Naked Fear

I don't get naked much. I suppose I do as often as the next guy, say for bathing or when it has some medical purpose, but I have this hunch that most people don't get naked much for completely understandable reasons. It is simply inappropriate for most of the working day, and sometimes it's just too damn cold.

Of course, getting naked at nude beaches is supposed to be a different story. Personally, I have always had a fear of sitting stitchless on a beach wondering how I'm going to make it to the water without everyone knowing as much about me as my mother does. Actually, it's not quite a fear, it's more a rumbling anxiety, the same gut-surge I feel whenever Britney Spears is about to tell us how much Kabbalah has meant to her during recovery. It is the fear of knowing too much about the uneasy bits of a person's life.

Which is why I will never understand how, on my first trip to the Caribbean island of Saint-Martin, I was goaded into going to the famous Orient Bay clothing-optional beach by my otherwise professional colleague, a reporter whom I'll call "Steve" because if his wife knew that he'd been sitting on a beach with several hundred beautiful and tastefully undressed women, she would not understand that he was able to convince himself that he did it for reportorial purposes only, and might very well do him serious harm. And I don't need that on my conscience.

So on we went; I, with a mixture of reluctance and queasy curiosity, and Steve with an oddly perverse enthusiasm, like Dick Cheney at a quail run.

Needing shade
When we arrived at the flesh-dense beach, it occurred to me that, in this environment, shade would be at a premium. So we found the umbrella hut and its proprietor, a young woman who was completely starkers except for an ankle bracelet and, of all horrors, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. She was French, as we found out when we tried to communicate.

The French, of course, have no shame. Several groups were playing volleyball games, or engaged in Frisbee-tossing spectacles that had them running up and down the beach, even diving into the sand. This engendered a great amount of bouncing, jiggling, and audible flapping, which looked painful and vaguely unhygienic. Yet no one seemed to care a whit. In fact, they were giddy about the whole thing. That didn't surprise me, but what did was this: I found myself admiring their freedom, their ability to be unencumbered by even the slightest degree of humiliation. Quivering and plopping, they looked less like satyrs than middle-aged, sweaty people who just happened to be naked.

Still, that didn't distract me from my own apprehensions. I broke out in a cold sweat. I have a wart on my thigh about which only two people in this world ought to admit they know, and one is me. The other is my wife, and the rest are damn liars. In my mind I began to pretend that this dime-size wart was the reason I did not want to get naked. It wasn't, of course. It was my fear that something else might be considered dime-size that drove up my blood pressure.

Naked is as naked does
But, when in Rome, etc. Being the only guy in a swimsuit on a nude beach is sort of like being Ron Paul on the campaign trail; everyone begins to wonder who invited you along. So I took a deep breath--sucked in my gut, if you really want to know--and, casting my inhibitions and trunks to the wind, found myself sitting naked next to a man whom I suddenly realized I hardly knew at all.

I reacted as I knew I would. I grabbed Steve's notebook--he was busy staring at something--and held it purposefully over that area of my body on which I could not in good conscience nor in public slather even the least bit of sunblock without appearing to enjoy it. This moment of terror started me wondering about the human condition. More pointedly, the human body condition.

Steve happens to have a pretty good body because he works out at a gym and has never eaten real food, apparently deriving nourishment via the osmosis of tanning oil. I, on the other hand, have the rugged exterior of a professional pie-eating contestant, and have begun to notice the waist spread that we nearly middle-aged men call "contentment diffusion."

When you go to a clothing-optional beach--I used to call them nude beaches and once did so in print, but was corrected by a hotel proprietor who assured me the word "nude" is tawdry and that there is, apparently, a significant difference between "nude" people and "clothing-optioned" people--you go with the knowledge that someone might very well look at your body parts. Don't ever let nudists, or clothing-optionalists, tell you their sole purpose in doffing their duds is the desire to get back to nature. Nature as I know it consists of carcinogenic sunbeams, rabid poison ivy, and mutant mosquitoes that carry away your babies. And all these things attack the skin, a large amount of which is available when you are stitchless.

Nosy people
No, publicly naked people are not always naturalists. They are something much closer to the human core, more primal.

They are nosy.

They want to compare. They want to compare this part or that part--not always pruriently, but for the sake of old-fashioned, competitive curiosity.

People are always competitive, even off the beach. We compare jobs, diseases, our divorce settlements. Men, I have come to believe, are the worst offenders. We compare what we call our "equipment."

When men talk about their equipment, they often use references to hardware or other objects one can easily pick up at Sears. I have a friend who uses the nickname "Old Kenmore Washer/Dryer" for his. Steve, on the other hand, inexplicably refers to his as "The United Nations." I personally use song titles such as "The Great Pretender." I needn't go into other possibilities here, you can let your imagination run amuck. The point is, men compare but would never be caught dead talking about it. Except in extremely public forums such as this one.

So there I sat in the buff (possibly from the French ou est le boeuf, literally "where's the beef?"), comparing and silently cursing my ancestry, which I'd begun to believe had shortchanged me, so to speak. I watched people walk by. Some were out of shape, the other side of Rubenesque. Others were buff, hard-bodies, toned and tanned. They were having fun. They were free with their bodies, serene in their innocence, at one with their universe and universal exposure.

They were French, of course.

And, as I said, I'd begun to admire their freedom. Beyond this concession, however, I vowed to never again be naked in public. It is flat out ridiculous for a grown man to be naked with people other than those who are required by marriage vows or professional courtesy not to laugh. I was reminded of this later when, upon returning the umbrella, I caught my reflection in the woman's mirrored sunglasses. Sand, I thought, does not make the man.

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