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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Column
Flush of the future
Tokyo's Toto makes toilets that do everything -- whether you want them to or not.
By Mary Roach
[10/22/99]

Urge: Naughty Bits
The changing fates of working girls
Germany greenlights its red-lighters, but Zambia says hookers mean trouble.
By Hank Hyena
[10/22/99]

Pentagon points a finger
Anti-nerve-gas pills may be a culprit, but in general, Gulf War Syndrome is still a mystery.
By Arthur Allen
[10/21/99]

Waiting room
For the great numbers of uninsured, the care may not be bad -- but the wait is.
By Scott Harris
[10/21/99]

Urge: Naughty Bits
The unbearable unhorniness of hermits
Two men on opposite sides of the globe have gone to great extremes to avoid love.
By Hank Hyena
[10/21/99]

Complete archives for Health & Body

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In the back room of Baskin-Robbins, my arms spotted to the elbows with rocky road and hot fudge, I am confronted by the lounging figure of Mark Hanson, drug partner, hanger-on, social reject. My friend. He is spread across some cardboard boxes, leaning his back against the wall. Mark wears his red winter jacket because it is winter. Other than that he looks the same as he does every other day of the year: desert boots, green fatigues, black T-shirt, capped off by a head of straight orange hair that hasn't seen a pair of scissors in two years. He casually fingers a glob of hot pink Play-Doh and says, "You know what a pussy looks like?" We are 15 years old.

"Sure," I lie.

"Let's see," he says, holding out the dough.

Cornered, I take the soft clay in my hands and begin to mold. Pussy, pussy, pussy. I try to recall my only actual sighting, when Mandy Wolf and I played doctor. We were 8. I begin shaping, momentarily believing that I might pull this off, but in a minute I am finished. I have formed a cube that features a single, narrow, vertical depression bisecting one plane from north to south. I look at my creation and recognize a model of riverine glaciation from the natural history museum. I try rounding the vertical edges on the face of the cube. This can't be right. After years of surreptitiously looking up girls' dresses, spying on my older sister in the shower, even trying on her panties when alone in the house, I have little idea what the object of my obsession even looks like.

"Well?" Mark says from behind the blackout glasses he wears night and day, "Ya done?"

I lay my creation on a carton of pink plastic sample spoons and try to affect an air of nonchalance. At 15, I am years from abandoning the notion that people might think I'm cool.

"Ahh! What's this supposed to be?" He turns it sideways and holds it up next to his own tight, somewhat liver-lipped smile before squashing it between his fingers. "Nice try, I had a feeling you were bluffing." He molds the Play-Doh with competent fingertips, using his one long fingernail for the fine lines. In a couple of minutes he shows me a delicate flower, something from the orchid family. His lips move, he is saying, "That's just about right."

In the year of the summer of love, my worst fear seems to be inevitable: No girl will ever open her jeans for me.

1992

Chloe knocks on my open door as she breezes into the room. "Can you do me a small favor?"

"Yes to anything."

She bends to read the title of the book I'm reading, Robert Graves' "The White Goddess," but doesn't comment. Her own literary tastes run toward "The Tortures and Torments of Christian Martyrs and Saints."

"It's this Friday, at the Art Institute."

"What is?"

"I'm making a short film; actually more of a tableau. I'm shooting a feminist interpretation of Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of Saint Therese' in pixel vision. You would basically just sit at a table, along with five other guys, looking up at two lightly draped women. One of them will be piercing the other with a silver dildo. Eight o'clock. Should take about an hour."

Next page | The art of Chloe's nakedness