A Nice Guy Like Me: A Memoir

Preface

Winter, 2024

This started out as a porn memoir. I’m not exactly sure what it’s become. The what, how and why of this story are all distinct things. The what and how are static: this is how it all happened and these are the events or actions that took place on this adventure. What follows is an account of the how and the what, from the surprising to the inevitable, from the titillating to the painful, from the foggy to the graphic. (That is your warning!) It covers a fast and furious ascent in the adult film business at the end of a decades-long golden age of gay porn—before the iPhone, before Grindr, Scruff and OnlyFans, before sex on camera became as commonplace as seeing a bird out a window. It spans the two and a half years I spent as Spencer Quest, how within two weeks of initially contacting Titan Media, I was filming in Palm Springs and offered an exclusive contract, and how over the next 30 months I captured magazine covers, features, a sponsorship, international fame, multiple industry awards, and a stint headlining a show off-Broadway. It also covers my equally fast and furious fall into a purgatory of addiction, mental health issues and self-destruction. It was, just like life, both a beautiful and a traumatic journey.

The why is more elusive and remains so even after two decades. As someone who cannot help reflecting, perhaps to a fault, my understanding of the why is still evolving as I mark the twentieth anniversary of my first film. My original fear when I started writing this book was that I would overly mythologize the story, describing some epic adventure as though I were one of those heroes with a thousand faces. But the fact is that’s exactly what this journey was, and what I’d intended it to be from the very start: an epic adventure, a quest, if you will. I chose my porn name for a reason. After all, aren’t we all on our own epic quests in life? The story probably isn’t that different from yours in its hows or whys, even if the whats may be vastly different.

Writing the first draft of this book in an eight-month daily ritual—assembling its bones—was like walking on broken glass. I love a challenge, even if it may make me bleed. As soon as I started writing, it felt like my addictions had all lined up on a balcony, throwing bottles three stories down that smashed at my feet. I stood there looking up, encouraging and taunting them, and then I started tiptoeing through the shards. Eventually I began intentionally stamping my feet on the sharp edges. Getting my story out became more important than the long journey of recovery I’d been on since retiring from the business.

But writing this was a necessary and essential part of that recovery as well, so I had a conundrum. I knew that revisiting my past would put me at risk of slipping back into it, but I also knew I couldn’t move forward without writing this. I wanted closure on these chapters of my life, to gather them in a book with a hardcover that I could stick on a shelf—one that would contain the things I was tired of fighting. Then, instead of being derailed by unexpected memories, I’d be able to choose whether to take that book down and page through it again. It would be my choice.

The months I was writing the first draft weren’t all painful. I managed to learn and conquer Rachmaninoff"s Prelude in C# Minor, I started acting and painting again and hit a personal open water swim record of four miles. Some of that glass in my path was beach glass, gently smoothed by years of tumbling in the surf. Writing this was its own odyssey with all the trials and travails, all the wonders and riches, one would expect when retelling tales. Love and joy and suffering and pain can promote growth and forge identity. By the time I started working on the second and third drafts in the following three months, adding the blood and guts, the muscle and skin to the story, the soles of my feet were thickly callused and I could tread more easily, often with a smile and a skip to my step. I even managed to sweep up most of the glass behind me.

While I’ve tried to be as honest as I can about my own behaviors and any damage I did or may have unwittingly done, much was lost during these years. Meth days were not always clear days, and memories tend to be filtered through our subsequent life experiences. They are not always accurate but instead are interpretations of what we think happened. I have no qualms with saying that maybe my recollections are bent. Bent, but not broken. It’s been proven that the same memory changes each time we recall it. Even though I still have all my personal and professional emails from 20 years ago, I’ve also forgotten many incidents. I’ve forgotten many people. I’ve used industry names but have changed others. And I’ve intentionally—and with good, necessary and compassionate reasons—excluded people, including some of the most significant people in my life at the time. During my short tenure in the business, I met the man who is now my husband. I won’t be weaving him into the story because this isn’t his story; just know that there was someone, many people actually, who cared deeply for me and supported me along the way through both the highs and lows.

The most important thing in this retelling is to be clear: I blame no one or anything for my own decisions. I was faced with tasks, puzzles, mazes, riddles and challenges on this quest, and I was the one who made the choices given me. I believe in serendipity but also in a universe that responds to my own intention. I do believe things happen for a reason, but to me, when I’m balanced, clean and stable, the reason isn’t divine intervention even if the messages and the signs I see appear to be so. The things and their reasons aren’t elusive lessons we can’t seem to grasp in the face of great loss or pain, although how to find peace through meaning is always the lesson. The reason things happen is simply the law of cause and effect. We are created by our experiences, not defined by them. Our choices are based on a cause. The reason, the why of this story, thus includes life episodes that formed me, some episodes in which I did harm to others and others in which I was harmed. Life lessons. Even when the cause was abuse or trauma, there is a story and reason behind that cause, a story behind the person doing the damage. Every cause is rooted in another cause. My father’s treatment of me had a cause, a logical one which, with some patience, you’ll discover later.

Yet, every experience, even the traumatic ones, has been a gift because I’m still here and every person I touched or who touched me is a hero on their own journey. And for those I wronged, I ask for forgiveness. While I wrote this for me, I truly hope it might help someone else, even just one person.

It was my intention when I sent those photos to Titan that I would write a book, that I would embark on an adventure and have a story to share. I got exactly what I asked for, something to write about. I had no idea it would take 20 years to tell.

My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

—Herman Hesse

Demian

Chapter One

This isn’t a story of my childhood although this story, like all of our stories, is rooted in those formative years and so some details may be helpful before I dive into the what and how of my becoming an adult film star. This introduction is an initial whirlwind telling of these years, and while you may find yourself saying, Whoa, hold up, tell me more, please know that I will. We’re starting with an outline of my first two decades, an overview which includes self-harm and sexual abuse. My dropping bombs, casually throwing something traumatic at you and then breezing forward, isn’t meant to frustrate. These are the past events that began to come to the surface during my years in the industry, so I will go back to them and give them their due once my porn quest begins.

Up until I was about three years old, it was my father who raised me during the day while my mother worked to support us. My sister, two and a half years older, had the benefit of a stay-at-home mother during her first years of life while my father spent those years doing this job or that, including being a debt collector who, even in Lititz, PA, our small town in Amish country, carried a gun while he knocked on doors. My father ended up going back to school at night at Elizabethtown College in 1968 to become an accountant, however, which meant before I turned one-year-old, my mother left for work each morning leaving me screaming and in a tantrum at her daily departure.

When I was old enough to stand at the door looking out at her as she got in the car, I would be inconsolable. This image is still one my mother reflects back on as one of her most traumatic for a 22-year-old mother. It wasn’t just that I was upset, it was that she was leaving me with him, my father who, while he may have had a basic understanding that he should give me security and comfort, was incapable of giving it. He didn’t know how to give it and didn’t understand how a lack of nurturing at this age would forever affect his son, even though he was familiar with the feelings of abandonment—his own childhood having been marked by it in a different form. He also demanded quiet throughout the day, so I spent a lot of time learning to tiptoe around him in between biting and scratching my sister who seemed to get from him what I didn’t. My acting out, my intentionally seeking out attention no matter how it came to me, whether it was a scolding or punishment, started early.

My sister was clearly the one my father loved. She was his princess while I was the troublemaker, the crier, the bedwetting, night-terror-screaming child who probably would have tested any father’s patience. Even as a toddler I could recognize that he was capable of affection because he gave it to my sister. I didn’t understand why he withheld it from me. I got used to feeling like an annoyance to my father early on and would eventually write a story in my head years later that I was the unplanned child, not my sister who actually was unplanned, that I was the extra mouth to feed, and that my father resented me because I existed.

But with every difficulty in my life, there has always been some beauty. We lived next door to my mother’s parents, sharing a wall with them, and while my grandmother didn’t have time to provide all the maternal love I missed during the days when my mother wasn’t there, she gave me all she could. Including ice cream. My grandparents owned and operated an ice cream factory, Rosey’s Ice Cream, that sat just yards behind the house. My grandfather would churn out flavors to deliver to the schools while my grandmother would serve soft-serve swirls and scoop comfort to town foot traffic, including local Mennonites who came into the cone shop. My mother was a Rosenberg, a family that had a long history of providing food and panaceas to others, whether it was Rosey Burgers from the lunch wagon in the Lititz town square (a continuing century-old tradition) or tonics at town fairs all along the East Coast. My great-great grandfather was a well known traveling medicine man whose own handmade tonics, including Rosenberg’s Great Century Oil, claimed to fix just about any ailment.

This juxtaposition of feelings of fear and abandonment I felt on one side of the house with my father and the feelings of love and comfort from the Rosey side of the house became a familiar pattern during my childhood into my teen years. I’d spend decades trying to reconcile the opposites but would learn early from my father that I "had nothing to complain about ‘’ in life and that, even as a toddler, I’d better stop acting like a baby during what he considered my overly emotional moments. His disdain for crying meant he’d send me to the happy side of the house where my tears would dry—a relief for me, but a disappointment as well. When I was an adult, my grandmother told me that I’d come over to their side in tears and ask why my father wouldn’t play with or throw the ball to me.

We moved to Audubon, outside Philadelphia, when I was around three years old, after my father had finished his degree and started working for Price Waterhouse in the city. My world changed drastically. Suddenly my mother was present during the day and my father was not. I began to get love and attention from my mother and from the other mothers in the apartment complex. But by this point I had already turned into a sullen, sad, lonely, overly sensitive and somewhat angry child. I didn’t know how to interact with other kids and didn’t know how to be a normal kid, one that wouldn’t bother my father and that would know how to play with other kids.

While my mother, now that she was home during the day, was the most beautiful, wonderful, kind and caring person I could have hoped for as a child, I was still scared for when my father would come home. During those hours my father was at work, I tried desperately to forge an identity that gave me the attention I craved from him. I still wanted his love. I would do anything to make him smile because if he did, maybe he’d not scold me the next time I did something childish, as though a three-year-old should know that once you hit the age of three, acting like a baby was no longer appropriate. My need to please him started early, so while I had the tendency to steer clear of him when he came home miserable from work, a nearly daily occurrence, if I sensed he’d had a good day, I’d try desperately to get a smile and a touch.

There was another side of my father which, when it appeared, confused me. While there were occasional moments when I had a fleeting sense of security and comfort when he was near, there were also rare moments when I was shocked by the collapse of his hard exterior. One such moment I’ve carried with me to this day, cherishing its significance because it still proves to me that there was always something more to my father.

In 1971, an ABC movie of the week, Brian’s Song, showed me a side of my father I would only ever see again a few times in my life. It was a true story of two Chicago Bears players, played by James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, who were close friends at a time when racial divides were clear even in football. When James Caan died from cancer at the end of the movie, my father cried—hard. I didn’t know what was happening and didn’t know why; I just knew it was a movie about football and that it was sad. The one thing my father did love was football. He had been a star football player in a blue-collar high school in York, Pennsylvania. He could have been on the football team at Penn State had he not decided on playing cards freshman year and getting my mother pregnant instead. I didn’t understand any of that, of course. I just knew he liked football, wouldn’t play with me and teach me how to throw a ball—and now apparently it was okay for him to cry, but not me. Boys didn’t cry; that had been made clear, and even though I wasn’t quite four years old, I was so confused. I didn’t know at the time how significant that moment and that movie would be for me throughout my adolescence, teen years and into adulthood.

Resulting from the long period of feeling abandoned and lacking attention while living in Lititz, my main coping mechanism at this time, an early form of the dissociation I’d use in my life moving forward, was to become the goofiest kid imaginable. Disney mania had resurfaced across the country with the opening of Disney World in Florida in 1971, so it was these cartoon characters with whom I found companionship and my first experiences with escapism. Their faces were on my shirts, pajamas and sheets. My mother had a Disney piano songbook and spent hours playing songs from classic shows with me sitting next to her singing along. Our bedtime stories were from Disney Golden Books. When I say I was goofy, I mean I was, well, Goofy. I’d take on the slapstick mannerisms of the character before changing to another Disney character. I’d become Pluto when I barked at the dinner table with a chicken leg bone in my mouth. I made people laugh. I was a jokester. I got attention and a feeling inside that felt good.

It was at this time that a neighbor, my mother’s best friend in the apartment complex, taught me how to talk like Donald Duck. Not only did I catch on quickly, I was good at it and I suddenly realized I could have a new identity when I used the voice. Oddly enough, by speaking like Donald Duck, I had found my own voice. Most kids in the complex didn’t appreciate it; speaking like Donald only made me weirder and less desirable as a playmate. But most adults thought it was adorable, and because I spent so much time alone and with my mother, it was usually her friends I would entertain. I talked like Donald Duck a lot. Donald took over my normal speech, and while my father initially half-smiled when I first used it with him, his face soon betrayed that it had quickly become an annoyance. But being able to distinguish between positive attention and negative attention from my father wasn’t something I knew how to do yet. So I kept using the voice in the hopes of getting something, anything, from my father that didn’t cross the line after which he’d demand my silence.

What happened next, between the years of 1972 and 1974, was a series of adventures. They added to my confusion as to how to manage my conflicting feelings, fear warring with my newly discovered feelings of excitement and awe. My parents called these moves adventures probably in the hope of appeasing an easily terrified child. In 1973, when my parents were 27 years old and already with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, we moved into a dilapidated 18th century colonial home in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. It was such a mess that the entire basement was literally filled with over a century’s worth of trash and debris that reached the ceiling and came up the steps to the first floor. There were bats in the attic I’d hear above my head at night. Our black lab dog would stand at the foot of the stairs looking up to the second floor and growling all night, his hair on ends, even after all the bats had been forced from the house. When my grandmother visited, she swore she heard other sounds at night.

There was also an enormous hole in my bedroom wall that had to remain there because it was the access to the pipes that needed to be dealt with when my parents eventually tackled renovating the bathroom on the other side of the wall. While they tried to hide it with a Disney themed stretch of fabric, I knew the hole was still there—and it terrified me nightly. The sounds, smells, spiders, rodents, holes in the walls and in the floors that seemed to have no end all worked their way into my imagination. It’s no wonder I developed an obsession with horror later on, especially after reading the Amityville Horror when it first came out. That house seemed like home; it was familiar. Any fear I felt and expressed to my parents in tears was dismissed and reclassified by my parents, who told me, it’s an adventure. For me, this started a lifelong habit of making myself walk, even dive, into fear in order to have an adventure. I learned that it wasn’t an adventure unless it was scary.

It continued to be a lonely time for me. My parents were distracted with renovating the house that happened to be in a neighborhood with no children my age. My sister found friends easily. I had no choice but to entertain myself and gauge the extent to which I’d purposely get into trouble so that I could get some attention but not fall victim to the full force of my father’s ire. Being threatened with the belt he used on our dog was too far to the bad side of the attention spectrum. Having witnessed and heard the pain my father inflicted on our dog, whom I loved dearly but my father never seemed to have wanted in the first place, made me fully believe he’d do the same to me if I couldn’t do anything right. When I dropped lit matches down an uncapped but disconnected gas pipe in the corner of my bedroom, he made me sit for hours at the dinner table until I ate the very last canned pea on my plate, something I couldn’t do without retching on each one. That was relatively easy punishment compared to the threat of a belt.

He was drinking a lot at this point while he worked on the house, something I would also do in my twenties. I never knew what would happen when he was in that state. But then he then decided to move us to Cape Town, South Africa, through an opportunity given him by Price Waterhouse. It was another move for the family, more extreme of course, again labeled as an adventure. But once we got there, my father drank more, because that’s what everyone did. My loneliness grew, as did my attempts at attention by talking like Donald Duck to entertain my parents’ new friends.

It was in South Africa that things started going really wrong, and while it’s hard to describe the emotional distress my father inflicted, I feel that my childhood ended our first year there, when I was seven. The energy dynamic in our family shifted; my mother, who once could protect me, suddenly seemed to lose her power. My father threatened me at the kitchen table in a new way, with what felt like hatred and disgust in his eye. He’d mock me in front of other adults and if I’d cry he’d rub his clenched fists over both eyes and pretend to cry, saying Wha.. wha.. wha…I’m such a baby. He scolded me for the smallest thing.

Then one night, he forbade me to ever speak in a Donald Duck voice ever again—or else. There’s nothing like an or else from a father that’s previously threatened you with a belt to give a threat weight. And in that threat, he stole the one sense of identity I’d managed to find comfort in the prior four years. I’d loved the world of Disney—my place within that world, within the characters, the stories, the music. Imitating those characters had become my tool to make people laugh.

This may seem insignificant to some, and in reality I had already switched to becoming a Hardy Boy and not a Disney character, but the threat wielded the power to completely change how I would walk through the world. The cute coping mechanism, a child dissociating from himself by slipping into a character, was gone and would need to be filled by another form of dissociation. I ended up simply not talking at all when I was near my father, not wanting to say anything wrong. But my deepest desire was still to make him happy, even though I apparently didn’t know how.

This threat came at the same time my parents were also caught up partying, doing what most young adults in their twenties in the early 1970s would do if they found themselves in a bohemian life of beach, sun, and booze, as they did in Cape Town. They became somewhat negligent and subsequently thought nothing of my hanging out and playing with an older teenage boy next door. He molested me at the age of seven years-old, and in doing so, he built the foundation of my adult identity–one that would be built on power, sex and the ability to