The game went on forever, its details discussed with passion. Often there was a debate over which ball was closest to the target. “I think it’s Carl’s, but why don’t we check. Phil’s ball looks neck and neck.” A tape measure was brought forth, handled gently and with great reverence, as if it might once and for all prove the existence of God. The team captains would squat down on their heels, their testicles bobbing against the gravel court. “Carl’s is eight and three-quarters and Phil’s is… what do you know, eight and nine-sixteenths! Looks like Phil’s team gets the point!”
The tedium of the game allowed me to forget the fact that I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and sneakers. At first, I’d hung around the outer edges of the court and retrieved my balls like a white-wigged countess, twisting my way toward the ground as if the queen were passing through the gardens. Now I hardly gave it a second thought. No one cared what my ass looked like. They were thinking of the game and nothing else until I lit a cigarette and my teammates asked me to put it out. You could be naked outdoors but apparently you couldn’t smoke outdoors. What sense does that make?
Looking out my bedroom window, I can see the clubhouse and its parking area. This afternoon I watched as a large trailer pulled up, led by a four-door, late-model car bearing out-of-state license plates. This was someone arriving to park themselves and stay awhile. The car door opened and a man stepped out, completely naked. He’d been driving that way on the highway. I guess he just couldn’t wait.
I went tonight to the clubhouse to watch TV and sat there alone for twenty minutes or so when Jacki, the bonneted woman from the pétanque court, traipsed naked from the bathroom, asking if I’d care to join her in the sauna. I had never before visited a sauna and wasn’t quite sure what it involved. Did I need a bar of soap?
“Atowel, silly. All you need is a towel. Now get those clothes off and get out there. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Because it was delivered as an order, it seemed useless to argue. Sooner or later I would have to appear naked, and this seemed as good a time as any. I ran back to my trailer, grabbed a towel, and lowered my pants, thinking I might inspect my ass in the mirror but knowing that if I did, I’d never leave the house again. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it. I swabbed myself with a washcloth just for good measure and returned to the clubhouse, where I undressed in the bathroom, folding my clothes and piling them neatly on the countertop. It’s all right, I thought, this is a bathroom. It’s natural to be naked in a bathroom. It was not, however, quite so natural to leave the bathroom and walk past the tables and chairs of a clubhouse. Other people did it with no problem whatsoever, and look at them! Jacki had breezed through the room, and I’d looked at her as though she were a goat that had wandered into a hotel lobby. The tennis players had done it this afternoon. Thousands of people had walked naked through this room, eating lunch and playing cards. Now it was my turn! I tried looking at it as a privilege, and when that didn’t work, I threw the towel over my shoulder, closed my eyes, and ran straight into the bookcase.
The sauna, a squat wooden hut, was located beside the pool. A stifling antechamber led to a sweltering hellhole heated by a smokeless cauldron filled with white-hot rocks. Jacki sat upon a wooden shelf, mopping at the sweat that ran down her breasts, over her considerable stomach, and collected in a puddle beneath her childlike, shaved vagina. She was a plump woman, tight as a tick, her head balanced on her shoulders with no discernible neck.
“Nasty bump you’ve got there on your forehead, Dave. You should put some ice on that before you go to bed tonight.” She aimed a squeeze bottle toward the cauldron and released a stream of fragrant water upon the rocks, causing the chamber to grow even hotter. “You like that?” she asked. “It’s eucalyptus. I can’t use it when Barb is here, because she’s allergic, makes her facial cheeks swell up like they were stuffed with cotton. You’re not allergic, are you? If so, you’d better run while you still have a chance. I threw my back out a few years ago and can’t drag a cat, much less a full-grown man. The most I can do is run to the clubhouse and call out for help but even that will take me a while. You could be dead by the time I get back — so make up your mind, are you allergic or not?”
I was not.
“Good.” Once again she aimed her bottle toward the furnace. “Can you feel that? Eucalyptus is a healing ointment, very big back in ancient Greece and Egypt. It opened the sinuses of Socrates and King Ramses the Second, allowing them to concentrate on more important things like… democracy and snakes. It frees the mind, eucalyptus. I get some wild thoughts here in the sauna, I don’t mind telling you! Thoughts like, well, what if everybody in the world were allowed one wish, but in order to get it, it meant they’d have to crawl around on their hands and knees for the rest of their life? That’s a real puzzler, isn’t it! If you wanted to be rich, you’d have to crawl around your palace, just like a baby with your mink coat dragging the floor. World peace, a cure for cancer, an end to hunger and suffering, what’ll it be? What’s your wish?”
The eucalyptus had obviously not cleared my mind the way it had hers. Still, though, once the question had been introduced, I found it impossible not to think about it. If I could have the face and body of my dreams, what good would it do me if I had to walk around like an animal? Maybe if I were to wish for happiness, I wouldn’t mind crawling — but what kind of a person would I be if I were naturally happy?
I’ve seen people like that on inspirational television shows, and they scare me. Why did I have to think about this in the first place? I looked over at Jacki’s round, glistening face, her hands folded over her belly like a wizened, patient genie. “If I had one wish, I’d wish for an unlimited amount of wishes,” I said.
She shook her head in a way that suggested she had heard this answer countless times before. “Don’t get greedy on me, Dave, you only get one wish.”
The room filled with steam, and in my woozy state, it occurred to me that this woman might actually possess some musty, supernatural power. The circumstances were so bizarre that maybe she had been sent to grant me my one, true desire. I thought of having my mother back, but often these are trick wishes. I might ask for my mother and receive an urnload of talking ashes that would complain bitterly at the sight of her son racing back and forth across the room like a bloodhound. Curing disease is a nice idea, but if we all got one wish, surely some enthusiastic fourteen-year-old would take care of that. “I’d wish,” I said, “I’d wish I could fly.”
“Fair enough.” Jacki scratched a mosquito bite on her upper arm and sighed, “I have to go away this weekend and am definitely not looking forward to it at all. I’d live here year-round if I could, but my trailer’s not winterized, and with this bad back, I wouldn’t be able to shovel my driveway. It’s gotten to the point where I hate to leave for any length of time. This coming weekend I have to go home for a church fund-raiser and then next Tuesday I leave for my granddaughter’s birthday. I can tell by the look on your face that you’re surprised by that one! Most everyone tells me I look too young to be a grandmother, but be that as it may, I’ve got three beautiful grandchildren and, oh, they used to love it out here.”
Yes, but what about my wish? Had this been a trick question designed to test my character? What was she talking about her grandchildren for, and where were my clothes?
“The first time I brought them out here they saw Cliff Shirley standing over by the pool and said, ‘Grandma,’ they said, ‘how come that man doesn’t have any clothes on?’ And I told them, ‘That man is Grandma’s special, special friend and he’s naked because that’s the way God brought him into this world. It’s all right to be naked here, just don’t mention it to your friends at school and, whatever you do, don’t say anything about this to your mother and father.’” She frowned down at her breasts. “I should have known they couldn’t keep a secret. My daughter’s just like the rest of them, thinks we’re some kind of sex fiends having orgies in the parking lot. And my
son, forget it. I just tell him I’m going camping for the summer.”
I felt I should offer her some kind of sympathy but wasn’t sure where to start. Instead, I wound up asking her to explain the rule concerning body jewelry and intimate attire.
“Clothingwise, they’re talking about thongs and negligees, anything that might be showy or suggestive. And the jewelry, it’s all right to wear rings and necklaces and so forth, they just don’t want any… Oh, Lord, how can I put this… If you have earrings, they should be in your ears — get it? It’s against the rules to have any pierced… thingies, you know, either up top or down… there.”
It struck me as odd that the subject had made her so uncomfortable. With sweat pooling just south of her shaved vagina, this grandmother could sit naked with a strange man but not for the life of her use the words breast or penis. We all just had “thingies,” mine simmering in my lap like a boiled shrimp. It was acceptable to be naked but improper to acknowledge the details. This drastically reduced the number of conversational topics. The absence of clothing made it very hard to describe people. You couldn’t say, “Who’s the uncircumcised gentleman with all the hair on his ass?” What made it even harder was that most of the men were bald, which meant you couldn’t even describe them by their hair-style. I asked Jacki about a man I’d seen down by the fully stocked pond. “He was a tallish man with a… friendly face and a blue towel.”
“Work with me,” she said. “A lot of men have blue towels.”
“He didn’t have a mustache or a hat, or any hair. He was maybe in his seventies.”
“Big scar across his stomach and another one running down his leg? Oh, that’s Dan Champion from Lot Sixteen. Nice man, used to be quite a dancer.”
I was relieved to know that it was socially acceptable to describe people by their scars. It was much easier than trying to identify them by their sandals.
Every few minutes Jacki would lean forward to shoot another stream of eucalyptus-laced water into the cauldron, and I found myself too weak to stop her. Sweat had blurred my vision, and the room had grown so unbearably hot that I could practically hear the blood bubbling in my veins. It occurred to me that I was going to die — not at some advanced, hypothetical stage in my life, but right now. My heart had been steamed, and I’d released so many gallons of sweat that my towel now weighed more than I did.
“Out with you,” Jacki said. “Go on now, quick. Scoot.”
I left the sauna, spread out my towel, and lay on the concrete patio beside the pool. It was a clear evening, chilly, but the air felt good. I heard a door slam and watched as Jacki waddled back to the clubhouse. She didn’t see me lying there, and I saw no point in calling out to her. I’d be fine on my own, lying naked on the ground and thinking things over. From off in the distance came a mournful, lowing sound I couldn’t quite identify. Neither quite natural nor manmade, it sounded like a combination of a sick cow and a foghorn. I’d heard it last night at around the same time and now came to think of it as the trailer park’s version of “Taps.”
Because of the pleasant weather, the tarp has been taken from the swimming pool, which is surrounded by comfortable reclining chairs, several of them positioned beneath a sign reading HANDICAPPED PARKING. It is a posted rule that you must be naked not only in the pool but also in the area surrounding it. This struck me as harsh. All I had on were sneakers and a T-shirt, but these things meant the world to me since, without them, I would be a freak. “The doctor will be right with you,” I told myself. “Just lay your towel here on the recliner, remove your shoes and shirt, and he’ll be here with the sedative as soon as he’s finished with the other patients.”
I stripped off my T-shirt and there I was, naked, easy prey for low-flying surveillance planes. Naked in broad daylight, surrounded by strangers who rolled from their backs to their stomachs, leafing through the pages of their books and magazines. The upswing was that I didn’t have to look at myself. There were no mirrors or plate-glass windows, and as long as I looked straight ahead, I thought I’d be able to slowly ease into my public nudity. I had just gotten used to this idea when I was approached by a man named Dusty who had clothespinned a sheet of shirt cardboard to the brim of his sun visor in order to extend its shading capacities. The man was doubled over, stooped with osteoporosis, his back and shoulders burnished like fine Italian leather and his belly white from lack of sun. He wore his thick gray hair shaved close to his scalp and, to my horror, a pair of mirrored sunglasses that reflected with great clarity the sight of my pale, fidgety nakedness. I asked him a question about the hot tub, and twenty minutes later he was reflecting on the zoning ordinances of his hometown. “I don’t think that legally they’re allowed to build a grocery store in the neighborhood because it’s not zoned for that. Oh, there used to be a little mom-and-pop operation where you could buy bread and soda and so forth, but that’s been closed and turned into a little church for the snake handlers. You might could put up an apartment building, but first you’d have to check with the city council and see if they have some kind of restriction on occupancy. I suppose if it was a big enough complex, they might let you build some kind of grocery but not a big one because the neighborhood’s not zoned for that.”
Had I mistakenly introduced myself as a real estate speculator? Why couldn’t he look away when he talked to me?
“Course, down in the city I guess you can build yourself an eight-story concrete beehive just so long as you have the money to pay everyone off. That’s the way it goes where you come from, anything for a dollar. Then you come up here thinking we’re all just a bunch of stupid hicks!” He mugged, widening his face into a spooky, exaggerated grin and running the tip of his tongue around the track of his lips. “We just a group of bumpkins, are we?”
Well, Dusty, now that you mention it…
He waved his hands as if he were casting a spell. “Oh, you’re all just so sophisticated sitting in your little cafes and looking up at the Empire State Building while the rest of us lie around in haystacks smoking our corncob pipes. Is that it?”
His attitude was both hostile and playful and was shared by many of the people I had met so far. I might have arrived from a militant Muslim nation with no problem, but something about New York seemed to rub people the wrong way. This was a family campground and New York was, to many of them, the place where wholesome families were regularly shot for sport. I’d go out of my way to admire someone’s trailer or praise the local countryside, but it was never enough. Dusty’s mobile home was parked nearby, and I complimented him on keeping such a nice yard. “Pretty nice, isn’t it?” he said.
“Very nice.”
“What do you think of that toilet I use as a planter?”
“It’s a cute idea, Dusty, and the flowers are beautiful.”
“You’re darn right they’re beautiful. You know, back where you come from a person probably couldn’t put a toilet in his front yard.”
“No, Dusty, that probably wouldn’t be a very good idea.”
“It’d be filled with crap, that’s what would happen! You’d have those New Yorkers lined up around the block waiting to shit in your front yard, but not here.”
“No, not here.”
“It’s nice and quiet out here, isn’t it? A person can hear himself think!”
I agreed with him, saying, “Yes, it’s wonderful. No car alarms or sirens. The only thing that gets to me is that loud farty sound I hear every night at sunset.”
“You like that?” he said. “That’s me! I’ve got a tube yea long and usually try to practice every night. Oh, it’s not a trumpet, nothing fancy like that, just a length of plastic. Old Pete Manchester up to Lot Thirty-Seven, he’s got what you call a conch shell that he holds up to his mouth and we kind of call back and forth to each other to pass the time. Most people, come nightfall, are inside their houses washing dishes, but not me. I have no dishes to wash because all I eat are raw vegetables. Yes, sir, I try to eat right and swim half a mile a day. If it’s cloudy
and the pool is covered, I just slip under the tarp when no one’s looking! Of course, that won’t be a problem today, will it?”
Dusty raised his leg, planting his foot on the edge of my lounge chair. “Yes, indeed, we’ve got ourselves some beautiful weather this afternoon. You’re not likely to find a day like this where you come from.”
I agreed with him.
“Sunshine, blue skies, and just a touch of breeze — it doesn’t get any better than this.” He adjusted his sunglasses and worried a bunion on his toe. There were maybe a dozen nudists taking in the sun. People came and went, walking clear around the pool in order to avoid Dusty, who would turn at the sound of the gate. “Phyllis!” he’d call. “When are you going to come by and see my turtles?”
“Cody and I have been meaning to do that, Dusty, it’s just that we’ve been so busy building our new deck.”
“Oh, I get it. What with your brand-new sundeck you’re too high and mighty to be seen with me, is that it?”
On the other side of the pool, a stocky, handsome young man moved from his lounge chair to the sauna, to the hot tub, into the pool, and back to his chair. He was someone who had come in just for the day and seemed determined to get his twenty dollars’ worth. Beside him sat the couple I’d seen on the tennis court, and next to them a wiry gray-haired woman leafed through a copy of Sports Illustrated. The two o’clock pétanque game had started, and I could hear the faint click of metal balls along with the familiar cry, “Great shot. High five, high five.” The young man was on his fifth rotation, and I admired his ass, which was plump and unblemished, high and firm enough to support the first-prize trophy I’d mentally awarded him for Outstanding Physical Achievement.
“Have you ever seen a compost heap?” Dusty asked. “I’ve got one going in my backyard, and you’d be amazed at all the activity. All kinds of creatures show up to take a nibble or two: skunks, birds, itty-bitty chipmunks. Then, of course, you’ve got your flies and maggots, who like to burrow in once things gets nice and mushy.”