On Film

“On Film” (latest draft)


This director rents out a small mansion tucked among the last orange groves in the city, not far from the house where I grew up. In the downstairs bathroom, Michael prepares himself, his jeans unbuttoned and down to mid-thigh while I wait with the crew as they set up the camera and lighting equipment in front of a black leather sofa and a glass coffee table in the otherwise bare living room. When the bathroom door opens, Michael appears in costume. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a plain white shirt, a semi under the fabric of his baggy jeans, ready to begin.
I’m told to stand behind the crew and stay quiet. Two men crouched on the floor do final checks on their equipment. Sara, the only woman in the room, turns to look at me, making sure I’m at a good distance away. Even though this isn’t my first time watching, I’m still treated like it is. Lifting her headphones over her ears, Sara turns back to the director and says, we’re all good. With his arm over the sofa, Michael sits with another guy, Cody, in similar attire, minus the hat. As they begin filming, the director casually asks Michael questions—his age, his height, and then more specific ones: “Do you have a girlfriend?” Yes. “So, you’re straight?” Yeah. “And you’ve never fucked a guy before?” I haven’t. “You ever been fucked?” No. “Do you wanna make some money?” Yeah. “How do you feel about Cody?” I don’t know. Okay?
This is acting.
The director laughs, and Cody and Michael smile, looking down and away from each other like they are strangers. When the director says, “Okay guys, take off your clothes,” Michael looks at me before he lifts his shirt.
Later, on the drive home, he has the passenger seat back, his feet on the dashboard; he’s tired. Night has fallen. The road that leads out of the orange groves winds down to the stillness of the sprawling neighborhoods, the quiet streets. No one can be found, no one walking their dog, or coming home from work. Neighborhood kids have disappeared, abandoning their bikes on front lawns. Farther down, the quietness breaks. Streets widen to busy intersections: impatient cars and flashing traffic lights, the closer we get to the freeway onramp. As the headlights illuminate the broken stripe that divides the lanes on this side of the freeway, I remember my first time coming back with Michael after a shoot. I had asked him what it felt like. He said that he liked it—to be watched, losing himself fucking, releasing something more from inside himself than come.
Now, I think of myself there with him in front of the camera: my legs over his shoulders, I’m crushed breathless and filled. I imagine that as I turn to see the bright light, the cameraman and the director beside him, from the middle of my chest I’m torn open, rib cages pulled apart, everything inside of me seen, obliterated.
With his head against the headrest, Michael looks out his window, at the houses along the freeway, lit up from the inside. Before he falls asleep, I say, “Let’s play a game.” He agrees. I ask him, “What do you want?”
“To get the hell out of here, away from this place,” he says. Before he yawns, he asks, “What do you want?” rarely saying my name. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t know it isn’t Raymond, but Raymundo.
I tell him that turning back, taking this freeway all the way down, down to Artesia Boulevard and following until we reach the 405, going north, will take us up to Santa Monica. I tell him that years ago, my mom and my stepfather took me there at night, to a lookout point just off Ocean Avenue to watch the Malibu fire. The coast curved out into the ocean, red against the dark, hills breathing heavy smoke. My mom holding my hand, pointing to the scene of the disaster, “Mira, Raymundo. Mira cómo todo se quema.” Through the eyepiece of a beach telescope—my stepfather handing me a quarter—I watched palm trees in flames; houses we could never live in, burning, collapsing into embers, into ash.
When he doesn’t say anything, I try to explain. “I want to feel like that,” I say, but he has already fallen asleep.

Michael and I have been involved for a few months. He’s finishing up a contract with the eighth largest Internet gay porn production site in the nation. It was our second time together, at his place, that he told me he made a living fucking in front of a camera. I told him that I was stuck working the third shift in the back room of a department store. I left his apartment that night thinking I wouldn’t see him again, imagining that the clothes in the bottom drawer of his dresser, left open, belonged to someone else. It was a week later that he called me again, to come over and fool around. In bed, he asked me if I would like to see him work. I said, yes.
Now, I go with him because he doesn’t own a car and can’t get to the places they’re shooting—from a rented beach house north of San Diego, to a loft with a city view in Studio City. It’s not because he can’t afford it. He says that it helps him to have me there on set—in an anonymous kitchen, an office, a backyard—to watch, and I try to believe him. Because Michael has become friends with the director, he says it’s okay for me to be there, and that this sort of thing isn’t unusual. The first time I showed up to one of the shoots, the director, Sean, could see that I was uncomfortable, that it was obvious I didn’t belong there, standing behind the crew and waiting for it all to be over. While Michael was in the bathroom freshening up, Sean called me over and, as to ease me in, began telling me of other actors he had worked with who’d bring their boyfriends or girlfriends with them. Having them there, he said, would turn them on, made them better performers. I nodded. But what I wanted to tell him was that I wasn’t sure what Michael and I were, that in fact, I was waiting quietly for him to leave me. I still am.
When we get back to Michael’s place he checks his messages on the answering machine. In his bathroom, with the door closed, I do the same on my own phone. I count the many times my mom has called while it was off, the messages she has left, all beginning with “Mundo, Mundito, answer.” She calls often, at night, telling me that the air she breathes is like water, that she’s drowning. She can’t be alone. I have to go to her, calm her down and set her to bed. I lay next to her, over the blankets, and she holds me close, like when I was a small child, when it was only me and her before she remarried and years later was abandoned—all her sadness and fear becoming my own as she holds on. Once she asked if I thought that life would be easier if we were dead. Mom, don’t think like that, I said. The more times I go the more I fear we will die on that bed. I have to wait until she has fallen asleep before I can make an escape route.
Beneath the door I see Michael’s shoes. His voice coming through, “Ray.” When I open the door, I ask, “Have you heard back yet?” I follow him back into the living room where he sits at his desk, his computer on.
“Not yet,” he says.
For the last couple of weeks, Michael has been searching for bigger and better things. He complains about the cost of rent here in town, the people in the apartment complex. Barefoot kids are always playing on the stairs, hanging off the railings. Many times, when I go home with him, we see the older woman who lives next-door. She doesn’t speak English. She sits outside every day, peeling vegetables for the dinner we will later smell through the walls. She stares at us when we pass by. It’s never friendly. We hear the couple that lives upstairs, a thin waitress from Manchester named Emily and her fat boyfriend, Shane, with his red goatee. Visitors climb the stairs up to their apartment at all hours of the night. We hear thrown things crash. Some mornings we see Shane coming out of his apartment with fresh cuts on his neck and cheek. Michael says it’s not worth being here in this shithole, paying what he does and so far from anything exciting: Los Angeles hours away in night and traffic. I want to believe him, that there is more. But I’m scared that this is life, that it’s no different here from there.
Now, Michael’s trying out for a better-known production company based out of Las Vegas that features young men with a collegiate look. He has already sent in his information along with pictures of himself that I took, one of his face, another of his upper body, and two full nude shots. He had asked me to take the pictures after I had brought him back to my apartment where he found a collection of photographs I had taken, mostly Polaroids, left on my coffee table. He sorted through them, held up two he really liked. One was of a young couple at a table in an outdoor café, the boy turned to the girl with one had hand on her arm, needing to tell her something while she looked away, at something out of frame. The other was a side profile shot of a woman at night, her hair covering most of her face and falling on her bare shoulder. In the picture she’s looking down, her prominent nose at an upward angle, a cigarette in her mouth. I told him that she was about to cross the street, at the crowded intersection of Lincoln and 6th. Lights from traffic and neon store signs lit up the square, but in the picture it is only the flash from my camera that hits her, and everything around her is black, like it had never existed.
When I arrived at Michael’s apartment with my Polaroid camera for the favor, he looked surprised. “With that?” he asked. It’ll be fine, I told him. In his living room, he stood naked in front of me, the afternoon light from the window touching his skin. Locating him in the viewfinder, he had his head titled down, looking straight at me. “No attitude,” I said, and his eyebrows relaxed, his eyes softened. As I waited for the film to develop, I saw him appear through blurry gray hues, young and fresh-faced. “Those look like shit,” he said when I showed him, and had me do it over with his own camera. When he asked me if I thought he’d be able to make it, I said yes, thinking of how his body would fit with those on the website. I’m sure that sooner or later they’ll contact him. Now we’re both waiting.
After he’s done with the computer, he gets up and sees me standing by the door, with a look that makes me think he’s forgotten I’m here.
“Are you going?” he asks.
“You seem tired.”
“I’m not tired,” he says. When I don’t move, he adds, “It’s up to you.”

When Michael and I fuck, for just a moment, I forget about everything. I go to him sedated, waiting to feel something. His shirt off, I smell his skin. I bite on his lower lip, his shoulder. “Beg for my cock,” he says, towering over me, slapping my lips with it. When he’s fucking me, I wrap my legs around him, pushing him. I want nothing left of me. Once, I let it slip, “I want you to hurt me.” I was shocked and embarrassed, lying naked under him. He stopped and looked at me in the near dark, the orange glow of the streetlamps coming in through the blinds, falling on us. Then, he turned me over, onto my stomach. Grabbing hold of my wrists, my arms out, he pinned me down. Through grunts, he said, “Am I filling you up?” “Completely,” I told him, half alive, my body blossoming as he continued crushing.
But now, I’m beginning to think that I’m disappointing him. The first time we fucked he came first. “Okay, now you,” he said, moving down on me. As he sucked me off, I could feel his jaw and neck beginning to tense, his eyes motioning up to me, wondering when I would. With my hands on the sides of his face, I brought him up. “Sorry,” I whispered, “I just can’t.” I told him that I hadn’t been able to with anyone. There’s a point during sex when I know that what I want won’t happen, that I will never feel what I hope to, that I can only come so close to it and then I have to give up. I’m worried it bothers him now. He’s relentless, always trying, and then I always have to stop it.

Twice a week I visit my mom after my shift at work. I try to catch her before she heads out, leaving her apartment with a large pot of warm tamales. When I meet her at the door, she sets the pot down and holds me close, bringing my forehead down to her lips. At the kitchen table with the tablecloth that belonged to my grandmom a long time ago, she sits me down and heats up the leftovers from her dinner the night before. “It’s mole verde con pollo,” she says.
She still wears the wedding ring my stepfather gave her. About a year and a half ago he ran off, left her in the home they had made together, the home where I grew up. She stayed, going about her usual chores, pulling out the wet laundry from the washer and moving it into the dryer, dusting the living room and scrubbing the stove. He stopped paying the mortgage but continued to pay the gas and electric bills until his failing business finally went under. Friends found him on the bedroom floor of his new apartment, with a plastic bag over his head and taped around his neck. My mom stayed as long as she could, until the bank forced her out. All of our belonging were packed into boxes. Some things we had to lose.
Now she lives in this apartment she shares with no one—with the furniture she was able to salvage—trying to recreate the home she once had. Since she lost him she’s tried to find other sources of income. When the applications she filled out, along with the resume I helped her build, didn’t lead to call backs, she began making tamales and selling them from the trunk of her car in super-market parking lots. The people she sells to love her food. Some even beg for her recipe, but she only smiles and thanks them. She doesn’t tell them that this is how she barely stays alive, that late at night she pushes her hands into an earthenware pot of cornmeal, pieces of it clinging onto her fingers as she wipes the side of her face with her forearm—her rings resting on the kitchen counter.
She comes back from the kitchen with the warm plate, setting it down in front of me. After I take a few bites, pushing rice onto my fork with a butter knife, I ask her how things are. “Here, everything is worse,” she says, turning the wedding ring on her finger. “I haven’t been making enough.”
“Mom, how much do you need?”
She points to the stack of bills in between the prayer candles on the table. She’s behind again; some of them are second notices. I go through each envelope, tearing them open and adding the amounts due on a napkin by my plate.
“Why didn’t you ask me before?” I say.
“I called you,” she responds.
I ask her if she has been taking her medication. She shakes her head. “Sometimes,” she replies. She gets up to retrieve her pill case from the bathroom. When she returns to the table she sets the case down in front of her. A small thing painted gold. Opening the case, she turns it to face me. “Look at my failure,” she says. “My life in pieces.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, and she nods, taking out a pill, brining it to her mouth. As she sips from my glass of water I take my plate to the sink, rinse it off. Above the sink, she has an old picture of the three of us, herself, my stepfather and me in between, at the Griffith Observatory at night. We’re standing in front of the view of Silver Lake and downtown, a blur of red and white lights. In the picture, my stepfather is looking up at the night sky, where no stars swirled above us, as if he already knew his way out.
Turning in her chair, she faces me, looking up when I come back into the room.
“It would be easier if you came back,” she begins. “If you shared this with me.”
“I can’t do that,” I say, standing by her chair.
“Who do you have, if not me?” she asks, holding onto my hand. “Who else?”
When I can’t look at her, she grabs at my arms, and buries her face just below my chest, in the folds of my shirt, her tears soaking through.

My apartment complex sits on the outskirts of town, in between an abandoned golf course and a wide-open field of dried yellow grass. All this will soon be a construction site for a new shopping center; this includes my building. When my stepfather moved us to this city, it was still mostly orange groves and quiet neighborhoods. Soon after, construction began. The orange groves were uprooted, the landscape became bare and new homes, schools and shopping center sprang up from the ground so quickly we almost forgot what existed before. Most of the tenants in my building have already picked up and left. My landlord stops by often, leaving his new sports car in the driveway, checking to see who has left and who remains. When he sees me arrive he stops me as I get out of my car, asking me what’s my plan, when are you getting out. I tell him I’m working on it. He tells me that if I don’t move quickly, construction will begin over me.
After my shower, I get a call from Michael. With a towel wrapped around my waist I leave wet footprints in the carpet leading to the phone. “I got it,” he says, his voice coming through the receiver, “They want me.” I meet him at his apartment. When I come in he smiles. He begins to tell me the details, that they need his test results as soon as possible to begin filming. “We’ll have to drive there,” he says, “it’s just outside Vegas.”
That night in bed, before we begin anything, he tells me more about the job. “They want me to look more natural,” he says. I feel the small patch of trimmed chest hair over his sternum with my fingers. “I’ll have to grow that out. They like body hair.”
“Vegas is far,” I tell him.
“ I know.”
“They’ll want you back.”
“I think I might move there.”
Across the ceiling we hear Emily’s footsteps in the room above. I bring the sheets up and around my shoulders, wrapping myself in a cocoon. “You’ll come too, it won't be hard to find a job,” he says. It’s difficult to pretend that I’m not an afterthought. I imagine myself in Vegas, in the extreme heat, wearing a button-down shirt and red vest, catching keys to other people’s vehicles at a hotel-casino parking lot—a landscape too new and constantly under construction. I imagine coming home to a bare apartment with black steel furniture against white walls, and no one else home.
He moves over me and then we begin. As we kiss, he brings each of my arms up over my head and pins them there until we’re both hard and swollen. “I have something for you,” he says into my ear.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he replies. We’re gaining momentum.
When it’s almost time for him, he’s behind me and has me face down, pressed into the mattress. My eyes closed, I say, “I want you to come on me.” Then, his hands stop pushing down on my back. There’s a sudden flash that shocks the room, then a mechanical moan.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he says, keeping my head down with one hand, “Keep going.”
My eyes still closed, I turn around. He keeps pushing in and my head goes back. I’m grabbing the edge of the mattress. Then he lifts away from me, and again I sense a flash. When I open my eyes, Michael’s up is on his knees, holding a Polaroid camera in one hand and a picture in the other. “It’s okay,” he says, dropping the picture over the bed, “keep going.”

In the morning Michael is still sleeping. Before getting up and gathering my clothes to return home, I look over the bed. On the floor lay the two pictures that he took the night before. The first one my back is pushed forward. My face is to the side, eyes clenched and mouth slightly opened. In the other, my front is washed out by the flash. The top of the frame cuts off my face, and there’s black all around me. Michael rolls over in bed, still asleep, his chest expanding with each breath and the sheets tangled between his legs. I’m embarrassed to look at the pictures, at the estranged, pathetic positions of myself.
The videos of Michael on the Internet, and the ones I’ve seen filmed, don’t bother me. For the most part I know they aren’t real. Sometimes I can separate fact from fiction. There’s always some distance between bodies in the videos so that the cameramen can get a good shot of the penetration. In the frame, while one is flat on his back, the other, usually Michael, is perpendicular, on his knees and holding the other guy’s legs up by the ankles. Between them, the viewer needs to see cock shoving in and sliding out.
When I return home, I watch videos of him on my computer. The thing is, I never have trouble by myself. I sit at my desk, my pants unbuttoned. There is a video clip of him that I return to repeatedly. It’s one of his earlier gigs, when he was still new, made on a digital camcorder. He lies on his back, alone, his head turned to the camera that stays on his face, close up. He blinks a few times but doesn’t look away, letting out quiet moans, and then smiles. The clip lasts only twelve seconds that I keep on a loop.
Once, in bed with Michael, he wouldn’t give up. After he came, he laid beside me and gripped me tightly with his right hand, going slow first then fast—my hips motioning up in soft thrusts. When I couldn’t, he went faster. “Just fucking come,” he muttered. Still going, he sat up and went harder. I felt his other hand on my throat, his thumb beginning to push down. “Stop!” I shouted, pushing him off and getting out of bed.
“What’s wrong with you?” he yelled as I left the room.

One time I did come with someone. I’ve never told Michael. It was with a man from the gay bar in Riverside—a man who stared me down, deathly, who bought me drinks and placed his hand on my thigh under the counter, his fingers running on the denim of my pants—a man that looked like my stepfather. The lights off at his place, on his bed, I straddled him. I put one hand against the wall as I jerked my dick with the other. He touched me all over and I looked up, away. Above, the ceiling fan spun slow, blowing air that made my sweat cold. “On my face,” he said, his voice resonate. I didn’t want him to speak.

As our trip to Vegas gets closer I see that Michael is already changing and I document it with the Polaroids he’s reluctant to pose for. After a trip to the drug store his hair has become a chestnut brown, a more natural match to his skin. His eyebrows are growing in fuller, defining his face. I’m discovering a new feel for him when my fingers trail down his torso over the new patch of chest hair, or the light fuzz on his ass. But we’ve been calming down at night. In bed, he begins to show a polite tenderness I don’t believe, rubbing my arm as I lay close. He’s saving himself. I’m thinking of the load of come he’ll shoot on film when he’s done, getting up and walking out of the frame for a towel to wipe himself off, not coming back to where I am. “Just a few more days,” he reminds me.

Days before we leave for Vegas I try to find my mom at her apartment, but she’s not there. I find her at the supermarket parking lot blocks away from where she lives. She stands by the trunk of her car, facing the entrance to the store, waiting. It’s getting late, the sky in red and orange. Soon, the streetlamps will come on. I go over to her and she greets me with a kiss. I give her the check I promised her and she thanks me, folding it in half and slipping it into her pocket.
“No one is buying,” she says.
“Mom, I’m going to Vegas,” I tell her. “I might not come back.”
“With who?” She often asks questions she doesn’t want answers to. The sky changes. The evening blue light weights everything down, my mom and I and all the parked cars in the lot. A woman with her small child leaves the supermarket, pushing a cart full of groceries. They walk past without noticing us, the cart rattling as they go forward.
“And me?” she asks.
“Mom, I can’t help you anymore.” I say.
Walking back to my car, the streetlamps on, she calls to me.
“All I wanted was a family.”
But I keep going..

The road to Vegas goes by in naps for Michael while I drive on long stretches of road. At convenience stores we pick up bottled water, soda, snacks and dated magazines. As we move ahead, I watch the black ribbon of road escaping behind us in the rearview mirror. Through the burning windows an endless desert in gold and brown burgeons into the horizon. I pull over to the side of the road when we reach Death Valley. Michael wakes up and asks what I’m doing. “I want to look,” I tell him. Before I get out of the car I reach to the backseat for the camera, hoping it hasn’t melted. Outside I can barely breathe comfortably. The sun cuts the mountains into sections, creased by light and shadows. Down in the valley, the dunes are so bright it hurts to look; I have to squint my eyes tightly to catch some of the glow. Everything shifts in heat, as if it were to disappear if I were to touch it. Bringing the camera up to my eye, I take a picture. Beside me Michael asks if I’m done.
“Let me take yours now,” I say.
“God, Ray. It’s really hot. Can we just go?”
“Please,” I say, and he stands with his hands at his waist, a golden valley behind him.

We don’t stop, driving through The Strip, muted in the harsh daylight. I ask him if we can go through old Las Vegas to see the neon cowboy, but we don’t have time. We take the freeway, crossing through the sprawling suburb in the desert until we reach a gated community of small mansions in North Las Vegas. At the gate, near the speaker box, Michael leans across me to my rolled-down window to speak. “We’re here,” he says.
Most of our things are left in the trunk of my car, parked on the curb. We both carry backpacks with a change of clothes as we walk up to the door of the mansion. A man named Greg meets us there and introduces himself as the director and producer. He’s dressed in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and cargo pants. Leading us in, he gives a short tour of the place, crossing through the living room, down a hallway to the large master bedroom where the walls are painted dark blue. There, four men set up the equipment around the king-size bed, checking the photographic and video cameras, positioning the softbox and the main spotlight. By the equipment an assortment of condoms and lubrication lay on a small table. “This is where it will take place,” Greg tells us, but really speaking to Michael. “We’re just waiting on Brandon.”
Greg gives us the okay to swim in the pool out back until Brandon shows up. Outside we breathe in the dry heat, standing in the shade under the awning. The backyard is closed off from the desert landscape by a six-foot brick wall. We’re left with an oblong shaped pool, a green lawn with the sprinklers going. But rising above the wall, in the distance, we see a pillar of smoke.
“Something’s on fire,” I say.
“It’s far from here,” he responds.
Michael makes a run for the pool as I follow behind, my feet burning. He jumps in, swallowed by a big splash. While he’s under, the light distorts him, bending his body as it moves through the water until he resurfaces. I join in, swimming slow from one end of the pool to the other. We both go under and when I come back up he’s already there, neck deep, looking at me like he wants to say something. But Greg comes out and calls him in. He gets out of the pool, dripping, picking up a towel from the poolside chair and wrapping himself in it as he heads in.
When I go back inside, into the master bedroom, Greg is speaking to Michael and Brandon, giving directions before shooting, the crew standing around. Right away I notice how handsome Brandon is, shaggy hair, a scruffy face and a muscular build. While Greg speaks I notice Michael examining Brandon, his eyes moving down his body. When Greg is done, the two men move onto the bed and the crew gets into place.
“Hey, stand over here,” Greg says, motioning to me. Once I’m next to him he says, “Okay, go.”
Already, I know this will be different. The two of them are slow to begin, their lips dragging, Brandon’s face lingering in the curve of Michael’s neck. As clothes are removed carefully with a sort of anticipation, I see they’re both locked onto each other. Michael isn’t looking back at me. As Brandon begins to move down on Michael, neither of them is making exaggerated faces or moans. It’s all pure hunger. We’re left in a silence until Michael begins fucking and Brandon clings to him tight, no room between them.

During a break while Michael and Brandon freshen up in the bathroom, Greg begins to tell me about his site. He says that in featuring these collegiate looking guys he hopes to recreate his own experience while he was in school, and the intensity he had with each of his partners. He wants to create something different, something that will stand out from all the other sites on the web. Not only do people want to see two good-looking guys fuck, he says, but they want to see something real between them, something that they, the viewer, may not have. When the two men finally come back, Greg wants to shoot again.

The motel room we stay at later has two twin beds with a pair of night stands between them. We’re removed from The Strip, even from Old Las Vegas. On the wall behind the beds is a mural of a locomotive headed straight for us. That’s the theme of this place, railroads. Michael and I haven’t said anything to each other since the shoot. “I don’t want to leave this room,” I tell him, turning on the television. He looks at me, again in the same way he did in the pool. He doesn’t need to tell me anything, because I already know. On the news, the anchorwoman reports that fifty miles away from the city fire fighters are unable to contain the blaze that started his afternoon. Before Michael says my name, I feel it all rush in, all the wrong emotions. Watching the screen, deep in the clouds of smoke, I see home. I lick my lips and taste salt.

My very own blog

This is very exciting.
I decided to start a blog so that I can post some stuff (writing) so that way, in the future, after school, I'll have a reason to continue, if that makes sense.