The girl who sat next to me in my first year drawing class was from Iowa. Idaho. Eh. Someplace Midwestern and naive beginning with an I. She was terribly nice. She was terribly nervous. She'd never seen a naked man before, she leaned over and confided, and she wasn't keen on it.
Charlie was her first. I'm guessing she went lesbian.
The people who make a career of getting naked in front of large groups of teenagers are, by and large — to my profound horror and disappointment — not very attractive. You can forget all that men's magazine stuff. Nude models fell mainly into three broad categories: drunks, skanks and deviants. If you were very unlucky, you'd hit the trifecta.
Art teachers like it this way. It suits their post-modernist vision of the elevation of ugliness and the denigration of beauty. I mean, it's not like they intended to teach us human anatomy or drawing technique or anything.
Charlie radiated "creepy" and "retarded" in equal parts. Rumor had it he'd came home from WWII a wreck and had been lobotomized for thanks. There was a lot of that going around in the late '40s, so who knows? Might've been true. There was something bad wrong up in there, anyhow. He had a permanent smile and a great, jutting loaf of a jaw.
He really hammed it up for us that first day. I suppose he'd performed this service for scores of nice girls from Iowa who'd never seen a naked man before. He strode to the center of the room wearing a non-descript bathrobe, paused for a long stare at our little scrubbed faces, and threw off the robe with one quick, mad flick. BEHOLD! NAKEDITY!
Twice in 1978, and never before or since, I have heard the same low, shuddering, inward sucking of breath drawn as one from a crowd. The second was in a theater later a few months later, when that alien burst out of John Hurt's stomach.
I'd bet anything that every one of us had the same three thoughts in the same order:
1. Holy Jesus! He's my dad's age.
2. Only...much, much fatter.
3. AND HE SHAVED EVERY INCH OF HIS BODY!!!
It was...indescribable. I'd've been happier at the autopsy.
I have to hand it to Charlie, though: he was a total professional. He took his job seriously and he was genuinely good at it (aside from being old, fat and creepy). The body-shaving was a nude modeling convention strictly from the old school. The 19th Century old school. And he could hold a pose like you wouldn't believe.
I once saw him lie on his back and balance an easel in the air on outstretched arms and legs for a full twenty minutes, entirely motionless. I'll never forget it. Mostly because Charlie made sure his business end was pointed directly at me, so I experienced the whole remarkable performance in ScrotumVision™.
See, Charlie liked me. I've torn the house up looking for an old drawing that would help explain why. Somehow, through a desperate, molar-grinding act of will, I could peer through Charlie's many insulating layers and find the slabs of muscle underneath. It was an act autopsy-like in its drasticness. It's a drawing technique I call "making shit up." Charlie naturally appreciated this, even if my sketches lacked sufficient honesty for my teachers.
On his breaks, Charlie would drift behind the easels in his bathrobe looking at our work. Silently, for the most part. Though I once overheard him declaim to a group of girls that, "when something is beautiful to the eye, you naturally want to touch it." See, that doesn't look so bad in writing. Imagine hearing it come out of, say, Boo Radley. Naked. Smiling. And played back one speed slower than it was recorded.
The school threw a lot of work Charlie's way, so we often saw him walking around the neighborhood in street clothes. He always recognized kids from the classes he'd posed for. I suppose he didn't have much to do while being a professional naked guy but look around at us. If he recognized you, he'd salute you on the street with, "hi, frennnn."
But not me. Oh, no. One day, I crossed Charlie's path walking with a group of friends. He gave me a sly nod and a "hi...spaycial...frennnn."
Thanks, Charlie. I never lived it down.
