and blenders and mixers and rusty egg whisks, fused in combinations of two, three, four items. His creations hang from the ceiling by piano wire, jut up from the floor, and cling to the walls like postmodern tarantulas.
Erik, my beautiful boy, my nurse, is also a sculptor.
My favorite sculpture is in his friend’s gallery (it wasn’t just a pickup line; he really knows someone with an art gallery) in Milwaukee. He took two antique iceboxes and turned them into robots. One has mixer beaters for eyes, toilet plungers for arms, and mops for legs. The other is meant to look incomplete. It has no eyes but a spiral mouth—a discarded burner from an electric stove—rolling pins for arms, and one leg made from a tower of fused pork-and-beans cans. Two strategically placed potato mashers assure you each is male. They’re holding each other. And you get the idea that the one with the beaters wants to look into the eyes of the other robot—eyes that aren’t there. Erik calls it Some Assembly Requited . It’s the first image that pops intomy mind whenever I think about us as a couple.
It’s a toasty night. I navigate through the labyrinth of cloned garages toward the sounds of Gregory Douglass singing “Hard.” Erik’s choice of music on any given day acts like a road map, guiding me to his mood.
I’ll miss you hard enough to hide it,
I need you hard enough to try,
I love you hard enough to move on …
“Hard,” in Erik’s world, means caution. Curves ahead, slow down . It tells me he’s been brooding today and he’s working his way out of a funk. It tells me he’s remembering past boyfriends, bad relationships. But that’s about to change. Because I am here to negate all funks. The caring boyfriend has arrived.
I turn the corner to Unit 481. As expected, he’s standing in just his favorite pair of paint-spattered, ripped jeans. I have seen the man in a business suit, in swim trunks, and totally naked, but nothing gets me revved like seeing him in those jeans, shirtless and barefoot. He even makes the colossal welding mask that swallows his head look sexy.
The space reeks with industrial backwash; singed metal and pungent magnesium. The familiar hiss of the welder blends seamlessly with the music’s synthesizer asthe squeal of two chunks of steel fusing together threatens to drown out both.
I lean on the entryway and gape at the work in progress. This is one of the biggest things he’s ever done. It’s unlike any of his other sculptures; very literal, not at all abstract. He’s created a skeleton of pipes, around which he’s wrapping long strips of steel sheeting that he’s first run over with a buffer so they’re coated in circular grooves, giving them a tarnished, scratched look. This sculpture is of two angels holding spears overhead in their outstretched arms, one foot off the ground as though they’re leaping into the sky together. Their wings, like mirrors, shoot out with a width twice the statue’s height. He calls it Fierce Angels.
“Why ‘fierce’?” I asked when he first showed it to me.
“Angels have to be fierce nowadays,” he reasoned. “We’ve come up with a thousand new ways to be crappy to one another since Biblical times when angels roamed freely. You’ve heard about people going ‘where angels fear to tread’? Not these two. Nothing scares them. They’ll go anywhere to help somebody out of a jam.”
Erik calls this his hobby. His heart, he assures me, is in medicine. He’s the top of his class in nursing school and he puts in more hours than any other intern at University Hospital. But even though he doesn’t call himself a “serious” artist, I know Erik is pouring everything he’sgot into this piece. It’s his first commission. At the end of the summer, the city is going to unveil it down at Reid Park as the celebration of their “clean up the neighborhood” project for that area.
Last year, two gay kids got the crap beat out of them at that park. One of
Erik, my beautiful boy, my nurse, is also a sculptor.
My favorite sculpture is in his friend’s gallery (it wasn’t just a pickup line; he really knows someone with an art gallery) in Milwaukee. He took two antique iceboxes and turned them into robots. One has mixer beaters for eyes, toilet plungers for arms, and mops for legs. The other is meant to look incomplete. It has no eyes but a spiral mouth—a discarded burner from an electric stove—rolling pins for arms, and one leg made from a tower of fused pork-and-beans cans. Two strategically placed potato mashers assure you each is male. They’re holding each other. And you get the idea that the one with the beaters wants to look into the eyes of the other robot—eyes that aren’t there. Erik calls it Some Assembly Requited . It’s the first image that pops intomy mind whenever I think about us as a couple.
It’s a toasty night. I navigate through the labyrinth of cloned garages toward the sounds of Gregory Douglass singing “Hard.” Erik’s choice of music on any given day acts like a road map, guiding me to his mood.
I’ll miss you hard enough to hide it,
I need you hard enough to try,
I love you hard enough to move on …
“Hard,” in Erik’s world, means caution. Curves ahead, slow down . It tells me he’s been brooding today and he’s working his way out of a funk. It tells me he’s remembering past boyfriends, bad relationships. But that’s about to change. Because I am here to negate all funks. The caring boyfriend has arrived.
I turn the corner to Unit 481. As expected, he’s standing in just his favorite pair of paint-spattered, ripped jeans. I have seen the man in a business suit, in swim trunks, and totally naked, but nothing gets me revved like seeing him in those jeans, shirtless and barefoot. He even makes the colossal welding mask that swallows his head look sexy.
The space reeks with industrial backwash; singed metal and pungent magnesium. The familiar hiss of the welder blends seamlessly with the music’s synthesizer asthe squeal of two chunks of steel fusing together threatens to drown out both.
I lean on the entryway and gape at the work in progress. This is one of the biggest things he’s ever done. It’s unlike any of his other sculptures; very literal, not at all abstract. He’s created a skeleton of pipes, around which he’s wrapping long strips of steel sheeting that he’s first run over with a buffer so they’re coated in circular grooves, giving them a tarnished, scratched look. This sculpture is of two angels holding spears overhead in their outstretched arms, one foot off the ground as though they’re leaping into the sky together. Their wings, like mirrors, shoot out with a width twice the statue’s height. He calls it Fierce Angels.
“Why ‘fierce’?” I asked when he first showed it to me.
“Angels have to be fierce nowadays,” he reasoned. “We’ve come up with a thousand new ways to be crappy to one another since Biblical times when angels roamed freely. You’ve heard about people going ‘where angels fear to tread’? Not these two. Nothing scares them. They’ll go anywhere to help somebody out of a jam.”
Erik calls this his hobby. His heart, he assures me, is in medicine. He’s the top of his class in nursing school and he puts in more hours than any other intern at University Hospital. But even though he doesn’t call himself a “serious” artist, I know Erik is pouring everything he’sgot into this piece. It’s his first commission. At the end of the summer, the city is going to unveil it down at Reid Park as the celebration of their “clean up the neighborhood” project for that area.
Last year, two gay kids got the crap beat out of them at that park. One of
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