The Beautiful Anthology (21 page)

John and I spoke on the phone multiple times a day. He’d check in during his lunch break and when he got home at night. John had a different living situation than I. He lived with an older gay man we’ll call Lewis. Lewis was probably in his early thirties, a clothing stylist, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that Lewis wanted John. It didn’t take me long because Lewis was blatant about it. He was somewhat hostile to me and stated openly to both John and me, together and on our own, that he thought he could turn him. John laughed it off. They met and became roommates when John got a job interning at the clothing company Lewis styled for. John grew up with a single mother and some sisters and making clothes was something he was evidently bred to do.

When it became clear that my virus wasn’t going anywhere soon, John said he missed me and wanted to visit. I told him how awful I felt and how awful I looked. If I’m not mistaken my period was also due. I was the whole package. He insisted none of it mattered and that he knew just the thing to get me feeling more optimistic. He inquired as to whether I’d ever seen the movie
Swing Time
. I had not. He said it was a film his family would watch over and over, a classic and a surefire mood elevator.
Mask
might have been more appropriate, given my current state, but with my body’s defenses down I was no match for John’s enthusiasm. I asked if he was sure he thought he could take it – my heinousness. He was sure. And so I relented.

He came over that night with the movie. When I opened the door he pulled me close, and I sank into his chest. When I looked up at him he said, “Your eyes look even bluer when you’re sick.” He sat next to me on the couch and I rested my head on his shoulder, partially watching Fred glide with Ginger across the dance floor, but mostly thinking about how lucky I was to have such a nice guy want to be with me. A guy who didn’t flinch one iota when he saw me. Who emitted only joyfulness at being in my presence. Mr. Astaire jumped from a table to a chair, landed just out of reach from Ginger, then held his hand out for her to grab it. John mimicked the last part of the gesture from his sitting position and I reached out to hold on.

Eventually, I got better and my “Aqualung”-like state became a distant memory. A faint redness in the corner of my mouth persisted for a while but it wasn’t anything some matte white powder and dark red lipstick, my look at the time, couldn’t disguise. John and I were now a month or so into our relationship. Because of our living situations we didn’t have a ton of privacy. Coupled with my weeklong sickness (plus healing time for the cold sore), and my not actually stated but more kept in mind and sometimes up for discussion “wait three weeks” rule, we had yet to find the time or place to “do it.” I’d stayed late at his apartment a time or two, but Lewis was there, lurking, possibly setting fire to a crude doll made from strands of my hair, and thus, circumstances were somewhat tricky to maneuver.

This one night, however, we knew Lewis was going to be out at some event for a while and that we would have some time to ourselves. We’d both worked until about nine o’clock and by the time we got to his apartment we were ready to be with each other, to push everything else that wasn’t us out of the way and just be. I remember that John’s room was dark, with the exception of the light coming in from outside. His apartment unit was on the ground floor so when we were lying down the street light hovered just above and next to us like a bedside lamp. He was so handsome. Under fluorescent or natural light, a pleasure to gaze at. As we held each other, becoming ready for our next step, John told me he had to tell me something. He seemed to be steeling himself while also becoming softer. He looked at me square in the eye and said, “I have a pretty small penis.”

I thought for a moment before speaking. “Come on,” I probably said. “Don’t worry about that.” But he insisted.

You may be wondering at this point how I might not have had an inkling about this up until now. How we could kiss and spend late nights together but for me not to have known anything might have been … out of sorts. As mentioned, I had that rule, so the first week or so I was probably trying not to tease him. Then I got sick and all cold sorey. And then we’re back into the story. I may have brushed my hand across the front of his pant leg a time or two but I probably thought I was feeling the zipper area. Or that he was favoring the other side that I wasn’t pawing at. I was young. And perhaps blinded by his kindness and beauty.

So then I probably told him just to kiss me.

And we kissed and we touched and we eventually were undressed and then I touched it and then I saw it. It was small. It was the size of maybe a seven-year-old’s penis. It was the size of a pig in a blanket. I felt bad for it. But more because it looked like it needed caring for, not because I was so experienced and thought I wanted or needed a big fat penis to be satisfied. I honestly hadn’t dealt with that many penises up until that point, though the ones I did were lovely and nice. But I hadn’t yet had the kind of sex that made me think, “Oh, that’s why people do it.” And I wouldn’t with John, either.

We tried to have sex. Or rather, we did have sex, though I couldn’t really feel anything. I felt his pelvic area against mine and I felt his lips on mine and his hands in my hair, but I didn’t feel a penis inside of me. He asked how it was. I told him it was great, and we fell asleep there together with the street lamp shining its light of recognition upon us till dawn.

That morning when we got up and it was time for me to get home to shower and change before work, we crossed paths with Lewis in the kitchen. He was clearly bothered that I’d gotten to the finish line before he could, but he covered it with an overwrought account about the extraordinary night he had and how much John would have enjoyed it. It was probably a blessing. We didn’t have to deal with our newest development. As I stood there awkwardly sipping a cup of coffee and taking on a supporting role while this scene unfolded, I noticed that John looked more vulnerable. Like he was seeing everything through my eyes.

John and I lasted for a few more weeks after our night. We went out and had mindless fun. Saw bands and movies. We went through the motions of having sex a couple more times, but eventually the intensity of what we had dwindled. It wasn’t because of any sort of conscious disappointment on my part, and it wasn’t about the penis per se. It just felt like there wasn’t anywhere else for us to go. Something was both missing and haunting us. What was promised now seemed to be a closed door.

I thought about John over the years for this reason or that – when I’d see a Gael García Bernal movie, for instance, or find myself at a kitschy party where mini hot dogs were served. I wondered if he ever found a way to make an intimate relationship work. I hoped that his situation wasn’t a lifelong frustration. And that maybe there was such a thing as a mid-twenties puberty spurt.

Ultimately, it would seem we each possess our own version of a small penis. Our particular something that would make life easier if we could just overcome it. Fear, self-doubt, viral infections that blister … bad taste in music. All of us wandering about in this life together, trying to get by, hoping someone will see past what we know is less than ideal and be there to make us feel beautiful, make us feel fine, when we can’t for ourselves.

JAMES D. IRWIN

FROM THE
VENUS DE MILO
TO PORNO MAGS:
THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY, & VICE VERSA

Beauty is a strange and incredibly powerful thing. In Ancient Greece, Helen of Troy was so beautiful as to launch a thousand ships – not in the way we launch ships these days. She was not smashed against the hull in the way the Queen smashes bottles of champagne against our warships. It was more of a symbolic thing. A thousand ships went to war for her because, although times and cultures may vary, men have always and will always do anything to impress an attractive woman.

It’s hard to imagine someone being
that
beautiful. In the 2004 film
Troy,
that’s exactly what film producers had to do. The woman they chose was Freddie’s sister, Diane Kruger. Diane Kruger is undoubtedly a very beautiful woman. Maybe not quite beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships, but certainly beautiful enough to listlessly masturbate over on a wet Sunday afternoon.

But beauty is also a concept open to incredible subjectivity. This is perhaps best exemplified by the vast amount of varying categories and subgenres in pornography.

Notions of what beauty is vary through time and throughout cultures. The fat chicks that we find repulsive and boner wilting used to be quite the opposite. Fat-bottomed girls really used to make the rockin’ world go round. Some guys really like Asian girls. Others, in a room with the cast of
Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle,
would ignore Lucy Liu in favor of skinny white girl Cameron Diaz, or the fuller-breasted Drew Barrymore. While it would be slightly cruel to ignore Miss Liu, and while it may be ethically wrong to offer girls up as pieces of meat, you get the point. Everybody has a different idea of what they find attractive and what they don’t, and it varies between cultures and it varies through tim e.

For example, we know that the average height of mankind has risen through history. We know this because of old buildings. I live in Winchester, which was a capital city in Roman time, and although little remains of Roman civilization there are many buildings from as far back as the seventeenth century. My favorite pub, The Wykeham Arms, has been standing since 1755. Other pubs I don’t like as much are older, and the door frames are ridiculously low. I’m a little over 5' 7". I am not very tall and even I have to limbo under the door it’s so low.

We would likely find women from those days freakishly short, while they would find a supermodel like Claudia Schiffer freakishly tall. We’re simply predisposed to find “normal” attractive – that is to say, what our culture, our society, considers normal. That’s why, on average, people of average height are considered more attractive than the more abnormally sized midget, or the 6' 6" skinny hipster. Of course, there are deviations from the norm. I, for example, find shorter girls more attractive, but then that can also be attributed to science – the genetic, primitive instinct to want to protect and so on.

The point I’m trying to make, I think, is that as beautiful as the ancient Greeks might have considered Helen of Troy, we wouldn’t necessarily share the same opinion. We probably wouldn’t. I mean I could be wrong; she could be five different kinds of beautiful our minds couldn’t possibly imagine or comprehend. But there’s a pretty good chance she was a really short Greek chick a bit hotter than average. I can’t make any guarantee … well, except the guarantee that Helen of Troy was not a leggy blonde like Diane Kruger.

Of course there are differences in opinion in our modern times and cultures. As far as I’m concerned, Diane Kruger is stunningly beautiful and, to put it as crudely as possible, I would tap that
.
But not everyone would agree with me. A Chinese peasant farmer, for example, would probably find her face to be pale and alien; bearing in mind that we are scientifically predisposed to finding our cultural concepts of normality attractive, then “pale and alien” would be strange and unattractive qualities. Even within our own Western culture there would be differences of opinion. Some guys find darker skin more attractive; some of us are crazy about redheads; some people are plain racist, and a few people I know would be turned off by the fact that Diane Kruger is German. (We call these people racists, too.) Everyone is different; everyone has different perceptions of the world and of beauty. Hell, some guys find other guys attractive. We’re all different, and no one is right and no one is wrong.

That doesn’t really stop anyone from fundamentalist Christians through to militant atheists from trying to argue otherwise, though. I mean, Jesus – how much longer can we argue about creation? Arguing over our creation – the creation of the world, the creation of the solar system and the galaxy and all of time and space …

Fuck it, can’t we just sit back and appreciate the beauty within it all? Who cares who put it here, be it an omnipotent being, a flying bowl of pasta, or a bastard of an explosion? While we’re all arguing about it, it’s all passing us by. We could argue forever, but guess what? None of us will live long enough to do that.

The beauty of nature, of our planet and our star system and our infinite smallness in it, is as close to a universal appreciation as we can get.

It takes around twelve hours to cross the globe on a plane. No planet orbits closer to Earth than Venus, a beautiful gaseous purple orb, and we can only just make it out in our sky without powerful telescopic equipment. Mankind cannot travel to Mars, a distance so small in the relativity of space that it doesn’t technically exist. There are four or five planets after Mars, depending on your feelings about Pluto, and that’s just one solar system in one galaxy.

There is such beauty in the miniscule dimensions of space we can see: shooting stars, the tranquil seas of the moon, supernovas and stars, so many stars – orbs of burning fire that we see only as dim fairy lights across the inky canvas of the sky.