Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake by Komail Aijazuddin

Author:Komail Aijazuddin [Aijazuddin, Komail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, LGBTQ+, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, Asian & Asian American
ISBN: 9781419773846
Amazon: 1419773844
Publisher: Abrams Press
Published: 2024-08-12T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

FLORALS FOR SPRING

I blame the devil wears prada for the mostly millennial delusion that merely graduating college would guarantee a glitzy job that would not only pay enough to fund a waterfront apartment and work visa but also keep me glamorously busy until I met the man of my dreams outside a Vinyasa yoga studio in SoHo one sunny spring morning. Things turned out rather differently.

For my final semester at college, my art history advisor encouraged me to take a course titled Artists of the Eighties. It was to be taught by a famous visiting German art historian called Professor Klaus. One had to apply to get into the class, a thrilling pretension that made me feel like one of the students from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The first day of class, twelve girls and I sat around a boardroom table when in walked an ambitiously overweight man of about seventy, wearing a fedora hat and accompanied by a stunningly beautiful male graduate assistant.

Klaus boasted of knowing the artists we were to study personally— all of them now living legends in their own right—by virtue of the fact that he was a friend of Andy Warhol back in the early seventies. The classes consisted of weekly visits to the studios of these “blue chip artists” followed by a discussion with them about their work. Seeing their magnificent homes and gargantuan studios in person was the first time I realized that visual artists could be successful enough to have medieval Tuscan libraries, reassembled brick by Florentine brick, in midtown lofts. A few weeks into the semester the good-looking TA mysteriously vanished, and Klaus made a joke about how the poor guy couldn’t adjust to the fast pace of New York City. We all laughed, and when Klaus asked a student in the class to be his temporary assistant, the rest of us were stung with jealousy. Klaus began chatting with me during class breaks, mainly about contemporary art and painting. He found out I was a painting major as well, and I was supremely flattered when he asked me to email him photographs of my work.

One winter evening, on the last day of our class, Klaus asked me to stay back after the others had left.

“You have talent,” he said, flicking through the images I had emailed him some weeks before. “A true gift.”

“Thank you!”

“Oh, you’re blushing,” he said. “You know, I could use a gifted man like you with my next project. I’m not sure there is space, but for you . . . what are your plans after graduation?”

“None yet,” I said, ignoring that sense of fatal anxiety that all graduating seniors who are not finance majors know so well.

“I’m working on major book project this year, commissioned by ze MoMA. Would you be interested to be my research assistant? Ze other one”—he gestured vaguely to his empty office—“didn’t last very long. I’ll even make sure your name on ze cover of ze book! What?” He grimaced when he saw my blank expression.

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