Henry woke up, and fumbled for the coffee pot remote. Only when he knocked the phone off its cradle did he remember he was in the hotel. He dialed room service and mumbled out “coffee” before falling back asleep until the knock on the door woke him up.

After two cups of decent coffee, he roused himself to shower and get himself together. He found himself humming while he cleaned up, and even smiling when he found a few thigh hairs painfully stuck together with cum.

Only after he had his shirt and pants on did he realize something wasn’t right. Of course. The money. He looked around the room, but there was no envelope, discreetly or indiscreetly placed.

Fuck. It wasn’t that he thought Colin wasn’t good for it, but it would be an awkward conversation to have. He decided he’d have Sunita do the dirty work.

Ready to leave, he put on his suit jacket and felt a soft poke. He reached inside and pulled out the envelope and laughed. Now that was subtle, he thought with admiration.

Henry counted the money, not out of distrust but out of hope that the tip would be $200 again and he could pay Con Ed and maybe even see a play.

He whistled when he got to $2,500. Five hundred bucks! Play time!

Then he recalled the 20% tuition increase at Christina’s school. Okay, he thought. Two hundred bucks of playtime.

All the same, it was a great start to the day.

* * *

He got home, and changed into his cargo shorts and t shirt, and took himself out for a nice breakfast.

After eggs Benedict, toast, bacon, hash browns, and fruit, all of which he wolfed down with the voracious appetite of a defensive lineman, he was ready to write.

He felt very retro, pulling out his Moleskine notebook rather than a digital one, and his two Uni-Ball Micro Elite Black pens (always two, in case one abruptly went dry in the middle of a brilliant sentence).

This, before Christina’s transfer to private school, had been the whole point of being Hamilton instead of Henry. He’d become Hamilton to buy time, literally. To buy his way out of a scheduled existence set for him by someone else, temping X hours a day warming a chair in a cubicle when a secretary was on vacation – because no matter how efficient the secretary or how well-timed her departure, it was necessary to her boss’ image that her station be manned, however idly. Or he’d spend the day fixing typos in someone’s PowerPoint, astonished that someone could get a MBA without mastering the basics of grammar, spelling and punctuation along the way.

Like many a young man before and after him, given the choice between selling himself to another man for one night, versus selling himself to a corporation for several weeks for the same amount, minus taxes, and losing all that time that could have been better spent on other things, well…

Henry was a writer, or certainly planned to be, as soon as he could get something written. Hamilton had been born to buy him the freedom to write, to think, to create.

His great dark secret throughout his writing classes in college had been that he didn’t want to write nuanced short stories that put a marriage under a microscope. He didn’t want to play with language and hear the music and make it all about the sentences. He didn’t want to close his eyes and nod rapturously when listening to the other students’ imitation New Yorker stories.

No, Henry wanted to write screenplays. For movies. He didn’t want to linger for a decade on a single short prose piece, like a Zen gardener, never satisfied but always hoping that pushing one grain of sand into a new position would finally create perfection.

He wanted a bigger canvas. The biggest one. He wanted to see his name in monolithic letters up there on the screen on opening night: WRITTEN BY HENRY DAVIS.

He wasn’t stupid, he knew the audience didn’t give a shit about anyone but the stars, or maybe the director, but still. None of it happened without the writer, the story.

He read scripts, and read more scripts, astonished by the number of them available free and legally on the web. He learned what not to do: avoid purple prose, not only in the dialogue but outside it; so no garnishes and flourishes like “EXT – DAY – FIELD OF FLOWERS. The morning is dewy with roseate strands of light dappling the peonies like faeries dashing home late from their nightly revels blah blah blah.”

He learned what he liked best (dark comedy) and least (anything whose beats and transitions were so formulaic that he could predict the “bathroom moment,” that five minute regrouping between acts 2 and 3 where you know you’ll miss nothing if you step out to pee). He learned about devising short, sharp character descriptions. He learned the Seven Point Story Structure, he read Syd Field and Lew Hunter and David Trottier and Alex Epstein and Michael Lent (and skimmed Robert McKee and Save the Cat but fuck that). He worked and worked on his skill set until he was ready to write.

The problem now was, that in three years of “freedom,” nothing had really come to him. Ideas, sure, sentences, a few gems of witty repartee. A situation, a concept, a character, but none of them anything other than bits of stuff floating around his subconscious, none of them merging and fucking to propagate other ideas.

He spent a lot of his free time in cafés, looking at a blank page and waiting for something. For the coffee or the sugar or a face on the street or a bolt of lightning to boot up his right brain, for the Ouija spirit to descend upon him and move his hand, picking out the letters for him.

He’d get as far as writing the fundamental script opening: EXT – DAY - … then scribble it out and write INT – DAY. And then what? Where? Who? Why?

He thought about writing about his father, like everyone else in college had, but that failed for a number of reasons. His father had worked hard and died early, but not before seeing the evidence that Henry was a good person (if you didn’t deny him that over things like sex work), mostly thanks to the efforts of Henry Senior.

It was no surprise that, given the eccentric artist he’d married, his father had accepted Henry’s early declaration of homosexuality with little more than a look into the distance, and a few words of perpetual astonishment at how many people couldn’t sleep at night, because they were so worried about who was fucking who.

There was little drama to be had in that story, certainly not the sort of action that would sustain a movie. And Henry became ill at the thought of a sentimental Mitch Albom-style memoir of their good times together, ended too early by Henry Senior’s heart attack, dead before his head hit the desk.

The rest of his mad artistic family, well, that would certainly be a story. But not one he could tell without all of them falling over each other to correct him or, more likely, demand that their own parts, however harsh the spotlight on their characters, be larger than anyone else’s.

He couldn’t even write about escorting, he thought. It was just a job. He did it well, like it or not, and sometimes he liked it and sometimes he didn’t, and when he really hated it or felt in danger, he was a big strong man and could just leave and say fuck the money, I don’t need this. And since that was the best working situation in the world, how could he complain? Besides, he was haunted by the horrible likelihood that anything he wrote in that department would turn into Pretty Woman, and that would not do.

He hadn’t really learned any Important Life Lessons about humanity from the job that he thought the world would benefit from. Everyone already knew that lonely people were willing to pay for company in all manner of ways, whether that was getting an entourage, or staying in an abusive relationship, or paying someone to hold you and listen to you talk about your job at the Box Factory when nobody else wanted to hear about it.

“Write what you know” was a universally accepted law of writing, but Henry was now finding the truth of the second law, which was, “And if you don’t know anything worth writing, you’re going to have to make some shit up.”

Instead, he found himself thinking about Colin. About their night together, and about what was to come next. God, the sex had been good. As far as he knew, it was the first time he’d ravished a virgin. And he knew damn well he’d never cum like that on an escort date – he’d always given his clients the Big Finish, but it hadn’t… With other clients, he made it happen, whereas last night, there’d been no stopping it.

Henry felt a bit uneasy about what had transpired. He’d said to Colin, and meant it, “If I met you in a bar, I’d walk right up to you and say, let’s fuck.” And Colin had told him he was too much the gentleman to do a thing like that.

No, he wasn’t, but he never would do that. But, Henry smiled, Hamilton might, with a few drinks in him. Henry would never have the nerve.

He liked Colin. Colin had turned him on, and more than that, Colin had made him laugh. A lot. How often did he laugh on a job, genuinely laugh at something funny a client said?

He frowned. He’d promised to meet Colin for a hot dog in the park or something next time. Which “Hamilton” never did. Hamilton lived in a bubble of elegance, his clients’ idea of him, of his life, the life Henry had concocted for him. Hamilton wore a suit and went to the theater and had cocktails in classy hotel bars and fucked in five star hotel rooms.

Meeting Colin outside that bubble was… Well, it was too close to meeting Colin as “Henry.” To breaking the fourth wall, as they say in the theater, when an actor suddenly addresses the audience and they’re reminded they’re in a theater watching a play. To let Colin see Henry was unthinkable.

And when Colin had said that his real daily wardrobe was shorts and t-shirts, Henry had almost shoved Hamilton aside and blurted, “God, me too! I hate this monkey suit!”

That was a thought that made him uneasy. “Henry” couldn’t show up for a date. Nobody was paying to spend time with boring, indigent Henry, for whom two pairs of sneakers would be a sufficient shoe collection (mesh/vented for summer, leather/closed for winter, the end).

Clearly, it was time for a trip to GQ to see Benjamin for some… Henry had no idea. He wanted to say Polo or Lacoste shirt but that was probably out of fashion, there was probably some $1,000 version of a polo shirt that “Hamilton” would wear to the park, with some $500 loafers or deck shoes or whatever the fuck fashionable men were wearing these days.

Because I won’t go as Henry. He doesn’t know Henry. And he won’t. He’s paying for Hamilton, and even in Central Fucking Park, that’s what he’s going to get.