Some years ago, I took an adult-education course in figure drawing at NYU. The class met in a large artist's studio in Greenwich Village, just off Washington Square Park. There were about a dozen students, ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-50s. Each of us sat on an uncomfortable stool before an easel, on which was mounted an oversized newsprint pad, tilted at an angle comfortable for drawing with a pencil.
The teacher was an ancient, bejowled creature with moist basset hound eyes and wiry gray hair that spoked out wildly, like Einstein's. She wore a loose cotton Indian tied-dyed dress that you can pick up at any New York street fair for ten bucks.
The students, mostly businesspeople, I suspected, were much better dressed. A quick scan of the women's arms, legs, and faces revealed nothing of interest, but then the model for the session, who had been standing off in a corner in a blue terry bathrobe, mounted the platform bearing the bench on which she would sit as she posed for us in the nude.
Even in the robe I could see that she had a boyish build, with small breasts, narrow hips, and a hard little ass. She was short, about five-three, and wore her straight, light-brown hair short, swept back over her ears and tapering to a point at the base of her neck. It made her look vaguely butch.
Her face had a skull-like aspect. Her eyes were sunken and dark-ringed, her cheekbones protruded beneath tightly stretched skin, and her cheeks were hollow. High on her right cheek was a swollen red sore that might have been an emerging pimple were it not the size of a silver dollar. I wondered if someone had slapped her around recently.
Her face, aside from thick eyebrows, was hairless, nor were any traces of hair visible in the V the lapels of her robe formed across her chest. But the sleeves of the robe only extended to the crooks of her arms, revealing hairy forearms the likes of which I have yet to see again. The fine brown hair began at her wrists, where it was about a half-inch long, and then continued growing longer and longer as it spread upward. At the swell of her forearms, it had to be eight or nine inches long.
The hair was neatly swept back over her forearms as if brushed, with the longest hairs extending well beyond her elbows—not up her arms but out into the air! I could thread my fingers through those long silken tendrils as easily as the hair on her head. I could feel her arm hair without actually coming near her arms.
The robe extended to her mid-thigh, exposing the lushest display of female leg hair I have ever seen in the flesh. It was the same light brown as the hair on her arms, and while it wasn't spectacularly long, it was spectacularly dense. The thicket of soft curls began abruptly at her ankles and spread up her legs in an ever-more-flagrant carpet. And her coverage was superbly even: The backs of her legs were as hairy as the fronts, even her knees were dusted with beckoning curls, and her exquisite forest proceeded straight up her thighs without letup as far as the hem of the robe would reveal.
When the teacher directed her to disrobe, nobody batted an eyelash, but my eyes were as wide and burning as Dracula's at the sight of blood. Loose curls hung from her inner thighs, leading up to a crotch that was engulfed in long thick curly hair. Viewed from the side, her bush jutted out from her pubic mound in an awesome star burst, with the longest, thickest hair--that surrounding her hole--forming a tail of hair between her legs a good eight inches long.
Her hirsute profusion totally covered her ass cheeks and sprouted out of her ass crack like fine fountain spray. And yet, while the hair flowed down over the backs of her thighs in long looping curls, it didn't spread up onto the small of her back. Nor did she have a treasure trail. It was as if a genetic line had been drawn around her waist. Below, she was as furry as a cave woman; above, she was hairless, except for the nipples on her pear-sized breasts, which were encircled by long, corkscrewing hairs; her armpits, each of which sported a full thatch; and her thickly haired arms .
The teacher instructed her how to pose. She was to sit back on the bench, using one of her arms for support. She was to put one foot on the bench so that her leg extended out at an angle. Her other leg was simply to dangle loosely in a position that exposed her hairy cunt. But from where I sat, I couldn't see it. I picked up my pad and pencil and found a free easel that afforded a better view of that feral forest, as the teacher gave me an opprobrious eye. Normally timid in this sort of situation, I was propelled by lust.
"Start drawing," the teacher announced.
A true artist strives for economy of line. I have seen sketched portraits by Picasso and Matisse that brilliantly captured the subject's psychological essence, yet consisted of little more than a single perfectly drawn line. I drew my lines in small, hesitant segments--the mark of an amateur. Nevertheless, I have a talent for reproducing shapes fairly accurately, if not particularly pleasingly, and after an hour, a reasonable likeness of the posed model began to emerge on my pad.
At this point, I found myself in a creative quandary: Precisely how much detail should I include? I had drawn the woman's face and figure well enough with my mincing, unconfident strokes, but her most salient feature--her extraordinary hairiness--had yet to be sketched in. I glanced at the work of the students--both women--on either side of me. Their portraits contained no trace of body hair. I faked a stretch and yawn, got up, and wandered around the room. Nobody was drawing the model's hair. Simply acknowledging her hairiness seemed to violate a social taboo.
I returned to my easel. At that point in my life, while I had spurted countless gallons of semen jerking off to fantasies of hairy women, I had never revealed my predilection to a soul. "Ah, fuck it," I thought. I began to sketch in her hair, using fine interlayered lines to capture a sense of its lushness, particularly along the length of her legs and around her crotch, where I felt I did justice to her extraordinary tail of hair.
The crone who taught the class was moving from easel to easel, making quiet comments. When she approached my easel, she bent toward my sketch. Squinting, she scowled, as if to say, "Oh, you filthy beast!" She then continued on without a word.
At the end of the session, the model enrobed and wandered among us, checking out our work. "Boy, you really got how hairy I am down pat," she said to me as naturally as if she were complimenting me on how I'd drawn the line of her nose.
"I was inspired," I replied. "You're the hairiest woman I've ever seen. I'd love to photograph you. Are you available as a photographic model as well?"
She gave me a mysterious smirk, then without another word, she went to the far corner of the studio where her clothes hung from a peg in the wall. She tugged on a long-sleeved sweater and wide-leg black slacks. Had I not seen her in the raw, I would have never guessed how hairy she was from how she dressed. What little of her that was showing was hairless. It made me wonder how many other women who cover their arms and legs are secretly hairy underneath.
Boldly, I went up to her. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee," I said. "We'll discuss your rates."
I followed her out the studio door. We went to the first Greek diner we came to. You're never more than a few yards from one in New York. This one was decorated like a vineyard. Plastic bunches of grapes hung from a trellis mounted on the ceiling. We slid into a booth. The waiter, who looked like Quasimodo in a tux, took our order: two coffees, black.
"So, do you want to photograph me or fuck me?" she said forthrightly.
"Well, both," I admitted. "What's your name?"
She hesitated for a long moment. "Camille," she said finally.
"Are you gay?" I asked, since we were being direct. I thought there was a good chance she was.
"Most of the time," she replied coyly.
"How did you get that bruise on your cheek?"
"Ah, my pimp knocked me around--that fucken cunt!"
"Your pimp is a woman?"
"Yeah. I told you, I'm a lezzie."
"So your--er, johns--are women, too?"
Camille nodded. "We call them janes."
Cute.
The waiter set our coffees down with a clatter, slopping liquid into the saucers, then lumbered off.
"Do you ever fuck guys?" I asked.
"Not since high school," she said. She looked in her late twenties.
"Then what did you mean when I asked if you were gay and you answered, 'Most of the time?'"
"I don't know. I was just thinking." She shrugged.
"Thinking what?" I pressed.
"Thinking that I might like to try it again."
"With a guy."
She nodded and took a sip of her coffee.
I sipped mine, too, and smiled at her. She wore a pouty expression. She gave me a fake smile in return.
