The receptionist had already had his sketch done.
He'd done it with his mother, pretend pillow-fighting on the bed. He said it like getting a nude portrait of you pillow-fighting with your mum was the most normal thing in the world.
Well. Maybe (hopefully?) they plumped for the non-nude option.
When my editor emailed me the release for Art Series Hotel Group's 'No Robe' campaign, I typed 'WTF', pressed send and thought the issue settled.
The hotel was offering the services of an arsenal of artists who would sketch paying customers in the buff based on photos they had taken with a special iPad. The sketches could then be ordered from your hotel room like some sort of pornographic room-service. Clearly a publicity stunt, the type which no earnest journalist would get involved in.
"Is this off-brand for you?" my editor followed up. You mean, is getting a nude portrait done something regular readers would expect from this fearlessly independent news-breaking firebrand?
OK. I was off to the hotel.
The iPad, mounted chest-high on a silver pole, stared at me smugly. 'You're definitely 100 per cent not going to regret this,' it seemed to be saying.
The pad-and-pole combo was delivered to my hotel room by a young woman. "You seem nervous," she told me.
Nope. Not nervous at all.
Say cheese
How does one pose in the nude, I pondered, after pouring myself a fortifying glass of wine. Do I go for something dark and artistic, Bill Henson-esque? Do I ... flex?
The most posing I've done was for the annual photo at high school. Smiling and saying 'cheese' would not be appropriate here.
The first pose was modest. I arranged myself on the bed, slouching forward in an effort to artfully cover my modesty. The iPad snapped a photo of a large flesh-coloured bag of assorted bones jutting at oblique angles. Hunched-over side-back is obviously not my best angle.
Night fell and the apartment's floor-to-ceiling window was a black mirror. I'm here, I thought. I'm really doing this. I'm naked.
I turned my torso to the camera, composed my face, and … OK, I flexed.
Two weeks later
I'm going to be in a nude, I tell all my friends later, pronouncing the word like it's foreign, like it's some form of high art. Nuy-de. I threaten my girlfriend by telling her I'm going to hang it from the mantelpiece. Perhaps it will ward off visits from mothers-in-law, like some sort of naked spirit-totem. The girlfriend is unimpressed.
The nuy-de finally arrives, two weeks later, in a rolled paper cylinder. I grab it from our office postmaster, squeal, and sneak into Fairfax's editorial library for an unravelling.
Among the dusty archives filled with great journalism on microfiche, I unroll my latest contribution to this paper's 150-plus-year history.
In the same order a child is born, the head emerges first. It is … small. Like a wrinkled prune. Dark and angry. I have an unkind mouth. And my hair has been reduced to a squiggled afterthought, a zephyr atop my skull.
Next comes the chest, and the arm. Oh, dear. My attempts at flexion has bestowed upon me a single bulging tricep. That is all. It juts from my arm like some sort of tumour. Perhaps that is why my face is so angry. It does not look comfortable.
But below the waist – oh my.
One's manhood is so much a part of one's identity that it is hard to put the finger on words that might describe it. It defines without being definable. Sketched with inky finality, it's strangely confronting.
For now, I have hidden my naked form back in the cardboard tube. It sits in my lounge room, a dead weight. Can I bring myself to hang it from my mantelpiece, or at least hide it in my bedroom?
The biggest obstacle is still to come. What am I supposed to say to the shopkeeper when I go to have it framed?
Other suggestions for stupid/unedifying journalistic assignments can be sent to liam.mannix@fairfaxmedia.com.au.