Naked Truth

I was 15 when I stopped wearing clothes. I’d come home from school, take my clothes off, and stay naked until I went to school the next day. I did my homework nude, I did yoga in the backyard nude, I even came to the dinner table nude. I felt free, with nothing to restrict my movement. I wanted to strip away the non-essentials, get to a naked truth somewhere inside. If I could have taken off my skin, I would have, and what was beneath that, and beneath that.

My parents put up with it, knowing they were partly to blame.

My mother was was born with hip dysplasia, undiagnosed by an incompetent pediatrician. She walked with a limp, one leg shorter than the other and twisted at an angle, the knee frozen with arthritis.

She could never look me in the eye, and I felt the shame she held in her body.

They never told us why but I guess the nudist camps were therapy for her. To be seen for what she was.

I was seven the first time we went to the Bare Oaks Family Naturist Park. As we drove up to the entrance, we passed by a few people working on flower beds by the side of the road. They looked up, smiled and waved. They didn’t look surprised or try to cover up. In fact, they made it look like the most natural thing in the world to be gardening in the nude.

My father paid the entrance fee to an elderly man who stepped out from the security shack at the entrance. One of his testicles hung down half-way to his knees. I wondered if some rare affliction had caused this?

“Don’t stare,” my sister whispered and poked me in the ribs. But as soon as we pulled away, we both started laughing.

“I’m not taking my clothes off!” I said.

“Well, I’m not taking mine off, either!” she said.

“I’m never, ever taking my clothes off!” I said.

“Dad, do we have to?” she asked. She was 12 at the time, and starting to get breasts and pubic hair.

“No,” he said, “But you’ll stick out like a sore thumb around here if you’re wearing clothes.”

I was the first with my clothes off, naked before my father parked the car. They teased me about that for a long time, but in my defense, I had less to take off. T-shirt, shorts, underwear, done. No socks, shoes, no bra.

But the last time we went, I was 11-and-a-half and launching full-force into an early adolescence. This time, I really did not want to get undressed. But I did, and as soon as the cool breeze started gently flowing over my skin, I felt my penis stiffen a little. I quickly grabbed my towel and wrapped it around my waist and made my way to the pool. Sandy, the lifeguard, was short, toned, had tiny breasts and almost no hair between her legs. She looked to me like she was 12-years old. I was confused. How could such a young girl give me my swimming test.

“Ok, Russell, you just have to swim two laps without stopping, and you get your pass.”

I stood at the edge of the deep end and dropped my towel. She giggled, “your cute!” I’d never had a girl say that to me. I immediately dove in and felt something totally new: the delicious force of water pulling my growing erection backward between my legs like a fish wriggling against the current. All my blood was leaving my extremities, and I was light-headed. I got to the shallow end and I put my hand on the edge of the pool, totally out of breath. Only one lap. I failed, and I was fully erect.

Sandy was standing on the ledge, looking down. “Don’t worry, you can try again. Want to come sit with me in the sun and warm up?”

“No, that’s ok, I’ll just stay here for a few minutes.” I looked over at the chain-link fence surrounding the pool and began to carefully count the number of holes across one side.

So my parents couldn’t say anything when I became a born-again nudist, taking it up like a new religion. At 15 I was more comfortable in my body and could control the spontaneous hard-ons. I can’t remember how long I stayed committed to the 24/7 nudism - I might have tapered off a little after my sister invited a new boyfriend over for dinner. The two of them were relaxing in the living room as my mom and dad cooked dinner, and I casually walked down the hallway to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I returned to my bedroom, and as I closed the door, I heard the young man ask, “Did your brother just walk down the hallway naked?”.

I had enough sense to put some clothes on that night at dinner. I overheard my father say something about “the idealism of youth” to my mother. I didn’t want to hear that. I was seeking the truth, I wanted to be natural, find something real amongst the phoniness that surrounded me.

But I guess it was just a phase. At 60, my body isn’t what it used to be and I don’t let anyone see me naked anymore. I’ve worked in one corporate role or another since college. I never felt I belonged in those square, drab buildings, cubicles, then shared offices, then private offices. I pretend to be a software engineer, and get paid as if it’s true.

That young idealist hasn’t totally died. He’s alive, at least in my imagination, like in a bottle of formaldehyde. I don’t know how to protect him from the mocking of the average cubicle worker. I hide my meditation practice, my belief in karma and reincarnation, my Radical Aliveness. I smirk along with the others at the YouTubes of wide-eyed teenagers who think they have solutions to everything. We nod to each other and say, Jesus that’s crazy, none of that will work.

It gets cold sometimes, even in the Southern California sun. You can’t just run around naked whenever you want. But I’m finding my truth still lives somewhere -beneath my clothes, beneath my skin, beneath the words I write.