Drowning Naked in Paradise & Other Essays. David Bakish
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Strunk and White, in their influential small booklet, The Elements of Style, advocate short sentences. It’s impressive mastery of the English language to have one sentence comprised of a long series of complete thoughts without losing control or producing unintended fragments and comma splices.
Mrs. Kline thought I was the best writer in her 1954–’55 classes and wanted me to be given an award at graduation but was told by the administration that there was no such award. I settled for being inducted into the National Honor Society and the National Thespian Society, the latter despite my weak acting and directing skills.
One of the essays I wrote for Mrs. Kline was a first stab at an autobiography. It was largely about my parents’ hard struggle as immigrants to this country, land of opportunity. She gave the essay an A-plus.
The literary high point of that senior year was reciting and acting out the witches’ scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
After that year, I never tried to copy any of the many great writers I would come to admire, but my appreciation grew for both luxurious, extensive, descriptive work and more concise, laconic, muscular work. In classical American literature, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and Faulkner might be at one pole, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and J. D. Salinger at the other pole.
3
Superman
I would venture to guess that many of us old-timers, when we were young whippersnappers, imagined all the things we wanted to be when we grew up. Sure, some kids already knew what they wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, professional athletes, or just anybody rich. Some of us boys growing up in the 1940s idolized cowboys killing Indians, now so politically incorrect. Today I might root for the Indians. Cops catching hardened criminals, though we might have admired the moxie of some wily gangsters. Sharp-shooting American soldiers mowing down Japs and Nazis, clearly evil people for whom none of us would have felt any sympathy. I imagined I could be like the comic strip character, Clark Kent, a bumbling, awkward guy like me, magically transforming into the awesomely powerful flying machine known as Superman, a comic book invention of two Jewish writers, nebbishes with vivid imagination.
Well into adulthood, I had dreams that I was Superman. The catch, however, was that my dreams turned into nightmares. I would fight off two or three bad guys, but out of nowhere, they were joined by a horde of others all jumping on me. I would then try to fly off a nearby cliff but, upon launching my muscular body into the air, my red cape failed. I crashed, and all the bad guys were again on top of me. When I woke up in a cold sweat, I was relieved to be alive and once again the very ordinary Clark Kent.
In real life, my greatest skills lay in my writing ability. I dreamt I would one day write the great American novel or a work of nonfiction that the literary world would welcome and award me some measure of fame. Although that never happened, I was recognized in a very modest way for my research and books on the black American author, Richard Wright, and the popular culture singing comedian, Jimmy Durante. One was dead serious about the social problem of racism; the other was a nonpolitical master of raucous humor. Still, the image of Superman continued to have its allure.
Superman sought to protect the innocent from those who would perform evil acts. He was, for me, a one-man army when conventional forces failed. Sometimes evil appeared insidiously clever and more exciting than good, but unlike in the real world, in Superman’s world, evil forces always lost. I hoped in some small way, I could do good, even if more like Clark Kent than Superman. After all, Clark Kent was a newspaper reporter, a writer like me.
4
Something I Never Told Anyone Before
In The Wiz, the excellent Broadway musical reworking of the classic film, The Wizard of Oz, there’s a number that piles up negatives in a very effective way of saying “No!” “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” Well, I could say “Don’t nobody never ask me to do nothing that nobody don’t need to know.”
If I’m asked to reveal a deeply buried secret, I’d better lie. If there’s something I don’t want known, there probably is a good reason, so why should I jump into hot water now and get scalded? Torture me, and I’ll make up the most creative lie like I was a friend of E.T. and came with him from another planet but stayed when he returned home.
I could say that in the most recent of several reincarnations, I was Rin Tin Tin, courageous German Shepherd silent film movie star, not likely some human great like Aristotle or Napoleon, nor a villain like Rasputin or Benedict Arnold, but maybe an insignificant street sweeper in Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius demolished the city in 79 AD If I’m in line for still another reincarnation, I’d like to request of the Powers That Be that I’ll be allowed to rest in my grave. My spirit is exhausted from inhabiting so many bodies of men and dogs, plus, who knows, even a turtle or a sheep.
The truth, if you really must have the truth, something I never told anyone before, is that I’m transgender and born in Reykjavik to Icelandic parents who disowned me after settling in Fargo, North Dakota.
5
Naked or Nude
My father, Marco, as a bachelor, took artful black-and-white photographs, many of lightning strikes across the summer sky, some of individual flowers, some of trips with friends to Niagara Falls and the Catskill Mountains. The best of these he mounted in a loose-leaf scrapbook on black pages and poetic descriptions in white ink. When he was courting my mother, he set up a timer so he could join her in “love photos.” These too found their way into his scrapbook with comments like “love calling.”
When I was in high school, I looked through his collection, surprised to see that he also included photos of Baby David. Then life got too complicated for my father, and he threw out photography equipment like paper stock and chemicals, putting his camera in a closet unused and forgotten. Included in the discontinued scrapbook were several photos of Baby David getting a sponge bath in a bassinet from Mother Rose. One had my father’s white ink remark, “I smoke my pipe.” I had a little pipe that blew bubbles. Two other photos showed me in that bassinet in completely innocent, even adorable, nudity. As a self-conscious teenager, I was embarrassed by a tiny penis preserved there for “all the world” to see, as though once I became famous, some tabloid newspaper or magazine would publish such an Italian Renaissance-like chubby cherub. Abject humiliation? Photoshop had not yet been invented to doctor the photos with fig leaves or a tiny bikini. Surreptitiously I destroyed the prints, hoping my father had not kept any negatives.
I cannot recall ever seeing my mother or my father naked, and if I had, I would have been as embarrassed as catching them having sex—and that never happened either. I didn’t even peek at my mother’s breastfeeding my sister, born seven years after me, and, of course, I have no memory of my own breastfeeding. My mother did invite me to feel her swollen belly when my sister was kicking furiously shortly before being born.
My teenage years in the Boy Scouts were as innocent as can be. I wasn’t even sure how babies were made until I sent away for a book that arrived in a plain brown wrapper. Not Dr. Spock but some nineteenth-century writer, maybe Paolo Mantegazza, whose Italian work was translated into English except for explicit sexual passages given in Latin, like something to be worked at or decoded. Also my aunt, my father’s sister, passed along a scary and outdated sex manual, not of how to do “it,” but all the venereal diseases you could get from sex outside marriage, illustrated by drawings of pockmarked degenerates. I was the next in line to get the family book that warned not to do anything stupid, or my penis would fall off.
When I had passed all the merit badges necessary to achieve the exulted rank of Eagle Scout except lifesaving, I had run out of time with repeated failures at the Boy Scout summer camp and went to a neighboring town that had a YMCA with an indoor swimming pool and an instructor who could test my water skills. What I didn’t know until I arrived there with my swim trunks was that the rules of that particular YMCA required nude swimming. Why? To keep the pool free of lint. My shock and chagrin at the realization