Stroke of Genius

A handful of Penn Valley Community College students on a cigarette break are sitting at a picnic bench, talking about the naked guy in their classroom.

"I've never had a model so proud of his stuff," exclaims Maria Wilkerson, who has been sketching the guy's junk in charcoal all morning at the school's Carter Art Center. "It was the way he'd look you right in the eye and make it twitch. Like, 'Hey, draw this.'"

Jonathan Hart, a 24-year-old student, commiserates with Wilkerson. "At times throughout his modeling, it was clear he was happy to be there. Wasn't he almost spread-eagle last week?"

Another student, a preppy black guy in a polo who goes by the nickname Crush, laughs. Wilkerson chides him, "He could be twitching it at you, honey."

They start discussing another of the model's poses, this time a standing position. "I got the backside of that, thank God," Crush says.

"Well, I guess that's the way you have to be," Wilkerson says. "If you're embarrassed, you won't last two minutes. So that's probably how you deal with it. I'm glad for people like him. Otherwise, we'd be drawing wooden dolls."

"Easy money," Crush says.

"But it's not that easy to stay still like that. It's not as easy as it looks," argues Wilkerson.

It's undeniable. Paul Allen is having an up-and-down day.

As a figure model for various art classes around the Kansas City metro, Allen can spend three hours a day naked in front of strangers who draw, sculpt or paint his image. Sometimes his limbs fall asleep while trying to hold poses for 20 or 30 minutes. Other times, he gets to lounge, reclining on a pedestal on top of colorful pillows. And though calling this a hard day's work might offend some of the heavy-lifting construction workers in this orange-cone-covered town, Allen says the job comes with its own set of roadblocks.

At least if you're a man.

"Funnier things happen to male [models] than females," he says, sucking on a Parliament 100. "Sometimes you get groups with an agenda to get a rise out of you. It's not like it was when I was in school. Girls wear these short skirts. They'll sit in front of you, and there's nothing you can do. Last week at the [Kansas City] Art Institute, they had this thing where they fly high school kids in to see if they want to go to school there. And these girls come in with these skirts on and straddle the bench in front of them and pull their skirts up to here, and I'm like, four hours of this? I can only go through so many [baseball] box scores."

Allen, who is in his late 40s, has a Burt Reynolds-like grip on his masculinity. He wears Hawaiian shirts (curiously, so did almost every male figure model interviewed by the Pitch), with buttons left open to show off an ample amount of chest hair. He wears tennis shoes and no socks. He prefers beer to coffee. For a living, in addition to modeling, he produces low-budget corporate marketing videos and cleans tables at a local bar. He flaunts big, gaudy, class-ring-style jewelry on his fingers; chains around his neck; and gold bracelets (and a yellow Livestrong band) on his wrists.

Staying in shape is a priority for Allen, something he can't say for all the folks he runs into on the KC nude-modeling circuit. "If we all lined up, you wouldn't look at us and pick us out for going out together," he says. "We're a wide variety. We wouldn't find each other in the same bar or anything. There are large people, small people, thin people. I try to stay in shape so they [the students] aren't like, 'Aw, I gotta draw this guy?'" he says, laughing.

Allen has a salt-and-pepper mustache, bronzed shoulders and a hearty level of below-the-belt pride. Try as he might, sometimes he just can't keep it down.

"I try to think of bad things that happen," Allen says of methods he uses to distract himself and avoid untimely erections. "I don't think it's really a big deal. It's human nature. It's just when someone's got tunnel vision" -- he cups his hands around his eyes -- "and is staring right between your legs and their pencil's not moving, I'm like, God. Look somewhere else."

Allen says he started modeling for extra cash a long time ago, when he was at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He picked up extra jobs at the neighboring Baptist colleges. He liked to draw, and over the summers he'd model at the Art Institute. Some of the teachers would let him attend a class as a student on occasion, giving him pointers. Today, he doesn't always appreciate the drawings he sees of himself.

"The artists are better at the Art Institute," he says. "They spend more money to get in there, so they're not going to be in there wasting time. Some draw me, and I don't know what they're doing. It's all abstract. But they're doing these things for grades. Everyone has their own flair as an artist."