by Forest, Will
“No.”
“What did you decide to do when the police called you?”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that statue. It’s a classic. But I didn’t want to stir up any trouble, and I didn’t want the media to come—huh, so much for that—so I decided to put a swimsuit on him.”
The camera froze awkwardly on Tucker’s image for a few seconds before the screen split with two shots of David, labeled BEFORE and AFTER, showing the nude but blurred David on the left and the garishly clad David on the right. Christopher guessed the replica must have been about six feet tall. The reporter’s voiceover could be heard: “What a difference a swimsuit can make. This is Lana Fitzgerald in Louisdale for Channel 5 at 5.”
The co-anchors, with forced smiles and no teleprompting to read as the show ended, looked gamely at each other. The male anchor said “How’s that for an exposé?” while the female anchor shrugged and delivered the catchphrase “Channel Five: Covering the Coast.”
Christopher laughed out loud. “Covering the Coast MY ASS!” he roared, jumping up to moon his TV. “The whole ass, or NOTHING! Exposé this!” Then he pressed the mute button on the remote control and sat dumbstruck for a few minutes. He called Tucker, not knowing what to say, and got his answering machine. While he prepared and ate his dinner, he couldn’t stop going over the remark of the “concerned citizen,” turning it over and around in his mind, exposing it to the need for knowledge crying out from the concerned citizenry:
“I found myself in a situation where I had to explain what a…you know…what a penis is.”
I found myself in a situation where I had to explain what a…you know…what a vulva is.
a situation where I had to explain what a…you know…what an erection is.
a situation where I had to explain what…you know…what menstruation is.
where I had to explain what…you know…what pregnancy is.
where I had to explain what…you know what sex is.
I had to explain what you know what anatomy is.
had to explain what you know what philosophy is.
to explain what you know what doubt is.
explain what you know what curiosity is.
you know what discussion is.
know what censorship is.
what love is.
life is.
Portraits
Hearing a knock, the interpreter opened the door to the small office that the Fri Skola had generously lent Angela during her stay. A girl walked in and placed her books on the table. The last interviewee, she had been excused from class for a fifteen-minute session like all the others.
After the customary greetings and initial basic questions such as age and number of years enrolled at the school, Angela began the control questions:
What’s your favorite class? Social studies.
Do you participate in any clubs? Swim team.
Do you have family members who come to the Free School assemblies? Yes, Mom, Dad, an older sister and a younger brother.
The answers were typical, Angela thought. She eventually worked up to her lead-in research question: do you feel comfortable with your growing body?
The girl, who had to remain nameless, began to talk, looking down at her breasts just beginning to develop. The interpreter spoke: “My mother tells me I have two beautiful roses blooming on my chest… that I shouldn’t worry if anybody says something silly to me. But I don’t think I have two roses growing. I feel like one big rose… blooming…” The interpreter paused. “All of me.”
***
Renee left her sociology class pondering that day’s discussion topic. Why are there still so many teenage pregnancies? A couple of her co-workers at Ricky’s gave birth while still teens and became single-mom strippers to support their toddlers. She walked heavily, shifting her legs like unbending pillars, her toes pointing out and her shoulders heaving with each impact from the ground. Expected at the library for a study group meeting, she felt too much like taking a nap. Since her dorm was on the way to the library, she stopped there first, with the intention of lying down for a while in the quiet of her single room.
She leaned on the door as she unlocked it, letting herself fall forward into her room and stepping inadvertently on a large sheet of cardboard that someone had slid under the door. She read the attached note:
Dear Renee,
Please accept these as a token of my strong feelings for you. You have become a terrific friend for me, and you’ve expanded my outlook more than you could know.
Yours in beauty and truth,
Terrence
Renee quickly removed the covering and found herself staring at her own portrait as the gauzy Amazon with the orange, or the vain goddess Oxum. The stunning woman in the colored pencil portrait radiated a stark, strong beauty that only gradually allowed Renee, as she stretched the drawing taut in the light, to recognize her pride shining there.
Renee reread the note and understood there must be at least one more drawing. And there it was, under another layer of the thin cardboard: Terrence’s likeness in pencil, the self-portrait that she herself had suggested. Seeing it in front of her, she imagined that she had commissioned the portrait, although the fact that he had drawn it, and so quickly, surprised her. But since she hadn’t implied anything about the nature of the portrait, what surprised her the most was Terrence’s decision to draw himself nude. Delighted with both portraits, and very pleased with Terrence’s build, she sashayed over to the bed and placed the portraits in the window, using one of the cardboard sheets to prop them up. She undressed and lay down, feeling much better, massaging herself while gazing at Terrence’s talent. Soon she was dreaming that she and Terrence were orixás, Afro-Brazilian gods dancing and floating nude in the sea spray under a tropical sun, just like in the mural she had seen in Rio.
3
OCTOBER
October
Run With the Wind
When the coach blew his whistle to end practice, a quiver of relief flashed through Greg’s thighs. He and his cross-country teammates, drilling on the bleachers in the air condition-less field house because of the stormy weather outside, felt like they were running in a colossal sauna.
Greg considered skipping the crowded shower stalls. Had the team been training outside, the athletes would have been returning to the locker room at different times, coming in from the day’s run each at his own speed, but today they would all be undressing and flooding the drain together. He just wanted to get some food through his body and down to his aching quadriceps, and study for his organic chemistry test the next day. But he started undressing automatically, and as soon as he had his shirt off, he decided he had sweat too much to go to the cafeteria without a shower.
“Yeah, boy, those step drills are good for the glutes!” announced Brian, one of his teammates, slapping Jeremy on his bared buttocks.
“You oughta know,” Jeremy told him, “that’s all you’ve got is glutes. Check out those chicken legs! They barely hold yo’ fat ass off the floor.”
“You callin’ me chicken legs? Look at those little twigs you call thighs,” Brian retorted as he pulled his shorts off. “I got the girth and the length where it counts, boy. I’m talkin’ real long distance runnin’ here!” Brian gave a whoop as he undulated his hips. “Championship love muscle!”
Greg and the others were still hooting when Alex, holding a towel around his waist, jumped onto one of the benches. “Hey guys, your attention, please! In the fun-lovin’ spirit of the Greek council, it gives me great pleasure to announce,” and here he paused to drop his towel, “the Halloween streak!”
The team cheered as Alex ran in place on the bench, lifting his knees high in clear reference to the coach’s admonitions on the bleachers. Greg compared the tan lines around his own arms, waist, and thighs with Alex’s completely bronzed skin.
“The streak will be a loop,” Alex continued, “from the Humanities Building courtyard across the lawn to the Camp
us Center, through the woods around the pond to the Library, and then back to the Humanities Building. Halloween night at midnight! And get this, boys: we’ve got glow-in-the-dark body paint!” Alex ran in place again to more cheers as a few guys headed to the showers.
“Halloween night will be Sunday, two weeks from yesterday. Now I’m counting on you all to spread the word,” Alex went on, “just don’t tell the campus police or anybody on the administration. And one more thing,” he said with a mock sad face. “I don’t want to hear about any prudes. Look at y’all, standing around butt naked and with fine bodies, nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You got that right,” said Brian, who put one foot on a bench and raised his arms in a flex pose.
“You gentlemen run the streak, and maybe I’ll see more of you at the nude beach for volleyball,” said Alex.
“You wanna see more of me?” teased Jeremy. “C’mere Alex, I got plenty for you to look at...”
“In your dreams,” Alex interrupted him. “Remember, the streak will be a co-ed event, how’s that for an incentive?”
Greg headed to the shower, intrigued but intimidated by the idea of streaking around campus in mixed company. Soon Alex and Brian were lathering up near him among the eight shower heads in the open-drain area.
“Alex, so, uh, you go to the nude beach quite a bit, huh?” asked Greg.
“Yeah, dude,” said Brian, soaping his pale chest with his darker arms, “we should call you Allo.”
“How’s that?” asked Alex, rinsing his hair.
“Allover Tan Alex!”
“I like that.” Alex grinned. “Listen: you know the feeling of freedom you get running cross-country? When we’re out somewhere, in the woods or on a trail around a lake, and you’re just running in the wind, with only your own fatigue to slow you down? Well, imagine naked cross-country – I ran a nude race once. Simply awesome. Or imagine that freedom at the beach. The sun, full-on. The sand, the waves, the breeze, full-on.”
Brian and Greg exchanged looks of wry disbelief. “Was it co-ed? The race,” Greg said.
“Sure. More men than women, but yeah, it was co-ed.”
Brian raised his eyebrows and smirked. “I can see you now, Allo, running nude races with ninety men and two women.”
Alex finished rinsing his body and shut off the water. “I don’t know what you see, Brian. But I think you guys have no idea how lame it is to run, to swim, with shorts on, after you’ve done it naked. Or maybe you can imagine it, but you’re too embarrassed, and for no good reason, only because you’ve been taught to react that way. It’s easier to run with the wind than against it, isn’t it?”
Grabbing his towel to leave, Alex asked, “So are you gonna come streak on Halloween?”
Neither teammate responded.
Academic Freedom
Christopher’s body memory knew the routine: arrive home, fling off your clothes, drink water straight out of the gallon jug from the fridge, unwrap a pre-made sandwich. But today had not been, by any measure, a routine day. He fished his wallet out of his pants pocket from the pile of clothes on top of the washing machine, and found the business card of his college roommate and best friend Manuel Ramos, Account Executive, Latin American division of StarCom in Silicon Valley.
“Manny!”
“Christopher? Hey, how are things?”
“Manny, you’re never gonna believe this!”
“Ahhh, hang on a second, I need to close this file. Okay, let me guess, another leopard-print thong on a Renaissance replica?”
“No, better!”
“Okay, what, you got tenure?”
“Better! Well, not really. But it’s definitely a new career high!”
“What? What already?”
“This morning. I answer the phone in my office, this morning. It’s a young woman on the line who says she’s a friend of a student of mine and that she needs to ask me an awkward question - are you married? And I say no and why? and she says well, I have a friend, your former student, who is getting married on Saturday and her bachelorette party is on Thursday and would you be willing to do a striptease at the party?”
“You’re making this up. I’m still at work, you know.”
“I know you’re still at work! I swear to you this is absolutely true. And I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I was very, very flattered, but I wanted to sound like a professional... stripper I guess, and so I said, well, what’s it pay?”
“You did not.”
“I did. And she said name your price.”
“As if! You have got to be making this up. As if anyone would ever ask you to do a striptease.”
“You’re just jealous. She said her friend had always thought I was really cute and hot and all that, and that nobody else in the entire state could perform a striptease and have it mean as much for this young woman on the occasion of her last fling before tying the knot...”
“I’m sure you politely declined.”
“...and so I said sure, I’ll do it for $500. Down to a G-string. I’m gonna come in dressed for school, all serious and boxy like my black briefcase which I’ll be carrying.” Christopher practiced his moves in front of the mirror as he continued on the phone. “And then when Madonna’s “Express Yourself” starts playing, I’m gonna fling off my...”
“You did not!”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Well, you’re right and you’re wrong. Everything I’ve told you really did happen, except my saying that I would do it. But after I hung up, when I told everybody at the office about it, we started joking, and some of my colleagues were jealous, and Roberta the secretary was turned on and made up the briefcase routine where I...”
“Please!”
“She thought it was a great idea. Extra income, you know!”
“You’ve got to be the most deranged, despondent, disheveled representative of academe that I know.”
“Look, in the Palace of Fine Arts, everybody should be naked.”
“That has nothing to do with performing a striptease at a bachelorette party. It’s more of your wishful thinking.”
“Okay, spiritually naked. Corporeal nudity is optional, but definitely encouraged, because nudity is a metaphor for the ability to express oneself completely, and to completely understand others’ expressions.”
“Spare me, okay? You don’t have to rationalize your little nudie dance to me.”
“Look, I’m not gonna do it. Are you crazy? One compromising photo would ruin my career. Or a video! Imagine that playing in the Dean’s office, after all I’ve been through with him.”
“It’d be in the papers.”
“Yeah. Yeah...well I should hope it would make Chronicle of Higher Education; they ran a piece once about a studly physics prof who posed for a beefcake calendar. Why shouldn’t I have the right to do something like that if I want to?”
“What, is this your precious academic freedom?”
“No, Manny, that’s something entirely different. Academic freedom would be if I wrote an article about the experience and related it to nudity as a metaphor for honesty or purity, then...”
“What?”
“Like Michelangelo...”
“What? Freedom is accepting your own limits, you know.”
“Yes. My skin—all of it—is my own limit. And to accept that fully, to be fully free, I’ve got to be naked, right?”
“Christopher, don’t get any ideas. That’s crazy. It’s bad enough what the public thinks about esoteric, out-of-touch academe.”
“But that’s not being out-of-touch! What’s earthier than a striptease?”
“I don’t think you’re imagining this correctly. This is gonna be a crowd of young women, drunk off their asses, who want to see you take your clothes off! They’re not going to be thinking about spiritual nudity or complete expression or whatever the hell you said.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“So what’s the connec
tion?”
“Possession.”
“Come again?”
“A striptease is a tease because the people watching are enticed into believing that the stripper gives them his or her body by revealing it. It’s a very participatory kind of event. Have you ever seen one?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too. At first it’s a real turn-on, but then it’s ultimately frustrating because, since you don’t know the person, you’re only responding to beautiful body parts you can’t touch. It’s just what it says it is: a tease.”
“So you feel cheated?”
“Definitely. The contact is illusory. It’s not nearly as strong as going to a play. A stripper offers only a body, and one you can’t even touch. But at a play, even though you have to accept that the people on stage are acting out some pre-designed situation, you can connect with them, possess them so to speak, assume their feelings and hang-ups and decisions. The actors radiate their own interpretation of the characters, while also transmitting through the director’s and the playwright’s interpretations, and you, you absorb all that, if you’re willing. If you’re spiritually uncovered, in other words if you expose yourself or your soul for maximum contact, you can possess those energies and feel a oneness with humanity.”
“So you’re saying everybody’s the same, everyone reacts the same?”
“No, you’re always you; there’s no escaping that. But you can change perspectives...”
“What, like changing clothes?”
“...sure...and like changing the medium you express your own energy back with: gestures and movement, words, song and images.”
“Christopher, you left the striptease behind somewhere...”
“I know. The stripping and the teasing...especially the teasing! Maybe I will do it. I can’t stop thinking about it...I can’t seem to shake it!”
“Well, you’re gonna have to learn to shake it if you keep this up.”
“Keep this up.”
“Oh, stop already...”