A Brief History of Male Nudes in America by Dianne Nelson & Dianne Nelson Oberhansly

Author:Dianne Nelson & Dianne Nelson Oberhansly [Nelson, Dianne & Oberhansly, Dianne Nelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780820315713
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 1993-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

The word karate would have never interested me. It was the telephone number 588-KICK that kept running through my head. I heard it on the radio about fifty times a day—a major ad campaign, I guess, and it worked. When I called, I expected an Oriental voice to answer—a Shing Lu or a Chan Chung—but it was Tony Ramirez—owner, master, fifth-degree black belt—who said, “Tuesday is when you begin.”

Certainly I was naive. Definitely I was grasping at straws. I did not have the total scheme laid out in my mind, but I knew that I needed to equip myself in some way to bring Gordon Jenner to the silence that seemed ripe and waiting for him.

And then, too, the stakes had been upped when my mother made a scene in a local Safeway. She spotted Jenner’s wife on the produce aisle, and when Mom could get no response from her as to what her husband had against Dixon, she started chasing the other woman through the store, imploring her to tell what she knew. There they were, each pushing those big unwieldy carts, running up and down the aisles until my mother banked her cart into a canned goods display and had her forehead engraved with a 16-ounce can of green beans.

Tony Ramirez, my karate instructor, would have given Mom this advice: “The goal is not to look where you’re going, but to see.” In the first weeks of class I had no idea what he meant by that, and he never gave any explanations, just told me to repeat the basic forms again and again. I’d stand over at the side of the bare classroom and complete twenty high blocks, then twenty low ones, and then I’d combine them. If I was lucky, he would nod his head at me and tell me to give it another round. There was no sport or art to Ramirez’s way of thinking; it was all discipline. Once he made me stand in a corner of the classroom and practice my karate shout, the kiai. “Listen to yourself,” he said. “Get used to that sound.” At first I was somewhat embarrassed to stand in the corner and yell at myself—the “uts” and “huhs” supposedly coming up from the diaphragm—but finally some layer of self-consciousness fell away and the shouting felt good, invigorating.

Dixon was never embarrassed by anything that I knew of, though maybe he should have been. Standing up in front of the church as best man at his friend’s wedding, Dixon—after too much preceremony champagne—let out a horrendous belch, and then he just looked up at the ceiling, like maybe the rafters were slightly shifting or a thunderstorm was threatening the day.

My brother did not, I repeat, did not moon the bride’s mother later during the reception, and whatever charges were filed for indecent exposure at that celebration had nothing to do with Dixon. All I will say about that incident was that the bride’s mother was a Joan Crawford look-alike who

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