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MARK OLMSTED: I play this morbid game sometimes where I think, ‘What if God came down? (I don’t believe in God, but, you know, in these fantasies), and said, alright, you can save three people from your past. Who wouldn’t have died of aids, who would they be? And I’m like, three? I have the list.The ones who left the most broken lovers, and then what if it was two? And it’s like, that’s really hard. And then what if it was one? And that’s like, excruciating.
And I don’t know why I put myself through that. Like it might happen, so you better decide. I go back and forth. I go back and forth. For some reason it comforts me to sort of have a list ready. I just imagine my friends who were widowers, not having gone through that, because that’s two deaths. The one who dies and the one who really loved them more than anything. And, that’s two deaths.
You know, I would like to be very angry. And I think there’s a level at which I am very angry about that. That, just, it’s because my friends and I are gay, if we are affected by this disease, that no one really cares, that it seems that we deserved it, so let us die. On the other hand, I realize that gay men are no different from the rest of the world when there are diseases affecting other people and not them, they don’t care so very much either. So it’s human nature and I don’t like it, but there’s not a lot you can do about it.
My whole relationship with HIV, was, I understood very early on that this was just a virus that had found a way to transmit very effectively and I had gotten it, and everyone else did, in the hunt for human intimacy. That was just nothing I could be ashamed of. Shame is very toxic, and it affects the body, and most of the guys who really suffered from HIV stigma, it was really an internalized homophobia. It’s the way they got it. Male sex. Man on man sex. And homosexuality was definitely not something I had any shame over. I rarely had to be even discreet about it. I found that when you are very matter of fact about being HIV positive, people usually act very matter-of-factly. If you act as if you’re blackened, then they will react to that energy, too.
I had never invested a lot of value in society’s judgment. Otherwise, I never could have come out and been very comfortable about being gay. So, I expected there to be full of fear about AIDS and finger pointing. I remember a lot of people I knew, or a lot of gays around, took it very personally. They felt punched in the gut, and I never really did. I always felt like this is a reflection of you and of your ignorance, and your hate. Even when people didn’t know what caused it. There was an obvious link to a damaged immune system, but the connections were still to be made. There was as yet no sense of an infectious agent, no awareness of person-to-person transmission, no knowledge of how the disease was spread.
I knew within a month, and I was telling my friends, I was like, it has to be sexually transmitted. It’s the only explanation why only gay men would be getting it. I also said, if we got it, it was in the search for intimacy. And I refuse to be ashamed of contracting disease in the search for intimacy with another human being. In fact, it has a dark beauty to it. We were the first to really grasp and understand sex, which we were celebrating so much in the 70s, because after years of being in the closet now it was something that could be related to death. And that was a deep and unpleasant psychic experience. A realization that I think broke a lot of our brains, frankly. And I think it broke a lot of Americans’ brains when it finally seeped into the masses.
I have a theory that it ended up being the beginning of the fracturing of the American psyche. Because when something as fundamental as life giving becomes death giving, it just is a mindfuck. It just happened with the gays before, and just as we were learning to really feel guilt-free, and free, happy, and celebratory about sex, this comes down. The whole idea of a disease that kills you through sex, that is sexually transmitted, which unites and marries the whole themes of sex and death–it’s very surrealistic. The feeling that my life had become a sort of living work of fiction. A sense that I was living in something unreal. In some ways, I feel like AIDS made me insane. But like the idea of AIDS, the very basic concept of it made me a little insane. By all rights, I should have gotten sick and died in those next few years, but I didn’t. But God, I had a good time.
In ‘93, I got my first AIDS illness. I was working in a place called Republic Pitchers. It was an administrative job, and I got sick with pneumonia. I had to go to the hospital. After that, it was like, ‘Okay, technically you qualify for full blown AIDS and a disability.’ And back then, if you had t-cells under 125, they put you on permanent disability. And I mean permanent, no questions asked. So I cobbled together an income that was survivable. I decided, ‘No, I’m not going to go back to work and kill myself in some administrative job and then die.’
In the middle of the 90s I was more comfortable using my own credit cards. After that first forgery, I started jacking them up, and then I got a viatical settlement. I had life insurance for $100,000, and based on the guesstimate of how long you have, they would give you money in advance of it. So I got $65,000 in 1993. The actuaries say the life expectancy of this person is not more than 24 months, so I had in black and white that I was dying. Every time I paid off my credit cards to zero, I was like, ‘Okay, new leaf, you’re not going to do any more fraud.’
I started bartending at night, so I was making money on top of my disability check. My mother was sending me $500 a month, and somehow or another over the next three years I started jacking them up again, jacking them up again, jacking them up again. And I realized I wasn’t going to be able to pay them off, it was something like $68,000 altogether.
I’d gone to Montreal, I’d gone to Boston, I’d gone to San Francisco, I would go away on weekends, I’d go to circuit parties, and each time I was thinking, ‘Well, you’ve got to do this because this is the last time you’re going to look this good. Any minute now, you’re going to get sick.’
Literally, the actuaries and doctors were saying, ‘This guy has 24 months to live, statistically speaking.’ I felt like when I die, and they may settle my affairs and find out some dicey things, it’s just like, ‘I don’t care, I will have gone to London, I will have gone to see my French family, I will have gone to these parties, or gone to these restaurants, and I will have a beautiful last two years of plenty of memories.’
That’s when I finally got the idea of taking Luke’s death certificate and forging it into mine. Now, I have managed to jack up my credit cards in both his name and my name again to a point where I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to pay them off. I had done the first forgery, it had worked. I was never going to do it again. I’d never forgotten it. It was always in the back of my mind. And so, this time, doing the forgery myself, because I had become quite good at Photoshop, and finding specialty paper that was a lot like death certificate paper to make the certified copies look certified, I went to Office Depot and I got a stamp. I said it was for a little league team that I coached called the Corona Cougars, and I wanted a double-C in the middle and then Corona Cougars around the thing, and that’s because it looked like the actual stamp on the death certificate that I had that was raised and said “CC” for court certified or something like that.
I sent in my death certificate with one of these card payments to get paid off by the insurance and it worked like a dream for three of the credit cards, and it was paid off by the insurance. So, they paid off three of my credit cards and then I got a call from a woman who said she had a little bit of a problem with one of them. And of course I had a heart attack over the phone. I never felt so panicked in all my life. So, we went over what the problems were and I pointed out to her that the seal was raised and it was court certified. And she looked at it over the phone and then she said, ‘Oh, no, no, that’s not the problem.’
And I said, ‘Oh, I think it’s on the back. I put it on the back.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, okay, fine. Okay, thanks so much. All done.’ And it was paid off. I hung up the phone, and there was an incredible relief. There was also a vow that that was the last time I ever was going to do that,and I didn’t do it for several more years. And there was also the rush of, I got away with it. This was a regular rush that I didn’t even know was becoming an intense addiction.
So, from the beginning of AIDS through the 80s and 90s, the trajectory of my lying continued to increase, increase, increase. But my honesty about this one thing stayed absolutely rock solid, and that’s about being HIV positive. The irony is that I was the most honest person I knew about my HIV status. All my personal relationships and everyone particularly that I met, sexual partners, et cetera, et cetera, I told the truth.
Before I was confirmed to be positive in 1988, I would just have safe sex, or as I understood it, very low risk sex, but as soon as it was confirmed, I never once in the 20 years after did not disclose that I was HIV positive. The interesting thing was that never once in 20 years did anyone tell me first. About 60, 70 percent of the time they would go, ‘Oh, I’m positive too. Big whoop.’ And we didn’t worry about safe sex. And the circles that I ran in, that was the biggest likelihood. Then about 20 percent of the time, they would say, ‘I’m HIV negative, as long as we have safe sex.’ And about 10 percent of the time, I would get rejected by someone who was either negative or thought they were negative.
It never bothered me at all. I would say, ‘Bless you, you do what you have to do to stay safe.’ And I remember this one guy from Brazil who was literally horrified I told him, because he thought that everyone with AIDS was like, skinny and skeletal and looking horrible, and so I educated him. But I’ve seen other guys complain about it and a lot of positive guys get furious, and still get furious, and that feeling of stigma and rejection. And that’s why it was very important for me to be very honest, so that if someone wanted to take a risk, even if I was lowering the risk, they would do so with full consent, but I wasn’t going to have to worry about getting a phone call later on. And I just never took it personally. I had reasons to lie because I equaled it with power and money and lack of consequences. And it’s true, I got a lot of, quote, benefit from the lying, mostly financial. The only thing by telling the truth to my sexual partners that I got out of it was a clear conscience. I needed that, because when you’re stealing from insurance companies or visa cards or the system, the justice system, stuff like that, it’s not hard to do that and still keep a clear conscience.
I still had respect for life and the idea that because I was afraid of rejection, to put someone else’s life at risk, that was never something I was willing to do. I think that this was a little bit of an anchor that allowed me to feel that the lying was more okay because it was, it wasn’t a personal lying, I was lying to entities, and I wasn’t hurting anybody in particular with my lies. I could hurt somebody real in front of me if I had told a lie, and that I couldn’t do. So, I had a compartmentalized conscience. I had to keep a corner of my conscience clean.
When I finally decided to go back to work in 1997 I found a job as an assistant managing editor of a literary magazine. I loved the job. I became an instant workaholic. I couldn’t understand how I had not had an office job all these years. I would come home from work and do more work. I was ecstatic because it was so much fun to put a magazine together. I wrote an article every time, so I felt like this was it. I was going to be a magazine editor for the rest of my life. But it paid shit, like a lot of dream jobs do.
I wanted to keep my disability as Mark, so when it came time to fill out the forms, I put Luke’s name down for the work papers. I said my nom de plume was Mark, but my legal name was Luke.
The boss didn’t even blink. He didn’t care at all. He just had the checks made out to LR Olmstead and I deposited them in Luke’s bank account and I kept collecting my disability. I justify that because this job that I loved so much paid like $20,000 a year. I could never have survived on it. So, I was paid as Luke and kept my permanent disability and private disability that I had at the same time.
When that job ended because the magazine moved to New York, I went on unemployment first as Luke and then disability as Luke. So, at one point, I was on two disabilities as Mark and Luke at the same time. And finally after a year of that, I had to get recertified for disability as Luke, and that’s when they denied me. They said, ‘You’re not sick enough.’
I actually went to social security at one point to see if I could clear it up, and he looked it up on the screen and he goes, ‘This says that you’re dead.’ And I go, ‘Are you serious?’ and said, ‘No, I’m very much alive.’ I showed him my ID as Luke and he said, ‘Well, it must be some sort of clerical error.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, you know, they make mistakes all the time.’ And he clicked to being alive again. That was one of the sort of more nerve wracking moments. It was feeling like I was juggling a lot of balls, especially with the dual identity.
Then after that, there was no more Luke disability. I had to live on just Mark disability, and I could have, you know–and should have–but I was just living beyond my means.
There are always good things that come out of bad things, and vice versa. So when this happened, I’m starting as a screenwriter. After my brother died I needed a roommate, and my friend Lanny, her best friend had moved out to LA and she needed a place to live. So, she moved in with me and she read my first screenplay, called Riding The F Train. And she said, ‘You know what? I’m going to send this to a friend of mine named Christian Blackwood, who is a filmmaker.’ And he said, ‘I love this script, I want to work on it.’ And we ended up working back and forth on it for many months. He started to send it around town, and when he was in the airport going to some gig he ran into Whoopi Goldberg, I guess, in the VIP lounge, and he pitched it to her. He sent her the script and she loved it. She wanted to play a character called Red.
So, we were very excited. We got Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Cusack also agreed to be in it. And then, two months later suddenly I don’t hear from Christian for like, three weeks. Then he finally calls me, and he’s been diagnosed with lung cancer. He was a very heavy smoker. He gets treatment, he goes into remission, he’s very excited again, and then, very soon, boom–he dies.
I was devastated on a personal level, because he was a wonderful guy, but also, man, this script, I had such hopes for it. And Molly comes through one more time and she says, well, you know, I have another close friend named Steve Abbott, who was the producer of A Fish Called Wanda, and I’m going to send him the script. He gave it to his assistant. She loved it. And I started going to re-writes with her. Then we start sending it to directors around town and it finally gets sent to Norman Reneé, who directed Longtime Companion and Reckless and was a New York theater director. So, I get sent to Italy to do rewrites with Norman.
We have a fantasy week in Rome and in Tuscany doing rewrites with him. I come back and we start sending it to studios again. And all of a sudden, no one can get in touch with Norman. He’s in the hospital, he had KS, a terminal case of Kaposi Sarcoma.
I only realized in retrospect that when I was there he had always been wearing long sleeves, but he probably had lesions there. He died very soon afterwards. For me, I felt like the directors were like drummers from the Beatles or something. Like, this was all while friends were dying. I was progressing from HIV to full blown AIDS. I’d gotten viatical, I’d gotten a disability, and so this immense hope just got dashed.
When I needed to rationalize increasing drug use, the fact that my hopes had been so roundly dashed twice in a row by two deaths in a row, one not AIDS but the other AIDS, it just added to the whole sense of this was not going to end well. And I was not going to be a success as a writer, which I really, really wanted more than anything. That’s when the partying really kicked in.
I had used meth for the first time in the early eighties at Provincetown. I remember it was so intoxicating and you felt so good and you had sex for so long. Meth was not a big party drug in the early eighties when I first tried it. There was drinking. We drank a lot. There was dropping acid. There was ecstasy, which we just called MDA. Cocaine, which no one in my circles could really afford. And so when I was first offered it, I don’t even think it was called meth. I think it was just speed.
So, I just did a few snorts and it was amazing. And what people don’t necessarily understand who are not in that world, it just primes the libido extraordinarily. You’re drenched with emotions and whoever you’re with, the first time I thought we were falling madly in love and we just made out for something like, I don’t know, eight hours. It was just ridiculous.
During the late nineties it shifted from a lot of drinking to crystal meth. I could drink a lot more without getting drunk and prolong it because I was a bartender for a lot of this time. I would drink behind the bar, but I had to be able to function and stay sharp, and crystal meth did a wonderful job of keeping you alert and functioning, and sort of canceling out the booze.
But gradually everyone I know, including me, would drink less and less and less, and do more and more crystal meth. Very soon after is when I met this very handsome young man named Nick, who’s the cutest thing in the world, and he turned out to be a meth dealer. I found out the hard way that this was a very hard person to have a relationship with, because everyone wants to do it with their drug dealer. Which is great if you’re a drug dealer that wants to have a lot of sex, but if you’re still a human being who likes to be in a relationship, the dealing makes it impossible. Your schedule is absolutely crazy, you’re always high, you can’t go out on dates. And so you have a lot of sex, but it’s a pretty lonely life. And this meant that I started getting used to getting my meth for free. That was kind of an important bridge to not wanting to pay for it. And the only way you couldn’t pay for it is if you became a dealer yourself.
When I managed to pull off the final payoff of all my credit cards, when they sent me back a letter saying you’ve been paid off, this has been resolved, I chop up the credit card and put it in the garbage. And about six months later, one of the Visas, they just sent me a new one–like that, out of the blue–even though I had faithfully reported Mark’s death to them. And what I realized was that If the insurance company pays it off, the other part of the company just marks it as like, oh, paid in full, but they don’t report that the card holder is dead.
I was very nervous about using the card again because I was afraid I would lay it down and some guillotine would chop off my hand and they would haul me away to Siberia. So I just left it in the drawer because something told me that I would have it for some sort of big emergency. And I had it in the drawer there, and then I fell in love with Nick.
I was still pretty much staying out of debt. I was behaving, although I was doing more and more meth. I was also working and doing other fraudulent things. I was collecting Luke’s unemployment and disability. So anyway, I didn’t need to use a credit card. Then Nick was arrested. A friend of his called me and said, ‘Nick’s been arrested. Do you think you have $5,000 worth of bail?’ Knowing what I know now, what a stupid expenditure, because he would have just been in prison for two months awaiting trial, and he didn’t need to come out. But I didn’t realize that. I just imagined him in this horrible, dirty place where he would be vulnerable to being raped. And I just grabbed the card. I was in the middle of a threesome when this guy called. I remember that. And so I had to throw the guys out. It was really too bad because we were having a great time. So I went down, I bailed them out and that felt like an act of love. He would have had to be in the gay county jail for two months. It would have been fine. But I thought being in prison was the worst thing that you could possibly be and the most horrible experience. But I had re-crossed a rubicon by taking that credit card and not cutting it up when I got it. And then by re-indebting myself up to $5,000 it started a cycle where I got more credit cards, and at that time I didn’t have a regular job.
I was getting better, I was getting the AIDS meds, but I couldn’t quite find my footing. Nick goes to priso, I know he can’t pay me back the $5,000. You’d think that would have been the wake up call of wake up calls, but instead, I just find myself using more and more. I developed a crystal addiction that went from every three day weekend, to every weekend, to more often high than usual.
You were not wanting to ever crash because you didn’t want to crash, which really, really sucked, then you had to keep at least low level maintenance. I discovered that it was very expensive to do that and that’s when it became, instead of recreational, occupational.
I realized that if I bought a little bit more than I needed, I could make some money dealing meth. I can make a lot of money dealing meth. The $5,000 credit card debt was suddenly very, very manageable. I would have two quarters for the weekend and then sell two quarters to cover my cost. I would buy a little extra and then you found out soon enough that other friends would say, ‘I need to get some for this weekend, do you think you could get some extra?’ So then you buy more, and then you’re just sort of dealing to a small circle of friends. But the demand, they talk to their friends and everyone is like, ‘I have a friend named Mark and you can get from him.’ That snowballs so fast into, ‘Can you get me some? Can my friend get me some? Can you buy a little bit more?’
There’s an irony that we sort of switched lives. Nick goes to prison and instead of me taking it as an object lesson and consequences, I start doing what he did that got him to prison. That’s it. And also, I liked making money because I wanted to be a normal person who made money and had an income, and then you’re building up this business. I mean, literally six months, I was just making tons. So, fast cash is just ‘whew’ what an addiction on top of the addiction of never having to pay for your own meth. Any dealer will tell you that once you get used to never paying for your own drugs, that the idea of going back to being a regular consumer, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no.
A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, but drug dealing, you think of men on street corners and drive-by shootings.’ But among the cocoon of the gay circles of partiers in Los Angeles, there were like 5,000 of us. It was very tight knit. It was very friendly. We were all having sex with each other.
At the beginning, 90 percent of my clients had jobs. They hadn’t spun out their lives. You really got this feeling that this was no more harmful than bartending. They loved me because I was very open. I’d spent so many hours waiting for the drug dealer to show up, and I hated that. So, when someone called, I would say, I’ll be over at X amount of time, and I always was. Or, ‘Yes, you can come over right now.’ This is how it worked with a new customer who was hot. I would start talking to them, I would sell them the meth, and then we’d do a little celebratory, introductory freebie together. And, uh, they’d all get high and our libidos were immediately drenched. Then I would just sort of go to the bathroom and then push open the door to my bedroom, and when I came back out, the customer could see that I had a sling over the bed. And so, you can imagine what followed. So it was an extremely easy way to meet new men.
What meth does, at least to the male brain, is it just soaks it in endorphins. It’s just the inhibitions, in particular, if you’re into leather and kinky sex like I was–I’ve tried to do kinky sex sober and I found it very difficult because getting into these characters of the top and bottom or the prison guard, or the burglar or whatever role, and I was really good at role playing, whatever role you wanted to play. It feels a bit artificial, sober. You feel a little bit silly. But, when you’re high on meth you really feel the character. You’re completely there. I’m not saying this to glorify meth in any way, but I do share this because the perception is just like, ‘Why do people do something like meth? It just makes you pick your skin to death.’ It all seems like it’s all negative, and for us at the time, particularly when we were dealing with all the death around us because of AIDS, it was this escape into this cocoon of fantasy. The body’s not evolved naturally to have sex for 12 hours with three costume changes. But if you experience that, you want to re-experience that. And it’s not insane at all.
I had to be able to justify and rationalize doing meth. I had to convince myself it enhanced my life. as opposed to ruining it, and so I had to have limits and rules. I would see other tweakers go on binges where they were up for three days and they would end up hallucinating. And so I was like, sometimes I might be up for a whole night, which is very common, but never for two nights. I always had some Xanax on hand to make sure that I enforced that. And usually by dawn if I’d been partying all night I would still take pills and go to sleep and get a night’s sleep. I also had a dog this whole time and rule 1, 2, and 3 was like, the dog can never be neglected. He has to be walked three times a day, well fed. The refrigerator had to be full and I had to have a good meal. The bathroom was going to be clean. The apartment was going to stay clean. I was like, ‘No, no, no, I have to be the non-stereotypical drug dealer.’ And I was very, very good that way. I was very proud of it.
So of course, becoming a dealer, you have to get your drugs from someone higher up on the totem pole, and the person I ended up meeting was a man named Larry. And Larry was in his mid-sixties. (Speaking in accent) He talked like this. He was from Oklahoma. He was thin as a folding chair and he had like three kids and an elderly mother he was supporting. Larry was just the nicest guy. He treated me very well, always gave me good prices.
One of the things that happens when you start dealing is that you become very popular. Everyone wants to be your friend, and I started to meet these customers. Sometimes I tricked with them, sometimes they were referred to me by somebody else. I had a two bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, so I had an extra room and I would meet guys who needed a place to stay. And so I let them use the extra room alternatively. And as things progressed and got more complicated, sometimes they had no money or they lost their jobs and I would end up informally employing them. So, they would do little deliveries for me, clean my house and always walk the dog and so on. And considering how you looked at it, there are either assistants or barnacles, hangers-on who wanted basically to get as much free meth as they could.
It’s like rock stars or any other income-generating operation. You have hangers-on, and some of them are valuable and some of them are not. Earn their keep and some of them are really in it for the free drugs and fuck you over. It wasn’t like an operation where I had these assistants and I was working full-time and they had a street corner or something like that. It was extremely informal. It was a matrix of chaos, of chaotic personalities and people who I felt like I was the only thing between these people and homelessness. It was a way to spiritually launder the money I was making by spending it on drugs, on helping others out. It was just friends. I told myself we’re my friends because I was a social being who needed to feel that I wasn’t acting like a traditional drug dealer.
It was so much fun at the beginning and it didn’t feel seamy or guttery. It just felt like this cool thing I was doing, and all that would come later. All of the seedy underbelly of people screwing up their lives, and wanting you just for the drugs, and getting into these horrible dramas, and these fights, and lovers calling you and saying, ‘Don’t you dare sell anything to my boyfriend, you’re ruining his life.’ Threats like that. And I would get very defensive. It was like, ‘Oh, he’s a grown man now.’ I didn’t feel apologetic at all. And of course, when I got sober, then it was like, ‘My God, you were so part of the problem, when you thought you were part of the solution.’
It’s funny because, I don’t know, maybe a year into my dealing, one of the guys who was my customers, He says, ‘Listen, you’re a very nice guy, and I’ve run this enough, and I just want to tell you, you can get away with it for about 18 months, and then that’s it.’ I remember thinking, ‘I should really listen to him.’
But once you’re in the mode, not only of the incredible fast cash, but then people who are like depending on you because you have an assistant whose rent you’re paying, and another one who’s walking your dog and you feel like a little cottage industry, drug dealing is about as glamorous as delivering pizza.
One morning I was on the phone with a close female friend who had absolutely no idea that I was involved in any of this. I hear this clattering, this sound that was so loud and so close. I said to her, ‘Oh my God, I think my neighbors just dropped a tray of dressers down the stairs. I got to go.’ That was the thing that flashed first in my mind. I hung up and I get from the bedroom to the living room just in time to see my door being battered down.
They’d shouted “Police open up!’ This was a moment of complete and total shock, suddenly my apartment was filled with police and SWAT gear with high powered rifles, and they had a little dog that was running through the apartment smelling and looking for places where there’s hidden drugs.
Then the head cop, who’s this red-haired guy with a mustache, handcuffs me and he takes me out to the wraparound veranda in front of my building and he says ‘We can make this go much easier for you if you just give us some names.’ When they would arrest you, if you were a very low level user, they would just say turn in three, go free. I wasn’t going to give Larry’s name or anybody else’s. There was a moment of honor among thieves. I’d become friends with him. There was some other people who I sometimes dealt with and were friends with, also, who technically were also dealers, and I just said no.
It wasn’t very long after that they had me down in the squad car. That was just a very scary ride downtown, just because I was in a state of shock. The driver was extremely friendly and nice, and I remember saying to him, ‘I don’t suppose you can just drop me off at the corner, can you?’
It’s entirely possible that some of these people who were my customers had been arrested and agreed they could get off if they turned me in. Out of the three guys who were regularly in my life, all of them had a run in with the police that could have easily resulted in my eventual arrest. But at the moment of my arrest, it felt completely out of the blue.
The sound of the battering ram was just horrible. I’ll never really recover from it. I had to go from, you know, West Hollywood police station to downtown and we had to go through that whole process of getting new clothes and a shower and being stripped naked. That’s really a horrific experience. I waited, I don’t know, another 12-15 hours, and then my friends did get the bail money together. So that was a 36 hour experience. Pretty hellish.
PRODUCER: Who were they arresting?
MARK OLMSTED: I don’t know. They’re arresting me.
PRODUCER: Yeah, but, which you?
MARK OLMSTED: Oh, they were arresting Mark. No one knew I was also living as Luke. I’d done that completely off the radar. It did not be discovered. This was only for the drugs and the drug dealing, so this arrest was simply about the drugs.
I had a completely clean wrap sheet. Nobody knew,or had discovered that I’d been living as my brother for 10 years. I sort of understood that I would get arrested. I would make bail. I’d come out. And being a first-timer, I wouldn’t have serious consequences or any sort of prison term. I just sort of instinctively knew that. I got three years probation, had to report to a parole officer, and $2,000 in restitution. And in their mind, the judge’s mind or whatever, it was like, ‘Oh, that’s the AIDS guy and he’s going to die anyway.’
You could use people’s fear of AIDS and their perception that it was a terminal illness to your advantage. So there was a little bit of a sympathy thing.
I got arrested in August and I was being called down to the parole office in late October. And those intervening months, I tried to get out of the business, but for some reason getting completely clean I was very resistant because I was an addict. What do you want? I would have had to get completely sober, cut off all my friends, quote friends, who were in the life, and I wasn’t brave enough.
It’s scary when you’ve been high that long to live without drugs. Yes, I was an addict, but it was like now my medication, and it’s what my brain needed to have enough energy to function. It’s what I needed to get anything done and it was unfortunate, but that was the way it was. In the same way. I’m sure Hemingway felt that, yeah, I’m an alcoholic, but I need alcohol to function. I can’t manage without it. And what did he end up, blowing his head off? Because in the end, addiction is very depressing. It’s just depressing.
I did intend to get out of the business because I didn’t want to be arrested again, and I found that partners who are these friends, they weren’t good at it like I was. And all my customers were like, ‘I tried to go to this guy you told me about, but he won’t pick up the phone.’ So I said, ‘Alright, well, I’ll just handle you’ And before you know it, everyone was back to me and it was the same situation. I get sucked back in. It was very Al Pacino, but I knew that I was taking a huge risk.
Obviously you get arrested once and you don’t get out of the business, you’re asking for it again, and that’s when the whole plot came together of what if I forged my own death certificate to get out of it?
I remember having this thought. What if you faked your death to the West Hollywood Police Department? Would the case just be closed and go away? I mean, you have a full identity as Luke, you have his ID. It would just go away. It wasn’t that I needed it to go away that much. I mean, you’d think that just getting clean would have been the smarter move and simpler, but once I had the idea, inevitably there was like, I wonder if I could pull it off. Can’t hurt just to try the forgery.
I had so many iterations and bright ideas and it was like I was kind of proud of my work. It was like this cool thing that I was doing completely in secret. I wasn’t going to tell anybody. I already knew a lot about forging death certificates because I’d used it for the credit card fraud, but this was the big kahuna. So I worked on it many, many late nights and came up with all these original ways to make it really look authentic. It became like the ultimate arts and crafts project. I felt a sort of perverse pride in how elegant it was. I also created a fake New York Times obituary that fit in perfectly into the New York Times that I had a copy of.
It was interesting to write your own obituary, and I chose my new death date as being my father’s birthday because it would be easy to remember, October 25th. After I made the obituary and I made the fake death certificate, I wrote a letter to the West Hollywood Police Department. I wrote as my brother Luke and I included a copy of Luke’s license and I said I have just come down from Seattle from the funeral of my brother, Mark, (because Mark died in Seattle, just like my actual brother, Luke, had died in Seattle).
And I also offered to go down and personally deliver these things. This is a trick with big lying, if you offer something that the other person is going to think, well, no fraudulent person who’s impersonating the dead person would ever offer that. It increased the likelihood that they were like, no, no, no, no, this is fine, assuming you don’t have a picture of me.
That was pretty ballsy, I must say. It was a letter that anyone on the other side would have been a little horrified at, but also, the death certificate was very clear that it was a fraud. AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and I knew the power of that–to make whoever was opening it literally go, ‘Oof’.
I used that when I sent in my fake death certificate to these insurance companies to get out of my credit card bills because I knew that there was this reluctance to deal with it. You wanted to go away. I knew the cops were reading it and that they had all these assumptions about West Hollywood drug dealers, and it was like, this guy, he’s gay, he had AIDS, he had it coming. And so I finally checked everything a million times over, sent in the letter as Luke, sadly informing them of the death of Mark, and then I dropped it in the mail. It was an extremely tense three days, or four days while I waited.
When the letter arrived, I seem to remember it in a very cinematic way. If there was a soundtrack, it would have just, the music would go up, very suspenseful. And so I open it and it’s a very workmanlike, but pleasant letter offering condolences and saying, ‘We have now closed the file on your brother, Mark Olmsted.’ In fact, I had remembered it as being friendly and polite, and only when I looked at it again recently, do I realize that that was very neutral. But the rush I felt was extraordinary. This was the biggest thing that I had ever gotten away with, by far. I was elated, and I had that rush, because by then, that was the strongest addiction of them all, more than the meth or the alcohol, or even the fast cash, was getting away with shit. It was just like, man, I’ve managed to reverse history, and set everything back to the way it was before I was arrested. But, I’d also killed myself off to the authorities.
I wasn’t willing to move or change my life or stop doing meth. I really wasn’t prepared for the upheaval that would have been required to get clean. You have to change all your friends, you have to change your way of thinking, I’d have to get a job. There’s the men’s and there’s the getting honest. And I was like, the idea of getting really honest about my life and my past when I had so successfully lied about it, I couldn’t handle it.
I remember that was when the meth really stopped working. I just couldn’t get high anymore. I used to have just crazy sex. I mean crazy. And I was just like, I was exhausted. I couldn’t get into it. I’d be 15 minutes and I was like, ‘You gotta go. I can’t get into it.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re not having fun yet.’
Something has to go because I always had fun on meth. And when you don’t have fun anymore, it’s like, what’s the point?
I do remember once where I had a few customers come at the same time, three of them. And they were actually smart dudes. And we were talking and I managed to make a few jokes and they laughed. I had a flash that this used to be my life all the time, and I realized that most of the conversations I’d been having were all around drugs. Where did you get it? Where did you get high? The fun we had. This was really good. Very little laughter. And I had always been known as a very funny person. There was so little laughter in my life. That was really depressing me. There was that one afternoon for 10 minutes where we were funny and having a good time, I realized how long it had been and how much I missed that.
I remember that New Year’s Eve standing out in the porch and looking at the moon and saying, ‘Something has to give, something has to change,’ because I knew that I was dishonoring my talents and gifts as a human being to be a drug dealer. It just was like a stupid thing for me to be doing, and I also knew on some level that things were going to come crashing down, but I was in love with this guy and I knew on some level that if I got sober we wouldn’t see each other again, and I was very attached to him. But I can’t say there was a good plan. I fell on this plan. I got away with it. Then the consequences.
There were a lot of other clues that the noose was tightening. For example, not far down the street, they had the men in the outfits and the gas thing, and I had no reason to think that they weren’t correcting something with the sewer lines. But I also realized that just the way my street was structured, there was really no way to observe me without me knowing it unless they were doing something like that. So, it’s entirely possible that they were observing me. I alternated between a cell phone and my landline, and a friend of mine who actually volunteered for the police department, who was also a big user, said that he had seen my phone number on a list of bugs. It was very stupid of me to immediately not switch only to the cell phone, but I’d seen in some TV show or something that there were these antennas that could detect your cell phone calls better. I thought he had made a mistake, but in retrospect, it’s entirely possible they were listening to my calls.
I always wanted to think of a way that I could deposit the meth outside of my apartment for someone to pick up. I would walk the dog down completely different streets looking for possible hiding places. It was like, where could I have little drops? I can never quite figure out a way, but I was worried. Plus the traffic. I had too much traffic coming up my stairs. Obviously, it was putting me at risk. It was just too obvious.
One day, I was in the middle of an angry email at one of the guys who I tried to give my business to who hadn’t taken it up, and we regularly had big battles over money. There was a crystal pipe in the ashtray because I had been smoking while I was conducting business. It was the late morning and I heard ‘boom boom boom’ on the door. This time I immediately knew what it was. I didn’t want my door torn off the hinges because it was very expensive to replace it.
So I immediately ran to the door, opened it. It was the same people running in. They all had their SWAT uniforms on. There was also the dog. As soon as they rushed in the door, I claimed that I wasn’t Mark. Mark had died. I was Luke. And I showed them my ID, and they already knew that was bullshit. I’m standing there in my living room, they’ve handcuffed me and a little dog is running through the house sniffing out drugs. And there’s this one young cop. She seemed like she had something to prove and her eyes meet mine. And she’s holding something in her hand that looks a lot like my fake death certificate. And she’s waving my fake death certificate in her hand. She starts to have a conversation in which she addresses me as Luke. And it’s like, ‘Well Luke, so, is this where you live with your brother? Is that true? Oh yeah, your brother died.’ She found whatever excuse she needed to address me as Luke at least three times. And when I tried to answer the questions right, as I would if I was Luke, you know, ‘You’ve got the wrong man, and ‘Yes, my brother died.’ And ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and all this stuff.
There was like, a pause, one, two, beat, and then she just goes, ‘Hey, Mark.’ And I turned so instinctively and so naturally when someone calls out your name, a big smile went across her face and she goes, ‘Gotcha.’ And I was like, ‘Ah, shit. The jig is up.’ And the sinking feeling in your stomach, you know. It’s very unpleasant to be arrested by a SWAT team.
This time there was no attempt to negotiate anything on the veranda because they had the death certificate and so there’s a whole other series of charges. I’m still unclear of what they found and didn’t find. I know they confiscated a laptop that I could never get back and they literally told my lawyer ‘You don’t really want this laptop back because we found some stuff on it.’ because I had a lot of attempts at fake licenses and fake forgeries that I worked on. I just let them have it. I still have my fake death certificate or copies of it. They didn’t confiscate that and they never found this safe I had underneath my desk because I had put a fake visual of books in front of it so it looked like if you opened it up there were just books. But it was just like this feeling of dread. It was like, ‘Okay this time I’m not gonna be able to get out of this because I insisted I was Luke and I had his ID.
I was arrested as Luke. I can’t quite remember how they disentangled it but in order to get my mail accurately, my mother actually had to write me as Luke a few times and that was, uh, the shame, the shame. Getting those letters were just the envelope. It was awful because it just, I mean, there’s so many ways what I did was wrong, but what it risked doing to my mother should have been the only incentive I ever needed to not engage in any of this, as if there weren’t all these others.
They took me out very quickly this time and I went to the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station for the weekend and then downtown L.A. County Jail., and I could go into the various characters that became friends while I was dealing, but one of them ended up betraying me.I still don’t know who. And you know what? I don’t want to know. One of them wanted to tell me. I didn’t know if they were going to tell the truth. But I never really wanted to know. I still am not sure who did. And I’m sure it was because they were arrested, and they were told that they would get off if they could deliver someone higher up. They chose to do that. I was given the same offer when I was arrested and I refused. because honor among thieves, was a friend of mine who I would have had to turn in. Because I’d been told, if you turn someone in and then you both go to jail and they’re in the next bed over or next cell over, you could get in serious trouble. So I wasn’t a rat.
When you get away with the biggest con of all, like I got away with faking out death. And then the myth also inflames your sense of delusionary, your ego is this big, and narcissism, and the fantasies can become very real. So when I actually got away with it my brain was kind of broken. Although, I have to say, there was a part of me that was 100 percent lucid the whole time of everything I was doing. I was appalled by it and amazed by it at the same time, and I was very relieved when I finally got to prison and started to reconstruct my life and got my brain back that I could actually step into the life of this observer person and not be appalled anymore, and just become him who was really me underneath all this fear and grief and drugs and delusions that had crested on top of me.
It feels as if all these years of always thinking I was going to die there wasn’t a death wish, but a desire for closure. It turned out that prison was the closest thing to death I could find without actually dying. Looking back, the real question becomes, how did this sweet kid raised in extremely white bread suburban America with very educated and loving parents, how did he evolve into such a liar? Because it didn’t just start with my brother’s death and taking his license and starting to use his credit cards. When I trace it back from very early on, and a lot of gay people will tell you this, but particularly gay men, around 7, 8, 9, I just realized I was different. I had a secret. And one of the things I did end up discovering was the link between all of my lying and one particular person in my childhood.