Preview: The Naked Truth

I hope you’re prepared to sit a spell and enjoy a longer than usual blog post today! As promised, here’s a chapter from my forthcoming ebook, The Naked Truth, out September 1st. I flip-flopped on what I should post and finally decided to start at the beginning. This is chapter 1. 

CHAPTER 1

NAKED AMBITION

My first work experiences came from helping with the family business. My dad’s company removed railroad tracks, bridges and trestles, and I worked for him as soon as I was big enough to carry a railroad spike. My younger brother and I had painted the offices, dragged railroad ties across the lawns of people who would use them to line their driveways or build retaining walls and hauled bits of metal to the scrap yard. My brother had the brawn and the brains to improve the company and get involved in all aspects of it, while I started experiencing lower back pain from trying to keep up with pushing hundreds of pounds of creosote-soaked wood around. I also didn’t particularly care what machinery they used and whether there might be a way to weld on a doohickey and make it more efficient. I wanted a job that wouldn’t leave a callous on my hand.

I had a semester off before starting college and I would go insane if I didn’t have something to do and a way to make money. I cast my net wide and pored through the Hamilton Spectator classifieds. After all, I had a car; I was portable. Hamilton was a twenty-minute drive away.  I could work virtually anywhere.

Several ads caught my attention with headlines such as, “Management trainees wanted” and “No experience necessary,” but upon reading them aloud for my mom’s analysis they all seemed shady or too good to be true.

Finally, one seemed interesting and worth pursuing. “General summer help for nature resort,” it began, and went on to paint a picture of an idyllic setting in which to carry out mundane tasks, such as garden maintenance, general cleaning and short-order cooking. The location was Freelton.

Mom stopped what she was doing.

“That’s the nudist camp.”

“So?” I asked. “It’s a job and it’s full time.”

“Lis, you can’t go there. Everybody is NAKED!”  I could hear the panic rising in her voice, and that made the ad even more attractive.

“I’m gonna call.”

And call I did, arranging an interview for the next day. On the other end of the line a man with a thick German accent gave me directions. The term “nudist” was never used, but it was soon clear that the coordinates were the same as the famed Four Seasons Nature Resort.  I couldn’t wait to get there and see what it was all about.

Another mother might have tried to talk her teenaged daughter out of plunging into the mysterious world of the steadily naked, but my mom–bless her–predicted that I would freak out over the revelation of a stranger’s puckered behind and rush home, horrified at the thought of living in close proximity to such a vile display. Mom didn’t realize how hungry I was for adventure, for something to happen in my life. Teen angst isn’t just a cliché; it must be a medical fact. The rush to get some sort of experience and carve out my own piece of the world ran through me like an electric current. If miles of unfamiliar skin were what it took to make me get there, well, bring it on.

Flaunting my naked self was never something that crossed my mind. I was a walking Glamour magazine fashion “Don’t,” covering up in as many slimming (so I thought) layers as possible, all year round. I had a love-hate relationship with my body, except without the love part. Cosmo magazine showed me 101 ways to improve myself, and I simply assumed it meant I was irreversibly flawed in 101 ways.  My self-image drew me as morbidly obese, when, in actual fact, I was just a normal, average size. So displaying my private assets was never a goal, in fact, just the opposite. I wondered how I would ever have sex with a man without having to show him my body and hoped science would eventually find a way.

Nervous and excited, I blasted Aerosmith and Boston on cassette for the forty-minute drive down country roads, to the Queen Elizabeth Way to Hwy 6 and, finally, to the gravel concession that led me to a gate with an intercom. I gave an unseen voice my name, and the metal gate rattled aside.

The acreage that encompassed the Four Seasons Nature Resort wasn’t visible from the entrance. The first thing I noticed was the huge clubhouse with its gleaming walls of glass.  It was stunning in the sunshine. I parked my Monza, smoothed the front of my skirt and went inside.

The huge room was mostly empty except for one naked woman holding a blond toddler in the Olympic-sized swimming pool. She gulped mouthfuls of water and spouted them onto his chest as he giggled. “Excuse me,” I said. “Can you tell me where I will find Hans?”

“In his office.”  She pointed to the south end of the building.

“Thanks.”  A naked woman and a naked little boy.  Big deal.

Then I looked up. Walking toward me were two men I estimated to be their 50s wearing nothing but smiles. My knees turned to rubber as an endless loop began to run in my head. “Act cool. Just act cool.”  Wanting nothing more than to appear to be a sophisticated and worldly woman, I made a conscious effort to look up and into their faces, instead of at my feet. That’s how I almost landed in the pool, as one espadrille-clad foot lost its way and hovered over the sparkling water.

“Whoopsie!” I said, louder than I intended. The men ceased their conversation and considered me briefly before resuming their stroll, their small penises flipping from side to side. This wasn’t going to be so easy after all.

I tapped on the open office door and a short, deeply tanned and unsmiling man looked up from the desk. This was Hans. He was wearing nothing but a pair of silky orange shorts with something–a pager?–clipped to the waistband. His manner was serious, his accent German.  Introductions weren’t necessary.

“Come with me,” he said, motioning the universal signal for follow me and we walked, or rather trotted, down a long hallway, past a wall of door-less showers and the glass-enclosed sauna and hot tub to an impressive black granite and iron spiral staircase. Hans took steps normally associated with a man twice his height. Less wind resistance because of his volume, I thought, as I struggled to keep up, afraid I would lose him in this maze where one never knew when a naked person might appear.

Up the corkscrew stairs we went to the most beautiful and modern kitchen I had ever seen. It was like something out of a decorating magazine, everything stark white or stainless steel, except for a large bowl of juicy-looking lemons in the centre of the powder-coated table. Appliances shone, and the floor and countertops gleamed. Something was boiling in a huge steel pot on the gas range and it smelled delicious and meaty as Hans gave it a stir with a large wooden spoon.

“This is something,” I said.

Hans nodded and abruptly walked out of the room, leaving me to assume that I should follow.

We toured the beautiful guest suites, decorated in white-on-white, and he pointed out where his son Mike and his family lived. Later I would realize the woman in the pool was Mrs. Mike and the child was their son.

We walked along a hallway that overlooked the pool to the other side, where Hans told me in clipped sentences that the simple rooms here were for the employees. If I were hired, I would be sharing a room with another girl who had already been hired.

Outside the rooms was a complete gym and weight room that could be used by non-club members who paid a fee.

Hans skittered down the staircase to the bar below. The woman and boy were still in the pool.  She was floating backward and holding him above the drink. Hans pointed out highlights of the bar; a blender, the glasses and bottles of booze. He hadn’t asked me my age, but I was not old enough to legally pour alcohol yet. I didn’t feel it would help anything by offering up that fact just now.

“So,” he said. “Let me get Mike.”  And away he went.

I studied the clubhouse. It was clean and inviting, obviously meant to hold hundreds of people. The summer rush hadn’t yet begun, and I tried to picture dozens of naked men and women in here, enjoying drinks or a game of cards.

My thoughts were interrupted by a tall, blond man in his early twenties with a friendly smile and a ready hand to shake. He wore a loose white T-shirt and dark blue swim trunks.

“I’m Mike. You must be Lisa.”

He was good looking in a Beach Boys sort of way. Not my type at all, but, still, I could appreciate his strong features and broad shoulders. Hans had disappeared, and Mike was now in charge of the odd interview. He gave me a basic application to fill out and chatted briefly about his expectations. The job would include a lot of cleaning. I, and the three other summer helpers, would scrub down the showers, scour the hot tub, tidy and vacuum the guest rooms and common areas, as well as serve dinner in the dining room and cook lunches in the short-order kitchen. The boys would do some of the heavier outside work, and we would all be expected to keep the grounds free of litter. If a guest needed something, such as a towel or a drink, we would fetch it for him or her. The pay barely grazed minimum wage, but I was guaranteed a forty-hour week, every week, and some overtime. My food and living expenses were nil. So, what did I think?

“I would really like this job,” I told him.

He would check my references and let me know. It wasn’t forty-eight hours before the call came that I was hired and would be moving to Four Seasons, the nudist resort. My mother thought it was funny and horrifying at the same time. My dad sat stoic as I explained that I simply had to work and there weren’t many jobs available. I needed to take what I could get. This began my father’s refusal to talk to me until my stint at the camp was over. Was it disappointment? Embarrassment? I’ve never really known. But to say he was not on board with my new arrangement was an understatement.

My little brother reacted in exactly the opposite way. In a rare display of affection, Kevin drew me into a bear hug that made my spine crackle and exclaimed that I was a pretty cool big sister after all. The revelation that family and friends were welcome to visit sent him scurrying to the phone to tell all of his friends. I’m sure he imagined that wanton supermodels were strolling the grounds in a hedonistic display of decadence and lust. All I had seen so far were two overweight, middle-aged, wrinkly men, but I didn’t dare ruin the fantasy for him. I knew so little about the camp at that point that a busload of bikini babes could have been on their way to prowl the grounds for virgin boys and I would not have been surprised. My upcoming summer seemed full of endless possibilities.

Somehow we managed to survive in the prehistoric days before cellphones, iPhones and BlackBerries.  We dragged our little Neanderthal butts through life and managed just fine. When there are no other options, you don’t tend to know what you’re missing. If you do know, you invent what’s missing and retire disgustingly young and wealthy, but that’s somebody else’s story, not mine. My folks had to be content with one land-line number that might or might not be busy when they tried to call. It was all there was.

My parents were the king and queen of euphemisms, and it astounds me still that they let me go to this foreign land, where a penis was a penis and no one tried to pass it off as a “thingy” or a “dewey.”  They said things like “poo,” “tinkle” and “fluff” for passing wind.  I wondered how they would explain to their friends and neighbours what their only daughter was doing with her final summer before college or if they would say anything at all. Besides making up gentle-sounding synonyms, another thing Mom was skilful at was changing the subject.

I spent the next few days packing up my things and filing my favourite records into plastic milk crates. I hardly gave a thought to the clothes I jammed into my duffel bag–a first. I had always paid particular attention to what I wore, settling only on those items I perceived to be slimming. But that concern evaporated when I realized I’d be spending my days with people who didn’t get dressed at all. My mind swirled with imagined scenarios of what life at the clubhouse would be like. It was wasted effort, like trying to imagine moving to Mars.