Naked: A Memoir of Sorts

When a school project finds me naked

My boxer-briefs are suspended like a hammock between my knees. My socks are still on. Otherwise, I am naked. The man in front of me is talking basketball while his latex glove is jostling my bits in some exhaustive and unbiblical study of the holy trinity. I’m half tempted to make a joke, quipping about Hercules and Diomedes or deploying a proven killer that is uncomfortably relevant to the situation at hand.

“You know, Doc, politics are like penises — whether you lean to the left or to the right, you should keep it to yourself.”

The joke falls apart before it’s even said because, clearly, my politics are showing, and I don’t need to give the doctor whose head is in my undercarriage any more reason to laugh. I don’t say anything. I remain silent but for a pitiful cough dropped politely over my left shoulder.

Had I remembered my annual physical was slated for Friday, October 6th, 2023, I never would have committed to writing a memoir of the day, a project inspired by Sonya Huber’s book of essays, Supremely Tiny Acts. I received the assignment for my nonfiction writing course, and there was a part of me that anticipated using every word of the 750 word-limit (yes, I’m over) to boast about how I wake up at five in the morning to write masterpieces and how I’m the kind of dad who shows up to his children’s events.

But I woke up on the wrong side of the couch after tending to my son at two in the morning and, unwilling to risk waking my wife, had no option but to curl up in a blanket on the sectional. I pushed the snooze on my phone four-five times, eventually rolling out midway through breakfast at 6:15. And it was around seven that I realized I would miss my kids’ Fun Run at school, only after my wife reminded me of the doctor’s appointment I had scheduled for the same time. She said it in that “Don’t forget” sort of way after pointing out a yellowing spot on our bedroom ceiling.

Of course, I had forgotten.

“New roof costs an average $17k,” she texted me later. Barf emoji. I was in French class, already nauseous due to an impending presentation that would showcase my American accent for a class of fifteen fluent French-speakers.

I am terrible at French. On the first day of 201, I nudged a shoulder into the kid next to me, shooting the shit about how we all must have forgotten everything over the summer, huh? He looked at me in a foreign language, and these tongues have been running circles around me ever since.

I try to give myself grace, but it’s hard being a non-traditional undergrad, always imagining my peers looking at me with big pity eyes and whispering, “Vous êtes si courageux, Monsieur Mains.” Trust me, I would have much rather stood there naked than hack gallic loogies in front of the class for participation points.

After French class, I hid in a Wells Hall nook, brainstorming exciting events I could manufacture for the memoir. I ended up blacking out in my phonology homework, and the hours after weren’t much more entertaining. I rode my bike home with zero poetic thoughts about the Autumn scenery or the wind upon my face. And though I try to make a habit of noting the changing trees over the Red Cedar and the sometimes-rattling tracks beneath the Grand River bridge, I didn’t notice either.

Once, while riding over the Grand River bridge, I made eye contact with a Northern Harrier. She was perched on a tree whose trunk was far below each of us, rooted down by the foundations of the overpass. We found ourselves mere feet from one another, both shocked and feeling caught, separated only by a wire fence curving road ward and our respective roles in a larger ecosystem.

I watched as her beak mangled the memory of her prey, her talons pinning a shredded carcass to a bloodied branch. And she watched me fly by, backpacked and dumbfounded on a two-wheeler.

But on October 6th, 2023, I arrived home as usual, likely feeling insecure that I’d rode past houses of neighbors who drive their kids to school in company cars. I left my bike in the driveway and went inside. I ate lunch, and I don’t remember what. I put my two-year-old down for a nap, scrolling through my phone as he faded and aged delicately beside me. And when he’d finally fallen asleep, I snuck downstairs, kissed my wife, grabbed my keys, and drove to my two o’clock appointment.

The man makes me wait for an hour, and he calls me by my first name even though I’ve told him I go by my middle. He tells me to strip to my underwear, and then leaves the room for “privacy” as if we both don’t know he’s about to crack my hood and elbow the gears. I experience a brief panic over what constitutes underwear. I ditch the white tee but keep the socks. Then, I perch myself on the exam table and wait patiently to be cupped and studied. I can see the doctor’s notes on the computer to my left, and I review my unique cocktail of ailments I’ve acquired over the years: ‘major depression, anxiety, seasonal affective disorder, vitamin D deficiency, vitiligo,’ and the newest, ‘cold urticaria’ which has me breaking into hives whenever my skin comes into contact with the cold.

It’s amazing how the catalog keeps growing. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact of my fading away among a laundry list of qualms and inconveniences. It feels like yesterday I turned thirty and someone told me I’d reached the age of second puberty. They didn’t laugh, but I did. I laughed and laughed until my body started changing. And now, I’m 35 — 36, in January — and I wonder what more is to come, or if I can do anything other than just keep laughing.

Sometimes I mull over an especially dark joke that is, admittedly, more haunting than it is funny. It’s a ghost of a joke that I’ve not quite written about how nobody knows when they’ve reached that dreaded period of so-called middle-age — when to have that secret affair or buy that fancy car — because it all depends on the terrifying factoid that is age of death. No one knows that fun bit of trivia until it has both come and gone. We go about our days, day in and day out, choosing — seemingly by the minute — either to believe we are immortal, or we are rabbits in the talons of a hawk.

So, I sit there, waiting in the doctor’ office, reflecting on my maladies. And I imagine if I were a touch less naked, I might hop down from that exam table, take the reins of that blinking cursor, and type into that empty space, adding to the list, ‘existential dread,’ ‘mauvais en Français’ and ‘roof leaks.’