Read Online A Brief History of Male Nudes in America by Dianne Nelson, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly - Free Book Online

only one hand to use. When the wheels stopped in the ruts or hit loose dirt, she placed her hip against the handle, pushed hard with all of her one hundred and fifteen pounds, and got us moving again.
    Who can really know the exact moment when something begins, but my mother’s opinion is that the real trouble with my father had started months before when Milo de Rossi’s car drove up, dust flying, the horn honking, two girls in the back seat tangled up with de Rossi in a way that was still illegal in this state. He introduced the girls as actresses.
    Later my mother looked at my father and scowled and, because her hands were full of wet laundry, blew a piece of hair tiredly away from her forehead. “Warren,” she said, “let me ask you this. How many movies do you think those girls have been in?”
    He stuck his hand in his back pocket, as if to get more room for thinking, and before he could answer she continued. “Looks like they got the auditioning down.”
    Milo de Rossi had been looking for a place to film his next movie and he’d heard about our ranch and the land it sat on: red cliffs, deep canyons, and the stark Bull Mountains in the distance. He found our land to be a cheap and ready-made set, just as other producers discovered it and made it fit their needs. With a few props and the right camera angles, our ranch was alternately transformed during the early 50’s into the Sahara, the moon, the Apache nation, and a hidden Mexican outpost filled with copper-faced desperados. In oneof the lowest budget films ever, my father watched cavemen battle dinosaurs in the mock prehistoric valley just below our house, and everything in those ten days of filming would have been perfect had my father not got into a shoving match with a caveman who, during a break, flirtingly lifted the edge of my mother’s skirt with his spear and then grunted.
    Milo de Rossi was not the first director to visit us, to shake my father’s hand and make a deal, but he was the first to tempt him. “And by the way,” he had said to him casually, “we might be able to use you in a few scenes that haven’t been fully written yet.” De Rossi backed up, squared his hands out in front of his face to make a fleshy lens through which to look my father over. “Turn to the left, Warren, and lift your chin a little.” My father complied, looking straight into the sun, squinting in a way that would later become Clint Eastwood’s seering trademark.
    They say that acting is a bug that bites, and if that’s true, then my mother could tell you how that bite makes a person sick. My father didn’t run a fever after de Rossi left, but he was as hot and irrational as a child with the flu.
    â€œHoney,” my mother tried to tell him, “the movies are a long shot. And you can’t trust those people.”
    But my father had taken up staring at the horizon. He rode his horse and irrigated and cut hay and worked hard like he always did, though de Rossi had planted a tantalizing idea out in front of him. And around that time my mother noticed how often he was combing his hair. Any reflective surface would do: a fender, a piece of glass, the still surface of water. By then de Rossi and his crew were due back in three weeks.
    We didn’t wait for bad news to collapse around us. When my father had turned ice cold that morning and said that his mind was made up, that he’d take whatever de Rossi would give him and that he’d work his way up from there, my mother set her shoulders, let him have one last look at us, and headed out.
    The sun was warm and she had stopped to give me a bottle of water. “Hey sweet meat, we’re doing fine,” she said, kissed both my arms, tickled the warm wet spot under my chin, and pushed the stroller on. The breeze quickened and the cedars waved. A sugar-fine pelting of dust blew over my mother’s ankles and between the stroller