Nine Kinds of Naked

by Tony Vigorito

  Elizabeth slapped his chest rowdy. “Don’t you dare say penis again! I can’t stand that word! It sounds so goddamn wee willie winkie. It’s no wonder men are so insecure with a word like that.”

  “Aye.” Diablo nodded in grim agreement. “It is an unfortunately diminutive word. What would you prefer I say?”

  Elizabeth propped herself up on an elbow and grinned at him. “A-dam,” she pronounced, accenting the second syllable as if it rhymed with mom.

  “A-dam?” Diablo repeated loudly, imitating her pronunciation. “That’s suitably sacred. Did you come up with that?”

  “Just now.” Elizabeth smiled, proud of herself. “I like your A-dam.”

  Diablo grinned and returned her compliment. “And I like your Eve.”

  122 SPECIAL AGENT J. J. Speed slashed madly with his newfound sword at the flurry of gnomes that rushed toward him from every direction, their jubilant cheers of “Hooray for the day!” and “Rex Nemorensis!” doing nothing to assuage his rage. Despite the maniacal severity of his saber, he accomplished nothing save shredding the remaining streamers of toilet paper still wrapping his balcony. But he persisted in his fury and his frenzy even as the gnomes were no longer visible, ceasing his slash only when a tangled whirlwind of shredded toilet paper confronted him, hovering in place as if daring him to take a swipe.

  He dared, and the next thing he knew his clothes were torn off and he was spitting toilet paper and then the hilt of his sword thudded against his crown. Falling to his knees in the manner of the beknighted, the last thing he saw before he passed out was the pendulum of the grandfather clock tick back into motion.

  123 LONG AFTER LOSING all track of time and their particular place within it, Elizabeth and Diablo gradually slowed the pace of their wild-making love and relaxed into a gentler rhythm, tender cooing replacing the biting snarling savagery that had left the both of them scuffed and scraped and buffed to rosy perfection. As his mind began to piece itself back together, Diablo couldn’t help but smile ever more broadly, and it wasn’t long before a snicker burst the seam of his lips.

  It was all just too much: Too much sensation, too much ardor, too much passion, too much wonder, too much gratitude, too much desire, too much satisfaction, and ultimately it was all too much to resist. The blazing bonfire of their passion had illuminated their very presence in the universe. Soaked in the sweat of their animality, they glistened with a luminosity revealed, a sublime expression of divinity undivided, and as the final floss of Diablo’s composure snapped he could do nothing but throw his head back in explosive roaring laughter. Delighted by this reaction, Elizabeth soon found that his gale of laughter had overtaken her as well. Within moments, breathing was long forgotten. For that matter, hyperventilating was long forgotten. Nothing at all remained but a sobbing hilarity of bawling bwa-ha-has punctuated by gasping whimpers and howling wails and somehow their respiration not only survived but thrived as each successive concussion of catharsis shockwaved throughout their bodies like great golden boulders churning into the Sea of Love.

  Spontaneity. There was absolutely nothing to do but step aside and allow the Spirit that animates to seize the pleasures for which the universe was created and which had been denied to the point of Armageddon. In the midst of this empyrean chaos, there would be no limp, postcoital query of “Did you come?” Yes, yes of course, but Elizabeth and Diablo did not have orgasms any more than they had sex.

  Properly stated, sex had them.

  124 IT WAS THOROUGHLY nighttime when Jacob Jingelheimer came to, sitting up stiffly as he found himself clad in a suit of chain mail far too small for him. But this indignity would not disgruntle for long, for clutched in the grasp of his left hand was his precious sprig of mistletoe. He grinned victorious.

  Grunting himself upright with his sword, Jacob Jingelheimer noted with relief that the pendulum was ticking just as the grandfather clock began to dong its midnight lamentation, echoing eldritch into the solemn of the night. Nodding as if in approval, he tucked the mistletoe under the belt of his scabbard and rested his sighing palms against the hilt of his sword. Despite suffering a chain-mail wedgie, he was unavoidably regal in his posture as he surveyed the scene off his balcony.

  The streets were devoid of any populace, silent and still in the midnight chill, although Jacob Jingelheimer thought he could sense a distant beat throbbing the air. Before he could confirm this, however, a trinity of gnomes punctured the hush, cartwheeling and vaulting over one another’s shoulders as they swept down the street like a whirlwind. Jacob Jingelheimer’s eyes narrowed and he gripped the hilt of his sword, and just before the gnomes rounded a corner a hundred feet away one of them turned and looked at him. The moment they locked eye contact the gnome was suddenly grinning on the balcony ledge directly in front of his face, and before Jacob Jingelheimer could stumble or start the gnome planted a honey-sweet kiss upon his lips and whispered “Life is but a dream” as he disappeared, somersaulting around the distant corner with his comrades, loosing nonsense and waking hooray.

  125 “MY, WE’RE ALIVE today!” Elizabeth exclaimed, her voice resounding in the shower as she examined the dozens of scrapes on Diablo’s body. “You look like you were attacked by a wildebeest last night.” Both of them had discovered immediately after crowding into the shower that hot water youches much hotter on abraded flesh, and their bodies were covered with scratches and scuffs from their evening’s tussle and tryst.

  “Aye,” Diablo agreed. “Nothing like a good grating on the surface of the skin to cleanse the system of impurities. This loofah ain’t got nothing on a tangle with you.” Diablo ceased talking as Elizabeth gathered some suds from his hands and began lathering him. He reciprocated by washing her arms and her breasts and her neck, her belly and her butt and as far down her thighs as he could reach. Once Elizabeth had Diablo thoroughly turned on, she carefully lathered the rest of him and then they kissed like seals and slip-slid their hands all over one another until the water began to run tepid at which point Elizabeth looked at Diablo and said, “Dare me.”

  “You dare me to dare you?” Diablo immediately replied.

  “I dare you to dare me,” Elizabeth affirmed.

  “I dare you,” Diablo answered unhesitant and without missing a beat Elizabeth guided him around so that his back was facing the blast of tepid water. Then she turned the hot water completely off.

  “Shock the body,” she said, her eyes flashing.

  “You’re crazy,” Diablo declared, locking his arms around her waist a second before the water seared freezing cold and he gasped falsetto and she laughed out loud and he wrestled her sideways so the cold water showered over both of them and she screamed in protest and he yelled encouragement until they could resist no more and they were cleansed of everything but the shivering exhilaration of being alive.

  126 JACOB JINGELHEIMER wasn’t about to take any more guff from these goddamn gnomes. Not remotely comprehending that he was King of the Wood, he resolved immediately to find the little bastards and figure out just what the cripes was going on. He first donated several minutes of vain effort toward removing his constricting armor before arriving at the befuddled apprehension that there were somehow neither fasteners nor seams. Placing further investigation aside for the time being, he set off in the direction in which he had last seen the gnomes vault and somersault, immediately discovering that despite the chafe of the chain mail he could move about with uncommon effortlessness, as if the world or himself were not really there.

  But there was no elation in this sensation. As he entered onto streets where citizens were milling into gradually more populated congregation, there quickly accompanied an unsettling perturbation in his perception. The ongoing yak of life seemed to crowd upon him all at once, an absolute inability to hear any particular thing apart from the all and everything, swarms of cheerful chitchat haranguing him like flies on a corpse.

  “—what time is it but he was like and she looked at me what do you think right do you know
what I mean for the time being give me a fucking break he doesn’t know what he’s talking about I’m not really a morning person isn’t it interesting it was so much fun that the word cyclone do you have the time derives from the Greek word meaning coil of the snake time is on your side so anyways here’s the thing I thought because only a bagel for breakfast I did my time long time no see and I have to say do you hear what I’m saying it could be so awesome every time I turn around it’s a rough time at one time or another what I’m going to do last week would be so cool it’s high time to kill time and take your time of your life if you would just relax and make up for lost time just in time before your time flies in the nick of time will tell all in good time after time and time again—” and on and on it went without relent, a clamor-slamming din and clatter shoving in on him from every direction at once. If that were not maddening enough, Jacob Jingelheimer had to dodge and duck around everyone, wheeling and careening down the sidewalk, supremely irrelevant to all passersby despite his ridiculous attire.

  Staggering at this abrupt brunt of the world, Jacob Jingelheimer clumsily unsheathed his sword as a sophomoric young poet matched pace with him, pronouncing his poetry with such grandiloquent gesticulation that he could almost discern his words apart from the onrushing cacophony of conversation everywhere else around him.

  Where is your center?

  What is your spark?

  Who is your life, or

  why are you not dead?

  Do you really think,

  or are you just dark?

  Haven’t you wondered

  what holds up your head?

  “Your neck holds up your head,” Jacob Jingelheimer replied and trailed off into meaningless reverberation, his words sounding to himself like the fading memory of a forgotten dream, the terrible tragedy of a life unlived. If the poet heard him, the cadence of his verse was not interrupted.

  It is no mystery,

  no mind-bending riddle.

  It is only your heart,

  the beating of your heart.

  The beating of your heart,

  the murmur in your middle,

  the hole to your soul,

  the path to your art.

  “Shut your mouth lest I shut it for you!” Jacob Jingelheimer could not avoid his diction poetic as he threatened with his sword, though he knew before his holler had satisfied itself that his own heartbeat had abandoned him and he was threatening only himself.

  Pounding pulsing pumping,

  drumming throbbing thumping.

  Ignite the fight that lights

  the heat beneath your feet.

  No timorous trembling,

  no bashful shy humping,

  we want the beat that moves

  your muscles and your meat.

  Panicked and completely lost in his apparent disincarnation, Jacob Jingelheimer desperately slashed his sword across the poet’s neck, eliciting not even a stutter.

  Move to the music,

  get sweaty, get bold.

  Bump it, yeah, grind it,

  baby, rock ’n’ roll!

  But who tamed your wild,

  your heart uncontrolled?

  Or better yet said,

  who stole your soul?

  A passing “Woohoo!” sounded a siren amidst Jacob Jingelheimer’s terror as a random someone remarked, “It makes no sense to seek a truth from which you cannot escape” while another voice shouted, “What a gift we are to us!,” and Jacob Jingelheimer thought he glimpsed a gnome in the periphery but when he tried to look directly it receded into immediate infinity, shockwaving laughter in jeers of no and cheers of yes and Jacob Jingelheimer shook his head no as the poet concluded his verse.

  Wide open your heart,

  and find that you’re kind.

  To live is to give,

  to enhance the chance.

  Abandon your head,

  and unwind your mind.

  How can you pray if

  you can’t even dance?

  And Jacob Jingelheimer overheard someone pontificate that “We’re all like tornadoes” as the world began to spin and he realized it was not the world that was spinning but himself and he grasped tightly the mistletoe and tried to steady himself against his sword, groaning, “Whoa . . . whoa now” against his own cyclone and thousands of gnomes suddenly flew at him from every direction, hooraying and spinning him yet faster until someone somewhere exclaimed, “The wind!” and then his cyclone ceased and the world stood still and there amidst a sea of frozen faces there moved but one, a woman shining pink and purple flamboyant and she smiled and kissed her palm as her words filled him softly. “Cherish it,” she said and she blew upon her palm as the final flicker of his mortality twinkled into the past, whiffed out by the wind of a whispered kiss.

  127 AND THE SPIRIT OF GOD moved upon the face of the water, but it was really just the wind. And the face of the water tumbled under the wind, churning upon itself like dolphins at play as hundreds of waterspouts arose like the tentacles of some leviathan, great columns of moonlight dancing under a gratitude of heaven as streaks of silver pinballed between, daredevil fish who’d taken that ride to the sky.

  And thusly did the Great White Spot dissipate, though it did not dissolve, sighing wide and propagating itself a thousand times nine. This was a wind of change, after all, an inspiration to liberation, and such a wind can hardly be suspected, and certainly never stilled. Newborn whirlwinds radiated in every direction, fractal emissaries of the mother-wind destined to caress the calloused canyons whorling through every desperate fingerprint grasping at freedom.

  And the wind would embrace the Earth entire and find itself bristling in birdsong and buzz, gasping into life and out of death, heaving with grief, bursting with laughter, exhilaration, exertion, an orgasm, a sneeze, a yawn at new dawn. And perhaps this would not be the night before a transcendental sunrise sweeps across the Earth, a galactivation of human consciousness awakened by the bump and the thump of the dance and the trance of ten or more million, but who can surely say what tomorrow may bring?

  Something was stirring, that much was certain, for between every blink a world was billowing apart and discovering itself anew. Collapsing structure, crumbling stability, vanishing certainty, a black and heavy veil was falling, an illusion was fading and a wonder was waking, a heart-bursting abandonment of all that was past, humanity admitting humility and facing the grace, and all of us finding a world more familiar than we can imagine. Here is the Earth at play in the mind of God, respiring the breath of heaven as one by one we lose control and find at last the peace that radiates eternal ecstatic out of every moment right now and we give up—and give in—to that inclination, that instinct, that impulse, to love.

  And a woman lonely on her thirty-fifth birthday finished lighting the thirty-five tea light candles surrounding the perimeter of her claw-foot tub before she eased her body into a bubble bath. After gasping inch by inch her torso beneath the scalding water, she closed her eyes and settled into lavender relaxation, stirring when she drew a breath so deep it felt as if the atmosphere were breathing her, and opening her eyes only when a single voice held forth from an emergent surf of din, exclaiming, “The wind!”

  And she sat up in her birthday suit and discovered not her bathroom but a crowded street at nighttime, though no one paid her candlelit bubble bath any heed. All eyes were up and heeding she knew not what, and she was left to wonder first at the voluptuous size of the bubbles in her bath and only second at how her bathtub was in the middle of a sidewalk on Tchoupitoulas Street. But she smiled nonetheless, and found her smile reflected in the eyes of the first man who saw her, who bowed glad and gracious as a swirling gust of wind tousled his hair and extinguished her tea lights as if they were candles on a cake and a wish was just granted.

  And a block away the kid with sun-bleached dreadlocks sat on a curb trying to tune the guitar he’d stolen from Diablo’s apartment days ago, but mostly he was just trying to capture some attention. And a
pretty blond in moccasins slowed her way toward Jackson Square, enchanted by his guitar as women sometimes are. And the kid with sun-bleached dreadlocks noticed her notice and he fastened his gaze and reached for a chord as a breeze licked his eyelashes and just then the guitar’s B string snapped with a cuss, welting his hand and wounding her ears and the pretty blond in moccasins resumed upon her way.

  And Dr. Rip Blossom wandered aimless and alone through the crowds making their way toward Jackson Square, dejected that Betty had not shown up at the club that day and realizing how broken his life had truly become. Lost in such thought, he had just resolved to quit it all—his obstetric practice, his striptease fiending, the whole depravity of his life—when an invisible whirlwind engulfed him, tearing off his shirt and sailing it up and away as it flared his nostrils with the breath of life reborn and someone slapped his back as if in congratulation and someone else kissed the squish of his belly and no longer was he alone but suddenly part of a pulse and a flow and Dr. Rip Blossom felt the frown of his face cramp into smile and then he understood and he touched the side of his nose and looked at a kid with sun-bleached dreadlocks sitting on the curb and sucking on the back of his hand and Dr. Rip Blossom pointed at him and spoke the words with which others had long taunted him but which he had never before grasped: “Walk away.”