The Disorientation of Survival - Part 2

Everything Is Stories

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.8 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2024

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

*This episode contains descriptions of sexual situations, listener discretion is advised. As a closeted gay teenager, lying was familiar to Mark Olmsted. Concealing parts of his identity was just part of the deal–and he was good at it. But when the AIDS crisis threatened his life and left him with little to lose, the lying would turn so grandiose that no one who knew him could quite believe it. In part two, Mark discusses his increased trajectory of deception in the immediate years after a death in the family. With his health hanging in the balance and hopes dashed after a dream screenplay project falls through, casual drug use and debauchery would eventually give rise to dealing methamphetamine in the Los Angeles gay scene–a desperate scenario that would lead to a dramatic encounter with law enforcement. With things escalating beyond his control, Mark would devise a plan to carry out the biggest act of fraud deception yet, but would it be enough to finally turn his life around for good? For more about Mark, you can purchase his book Ink From The Pen: A Prison Memoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them.
0:10.0	The way to understand these stories is to say they are about us.
0:14.0	No, no.
0:16.0	No.
0:18.0	The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them.
0:22.6	The way to understand these stories is to know they are about us. This episode contains descriptions of sexual situations.
0:48.3	Listener discretion is advised. Previously, in part one of the disorientation of survival.
1:07.2	After the revelation from my cousin that I was gay, I got a letter from Luke.
1:13.6	And the first page, three-quarters of it was really excoriating.
1:20.6	It was the harshest words he'd ever had for me.
1:24.6	And then the very last paragraph, he said, and little do you know, all along, I've had the same
1:34.2	feelings as you. There were these backroom bars like the mine shaft or the anvil that stayed open till six in the morning. And it was
1:47.5	decadence and debauchery. It was the best time in my life and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
1:54.8	I have no moral judgments about promiscuity whatsoever. But it feels like in retrospect,
2:01.6	you could only have so much hedonism before it became destructive.
2:07.6	I just wish the universe had come up with a different way to slow us down than AIDS.
2:15.6	We were gay brothers, both HIV positive.
2:19.3	We lived together.
2:21.3	He dies.
2:23.3	I am responsible for settling his affairs.
2:26.3	I use the card and I do that initial fraud and then I'm going to just close everything out.
2:33.3	So I went to the DMV and handed in his old license, and she looked at it, tossed it aside,
	...

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