Originally Posted Wednesday, July 17, 2013
I hate when girls laugh at me, though. I don't do ridicule. I avoid it like success. They are usually two sides of the coin.
I prefer this other thing. It is non-threatening and seems to work. A model shows up at the studio. She looks nothing like the pictures. You cannot connect the two. You do what you do, begin to chat, but she seems distracted, non-responsive. As you talk, she pics up a photo book and begins to thumb through it. She glances at you quickly, furtively, from time to time. This will be awful, you think. You wish you were home watching television or reading a book. . . anything. Oh, well, you tell yourself, give it your best. You take her back into the studio, show her the mess out of which you make your pictures. Still nothing but grunts and quick head shakes. You find some wardrobe for her. She is not pretty, even less than that, ungraceful. You begin to chuckle to yourself. Finally, she is ready. You begin. She pulls at the hem of her short slip. Oh, you say, would you mind taking those off. She is wearing a pair of contemporary underwear. I don't do that, she says. Really? O.K. Let's see what we can do here. I want you to be happy. You ask her to remove the slip. She is really very lovely, you begin to think. Let me ask you, are you OK if you just cover yourself with your hands like they do in the ESPN nude shoots of athletes. That is O.K. she says. She stands in profile. Jesus Christ, you say, that's it. You are spectacular. And she is. Look at you. You look like Africa. You've taken the chance. She could take offense but you mean none. It is just that nobody looks like that unless they have a certain heritage. It is the sudden and rakish inward turn of the spine, the short waist, the larger than life glutes and hams. She says yes. You have never seen anyone more beautiful. In the end, you are friends, more.
That is how it happens. There is so much beauty everywhere once the barriers come down. It is how people fall in love.
There is an opinion in today's N.Y. Times online that I have gotten into much trouble for stating in the past ten or fifteen years (link). The idea stuck with me from the first time I heard it. Race is a linguistic construct (Gates). My older African-American friends didn't like that. They preferred heritage. It was theirs, their memories, their past. I've seen them get very angry at white liberals who thought they were saying the right thing when they talked about how horrible the past--black people's past--had been. Nobody wants to hear their existence trivialized. There were sweet things, wonderful people who loved. There were lovers and there were birthday parties and grandmothers. . . and there was adversity. For a long time, now, I have seen only features, the length and breadth of noses, the size and placement of cheekbones, the narrowness or width of lips, curve of jaws and chins. The Japanese butt. Africa. I went to China with people who couldn't tell one person from another, they said (and these were African-Americans). I had never seen such tremendous diversity. It is all in the willingness to see, to hear, I think, without resistance, without restraint.
I understand what people feel about the Zimmerman case. It is wrong. All of it. Every bit of it. We should quit.
We won't. People like teams.
I got a lot of requests yesterday for porn sites. I think of them as anthropological sites. The study of human behavior. It is the history of our times, this era. We learn more and more again and again of what humans want, of what they are capable. We are scary and hideous. We are beautiful.
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