PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

By Shaun Costello

This story is excerpted from Shaun Costello’s childhood memoir:

THE LAST TIME I SAW JESUS

Surviving God and Elvis in the Time of ‘Duck and Cover’

My friend Mickey Nolan had parents with a different last name than his, which, considering the divorce rate in the Forest Hills Gardens, was not that unusual. His mom had married a Greek man named Karras, who owned a Greek Restaurant somewhere in Brooklyn. Mrs. Karras was quiet, blond, and very attractive. Mr. Karras was very friendly, always trying to get local kids to try food from his restaurant. It seemed to give him great pleasure to get someone like me to try spinach pie, or lamb kebabs, or bacclavah for the first time, and made him truly ecstatic if you enjoyed it. These were tastes I had never experienced before, and I really liked them. My mother’s cuisine consisted of burned meat and frozen vegetables, so anything new was welcome. Mrs. Karras was a painter who did pastoral water colors and occasionally had exhibitions of her work at their house. On one particular Saturday I went looking for Mickey to play some stick ball and there was a sign outside his house that read, “EXHIBITION TODAY”.

Mrs. Karras was a painter who did pastoral water colors and occasionally had exhibitions of her work at their house.

There were lots of people, all dressed up, and Eddie’s mom told me that he was up in his room. Eddie was standing at the top of the stairs, frantically waving me up. He told me that he found something in his parent’s closet – something so cool that he was certain that I had never seen anything like it before. We went into his room, and he locked his door. He took a shoebox from under his bed, opened it, and took out a stack of black and white photographs. They were pictures of naked adults doing strange things to each other. When I looked closer I realized that they were pictures of Mickey’s mom, Mr. Karras, and several men, all naked, and involved in kissing, and touching, and caressing each other. Mickey was right. I had never seen anything like this before. I could not even have imagined it. They were mostly of Mickey’s mom being caressed by the men, who all had swollen dicks. So this must be what a boner looks like. Some of the pictures showed Mrs Karras fondling the boners of the naked men. Some even showed her even putting them in her mouth. I was horrified and fascinated simultaneously. With puberty still a year away, the activities graphically displayed in the pictures were a mystery to me. I was only ten years old, but somehow I sensed that what I was seeing was important, a seminal moment in my little life.  I mentioned something to Mickey about his mom looking great in the pictures. I really didn’t know what I was supposed to say. He told me, “What, are you crazy? That’s not my mom. She just has the same color hair, that’s all”. The woman in the pictures was definitely Mickey’s mom, no matter how elaborate his denials. What I wondered was why he was showing them to me.

He took a shoebox from under his bed, opened it, and took out a stack of black and white photographs.

On the way out Mrs. Karras was shaking hands with people who were leaving her exhibition, some of whom were carrying framed water colors they had just purchased. “Bye Shaun”, she said. “You behave yourself now”. It seemed that each day something happened to me that made me different than I was the day before. This was one of those days.

                                                                  *

© 2015 Shaun Costello