Monday, June 16, 2003
A SMALL PRICE TO PAY
A SMALL PRICE TO PAY
(sunday night)
It’s been a good weekend, a good day. I’ve lounged, cooked (extraordinary beans and carrots, really quite remarkable, and the cubed zukes and tomatoes in italian herbs went down pretty easy too), talked to dad, repaired the dog run, did the Pt. Bonita ride, went to the gym, bought two pair of pants and two shirts, viewed the eyepopping sidewalk art at the San Rafael Street Painting Festival (including a 1/4 scale representation of the entire sistine chapel roof), and generally had a fine old time. Sure, at this particular moment Kel is plucking my eyebrows and I’m a bit distracted by the regular bursts of searing ocular pain, but it’s a small price to pay.
However, there is one impediment to my total nirvanic bliss, my achieving such actualization that I blow myself out of this physical plane into an unexplored dimension. It’s me. I’m grinning like a dork, sitting in a big barrel of water, staring at myself. I’ll have to get over it eventually, but right now I’m creeping me out.
Here’s how it works: Kel has three frames on her dresser. One has displayed, for a long time, a totally cute photo of her at first communion - in keeping with the transubstantive event being memorialized, you could just gobble her up. Then there’s a shot of the two of us necking at the MGM lot in 1985 when she came out to visit me during summer break after we met. And now there’s a new one, from our recent Mendocino trip.
I took several photos that weekend that turned out rather well, if I do say so myself - mostly landscapes, closeups of details, panoramas… Kel got into a documentary mode and took a stack of pictures of me waving out the back of the car, or walking inexorably toward the photographer. Fun. Not really art. (Note: we both take standard analog photos and we don’t have a scanner, so I can’t share these shots with you.)
But one photo Kel took is kind of artistic, if only accidentally. She was using a funsaver camera. It’s hard to frame your subject with them because you don’t view through the lens. By comparison, my old SLR lets me know exactly what I’ve included in, and excluded from, my photos. Kel didn’t have this level of control, so when she shot me at Sweetwater Spa in our private sauna-and-outdoor hot tub suite (on the link, it’s the one with the mosaic on the wall), exposed to the unblinking sun in my pink, unprotected altogether, she thought she was photographing my face. And I suppose she was - my face is in the middle of the frame.
There’s a lot of wall behind me. And below my face, my arms are stretched out across the top of the wooden tub, the water crystal clear and rising to the top of my chest. My body is plainly visible in the water, from my clavicle down to… well, here’s where we got “artistic.” At the very bottom of the print, a portion of my body below my navel could be seen through the languid water of the hot tub, in perfect water-distorted focus, an eerie green under the blazing sun overhead. I am depicted exactly to the crease at the proximal insertion of my wang - right down to the edge and no further. Nothing offensive or prurient here - a bit risque, but not giving anything away.
Except: it’s all underwater, and something seems to have floated up into the frame just a tiny bit. A smudge. A blur of rosy flesh. An intruder. An inverted dangle. We had just barely perceptibly gone from beefcake to beefstick. Suddenly the broad ecstatic grin on my face took on new meanings, recalled more pungent recollections.
So we had a giggle at the photo and then moved on with life - or so I thought. But when I came into the bedroom this afternoon I found her fitting this lecherous and wangtastic photo into frame #3.
“You’re putting that photo in a frame?”
“Yes - I like it. It makes me happy.”
“But honey - that’s the wang shot.”
“That’s okay - I cropped it.”
Ouch. Just like that. I felt so violated. She had cut off my wang without even offering it a blindfold. I urgently dug among the scraps of photograph on her dresser until I found a long skinny sliver of my center, including the offending, inoffensive, tiny pink smudge. I’ll take good care of it - it’s been through so much already. And still I grin at myself from that frame. It’s as if something good were happening. Even wangless, that was a damn fine hot tub.