Nine Kinds of Naked

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Nine Kinds of Naked

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright © 2008 by Tony Vigorito

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

 

www.hmhco.com

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Vigorito, Tony.
Nine kinds of naked/Tony Vigorito.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Coincidence—Fiction. 2. Tornadoes—Fiction. 3. Life change events—
Fiction. 4. Life—Fiction. 5. Experimental fiction. I. Title.
PS3622.I48N56 2008
813'.6—dc22 2007047968
ISBN
978-0-15-603123-3

 

e
ISBN
978-0-547-54283-6
v2.0115

 

 

 

 

For my family

 

 

 

 

Something unknown is doing
we don't know what.

 

—Sir Arthur Eddington

 

 

 

 

1
T
HE MORNING
the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the morning a runaway serf dared a dreamer to untie the fourth and final knot on a ratty strip of leather. The dreamer accepted the dare and untied the knot, and life would never be the same.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the day Dave Wildhack colored his kitchen wall with an old box of crayons. Afterward, it would finally dawn on him what his late wife had meant by her last words.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the morning Special Agent J. J. Speed woke up in his hotel room to find a grandfather clock lying in bed next to him. Later that same day, he would encounter a simulacrum of himself, completely and unabashedly naked, gallumping on a donkey around the streets of New Orleans.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the day that Diablo was seduced by his goddaughter. It was a daring and lovely match of intellect and wit, although it would take two tornadoes and a crusader's cajoling to convince Diablo to open his heart.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the day that Elizabeth Wildhack quit her job as a stripper. This would vex her afternoon clientele considerably, particularly an obstetrician-gynecologist by the name of Dr. Rip Blossom, although Elizabeth only knew him by various aliases, and knew nothing of his profession.
His is a sad and pathetic story, and one we hope not to dwell upon at length, although at this point in the telling we must warn you that anything is possible.

And anything is indeed possible. A world containing phenomena as astounding as tornadoes should never be underestimated for its ability to startle one's expectations.

 

 

 

 

 

2
T
WENTY-FIVE YEARS
before the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm, Bridget Snapdragon was stung by a bee.

Bridget Snapdragon's legal name was Bridget Wilson, but as far as she was concerned, her last name was and always would be Snapdragon. Regrettably, Bridget Snapdragon died nine months after that bumblebee pricked the sunburned skin of her left butt cheek.

Bridget Snapdragon lived in Normal, Illinois, a midsized college and insurance town an hour south of Chicago. Bridget found residing in a place with the awelessness to call itself Normal to be a troubling circumstance. After all, though Catholic by heritage, Bridget Snapdragon fancied herself pagan. She fancied herself many things, but alien, outlaw, and pagan were her favorite and most frequent secret identities. Normalcy, in other words, was no aspiration of hers.

On the other hand, her husband, Dave, was a gainfully employed actuary who kept a well-organized basement. Dave thought his wife's imagination charming initially, then peculiar, and ultimately dangerous. He expressed his fears and misgivings to their pastor, Father J. J. Speed, one Sunday afternoon over hot dogs at a church picnic. Father J. J. Speed chewed his toothpick, which was a perpetual presence on his lips, and though he couldn't care less about Dave's problems, he nodded in feigned compassion.

“The feminine mind,” Father J. J. Speed explained, “is particularly vulnerable to such ominous whimsy. You don't have to be ordained to understand the role of Eve in Adam's fall from grace. Women are more susceptible to temptation, and
are apt to seduce men into evil as well.” He deftly snatched his toothpick out of his mouth before biting into his hot dog.

“What should I do?”

“Take comfort in the fact that you are not alone.” Father J. J. Speed swallowed hard and continued. “And remember, you're her husband. It's your responsibility to see her through her temptations.” He grabbed Dave earnestly by the shoulder, thinking all the while how satisfying it would be to slap the crap out of him. Jeezus gawd, how he loathed his panty waist parishioners. “Pray for her, Dave.”

And so he did. In fact, shortly thereafter, while Dave knelt praying in their front room, Bridget scampered off into the woods behind their home. A sizable creek chattered through the woods and was large enough to form a swimming hole at the base of some mild rapids. Bridget liked to pretend she was a wild woman of the woods—a sylvan maenad, she determined—and on this particular day she decided to go skinny-dipping. She stripped down to her panties and bra under the cover of the low-hanging branches of a nearby willow tree. After peering around for other people, furtively at first and then warily as she fell into character, she tore off her undergarments and skedoodled twenty paces across the rock and shale until she splashed gasping into the cold water.

Bridget was soon floating lazily on her back, breasts bobbing the surface like apples in a Halloween barrel, ears underwater listening to the muffled waterfall. Her bronze hair drifted free of constraint, billowing like a jellyfish in the lusty currents of the water, and her imagination stirred. “
Hoodly-doodly
,”
she sang out. Her voice chimed hollow and distant in her submerged ears, as it might sound to one's spirit unshackled from the flesh. “
Doinkery-dinkery-dick
,” she snickered, attempting to summon a spontaneity of song. In Bridget's mind, glossolalia was the proper language in which to cast a spell, though she rarely had a specific purpose in mind, and knew she had never really attained the flawless abandon that constitutes the diction of the Holy Spirit. On this day, however, after a few more false starts and self-conscious stumbles, she achieved a perfect and poetic nonsense:

 

trippety flips,

o fabulo mickey,

dracula dickey

jeskers a lee.

 

sluckery yuck

ta wimble zoo doo.

quabbery pips

gimbles le bloo.

 

kottle-ree-vockle-dee-mastle-nee-jee.

wee wee-he,

go go-she,

ta baxery bee.

 

She laughed loud a few beats after triumph, loud enough to attract the attention of a terribly sad twenty-year-old man
desperately trying to stroll through the woods. His name, or the nickname with which his unit had tagged him, was Diablo. For reasons that have no place next to a naked woman at play, Diablo could not accomplish this supposedly pleasant endeavor. I'm taking a walk in the woods, he kept reassuring himself, but it was having neither the calming nor the grounding effect that kitchen calendars so often suggest that it will. No, Diablo's consciousness was a cold observer once removed from the ape in combat fatigues trudging along the trail. He was out of his head, and he was scared to death of life.

But all of this disappeared the moment Diablo's ears caught a whiff of the outspoken and mellifluent music glancing through the trees. He snapped immediately present, and the psychopathic cacophony he had been nurturing in his head like a cracked rotten egg fell suddenly silent. Indeed, he would realize upon reflection that it was the first time in years that he'd felt like something as straightforward as himself.

Diablo followed the melody toward the creek, but it ended before he could zero in on its source. He paused, holding his breath, silent and perfectly still, goose bumps popping all over his skin, then nearly leapt out of his sweat at the eruption of wild, fierce, and benevolent laughter that burst out less than twenty-five feet from where he stood. Acting only on an instinct of childish curiosity, he crept forward to the tree line of the creek. There, he was greeted with a scene of such majestic sensuality that enchantment was his only possible reaction.

And how could it be otherwise, trailing as it did the accidental spell pronounced so playfully by Bridget Snapdragon? But here all agnostics must pause and murmur. “Yes, but was
it
really
a spell?” Perhaps not, or at least no more than we are
really
who we think we are. Skepticism is commendable, but it can be as blinding as faith, and sometimes such assertions destroy the experience and undermine the immanence of our story, which is to say, the significance of our existence, and this is precisely the realm Diablo inhabited before stumbling into the watershed moment of his life. We do what we do because of who we think we are, or who we think we ought to be. Bridget Snapdragon thought she cast a spell, and so for all intents and purposes, she did.