Naked Sleeper
I flip the page and inspect the photograph, immediately drawn to the man’s unblemished, lunar ass. His round cheeks are split down the center by a crease like the rippled seam of some kind of stone fruit and the folds where his ass cheeks meet his thighs form a shadowed arrowhead that guides my gaze down the length of his legs, one of them casually draped across the other. Neither of his feet are visible. He is laying on a couch and his face rests near the edge of the couch, hidden behind strands of messy, shoulder-length hair. His arm droops off the couch and onto the floor where his hand rests between the pages of a book. It is unclear if he is awake or if he fell asleep while reading. I remove my phone from my back pocket, gently flatten the spine of the photo book in my lap to prevent shadows, and take two images of the photograph.
What do you think? G asks and gestures to the book perched in my lap while folding a pair of black denim jeans. She slid the book out of its plastic wrap and handed it to me so that I could examine it as she folded laundry in her bedroom. I admired the gray hardcover, the monochrome image of a person’s muscled back on the front, and the embossed spine, which read: Deep Springs by Sam Contis. G apologizes again for her rudeness, and I wave my hand, insisting I am capable of entertaining myself while she cleans. She is preparing to host another friend later the same evening, someone she fell out with earlier that summer and wishes to confront, I assume, to offer them an opportunity to rectify his mistreatment of her. Do you think the clutter looks intentional or just disorganized? G asks. I hesitate, entirely ambivalently, and politely insist that he probably won’t notice.
This book inspired my own project, G continues, referring to the box of prints she showed me earlier that documented the little ivy league she attended for undergrad. But I want my book to pair the photos with writing, a novel, or stories. What a wonderful idea, I say, I cannot think of another book that does that. I rifle through the pages and point out some of my favorite images: three men laying facedown on a mountaintop with jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada in the background followed by a shot of three horses laying on their sides, a detail shot of freshly shorn wool, several shirtless men digging a trench through the desert, a small, scalpel-like blade cutting through two slabs of pink meat, a painted self-portrait.
The photos are from Deep Springs College. G says. Have you heard of it? I’m not sure. It sounds familiar. It’s a tiny, all-male liberal arts school in the middle of the California desert where the students tend to the cattle ranch by day, G explains. It’s totally unorthodox. Did you see the dedication? I invited Sam to give a lecture to my department. I nod and flip to the last page, gently pushing aside a sheet of tissue paper slid between the pages to prevent the ink from transferring, I think, and read the dedication again. G interrupts, the students, like two dozen young men, voted to decide whether she was allowed to come and photograph them.
G leaves me on her couch again. I look around. Her living room is sparsely furnished with a few bookshelves lining the length of the room, a single table beneath three western-facing windows, and the large couch from which I survey the space. I notice there is no television. Instead, the room is filled with books, papers, and a random assortment of trinkets and writing utensils. A small stack of books near the room’s entrance suggest a constant arrival and departure of reading material. The windows overlook an empty, grassy lot, and the unobstructed view allows golden-hour light to fill the room, which lends the studious disarray a romantic aura.
I return to the photograph again and more closely inspect the details as if they might reveal the relationship between the photographer and the subject and whether the photograph is candid. And then I momentarily wonder if it even matters whether this seemingly unguarded moment Contis captured is performed or authentic. There is no evidence of her presence in the photographs, the mark of a good documentarian, I suppose, but I am curious to understand how she navigated this project, winning the trust of these men in order to photograph them. Exasperated, I close the book.
Is it possible that my need to understand the relationship between the photographer and subject, to distinguish artifice from authenticity, prevents me from acknowledging the most basic truth about why this photograph captured my attention; it resembles an image I discovered on the Internet as a teenager, a snapshot of a golden-skinned, muscled man laying naked, like a sleeping hermaphroditus, in a field of ivy—a photo that I recently found saved on an old external hard drive. His ass was the focal point of the image, his face entirely concealed by the mounds of his shoulder blades. Photographed, both men symbolize a form of unguarded masculinity that I desire but can only possess briefly, as a spectator. As I continue to browse the pages of Deep Springs, I decide the naked reader’s erotic appeal is enhanced by his relationship to manual labor in such a remote landscape, replacing horseshoes and dressing slaughtered livestock, as well as his relationships with the other men. In this photograph, I realize, he represents an appetite for extremity, the unconventional.
G finishes folding her laundry, returns the photo book to its plastic sleeve, and offers to show me several large format photos of her ex-boyfriend. She removes one of the prints from between a sheath of cardboard. In the photograph, her ex-boyfriend is lying in bed, presumably naked, even though he is covered by a comforter. His face is handsome, but expressionless, like a suburban lawn, admirable mostly for its uniformity. I assume it is a post-coital snapshot and am warmed by G’s willingness to share this photograph, an artifact of her past, a period of her life I would only encounter in these incomplete glimpses. We are new friends and had never spent time alone together—a fact I pointed out to her while we talked in her living room. And that afternoon, I disclosed fewer details about my sexual encounters with Z during our conversations that day, demonstrating, I hoped, that I was capable of some semblance of propriety after divulging shocking details in excess during our past few encounters.
I ask G how long her and her ex-boyfriend were together. G frowns and explains that she generally avoids lying but that occasionally, when a stranger asks how long they dated, she tells them that they were together for a year even though it is untrue. I understand, I say, time doesn’t necessarily equal legitimacy or depth of connection.
Later that evening, G sends me the photos that she took while we biked along the Lakeshore Trail, and I scroll through my phone’s camera roll to ensure they transferred. I pass the images of myself smiling as I straddle my e-bike, pause at the picture of the naked reader, and idly explore further back until I noticed a similar photo that I took of Z. He is not responding to my messages after our phone call earlier, so I contemplate the image silently instead of sending both to him.
Z was laying on his stomach on top of the red fuzzy blanket we spread over my bare mattress after I moved my lube- and shit-stained bed sheets to the washing machine earlier that morning. The lighting in my bedroom was precious, like the wet, porcelain gleam of a freshly boiled and peeled egg. Z was holding a polaroid. He had been fucking me from behind, stopped to adjust his position, and commented that my ass looked really good. I opened my mouth, paused, and then timidly suggested that he should take a polaroid so that I could see. Ok, he said and grabbed the camera from my desk. I arched my back and held my breath while he inserted himself again and then tried to frame the photo. It’s hard to get the whole view, he said. But a few seconds later the camera flashed, and I heard the mechanical whir of the photo being ejected. He set the camera beside my bed, and we continued to fuck until both of us came.
I picked up the polaroid and looked at it after a brief dizzy spell passed. My broad, blemished ass and lower back dominated most of the image. But Z’s cock was visible near the bottom edge of the image, like a fence post, or flag pole, buried inside me. Z asked for the photo, so I handed it to him and used a towel to wipe off my stomach. When I turned around, I said that he looked beautiful in the light as he held the polaroid and instructed him to remain in that position so that I could take a photo. He corrected his posture and turned his neck to look back at me. Unlike the naked reader, Z’s ass is unshaven, yet it forms the same shadowed arrow shape where the cheeks meet his thighs. There is no shutter click to punctuate the moment.
Afterwards, he stands up and puts on his indigo boxer briefs and a pair of black cotton lounge shorts that he borrows from my closet. The shorts have a tie waist, but the end of the tie constantly slips inside the waistband, so he fumbles to remove it, grasping the metal aglet and tugging. He ties the shorts and stands in front of my floor-length IKEA mirror. He twists his torso and puffs his chest as he often does while dressing, and I observe his ritual silently. He repeats this routine often, sometimes inflating his stomach to assess whether he’s lost or gained weight and other times admiring his ass. I consider offering a compliment but don’t because I worry it will be rebuffed or ignored. His ego is irremediable, like an aging European villa, defined by some previous era of unspoiled splendor that he dreams of rehabilitating even though the marks of use and time are now central to the structure’s charm. He hands me the polaroid and asks if I will display it. Maybe, I waver and set it on my desk.
The photo remains there for weeks until, in a sudden burst of inspiration one afternoon, I carefully remove an adhesive sticker from the pack I bought months ago, place it on the reverse side of the polaroid, and affix it to the wall above my bed alongside the dozens of other polaroids I’ve arranged to form a sort of headboard of images of my friends and family. The photo adopts an anonymous quality despite my distinctive back tattoo being clearly visible; Z’s cock is blurry and almost entirely out of frame, evading permanent capture. But I realize I forgot to date the photo and tear it off the wall. I search for a pen and write in the thin white border, Z and I, 2024, as if can undo the image’s shortcomings by simply declaring his presence. I lazily fan the polaroid to make the ink dry faster and briefly attempt to imagine who might discover this photo one day and benefit from this identification. No obvious candidate emerges. I experience a momentary pang of existential anxiety before I decide the ink has sufficiently dried and pin it to the wall again.
Image: Sam Contis, Three Horses, 2014.