Naked

Dear Everybody,

Here's a story that's more like a blog post. I wrote it on 5.26.2010. Since then it's just been sitting there, doing nothing. Well I sent it to the New York Tyrant but they rejected it with a kind note attached. Probably thought I was one crazy moron. ATTENTION: it's a STORY. Fiction. Not really me. Well sometimes it me, but not really! I mean, I'm kind of grouchy, but I'm not THAT bad. Not yet. I also don't use such foul language or hate my neighbor or think about my mailwoman's underpants.

Kevin Spaide


Naked

I went for a walk with my clothes on. Everybody else had their clothes on too. Even the children. It seemed sort of stupid. The whole clothes-on thing. Because it was fucking hot out there. I was sweating into my underpants. I wanted to jump in the river. I wanted to drown in my bathtub. Sometimes I feel like an alien being.

The woman who delivered our mail was walking up the street in her uniform. I said hello to her. She looked at me and said hello and probably thought about my mailbox. I thought about her body inside her clothes. Then I thought about her underpants. Then I thought about my hand inside her underpants.

When I go to the beach I wear a bathing suit. My wife walks around with nothing on. Right in front of everybody. Right in front of Japanese people. For God’s sake, she just doesn’t care. I mean, those people could be anyone. Anyone at all.

I don’t give a fuck about a lot of things, but I wear my clothes. I don’t sit around naked. No way. Not even when I’m alone. I’m naked in the shower. I’m naked when I hump my wife. That’s about it.

One time a cat got loose in my house and knocked a rock off a windowsill. The rock cracked the bathroom sink, pieces of which fell on the floor. If you turned the water on it leaked out of the sink and ran down the walls in the kitchen, which was under the bathroom, and then the power would go out. We put a sign up to warn our friends. My wife drew little flowers in the corners of it. I don’t know what kind of flowers they were. Then the landlord came over and said, What the fuck is THAT?! I tried to explain about the cat. She said, CAT? CAT? So I got another sink and asked this guy I knew to install it. He said all right, and he came over and got to work. There was some sort of problem though. Some tool he needed. I don’t remember what the deal was. Anyway it’s not important. For some reason he called me into the bathroom. I found him there wrestling with the sink, fitting it into place. And he was totally naked. He didn’t even have his underpants on. I don’t know why. It was like he thought he had to be naked to do this job. He seemed at ease. It was the most normal thing in the world for him. He grew up in Amsterdam. Everybody knows the Dutch are light-years ahead, but this was ridiculous. I didn’t say anything about anything. I felt like I shouldn’t draw attention to his nudity. He didn’t mention it either. We’ve talked many times since then, but we’ve never talked about him taking his clothes off in my bathroom. Maybe someday.

Charlie Parker got locked in a mental hospital for walking around a hotel lobby without a stitch of clothing on. He was drunk. I’ve been drunk on occasion, but I don’t ever remember disrobing. I mean in public. I’m the other way around. I get drunk and sleep in my clothes, my winter jacket, my hat. My wife has to pull my shoes off. Charlie Parker kept showing up at the reception desk naked. He was relentless. Wanted to use the phone. The porter got freaked out. You can read about it on Wikipedia.

Politicians are sometimes described as “nakedly ambitious.” Countries sometimes use “naked aggression.” The naked in these phrases connotes undisguised rapaciousness.

I seem to recall a TV show about people hunting with no clothes on. Or maybe they were just running naked with some animals. I don’t know. But they were naked and they were running and there were animals involved. It was pretty damn striking. They were white. The people, I mean. Their bare asses were like vanilla pudding. It all seemed to make perfect sense. It took me back. Maybe about sixty thousand years.

On my walk with my clothes on, which is where I began this thing, I met my neighbor. No matter what time of day I leave my building I meet this woman, my neighbor. She must walk her dog twenty-five times a day. I don’t like dogs. I especially don’t like it when people put clothes on their dogs. It makes me feel like I’m living on the wrong planet. Like my life is some terrible mistake. An error. It makes me feel like a stranded alien.

I said hello to my neighbor. We hate each other. That’s because we constantly meet up in the stairway of our building. No matter what. Her dog didn’t have any clothes on because it was too hot for that, but I’ve seen that dog dressed like Sherlock Holmes, a little pipe in his mouth. No, I’m kidding about the pipe. But he had the tweed hat on. The one with the ear flaps. Or whatever those things are.

When I meet her on the stairs she talks to her dog instead of talking to me. She talks to her dog ABOUT me. Informing him what to do. How to negotiate my presence. How to navigate his little doggy body out of my terrible way. I have to admit I find this irksome, but really I don’t care. Who has the time? This has nothing to do with being naked. Sorry for diverging from the topic.

I write stories that involve going to a corner store or supermarket. This crops up often actually. Not sure why. Maybe I shouldn’t write so many stories about shopping or shoplifting. Maybe it’s boring. Maybe I shouldn’t write so many stories period. It’s not good, you know. It’s dooming my marriage. It’s killing me, and I’m not getting much out of it. What a fucking idiot I am. The sun is shining and I’m in this tiny room full of books and rocks. The rocks belong to my wife. She collects them. They’re all over the place. What am I doing with my life?

Anyway, there’s this corner store in the neighborhood, but I almost never go there. Some old guy named Angel owns it. I bought a bottle of cognac from him once and he took it off a high shelf with a special stick he probably made himself in the 1950’s. Maybe his father made it. A perfect little clamp fastened around the bottle and down the damn thing came. Ingenious. The cognac was expensive, but it was a medical matter. I had a sore throat and it was raining.

It rarely rains in my stories, though the sky tends to cloud up with depressing regularity.

Sometimes I write about a woman or a girl working in Angel’s corner store. No woman works there really. I just make them up out of my head. Inevitably I describe how her body fits into her clothes. This seems to be a fascination of mine. Or a preoccupation. Or - let’s be honest - maybe the signal of a base longing. Maybe I’m a pervert. That’s probably it.

I’m always amazed at how many words writers use to describe clothes. Why this need to catalog clothing? Am I missing something? Vestis virum redit. I know, I know. But why do I need to visualize what all the people in all the books are wearing?

Why?

As in: He sported a green button-down shirt and a pair of tan slacks. The slacks were worn at the knees as if he were constantly on them performing God knows what unspeakable service of devotion. The toes of his shoes were scuffed. He had ring-around-the-collar. One of the buttons on his shirt didn’t match. It had been sewn on by hand. Etc.

Yes, those slacks (slacks?) were tan. Not brown. Tan.

And when they get into brand names? Oh my God!

She had a pair of white Adidas on. Her faded blue Levi’s were too long but not long enough to roll the cuffs as she did when she was a little girl because her alcoholic mother was too dense and lazy to alter the hem. Her gleaming Raybans sat atop her head like a delicate plastic crown. It was as if a miniature Louis Vuitton spaceship had lowered them there without her knowledge. The traumas of her childhood had made her a master of casual wear.

Maybe people who read my stories think my characters are naked because I don’t describe their clothes. Is that possible? Do people read my stories? Do I have to mention what color a guy’s shirt and pants are every time he walks onto a page? That’s enough to make me give up.

If only!

My wife would be so happy. The editors at McSweeneys and Ninth Letter would throw a party. I would too. What a relief! I could go for a walk instead of writing about going for a walk. I could get a dog and dress him up like Sherlock Holmes, a little pipe in his mouth, an actual little Sherlock Holmes doggy pipe, and parade him around the neighborhood. I could have an affair with my neighbor. Our dogs could fight and breed. We could play tennis together. We could play video game tennis in her living room while our dogs rutted and fought under the dining room table.

I could do so many wonderful things!

I could feed this computer into the oven. I could grow old without going crazy. I could get drunk at night, and howl, and take my stupid clothes off. I could walk around and around and up and down while calling people on the telephone. Naked. Whispering into strangers’ ears. Out of my mind. Naked.

Charlie Parker died when he was 34.

You probably would too.