Every morning since I swung by around two weeks ago and offered to help him, I’ve been texting my dad to see if he needs me. All his messages are the same: I got it. Don’t worry.

  My mom says to ignore him. “When he says that,” she instructs me, “you go anyway. You stay there whether he likes it or not.”

  But I’m not gonna hang out where I’m not wanted. That’s what I tell her when she calls me this morning as I grab my duffel bag and head out the door.

  * * *

  I’m at my gym working out—trying to focus on my reps rather than my father’s stubbornness—when Tim approaches. I’d seen him in the days before the pandemic—on the rowing machine, doing leg squats, running on the treadmill. He’s a nice-looking guy in his late fifties with salt-and-pepper hair that he wears cropped close to his scalp along the sides. He sports a pair of trimmed sideburns, and two pierced nipples poke through the taut fabric of his shirt. A scar running up the entire length of his left forearm’s tattooed to resemble a snake, the raised ridges of skin disguised as scales, the tip a rattle curled around the wrist. Beady eyes peer back, floating just above a pair of sharp fangs. He’s tall, about my height, muscular, with a firm ass that sits high up on his thighs like a trophy. It’s the kind of ass that demands to be seen, that preaches when it walks by. Hallelujah! There’s a swagger to him, and when he smiles, the left side of his mouth curls up so that it looks more like a pout. I’m there doing bench presses when he strolls over. I sit up, toweling my face.

  “You survived,” he says, then offers to spot for me.

  “What?”

  “The shit show that was 2020.”

  “Huh?”

  “The pandemic. You know?” He twirls a finger in front of his face, the skin across his jagged jawline glimmering under the gym’s lights.

  With everyone all packed together again, sweating, grunting, and the music blasting from the Zumba classes, it’s almost as though it didn’t even happen, almost as though so many people didn’t lose their lives, so many that we stopped counting.

  Almost.

  “Oh, yeah. All of us, I guess. Cool, right?” I reach my hand out. “Julian.”

  “We can do this again.”

  “Huh?”

  “Shake hands. Touch. Human contact. Nice, isn’t it?” We switch positions on the bench press. “I noticed you here. Before, I mean.”

  “Is that right?” I stand over him now, my legs slightly apart, his head just below my crotch. His eyes linger there for a long while. “Getting a good look?” I ask.

  “Easy, tiger.”

  Tim grimaces between reps, his face turning beet red, neck muscles bulging as he strains to lift the weights. He’s sweating, huffing.

  He sits up now. “Yeah. I did get a nice, long look. Appears to be very impressive.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “You’re cocky. I dig it.” That smirk-pout again. “I have a proposition.”

  “Sounds intriguing.”

  “It’s a chance to make some extra money. And you’ll have fun doing it.”

  “And illegal.”

  “Have dinner with me. I’ll tell you more. At least hear me out, okay? If you aren’t interested, no biggie.”

  I shrug my shoulders, flex my muscles in the full-length mirrors lining the gym’s walls. It’s been so long since I’ve gone out. Dinner with a relative stranger, a nice, even sometimes awkward conversation with someone I hardly know, a night of raw, intense sex, sounds fucking great.

  “Sure,” I say. “Let’s do it. Let’s have dinner, stud.”

  * * *

  Like all of us, I spent 2020 and most of 2021 in front my laptop, staring at my countless students, their faces caught in the small electronic tiles that filled the screen. Their cameras would freeze up, their voices cutting in and out. It sometimes felt as though I were talking to myself as I asked them questions about the assigned readings, as I lectured on about thesis statements and misplaced modifiers. There were enough days that convinced me I was losing it. The walls inside my dingy apartment closed in. Even with the ceiling fans on high, the air was hot and still. I’d take long drives through downtown LA and Hollywood, but the endless miles of empty streets, the sidewalks clear of pedestrians and tourists snapping pictures only depressed me more.

  I’ve never been one to sit still, to stay put. I crave movement and contact. Just like my tía Mercy. Her job as a civil rights lawyer had my aunt traveling all over the world—Brazil, Spain, China, Thailand—until travel restrictions kept her at home in Berkeley during the lockdowns. She’d call me at least once a week during this time, checking in to see how things were going, if I needed anything.

  I was teaching six classes for four different community colleges and barely making ends meet. Each section had, on average, thirty students. Before schools shut down, I was spending most of my time stuck in traffic, commuting from one school to the other, grading endless stacks of “compare and contrast” essays or research papers on gun control, climate change, and abortion. Once the state ordered schools to switch to online teaching, I found myself pretty much in the same exact situation. Except I wasn’t driving from one end of Southern California to the other. Instead, I was glued to my laptop, teaching session after session, grading papers, and holding virtual office hours. Groceries were delivered weekly by a driver whose face I never saw. Sex was a bottle of lube and gay porn websites or cam-to-cam sessions with men from Canada, Germany, or New Zealand, where we’d watch each other jerk off and then abruptly cut off our feeds once we were finished. We thought it would last a few weeks, maybe three months max, but it went on and on.

  I ordered more lube.

  If you see me, the first thing you might think is that I’m one of those Mexicans who just crossed over. With the right clothes I can easily be mistaken for a day laborer or a gardener. In baggy jeans, an oversized hoodie, or a baseball cap, I’m a hard-core cholo from El Sereno or Belvedere. My skin’s dark, but not too dark. I get this from my father, who got it from Abuelo Ernesto. I have a square jaw; a thin, pointed nose; sharp cheekbones; and dark eyes set deep behind a set of low, heavy black brows. Sometimes I sport a goatee or a stash, sometimes I don’t. When it’s grown out, my hair’s black as oil and just as slick. I keep it buzzed down to the scalp, especially after the pandemic, because shaving it was easier than letting it grow out or learning how to cut it myself.

  Exercising is something I take seriously. No matter what. Even during the lockdowns I kept in shape by lifting inside my living room and jogging around the neighborhood. But here’s my thing: I don’t like being hit, don’t like the sight of blood. Ever since I was a kid, when I was six and fell and hit my head on the edge of the bathtub. My dad was with me, was supposed to be supervising me while my mom was in the kitchen. He turned around, and I slipped trying to get out. All I remember are those drops of blood on the smooth porcelain, my eyes clouded; the whole room turned red, and my stomach churned and churned. My dad panicked, grabbed a towel, pressing it against the cut, but it was soaked in a matter of seconds. Next thing I remember, he’s cradling me in his arms, and we’re running out to the car, my mother trailing behind us. Inside the emergency room lobby, they got into a fight. It was so bad that one of the security guards walked over and asked my mom if everything was okay. The fear of being hurt only grew the older I got. In elementary school, I avoided the blacktop and spent recess leaning up against the brick wall by the drinking fountain. In junior high PE classes, the teachers yelled and pushed me on the basketball court and the football field. Their taunts only made my condition worse, only worked to raise my anxiety. In high school, the only reason I agreed to try out for the wrestling team was so I could get my dad off my back. But my time there didn’t last long at all. I walked away. He didn’t say so, but I knew my dad was disappointed. I could see it in his eyes; he never looked at me the same again.

  Even though I didn’t follow in their footsteps by becoming a luchador, I still respect the tradition, still know it. My likes are just different.

  Before the pandemic, sex was a full-time job. I’ve been with guys inside supply closets. Gas station bathrooms. Department store dressing rooms. Empty fields. Along secluded roads. Adult bookstore video arcade booths made of flimsy plywood walls where the stuffy air reeks. Countless hotel rooms. So many hotel rooms. Target bathrooms. Airports. The cab of a big rig truck. The office of a college professor. A locker room. On rooftops. Balconies. Dark movie theaters. With two, three, ten other guys. In swimming pools. Jacuzzis. Tennis courts. Construction sites. The kitchen of a five-star restaurant in Beverly Hills. A funeral. A wedding. A quinceañera. A bris. Yes, a fucking bris. At a major intersection. Inside an elevator. During a lightning storm. In the middle of an earthquake. During a once-in-a-century pandemic out on the front landing of my apartment late one night because I couldn’t have him inside just in case he was infected. I tied a bandana around my mouth and nose, and he gripped the railing of the second-story balcony and gritted his teeth. When I penetrated him, he moaned, and I worried my neighbors would hear, would come out and find us there—me half-naked, the guy with his pants around his ankles, his freckled ass so pale, blue veins marbling his skin. It was two in the morning. We were out in plain sight, the chilled air hardening my nipples, and the heat radiating from his body smelled like soap, and in my head, I traveled through the night air up into the sky and watched as a multitude of small lights below me were blown out for good.

  * * *

  The server at the restaurant where I meet Tim points to a little sign on the table that reads Scan Me when he asks if we can have some menus.

  “Hi-tech, right?” Her name’s Kaylee.

  Tim smiles from across the table once we’re alone. “Our brave new post-pandemic world.”

  His collared shirt is the same soft green as his eyes. He sports khaki pants and leather sandals, his toes slim and tender-looking. Yellow whisps of hair cover his taut arms. He looks around the restaurant, at the people crowding the bar, at the masked servers darting between tables, carrying trays of food and glasses of water or wine. He apologizes a few times for taking so long to reach out after we ran into each other at the gym; for being slightly late; for Kaylee, who takes a while to return with our drink order.

  “It’s cool,” I say.

  “What part?”

  “All of it.”

  We’re getting used to being out again, to meeting up at bars or clubs, at parties and social events, I assure him. I’ve always been good at small talk, at making whoever I’m with comfortable and confident, I say, even when things are awkward.

  “I can tell,” he replies. “It’s one of the reasons I first noticed you.”

  According to him, there’s something magnetic about me, something charming and likeable. I have a vulnerability about me, he asserts, a quality that makes people want to nurture and take care of me. But he senses that, at the same time, I can be rough, shrewd, take control of things.

  “Is this a psychic reading?”

  He laughs. “You seem to be possessed of many talents.”

  “The only talent I got right now is the talent for correcting grammar and making a shitty salary.”

  Apparently, I’m in luck, because he’s in the business of finding young men who are not only attractive but smart and able to hold a conversation if need be.

  “I recruit people like you,” he continues. “Good-looking. Nice bodies. Guys who are versatile and uninhibited.”

  I take a swig of my beer. “Are you going to offer me a job selling steak knives door-to-door? Because I did something like that in high school, but with candy bars, and I was terrible at it.”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  Kaylee brings our food over; mini chicken tacos for him, a cobb salad for me. We order another round of drinks and eat in silence for a while. The restaurant’s more crowded by now, and even though cases have dropped nationally and globally, and the hospitals and emergency rooms aren’t overrun, it’s still a little unnerving to see so many people packed together so tightly.

  “We haven’t learned much,” Tim says.

  I chuckle. “You read my fucking mind. So, this job? It’s gay porn, right? I’m a college teacher. I have a master’s degree. There’s no way I’m doing porn, no matter how much it pays.”

  He takes a bite of his taco and wipes his face. “Not gay porn.”

  I’m supposed to think about it like a series of blind dates or parties with different men. They pay me for my time, and whatever I make, he gets a cut of it.

  “So, you’re a pimp?” I ask.

  He places his hand over his heart, mouth agape, taco carnage plastered to his roiling tongue. “I’m so insulted.”

  “Sorry, but, well, that is what you are. In the technical sense.”

  He smirks. “Kidding. I’m not insulted. Yes, I’m like a pimp. But a classy pimp.”

  “So, you’re offering me a job as a hustler? I’m supposed to have sex with these dudes?”

  “Not always. But it’s common.”

  The men he works for are wealthy. They live in Beverly Hills or Malibu or Pacific Palisades or they’re in town on business. They’re studio execs, lawyers, bankers, oil tycoons from Texas, rich farmers from Iowa, software engineers from Silicon Valley. They have a lot of money, and their sexual proclivities need to be kept secret. Tim’s job is to find hot guys who are semiprofessional, educated, drug-free, and screened regularly for STDs.

  He wipes his mouth. “I think you’ve got what it takes to make some very good money. The whole package.”

  “To be honest, I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted.”

  He says that’s how he first felt when he was approached by his boss. Tim was at a club with a few friends. This guy with a thick pinky ring approached him. He carried wads of cash and kept buying Tim drinks.

  “I was flat broke at the time. Hurting,” he says. “Marco took me in, fed me, bought me clothes, even paid my rent. And all I had to do was go out with a few men a couple times a month. Dinner. Drinks. Trips to Carmel and San Francisco. Real extravagant shit.”

  He takes good care of his “boys,” he assures me. They are never without the things they need to help them get by.

  “And you pimp them out in return?”

  “Well, technically yes. I get that you’re resistant to the idea. Let me ask you something: Do you like having sex with men?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How often do you do it?”

  “As often as I can get it.”

  “Then why not get paid for it?”

  He has me there. Still, the whole idea’s unsettling, and all I want to do is finish my meal and leave and never have to think about being propositioned again. Outside the restaurant, Tim gives me an awkward hug and says he hopes to bump into me sometime at the gym.

  I’ll be doing my best to avoid him.

  ERNESTO VEGA

  I looked over at the table that she covered with a cloth. She arranged photographs of our parents around a vase filled with water and a single red carnation. Sheets hung from a piece of twine running down the middle of the room.

  Julián didn’t say much, just shook his head and glanced around. “It’s… nice.” He kicked his dirty shoes up on the table, smearing soot on the tablecloth.

  She served us each a bowl of black beans. “The people around here are very nice.”

  “What? You thought I lived in a slum?” Julián rolled a tortilla.

  I slept heavy that night, my body resting comfortably on that thin, lumpy mattress, the two of us separated from Julián by the curtain. The next morning, we rose once again and took the same route into the city with the same driver in the same truck. I hauled more wheelbarrows full of wet cement, watched the men set it into the ground, the walkways coming together little by little. That’s what it was like for the next few weeks. I worked from very early until late into the afternoon.

  That’s how the first year went. And we were still sleeping on Julián’s flimsy mattress in his little apartment in Ajusco. He and Elena learned how to live together. In a way. Mostly, they did what they could to avoid each other, only speaking when it was necessary. There was no rudeness between them, just a polite tolerance. I was caught between my love for my wife and my loyalty to Julián. I tried maintaining the peace by always keeping us busy and distracted. The three of us strolled through parks and spent afternoons wandering around the marketplaces. On weekends we visited the museums on free days, then rented a gondola to paddle around the chinampas in Xochilmilco.

  But I knew why they resented one another, that it was my attention they both vied for.

  It was on a weekend afternoon in mid-September, after the Independence Day celebrations when we had watched the fireworks light up the night sky like falling stars. A day when the thunderclouds rolled into the valley of Mexico from behind the tall peaks of the ancient mountains and volcanoes ringing the city. They burst open with rain, and then evaporated, the sun coming out, its light refracted, broken up, as it danced in and out from behind the buildings and trees. The sidewalks were washed clean, and everywhere there was the smell of fresh rainwater. I sat at the table with Elena. We were sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes when Julián entered and removed his wet jacket.

  “Look what I have,” he said, waving a damp envelope before us. Inside there were three tickets to a lucha libre match.

  Back in the campo, I had seen copies of Box y Lucha for sale on the shelves of the newsstand beyond the church walls. Once, while buying the daily paper, I picked up an issue, thumbed through it, studying the pictures of luchadores in threatening poses. I knew that people followed the exploits of their favorite wrestlers, like daredevils.

  “I managed to get three.” Julián forced a smile in Elena’s direction. “Let’s go.”

  She took a puff from her cigarette, then said, “Maybe I’ll stay here. You two need time with each other, I guess.”