In Praise of Layering

The slim bespectacled guy behind me in line at the hamburger joint, chatting and laughing with his buddy, wore umpteen layers of clothing. A downfilled vest, pullover sweater, lord knows what else underneath. He was certainly cute, brunette, maybe about 24 or 25, an intriguing jock/nerd thing happening facially.

I sat down to wait for my burger. Noticed Jock/Nerd's black track pants, with a white stripe down each leg. After the guys ordered, they sat down near me. JN unzipped his vest, slipped it off. As he began wriggling an intention to go further, my crotch wriggled too. Off came his pullover, up—a few delectable inches—went the white tee-shirt beneath. A ring of taut belly skin, bottom-fringed by a black Prodige waistband, flashed momentarily.

Oh my fucking god.

The curtain went down on the show split seconds later. Then I noticed his arms. Or his arm, rather, the one closest to me, spilling out of its t-shirt sleeve. What a bicep! The kind you want to slap and chew and hug. And a fancy string of calligraphed letters descending down it. BFNP, I think. His initials?

The belly flash inspired me to look up a passage this morning from Stan Persky's Buddy's: Meditations on Desire that I've often recalled since reading it way back in 1989:

Sememe

Peter, an attractive hustler shooting pool at Buddy's stretches his body over the worn felt-covered table to make a shot. As he does so, his jeans pull tightly around his ass while his black T-shirt draws upward in the reaching movement of his arms. Unexpectedly, an inch or two of tanned flesh flashes before our eyes in the space between the two items of apparel. A moment of stasis or still-life: Peter is sprawled/taut; vulnerable/poised; then there's a click of pool balls. He straightens up, his T-shirt readjusts itself, skin disappears, he steps back into the shadows. If the smallest unit of meaning in the science of signs can be called a sememe, then the glimpse is the smallest unit of meaning in the composition of desire.

Or: "Is the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?" asks Roland Barthes. "...skin flashing between two articles of clothing...it is this flash which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance." The conjunction of reading that fragment (the other day) and of seeing Peter appears to me as a demonstrated proof of Barthes' assertion, almost a replication of scientific findings.

Plato's Charmides: "...at that moment, my good friend, I caught a sight of the inwards of his garment, and took the flame. Then I could no longer contain myself."