September 1979
In the orthodontist’s mirror, for the first time in two and a half years I see a mouthful of straight teeth unencumbered by shiny metal and little rubber bands. When I run my tongue over the smooth surfaces, it’s not snagged and poked by wires or sharp edges. Sure, I’ll have to wear a retainer for a few years at night and return to this dismal little office from time to time, to ensure my teeth won’t drift and collide like wayward glaciers. For now, though, after long enduring both the uncomfortable hardware and the restless nights after each painful tightening, I’m free.
I’ve no context for what I’m supposed to be feeling. There’s Freaky Friday, the body-switching novel, in which Mary Rodgers’ juvenile heroine spends a harrowing day in her mother’s literal shoes, only at last to discover that her thirteen-year-old body’s had a glow-up, thanks to her crafty mother—braces removed, hair done, a new wardrobe courtesy of daddy’s credit card. Then there’s Freaky Friday the Disney movie, in which a butch and tomboyish Jodie Foster is shown admiring her unadorned smile in the orthodontist’s chair, followed by a montage of beauty shops and department stores in which she’s transformed into a—well, a version of Jodie Foster with the very slightest of hair waves and the faintest application of pink lipstick. Still pretty butch. Still very Jodie Foster. Not exactly a model of how I might celebrate the moment.
Out in the lobby waits my mother, back erect as she perches upon the edge of a seat, legs crossed, studying the detective novel in her hand. “Let’s see,” she says at my appearance. I bare my teeth in a grimace. She peers closely and shakes her head. “Let’s hope it takes. That’s a lot of money in that mouth.”
At home, my father makes a similar show of squinting and peering in my direction. His vision is so low, though, that he can’t distinguish any difference. “If you say so,” is all he says before returning to the pile of maps on his desk. Then, “Be careful. We paid a lot for those teeth, you know.”
I know. I’ve been reminded with every bill.
It’s not as if I can rely on peers to validate what should be a positive, life-changing rite of passage. My friends don’t notice a difference, even when I allow myself to smile more than I have in the past. And my torturers, now deprived of insults like ‘brace-face’ or ‘metal mouth,’ have plenty of other ammunition against me. There’s my beanpole frame, my freakish tallness, my spectacles, the cheap clothing that always seems to be out of style, but which I have to wear for the duration of the school year. There’s my dad’s seventeen-year-old Dart with the right side long ago bashed in and never repaired, now rusted, which is always laughed at when he drops me off at extracurriculars. And then there’s my whiteness, which in an all-Black high school is both my most obvious distinction, yet the least remarked upon.
The only congratulations I receive, that first week after my braces come off, is from my orchestra teacher. He’s startled at my sudden inability to play my school-provided instrument, so used am I to a solid quarter-inch of metal abrading the insides of my lips. “No braces! It will do wonders for your embouchure!” he exclaims, clapping his hands together.
It never does.
“Hold.”
At the base of the spine, my skin twitches and pricks. The artist’s voice arrests my hand as it begins to move, however. I return it beneath the pillow, where it relocates the indentation from nestling so long beneath my head. My naked hips wriggle in protest.
“Hold,” he warns again, his voice barely audible above the whirring locusts in the branches outside.
“I’ve got an itch,” I complain. I’ve been lying in the same position for nearly an hour at this point: prone on an unmade bed, pillow beneath the right side of my face, both arms thrust beneath. My left leg is drawn up, while the right points where the man captures me from a leather-bound chair beyond the four-poster’s foot. All the practice I’ve had exchanging my body and time for cash should have made me perfect at this particular exercise of lying on a mattress without complaint. But at fifteen, remaining motionless without fidgeting is anathema to my very nature.
“Where?” he asks. I tell him. Without a word, the nude man sets aside his tin of paints and the board upon which he works, and rises to loom over me. I sigh with relief at the sensation of his nails against my skin, right where the agony is worst. He scratches back and forth for a long and satisfying moment, then runs his fingertips down my back to leave a trail of gooseflesh in their wake. I feel the flat of his palm caress my ass. Automatically I respond with shifting legs and by arching my hips with a deep, deep sigh.
Martin doesn’t like that. His hands guide me back into position, then reposition the clothing in which he’s dressed me. This week, it’s a white basketball jersey trimmed in blue and red, aesthetically pushed from the bottom almost up to my armpits. Below, a jockstrap. Adult-sized, I think, because it hangs loose around my waist. With the excess tucked on my underside, though, it’s impossible to tell. Calf-high tube socks emblazoned with red stripes around the top hug my legs. He yanks them both so taut that the cotton fabric curls my toes, makes a few final adjustments to my positioning, and settles in his seat. I listen as he picks back up his painting board, pulls closer the tray table with his brushes and water, and returns to his work. I close my eyes and commit to remaining as still and silent as possible.
It’s not the first of Martin’s watercolors for which I’ve posed. Tall stacks of his art lie atop the many old granny tables and bureaus that line his bedroom walls, each thick sheet of cotton rag separated by a layer of tissue paper, then thick cardboard. Somewhere among them is a deft study of me clad only in a tight tee, standing planted on my left foot, right toes bent on the floor, back turned to the artist, arms crossed over my chest so that only the tips appear over my shoulders. Another, completely nude save for another pair of tube socks, sleeping on an antique love seat with enough of my face buried in a chenille pillow that only the underside of my chin and nostrils are visible. A third, again in only socks, in which I sprawl in a Victorian armchair, one of my legs crooked over its arm, with a lacrosse stick angled over my knees.
All Martin’s art is beautiful, to my eyes. A few broad washes of color, a stippling of pigment to create an illusion of texture, sparse pencilled or inked lines for delineation. Every stroke is careful and considered. The finished work, a lesson in economy.
I’m not his only subject. There are a score of other men in various states of dishabille, brandishing sports-related signifiers of masculinity in varied tableaux. Separated from his many landscapes and floral still lifes, Martin’s nudes might form some kind of reimagined tarot, the subjects of his major arcana representing the spectrum from callow youth to old age. The last is represented by his unclothed self portraits, remorseless in their gaze.
Yet, as inspiring as his work may be, it’s never appeared in galleries or public shows. Perhaps he doubts his talent. Perhaps—and I tend to think this more the truth—he shuns the scrutiny that would accompany a public appearance. Either way, his moving finger paints, and having painted, moves on.
“All right. Take a look” The words, softly spoken, awaken me from my trance. So stiff that every movement is a new experience in pain, I rise from the four-poster and grab onto one of its carved columns until I’ve regained my balance. The too-large jock falls from my slim hips onto the floor as I take my first steps. The board on which he’s been painting straddles his spread thighs, angled flat to keep the paint from running. The paper still glistens where it’s wet.
The figure illustrated with sparse lines and broad washes is undeniably me. I recognize those skinny legs, somehow lent the impression of glinting hair below the knees, those narrow hips, the thin chest. He’s given me more of an ass than I actually possess, I fear. But even without much face on display, I recognize the boy as myself.
“Well?”
I cannot stand to look at myself in the mirror, but Martin’s hands have rendered me better than I deserve. “It’s beautiful.”
“Only because you are.” He sets the board onto the floor to his side, then seizes me by the wrist. Slowly he pulls me down. Every instinct warns that he expects a kiss. That’s a hard limit I’ve set from the first, though: kissing is something I never do. It’s a lie, of course. With anyone else, I love making out.
But even for cash, I dread bringing my face that close to Martin’s.
I’m relieved when instead, he pulls my hand to his cock, now stiffening between his legs. Once he’s wrapped my fingers around its obscene thickness, he whispers into my ear, “This is what you want. Right?”
I nod, grateful not to have to look at his ruined visage up close. “Right,” I say, fixing my gaze at the painting that lies on the floor beyond. I grin in an attempt to please.
That’s when he turns my head with his hands, forcing me to regard him. Our noses are scant inches away. I try not to shudder, so close to that sightless, dead left eye, that gruesome scar that curves from eyebrow to nose to jowl, a canyon of pinks and deep reds that’s ragged around its peaks.
The left half of Martin’s face is the stuff of nightmares. My eyes water as I am forced to acknowledge those brutal remains of past misfortune. Whether they arose from accident or act of violence, I do not know. I continue smiling, even as tears well.
“Your braces. They’re gone,” he remarks. I nod, not yet trusting myself to speak. “You’re even more handsome without them.”
“Let me take care of you,” is all I croak, at last breaking from his grasp. I know where he keeps the jar of Vaseline that’s his preferred lube. I retrieve it from the bedside drawer, then kneel at his feet and rub some between my fingers. Down here, with his massive dick at eye level, is where I’m more comfortable. “Relax,” I whisper, pushing at his belly. “Let me do the work.”
He lets out a long sigh as my slick fingers grease his needy flesh, and settles into his chair. His head lolls as my fingers slide back and forth over the shaft. Even at that angle, I close my eyes, so I don’t have to see his expression, or the ravages of his face.
I’d been warned about Martin’s appearance before I’d first met him, a few months before. Earl—the man whom to me is equal parts mentor, procurer, and Fagin to my Artful Dodger—had been careful to let me know what to expect. Still, when I’d arrived at Martin’s townhouse in the Fan and rapped the imposing brass knocker on the door of stained wood, I’d recoiled when it opened to reveal the figure within. Tall though I am, Martin towered over me at six foot five; though not exactly heavy, he weighed twice or more as much. Though he couldn’t have been older than sixty, he dressed like a very old man in a droopy cardigan, with the waistband of his slacks hiked up to a height Humpty Dumpty might have appreciated. His head was smooth and egg-like as well, freckled with liver spots and decorated with the shortest fringe of hair at the temples.
Then there was the face. I dared not stare at the disfigured left half, so I had unfocused my eyes and shifted them to the dour right as I proffered Earl’s business card, upon the back of which he’d scrawled this man’s address. “Kip,” I told him, using my working alias.
Martin had handed it back with a nod. “Kip.” There was a hesitation before he’d asked, “Do you still want to come in?”
I’d looked beyond the door into the man’s hallway and living room, crowded with antiques. Not spindly, delicate valuables that increase in rarity and appeal with age, but the heavy, hulking kind of antiquities inherited from family that one is loath to discard, no matter how unattractive they might be. Still, it’s tidy within, and the man was obviously waiting.
“Of course,” I’d replied, and crossed the threshold.
Later, I’d asked Earl what had happened to Martin. He’d shrugged. He didn’t know. I didn’t dare press answers from the man himself. I was too busy maintaining the fiction that nothing was wrong, that I didn’t notice his disfigurements. With each meeting, the pretense grew easier. Martin was a quiet man. A kind man. Even before he’d begun to pose me for painting, he took his pleasure in providing outfits for me to wear during our encounters. Tube socks with stripes were his fetish; he kept a plastic-wrapped 12-pack of them in a trunk at the bottom of his bed from which he would peel a fresh white pair with every visit. While he knelt and stretched out the elastic opening, I would slip my feet into one after the other, like Cinderella stepping into her Prince’s slipper.
With shaking hands, Martin put me into my first pair of black briefs. He would tug up my hips pairs of tight, high-cut red or blue running shorts with white piping—always new, never used. He would slide over my shoulders athletic jerseys I’d never otherwise wear, then crown my head with baseball caps and turn them rakishly to the side, like a delinquent in an old Archies comic. Once he fitted me with a pair of actual blue jeans, the first I’d ever worn—Levis, no less—just for the enjoyment of admiring me in denim.
He’d urge me to take these items with me, after we were done. “What am I going to do with them?” he’d ask, entreating me to accept his gifts. “Please. Wear them home.”
“I can’t,” I’d say.
“But it would make me so happy.”
It’s always difficult for me to talk about my family’s finances, of how despite my father’s white-collar job, we have precious little money to spare—not for vacations, not for luxuries, not for new cars, not for clothing other than the few basics my mother buys from Sears at the beginning of the school year, that I have to make last no matter how many inches or shoe sizes I grow. It won’t do suddenly to have new socks and shorts appearing in the laundry basket or new shoes in my closet, I explain. My underwear drawer is a neighborhood of lily white Fruit of the Looms; I can’t integrate it without notice or comment. And my mom has never, ever bought for me a pair of jeans. Jeans are too expensive. If she had, they would have been practical, cheap Toughskins. Never an expensive indulgence like real Levis.
His gifts would arouse questions. With what I am, with what I do for men like him, I cannot afford interrogation.
I confess these things in a stutter, with reddened cheeks and a choked throat, ashamed of having to lay bare the realities of genteel poverty to someone who lives in a townhouse full of heirlooms. I’m never sure he fully agrees with my logic. I’m grateful, though, when he stops pressing me to accept his gifts, because I intensely dislike having to say no. Though he continues buying new items for me to model, without comment he begins including an extra twenty in the fold of bills he hands me when I arrive.
I know by now what this man likes best, just like I know the quirks of all my regular clients. A firm fist around his slick shaft, a steady rhythm, the heat of my face close to his thighs, light fingertips down his balls. I’m barely breaking a sweat when his knees begin to jerk and twitch and bang against my shoulders. “Can you suck?” he breathes. “Is that okay?” I keep my focus squarely on his tool when he looks down at me.
Of course I can suck. I drop my jaw and engulf him halfway, turned on by the girth even as my taste buds resent the Vaseline’s mineral tang. He begins shooting immediately, thrashing wildly in his seat while I keep my lips glued to him. The semen arrives only as he subsides, a sour quarter-sized glob on my tongue that I gulp down. Slowly, inch by quarter inch, he slides himself out.
“Thank you, Kip. You’re a very kind boy.” He’s always at his sweetest, after he comes.
Kip is not my name. It’s what I let all these men call me, however. It’s more than a nom de guerre; Kip is an identity. He’s braver than I. It’s Kip who poses in the nude without demur, who shows off his body, who kneels on command. Kip is the fearless adventurer who smiles at strangers and winnows cash from their fists. At home, myself once again, I’m merely the boy who guards Kip’s secrets.
I’m the one now anxious to make my getaway, who wipes my mouth on a nearby towel and eases back onto my knees, ready to rise. Already I’m preparing what to say to wriggle out of this man’s bedroom—something about the lateness of the hour or the long trip home. But before I can struggle to my feet, Martin has rested his hand aside my cheek. “When did your braces come off?” The week before, I tell him. “You must be happy. May I see?”
His face looms uncomfortably close to mine. Every instinct warns me to squirm from his tender grasp and run, but I close my eyes and force my lips apart.
There’s indulgence in his voice. “Come now. You can do better than that. Show me those pearly whites.” He brushes the hair from my eyes. His good humor hardens into disappointment, when I hesitate. “Kip. Am I truly that terrible to look at?”
Earl had never been able to tell me what had happened to Martin, but my imagination is always overeager to supply answers. He’d been wounded in the war. Exactly which, I never quite decide, because I’m bad at both math and historical dates and can never quite reconcile the two around a specific war. He’d been a notorious criminal—though those of that bent perhaps didn’t live in swanky townhouses in this exclusive part of town. He’d suffered an accident as a child, or had been in a car crash.
Or—and this is the possibility that haunts me late at night, when I’m alone in the dark—he could have been attacked. There are men out there who delight in preying upon people like us. Who would happily pull out a knife to assault and mutilate, just because of a wayward glance or the wrong word or tone from another man. Since the second grade I’ve been subjected to words like pansy, queer, and faggot. I’d been lucky to avoid violence, so far. One day, my luck might run out. Maybe it had with him.
To imagine that what might have happened to Martin could easily be my fate, with bad luck, at the wrong time, in an unfortunate place…well. That frightens me more than his face ever could.
His question has awakened my guilt. This is a man living with a disfigurement, secluding himself away from the world and hiring companionship because of his appearance. But he’s no monster, no B-movie Lon Chaney lurking around opera houses. This is Martin. The man who sees me in ways I cannot envision myself. The man who dresses me and calls me beautiful. The artist. Martin, the one person who has noticed what’s changed in me this week, without having to be told.
It’s Kip, the more courageous of us, who opens his eyes to meet the older man’s gaze, full on. “No,” Kip says. Martin’s palm still cups my jaw. I return in the gesture, resting my right hand against the left side of his face, in mirror image. My long thumb crosses the jagged crevice at an angle. “You’re not.”
We gaze at each other for an extended moment. The longer our eyes lock, the easier it becomes. It’s just a scar. It’s just a stupid, unfortunate scar, and too long have I allowed it to frighten me. To prove my sincerity, I lean forward, and press my soft lips against his.
“Oh, Kip,” he breathes.
I’ve agreed to stay for another hour. I’ve spent it curled in a hollow upon his mattress, still wearing the basketball jersey and socks. “Hold,” commands the artist, who sits crossed-legged and naked next to me, drawing board upon his lap.
I reach out and squeeze his flaccid dick.
He swats away my hand with a laugh. “Don’t hold that. Come on, now. I’m nearly done.”
“Let me see.”
“Let me finish.” He pushes me back down. “Smile?” My face is nearly numb from holding the same expression for long minutes, but he gently strokes and tickles my legs until once more I let loose another oblique beam. I’m rewarded by the scratching of his pencil. “Take a look,” he says at last.
It’s only a sketch, this time. Again, it’s composed so sparingly that I marvel I can recognize my half-closed eyes, my bulbous nose, the sharp jut of my chin. That unmistakable grin of mine, pulled to one side, as if someone has shared a private joke. Beneath the representation he’s scrawled a title.
Kip, it reads, in quotation marks.
“I wish you could take it with you,” he whispers, tracing the very jaw he’s just committed to paper. “But I understand.”
He’s reading my mind. I nod, agreeing. I wish that, too.
This is celebration enough for my transformation, this intimate moment between the artist and his model. I watch as he rises, retrieves a clean sheet of tissue and a new length of cardboard from a stack in a cupboard, and places his latest drawing atop one of the piles. Already it’s fading into memory, soon to be buried beneath the floral paintings and figure studies of men in tube socks and athletic gear that surely will follow. Who knows when it might be appreciated again, or who might one day sift through all this unseen work and happen upon a portrait of a smiling youth named Kip, sketched from above where he once lay and smiled, one early autumn evening long ago?
Let them think kindly of it, I wish, as I watch it disappear.
