Hey there folks,

I decided to move this from the O-girl blog, to its own blog because it really didn't fit the rest of the narrative, and I figured that Cory needed his own entry. I will warn you all that this story does not end well. It's honesty tragic. So, if you aren't really looking to hear such a sad tale, skip this blog.

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Cory and my relationship started around late 1996. At first, it was completely online. We used to hang out in an IRC chat room (remember those things). I think it was called alt.bondage - but it has been so long that I might be confusing it with something else. Regardless, it was a place where a bunch of folks got together and chatted about all things bondage. There were people like me that had written stories, and then others that were players and shared their experiences. It was quite a tight community. Cory and I chatted back in forth in open chat for a long while. At one point, he got hired by
Lorelei of Bedroom Bondage to PA for one of their shoots. This chat was happening on a Tuesday night around like 10pm. It was very interesting listening to someone explain exactly what happened at a real bondage shoot. Cory was being Cory. He tended to be very full of himself and bombastic. He was over the top, and everyone liked him for it.

I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was some sort of snide comment (not meant to be mean - I have a pretty dry sense of humor), about how he needed to sit the fuck back down, and he wasn't God's gift to the earth, or something similar and he immediately Direct Messaged me. He thought what I said was funny, and that he appreciate the fact that I wasn't a "suck up". He asked me I lived. I explained that I lived in an area west of the San Fernando Valley in California. He immediately chimed in, "Holy crap, I live 20 minutes from you, we need to go get a DRINK! I mean like right now!"

So, on a work night (I sold computers in a Corporate environment), I just went outside, got in his car, and he drove down over the hill into West Los Angeles to a bikini strip club called Fantasy Island. Now folks, I have to say I didn't go to strip clubs. I still don't go to strip clubs, but I did that night. Cory and I sat at the bar for hours, talking about how we should start our own bondage company. He was already getting stuff together to do it, but he didn't really have a lot of extra money. I had extra money, but I had no idea about starting a bondage company. I did, however, honestly have a vision as to what I wanted to do if I were to start a bondage company. There wasn't anyone creating the type of bondage content that I had in my head. I wanted to shoot super high gloss bondage content, with real corsets, and latex and stockings, and crazy high heels. Basically what you have all come to know as my style. He wasn't as far into the whole John Willie fetish thing as I was, but he also had a vision as to what he wanted to do. So, right there and then, at the bar of that strip club, as we turned down requests from the strippers for private dances, we decided to team up and create our own bondage company. He had already started a discussions with another guy, but he wanted me to join them.

I need to first explain who Cory was. He was a large, overweight guy, who was utterly unlike anyone I had ever met. He was loud. He drank too many beers when he went out drinking. But under that brash exterior, he was a lovable guy. He gave off a scorched earth policy sort of persona. Anyone that gave him a hard time online, was certain to get a fire filled flaming response. And if it continued, the flame war that would ensue, could be legendary. So much so that he called his first website Shortfuse.com It was honestly apt.

We got on really well tight from the start. Our personalities couldn't be much different, but for whatever reason, we clicked. We strangely did have quite a few things in common. He was a guitar player and had been in hair-metal bands in the 80s and 90s. I was a guitarist, but was in bands more like the Fixx. We were both at the same point in our lives. I was a little older, but not much. His original partner in the bondage company didn't last long. This guy really resented me coming in and joining this thing. He wanted me to be a "money guy" and sit on the sidelines and do nothing. The first shoot we did was with Summer Knight and we shot it at my apartment. This guy had been so adamant that I wasn't going to be doing any tying. Cory had other ideas. After both Cory and this other guy did scenes, Cory turned to me, and just said, "She's all yours, Captain" and threw me some rope. This other guy was pissed, but Cory didn't care. I did my scene, which was kinda pathetic, but not bad, and that was that. There would be no silent partnership for me.

It was at the next shoot where things got out of hand. Eve Ellis and Talia Monet had come by. This was our first shoot with a really well known bondage model. I mean it was Eve Ellis for God's sake. Anyway, Cory did a scene and then this guy started on his. He had cling filmed them together facing each other. Without warning, this guy pulls out a big knife, flicks it open and moves to cut film from their breasts. Eve and Talia's eye opened so wide, and they back as far away as they could in horror. Cory and I went ballistic. What the fuck do you think you are fucking doing?!! You don't pull out big knives in the middle of a bondage shoot. That was just utterly wrong. Cory threw the guy out, and that was the last time he was around. From that point on, it was just Cory and me.

Luckily Eve and Talia understood that the other guy was not us. And we were accepted into the Los Angeles professional bondage community. It happened that fast. People realized that we were good guys and we never looked back. Funny how things like that work out. Anyway, we just worked and worked after that - and we steadily improved. The thing is that Cory and I had something else in common: We were really competitive people. Not in a bad way - in a good way. Sort of like McCartney and Lennon (no, I'm not saying there is any comparison between those legends and me... just that they were really competitive with one another). Cory and I would literally try to one-up each other from scene to scene. Oh, that's a cool tie... but not as cool as this! Basically it was "Anything you can do, I can do better" all the time.

At this point, we were just taking photos to sell the videos that we were creating - and all the photos on Shortfuse were free. Somewhere along the way, about a year later, we decided that was a not smart, and made a new website called shortfusevideo.com. It would be a membership site. Here is the thing. When give away everything for a year, you tend to get a lot of people coming to you site. I lost a bunch of money that first year, but when we opened the paysite, that changed immediately. We had 600 members within a week and it just continued to grow from there. Cory and I were working like crazy, and we both had day jobs at this point too. We both got divorced at about the same time too. Turns out that I had really changed - I totally get it - but it crushed me. And Cory was crushed too. So we became even closer friends. And the company continued to grow, and at some point in 2000 I quit my job and decided to just do photography for a living. Strangely, the day after I quit (there really isn't any point in giving notice when you are in a completely commissioned sale job), the 5000 person company I worked for, went belly-up. Chapter 13. Everyone was laid off. Crazy huh?

At some point around here, something happened that would change everything moving forward. Cory invited me to go with him to Nick Menza's (ex-drummer of Megadeath) house. Now I'm not a heavy metal guy at all, but I figured it would be fun. That night, at that party was the LAST time I did cocaine, and the first time Cory smoked meth. In the 80's and 90's I had done my fair share of cocaine. Hell, I was in a rock band for 15 years in the 80's and 90's. It's gonna happen. But I never, never smoked crack or meth. That was just scary as fuck to me. No fucking way. But Cory... well he did that night - and that was literally the beginning of the end. He was never away from the meth pipe from that point on. Folks, I have seen a lot of drugs in my life, but I have never seen anything like meth. It DESTROYS people. I watched helplessly as my best friend just fell off the face of the earth.

I tried at first to ignore it - hoping it would go away, but nope. That will not happen. Our relationship started deteriorating. I was desperately trying to get him to stop doing drugs, but it was useless. He was drifting further and further away. The quality of his work continued to improve however. He was so amped all the time and he was so talented. Man, his photography went to a different level. But there was a catch. His work ethic about editing and posting what he was shooting? That went into the toilet. I ended up doing all the updates for Shortfusevideo with my content, even though Cory had tons of incredibly cool stuff to post. He just couldn't do the hard part of the job anymore. Week after week, I would post twice as much as normal to make up for him not posting.

I'm was getting more and more depressed. I talked to a counselor and he told me I had three options. I could:

1) stay, and enable Cory's drug use.
2) I could leave
3) or I could call the cops.

Option one was no longer an option. I could not sit by and watch him destroy himself. And we were linked in everyone's mind. It was Cory and Jim, Cory and Jim. What he did reflected on who I was, and he was becoming more and more unstable. Option 3 was actually the right option, but I knew if I called the police and had him arrested, he would hate me forever. I chose the easier option, option 2. It was the chickenshit option, but it is what I did. I couldn't get him to stop. Nothing I said made any difference. So I left.

I left and opened the BondageCafe in April of 2001. Cory wasn't happy, but he understood. We continued to have a sort of relationship or sorts. I would laugh because he would post photos of me on milk cartons, or the side of a bus, on the front of his website, cheekily asking everyone "Have you seen this man?" That was pure Cory. But the drugs didn't stop and we drifted further apart. Eventually I really didn't hear from him much at all. I would hear about him from models and what I heard was bad, but that was it. Then about a year later - sometime in 2002, Cory lost it. he ripped out the walls in his house because he thought that the government was tracing him. He was thrown out of his house by his landlord and ended up on my doorstep. I told him that he could stay - BUT - he could not do drugs. PERIOD. If he wanted to stay at my place, his couldn't do meth. He didn't stop doing meth.

A day or so later, I was woken up at 4:00 in the morning by a horrible grinding noise. I went out into the living room to find Cory taking apart the electrical sockets in my apartment. I was like, "What the fuck?". He explained that he was removing the ground wires because the government was tracing him through them to his computer. Folks, I'm writing this because mainly I wanted to let everyone know how evil meth is. If I can stop ONE person from not trying meth, this was all worth it.

At this point, I have to tell the story of Gilda. That isn't her name, but for the sake of this, that is her name. Back in the 1999 area, Cory met Gilda at a strip club and got her to come model for him. This was before the Nick Mensa night. Cory didn't do meth at this point. Gilda did. And there were a couple of crazy situations that happened. One night, Dominic Wolfe and another model were hanging out at Cory's with me and Gilda came over. Gilda started talking about how her lower jaw hand been replaced. I shit you not. We were all like, "That is not possible Gilda." She was adamant. She said, "I've got proof!" and pulled out a full sized x-ray of her head. A huge, full sized x-ray. She lifted it up and say, "See! See! it's not my jaw." How she had an x-ray of her head is not important. It was bizarre, but not important. The fact that she was psychotic enough to have it and carry it around was the point. I said, "Gilda, you can't have had your jaw replaced. There aren't any scars." She didn't skip a beat. She said, "There aren't any scars because they removed it, by coming up through my vagina." This was not a joke. This a gal that honestly believed that.

On another occasion, and I can't believe that this previous last occasion, wasn't the LAST occasion, Cory and I were shooting a couple of models and Gilda arrived, and started tearing apart her car in his driveway. I mean really tearing it apart. Carpets, headliner, dash board, etc. We were again like, "What the fuck?!" She replied that there was a bomb in her car. She said she thought boyfriend had gotten involved with some Neo-Nazis and they had put a bomb in her car. Folks, there weren't any Neo Nazis, and there certainly wasn't a bomb in her car. She was just nuts at this point. Driven to psychosis by meth.

I explain this backstory, because at the time, Cory and I were both completely shocked and dumbfounded by how someone could be that way. It was a running joke. Gilda with the x-ray of her head. It was a sick joke, but it was a joke. So at that point, in my apartment, I tried to get through to Cory how he was acting. I said, "Cory, remember Gilda? Remember fucking Gilda?!! YOU, ARE FUCKING GILDA RIGHT NOW!" It was impossible. He couldn't see it. He tried to say that he wasn't doing drugs in my apartment... he was going outside to do the drugs. I made one of the hardest decisions I ever made at that point. I told him to leave. I told him he was going to kill himself with this shit, and I wasn't going to enable him to do it. He didn't care. He said he would just die and leave a "legacy". I said, "Legacy? Legacy's are bullshit. A legacy doesn't mean anything to you, because you're dead. Van Gogh only sold one fucking painting in his life and died miserable. Who cares if he is considered one of the greatest painters ever today. His legacy is no use to him. He's fucking dead." Cory had no answer and just left.

I didn't hear from him until around April of 2003. He called me and explained that he had been arrested early in the year and put in jail for brandishing a firearm. During that period of time in jail, he had quit drugs. Completely. He came over to my house and we reunited. It was honestly miraculous. Sitting in front of me was the Cory that I had started Shortfuse together with. It was awesome. Over the summer and fall, Cory came back into my life. We would hang out together. It was great. Then late December, everything went to shit. I heard from his brother, that Cory had been arrested for sending white powder in the mail to the the District Atty of Ventura County. I was stunned. Cory's "shortfuse" had gotten the better of him. He had quit drugs, but he had substituted that for a hate of the justice system. All summer he had told me how fucked up it was. It was his new crusade. In some sort of crazy scheme, in the middle of an anthrax scare, had sent talcum powder to the DA. What the holy fuck. None of us had ANY idea. In the cruelest form of irony, Cory, completely sober, had been under surveillance by the FBI for months. They had been following him and had staked out his place. They were watching him 24/7. Unlike his meth induced psychosis, this was real. On December 19th, they swooped down, arrested him for terrorism under the newly signed Patriot Act and whisked him down to San Diego, where he was put him in a federal detention facility. He was denied contact with everyone. His brother tried to get word to him, but the FBI was holding him as a terrorist, and he couldn't talk to ANYONE. Not even a lawyer. He had no rights, whatsoever. Indeterminent detention. Then a bit over a day later, on December 21st, 2003, we heard that Cory had committed suicide. He had hanged himself in his cell. The news was absolutely gut wrenching. Just writing this, makes me cry, 18 years later.

One of my very best friends, a super talented, artistic, caring guy, who had come back into my life after being lost to drugs, and then rebounding - was dead. It was just over.

Folks, the reason that I'm here, writing this blog on this website right now, is Cory Thompson. He completely changed my life. Without that phone call on that Tuesday night, I would NEVER have been Jim Weathers, the bondage and fetish photographer. I would have been a completely different Jim Weathers. That is Cory Thompson's legacy. Me. I have no idea if I can live up to that, and I still feel guilt for his death, all these years later. Even though I don't drink much at all, every winter solstice, I pour a shot of tequila and drink a toast to him. Thanking him for changing my life forever. RIP.