Daniel

 April 14, 2022

04/18/22  I’ve been out of town doing an internship for school.  Just before leaving town, as I was rushing to get ready to leave for the internship, I decided to drop into the life drawing session at Delmer Studios.  It was a busy night and most of the usual artists were there.  They had relaxed the mask requirement, so it was strange seeing everyone’s faces.

A new model posed for us, an athletic young man named Daniel.  He gracefully dropped his robe and got up on the pedestal to pose.  He wasn’t great at holding still, rotating ever so slightly over the longer poses, and I could hear some of the artists scoffing with frustration at their easels.  What he lacked in modeling skill, he made up for with his toned body and the elegant lines it made.

During a break between the last two poses, he walked around the risers, looking at the drawings that were being done.  I was sharpening my char coal pencils, and he stopped and gazed for a long time at my pad.  I had rendered him in the seated pose and exaggerated the light spilling over his shoulders and neck and really punched the darks around him.

“That’s really beautiful” he said.  I smiled back at him.  I could tell he was genuinely taken by the drawing.  “It’s the most amazing drawing anyone’s ever done of me.”

“Well, I guess that means you have to take it home.”  I replied, pulling the drawing off my news print pad.  I rolled it up and put a rubber band around it and handed it to him.

He lit up with excitement.   “That’s amazing!  Thank you!”  He beamed.

“You’ve given us three hours of your life here, I’m just giving you back twenty five minutes.”

At the end of the drawing session I was walking down the stairway to the street and at the bottom of the stair, Daniel opened the door and held it for me.  

“I really want to thank you for the drawing”  he said as I walked past.  “Can I buy you something to eat or  some tea?” 

I paused for a moment and then told him,  “sure”.

We stopped by a poke bowl place, I was actually really hungry.  It turned out that Daniel was a dancer who split his time between performing in the chorus of the Los Angeles Ballet and an experimental modern dance troupe called Alma Pino Dance.  In some of the performances for Alma Pino Dance, he would actually dance nude on stage and so would some of the other dancers.  

I was so used to being the one to to explain my relationship with nudity, it was fun to pretend to be a textile and question him.  “How do you do that?  How can you actually show your whole body like that to so many strangers?”

“When I dance, or when I pose or just choose to be naked around friends, I look at the faces of people around me, and no one is really that uncomfortable, they just feel like they should be for some reason, but they aren’t.  When you draw, you have this gift, this beautiful gift and you show it and are not afraid to hide it.  Being yourself, being naked is sort of the same thing.”

We walked to my bus stop and I could see the number 16 down the street.  

“Hey, this was fun.”  Daniel said, “Can I have your number and maybe we can hang out a bit more?”

“I’m with someone.”  I smiled.  

I waved bye to Daniel from my seat on the bus and I was thinking that I just said goodbye to my dream boyfriend, but I love my Tony.  The truth is that Tony and I had been so busy, we had not found the time to even talk about us going to Alden’s pool party.  We’ve been dating six months and had not had any naturist experiences together.  This encounter had made me realize that Tony and I need to find time to start sharing naturist experiences.