Easy Money

-by Beau Burriola

'Matt'

Candles flicker throughout the darkened room, lighting the occasional smiling face or shadow. A beautiful blonde boy named Matt, only just twenty one, sits looking across the table from his companion. He seems to glow in the candlelight, attracting the eyes of more than one person in the small bar.

Behind his beautiful smile and youthful skin, you wouldn't really notice how difficult his life is. You wouldn't know the challenges of trying to survive in this line of work, trying to protect yourself and still trying to live a normal life.

He started escorting when he was nineteen. It was an easy alternative for someone who wanted to stay up late, to party a lot and to be viewed as sexy by other folks. It was easy money, good hours and he didn't really answer to anyone. Still, it didn't take long to see the dark side: the culture, the drugs, the fear, the skepticism, the emotional confusion.

"I won't always do this," he says, sure of himself. "This is just temporary, until I can do something else."

'Drew'

Sitting across the dinner table from a usual customer, twenty seven-year-old Drew doesn't ask for money right away anymore. This client has been pretty steady for the last year or so and sometimes he wonders if the older man sitting across the table isn't getting a little too attached.
Drew is now seasoned by escort standards- he has his usual clientele and only rarely needs to find new customers. Still, after five years of being an escort, Seattle seems smaller than it ever has. He finds it a little difficult to date, difficult to say what he does for a living when people ask and still imagines doing something else.

He's still thinking about where in life he wants to go... where he wants to be.
"There's still time," he tells himself, hoping it's true.

'Johnny'

Watching the smoke rise from his cigarette, anyone might think that he has smoked for all time; that maybe this fifty-year-old man was never quite young. Indeed, the shifty eyes seem to carry a deep emptiness behind the well-controlled smile.

John has done this now for thirty years. It's a job just like any other job, he always says. Sure, it's got some tough points, rough patches and scary people but it's a job and it puts food on the table. It's what he does, all he's ever done.

It started as a way to earn money... he was always going to eventually do something else. Soon the years passed by and he never really developed another plan. Once he tried to do something else, but he found he couldn't.

He sits looking at the skeptical man in front of him.

"I thought you'd be younger," the man says at him.

"You won't be disappointed," John says in a well-rehearsed voice, but the skepticism doesn't seem to move from the man's eyes.

Silently Johnny thinks to himself how badly he needs this client.

'Sexscoriting' is an easy to get into, and hard to get out of. For those who become used to the cycle, the schedule, the people, the culture, there isn't really a fitting way out.

For Matt, days will fall into months and months into years and years will find him like Drew. For Drew, years will continue to pass, the questions will remain the same, the constant 'I'll do something else one day' never really leaves, until the years pass to decades will find him like Johnny.

As the cigarette smoke rises into the air, the man sitting across from Johnny looks down and then stands up suddenly to go.

"Where are you going," Johnny asks as the man walks away in silence.

Now alone at the table, Johnny finishes his cigarette and wonders for the first time in thirty years, "What am I going to now?"