I could feel myself burning, the flesh growing tight and dry. Reflected in Dusty’s glasses I saw that my face had moved past its pink period and settled into a deep, fiery red.
“I’m sorry, Dusty, but I think I need to go back to my trailer and put on some lotion.”
“Oh,” he said, “is that your way of telling me I’m boring? What, I’m not exciting enough compared to all your friends back in the city?”
He continued to harass me as I put on my T-shirt and folded my towel. “Is that what they do back where you come from, walk away from people while they’re talking to you?”
“Yes, Dusty, it is.”
The initial excitement I’d felt had worn off, and it no longer seemed novel to walk around my trailer naked. My house-hold nudity was becoming routine, and this for some reason frightened me. After barricading the door, I lay on my bed and tried to masturbate, just to remind my penis that it wasn’t as free as it thought it was. Usually I have no problem completing this exercise, but suddenly I was having a hard time concentrating. I tried thinking of the young man beside the pool, but his body was repeatedly pushed off the stage, replaced by vivid images of Dusty, whose enormous testicles hung like a wasp’s nest between his shriveled legs. I had never before experienced a sunburned penis and worried that my incessant tugging might have the same effect as rubbing together two dry sticks, the wisp of smoke leading to a sudden, violent flame. It became obvious that penis had no intention of cooperating. I thought of forcing it but worried that the struggle might result in a blister that would drive me into hiding for the remainder of my stay. For the time being, my penis had the upper hand and lay upon its nest, gloating. “All right,” I whispered. “You won this round. Enjoy it while you can because once we get back home I’m going to beat the living daylights out of you.”
Returning naked from the sauna this evening, I passed a group of senior citizens who had gathered to watch a game show on the clubhouse TV.
“Ask for an e!” someone shouted at the screen. “I mean a c, ask for a c.” The speaker was a rowdy white-haired woman with wrinkled, sun-cured skin the color and texture of a blond raisin. She wore nothing but a pair of bedroom slippers and a cardigan sweater she’d draped over her shoulders. “I meant a b, that’s it, a b.”
It’s an odd sensation watching TV this way. Because they are dressed, the people on television seem even more remote than usual. It’s as if they inhabit another world, something familiar but also closed off by high fences and aggressive border patrols.
“I wish this show was naked.” The woman absentmindedly ran her fingers over the tabletop. “It would be so much better that way, don’t you think? They could take all the money the hosts spend on clothes and make the prizes even bigger. I could play the nude version and make enough to — I don’t know, maybe I’d have someone dredge me a lake and fill it with boats. I like boats, always did. There’s nothing like a boat.” She scratched at her arm, leaving white tracks that quickly faded, the skin resuming its natural color.
I like the idea of that, filming two separate versions of any given program, one clothed and the other tailored to capture h the network saw as its vast nudist audience.
“Do I have to?” Peter Jennings would ask.
***
This is Friday and I awoke to a loud, grinding noise that turned out to be the owner’s grandson circling my trailer on a riding lawn mower. He made several rotations before his mother ran up shouting, “What are you, an idiot out here mowing the grass this way? For God’s sake, boy, lay a towel down on that seat!”
I went to the pool this morning and watched as a man removed his colostomy bag and taped a sheet of plastic over the hole before entering the water. I was thinking of how uncomfortable he must feel and turned to see a very old man who walked with a crutch and had no penis. It hadn’t been shriveled by the water; he just didn’t have one. His testicles were large and hairless, but where the penis should have been, there was only a small cavity. He noticed my staring and said only, “Hot enough for you?”
I’m trying not to aggravate my sunburn, so I spent my early afternoon in a T-shirt, wandering the grounds and noticing the great number of people who rarely visit the clubhouse or recreation areas. Here were men and women kneeling in their gardens and operating Weed Eaters, doing the same things other homeowners do but without the benefit of clothing. Sitting on the grass beside a concrete mermaid, a father and daughter strummed “Muskrat Love” on their guitars while a middle-aged woman hummed along, washing her hair and rinsing off the lather with a garden hose. On the playground a freckle-faced child stood alone in the plywood tower, lifting a plastic bucket filled with stones. A man lit a charcoal fire in his backyard grill. He had protected his chest with an apron reading “World’s Greatest Chef” and used his spatula to startle a fly off his ass. Nudist life was just as mundane as any other, perhaps even more so as its practice demands that you never leave the grounds. The clothed world was out there, just beyond the front gate. They had restaurants there, and movie theaters, a wide variety of distractions my neighbors had surrendered in exchange for the opportunity to grill chicken breasts in the nude. Obviously, I was missing something. I had washed dishes naked and eaten in the clubhouse, picking potato-chip crumbs out of my pubic hair and wondering what all the fuss was about. I have played games naked and watched TV naked and afterward I have yawned naked, finding my sigh no different than any previous expression of boredom. I hear people say, “Why go into town for lunch when we can stay here and be naked?” A person might enjoy golf or fishing, but that doesn’t stop them from visiting a department store or Chinese restaurant. I suppose if you’re a die-hard nudist, you can’t really go anywhere except for the few parks and isolated beaches that will have you.
Everyone’s very excited about the coming weekend, which brings a large, reportedly younger crowd of day visitors and trailer owners who haven’t yet retired. I went late this afternoon to the sundeck overlooking the pool, where I met a fun couple in their late thirties. Duke and Roberta own a lawn-maintenance company and were just beginning their week-long vacation. At thirty-six, Roberta is already a three-time grandmother. Duke, her third husband, is tattooed with sports cars, top hats, and beautiful women. Everything he can’t have in real life is pictured on his arms, back, and chest. The nudist park management frowns upon drinking, but the couple sat defiantly working their way through their third six-pack, the empty cans stacked in a bee-covered pyramid on one of the surrounding tables.
“Duke here is the big nudist,” she said. “It took him two years to get me down here, and then, last summer, we finally bought our own trailer. It’s been great except for all the god-damned snobs. Some of these snoots have got their noses so high in the air, they’re choking on their own snot. They’re up there on Snob Hill with their eighty-thousand-dollar trailers and jazzed-up golf carts, thinking their shit smells better than ours. Some of these bitches…”
Duke patted her arm and nodded at the white-haired woman staring in our direction.
“What?” she said. “I can say the word bitch. It’s a female dog. Look it up in the dictionary, fuck face.” She beckoned me close. “They don’t allow cursing here, so you really have to watch what you say. Some of these old fuckers will turn you in, just like that.” She tried to snap her fingers but they were coated with suntan oil and produced only a weak, slapping sound. Roberta filled me in on everyone, moving from anger to a drunk, sloppy sentimentality I would have found repellent had I not liked her so much. “Look at me,” she said, blinking back a tear. “My goddamned tits sagging halfway down to my knees, rolls of fat hanging off the sides of my chair, but what the fuck, I’m happy, right?” Without warning, she grabbed my sunburned face and hugged it to her breast. A thimble-sized nipple poked me in the eye, and she held me tight, rocking my head as though it were a baby.
I’ve noticed that when forced to go into town, the costumed nudists appear ornery and uncomfortable, like cats stuffed into little outfi
ts for the sake of a wacky photograph. They claw at their buttons and zippers, their eyes wild and desperate. Because clothing doesn’t interest them, most of these people are liable to wear anything: stripes with checks, pants three sizes too large or small — it simply doesn’t matter to them. This morning I saw a woman wear her sweatshirt toga-style, the neck stretched beneath her arm in order to reveal a single breast. I’ve seen a lot of warm-up suits, which many of the couples tend to view as two separate outfits. On the cooler mornings the wife wears the bottoms while her husband takes the top. I’m wondering if it isn’t the complete inability to throw together an outfit that turned these people nudist in the first place. Coming here from New York, it is heartening to walk into a room and know you’re not being judged by your clothes. Still, though, as bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.
Tonight is the scheduled Hobo Slumgullion, and we were instructed to bring a canned vegetable to the pavilion no later than noon. I took the only canned good I’d bought at the grocery store and carried it down the hill, where I found two naked women wearing chef’s hats and stirring a kettle of ground beef and water.
“Just pray nobody brings any more corn,” the heavier woman said. “We got corn coming out the yin yang.”
I set down my can of corn and asked what they meant by “hobo slumgullion.”
“It’s a stew. This here is the base, and we add whatever people bring, which in your case is corn. Come five o’clock everyone will dress like a hobo and we’ll eat out of tin cans. There’s even a prize for the best costume. It’s fun. You’ll see.”
When I returned that evening for the slumgullion, close to a hundred people sat eating out of cans. One man had smeared some charcoal on his cheeks. He wore a tie and tattered sports coat and carried a stick onto which he had fastened a plastic grocery bag. Everyone else was naked, so he won the prize for best costume.
While eating my dinner I spoke to a small, topless mother of four grown children who said, “Oh, you should have been here for last year’s pudding toss.”
“I beg your pardon?” Pudding toss. I thought it must be some nudist term for a potluck supper. Pudding isn’t conducive to being tossed, is it? “Oh no, you can toss it, you just can’t catch it!” She chuckled, mopping the inside of her can with a slice of bread. “What we do is make the pudding in five-gallon tubs and carry it out to the field, where we have the chocolate team against the vanillas. Then we just dig in and start pitching it at one another and, oh, what a time we had. Some good times! Bees and flies pretty much occupied the field for the next few weeks. A lot of people got stung, so we won’t be doing it this year.” She studied her crust of bread for a moment or two. “I keep thinking that maybe if we’d used diet pudding, this wouldn’t have happened but no, no, I just have to put it out of my mind and move on. Let it go, I have to let it go.”
Her husband gently patted her hand. So real was her grief that you’d think she had lost a child rather than an opportunity to sling a fistful of pudding.
This is Sunday and looking out my bedroom window, I’ve noticed that a lot of today’s visitors have spent the morning in church. Men, women, and children stand beside their cars stripping off their sober costumes. The suit jackets and dresses are carefully folded and placed into backseats. This would be a terrible place to get locked out of your car, as the nearest coat hanger is probably a good fifteen miles away. It’s probably not a good place to find an iron either, but if you’re searching for a Bible you’ll have no problem. The clubhouse shelves are lined with religious books and pamphlets, and several of the campers attended the recent Christian Nudists Conference held at a resort in eastern North Carolina. One of today’s visitors was a Presbyterian minister, a plump, freckle-faced man with Daffy Duck tattooed on his ass. He wore it with a swagger, calling attention to a body part the Lord had clearly not blessed with muscle tone or unblemished skin. The duck’s beak was distended and he appeared to be picking at a rash of strawberries.
There were quite a few new faces today. A black man arrived in the company of two enormous white women whose bodies were dual masses of rolling, dimpled flesh. Fat spilled over their knees, and their stomachs fell like heavy sacks of birdseed, covering their vaginas and hanging halfway down their thighs. Legs like tree trunks led straight into sandals with no mention of ankle or discernible calf. The women went unnoticed, but not the man. “Who’s the colored guy?” everyone asked. It was as though he carried a spear and wore a necklace fashioned from shrunken heads. There was speculation that he was a pimp or white slaver who’d come from the city in search of naive nudist girls. I was beside the pool when the black man, speaking to Dusty, mentioned that he had two sons at Penn State.
“That’s tough,” Dusty said. “I’ve got a nephew in prison myself and I know just what you’re going through. When are your boys getting out?”
This was the first day I’d left the house completely naked without even thinking of wearing a T-shirt. Suddenly it felt normal to tuck my cigarettes into my socks and head out the door carrying nothing but a towel. We’d had an overcast day, the sky a flat, mustard color. Just when I’d surrendered any hope of refreshing my tan, the sun came out and hundreds of people flocked to the pool area. The air filled with the scent of tanning lotion, and from the playground to the pétanque court, there was a genuine outpouring of goodwill. The deck and sunning corral were filled to capacity, and I wandered around, searching for a place to lay down my towel. Duke and Roberta had a table near the hot tub, and I joined them as they sat listening to a slim woman in her early fifties. The woman spoke about a nudist resort in Arizona that charges only five dollars a night for camping privileges. “And,” she said, “get this, they’ll even pick you up at the airport and drive you to the grounds free of charge! It’s a marvelous place, and the people? I mean to say there are some great naked people out in Arizona, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
I listened to her for a good ten minutes before realizing that she was missing her left nipple. Not the breast, just the nipple. The surgeons had done an excellent job, and the scar was slight, resembling a short length of fishing wire. It was like discovering that someone had six fingers instead of five. Had she been the first nudist I’d met, I would have noticed it immediately, but part of feeling at ease with my own nudity involved not noticing it in others.
“Betsy’s real people,” Roberta said after the woman had left. “And I like what she’s done with her cunt. It’s a cute look. Wouldn’t work for me, but then again I’m bigger-boned.”
I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary and I looked over the edge of the deck, where the woman stood speaking to the visiting minister.
“There are some sweet naked people out in Arizona, and they’ll drive you to camp grounds free of charge,” she said. I saw then that she had shaved all her pubic hair except for a brief, Hitler-style mustache. The exposed, lotion-coated vagina resembled one of those shiny plastic coin purses given away by banks and car dealers and carried only by the very young or very old. The phrase keep the change came to mind. I’ve been here for almost a week and still haven’t figured out this shaving business. It is common to see men with five o’clock shadows on their faces but fresh, bleeding razor nicks on their bald testicles. Is it done to expedite the search for ticks, or are these men and women shaving away the gray in the hope that they might appear younger?
“It’s to keep the hairs off the furniture,” Roberta said. “Personally, I’d just as soon suck it up with a Dustbuster, but what the fuck. To each his own. You might save a little time on the cleaning, but when you consider all those hours spent shaving, I don’t know that it’s really all that efficient. Maybe it’s better to just buy a sofa that matches your hair color, that way you can forget about both the shaving and the cleaning. That’s what I’ve done and I ain’t hearing no complaints, right, Duke?”
This was my last morning at the nudist park. Returning from the sauna last night, I saw a na
ked woman run from my trailer and jump into a waiting car. It had been Roberta, and she’d left a note, inviting me to join her and Duke for breakfast. Before arriving here, I tried to imagine what it might be like to go to someone’s house for a meal. According to my mother, it was fine to use your plate as an ashtray but under no circumstances should you ever enter anyone’s home bare-foot. With this in mind, I wore sneakers and, on the off chance they dressed for meals, carried a canvas bag I’d packed with a towel, shirt, and a pair of shorts. I arrived to find my hosts seated naked in their kitchenette playing SuperNintendo and listening to one of those early-morning wise guys on the radio. Unlike my trailer, which was grounded to the earth, theirs was designed to be pulled behind a car, and it sat parked upon a tiny lawn, its wheels blocked with bricks so that it wouldn’t roll down the hill.
“Why so formal?” Duke asked. “Take off your shoes and stay awhile.”
We wedged ourselves around a tiny built-in table, and Roberta presented a pillow-size omelette, filled, she said, “with all kinds of shit. There might even be some cat litter in here, for all I know. We left the fuckers back at our apartment in town but that stuff has a way of working itself into the damnedest places. Oh well, eat up, everybody.”
Every now and then someone will offer some little bit of information that suddenly changes everything. I asked how many cats they had, and Roberta pulled out a pencil and notepad. “Let’s see, seventeen plus twelve minus two plus the one that asshole gave back after it shit on his rug.” She squinted at the paper, struggling with the figures. “Twenty-eight. We had twenty-eight cats the last time I checked, but that was a few days ago. Coppertone dropped eight kittens last month, and I was trying to deal with those fuckers when what’s-her-name, the crippled one, had four babies right there on the goddamned bed while Duke and I were getting it on.”
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