Drowning Naked in Paradise & Other Essays. David Bakish
the owner of a small motorboat took us to a nude beach the tourists called Paradise, Hiroshi was surprised to find buck naked people, and I was surprised to find only men. “Where are all the women?” I asked the skipper, who understood English. “Oh, I see two men, so I think they want the homosexual beach. There is another beach with men and women. My mistake. I take you there.”
Now on what tourists nicknamed Super Paradise, I saw luscious blonde nude women, Scandinavians taking off their string bikinis and getting full-body tans to take back to cold northern countries. All the men and women I saw were physically fit, no double stomachs or sagging breasts. I was too overcome by all this beauty to approach any one of them, as though each nude were a sculpture in the Louvre back in Paris, Venus de Milos, but with added arms, torso, and legs. In any case, there were two of us who, under other circumstances, might have asked two beauties to join us, risking rejection, but what was I to do with a shy friend who spoke only Japanese?
We found a spot for our towels, and Hiroshi seemed very puzzled now but did not know how to ask, “Where am I and why all the people with no clothes?” This would have been more than his phrase book could have handled. He sat on his towel staring at the sand, afraid to look up, or even to take his polo shirt off, much less his trunks. I signaled that I was going into the water, using improvised sign language, hands making swimming motions. He nodded and used the word that seems to be international, “okay.”
I swam out past the anchored yachts, enjoying the quiet lapping of clear water, only to discover that there was an undertow. As I tried to return to shore, I was silently, insistently, carried further away. Had I come to this idyllic, romantic island, to a beach called Super Paradise, only to drown? And completely naked? With a Japanese friend who did not even know my last name? And no lifeguards?
I felt the sharp edge of fear and thought of calling out to someone on a nearby yacht for help, but how would that work? “Help! Help! I’m drowning! So sorry to interrupt your cocktail hour. I hope you don’t mind having a naked man on your boat. Please excuse me for not being a beautiful young woman or a mermaid.”
My mind began working hard to calm me down. “Look, you’re a macho man, like that song from the Village People that Club Med likes to play at beach parties together with ‘Y.M.C.A.’ And you have Boy Scout swimming and lifesaving merit badges. Lifesaving passed at a YMCA, in the nude.”
I felt the pleasant softness of the water gently caressing me.
“Yeah?” I answered myself, “but I was in much better shape then.”
Floating on my back, gathering my strength, I appreciated the sun, high in the midday sky, warm and bright.
“Of course, but you still have the skills, like riding a bike.”
A few seagulls glided silently by. Calm began to conquer fear.
“Yeah, I do remember what I learned so many years ago: swim parallel to the beach, work your way slowly inward, float on your back to rest when you get tired. You’re okay. This is terrific exercise.”
The beach was now within reach, as if its closeness had been willed by my still-calm brain.
As I staggered onto the beach like a shipwreck survivor, dazed from the struggle and nearsighted without my glasses, I reached the blur that I recognized as Hiroshi. Looking in his phrase book, he asked, “Good time?”
Breathing hard, I could only say “Okay,” as I dropped onto my sandy towel. I closed my eyes to the sky, exhausted, but not too tired to imagine folding my arms around one of the gorgeous women, with no daylight between our bodies.
7
Amnesia through Age Five and Sitting Still
Strange for someone with an almost photographic memory for many people’s faces and events in a life that so far has carried me within striking distance of age eighty, octogenarian territory, but I have no memory at all of the first five years of my life. Oh sure, I was told about multiple events multiple times by my mother, and I looked at early photographs my father took before he stopped thinking I was cute and adorable, but the first thing I actually remember was the first day of kindergarten at the Ben Franklin Normal School far from our house. Betty Moser wet her pants and, in tears, was taken home by her mother. The rest of the year is a blank.
I do remember a few events of the first grade at the nearby Fifth Street Elementary School primarily because Miss Krauss, the only Jewish teacher, reported home to my mother that I had trouble sitting still. She had me sharpening large batches of pencils, and maybe this was the year when I was sent out to the very rudimentary, gravel-covered playground to pick up candy wrappers and other garbage, wielding a long stick with a nail on the end. I also remember being home in bed with the measles and Miss Krauss—her first name was Sarah—visiting me, maybe giving me a coloring book, but I’m not sure of that. Her visit struck me as an honor, my teacher coming to my house, the only time that ever happened, ever.
Second grade passed like a blur. I could recall only the teacher’s name, a Miss or Mrs. Gorey. I’m not even sure I got the name correct, and I don’t think I ever knew her first name. Most teachers did not give out their first names like that was some kind of dark secret, and her face is also a blur. I have no memory of any class projects, anything I learned or any discipline problems I might have created. Nothing.
My memory started to focus more clearly in the third grade. In the classroom of Mrs. Bundens—I later discovered her first name was Victoria—I remember being assigned a part in a play and missing one rehearsal because that school day, my father was driving my family back from New York City where we visited my mother’s two sisters, Clara and Martha. It was a boring and exhausting four-and-a-half-hour trip long before the interstate highway system had been built with Route 80 significantly shortening the travel time. Sitting on a steel railing at the edge of the school property, I stared into the distant window of my first-floor classroom. My watch told me the school day was almost ending. Eagle-eyed Mrs. Bundens saw me and, opening the window, called out, “David, come in, we’re rehearsing the play. We can use you.” I enjoyed being the focus of positive attention as an actor, much better than forced to sit still in my assigned seat. Most of all, however, I recall being kept after school another day for misbehaving. I stubbornly refused to apologize like the bullheaded Taurus that I was. I wore down the teacher until she let me go home without an apology. She whacked other boys on the butt for various misbehavior, but I was spared that indignity. I wondered how girls in the class could sit still and avoid punishment. Maybe girls were given less freedom to act out while, as the saying goes, “boys will be boys,” meaning rambunctious and hard to control.
8
Two Wooden Candlestick Holders
In my living room, on a shelf between the TV and the window, I keep two wooden candlestick holders. A classmate, skilled in woodworking, made them from the ornate and well-worn bannister that led from our elementary school’s first floor, with its six classrooms, grades one, two, and three, to the second floor’s grades four through six. Mementoes were salvaged when the building was demolished after sitting lonely and empty for many years.
The old place had no gymnasium, library, lunch room, nurse’s room, or faculty lounge, in fact, no amenities. There was a back room for the principal, the only male teacher, where he could paddle misbehaving students sent to him for firm correction. His own sixth grade class would await his return, listening through a closed door to the whacks and screams.
In the closing years of World War II, the class that collected the most tin cans and scrap metal to help the war effort got its name on a huge banner that hung at the top of the staircase.
Although the likelihood of a German or Japanese plane attacking a school in a small Northeastern Pennsylvania town was remote at best, our principal held regularly scheduled air raids. At the sound of alarm bells, teachers lined us up by twos and led us down another less ornate staircase into the asbestos-covered jumble of heating and water pipes in the cellar. When the same bells sounded the “all clear,” we were marched back up the many stairs to refocus on