(Pygmalion and Galatea)

While he was standing on his pedestal with the other boys in Gianni Versace’s courtyard in Milan, not smiling as he’d been cautioned because of his bad teeth, Jack thought of things he liked. Each boy had his own pedestal, and he wondered what they were thinking.

Jack thought first of the movies he liked—Furious 7, Choppertown, The Visit, Snake and Mongoose movie. He thought of music he liked: Kid Rock and Stank Sauce and most country music. TV? There was NASCAR on Fox, The Weapon Hunter, 4wd TV, Power Nation TV.

He moved a little; he was not supposed to move at all, but look like a statue. Still, some of the others weren’t motionless. Sometimes they shifted and took a hand out of one pocket and put it in the other.

So many sports: Team Drift-Monkey, Don Ray Gear Fishing, RC Emerson Racing. He liked to be outside and moving fast, risking himself and getting banged up.

The editors of the men’s magazines—he didn’t know one from another—were there and looking up at him in his pink suit, worn without a shirt, open to the waist with pantaloni so low they rested on his hipbones. Totally gay. He said the new word pantaloni to himself a few times and thought how that would go over in Valdosta.

The games he liked were Grand Theft Auto and Devillian. He listed his two favorite books: High Tide in the Korean War and Fate of a Deported Veteran just like he would when he was famous and being interviewed.

Thirty-five boys without stomachs in ice cream suits on pedestals, stuck up there for an hour. Then down for fifteen minutes, then back up for another hour plus for the store buyers and the Instagrammers and the bloggers and more photographers. Some frowned, some looked blank, some pursed up their mouths to look tough, some permitted themselves the tiniest embarrassed smile like one they might share with a mirror silently complicit in admiration. His friend Beau practiced the scowl he got just before he socked someone.

It was amazing that Beau had gotten Jack into this, gotten him to Milan and his first show, the only one he was booked for. Even if he had to stay outside Milan in a dump with the other new boys, it was awesome and worth it.

“Halston Graham! Holy shit!” Beau whispered from the pedestal behind him.

Jack thought he must mean the little short man who had been staring at him with burning eyes and circling his pedestal for the last five minutes. Jack knew that look very well and usually ignored it.

“He was really into you,” Beau said in their break. “he kind of looks like an old man you, but short.”

“Who’s Halston Graham?” Jack had folded back the cuffs that flapped over his knuckles and was cramming his mouth with everything he could from the catering table. He really had not eaten anything since they landed.

“Only the most awesome designer in America. Not stuff like this,” Beau looked down at his lemon silk shorts suit that stopped right under the knee above his waxed legs.

“What do you think about when you are up there?”

“I think about boning.”

“Speaking of which, I see that Halston Graham is sticking around for the second show…” Beau parted the curtain for Jack who saw a tiny blond woman in a tight dress talking to the designer and looking over at them.

“Today I made what I make in three months at Sticky Fingers. I didn’t even have to shave.”

“I told you this before, Clyde—this can be your life. If you fix your teeth and stay up North.” Beau called Jack “Clyde” because boys of his type were called Clydesdales to distinguish them from the waifish Angel Boys floating down the runways this season in Milan and Paris. The Angels all had twenty inch hips and hair that bounced on their shoulders when they walked the runway.

That night Count V. Volpato invited some of the Versace men to his villa outside Milan where Beau and Jack saw things they had never seen or even vaguely imagined in their young deprived lives. The steaming mid-summer gardens, the tapestries hung above the modern furniture, the delicate food all had a velvety moonlit opulence that frightened and seduced the boys educated no further than high school in Georgia, with Beau graduating two years before Jack, who had repeated two grades.

“This is the life,” Jack said, but he was unsure. Never had he felt so misplaced and out of sync. He didn’t much want to drink, looking around made him nervous. He had quickly become used to being stared at and didn’t mind that at all. What he minded was the thought of having to speak to anyone, especially an Italian person.

“You have any Hennessey?” he asked one of the waiters, a definite Angel Boy, “or a beer-o?”

Around him drifted a flock of boys with putti faces looking frail and lost.

“Their feet haven’t touched the runway in years,” Beau said.

Jack did not dare to speak to any of the model girls so he stayed among the scowling men wearing jeans or loose drapey clothes over bodies with nothing to hide.

The little blond lady was there with diamonds all over her body. She had eyes like fireflies in the summer garden.

She stood in front of him and put out her hand to tug on his denim jacket.

“Ciao,” Jack said, using his second Italian word.

In bad English, which he was trying hard to understand, she told him that Halston Graham liked his “look” and would call his agency. Jack gave her Beau’s number because he did not have an agency. Then he did not know what else to say and so she walked away with her spiky shoes sinking into the lawn.

Jack had adopted a grave challenging expression to get him through the night, and he took it back with him when he returned to New York and put his sleeping bag on an old futon on Beau’s floor.

Halston Graham’s people called even before Beau got him an agency, before any test shots were done or measurements taken. Outside of his yearbook, he had never been photographed, so of course he had no modeling book.

He went to be seen at Halston Graham’s offices in his jeans—worn, as was his habit—without underwear. He knew they’d give him something to put on as they did in Milan and Beau told him Graham made cool underwear, the kind they did not sell at Kmart or Ross’ (Valdosta did not have a Walmart) and Jack was not a shopper anyway. Beau took him right to the building on Seventh Avenue, but did not go up with him.

Before he went into the building, Jack turned his head to his shoulder and tried to smell himself. He raked his fingers back through his dark blond hair and decided not to comb it.

“Ciao, Ma’am,” he said to the receptionist, a real beauty. He leaned on the counter and his elbow slipped. She seemed to be looking at the two pimples which had sprouted on the flight back from Italy.

He put on his Kid Rock face as he sat down to wait, his hands hanging down like helpless things between his spread legs. He had forgotten his phone and had no idea what to do without it.

He was being measured and up on a small platform again when the designer walked in, circled by three assistants and a girl model with a clipboard.

Halston Graham looked at Jack as though he wanted to be sure and then he was sure. He had felt this disruption before and he knew for a while it would make him happy before tearing him up.

“Hi, are you liking it up here, Jack—pretty far from Milan and…. where do you come from?”

“Sure is. Georgia, sir,” He felt Graham was seeing his pimples and tried to turn his face.

Harlan, in fact, was remembering “Little Horse” the Tennessee Williams poem his mentor said to him so many times.

I came upon him more by plan

Than accidents appear to be.

Something started or something stopped

And there I was and there was he.

“Why don’t you join us tonight for the ballet,” Graham waved at his group “We’ll get you dressed and get you there. Nothing to worry about, no sweat.”

Halston Graham had never said “no sweat” before and the retinue noted it.

No one said anything but all saw that Jack looked somewhat like an ideal version of their boss and they were not sure which one of them would have to be worked on to further the resemblance. Of the entourage, each was jealous in a slightly different way.

“Did you see the teeth?” the assistant Corey whispered to the assistant Ross. “And the pimples…”

Ross had, as well as noting how scared the boy was and how hot. Truly a sexy boy with those hooded eyes and the little sneer on the bow lips, undeniably well hung and as perfectly formed a man as any they had ever seen and they had seen many. Jack was like his mother’s old idol, Elvis Presley, with that same wicked dumb slow knowingness—very southern. Ross was sorry for Halston Graham, who was now telling them to get Jack clothes and book him with his own celebrity dentist and dermatologist.

Harlan Graham was such a good designer because he could see what things could  be—a suit from a bolt of cloth, a room from a picture in a book, and in Jack he saw it all, the way his mentor had seen him. He saw him with the new clothes, the new tousled hair and the skin fixed, a carving and then a vast polishing of the stone. He would teach him, give him things to read, take some of the south from his voice but not too much, and give him the toys his other boys had craved. He saw Jack, his shirt open to the sternum in the Merc he would lease for him, waving and smiling with teeth as white as could be.

My name for him is Little Horse

I wish he had a name for me.

“’Have him stripped, washed and brought to my tent,’ as Cher said,” Corey muttered.

“What was that Corey?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“I want him taken care of. Give him some cash, a lot, and make sure you send him home in the car.”

All of them knew that their boss in love was just like a sixteen-year-old girl: Obsessive, determined, and as focused as possible.

“He’s definitely not gay,” Ross said to Corey.

“When did that matter…”

The team moved off down the halls lined with Graham’s sketches and pictures from previous collections, all of intense Clydesdale type men who looked born to wear Halston Graham’s three thousand dollar suede bomber jackets as they frowned and squinted into Western horizons. They all could feel Graham’s wanting, his anticipation, a kind of beating thing in the air surrounding them as they surrounded him.

One of them would have to get the ballet tickets, another would go back to dress the boy and give him cash and explain to him about the dentist and the skin doctor in the nicest possible way without exactly telling Jack what his new life would be if he wanted it.

Jack stepped down off his little platform as a new young man, a fellow of the city with $500 in twenties, a sweater he did not know was cashmere and cost $1500, a blazer, grey pants and black loafer shoes with tassels that he hated. He was carrying his boots and jeans in a Halston Graham bag.

Jack knew that he would not be carrying trays of ribs and pitchers of beer to the thick folk at Sticky Fingers again. He would not be removing the platters of sweet burnt bones and the glasses rimmed with webs of dried beer foam. He would not be scraping the singles and change off the red checkered table cloths.

He leaned back in the car and told the driver Beau’s address just like he had been doing it for years. He wished he had his phone so he could call Ginger right away.

 

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