Even before his plea deal, Darrell realized that, once again, “gay” had to evaporate like a dream. He spent the next fifteen months in the Jess Dunn Correctional Center. Predictably, he gravitated to the skinheads. Attraction and identification were more or less the same thing. He had to prove himself, method act, insinuate himself among guys he believed hated him. Here, apparently, he found Chaos Squad.
Darrell’s specialty, perfected in California, was to play the Tasmanian devil, the little guy who makes up for what he lacks in stature with sheer craziness. He could never be the lumbering giant whose prison poker face and ropey muscles projected unassailable masculinity without effort. Instead, Darrell kept fellow prisoners awed and off-balance with his violence and ruthlessness. Words alone, joking about some insane cruelty, were often enough to startle much bigger, quieter men.
The constant irony was that daily life among the skinheads in prison was strikingly similar to scenes from the gay porn movies Darrell had appeared in not long before in California. He was aware of it even at the time, though he could twist himself into half-believing in his straightness. Sometimes a group of guys would all raucously pull out their dicks for comparison. The rough camaraderie sounds pretty gay but wasn’t. Darrell suppressed any desires with a healthy fear of death. Likewise, prison banter was both true and untrue. Buddies threatened, “Better not be looking at my dick.” Now Darrell admits, “Of course, I always did look.” You could beat off with your buddy, but if you were somehow “gay,” the same buddy might beat the life out of you. The difference amounted to the thickness of a playing card, facedown.
This experience hammered into Darrell something he’d always known: “gay” was a global form of betrayal. It’s why in California he could hustle and gay-bash in the same day, perhaps why he could set up busts as a confidential informant for the police, why he was able to kill Brad, his own pledge and partner, why he now must fear for his life as a Chaos Squad “traitor,” and why he says his greatest worry is how gays “will treat me when they find out I have killed some of my own people. Yes, I said some.”
IV. Los Angeles and Truth
I sent Darrell an old photograph of himself and he tells me he remembers the occasion well. Billy Houston, as he was known, had taken off his clothes. Behind him a few shaggy trees filtered golden light. He and the photographer and a guy holding a bendable circular diffuser were in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. It was a photo shoot for a small gay magazine called In Touch. But the pictures would eventually be used as stills for one of Billy’s first XXX performances for the director Richard Lawrence. (The original Richard Lawrence. Something of a humorist among porn directors, his name was later appropriated by a more prolific, unfunny director.) This was 1991. Darrell had just turned twenty-one.
As Billy, Darrell had just one tattoo: Jamie in italics on his left shoulder. (Darrell explains, “He was the love of my life for a while. He was a very young dancer I met at a coffee shop in West Hollywood . . . He was really OPENLY gay . . . He would try to hold hands and I would push him away forcibly.”) For the photograph Darrell wore underwear and a blue jean jacket. The cuffs of the jacket were rolled back two turns. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his Calvin Kleins and tugged down a few inches. At a distance two passersby—some gay hookup probably, Darrell says—slowed down to watch and grinned. Looking right through them, Billy smiled. Unlike many porn actors, he had a dazzling smile.
His light brown hair fell in a silky mop over his forehead and the tops of his ears. Hanging open, the jean jacket showed that otherwise he didn’t have a hair on him. His eyes, which appeared cutely crossed, were a little close-set for perfect beauty. They squinted and drooped when the dimpled smile crept across his face like syrup. He looked like a young Jan-Michael Vincent. He had the same endearing dopiness. But unlike the old Disney star, Billy’s appeal was highlighted by a touch of harmless wickedness.
* * *
Though they’re hard to find, I tracked down and watched some of Darrell’s pornographic movies and was baffled and disturbed. He’s very young-looking and has a distinct hint of “gay” in his voice. His acting is a little more developed than the average, his sex a lot less so. He stars in an early one, The Devil and Danny Webster, without doing much. He plays an unpopular, supposedly unattractive, glasses-wearing geek who makes a trial pact with the devil to become the most popular guy in West Hollywood. As the film opens, the character walks by the very shopping plaza Darrell later tells me was his favorite hustling spot. For the big “transformation” from geek to god, he takes off his glasses and drops the blanket he’s wrapped in, appearing naked. “I’m beautiful!” he says. And he is. He starts rubbing his shoulders and chest, full of joy in the new body. Several sex scenes later, including an indistinct, creepy one he watches in “hell,” Danny rejects the pact with the devil and is told by the cute neighbor that he’s great just the way he is. The neighbor says he loves natural bodies and can’t stand the vain West Hollywood jerks. Danny turns his studious wire rims to the camera for a close-up. The smile spills out, and he says, “Well, I’ll be damned!” According to Darrell, the moderately awkward boy starring in that film was already a murderer.
Billy Houston “plays” bottom only once, a single scene in Hip Hop Hunks, which he tells me was the only time he was ever paid to bottom (the datum is important to him). He adds that he only did it because he was so attracted to the guy, a self-absorbed, bouncy, vacuous-looking, knit-cap-wearing “Tony Young,” boyish but seemingly more Italian than Aryan. Darrell looks uncomfortable in the scene. When I ask whether it was particularly upsetting, given his feelings about “gay,” he says that he was only self-conscious about that part of his body (his asshole). Something in his offhanded tone, though . . . an airy pleasantness completely stripped of feeling.
Like most careers in porn, Billy Houston’s was short. He made six movies in two years and that was it. Despite the drugs, it was the high-water mark of his fortunes in California.
He’d arrived there from Houston around 1985, aged sixteen, as the guest of a Texas businessman at a West Hollywood hotel. Off hours he drifted down to Santa Monica Boulevard or to a hustler bar called Hunter’s. For one admirer he spun the story that he was staying with his rich dad and was excruciatingly bored at the hotel. He was well-spoken enough, his looks angelic enough, to pull this off. He was taken home, photographed naked, paid nicely, sixty dollars for minimal sex. He says he had only two bad habits at the time: Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. (But he’d killed in Houston, supposedly.) Soon he was living in West Hollywood and fell out of touch with his new friend.
Next time the Los Angeles friend saw him, four or five years later, Darrell was parked in front of a 7-Eleven on a new Honda Gold Wing (thirteen thousand dollars) dressed in leather with a leather cap, necklaces, diamonds on every finger, looking as gay as the day is long. “Looks like you found yourself a sugar daddy.” Darrell just smiled. It was his first year in porn, 1990.
But in LA Darrell was also Richie Rich, a different person, not Lynn his hustler self, or Billy his porn self. Richie Rich hung out with skinheads who would have beaten or killed the other two. With the skinheads, he was always in a state of repressed ecstasy, thrilled by the crime, longing, brutality, and by the big falsehood itself. As usual, he distracted the others with shocking craziness. He out-hated the haters.
As he describes it now, each member of the skinhead gang had his lick. One taught them how to steal the empty video boxes from Blockbuster stores. A Chinese counterfeiter would buy them to dress up his own products. The boys (they really were boys, ranging from thirteen to twenty-one at most) stole mail and sold it to identity thieves or washed the ink off checks with methyl ethyl ketone and rewrote and cashed them using fake identities. Another lick was stealing concrete statues and huge urn planters. You had to lift the heavy planters, tree, soil, and all, straight up off the rebar that kept them in place. You dumped the prize in a stolen car, a puddle jumper good for one night, and took it to a v
ery nice Mexican lady who’d buy every one and didn’t mind being woken at four a.m. as long as you always came to her first. A dangerous but favorite lick was robbing the crack dealers on Crenshaw Boulevard, not a skinhead-friendly part of town. Gang members would pretend to be buyers (though crack was considered a “black drug,” and they never touched it). When a dealer unwarily leaned in through the car window, his hand full of rocks, they’d knock it empty and peel out firing a shot over the man’s head in parting. Afterward they combed the car for every last piece of crack and traded it for heroin, speed, pot, or cash. It didn’t always work. Once they were crazy enough to try it with the gas gauge reading E and simply lucked out. Like the barbarous raiding parties in Tacitus’s Germania, they robbed partly for the thrill, the story, for bragging rights in front of the youngest recruits.
On Saturdays they headed over to LA’s largely Jewish Fairfax neighborhood. The swastikas they’d spray-painted on the synagogues the night before were disappointingly already cleaned up, but they’d walk four or five abreast on the sidewalk, tattoos on display, talking racist trash and forcing Sabbath-goers to walk around them. Often they got violent. It was—perverse as it sounds—a joyous time. Joyous from within the gang, obviously. They were spreading terror. From my insular, nonviolent America, I rebelled at believing Darrell’s stories for a long time.
Tentative as a mating black widow, Darrell now and then managed the seduction of a brother. After which, profound silence. Or he’d inveigle one to come with him to Santa Monica Boulevard to get a blow job for cash. After which, silence. Darrell himself had to be careful he wasn’t flush with cash in too obvious a pattern. But money vanished like steam. Sometimes he was reduced to squatting with the gang.
That old client of his saw him again after a long break. It was near the notorious Okie Dog, a hustler and lowlife hangout. Lovely as ever, Darrell was in a wheelchair now. He explained that he’d developed diabetes. The client remembers taking him home, lifting him—a pornographic deposition of Christ—from wheelchair to bed, and having unforgettably tender sex (for money) with the angelic, wicked, damaged, diabetic boy.
Years later, after Steve Domer’s and Bradley Qualls’s murders, the same client nerved himself to visit Darrell in prison and worriedly asked whether the inmate was getting his insulin. Darrell chuckled and explained that he’d lied. He’d only needed the wheelchair after ruining his legs with drugs. He’d been hunting obscure veins to use for shooting meth.
When I visited a few months later and asked him again, Darrell smiled and told me, no, he’d lied again. The wheelchair was a scam from start to finish. No diabetes, no drugs either. One day he just decided he didn’t want to walk anymore.
He liked the sympathy. He loved getting people to wheel him around. It lasted the better part of sixteen months. “Some of it,” he admits, “was I thought they wouldn’t be as likely to arrest a poor guy in a wheelchair for dealing drugs.” That theory didn’t pan out. He spent six months in the LA County jail, all the while pretending he was unable to walk. After the big-money years in porn and running a phony “agency” that had “Billy Houston” as its principal whore, Darrell was sliding into unglamorous drugs and crime, and soon he’d be tossed back to the plains of Oklahoma for good.
* * *
The truth, as you can see, becomes uncertain. There are old lies. Why did he need the wheelchair? There are self-confessed problems with memory, because he did take so many drugs. There may be a natural boastfulness now as he looks back from the monotony of prison, even a twisted pride in how awful he was. To hear him tell it, he was already a killer as a boy in LA and he killed again once he was there. I find it hard to believe. But I wouldn’t peg him for a killer now, either. I’ve had to examine the truth ceaselessly while speaking with Darrell and writing about him.
There was talk about making a movie of his life. An interested filmmaker visited Darrell in prison. When I interviewed the filmmaker later about their meeting he described a Darrell I don’t recognize. He says Darrell was incredibly scary, boasted about a fight with his cellmate (“I wiped the floor with him”), and claimed he’d committed his first murder as a kid in Houston. Asked to prove himself to the skinheads there, he was handed a gun and casually shot the next black guy to drive past.
The episodes of prison violence appear to be true. Darrell has told me about three bloody fights with three different cellmates. (About one he says, “I swear I wasn’t leading him on.”) After each fight, he’s left happily alone in the cell until the next cellie (they’re usually older, around fifty) is brought in and, to use Darrell’s word, “trained.” Darrell describes himself as autocratic and obsessive. He struggles to control his bulimia, a lifelong problem. A screwup with his laundry is completely unsettling to him. He rises at five and likes to keep to a rigid schedule of TV shows (Ellen, The Price Is Right, and, above all, Nascar), which keep anxiety at bay.
I have a slightly girly/tyrannical vision of Darrell, so the filmmaker’s description is confusing. Most alarming, the filmmaker says Darrell has lied to everyone about something crucial. After hearing my version of this story, the filmmaker says in a low, disturbed tone of voice that Darrell told him that he (Darrell) had killed Steve Domer, not Brad. That would change everything. I immediately have a suspicion, though. The filmmaker is straight.
The first chance I get, I ask Darrell whether he got his back up when he met the filmmaker because the man was straight. Did he try impress him even to the point of appearing scary or unbalanced? Darrell says, “You are probably right about me being a little defensive where [he] is concerned. I can be ME with you.” This is important. His behavior during that visit must have been convincing. Someone familiar with actors and performances bought it (considering he really is a killer, there’s probably madness in Darrell’s method). Here was a hint of Charles Manson, after all. More to the point, it was the blurry reflection of the “crazy, raging” Darrell that I have such a hard time visualizing. Darrell doesn’t try to scare me. With a consistent love of regalia he asks me to send him the rainbow flag and pink triangle of his new “gang.”
I do sometimes get the feeling that Darrell’s holding back or even lying. He told me he didn’t remember discovering his father’s body in the chicken coop. “I know they say that, but I don’t remember it,” he once said to me with a strange, light finality. His tone made me think the story was either true and he didn’t want to talk about it or an old lie still floating around, and he believed I might catch him in it. It would seem a difficult thing to forget.
Despite Darrell’s steady and convincing frankness, doubts come up. Lies or reticences blur into the possibility that he simply doesn’t remember things or understand himself. He can’t possibly be as chipper about life without parole as he appears. In prison, Darrell sounds personable and upbeat, like a limo driver or a hustler trying to make a cheery first impression. He smiles readily. He flicks very long dark hair from his cheek with his good hand. He shows me the floppy left hand: “Poetic justice.” When he pins the telephone handset between his ear and shoulder, his head is fixed at an endearing angle. He clearly wants to be liked and boasts, “They love me in here!” He stands and lifts his shirt to show the old tattoos he’d like to cover up. Since he isn’t allowed the privilege of “contact visits” (his security level and the fights), you can only see him through a very blurry CCTV. The camera is slightly askew. The tattoos don’t show up well. Making light of the prison indignity of protective custody (his life really is in danger from skinheads, and he’s been afraid to go into the yard for a long time), he says happily, “In California it was considered bad, but everyone seems to do it here. It’s like the thing to do.”
With the usual hitches—my shirt snaps set off the metal detector—I’m let into the large visiting room through an entryway they keep at an elevated air pressure so the doors will always slam closed. The locks at either end open with a wheezy thud. Prisoners who are allowed contact visits are released into this room. Their fami
lies or girlfriends are already milling around or fussing with babies or reserving the too few chairs with a deft high school lunchroom sense of purpose. They stock up on junk food for the visit from the wall of snack machines. Everything but a roll of quarters has to be left in visitors’ lockers outside. (This is a for-profit prison!) At the center of all the commotion a few corrections officers lounge at a desk.
The CCTVs, about six or eight of them, not all working, hang along the back wall opposite the snack machines. Voices are hard to make out through the balky phone system. The hubbub behind my back is distracting. Darrell now and then twiddles his fingers to wave over my shoulder at a wide-eyed three-year-old black girl in beaded braids. I smile, but if it’s for my benefit it’s wasted effort. I know that friendliness, even intimacy, is not the opposite of racism. In the lives of certain people, racism is like the morning fog, here and gone, always possible under the right conditions. Even if they wish it weren’t so, it’s become a phenomenon of their natures.
Almost too readily he says, “I’ve done such really awful, awful things.” He seems more or less earnest. But he won’t talk about the other possible murders (except to claim they happened both in Houston and California), because the CCTV records everything. “I really don’t want the death penalty . . . Oh there now! I shouldn’t be thinking of me. I should be thinking about those other people.”
When I press him about how events escalated the night of Steve Domer’s murder, he’s quick to agree to my understanding of things. “Right, Brad and me were like always trying to outdo each other. It was a constant competition.”
“But you came out on top in the end.”
He bows his head at my irony, and the long hair screens the faintest of smiles, and he gently scolds me, “Oh, that’s terrible. You’re terrible.”
American Honor Killings Page 13