Naked at Lunch (23 page)

Steve, a friendly young man and a “third-generation nudist,” gave me a tour of the resort in a golf cart. He drove the cart casually, bouncing over a grassy field to show me the large lake for kayaking, paddle boating, and swimming—although Steve warned me that the water might be “cold this time of year.” There was an area with bungalows and mobile homes where many of the year-round residents lived, an RV park with full hookups, a campground, and the “Villa Hotel” rooms where I was staying. For fun I could go to the horseshoe pits, pickleball courts,
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two swimming pools, a fitness area, a spa, and two different restaurants: Cheeks Bar and Grill, which was sandwiched between the pools, and the Lakeside Restaurant and Scuttlebutts Lounge.

There is a ramshackle charm to Cypress Cove. The mobile home residents show off their individuality by landscaping their small lots with spinning plastic gewgaws, flower beds, topiary, and exotic plants; there are bird feeders, antique-looking streetlamps, oversize nude statues, and the occasional garden gnome. Most of the residents seem to drive golf carts—I even saw one that was designed to look like a Mercedes-Benz—and at dinnertime, you have to pass through a gauntlet of the electric buggies as you walk toward the restaurant. The lake and surrounding woods are beautiful and the residential area is compact, so that you get the sense that there is a lot going on, even if it’s mostly people sunning themselves or stretching out in a hammock with a book.

My room had been recently remodeled and, except for the naked Australians drinking beer at the picnic table directly outside the front window, looked like a stylish suite you might find at a hip boutique motel in San Francisco.

The library is normally closed on Mondays, and naturally the only day I could be there was a Monday, but I had arranged a special visit with Bob Proctor, one of the volunteer librarians who runs the place. I told him I’d be easy to spot: “I’ll be the guy wearing clothes.”

The library is housed in a bungalow right next to one of the swimming pools. I was standing there trying not to feel too ridiculous in my khaki pants and T-shirt when Bob and another library volunteer named Jim pulled up in a golf cart. Bob was wearing only a T-shirt, and, except for his hearing aids and some faded tattoos, Jim was completely naked. Was I expecting the librarians at the American Nudist Research Library to be wearing clothes?

Not really.

Although the library isn’t that big, the collection is impressive. There are nudist magazines from France like
Solaire Universelle de Nudisme
from the 1950s,
an extensive collection of magazines from the
Freikörperkultur
in Germany, a few in Spanish, and then almost every nudist publication in English from the 1930s to present day, from classics like
Sunshine & Health
,
American Sunbather
,
Health & Efficiency
,
Sundial
,
and
Suntan
to more eclectic magazines like the Australian magazine
Tan
,
New Zealand Naturist
,
Jaybird Safari
, and
Nudest
,
the magazine for Dutch smoothies.
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Most of the magazines had been collected and hardbound by year, although more recent publications were stored in loose cardboard racks.

Looking through the old magazines, I was struck by the articles they published. A quick read of the table of contents of, say,
Sunshine & Health
from March 1945 and you’ll find articles on the exact same subjects you might find in a current edition of
N
or any other contemporary nudist publication. There was “Why I Am a Nudist (Part Two),” “Let’s Eat Healthfully and Like It!,” “Analysis of the Nature of Obscenity,” and “Is Going Naked a Sin?”

It seems that when it comes to the idea of men and women taking their clothes off and socializing, society still has the same old hang-ups.

One of my favorite discoveries was the reader-submitted photos published in
Health & Efficiency
in the 1940s
.
They were typically pictures of naked young women in natural settings, studying flowers, walking in the woods, or gazing off into the middle distance by the seaside. The photographs were given captions like “Tribute to Grace,” “After the Bathe,” and “The Lily Pool.”

The library contains hundreds of old photographs of nudists, some dating back to Sky Farm in 1932 and the original American League for Physical Culture nudist camp in 1930. There’s also a collection of nonfiction titles about nudism and a smaller section of fictional titles with nudist themes.

As I browsed through the collection, Bob sat on a towel and worked on his laptop. He’s got a big smile and a sweet demeanor, and with his graying beard and glasses he looks like a friendly history professor. Bob’s a former pilot who now grows papayas in his garden, teaches Apple computer classes to his fellow retirees, and, when he’s not volunteering in the library or enjoying nude recreation, maintains a collection of more than one thousand beer bottles and cans and offers seventy different recipes for Jell-O shots on his webpage.

Although Bob had only been living in Cypress Cove for “six or seven years,” Jim was an old-timer. He’d been coming since 1964 and was somewhat notorious for, as he said, “bringing a different girl every time.” Jim is tan and trim and has a full head of windswept hair that makes him look like one of the original members of the Beach Boys. With his bangs, tattoos, and mischievous grin, I’m not surprised the ladies like him. Back in the day, Jim and his girlfriend wanted to live in Cypress Cove full time, but the owner wouldn’t let them until they were married. Like I said, it’s a family place.

By 1984, Jim was living here full time.

The library opened in 1979 and then expanded in 1996. A large chunk of the room is taken up by a state-of-the-art digitization device. Volunteers perform the tedious task of scanning every page of every magazine in the collection. It’s an ambitious project and they still have a long way to go, but the goal is that someday every piece of nudist history will be available online for scholars and historians, even amateur ones like myself.

Knowing that I was traveling alone and being, as I said, a very nice person, Bob invited me to join him and his wife and some of their friends for dinner at the Lakeside Restaurant.

“I hate to see people eating alone,” he said.

I quickly agreed.

The Lakeside Restaurant and Scuttlebutts Lounge is, as you might expect, right next to the lake. The interior is large, with tables on two levels surrounding a dance floor in a wide U shape. There is some kind of entertainment every night and a small stage acts as the focal point for the dining room. The entertainment that evening was a singer doing karaoke versions of “hits from the ’50s and ’60s.”

I joined Bob and his wife, Mitzi, at the table along with several of their friends. There was a couple, snowbirds down from “a little town just outside Toronto”—when I said, “I really like Toronto,” the snowbirds looked at me as if I’d just announced that I was freshly released from an insane asylum—and at the far end of the table, another couple, a man whose name I didn’t catch and his wife, a tan woman with a quick laugh who went by the nickname “Ro.” I was told that she knew everything about everyone at the resort.

The Canadian husband flagged down the waiter and ordered a pitcher of beer. His wife looked at the waiter and said, “And don’t forget my dildo.” This, I realized, might become a unique dining experience.

Suffice to say that everyone at the table except me was older than sixty-five, but they were tan and happy and ready to party. They were also, I should clarify, clothed at dinner. When the pitcher of beer arrived, I was shown how the dildo—really it was more like a plastic cylinder that had been frozen—could be inserted into the pitcher to keep the beer cold. Ingenious, practical, and potentially kinky.

Bob and Mitzi both recommended the eggplant rollatini, so I ordered that and a Goose Island beer.

As I sipped my beer, the evening’s entertainment began. The singer was a portly man in, I’m guessing, his early thirties, wearing saggy black pants and a black shirt. Ro looked at the stage and clapped her hands together. She turned to the snowbirds and said, “Look at how much weight he’s lost!” Which made me wonder just how big he was before this miraculous weight loss. A prerecorded band started playing. The singer picked up the microphone, scrunched up his face in a rictus of well-rehearsed emotion, and began to croon.

I wasn’t surprised to hear the hits of Elvis Presley, Tab Hunter, and Sam Cooke. I wasn’t surprised to see dozens of couples taking a spin on the dance floor. What surprised me was that most of the men weren’t wearing pants.

They weren’t naked, exactly. They wore Hawaiian shirts and sandals—or, for a few of the fashion forward, shoes and socks—but their genitals were free to swing in the breeze. The women were not so free with their bodies. They wore dresses or blouses and shorts; there wasn’t even much cleavage on display. I ate my rollatini and drank my beer, enjoying watching the dancers as they swayed and twirled to passable versions of the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown” and Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” the men enjoying their anti-textile freedom from the waist down, their penises swinging to the beat like fleshy metronomes.

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Toyota’s answer to the Kia Rio and Honda Fit.

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The International Federation of Pickleball describes the sport as “a simple paddle game played using a special perforated, slow-moving ball over a tennis-type net on a badminton-sized court.”

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See the chapter “Trends in Genital Topiary” for a closer look at the smoothie phenomenon.

Free Beaches

I
n the American Nudist Research Library there’s a small wooden sculpture of the German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx. Although there is no historical or anecdotal evidence I can find that Marx was a nudist, he is depicted standing naked, his beard wild and unkempt, his belly jutting out over his penis. He’s holding a book in one hand, the other raised in a revolutionary fist. Naked Karl Marx looks like he means business.

A small plaque attached to the base reads:
DONATED BY LEE BAXANDALL
.

Lee Baxandall was a writer whose work ranged from translating plays by Bertolt Brecht to editing a collection of writings by Wilhelm Reich and the anthologies
Marx and Engels on Literature and Art
and
Radical Perspectives in the Arts
.
⁶³
His writing appeared in magazines and periodicals as diverse as the
Nation
,
Partisan Review
,
Liberation
,
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
, and the
New York Times.
Ironically, despite his highbrow preoccupation with the intersection of the arts and dialectical materialism, his biggest-selling book is
Lee Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation
.

How does a socialist become a nudist? Imagine if Fidel Castro had suddenly turned the whole revolution thing on its head and changed Cuba into a clothing-optional paradise. Actually it’s not hard to imagine that there would still be some kind of embargo, what with American culture’s fear of naked people.

Baxandall was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1935. His childhood seems normal enough, but as he grew older he became “bored and alienated by Oshkosh.”
⁶⁴
He was an Eagle Scout, a member of the high school debate team, and class president, which is pretty much the résumé of your average all-American go-getter, but it was the Scouts that introduced him to skinny-dipping, which, honestly, is something I didn’t know the Boy Scouts did. I can’t imagine that there’s a merit badge for nudity. But if there were, what would it look like?

Baxandall attended college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, earning a BA in 1957 and his MA a year later, and appears to have gotten into all the trouble that a young, rebellious, and highly intelligent young man might get into. He fell in with a radical crowd; cowrote and directed an antimilitarism play,
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cofounded a left-wing journal called
Studies on the Left
,
and “smoked unusual cigarettes.”

In New York, Baxandall was a part of the intellectual bohemian lifestyle, editing books on sex and left-wing politics, writing plays and articles, meeting Che Guevara in Cuba, and protesting against the Vietnam War. To escape the heat of the city, he and his family—his second wife, Roz, and his son, Phineas—spent their summers on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, skinny-dipping at the nude beaches at Long Neck and Brush Hollow.