Mirrors

   He took off the condom carelessly, threw it on the bin and look at himself in the mirror. For years, he had known he was a very attractive man. Men and women always made comments about how good he looked and how educated and well dressed he always was in parties, even if they weren’t the kind of parties to dress up to. His hair had always been shiny, his teeth white and his muscles very well toned and defined. He didn’t really have much to complain on the front.

 However, as he saw closed the door to pee in privacy, he looked at himself again on the mirror but saw someone else. He was suddenly looking at a short kid, kind of chubby and with a serious acne problem, which was odd because he seemed too young to be having acne problems. That was him when he was about ten years old, maybe a little younger or a little older. Maybe it wasn’t really him but the image he had of himself after so many years of looking at himself in mirrors.

 The man looked on, even after being done in the toilet. He looked at himself naked and saw beyond what people saw every single day. They loved his ripped abdomen but then he recalled he had worked for that body, day and night, paying month after month of a gym membership his parents had bought him to help his poor self-esteem. They had taken the advice of a teacher and the boy just ran with it, going every single day for a couple of hours. He was thirteen back then.

 Outside the bathroom, shuffling could be heard. He was back in the real world, a place he hated to be in but had to love in, like everyone else. Looking at mirrors had always been a way for him to be at ease, because that way he could see beyond everything. His goals were always clearer when he looked at himself on a mirror. It didn’t matter if it was the elevator of an old building or the wet toilet of a very rundown cruising bar; he felt mirror gave him a door, a way to escape.

 Sadly, there was no one to talk about what he felt. People always seem to now what he wanted and how he was going to get it. It was because he was better looking and a success romantically. They only knew the cover story but they were fascinated by that man that paid a great apartment, a car and many other things, only by modeling in underwear for several companies. And to be fair, he was very successful that way. But not enough. There were always younger, hotter models to be in advertisements of any kind, and they didn’t mind doing whatever the job needed them to do.

 That was how he started performing sexual favors in order to get money. However, at first he only did it to gain the contracts he needed so badly to keep having a stable income. But then, as he gained popularity, he started to do to win more money, to keep his lifestyle alive. It was impossible to live properly by only putting on a speedo. He needed to do more than that and he did. He took off every single piece of clothing and became an escort for the rich and wealthy who visited the city.

 He let water flow on the sink and looked at the water for a while. He put his hands under it for a bit and then used the humidity to comb his hair. It was a calming motion, to pull his hair back and forth, to get it just right on his head. It made his head quieter, better for thinking about what he was doing to do next. But the conclusion he reached was always the same: he needed the money, so he would keep going out with those rich men until he had enough saved to stop having sex with them.

 However, saving was not something he did, not as often as he wanted at least. Most of the money came and went, spent mostly on clothing, skincare, his gym membership and the payment of his debts, of which he mad many. All of that wasn’t cheap at all and only a very small amount of money was spared every month. That tiny amount went to his savings account but it almost didn’t grow at all. The last time he checked, he wasn’t close to live a really freed life. Not by a long shot.

 There was a knock on the door and then a deep voice. The man outside told him that he needed to get going, so he wanted to know if the younger man needed a ride. He answered “No”, bluntly. The man answered back with: “I had a great time. You can stay the rest of the night of you want”. When he heard the door of the bedroom closing, the young man stepped outside and noticed his client had left everything in a very neat order, except the bed sheets, which were a mess.

 He let himself fall on the bed and lay there naked for five minutes or so. It almost never happened that his clients just left. They normally wanted to talk or play some creepy old fantasy that they had. Even after the sex was done, they still wanted the charade to go on for as long as they wanted. They thought that time is money and when paying a room in a luxury hotel for a whole night, they wanted to get their money’s worth. The same was applied to him. He was no better than something like a room, a thing. He was very well aware of that analogy.

 He was merchandise. After all, it had been him who had started everything, even asking clients to recommend his services to others and so on. He had a website with pictures and videos, not showing his face of course, and it was visited daily by hundreds of lonely men. Only a handful could actually pay the price to spend a night with him, as he had several rules and conditions to actually let them even look at him. He used his looks in his own advantage and he did very well.

 However, he had heard of competition and there were many young men in need of money who delivered the same services for cheaper. They were mostly college or high school students who needed money to pay for education. And they were younger and better looking than him, at least in the eyes of his clients. He had to take care for them in the world of modeling and also in the world of escorts. His life was tougher than many would have thought so, but he had chosen and he always reminded himself of that.

 He got on his feet and walked towards the window. He looked outside: the sun was rising and, in a few hours, the streets would be filled with people going from one place to the other. He grabbed his jacket, which he had put on a chair just by the window, and took a lighter and a cigarette from one of the pockets. It wasn’t allowed but he didn’t care at all. He opened the window and started smoking, feeling the cold wind of the morning on his thighs, penis, abdomen and chest.

 He looked down, towards the people, and he kept thinking of other ways to achieve his ultimate goal, which was to live like a superstar without having to do everything that he did to live like that. He could learn a proper skill, but that meant spending money on education. That way was a no go from the start. He could create some kind of enterprise but he had no ideas of what to do. His body was all he had and it was already difficult enough to be a model in such a crowded industry.

 The cigarette fell to the ground when he finished smoking, when he realized there was no way out and he had to keep doing what he did, until something else happened and changed his world. There was no other way about it, no matter what people thought about his so-called advantages.

 He put on his clothes, looked at himself on the mirror once again and then stepped outside the room. In the elevator, he saw that kid from his past again but he closed his eyes until the machine stopped and he walked fast towards the exit, into the cold streets of an uninviting city.

Everything is nothing

   As the blood dripped down to the floor, getting the thick white carpet wet and stained, the man just looked through the window, contemplating the lights of the city that had been his home for so many years. He hadn’t been born there but he felt as if he had. He had always felt like someone from the city and not the son of a farmer. Either way, it had all lead him to that moment in his life and he realized by looking at the city that he was all alone, as he was on the farm all those years ago.

 His name was Alan and his blood was very dark. He barely felt it sliding down is hand, his fingers, falling almost silently to the floor. The dagger he had used, an old antique he had bought on a trip to Vietnam, laid in the sofa. It was clean because his blood had not rushed out from him but had rather been very slow to come out, as if his body was trying to hold on to life as long as it could. But he had decided his own faith and there was nothing that could save him from it. There was no turning back.

 His apartment was very large, with five bedrooms, each with a bathroom. The kitchen had a lot of space to do all kinds of recipes and the cabinets added an almost never-ending amount of storage space. The living room was the part of the apartment where he stood, barefoot, looking at the twinkling lights of the city below. He had other antiques all around the house, including on his dinner table and the small lobby where he had greeted so many of his so-called friends and family.

 There was no family anymore. Helen had left months ago. She argued it was because of him, because he failed to touch her as much as she wanted too and hadn’t really been a sweet and caring husband during their short marriage. He had a different point of view to the matter: Alan knew his wife had been sleeping with someone, almost from the first day they had been married. He had pictures and even a couple of witnesses. But he wasn’t the kind of man to play all his cards at once.

 By the way, what she had said was the truth: Alan had never really loved Helen. The real thing was that Alan had never cared for anyone in his life. He had been born into a poor family with two sisters and three brothers. That house did not have any love either, just responsibilities. He had learned from a young age that what mattered was to work like a horse every day of your life to make some money and to be someone. To make people tremble when they heard your name, if possible. And Alan had dedicated his life to achieve exactly that.

 His eyes were beginning to go foggy and he stumbled bit, almost banging his head against the window’s glass. But he didn’t fell down; he remained where he was, his blood dripping still. He felt thirsty but he didn’t even try to go to the kitchen for something to drink. He just stood there, remembering how Helen had thought she had the moral high ground when they argued for the last time. She was an overly dramatic woman and he asked himself often why he had chosen her and not another.

 Well, that had a rather simple answer: she had been there when she was necessary. Helen was the daughter of a wealthy man, very well known in the business circuit. As Alan was climbing levels, he realized he had to have someone by his side to be supported by others. For some reason, people still mistrust someone that has chosen not to have a family or even not getting married. And Alan was one of those but he had to fake he was just like them. So he met Helen and eventually married her.

 The relationship lasted for less than three years. During that time, she slept with another man at least three of the seven nights of the week. Other three nights she spent at her family home, where her father and mother would shield her against her “horrible husband”. Only one night a week she spend it in her actual home, where she bitched and moaned at everything because that was the way she was, always trying to end something she had agree on building too, whether she remembered or not.

 Alan was not the kind of man to fall in love or have lovers. He had never hired a prostitute or even visited a strip club. He didn’t feel any of those urges that are the norm among men. And no, he didn’t felt it either for men or other living creatures. He didn’t really have any perversions of the mind or of the soul, at least not related to his romantic interests. That was because he had none. Love was not one of his priorities in life. It had never been like that and it would never be.

 It was probably the reason why, after living his farm at a young age and thanks to his own efforts getting a scholarship, he just left his family and never saw them again. They tried to contact him several times and he even checked on them she had checked on his wife, but every time he got information on them he realized he wanted them far from everything he had. His family was greedy and could be summed up as a group of awful people, stepping on each other to climb little bit further. They were awful and Alan did not want to have anything to do with them,

 With no family and no need or urge to love or even to fuck someone, Alan had always been alone. Because, of course, friends hadn’t been a priority either. No friends had meant that he finished high school and college much faster than anyone else. It had meant for him that no money was thrown into useless things like alcohol or drugs, instead he did the best investments possible and got much more money than he had always needed. Friends would have only been a distraction.

 He had always been alone and he had always been fine with been alone. Those long and luxurious trips he had gone to in order to get half of the things he had on his house, had been done by himself. He had no guides and no nagging wife telling him anything. He had enjoyed the purity of those places and he had even felt he belonged to something greater than him, something he had never reflected on in his life. Knowing the world changed some of his preconceptions on people and the world.

 His family was not religious so he had never learned what it meant to have faith. His wife was supposedly catholic but he had never seen her got to mass or say something in that regard. When he traveled, he discovered that spiritual side that had never really been in him. He started having many ideas about it and would spend long nights trying to decipher his own sense of religion and faith. For Alan, it was something fascinating to discover but he never really became a fanatic. He knew when to stop.

 It was during that study of faith, when he realized the kind of life he had lived. In general, nothing too bad could be said about it. His business movements had always been clean, he had tried to provide for a wife who hated him and had attempted to save various artifacts that he thought could be lost if he didn’t buy them and put them on display in his apartment. In his mind, he had done many good things and nothing that could be classified as “bad”. But he was very wrong.

 He had lived a sad, pathetic life, alienating everyone from it. Religion showed him that living with others improved a person’s well being, it improved their lives in ways he had never even thought possible. His life had been lost to material things, to what does not remain.

 Realizing he had done nothing with his life, that he had decided not to give any of what he had to an heir, Alan decided fast and firmly, as he had always done. He grabbed his precious dagger and cut his wrists the best way he could. And then waited, because there was nothing left to do.

Unexpected

   Adam had always been, to the eyes of others, perfect. He had always been taller than others, but not too tall. He was also smart, but not exceedingly intelligent. He was a very sporty guy but also found time to enjoy and participate in so many other activities such as theatre and dancing. Besides, everyone loved his physique, his smile and his nice and gentle way of being. He was perfect, as said before but the only thing people judged him for was the choice of his career. He had envisioned, at first, to become a professional footballer. Then, as he was stopped everywhere he went, he was asked to be a model several times and he enjoyed every experience he had doing that. He even acted on a couple of TV advertisements for products aimed at young people.

 So it was a surprise, to everyone, that he ended up being a porno star. Yes, Adam had found a way to earn his life honestly by taking his clothes of and having sex on camera. As a model, he knew he looked great on camera and as a sports player he knew his body was more than enough to be able to pose naked. The sex part was the most awkward for him but once he got to know the people, it was more comfortable. He had chosen this path, solely because his family was having money issues and he wanted to help them as much as he could so the best way to do it was with porn, as they paid fast and generously. Before he realized, he became one of the favorite actors and he was doing movies in other places, travelling for conventions and getting more and more in the industry.

 Different was the life of David, who was not a perfect guy, or at least he would never be named as such by anyone he knew. He was not good at sports and he didn’t really like any of them. And the concept of going to a gym, a “cage for monkeys” as he put it, was not even in consideration. He was smart but not intelligent and he had no special talents, at least not that he had found in himself. Physically, David was rather short and not fat but not skinny either. He didn’t really like to take his clothes off at the beach but didn’t mind doing it in his house. David and Adam were very different but, somehow, they ended up in the same place.

 But not in the same capacity. David had gone to college and studied to become a film director. He loved movies and wanted to make his own, mainly science fiction and maybe some action ones. He loved everything that had to do with creation and writing and he was ready, at some point, to take over the world with his ideas. But that didn’t happen. Finding a job, specially when you’re young and have no experience. So David sent his curriculum everywhere and only one company responded. He only found it was a porno production company once he went there for an appointment with the head producer. But he saw it was money and he needed experience so he took the job.

 The two guys didn’t meet immediately or anything. Adam was too busy getting famous in his medium and, eventually, he even told his family about what he really did for a living. They were shocked at first and even prone to convince him not to keep working on porn, but then they realized it was that money that had put them through rough times, so they couldn’t really say much. With time, they learned to respect Adam’s decision and they would simply not ask him anything about his job, except maybe when it was him that brought it up, normally something from a trip or a funny story he had lived. He understood those unspoken conditions and was fine with them, as he knew his family would eventually be ok with it.

 He would travel a lot, going from city to city, country to country, visiting all conventions aimed at adult entertainment. The funny thing the first couple of times was the amount of people that recognized him. Both men and women knew who he was from ads online or his movies and that, to him, felt very strange but very good too. He would pose with many fans for pictures and would sign various deals in those places, to put his face on several products sold to adults, toys and so on, but he also signed on for more and more movies, in other countries and with actors and actresses he had never worked with. He had good experiences and bad too but he was always “the perfect guy” and that was even the name of one if his movies.

 David, on the other hand, was working very hard for not so much money. At first the pay was good but then he was transferred to another production company, one that was smaller, and his workload became much larger and his paycheck much smaller. He endured for a bit as others praised him because of his technical ability, something he didn’t even know he had in himself. He did so for several months until he was transferred back to the place where he had a better workload and was surprised to know they wanted him to do the lighting for all the top movies they were releasing. That meant, that all the movies he would do would be the ones the production company was going to push harder on their clientele and that meant also that David’s work would be known.

 The young man was happy to see that people know respected him more, even if they didn’t always knew his name. He had control over a whole section of these movies and, even if they weren’t what he wanted his life to be about, it was a good beginning, as his technical expertise would suffice to make someone important look at him. But at the beginning it was all about porn and filming in these crazy locations such as lavish mansions and fantastic forests and even a rundown train station. It was funny to him how everything got into porn in such an easy way and no one even doubted it would work.

 After returning from a filming in Japan, Adam had several hours on the plane to think about his life. He was as perfect and gorgeous as he would ever be and he had the favor of many people that surrounded him but he had started to wonder if he didn’t need something more in life, maybe something to call his own. He had the idea of starting a pizza business but the idea remained there on his mind because of the amount of responsibilities he had and that he couldn’t ignore. People were also asking why he didn’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend but he would never answer those questions and he didn’t really know the answer. Maybe it was because, in that line of work, it was best not to combine your personal life and your private one and adult movies are something not every couple would understand fully.

 Meanwhile, David had been contacted by an independent filmmaker, who had asked him to pitch him some ideas for a mystery movie. He had seen David’s work in the adult industry and had also read some of his stories that he published online and had been surprised by his ability to tell stories. So now David had a way to slip away from porn and reroute his life towards what he really wanted. But as he developed the mystery film, he didn’t stop working with the company that had paid him for so long. After all, he had commitments to them and he didn’t wanted to just drop everything and move on to something he didn’t even know if it would work or not. So he opted for patience.

 Eventually the mystery film went into production and David decided it was time to leave the adult film industry. He announced it to his boss and they scheduled together his last film that would star none other than The Perfect guy, in other words, Adam. Curiously, it was Adam’s last film too before he decided to move along and create his pizza business with his family. The filming was very relaxed, despite being quite ambitious for a porno film. They had amazing cameras and lights and costumes. It was a true film being made and it was, for many, the first time porno films were being done in such magnitude, with such grandeur and potential. It was supposed to be a game changer.

 The truth is, Adam and David only spoke once and it wasn’t even a conversation. It was David telling Adam to move a couple of steps backwards for the lights to hit him in the best way and Adam complying. That was it. Adam was of course no interested in David, as he didn’t even acknowledged him at all. David, on his side, did look at Adam extensively as it was stupid not to but he got bored after the first half hour. He was just too “up there” and he was just himself. So after they wrapped up, everyone went home and carried on with their lives.

 Adam’s business was a success, although only in his hometown were the pizzas sold nicely and people would often ask him if he was who they thought it was and also asked for a picture. David’s mystery film was well received in festivals and he went on to win a couple of awards for it. He moved on to be a prolific director, notably adding very intimate scenes in many of his movies, all of them beautifully lit.