I turn back to his laptop and open the screen before moving his wireless mouse across the pad. The main desktop screen pops up, and there’s a beautiful image of a shirtless angel, his wings spread out, as he emerges from a raging fire beneath him.
“Shit, shit, shit,” shouts Scott. I turn to find him hopping to his feet, his dick swaying about as he hurries over.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“Sorry. I meant to close that when I was done.”
I look back and notice that the image of the angel is opened up in Photoshop. “Holy shit,” I say. “This is the thing that you think is full of issues?”
“It’s not finished yet.” He leans over me and closes out of the screen.
“Are you fucking shitting me right now? That was beautiful.”
“It’s not like I made that hot man. I got him from a photographer I met online, and then I just put together the other images from stock photos. But it needs a lot of work.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t shown me this shit already. It’s really good.”
“Thanks.”
But he doesn’t sound like it means anything to him, and I want him to understand how incredible I think this is.
“I’m not saying that to be generous or to just say it. Like, I don’t even know how you did that.”
“A little Photoshop and a lot of hours.”
“This is such a big part of your life, Scott. I would love if you would show me some of it. At least, stuff that you would be okay with me seeing.”
“Really?”
I can tell I’m one of the few—if not only—people who have asked to see his work. That frustrates me. His family should be more supportive. His dad, especially. I don’t doubt that he loves him, but this is his son’s life.
“You mind if we take it over to the bed?” I ask him. “And then maybe you can pull up some of the ones you’re proud of? I can at least see those.”
“I’d actually really like that.”
We take the laptop onto the blow-up mattress. He opens several image files before setting the laptop on my legs and pulling up the first. It’s the image of two men holding each other in a garden with a snake descending from a tree.
“Obviously I couldn’t Photoshop the men kissing. I’m not a miracle worker, but they were on a bed initially, so I had to move them into this scene, which was a field initially that I had to turn into a jungle for the Garden of Eden.”
“And who was this for?”
‘Oh, this was just something I did for me. Like for fun. Did you just want to see stuff I work on for clients?”
“Fuck no. This is exactly what I wanted you to show me. How did you get into this? Like, how did you first know this was something you were into?”
“A lot of fucking around on the computer when I was a kid. When I first knew how to use Paint, I would cut out different images that I saw online and sort of put together these scenes that I thought looked cool. One of the first ones I did was an ocean, and I grabbed a bunch of different images of fish from online. I mean, you’d think it looked crappy as fuck, but I was eight when I did it, so I thought it was the shit. I even had this cool shark image—”
“You’ve been doing this since you were eight?”
“Oh yeah. And I just got deeper and deeper into it as I got older. Never really could shake it. It was like my own sort of art.’
“It’s not sort of art. Itisart.”
“Thank you.”
He smiles, but I’m so fucking pissed right now. “I don’t know how your family can see this shit and not admire what you do.”
“In fairness to my dad, he didn’t really ever get to see most of this stuff. When I was little, I tried to show him a few of these, and he wasn’t interested. And by the time I was in high school, they became very dirty. Like my discovery of porn collided with this, and it was just filthy picture after filthy picture. Thank God I had my own laptop because Dad would have been horrified if he’d seen half the things I’d created.”
