A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Read Online Free

bottom, some man thinking it is love.
    Blair makes the sound of a wounded duck, which is the combination of a honk and a wheeze. It is not something I would equate with passion, not a sound that I think of in response to my mother’s pear-colored skin. In the room next to theirs, I am reading, studying, fighting my way into a book, and that sound goes on forever. The walls of this house aren’t thick enough to keep that kind of sadness contained.
    I’m sitting at the desk with the English book in my hands, though it just as well be a jellyfish or a brick. The noise goes higher, louder, the duck becomes inconsolable. I strain, but the words on the page are futile hash marks.
    Ten steps and I am at the front door, then out into the night, walking as quickly as I can. I live on an old quiet street that’s blessed with big trees and where people still use push mowers. The houses are nothing special—bland with red brick, too symmetric with their sidekicker porches. I know some of the names here: Peterson, Barnett, Stanopolous. The only time I’ve seen the police on this street is the afternoon that Nelda Peterson’s eighty-year-old mother fell flat dead in the azaleas and lay there like she was floating until her son-in-law came home that night. That’s the only fatality I know of on this street—that is, if you don’t count my mother.
    When I get to the end of our block, I turn around, and back there is our house—2431—and from this distance my mother’s lighted bedroom window is no bigger than a postage stamp. My heart is beating recklessly and my hands would be so much better if they had something to hold. I take a breath—the kind that stings the back of your throat—and then I count to ten or twenty or a hundred thousand. Nothing changes. The lights do not flicker. The moon doesn’t dip. The sky does not go dark as oil.
    I turn around and continue on to the next block and the next, past a row of stores, beyond Ace Hardware, into other neighborhoods where both rambling houses and rattletraps perch at the edge of great lawns, where porchlights shine hot as meteors welcoming somebodyhome. When finally I don’t know where I am anymore, I get smart, as my mother would say. I turn and start back, and at last I’m calm on those sidewalks, I’m limp and light. I watch my feet all the way home, step after step—no melody, no rhythm—until all I know is the beauty of my own shoes.

Evolution of words
    I tried to see the city as he must have seen it—a miracle of light, the rain-wet streets opening from Battery to Sansome and finally down to Grant. Judd hadn’t slept in four nights, and so, when he left his parents’ house on the fifth night and walked downtown, the city must have spun with music for him. He was seventeen and sleepless and that close to what his mother would later call “release.”
    We cried at that. Release. The idea of Judd walking in Chinatown the fifth night, change in his pockets, the on-and-off rain a passage into something we had no knowledge of. He liked it there—Chinatown—the piles of foreign newspapers, the boys with braids, with needletracks dancing up their thin arms. San Francisco was a waking dream that my cousin Judd walked through tirelessly. He didn’t want a car.
Leslie Prada and Her Topless Love Act
was something he had to see on foot, next door to The Condor, across from Dutch Boy Paints,and only a half block down from El Cid’s
He and She Revue
. “Get a job and you can have a car,” Judd’s parents told him, but he continued to walk from Nob Hill to Lands’ End in tennis shoes and T-shirt, with the long dark hair that would be cut before he was buried. No one knew where my cousin’s spending money came from.
    For months afterward I looked for answers by trying to re-create the scene of that shadowy fifth night, the world in rags. Even fish sleep, their