Mural
One
IT WAS ONLY OCTOBER and college was a bust. My best friend from high school was excited and having a great time—on the other coast. For me, it was depressing. I wasn’t going to last until Thanksgiving.
It was my own fault, I suppose. I could have gone to the University of Nebraska and been an art major. Instead, I was blown away when The Pacific College of the Arts and Design, a small and exclusive college on the West Coast that was my ‘reach’ school, accepted me and I decided to attend. Not only that, but they’d offered me a financial aid package that meant I might escape college only about thirty grand in debt instead of sixty. My portfolio was weak, but I’d managed to sell it well enough that the school actively recruited me and I fell for it. Now I was regretting it.
It wasn’t very intellectually challenging. The school didn’t offer a liberal arts BA; I was in a Bachelor of Fine Arts program. I had enjoyed the academic classes in high school and did well in both AP English and AP Math. But my only pseudo-liberal arts course in college was Art History taught by a boring old fossil. It was a three-hour class that met twice a week. We walked into class, he turned off the lights, turned on a slide projector, and everyone went to sleep.
The Fundamentals class was no better. We were ‘taught’ all the menial tasks of studio art. That meant six hours a week of stretching canvases, doing paint-overs, and scrubbing the studio floors. Over and over. Freshmen were pretty much the slaves of everyone else in the department. As far as I could tell there wasn’t even a sophomore who cleaned his own brushes. How I managed to get both Studio Fundamentals and Visual Concepts the same year is beyond me. I guess it’s because I got a pass from taking English Comp because of my high school AP scores, so they moved Concepts up a year.
The one bright spot in my schedule was my three-hour elective lab on Fridays in Figure Drawing. It combined basic anatomy drawing and live model drawing. There was a lot of sketching skeletons in the first three weeks, but then we had our first live model. Don’t get excited. It was the professor’s mother who came in and sat for a portrait sketch. In other words, she sat in a rocking chair and knitted for three hours while we drew her face and hands. The good part was that she had a really interesting face and you could tell she’d done this before because she really did hold a single expression for each of the posing sessions. Of course, she had the same expression on her face during her breaks.
Three weeks into school I had my golden birthday. That’s when your age matches the day you’re born on. I was 19 on September 19th. I had a phone call that night with my folks and about a dozen text messages with my best friend, Beth, out East. Nobody else knew—or cared. Whoopee.
Classes continued to drag on. I built frames, sized canvases, sorted fabric, wood, and metal scraps into bins, helped unload a massive rock from a truck, and burned my elbow on the kiln. Everything was crappy, including the weather. It was dark when I went to my first class and dark when I got back to my dorm room. I hardly ever heard from Beth anymore. Too busy. I called my folks every week, but they kept asking how it was going and I didn’t want to tell them.
The high point of my week was going to a local racquet club to play racquetball. Dad had insisted that I have some physical exercise while I was at college. I was going to an art school. There wasn’t even a gym. Racquetball was the best I could do, and I liked playing. Still, that was only a few hours a week and I was tempted to quit that, too, if it wasn’t for the one hottie that I sometimes got to play against. She was some kind of national champion, so she creamed me on a regular basis, but just watching her work up a sweat was usually good for keeping my spirits and other things up another couple of hours—or until I got back to the dorm.
It wasn’t until late October that we got our first nude model in Figure Drawing. We knew something was up when we came into the studio that Friday and the temperature was about ten degrees higher than normal. Professor McIntyre explained that this was for the comfort of the model. I was sweating. The model was a woman about forty years old, who I recognized from sketches that decorated the walls from years past. She was a little overweight, but I guess attractive enough. Not enough to be beating off to her image that night. I looked around the studio briefly when she had taken her first pose. None of the other students seemed all that enthused about drawing her either.
Of course, all the other students in the class were girls. Five of the twenty of us were freshmen. This model certainly wasn’t showing any of them anything they weren’t already intimately familiar with. We drew and I actually left with a couple pretty decent sketches. There were nineteen other women in the class I’d rather have been looking at naked.
On the way out of class, three of my favorites who I had lunch with on many Fridays fell into step on either side of me. I could tell something was up.
“Well, did you get an eyeful?” Sandra asked.
“That wasn’t your first time seeing a naked woman, was it?” Melody joined in.
“Didn’t she just get you all hot?”
“Did you sprout a woody? You stayed behind your easel the whole class,” Amy asked.
“Oh come on, you guys. She’s a model. Who’s going to get turned on while they’re drawing?”
“Don’t tell me you aren’t interested in women!” Melody sounded shocked.
“All right,” Sandra rejoined, “we’ll have to hold this conversation after we’ve had a male model. It’s no fun teasing someone who won’t get embarrassed.” Actually, at that mention I was embarrassed. I was—shall we say—sexually inexperienced, but I wasn’t gay. All my life, though, people just assumed that if you were a male artist, you must be gay. Granted, I was sensitive, quiet, and a bit shy around girls, but I was definitely interested in them. Melody, especially. She was about 5'2" and nicely shaped. I’d done a few covert sketches of her when I was supposed to be drawing hands or feet of a model. Back in my room, I’d even enhanced a few of them into imagined nudes. I thought about the shape of her breasts and the size of her nipples. It wasn’t like I hadn’t noticed when they hardened under her t-shirt. Women don’t seem to have any more control over the headlights than guys have over their cocks.
Talking to her was something altogether different. I was fine as long as we were just palling around the cafeteria or the studio, but I’d never be able to ask her out. The few times I’d been with her without another friend, I hadn’t been able to say two words. Besides, I’d heard she had a big scary boyfriend. I was relieved that Sandra and Amy were always around. The three amigas. I don’t think I could have been alone with Melody and survived.
It took me all of two weeks at school to figure out why I’d been recruited so aggressively by the admissions office. I was the only guy in studio arts who wanted to study painting instead of animation. At first I’d just thought it was weird that I had a Figure Drawing class with nineteen girls and me. It’s the same as when I was in high school. Guy in art? Of course, he must be gay, right?
I didn’t go home over Thanksgiving break. It’s over 1,500 miles and we aren’t rich. I ate turkey loaf in the cafeteria. We still hadn’t seen a male nude in Figure Drawing. It wasn’t like we had a lot of body builders in the art school lining up to model. In high school it was like a big initiation for the jocks to model for the senior art class after they turned eighteen. Pay was never mentioned. School rules said the guys had to wear jockstraps. Girls had to wear bikinis.
The first Friday of December, we were finally expecting this older guy, who’d done one of our portrait sessions, to show up as our first male nude.
Dr. Bychkova, my art history professor stopped me in the hall before class to ask about my progress on some stupid paper I was supposed to write, so I was late walking into the studio.
The semicircle of easels had been pulled a little closer around the posing platform and every single one of my nineteen classmates was in position waiting. Don’t ever believe that women aren’t as curious about the opposite sex as men. They’d been waiting for this day all semester. Even Amy had managed a spot near the center, and she’s definitely gay. I got the last position at the end of the semicircle where, if I was lucky, I’d see a profile of the model’s head and one butt cheek. It would be a great drawing. Ha ha. Professor McIntyre came into the class and walked to the dais. She gave a sigh.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Johnson (yeah that was his real name) called in sick. I just got the word from the office. Since we don’t have a model, we’ll work from a manikin for today.”
“No fair!” The girl who blurted out the sentiments of all the girls in the class was Sandra, and her easel was dead center. She’d probably come in twenty minutes early to get that spot. But she wasn’t the only one grumbling. There was a general dissent in the class.
“What can I do?” Prof asked. “I can’t materialize a model out of thin air. Believe me, this class would be a lot easier to teach if I could.”
“Let Tony model.” I almost swallowed the pencil I had between my teeth as I was fastening paper to my easel. Me? Who made that suggestion? I looked across the easels and saw Melody grinning broadly.
“That suggestion is flawed. Tony hasn’t asked or agreed to model. If he had, it is still inappropriate to expose a classmate. I’d say the same thing if you had suggested a woman. And it would be unfair to Tony to spend three hours posing and not drawing.”
“I don’t mind.” Was that my voice that just spoke? Geez! What was I doing? Professor McIntyre looked at me. I felt the heat rise in my face and knew I was red. But, shit! Melody had just asked to see me naked. “Um… I mean… I’d rather not draw pictures of a manikin, anyway. I assume that by ‘being exposed,’ you mean my privates and I’ve got a jockstrap in my bag. I could wear that.” I was getting redder the longer I talked. I’d just told a class full of girls that I was carrying a jockstrap!
“You just happen to have an athletic supporter in your bag when you attend this class, Tony?”
“I usually go play racquetball after class on Fridays. It’s my gym bag.”
“And do you have your racquet with you as well?”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was total silence in the room as Professor McIntyre thought about it. You could feel the tension from the girls.
“Are there any students here who would feel uncomfortable having Tony model for the class while wearing an athletic supporter? Anyone at all in any way? Please be absolutely free to speak up. If it would make you embarrassed to have your classmate up here, say so. This is an art class. Art is not necessarily sexuality. The purpose of this class is to study the figure, not to embarrass or titillate. Please say now if this proposition is not okay with you.” I almost raised my hand, but I’d committed. I wasn’t going to back down now. No one in the class said a word. If I had to guess, I’d say they were all holding their breath.
“Okay. Tony, if you are sure you are okay with this, then please step behind the drape and get ready. Bring your racquet out with you. I’d like to see some action poses.”
Action poses. Right.
While I stripped off behind the drape and put on my jock I could hear Professor McIntyre continue to lecture the girls in the class quietly. She made it very clear that if they could not maintain a professional attitude when ‘the model’ was on stage that class would be immediately dismissed.
I’d worked with nude models before. We had a pretty progressive art program in high school and students who were over eighteen years old were invited to a weekly sitting that was technically not on school grounds, but still had ‘club’ status. It was held at the local art store where several art classes were held. The owner brought a model in from Omaha once a week. None of us knew who he or she was and we seldom saw the same person twice. But I knew what needed to be done.
When Prof asked if I was ready, I took a deep breath and croaked out the word “yes.” I walked out onto the dais and kept my eyes focused on Prof, intentionally not looking at anyone else in the class.
“Tony, I presume this is your first time as a model. Keep in mind that you need to make sure you are comfortable in your pose and can hold it for fifteen minutes. We’ll change poses then, and again at half an hour. At forty-five minutes, you get a fifteen-minute break. Don’t do anything that forces you to hold a strenuous pose. No balancing on your toes or one leg or anything. Let’s start with a common racquetball pose. You’re waiting for the serve. Feet shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, racquet in front held in both hands, facing straight forward.” I had no idea that Prof knew so much about racquetball.
I’m not particularly self-conscious about my body—most of it. It’s not like I’m ripped or anything, but at nineteen, I’m not overweight either. Sometimes I even manage to play racquetball twice in a week if I can escape from homework. So I guess I was in pretty good shape. Posing like I was waiting for the serve was an easy thing to do. The model platform was raised about a foot-and-a-half above the floor so artists could look over their drawing pads and see the model. That meant that if I looked straight ahead, I was looking over the tops of my classmates and didn’t have to make eye contact with any of them. I reminded myself that they were just a roomful of artists and not nineteen sexy female classmates.
I just stood there in the pose Prof had dictated. In my mind’s eye I built the end wall of the court and could almost see where the ball would hit. When her timer went off at fifteen minutes, I found myself in a Zen-like trance. I don’t know where I went while my body posed, but as soon as Prof directed me into a backhand position, I returned there. I held my racquet in my hand in one position and could imagine what it would look like on paper. I could see the strings in their weave and the tension in my own muscles. I knew that if I left the class right now, I could draw the same pose. The class flew by. Before I knew it, Prof told me to go back and get dressed. When I came out five minutes later, the girls all applauded and said thank you. All told, it was pretty cool.
With racquetball after lunch and getting to play against Lissa, the cute champion, I didn’t get depressed again until I woke up Saturday morning.
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