Chapter 5 Business
Business
It’s lunchtime, and I’m back in the restroom.
It’s empty except for me. I’m in the far stall, working on my laptop, my Beats headphones wrapped around my head.
I texted Emma a few minutes ago and told her that I had to study for a test and that I would catch up with her at the end of lunch.
She expressed her disappointment because she thought we would spend the entire lunch hour talking about the sex we’re supposed to have tonight.
I’m not studying of course. Yes, I’m trying to avoid Emma right now, but I’m also actually working. I have a backlog of dozens of videos that I haven’t gotten around to editing yet. And if I want to make some money, I need to get this done.
What is “this”? Well, many people would probably judge me harshly if they knew. But I would beg them to hear me out, take them back to the beginning so they could at least try to understand.
I suffer from occasional anxiety attacks. I don’t know if something’s broken in my brain or if it’s not psychological at all and stems from something physical.
There are movies in which certain characters, usually timid or nerdy ones, will sometimes panic when confronted with a difficult situation, and they’ll pull out an asthma inhaler and breathe in desperately.
I’m sometimes sort of like those characters—although I don’t have asthma, I don’t have an inhaler, and my panic will bubble up out of nowhere.
Like, I’ll be on my computer, writing code, and all of a sudden I’ll start thinking about death for no reason.
And my mind will spiral out of control, and I’ll feel pain in the pit of my stomach or right in the center of my heart.
One of the random things I worry about, that will pop up out of nowhere, is money.
My parents have made clear that they’re not helping me financially with college at all, mainly because they’ve been paying for Nash’s college expenses (he is the Golden Boy after all) and both of them are still paying off their own student loans. There’s nothing left for me.
Also, I wasn’t a part of my parents’ plans in the first place, really.
One time when my mom was lit from a couple glasses of wine, she let slip that I was an accident.
They weren’t expecting me. And even though both my parents are super Catholic, my mom claimed that my dad wanted her to have an abortion. But she demanded that I be born.
I’m not convinced that all this is true. But true or not, what a shitty thing to talk to your son about. In her own sick way, she was trying to express her love for me.
“Dad wanted to get rid of you,” my mom said. “I mean, sure, we could afford another child, but that meant paring down financially, buying less of the things that we wanted, going on fewer vacations, sacrificing more. But having you was worth it. I love you so much. You’re worth all the sacrifices.”
After that I was determined to find a way to pay my own way through college, without having to take out loans, because I saw how much debt my parents were in. And whenever they argued, they usually argued about money. I wanted to be financially disciplined. I needed to make a lot of money.
Last school year, when I was a junior, there was one day when I was jerking off to some gay porn in my bedroom when I noticed an announcement at the top of the home page of the site I was on. It said that people could make a lot of money if they uploaded their own videos to the site.
After researching a bit, I found out that uploaders would get a cut of advertising revenue. Plus, visitors to the site would sometimes “tip” people with money if those visitors were generous.
I decided to conduct an experiment to see if getting involved on this site would be a viable source of income.
Because I was so insecure about myself, especially when I compared myself to my brother, and because I burned with jealousy about the financial advantage given to him by my parents, I decided he would be the center of my experiment.
So I ordered a spy camera online. (I made a little freelance money working remotely as a computer programmer.) I strategically placed the camera in the vent in the bathroom that he and I share. Sometimes his showers are reeeeeeeeeeally long, so I’ve always suspected that he beats off in there.
On the first day of recording all the activity that went on in our bathroom (the camera was motion-activated), I already struck gold. When I was reviewing the footage that night, I saw my brother masturbating.
I almost immediately started editing down the footage of my brother to the hottest three minutes or so.
Now I’m not a sociopath or mean or anything, so I had the good sense to teach myself how to blur out my brother’s face on the video by watching YouTube tutorials.
I wanted to make sure that he was anonymous, couldn’t be identified.
And then, I created a user profile on the site and uploaded the video.
To my surprise, after a few days, the video started to rack up a lot of views. After all, my brother had the perfect body, complete with muscles and abs, and his dick was a sight to behold. Big, meaty, impressive, but not like freakishly huge.
I saw my cut of the ad revenue increasing, and visitors who thought the user profile belonged to my brother started depositing money into my user account, which prompted me to post more jerk-off videos of Nash.
I eventually made some of the longer shower videos available behind a paywall, and some people actually paid money to watch them. The more shower videos I posted, the more money I made.
At first, I was earning pocket money. Then, it got into the hundreds. Then, thousands.
I think the videos got so popular because, yes, Nash is objectively hot, but in some of the videos he does more than stroke his dick.
The videos with the most views and “thumbs up” are the ones in which he’s doing different things, like kissing his own biceps or gliding his tongue along his armpit or cupping his balls or—this one made me a lot of money—massaging his butt cheeks.
What started out as a little experiment turned into a very lucrative business. That’s how I was able to buy that used gray Prius by myself. That’s why I have all that money to spend on me and my friends.
I’ve told my parents and everyone else that the money comes from apps that I’ve created and sold, and everyone believes me because they all consider me a “computer genius.”
But nobody, absolutely nobody, knows how I actually make all this money.
Do I feel guilty? Do I feel like I’m doing something wrong? Absolutely. Like I said, I’m not some kind of sociopath. I know what an invasion of privacy this is. I mean, I would be pissed beyond belief if anybody did this to me.
But I’ve become intoxicated by the money, by the kind of lifestyle the money allows me to have, by the amazing future I’m heading towards because of this money.
Also, any time I think I’m going to quit doing this, I notice the look of admiration and awe that my mom and dad have whenever Nash walks by. So my actions aren’t only financially motivated, but they’re also fueled by my feelings of injustice.
By the end of my junior year of high school, the money coming in from the porn site started to dry up. It was clear that shower videos, no matter how varied, were not enough. I needed to up my game.
So I moved the spy cam to the inside of the smoke alarm in my brother’s bedroom. That’s where it is now, after being there all summer. It’s now the fall.
The lens is aimed directly at his bed, so I’ve been able to record him having sex with Alessandra.
There’s some really good money-making footage.
Aside from the vanilla sex that I was in the room for this morning, they’re also into rough stuff: tying each other up, throwing each other around.
There’s also some weird role-playing with costumes (pirates!).
I haven’t uploaded any of these videos yet. I’ve just been working on blurring Nash’s and Alessandra’s faces, which takes a lot of time.
But I also think what else has been taking me so long is that I feel super guilty—less about invading Nash’s privacy and more about invading Alessandra’s privacy. She’s a sweet girl, and she’s always been kind to me. The fact that I’ve recorded her specifically makes me feel like a shitty person.
I look at Alessandra on my laptop screen now. She’s facing the camera. My brother is having sex with her from behind, doggy-style.
I’m suddenly hit with one of my anxiety attacks. Feelings of guilt, of being bad, of being evil, of hurting other people, seize my chest.
I click out of the video. I move the file to the trash bin.
I click on the folder where I keep all of Nash’s videos. I hit the delete button.
I should take down all of Nash’s shower videos too. I’ll find some other way to make money.
I navigate to the porn site that hosts Nash’s videos so that I can start deleting.
On the home page, there are a bunch of new videos I’ve never seen before, and all of a sudden I pop a boner and get super horny.
I don’t think a lot of girls understand how sometimes guys have no control over their dicks.
This restroom may not be the perfect place to rub one out, but I’m alone and there’s time. So:
I double check that my headphones are plugged in. I click on a video that has an enticing thumbnail. Two hot dudes are blowing each other.
I unbutton and unzip my jeans and pull them down a little.
I start stroking myself, my eyes fascinated by how the dudes’ heads bob up and down, rhythmically and almost synchronized.
Then, they start having anal sex. Really loud anal sex.
Gasping, grunting, moaning, screaming. It’s almost comical, but it’s also really hot.
BOOM! Suddenly, the restroom door bursts open.
I’m so startled that I jerk my head back.
When I do so, the cord to my headphones disconnects from my laptop.
The speakers on my laptop blast out, with remarkable clarity, the sounds coming from the video, the primal noise of gay sex, the bold commands of an aggressive male voice exclaiming, “Fuck me, yeah, fuck me harder!” The voice bounces back and forth between these restroom walls, echoes loud enough to wake the dead.
I quickly try to pause the video, stop the video, click out of the video, but it’s just more “fuck me, yeah, fuck me harder!” I repeatedly press the “volume down” button, but when the sex sounds only get louder I realize I’m mistakenly pressing the “volume up” button.
I manage to hit “mute,” and all is quiet. I don’t move.
I don’t hear anything out in the bathroom. Is the person who came in still here? He could’ve gone out, but I wouldn’t have necessarily heard him leave because the video was so loud and I was so panicked.
I decide to wait quietly. One minute, two minutes. It’s still silent. I guess it’s all clear.
Abort mission. I slip my laptop into my backpack. I pull up my pants. I open the stall door.
When I reach the sink, I notice, in the reflection in the mirror, my best friend Oscar standing by the door. It seems that when he walked in and heard what he heard he froze. He’s now looking at me, confused.
“Hunter?” is all he says.
Even if I could respond right now, I have no idea what the hell I would say.