Dear Friday, You’re A Failure
What’s Friday without a content warning? Eroticism punctuates the day and most importantly this essay. Tread respectfully.
Dear Friday,
13:00, or A Digital Facelift
Before stepping foot inside the gym, you sit in your car for about thirty minutes. Are you planning your workout? Fuck no. Are you tallying up the calories you ate earlier today? Absolutely not. Are you dreading the surmountably insurmountable stair master? Maybe. Truth is, when you’re not questionably catatonic, you’re scrolling through Grindr looking for models to draw. A year and some change ago, shortly after starting therapy, you gave yourself a digital face lift.
Hello, your hook-up profiles read, I’m taking a figure drawing class and I need naked subjects to draw. More than happy to illustrate your nudes or meet up to draw you in person. Let me know if you’re interested.
Your inbox, previously inundated with bots, bozos, and BBC seekers, now flaunts a throng of prospective subjects.
The Ledger of Irony:
They only know they’re multitudinous when you see them multitudinously.
According to Hammurabi’s Code, they don’t deserve it——person for person, thing for a thing.
You offer them personhood despite your spite.
After seeing one of your selfies followed by three of your drawings, they express, at the very least, a curiosity in being rendered. They are curious, you figure, because they haven’t ever considered their person as a creative well-spring. You, a multihyphenate, are touched and taken aback in equal measure. All your big schools and big experiences have taught you that art’s everywhere. Just have to know where and how to look.
14:00, or A Draftspersons Studio
Go to the locker room. No, seriously. Having conquered the stair master, walk over there and sit down for a celebratory ten-to-fifteen minutes. Yank out your notebook, scribble down some numbers, then put it away. Stare into space. Whether you’re taking a breather or loitering is anybody’s guess. Now, fiddle with your padlock and pop in your AirPods. Just look busy. Then go back to your notebook. Drip after drip, drop after drop, sweat rains down from your head onto a scrawl-laden page. You barely even notice that your notes and numbers are becoming stained and illegible. Locks clunk against locker doors. Tap water rushes from the faucet. Naked and half naked men ambulate to and from the showers and lockers. They pass you by, holding your flyaway attention captive. You barely even notice that you’ve turned the page and picked up a pencil.
“To draw anything,” naturalist Peter Steinhart writes, “you have to find a connection with it…turn off the noise that keeps you from focusing.”
His essay, “Connecting” from The Undressed Art, stays with you. Building your body, you focus by counting. Building a body, you focus by connecting, by seeing slowly. Old stall doors slam shut. Loogeies hock themselves into the drain. An unclad gym goer lingers in the walkway, eventually meeting your gaze. Steinhart’s essay, “Desire,” stays with you too.
“In artistic endeavors,” Steinhart writes, “order is beauty and work is play.”
Looking down at your notebook, you realize you’ve begun a gesture drawing. Steam, overhead lighting, and running water accompany you and the unexpected model
15:00, or Twist Them Titties
As you sit there and sketch the modeling gym goer, G by John Berger broods. “Sexuality,” you recall, “is by its nature precise: or rather, its aim is precise.” Art too. Your seeing, led by homosexuality, slows itself down. Providing connections, disclosing details, his body reveals itself to you through sexless associations.
To draw the head, a cube.
To draw his neck, a tube.
To draw his chest, a sphere.
To draw his nipples, draw his nipples.
Connect them all through simple yet characteristic gestures. Even in the locker room, art demands eroticism, play, and most importantly focus.
“The breast,” you recall, “may be seen as a model for such focus, gathering from an indefinable, soft variable form to the demarcation of the aureola and, within that, to the precise tip of the nipple.”
What is the difference between a nipple and the tip of a pencil? To the artist and writer, maybe nothing. They seem like they are one and the same. Like an arrow, dark and pointed, they arouse your attention to the present.
“Every feature,” you also recall, “asserts its contingency—here, here, here, here, here, here. That is the only poem to be written about sex—here, here, here, here—now.”
But you’re not writing about sex. And yet, your nipples rise as you draw. I’m wired, you think to yourself. Does he know how wired you are? Maybe.
16:00, or Sam and Zay Could Get It
Maybe not. He smirks alongside Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets. No matter.
“He began to tremble,” you revisit, “which made him angry because it made him feel exposed.”
I know you want to fuck me, the modeling gym goer thinks to himself. And he isn’t wrong. You decide his name is Samuel, yours Isaiah. Characters from Jones’ novel. Ever encountered something so fictive it’s real? You have.
“Isaiah didn’t see the anger,” you remember, “instead he saw beckoning,”
Words like beckon lead to words like attraction which eventually lead to words like magnetism. But none of them are as accurate as you’d like. Chemistry, a word entrenched in reaction and transformation, comes closest to the word you mean. Being beckoned agitates matter. Being beckoned changes you.
“He rose to move on top of Samuel,” you remember, “who flinched a bit before relaxing. Isaiah slid his tongue, slowly and gently, over Samuel’s nipple, which came to life in his mouth. Both of them moaned.”
You hold your breath as the gym goer stretches his hand toward you pressing it into your chest. No homo, he says matter-of-factly. Panicked, you wonder if you have crossed a line. He takes his towel and wraps it around his waist. See ya, he says coldly.
As he turns the corner, exiting in silence, you watch the studio snap back into a locker room. If Jesus isn’t coming, neither is Prince Charming. Contrary to popular belief, he isn’t even real.
17:00, or A Dream Is A Wish Your Dick Makes
Waking from your sad little daydream, you realize it’s finally Friday. A gray kitten, Ravel, yowls hungrily at your feet. Good morning to you too, you say groggily. Rubbing your eyes, you notice Hello Stranger by Manuel Betancourt resting on your pillow. “Naked Friends,” one of its essays, kept you company just before you fell asleep. Ravel leaps onto the bed and nips at your exposed toes. You rise begrudgingly, crack open a can of kitten food, and pour its wet slop into a pink bowl. Don’t forget to say grace, you yawn at your first born.
“We have no vocabulary,” the essayist opines, “to talk about the kind of intense intimacy that can be captured in nude portraiture without resorting to sexual innuendo.”
Morning seeps into your bedroom slowly, shedding light on an orange jockstrap, black t-shirt, and crumpled pair of grey sweatpants strewn about the floor. Ravel forgets his meal briefly, spotting the pile and then you. One look acknowledges the aftermath of last night’s zoomies. You pick them up and pause. A floor length mirror captures and releases your nakedness back to you.
“But that’s as much a failure of our collective imagination,” Betancourt continues, “as it is a failure of how we codify intimacies that skirt the line of propriety within a society that conflates nudity and sex.”
Your dark hands hover over your dark body. They rest on its crevices, peaks, valleys, and hard curves. Your body is a landscape—smooth, outstretched, and reaching. “There’s a call toward closeness,” the essayist muses, “that depends on distance.” Who, you wonder, will call out from across the way. Ravel trots over making his way toward you. Smiling, you pick him up and kiss his silver little tummy. He meows, you coo, and everything is momentarily right with the world.
Sincerely,
The Biceps, Triceps, and Deltoids
P.S. As a person moving through the world, privy to the terrors men inflict on everyone but especially women, I reach. Men’s sexuality is bound by systemic bonds and desperately needs to be cut loose. Hand in hand patriarchy begets disconnectedness, capitalism isolation, and authoritarianism loneliness. Reaching inward while reaching outward, I try my best to subvert their conventions. Put plainly, I go to therapy and suck strangers’ dicks in the wild. No flowers, cookies, or applause. That’s not what I’m after. What I’m trying to say and saying very poorly is that my sexuality springs from the political just like my sentences. Curious. When picturing the model, did you picture them as black? After reading “Thursday,” you should have. Don’t worry! You’ll get a second chance tomorrow.
P.S.S. If the pronoun I is shorthand for the word inheritance as poet Tommy Pico suggests, I, an African-American have inherited the experience of being claimed in spirit, soul, and body. Why no one has asked my opinion on reclamation is anybody’s guess. I promise my opinion is simple. Persons are not meant to be claimed, which is to say stolen, held captive, or consumed. If one’s personhood is tied up, and many of them are, resource them generously and set them motherfuckers loose.
P.S.S.S. Sorry. I had to add that last bit. Don’t read this as a misery memoir or a reclamation story. Please. I am a person———to quote Princess Jasmine———not an empathy-leds-to-improvement prize to be won.