You had refused to watch the videos but wanted “the facts.” How many there were, who was in them, where they were shot, how much had they paid me, had I used protection, had I used drugs? Of course I said nothing. I knew my Miranda rights. (Four, I don’t know their names, mostly at the Super 8, a hundred bucks a pop, sometimes and sometimes). If you have to know, I answered an online ad, showed up at an office above a strip mall, and shot an “audition” tape, a solo they paid me fifty bucks for, and then they asked me back the next week for a hundred bucks to shoot a scene with two other guys, both a bit rough-trade, one fairly hairy and stocky and the other scrawny with bad teeth, not lookers, but then neither was I, and I guess there’s a market for that, who knows. If you have to know, I climbed into a hatchback with them and two cameramen and drove out to the motel, and the front desk attendant was so remarkably unfazed I was almost moved to tears and had to look down when our eyes met. If you have to know, I studied the carpet of the hallway as I walked. Grey synthetic fibre, almost silver. The colour of duct tape. The walls were wood-panelled along the bottom and wallpapered on top. An insipid design of little yellow flowers woven through a damask pattern. The hallway smelled of cleaning solvents and the room was at the end on the ground floor. A little wooden door with the number fourteen on a vinyl sticker. The older cameraman, the one with the white goatee, had to pull the doorknob towards him to get the key to enter the lock, and then gave the door a little shove to open it, he seemed to know the trick. The wallpaper continued into the room, it was rippled in places, there was a large mirror, a black telephone, and two firm double beds on metal frames. I looked up at the water damage on the white plaster ceiling and then out the window at the parking lot, where a pile of old computer monitors had been dumped. Later, as I was playing some naive hustler version of myself, unbuckling this supposed businessman’s belt with my scrawny hustler comrade, I caught my reflection in the mirror and for a brief moment I felt as if I was looking into another room at another person altogether, just out of reach. Someone bolder. Beyond shame. Not a child but not quite a man either. Somewhere caught between the two. On some quaking, fragile boundary. One who has never on his own gained by being a man while knowing that he was becoming one.