Naked

by David Sedaris

I had no notion of the exact mechanics, but from overhearing the neighbors, I understood that our large family had something to do with my mother’s lack of control. It was her fault that we couldn’t afford a summerhouse with bay windows and a cliffside tennis court. Rather than improve her social standing, she chose to spit out children, each one filthier than the last.

It wasn’t that I enjoyed pressing my nose against the scalding hood of a parked car — pleasure had nothing to do with it. A person had to do these things because nothing was worse than the anguish of not doing them.

Because it was pleasant and relaxing, my rocking was bound to be tripped up, most often by my brain, which refused to allow me more than ten consecutive minutes of happiness. At the opening chords of my current favorite song, a voice would whisper, Shouldn’t you be upstairs making sure there are really one hundred and fourteen peppercorns left in that small ceramic jar? And, hey, while you’re up there, you might want to check the iron and make sure it’s not setting fire to the baby’s bedroom. The list of demands would grow by the moment. What about that television antenna? Is it still set into that perfect V, or has one of your sisters destroyed its integrity. You know, I was just wondering how tightly the lid is screwed onto that mayonnaise jar. Let’s have a look, shall we?

It was virtually impossible for me to ride in the passenger seat of a car and not press my nose against the windshield, and now that the activity had been forbidden, I wanted it more than anything. I tried closing my eyes, hoping that might eliminate my desire, but found myself thinking that perhaps he was the one who should close his eyes. So what if I wanted to touch my nose to the windshield? Who was it hurting? Why was it that he could repeatedly worry his change and bite his lower lip without the threat of punishment?

Were I not smoking, I’d probably be on some sort of medication that would cost the same amount of money but deny me the accoutrements: the lighters I can thoughtlessly open and close, the ashtrays that provide me with a legitimate reason to leave my chair, and the cigarettes that calm me down while giving me something to do with my hands and mouth. It’s as if I had been born to smoke, and until I realized it, my limbs were left to search for some alternative.

I spent my time at Ya Ya’s wondering what this place might have been before someone got the cruel idea to rent it out as an apartment. The dark, stifling hallway had been miscast in the role of a kitchen, and the bathroom looked suspiciously like a closet. Clothespinned bedspreads separated the bedroom from the living room, where the dining table was tightly wedged between the sofa and refrigerator. Surely, there were other places to live, perhaps a tent or maybe an abandoned muffler shop, someplace, anyplace, cheerier than this.

‘He no happy no more and think to have a suicide,’ she said. ‘Commit,’ my mother said. ‘He committed suicide.’ She threw her cigarette butt out the window and stared down into the littered alley below. ‘You don’t have a suicide, it has you.’

‘He have the suicide and now I sad sometime.’ Ya Ya stared into the distance and sighed. I imagine she had spoken to the fish, had loved it the best she knew how, but her affection, like her cooking, was devoid of anything one might think of as normal.

She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yielded five, a wealth of hearty field hands destined to return to the village, where we might crush olives or stucco windmills or whatever it was they did in her hometown. She was always pushing up our sleeves to examine our muscles, frowning at the sight of our girlish, uncalloused hands. Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that mattered.

One could always change the channel while Ya Ya was watching TV; there was no need to even ask. She could go from the State of the Union Address to a Bullwinkle cartoon without ever noticing the difference.

Ya Ya left behind no money or real estate, no priceless recipes or valuable keepsakes, nothing but a sense of release; and what sort of legacy is that? I can’t help but imagine she had started off with loftier goals. As a young girl in Greece, she must have laughed at private jokes and entertained crushes on young stonemasons named Xerxes or Prometheus. When told she would be sent to a new world, I hope she took a few hours to imagine a life of cakes and servants, where someone else would shine her shoes and iron the money. Life had sentenced her to die among strangers. Set out to pasture, she spent her final years brooding and stamping her feet within the narrow confines of her fragrant stall.

I felt uneasy implicating our parents, but Gretchen provided a wealth of frightening evidence. She noted the way our mother applied lipstick at the approach of the potato chip delivery man, whom she addressed by first name and often invited to use our bathroom. Our father referred to the bank tellers as ‘doll’ or ‘sweetheart,’ and their responses suggested that he had taken advantage of them one time too many. The Greek Orthodox Church, the gaily dressed couples at the country club, even our elderly collie, Duchess: they were all in on it according to Gretchen, who took to piling furniture against her bedroom door before going to sleep each night.

When he was young my father shot out his best friend’s eye with a BB gun. That is what he told us. ‘One foolish moment and, Jesus, if I could take it back, I would.’ He winced, shaking his fist as if it held a rattle. ‘It eats me alive,’ he said. ‘I mean to tell you that it absolutely tears me apart.’ On one of our summer visits to his hometown, my father took us to meet this guy, a shoe salesman whose milky pupil hugged the corner of his mangled socket. I watched the two men shake hands and turned away, sickened and ashamed by what my father had done.

Our next-door neighbor received a BB gun for his twelfth birthday and accepted it as a personal challenge to stalk and maim any living creature: sunbathing cats, sparrows, slugs, and squirrels — if it moved, he shot it. I thought this was an excellent idea, but every time I raised the gun to my shoulder, I saw my father’s half-blind friend stumbling forth with an armload of Capezios. What would it be like to live with that sort of guilt? How could my father look himself in the mirror without throwing up?

While watching television one afternoon my sister Tiffany stabbed me in the eye with a freshly sharpened pencil. The blood was copious, and I rode to the hospital knowing that if I was blinded, my sister would be my slave for the rest of her life. Never for one moment would I let her forget what she’d done to me. There would be no swinging cocktail parties in her future, no poolside barbeques or episodes of carefree laughter, not one moment of joy — I would make sure of that. I’d planned my vengeance so thoroughly that I...

There are only so many times a person can apologize before it becomes annoying. I lost interest long before the bandage was removed, but not my father. By the time he was finished, Tiffany couldn’t lift a dull crayon without breaking into tears. Her pretty, suntanned face assumed the characteristics of a wrinkled, grease-stained bag. Six years old and the girl was broken.

Fireworks were hazardous, but thunderstorms were even worse. ‘I had a friend, used to be a very bright, good-looking guy. He was on top of the world until the day he got struck by lightning. It caught him right between the eyes while he was trout fishing and cooked his brain just like you’d roast a chicken. Now he’s got a metal plate in his forehead and can’t even chew his own food; everything has to be put in a blender and taken through a straw.’ If the lightning was going to get me, it would have to penetrate walls. At the first hint of a storm I ran to the basement, crouching beneath a table and covering my head with a blanket. Those who watched from their front porches were fools. ‘The lightning can be attracted by a wedding ring or even the fillings in your teeth,’ my father said. ‘The moment you let down your guard is guaranteed to be the day it strikes.’

After a while we began to wonder if my father had any friends who could still tie their own shoes or breathe without the aid of a respirator. With the exception of the shoe salesman, we’d never seen any of these people, only heard about them whenever one of us attempted to deep-fry chicken or operate the garbage disposal. ‘I’ve got a friend who buys a set of gloves and throws one of them away. He lost his right hand doing the exact same thing you’re doing. He had his arm down the drain when the cat rubbed against the switch to the garbage disposal. Now he’s wearing clip-on ties and having the restaurant waiters cut up his steak. Is that the kind of life you want for yourself ?’

‘That license is going to be your death warrant,’ my father said on the day I received my learner’s permit. ‘You’re going to get out there and kill someone, and the guilt is going to tear your heart out.’

Our father collected these tees as good-luck charms and kept them stored in a goldfish bowl that sat upon his dresser. It was forbidden to wander onto the green during a tournament, so he used us to do his legwork, hoping the officials might see us as enthusiastic upstarts who decorated their rooms with posters of the masters working their way out of sand traps or hoisting trophies over their heads following stunning victories at Pebble Beach. Nothing could have been further from the truth. No matter how hard he tried to motivate us, the members of my family refused to take even the slightest interest in what was surely the dullest game ever invented.

‘Oh, Lou,’ my mother would whine, dressed for a cocktail party in her muted, earth-tone caftan. ‘You’re not going to wear that, are you?’ ‘What’s wrong with this?’ he’d ask. ‘These pants are brand-new.’ ‘New to you,’ she’d say. ‘Pimps and circus clowns have been dressing that way for years.’

We were well into the summer reruns when our household was shaken by a series of very real crimes no TV detective could ever hope to crack. Someone in our family had taken to wiping his or her ass on the bath towels. What made this exceptionally disturbing was that all our towels were fudge-colored. You’d be drying your hair when, too late, you noticed an unmistakable odor on your hands, head, and face. If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that you might go from day to day without finding shit in your hair. This sudden turn of events tested our resolve to the core, leaving us to wonder who we were and where we, as a people, had gone wrong. Soul-searching aside, it also called for plenty of hot water, gallons of shampoo, steel wool, industrial scrub brushes, and blocks of harsh deodorizing soap. The criminal hit all three bathrooms, pausing just long enough to convince the rest of us that it was finally safe to let down our guard. I might spend twenty minutes carefully sniffing the towel only to discover that this time the asshole had used the washcloth.

On television a search warrant guaranteed that your home would be trashed, and this was no different. Mine was the only clean room in the entire house. This was my shrine, my temple, and I watched in horror as my drawers were emptied and my closets brutally divorced of order.

The Fugitive’s hair always looked perfectly natural. It blew in the breeze created by oncoming trucks as he stood beside the lonesome road, bidding farewell to a town unable to appreciate his unique gifts. My natural hair looked pretty much the same way, but once the polish dried, my hair hardened into a stiff, unified mass that covered my head like a helmet. I went to bed and awoke to find my sheets and pillows smudged and ruined. My face and arms were bruised-looking, and everything stank with the rigid, military odor of a buffing rag. It was no wonder the Fugitive was a loner. I liked the sheen and color of my hair but found I needed to slick it back to maintain a clean forehead. This hair of mine was bulletproof. You could have pounded my head with a golf club and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.

stride, but I had never imagined such a world. A bedsore would eventually heal, but what about the patient’s more substantial problems? A regular hospital, with its cheerful waiting room and baskets of flowers, offered some degree of hope. Here, there were no get-well cards or helium balloons, only a pervasive feeling of doom. Fate or accident had tripped these people up and broken them apart. It seemed to me that something like this might happen to anyone, regardless of their fine homes or decent education. Pitch one too many fits or spend too much time brushing your hair, and that might be the first sign. There could be something hidden away in any of our brains, quietly lurking there. Just waiting.

After his shock treatments my grandfather returned home, where he spent the rest of his life coring apples and baking pies. His children gone and his wife hypoglycemic, there was no one around to eat the pies, but that did not deter him. He baked as if the entire U.S. Marine Corps were stationed outside his front door, drumming their forks against tin plates and shouting in unison, ‘Dessert! Dessert!’ Four pies in the oven and he’d be rolling out flag-sized sheets of dough for the subsequent crusts. Twice a year we visited my grandparents’ house, where I recall pies cooling on every available surface: the window sills, the television set, even the dining-room chairs. The man never said a word, but neither did he take another drink. He just baked, dying, finally, of a stress-related heart attack.

If my math teacher were able to subtract the alcohol from his diet, he’d still be on the football field where he belonged; and my Spanish teacher’s credentials were based on nothing more than a long weekend in Tijuana, as far as I could tell. I quit taking their tests and completing their homework assignments, accepting Fs rather than delivering the grades I thought might promote their reputations as good teachers. It was a strategy that hurt only me, but I thought it cunning.

When the words became confusing, you needed only pay attention to the actor’s face and hands to understand that this particular character was not just angry, but vengeful. I loved the undercurrent of hostility that lay beneath the surface of this deceptively beautiful language. It seemed a shame that people no longer spoke this way, and I undertook a campaign to reintroduce Elizabethan English to the citizens of North Carolina.

I took to brooding, refusing to let up until I received a copy of Shakespeare’s collected plays. Once they were acquired, I discovered them dense and difficult to follow. Reading the words made me feel dull and stupid, but speaking them made me feel powerful. I found it best to simply carry the book from room to room, occasionally skimming for fun words I might toss into my ever fragrant vocabulary. The dinner hour became either unbearable or excruciating, depending on my mood.

Unfortunately, having spent the better part of their lives behind bars, the men and women I worked with seemed to have learned nothing except how to get out of doing their jobs. Kettles boiled over and steaks were routinely left to blacken on the grill as my coworkers crept off to the stockroom to smoke and play cards or sometimes have sex. ‘It suddenly occurred to me that people are lazy,’ my reflective TV voice would say. This was hardly a major news flash, and as a closing statement, it would undoubtedly fail to warm the hearts of my television audience — who, by their very definition, were probably not too active themselves.

It made me sad and desperate to see so many people, strangers whose sheer numbers eroded the sense of importance I was working so hard to invent. Where did they come from, and why couldn’t they just go home? I might swipe their trays off the belt without once wondering who these people were and why they hadn’t bothered to finish their breaded cutlets. They meant nothing to me, and watching them move down the line toward the cashier, it became apparent that the feeling was mutual. They wouldn’t even remember the meal, much less the person who had provided them with their piping hot tray.

My animosity was getting the best of me until I saw in their behavior a solution to my troubling identity crisis. Let them have their rolls of gift wrap and gaudy, personalized stockings: if it meant something to them, I wanted nothing to do with it. This year I would be the one without the shopping bags, the one wearing black in protest of their thoughtless commercialism. My very avoidance would set me apart and cause these people to question themselves in ways that would surely pain them. ‘Who are we?’ they’d ask, plucking the ornaments off their trees. ‘What have we become and why can’t we be more like that somber fellow who washes dishes down at the Piccadilly cafeteria?’

Woken by the noise, my father wandered up from the basement, where he’d been sitting in his underwear, drowsing in front of the television. His approach generally marked the end of the party. ‘What the hell are you doing in here at two o’clock in the morning?’ he’d shout. It was his habit to add anywhere from three to four hours to the actual time in order to strengthen the charge of disorderly conduct. The sun could still be shining, and he’d claim it was midnight.

I called back an hour later and he answered saying, ‘I’m on my way out the door right this minute.’ A studio audience laughed and hooted from my father’s end of the phone. The situation comedies had started. This meant he’d been asleep in his chair. He would sit there snoring until someone tried to change the channel. ‘What are you doing?’ he’d yell. ‘I was watching that!’

I started hitchhiking on a regular basis. Aside from the convenience, I enjoyed spending time with people who knew nothing about me. I was free to re-invent myself, trying on whichever personality happened to suit my mood. I was a Broadway actor studying the regional accent for an upcoming show or maybe a California high-school student, here to track down the father I’d never known. ‘Word has it he goes by the name T-Bone, but that’s all I have to go on.’

He yelled out for Hutch to hold the wheel while he opened the packet of fudge, and the Jeep swerved into the other lane, barely missing a tanker filled with diesel fuel. Horns blared and brakes squealed, and for the first time in my life I thought, This is how people die; this is exactly how it happens. Randolph’s hat flew out the window, but even if the violent wind had taken his guitar, I doubt I would have been able to appreciate it. This wasn’t a situation that allowed me to laugh at someone else’s misfortune. He and I were in this together. We would either die or spend the rest of our lives on the back wards of some hospital where nurses would come regularly to massage our comatose limbs and whisper words of encouragement.

We covered an enormous amount of ground before Starsky pulled over to relieve himself behind a billboard. It struck me as odd that he could steal gasoline and threaten the lives of countless strangers, yet feel the need to hide so completely while peeing.

The San Francisco that awaited us bore no resemblance to the bohemian think tank described in Randolph’s tattered paperbacks. The streets were crowded not with soul-searching poets but with men wearing studded vests and tight leather chaps. This was not a Beat town but rather a beat-off town.

I spent my year buckling down and improving my grades in the hope that I might transfer somewhere, anywhere, else. I eventually chose Kent State because people had been killed there. At least they hadn’t died of boredom, that was saying something. ‘Kent State!’ everyone said. ‘Do you think you’ll be safe up there?’

I lay there until sunrise, when the bus took an incline and a bottle of chocolate soda rolled across the floor, smacking me in the forehead. Crawling back toward the aisle, I stepped into the bathroom to battle the many wads of chewing gum fused to my scalp. The passengers awoke, one by one, all except for the young woman occupying my seat. A good, sound sleeper, she rose at ten, asking me to save her spot while she went to brush her teeth. I was out in no time, waking minutes later to find her rapping on my skull with a tube of toothpaste. ‘Hey, wake up.’ I pretended to sleep through it, figuring she’d give up sometime soon. ‘Hey, this son of a bitch took my seat,’ she shouted. ‘I went to the ladies’ to freshen up and now I don’t got no goddamned place to sit.’

Once the seat was empty he wiped it free of crumbs and gestured for the young woman to make herself comfortable. I thought briefly of taking my case to the people, but this was clearly not my crowd. They leaned forward, craning their necks to whisper and laugh while I stood in the aisle pretending to be a foreigner, unfamiliar with the customs of this magnificent country. I might have accidentally taken someone’s seat, but, oh, look at the way I seemed to appreciate the rugged landscape the rest of them took for granted. I bent at the waist, lowering my head to peer out the window and raising my eyebrows in delight at every passing boulder. Look! I seemed to say. That one resembles a cardinal nesting on the rim of on enormous pancake! And here we have what appears to be an overturned clog, lying beneath what closely resembles the pocked, flat-featured head of the ignorant hillbilly occupying my rightful seat!

My friend Veronica and I had been living in San Francisco when she laid down her copy of The Grapes of Wrath and announced that we’d had enough of city living. It was her habit to speak for the both of us, and I rarely minded as it kept me from having to make any decisions of my own.

Hobbs unlocked the door of the trailer, a bulbous, aqua tankard set upon cinder blocks. It worried me that the moment I crossed the threshold I might become the sort of person who lived in a trailer. A trailer, the very word set off alarms in the base of my skull. People who lived in trailers called the police to break up violent family fights. They peed in the sink and used metal buckets to barbeque tough purple steaks marked ‘reduced for final sale.’

During my first hour I made the mistake of biting into one of the apples. Fresh from its chemical bath, it burned my lips and the flesh at the corners of my mouth, leaving a harsh aftertaste that lingered long after I’d run to the bathroom and washed my mouth out with soap. Hobbs had been right about never wanting to see another apple, but his timing was off. I was ready to banish them from my sight after my first forty-five minutes. They were merciless, pouring down the belt without interruption twenty-four hours a day, turning the concept of world hunger into either a myth or a very cruel joke. During a single half hour I had surely handled enough apples for every man, woman, and child with the teeth to bite them or the will to mash them into sauce.

It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of cotton stuffed into his ears. Every ear of corn, every chocolate-coated raisin or shoelace. Every barbeque tong, paper hat, and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery. Vegetarians look at a pork roast thinking about the animal. I’d now look at them wondering whose job it was to package the shallow Styrofoam trays. That’s where the real tragedy lies. Cigarettes, crackers, gum: everything I saw would now be tainted by the reminder of my job. ‘Brothers and sisters, RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!’