Favorite
Nigel pinged me for my favorite poem. I’m too fried to write anything of my own at the moment. My favorite, of all the ones that have gone past my eyes? Midnight Dancer. Once a pretty boy with soft skin read it to me by the light of his computer screen. Sometimes it echoes in my thoughts when I’m not quite paying attention.
Langston Hughes
Midnight Dancer (To a Black Dancer in “The Little Savoy”)
Wine-maiden
Of the jazz-tuned night,
Lips
Sweet as purple dew,
Breasts
Like the pillows of all sweet dreams,
Who crushed
The grapes of joy
And dripped their juice
On you?
Never-Never Night
This is the story of my best friend Stitch, and the night we didn’t fuck on a welding table.
Predictably, my best friend is male. He is, in fact, the epitome of male. He is a heavyweight rower, hopefully (I still cross my fingers) Olympic-bound, and a sculptor. We came through our college art program together. He is my adopted family, my refuge. Stitch is my haven. He is also vanilla, monogamous, and Christian.
Stitch has deep-set eyes with smears of midnight blue slung around them in half-moons. He has thick black brows, thick black hair, a thick, rich voice. I am not a small woman, but his hands can span my waist and the breadth of his shoulders doubles my own. One of the first nights I met him we sat in big brown leather chairs by an open window, somewhere I forget, and he read me the Song of Solomon from his battered bible.
He occupies a strangely shaped place in my heart, not so much other-manly as other-worldly. He’s the man I would have wanted if I had grown up my own sexual complement. I was in love with him, for a laughable gap of months, the way sometimes little girls are in love with rock stars. That totally impossible, sexually incompatible, logically incomprehensible kind of way.
This story is the beginning of that laughable gap.
Eight-thirty on a Thursday night in spring four years and seven months ago, Stitch called me. I was sitting at my crappy desk trying to thread seed beads. The light was weak, I hadn’t bought new bulbs for the lamp, and my eyes hurt. I was short when I picked up the phone, a bit of a snap in my speech.
Stitch’s voice is a rumble over wires. “Hey, I mean, hi, am I interrupting?”
“Yes,” I answered. “You suck, and I hate you.”
He made an ‘Mmmmhm’ noise, the half laugh of someone who knows me too well. “Do you want to come to the studio with me? I have a thing to finish for tomorrow.”
“I don’t really have any studio work to do right now.” I knocked a few seed beads off the desk. “But no, I’ll come. I want to get out.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“I know.”
The sculpture studio of our art department was eleven blocks uptown, one of those flung-off outlier old buildings skirting the edges of where I don’t walk at night. I met the boy on the sidewalk of 117th, stuck my tongue out at him, and buried my head under his chin as he wrapped me up for a moment and blocked out the light of the street.
Stitch wore a mechanics suit in dirty blue, a one piece canvas sheath with a zipper up the front, and a black beater underneath. It was open past his navel, letting in the warm night, and the shape of his shoulders showed through. The bitter smell of his sweat filled the creases of the canvas.
“I didn’t mean to drag you out,” he said.
I thought of the seed beads rolling over my floor. “No worries, lil bro.”
“You really don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” He sounded genuinely worried, and his brown eyes had gone liquid and wary.
“I’m here already!” I cried. “I’ve come, I’m breathing deep and half asleep, I’ve come for fucks sake - Will you calm down?”
His eyes went from wary to warm. “That was brilliant. Did you think of that yourself?” He was smiling at me indulgently.
“Sometimes I am funny, you know.” I glared at him sideways. He smirked again. “Jackass,” I snarled, but it was too late; I was laughing.
Stitch was in the middle of a metals class that semester. The metal studio is on the top floor of the building, and has two steel tables and a double barn door in the corner that opens onto the roof. The roof was his favorite place to test theories; Stitch had a penchant for setting his sculptures on fire.
He gathered tools and scraps and three sheets of steel together while I puttered about in the corners of the room, knocking my sketchbook against things. Working studios are a fabulous place to putter; half-finished pieces abandoned by freshman were tucked in corners, bins of bits of sawed-off copper rods and shiny stacks of solder neatly lined up on wooden benches. The room was empty but for us. I swung myself up onto one of the tables, tucked my legs under me and watched him move, a pencil in my hand quickly forgotten.
There is something undeniably butch about men welding or soldering steel. Welding is a focused stream of slow, strong motion; the torch can give the illusion of kicking back, making the hand shake and causing bubbles in the metal. Get too wrapped up in the danger of the tool, the heat and shivery noise of burning gas, and nothing comes out right. Smooth lines come with control. I thought of holding a knife to someone’s cheek, of sliding needles into skin with a smile, the same kind of casual confidence.
Stitch had pushed a helmet with a face guard over his head, zipped his coverall up to the neck, and was working with his back to me, shielding the torch flame from view. He had two of his flat steel sheets pressed together in a right angle. A pretty welt of metal grew along the seam.
I detailed the edges of his clothing with my eyes, the brace of his feet pressed against the concrete, the impossibly broad shoulders, the impossibly thick arms. Stitch has never had an ass worth noticing, but the blend of his spine into his thighs, lean with crew muscles, is undeniably eye catching.
I caught myself undressing him, sketching in the flanks and shadows.
Stitch seems easy to mentally undress. Sometimes when we would go into the city on Saturday romps I would see women (and men) doing it, their eyes calculating, his clothes vanishing one by one in puffs of fantasy smoke.
But then, I had seen him stripped before that night in the studio, come back from late nights at the gym in sweaty spandex, peeling back the cling of the soaked fabric. I knew the color of his skin (faded tan, olive undertones), the pockmarks in his back, the lines of his hips. The web of personal history laid over the fantasy frame.
Stitch has a body of secrets. Scars, dips, invisible fingerprints. Tight bulges where he’s strained muscles most of us never use.
This night in the studio was the first time I wanted to know his secrets. Wholly, utterly. Biblically.
The entire room was humming, through the muscles of his legs to the floor and up the legs of the table I was sitting on, buzzing delicately on those sensitive lines of skin where my labia meet my thighs. His sculpture was growing, slowly.
I could see it happening, how the wires of artistic tension and sexual tension were crossing in my mind. You’re being dumb, my logical brain thought quietly. He’s your best friend, he has a girlfriend, and you don’t actually want to fuck him on a welding table. My body begged to differ, the steel under me turning warm. The seam of denim pressed to my crotch was damp.
This is how I am with art and artists. I get strung out in the tight-wire of craft and form. I chronically sensualize process and creation, when we exist in a bubble of time shaped by the things we make with our hands, and pressed together by the understanding of how the things are made.
Eventually he turned the torch off, stepped away, undid his coverall and let it fall to his waist. He tied it off in a narrow band. His smell hit me as I crept up on him: boy, Old Spice, bitterness, steel, sweat, skin.
“Oh, fuck me,” he said quietly.
“What?” I jumped a little.
He turned, gave me a wry look and a sigh. “I fucked up. See? There.” He pointed.
“Oh.”
“What did you think I said?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
He wiped a dirty forearm over his brow. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Come on, I’ll buy you a donut for coming out here with me for no reason.”
It was just you being horny, and the metal, I thought as I watched him walk home ahead of me, his long familiar stride. You’ll get over it. A soothing lie.
It took me a year to get over him.
Charcoal Willow Sticks
In one of our nude beach outings last month, a bunch of people got into a discussion about body types. This was a fairly obvious discussion to get into, surrounded as we were by naked bodies of all iterations. Eventually a theory was put forth that people automatically categorize those they see into specific body types.
The professor, who was lounging on a blanket at the time, looked at me. Simultaneously, I looked at him. We exchanged a silent nod, and then smiled.
“Yea, um,” I said. “Artists don’t actually do that.”
The professor (who teaches art) chimed in. “There’s an alternate understanding of visual relationships.” Obviously he sounded smarter. His nickname is the professor, after all.
I’m thinking about this conversation now in relation to the recent posts May and I have made about pretty men. May is a pretty man. I find him extremely attractive. But only vaguely is he “my type.” I have some generalized preferences, but in the end, I don’t have a type. And curiously, I think this kind of thinking stems directly from how art is involved with my life.
I started drawing before I can remember. I know this is so because my parents saved all my drawings for me to look at later. (Why do people do this? They saved everything. We have a whole filing cabinet full of my crayons.) But unlike most kids who can draw when they’re six but not when they’re sixteen, I didn’t grow out of drawing. I could always draw.
But then, even though I could always draw there was a specified starting point when I began to educate myself about drawing. Seven or so years ago I began taking classes. I read some books. I fought like hell to get into a drawing class as a college freshman that I would never have been allowed to take if I hadn’t been as talented as I was. The class was taught by a short dumpy man, bitter, balding, who would wear brightly colored ties and tell us stories about eating in diners with Jackson Pollock. He never uttered a word of praise in his entire class, he was vicious tearing into people’s motivations, and he could break sight into shape and line like a child hitting windows with a baseball bat. He was also a famous professor, in demand, brilliant, and had no qualms in showing it. I was a little bit in love with him.
I might have been a little bit in love with him because he was the first person to say this to me out loud: “You’re going to look at the world differently, and you’re going to do it all the time. And,” he would sometimes add, “you’re going to work to do it.”
This was the year I consciously recognized that I was redefining my visual relationships all the time. Not just in class, not just with a sketchbook in my hand. This was also the year I came out as bi. It was the year I joined the public scene. Are these things related? Bisexuality, at least, makes a lot more sense to me when beauty conveys itself in abstracts rather than gendered archetypes.
When you first start to draw, a common practice is to create an image of a face. Your face, maybe. So you draw two eyes, and a nose and a mouth, you give it some hair and ears and a line that encircles the head, and then you sit back and start thinking why the hell it looks nothing like you.
Similarly, you could draw your own body. If you’re a woman, you draw a head atop a neck, with shoulders and arms, breasts, waist, legs, feet. Again. Nothing like you.
Then you start thinking about how the pieces fit together, and the way that the creases in the skin can be echoed by your pencil on the page, and how shapes superimpose themselves.
This is the thing I learned very, very quickly as an artist: Holding a preconceived or stereotyped notion of body image is the fastest possible way to fuck up your figure drawing.
When I look at faces I see lines and shapes. I see cheekbones in relation to eyes in relation to the spacing of the forehead and the chin. When I look at bodies I see planes and angles and negative space. I see details, curves, and intersections. I find these elements more interesting, and in many cases much more attractive than specific body parts or specific adherences to aesthetic codes.
Seriously, would you like to help yourself break down the cultural imprints of stereotypical imagery in your brain? Learn to draw.
What does this mean for me? For one, it means that the people I’m attracted to look very different from one another. It means that I have never had a lover or partner I did not find aesthetic pleasure in. It feels slightly as though I’ve expanded my conscious perception of beauty as reflected in human aesthetics.
It also means that the thought processes in my head seem to work differently than those around me. I like different kinds of pornography. I point out different people on the street. I notice quirky details, and then notice myself noticing them and wonder if that’s the artist in me coming out.
