thing that kept him from dying. The cardiologist delivered the news the next day that my dad would need to undergo a triple bypass surgery. My dad was still only in his mid-forties. What the hell was going on? They scheduled the surgery for the following day. My mom stayed by his side the entire time, and once again was back in survival mode and seemed to be doing quite well.

As we all know, most things aren’t usually what they seem to be. The REAL beginning of the end was just around the corner.