Adam Gnuse

Naked, Among Friends



One of my favorite stories is by Italo Calvino, titled “The Adventure of the Bather,” about a young woman who loses the bottom of her two-piece bathing suit while swimming off the coast of Italy. Much of the story involves her paddling about, growing soggy in the water. When other bathers return to the shore, she watches the ocean slink away from their hips and legs and dreads what that would mean for her: exposing that private part between the navel and thighs. What disaster! And so, she swims about, delaying the inevitable for as long as she can, and finds herself entangled in numerous adventures.

Perhaps one reason I enjoy the story so much is that I relate to her plight, that inability of hers to say “fuck it” and let the strangers suffer through the moment of nudity it takes to find a beach towel to wrap around her waist. Even as a boy, standing along the river bank of the Mississippi south of New Orleans with my older brother, it was always he that dropped his pants for the passing cruise ships—never me. I’d shrink back into the underbrush beneath the cypress trees and marvel at the confidence in him, the joyful willingness he had to display his body for the row of small strangers, leaning over the gunwale; how he gyrated his genitals into a windmill as they one by one tipped their heads to the side.

Even as an adult, post-coitus, I’m almost always the first to grope across the bed for underwear, because, even with an understanding of the merits of a body-positive mental outlook, there has and will always be something about a penis lying across a thigh like a wet sock that gently freaks me out. It’s a thing doesn’t seem like it should be entirely of this world.

In my mind, my penis is just another of those low-level, daily horrors we learn to ignore (like the long, pointed teeth of our pets, the meat-packing industry, or how long it’s been since we last disinfected our toilet seats), even if I do love the thing.

I do. I love my penis. I even love my friends’ penises, as I think of that time I was swimming at a high school pool party during my senior year, and somehow, someway my best friend’s trunks dropped just as I was bending down before him to pick free a leaf clung to my foot.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” he said, frantically pulling the drawstrings of his trunks tighter.

There was no way I couldn’t.

He thought about it, and said, “Well, I guess it was probably about time.”

And it was. It was nice to have that exchange, in a strange and uncomfortable way, not just because he’s my oldest friend, and I want our friendship to be based on a full understanding of one another, but because it cuts through some of that stigma of nakedness I have for my own body, for others’.

I’m thinking of that odd moment of disrobing at the beach with friends or family, when we each pull loose from our shirts and kick away our shoes. Of that casual indifference we display for each other’s suddenly much-more-apparent body; the way we deliberately not notice, instead looking towards the water, or the ice chest, or our own bare bellies, as if wearing less clothing hasn’t actually transformed us into an entirely different creature. At least, it sure feels that way, with our skin garish in the sunlight, with our collective shoulder blades and back dimples, our innies and outies, moles and birth marks and whatchamacallits, all these different sizes and shapes and colors so wildly different we might not be so convincingly part of the same species.

And, in another way, it’s amazing how normal we each are. How mundane we become—as the day slumps into late afternoon—our bodies and the bodies of our family and friends, returning from the water to shake out our towels, to brush the sand from our calves, to bend and pack up our belongings for home.

How odd it seems to think any of us were anything odd at all.

How could it, when I look back and realize there is that agreement, tacit but substantive, made when we pull our shirts from our bodies.

We show our skin together, to one another, and say: I love you, this thing you are. I hope you love me, too.