A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Read Online Free Page A

bodies like silvery, shot arrows lining the Embarcadero and Baker’s Beach and spreading outward on waves to Sausalito. Fridays were open buffet at Song Hay, and Judd could have been there that last night, but the restaurant was so busy that the cashier couldn’t remember just one boy. An attendant at the Ginn Wall parking lot may have seen Judd, but there was nothing distinctive about my cousin’s face, and in the darkness at the corner of the lot a slouching boy in a denim jacket was the least of things to notice. With a Chamber of Commerce city map, I tried to reinvent his path, tracing the cold hard steps he might have taken past the Greyhound Bus Depot and maybe on to the Flower Terminal where the chrysanthemums must have glowed, to him, like an eerie experiment set in white rain. North or south from there, perhaps unable to hitch a ride to Sonoma, cold and breathless and stinging with enough life to ground three people, my cousin turned, wherever he was, and finally headed for the nailhead lights of the Golden Gate Bridge.
    That’s where I stopped reimagining the scene—the place where Judd put on his Walkman and stepped into air. No one knew how he got past the attendants at the tollbooths. Magic, determination—my cousin wanted to fly, the music pounding in his ears, the rough wind making its momentary promises.
    In the gloomy days before the funeral, no one thought about Judd’s hair, about the way he had wanted to be. By the time we gave instructions, we were too late. Hyberland’s Mortuary had already used army clippers on him.
    Judd’s mother, entranced, made endless pots of coffee, and it was not until months later that she said it: “release.” Sitting at the kitchen table, our hearts turned liquid and we finally caved in.
    Now, years later, there are other words we can’t get past: “winter,” “midnight.” Even “water” hits us like a clap of thunder.

A Map of Kansas
    E arly on a June morning my relatives come driving in from places small and windswept, places with the names of lost souls: Netawaka, Leavenworth, Skiddy, Sabetha. Those who live in the Far West—Liberal or Scott County—have driven through the night or stopped in one of the gray, mid-state, freeway towns where motels raise holy hell with each other in their war for customers. I’ve seen the signs and come-ons before—Better Queen Sized Beds, Super Satellite Cable, Free Ham and Egg Breakfast—and I’ve usually been fortunate enough to have somewhere else to stay. A desperate Imperial Inn or Regal 8, say in Salina or Garden City or anywhere in the great slackened palm of mid-Kansas, can signal the beginning of a long and lonely night.
    My aunts and uncles and cousins, my half relatives and step-cousins, people who claim to be related to us, and people who belong to our family only by accident or indiscretion—all of them head home for the reunion early on a June morning. They do sixty and seventymiles an hour on the highways, the fields of wheat and sorghum and foot-high corn whipping by in a sweet fast-forward. The rural premise here is to get where you’re going. Their windshields fill with the delicate blue and yellow and black of early morning swarms. Almost always there is a baby crying from the back seat and almost always one of my aunts or cousins will turn around from the front seat with a bottle or a Tootsie Pop or a half-serious warning or begin to tiredly open up her blouse. My relatives travel the prairies at the speed of light to get home, maybe to be the first to arrive, maybe to get the long and lonely ride over with—star to star, town to town.
    I know long and lonely. I also know joy and comfort and being wanted. My life has taken a wandering path, and maybe I’m smarter because of this. Jean, my mother, thinks we’re smarter for having moved to California almost ten years ago, though the day we packed the U-Haul