Chance (Part I)

The frustrated dreams of adolescence haunt you for the rest of your life, and you take any shortcut when you see that you can achieve them.

At 23, Gaspar had taken a shortcut. He liked to dance, and at 14, he danced in front of the windows of a store with his friends, to the annoyance of his parents. But he never got to dance seriously. He didn't study either and barely finished his secondary education. At 18, he started working at whatever he could, and he ended up doing it for almost two years at a soft drink distributor. He had to be there at 6:00 AM to be assigned a truck and drive a long route, carrying boxes of soda in various types of packaging from the truck to supermarkets, neighborhood stores, restaurants, and casinos, in a tedious and numbing routine.

It was a job that required notable physical exercise, which he didn't dislike, and perhaps it was the only thing that motivated him. At 19, he had left his parents' house due to his tense and conflictive relationship with both of them. He ended up living in a small room, close to his workplace.

What anguished and desperate him was that this boring and irrelevant job consumed him, because he didn't forget his dreams.

He liked to dance, and every Saturday, almost religiously, he went to nightclubs where he could do so: discos, bars, event centers, themed parties. He saved up for it. He dressed up for the event. He wasn't ugly, but he had that appearance of a worker that didn't fit well with university students and professionals, because he enjoyed those environments more. He had a group of friends with whom he arranged those outings: it was a variable group, between four and six people, close to his age. He was the only manual worker; the others were professionals, office workers, and university students, with some of whom he ended up having sex. Yes, in his adolescence, Gaspar had discovered that he liked men. It's true, he tried to establish relationships with a neighbor, but it didn't work out; you can't contradict the obvious.

He made an effort to produce himself, although the result was insufficient, according to his own expectations.

He had a piercing on his eyebrow, a septum in his nasal fossae, another in each ear, and he thought about getting more, but he lacked the money. He wanted to get a tattoo on his arm, but he couldn't find the right image.

Gaspar had a good body, relatively tall (175 cm), thin (67 kg), but toned, with little hair, and he didn't have a beard or mustache, and his hair was almost shaved on the sides and more abundant on the rest of his head, which highlighted a fairly harmonious and even attractive anatomy.

He was a good soccer player. On Sundays, he usually played with a team that a coworker, a driver of one of the distributor's trucks, had invited him to.

That night, they went to a new nightclub, frequented almost exclusively by homosexuals. He went with four young men, and they...