Polka Dots
by Andrew Kauffmann
CW: homophobia
Frigid as a schoolboy’s knees, one whose nylon shorts sit too high on his legs. A rugby ball covered in cowpat catapults close to my face. I invite you to a drizzly playing field, where groins are grabbed, shirts are tugged; a landscape where art scarcely exists.
After the whistle blows, to the showers. Hot water hoses my frostbitten forearms and bites my puny chest. Aged twelve, I’m the taps in an English boarding house, intensely one temperature until I’m turned to pour the next.
A classmate’s polka-dotted boxer shorts do battle with my adolescent gaze. They’re black-and-white. Do I stare? Will he notice? I exit the changing rooms hunchbacked, or so my PE teachers’ imitations exaggeratedly suggest. Slinking home at night, bag over my shoulder, my colour’s marengo grey. To the boy with the polka dots, I’m faceless. I function, as LS Lowry townscapes might attest.
Later that night, the dots converge. They’re no longer the colours of a zebra but monochrome; a flaky alabaster on my teenage bedspread.
In English classes, our set text is George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a miser, a realist, a man in whom I have nothing to invest. Still coiled in my goonish glasses and oversized mac, I sign up for a school trip. Picture the scene: the Upper Gardens of St Petersburg’s Peterhof Palace. I didn’t possess the language to describe or pen the Anna Karenina panorama, not then, not when I was repressed.
It’s a gilded glimpse of a life resistant to ridicule, one where people rule supreme, where even I might yet be appointed ‘Form Captain’. In this vista, I’m fanciable, a sweaty fold in my polka-dotted classmate’s short-sleeved shirt. Much like the Peterhof’s fountains, I try to stand erect.
One day in Art, we’re taught in a slanting room. That’s unlikely; a fiction, call it what you will. Picture instead a sloping, adjustable desk, and me, the iron filings deposited deep within the cracks. We’re asked to think for ourselves, us boys. Picasso’s Blue Period is introduced with creased textbooks, no bugles to muster us to what we’re about to digest. I stare at a melancholy woman with a pinched triangle for a shoulder, and, not that I care, no apparent breasts.
Dad takes me to churchyards close to Cuffley in Hertfordshire, a London outpost with fire-heated pubs. Warmed by his easy trust, I sketch cumulus clouds, Formula One racing tracks and a pair of boxer shorts descending, wispy, daydreams fallen beneath a bed.
Year 10 arrives and I’m praised for my ‘attention to detail’. A freckled teacher tells the class how well I’ve captured ‘the likeness of a primitive mask.’ ‘Andrew’, she repeats. I look up from my books and both crave and avoid the ensuing gaze. Science is next. Peering over the surface of a globe, I watch the polka-dotted boy’s white toothed smile. Clipped, much like a crescent moon. Eyes meet eyes. My smile settles into an uncomfortable grin.
Adulthood hits. Infinitesimal choices abound as art fans into arias, adagios for strings, and amateur porn. A pit-stop in the toilet. Grindr’s ocular pains accompany Twitter videos of bubblegum-haired ‘twinks’. ‘Art’ argue some. A new avant garde, one’s surrounded by orifices which twitch. ‘Procrastination’, my conscience protests. ‘How foolish’. There’s a libidinal urge, but is it just me? When I see that devilish icon on Grindr, I’m engulfed by Bosch's licking flames, hellfire, and for good measure, Goya’s daytime tricks. ‘Uninstall the apps!’
I roam Paris’s 6éme, my eager eyes and hungry belly in concert, a flâneur, I must confess. There’s a panoply of pantheons and palatial routes ahead. Leaf through Edmund White’s memoirs, pay a therapist, see in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star a mannered protagonist who covets young men he’ll never possess. There’s a canon, I learn; you can start with Thomas Mann’s Count, who’s deathly and effete. Books pile above, I shove one far under my unmade single bed. Edmund White’s ‘gay’ autofiction: The Beautiful Room is Empty. I avert my eyes. I’d rather preserve what must remain unread.
A crutch many years later, art tantalises with its whisper of flesh. Modigliani’s eyeless women, Cézanne’s bruised apples and pears. Life drawing classes booked. I’m a ‘creative’, a ‘dreamer’, not a manager in a suit reeking of regret. Trudging along the Thames to offices of thirteen storeys, staring east and west. I feel a premature tightness in my chest, and later, at my easel, a pulsating dance as my fingers stretch. I forget form and fancy myself an expressionist above the Arts Theatre in London’s all-singing West End. Three weeks in, I foreshorten a male model’s limbs. I rip up the resulting print.
Chronos dictates I pick up the pace. I ‘come out’, and as if on cue, make acquaintance with my toilet seat. Can I ever absorb it all? Van Gogh’s twilit skies? Musée d'Orsay has its Rodins, the post-impressionists’ have their last-gasp sunsets? What knowledge I desire and hope to possess now I’m unleashed. Holst’s cymbals clash, and look who’s here, my planetary ruler Saturn, reminding me, mocking me even, ‘thirty-nine, huh, you’re simply too late’.
The plucked notes of Old Father Time echo in Madrid’s Cortes quarter. I transport myself somewhere foreign again. There’s Picasso’s Guernica and its incapable, two-dimensional tongues. The Paseo del Prado slavishly takes me to Museo Thyssen where German abstractionism shines curiously bright. Men were exiled, some killed themselves, others were condemned: ninety years later, the gays among them are still curated as, you guessed it, ‘degenerates’.
‘Enjoy Madrid’, they say, but ‘enjoy’ isn’t the word I’d choose, not in my current catatonic state. Staying up late, fuelled by my insatiable need to read more, do more, be so much more. There’s not enough time to root like mould, to be as vapid as a blotch of white paint. There're swarthy men, to be sure, with impossibly good genetics, but they’re twenty-four, twenty-seven, and what good does it do me trying to pretend that I’m hot like them? In any case, I’ve got an income to make. There’s a Nicolas Roeg retrospective to pencil in.
Wait, which room did I miss? In the Thyssen, Kandinsky’s isosceles triangles and squiggles shine resplendent, the primary colours of primary school palettes and mauves, pinks and the rest. Vortexes jostle for my attention next to trapezoids and jagged cliffs. There’s the aquamarine of Melville’s Pacific. I’m there, in an arcadian deep breath. Let me enter the improbable purples of Gauguin’s lush volcanic islands, let me love this art, have sex with it, for I insist, I am not sexless.
I turn a corner. There’s a shock of Pollock’s polka dots. I’m in no mood for mournful songs, the memory of regrets. It’s time for lunch; a duty to smile and be something other than myself. An uncomfortable drumming stirs in my head.
Heading to the Retiro, I pass palladian architecture. I could Google the building, but I’ll lose the thread. Seven tabs flicked through, and here’s a review of Ben Lerner’s new book, still unread. Earphones untangled, watch out for the mess, the pavement cracks and it’s Melvyn Bragg. A podcast, an old BBC debate: gender-bending in the work of Virginia Woolf, with strangled voices and, at best, only a year of ‘youth’ left.
The pandemic walls me in and I’m resigned to rectangular runs in Collioure, another artistic escape. Besides Mediterranean waves, over pine needles I jog, frenziedly, picturing wild-haired Matisse, and his younger, foppish friend. With such wild abandon, I listen to Shostakovich’s Second Waltz, its ternary rhythm imploring me to further quicken my pace. Forty’s not fifty, but I came out so very late.
The lyrics to Abba’s Fernando accompany me in my wakeful dervish, in my constant, wakeful dreams. ‘Can you hear the drums?’ Yes, I can, but running to whom and to what?
Raptured, my feet are projectiles without strings or ends. I want to waft in the sky, cuddle a pine tree tight. I must explore courses on flora, and while I’m at it, Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents. Perched on those branches, simultaneously bathing down by the rocks, I’m swimming and taking flight, hours multiplied by hours, bewitched by these new longings, my full chromatic spread.
I slow, so in the bath I soak. May I close my heavy lids? Dare I file away new facts and sink my soapy head? To feel it drop, to turn the faucet with my toes, to expose myself to its steady drip? To watch nothing but the mirror reflecting my respiring breath? Perhaps I ought to embrace the hinterland, celebrate celibacy instead?
Towelled into bed, I try to sit still, to drop into the ocean of inner voices, to magic reprieves in my stead. All I hear, or so my therapist insists;
‘It can be men from now on, what you covet; draw pictures of men. Allow yourself to fall in love with your painted polka dots, and whatever you do, don’t protest’.
Andrew Kauffmann is a queer writer located in Madrid, Spain and has been published in Untitled: Writing and Queerlings. He is a genealogy geek and loves family trees. He blogs on storytelling and mental health at www.andrewkaufman.co.uk