Naked Man on Main Street

What people are saying about Jenny Gardiner's books:

A fun, sassy read! A cross between Erma Bombeck and Candace Bushnell, reading Jenny Gardiner is like sinking your teeth into a chocolate cupcake...you just want more.

— Meg Cabot, NY Times bestselling author of Princess Diaries, Queen of Babble and more, on Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

With a strong yet delightfully vulnerable voice, food critic Abbie Jennings embarks on a soulful journey where her love for banana cream pie and disdain for ill-fitting Spanx clash in hilarious and heartbreaking ways. As her body balloons and her personal life crumbles, Abbie must face the pain and secret fears she's held inside for far too long. I cheered for her the entire way.

— Beth Hoffman, NY Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt on Slim to None

Jenny Gardiner has done it again — this fun, fast-paced book is a great summer read.

— Sarah Pekkanen, NY Times bestselling author of The Opposite of Me, on Slim to None

"As Sweet as a song and sharp as a beak, Winging It really soars as a memoir about family — children and husbands, feathers and fur — and our capacity to keep loving though life may occasionally bite."

— Wade Rouse, bestselling author of At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream

NAKED MAN ON MAIN STREET

By

Jenny Gardiner

PUBLISHED BY

Jenny Gardiner

NAKED MAN ON MAIN STREET

Copyright 2012 by Jenny Gardiner

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*****

NAKED MAN ON MAIN STREET

INTRODUCTION

Years ago when I worked as a publicist on Capitol Hill, my overlords were always blathering on about how, as an assistant press secretary to a United States Senator, I was one of an elite group of only one hundred such people in the world — as if to impress upon me the gravity of my position (when in fact I think it was more like they were rationalizing why the pay sucked so much, as in: There are a lot of people in line for your job, sister, so stop bugging us for a living wage!).

This is how I’m choosing to view my experience witnessing a stark naked dude quite literally on Main Street, bent over nonchalantly trying to tie his beat-up Converse chucks: I’m among the elite few ever to have been granted such a unique opportunity. I mean how many people have actually found themselves in this bizarre position (shy of someone living on an obscure island in the South Pacific where everyone might wander around naked)?

As a writer I’m an obsessive observer. Some might just chalk this up to ADD, as I’m perpetually distracted from the probably-more-important by whatever far-more-irrelevant is happening around me: quirky behavior, peculiar mode of dress, and other generally weird stuff. My family mantra as it refers to me is: Look! A butterfly! Usually said in my direction accompanied by a pronounced eye roll. No one thinks I’m paying attention; I am, just maybe not to what I should be. So perhaps I’m just more likely to notice the naked man while I’m driving, rather then the car in front of me (though in my defense, the bus blocking my way inevitably led me to gaze off to my right just in time for that perfect epiphanic moment), but I seem to encounter this sort of weirdness in my life more often than others, and frankly I can’t help but write about them. Material, as they say.

So...Naked man on Main Street. Really? This really happened?, you ask. Yep, it did. One of those strange but true things I’ve stumbled upon over the years, something so bizarrely unexpected, I couldn’t help but write about it. Because that’s what I do. I write about stuff. I don’t write epic narratives about great men. I don’t write compendiums of literary discourse that will issue Pen-Faulkner awards my way. I write about nothing. And why not? It worked for Jerry Seinfeld.

I’ve always found that nothing makes the most interesting subject matter. The stuff we all deal with, the day-to-day experiences that have a universality to them that make them fun to share and to empathize with and to just feel better knowing others have dealt with that same nonsense as well. Not that you’ve all encountered a naked man bent over tying his sneakers at ten in the morning while tooling along a city road as I was so lucky to have done, but still.

Once at a writers’ conference I shared a panel with two illustrious literary fiction writers. Their books had received rave reviews from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a host of other highbrow vetters of all things important in the world of letters. My novel was titled Sleeping with Ward Cleaver. You can imagine how many such publications chose not to review my book. A reader in the audience asked a question about our choosing to write on the panel’s particular subject matter, marriage. I responded that I like to write on themes of universality and like to share this with others, thus I presume (hopefully not wrongly) that others like to share their experiences and impressions as well. One of my fellow panelists, an MFA professor at an elite private university, scoffed at writing to the universal, making a point of saying that he teaches his students not to do this.

Meh...whatever. It works for me.

So about that nude dude. I’d left a morning meeting and was headed home. The little local university bus was virtually parked smack in front of me on the main road. I couldn’t drive around him illegally to the left without risking powering into oncoming cars. I’d hoped to slip to his right but a parked car blocked my egress. So instead I sat in the road cooling my heels, wanting to get home and not wanting to suck in exhaust from the idling bus before me. Out of boredom I glanced over to the sidewalk. It was then that I saw him: pasty white beer gut and other appendages just out there for all to not admire. I wrestled with whether or not to continue seeing him: it’s sort of creepy to stare at a person without any clothes under such circumstances (then again, when isn’t it creepy to stare at a naked person, really?!). But stare I did. While wrestling with whether to whip out my iPhone and snap a picture and immediately upload it to Twitter and Facebook. I didn’t. But I chose, however, lock my car doors, stuck as I was right there, a mere ten feet away from the guy. I sort of regretted not having captured the image for posterity (his posterior! For posterity!); it would’ve been great for a laugh over drinks with friends. But out of respect for the mentally ill, which I presumed he was (because who else would drop trou like that? Granted I live in a college town, and maybe at three in the morning after a wild weekend you might see a thoroughly snookered frat boy doing something so stupid, but aside from that, nada). But oh, the amusing conversations I didn’t get to capitalize on via Twitter and Facebook with that one.

But I did sorta stare. Well, more like peek. How could you not? If you think I might stare a little longer at a dreadlocked guy at the gym contorting himself into bizarre bodily poses dressed in street clothes covered with paint (yes, he’s a regular), or at a woman whose entire visible part of her body is tattooed right up to her chin, well, you can rest assured I couldn’t easily remove my eyes from naked man, if only for the shock factor. Besides, the bus driver hadn’t taken it upon himself to get a move on either; likely he and his passengers were equally transfixed. But I looked around me and realized that only the riders of that bus and me were witnesses to this event, so I figured I might just wanna keep an eye on things, just in case...

Nudey stood tall, a middle-aged man with straggly mouse-brown curly hair (and here you thought my gaze was fixed downward!). He sort of wandered in a circle as if doing the hokey pokey, right in front of a closed restaurant. It was like he didn’t know what to do now that he’d denuded himself of his exterior layer. But then it came to him — his aha! moment: tie your shoes. So he bent down to do just that, mooning me to my chagrin, while he better affixed his ratty black hightops to his feet. As if at that point adorning any part of his body with protection and/or adornment mattered. Once securely fastened to his feet, he stood and paced like an expectant father waiting for the verdict on the sex of his child.

I wondered if I should call the police. But assumed surely the bus driver must’ve already done so — why else would he be stuck in park right there? I wanted to share my weird experience with someone, but how do you do that without actually videotaping it? I wanted to be sure he didn’t have a gun (and felt relief in realizing he had nowhere to hide it under the circumstances). But then I wanted to leave. Because there is only so much you can do when an unstable middle-aged man decides that the best thing to do on a Tuesday morning is to be unclothed in public. So when the bus finally started moving onward, I had no choice but to follow suit. By then someone who’d come out of a nearby bakery was coercing the guy to don his garb.

I tried to imagine how the arresting police officer would handle this: being particularly careful of where he grabbed the guy as he tried to cuff him. Did he line the back seat of the police car with a blanket, protecting the sanitary integrity of the thing? Or did he have to actually dress the guy, down on this knees, front and center, zipping him up like you would a small child? It made me especially glad I wasn’t a cop. Or someone tasked with talking a naked man off the ledge, figuratively. Life’s complicated enough without adding that into the mix.

I hope as you read these selected essays you’ll get a few laughs, find something interesting, maybe even something that reminds you of your own life experiences. Enjoy!

I YAM WHAT I YAM

When I was first married and took on the surname of my husband, I often got quizzical looks when I met new people.

Jenny Gardiner, they’d say as they shook my hand. That name sounds familiar.

Of course I knew why it was memorable. Because everybody knew I had been blown up in a ski boat a few years earlier while my beloved husband – the intended target – watched helplessly from the shore.  I was the hapless victim of my former fiancé, a fellow supermodel. Well, not really. This was on a soap opera. All My Children, circa 1984: I was one half of the star-crossed couple named Jenny and Greg that enjoyed very little bliss, wedded or otherwise, over their tortured four-year courtship.

Sometimes having a common name can lead to uncommon problems. A couple of years ago a friend was on his way to an elegant wedding of a high-profile client when he was pulled over by the police. Seems a routine run of his driver's license revealed that he shared the name of a local (and notoriously violent) criminal with a number of warrants out for his arrest. My friend, wedding-bound and attired in black-tie, sat nervously in his car with his entire family until the cop could ascertain that he was not the felon in question. Apparently he was lucky the cops didn’t shoot him on sight.

I love discovering the many alter-egos I never knew I had, thanks to Big Brother Google.

Originally, years ago, I’d Googled myself to find out if someone owned my domain name. Then launching my writing career, I figured it might be useful to own it outright (note to self: next time plan ahead by about five years). I was dismayed to learn that I was already owned, by an androgynous minister of Parliament in Australia. Damn, bad enough that I couldn’t own my own name, but then when my adoring fans (or worse-yet old boyfriends!) Googled me, the first thing they’d likely find is a picture of an impossible-to-discern man/woman who might just send them running for cover.

Once I clicked onto Jenny-the-androgynous-one, I became hooked. I had to see what else I’ve been up to in this world. And I’ve learned Jenny Gardiner is quite the talented woman. I am a Scots fiddle tutor somewhere in Scotland (I assume that’s where Scots fiddlers fiddle.) I’m also an actress, whose 2003 blockbuster film, Queen City Blowout – with the lamentable tagline: Drugs, Death and Bratwurst – may well have been direct-to-video. I just hope it’s not hard-core porn. It’s bad enough that people already think I’m a man.

So what other crazy things have I been up to? Well, for starters, I’m the assistant treasurer and uniforms coordinator of the Saint Mary’s Old Girls Netball Club (affectionately dubbed SMOG) in Wellington. I am pretty certain that netball is like basketball, and I think this is somewhere in New Zealand. It looks like a sport I might enjoy as they wear these adorable tennis-style skirts instead of gym shorts. Must be because I’m in charge of coordinating uniforms and all. Oh, and the upside, based on the pictures from the website: it’s a very good-looking group of women. At least I’ve made up for the whole androgyny thing.

Some of my other skills include mixology. I got a rave review for a mean white sangria I concocted at an art gallery turned chic café in Portland, Maine. My secret ingredient? A wine-poached pear. Evidently the double-maceration does wonders to boost the buzz in the punch.

Onward, though, as I had careers and alter-egos awaiting. Library media teacher at the Terman Library in, oh, darn, I’ll never know where, because Google couldn’t find it. Well, it did indicate that the library might be closed due to budget constraints, so I guess I got the axe.

My husband Robin and I (I have a husband named Robin? Wait till my own spouse hears about that) evidently have naughty cats that have scratched up our wood-chip wallpaper. Which leaves me to wonder, exactly what is wood-chip wallpaper, and why would I want it? Further, why would I want it enough to contact an Internet helpline for suggestions on how to repair it?

I’m a jobs coordinator with the Learning Skills Council in Bedfordshire and Luton. England, I suppose. Good for me, helping to boost local employment.  Oh, and a social worker, also in England (though I look again a bit like that man/woman from Australia.)

I’m a basic skills social worker who enjoys writing. Writing? Another Jenny Gardiner who writes? Oh, no, that’s her colleague. I read the wrong line. Phew.

I came in eighty-fourth place in the over-fifty-five division of the Great Scottish Walk. Twelve miles. Not bad. Except eighty-three women beat me. I wonder how old the ones who finished after me were. Not to be outdone, in Edmonton, Alberta, I ran three hundred-meters in just under forty-five seconds. That can’t be too bad. The website said it regretfully didn’t have the results in the naked two hundred-meter run. Let’s just hope there aren’t any pictures of that!

My husband Phil (!) and I own a farm in Australia and my other Australian husband Trent and I have a straw farm and a snazzy eighteen-wheeler in which to haul it. Apparently there’s a lot of me’s in Oz.

In addition, according to a news-hires listing, I have  vast and diverse experience in all areas of accounting and now work for Catering Services International. Well, I do love fine food.

Okay, so I did find a blog of a fourteen-year old Jenny Gardiner who proudly declares that she loves getting pissed. Getting pissed? At fourteen! And her boyfriend Chris says that he’s happiest when he’s getting pissed with his girlfriend. She wants "to be a glamour model or sumfink to do wif being a social worker or counciler (sic)" and mentions something about thanking her psychiatrist for fixing her problems. Yikes! I hope she learns to pay more attention in her language arts class in the meantime.

And now I even have a friend on Facebook who is also a Jenny Gardiner (from Oz, natch).

Well, I’m proud of all of those Jenny Gardiners out there. Not a stripper (not counting the naked two hundred-meter dash!) or hired escort amongst them. As an added bonus, no arrest warrants. It seems that those stewards of my name the world over are keeping the rest of us out of trouble. Thank goodness. Now, if I can only get back to my writing. And whatever you do, don’t bother looking for me at jennygardiner.com. S/he must be an imposter, trust me.

OF MICE AND MEN

(And Rats And Sex And Cheese)

I heard an interview not long ago in which an author was promoting her new book about sex. While I totally forgot the name of the book. I do recall what she said about a few studies in which they tested rats (or was it mice?) while they were getting it on.

Now first off, there is something particularly unseemly about being a voyeur to rat fornication. On so many levels. Not the least of which is because rodents having sex = more rodents on the horizon. And those rodents will then have sex, and so on and so on. Having fended off my share of mouse infestations in my day, I’m of the mind that anything involving rodent procreation should be vigorously avoided at all costs.

But also, ick! Little teeny rats (or worse yet, big fat black ones like from the movie Ben — remember that?), doing the nasty in a lab simply evokes a sense of repulsion in me. Especially when I learned that one of the tests they performed involved the rats donning polyester pants — teeny little rodent disco-wear! — so that researchers could determine the effect of polyester on sperm count.

I couldn’t help but wonder: who drew the short straw to have to count the rat sperm? And probably worse yet, who had to ensure there was rat sperm to count? I know I'd have volunteered immediately to whip up a few dozen pair of the tiny pants on my sewing machine at home — far, far away from the lab — thus assiduously avoiding the rat-wanking job.

In case you were wondering, polyester did decrease sperm count. So there you go, Tony Manero Rat. Disco must be dead for a reason.

But the test I especially enjoyed learning about involved little rats in the midst of doing it — in the heat of passion, if there is such thing as rodent passion — only to have the scientists introduce a diversion.

So there the mice/rats/whatever were, in lock-and-load mode, when in the distance, the researchers placed cheese within smelling distance. While the boy rats just kept on doing the nasty, the girl rats? Well, consider it the filing-your-nails-while-in-the-missionary-position tactic. Yes, they were far more girls interested in cheese than getting some lovin' from their man. They walked away, in flagrante delicto, in favor of in flagrante delicious! Talk about coitus interruptus! All for a little Velveeta.

I suspect we human females have something in common with our rodent cousins. And it's not whiskers (as long as there's electrolysis at our disposal), no twitching pink noses, nor a long icky tail. None of that. Women don't want a wham, bam experience. They want to be wooed. Wined and dined, made to feel wanted, to feel as if they are the most important thing in the world to their man. Sure, any old creature of God can get it on. But copulation without representation is not the goal. Well, you know what I mean: sex without passion, without amore, without a modicum of emotion, (dare I say) adoration, and certainly respect, doesn't seem to be on the menu.

Any old rat can have a quickie in a laboratory. But when it comes to making love, perhaps a lot of men can learn from this rat survey, and figure out how to appeal to the cheese-lover in us gals.

TEN-FOUR, GOOD BUDDY

In hindsight, maybe it was the rain. All that water just has to make a girl thirsty. Or perhaps it was all that running water pummeling the car, what with the power of suggestion and all...Or maybe it was just that I drink far too much water when we're on road trips.

In my defense everyone always says drinking a lot of water is healthy. And boy, do I drink a lot of water; I'm rarely without a liter of water in my clutches. Which means road trips for me mean frequent stops. But when I know we're within a reasonable distance of our destination, I'll hold out, just to spare the family yet one more pit stop. Which was what happened recently on our way back from Manhattan, during that miserable Tropical Storm Lee's sodden unwelcome visit to the East Coast, stuck as it was in a holding pattern of torrential downpours over much of the Eastern seaboard.

After enduring a couple of days of trudging through rain-slicked New York and Philly, I'd had enough of water, at least the precipitation form of it. Only too bad I'd had too much of the stuff to drink, as well. But we'd planned to stop in DC for dinner to wait out rush hour before making the final two-hour trek home. I knew I was in need of a Sheetz or WaWa or maybe just an outhouse, well before we had to choose which direction to go on the Beltway, but I figured I could tough it out for the remaining forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes? Ha! As if. What I hadn't planned on were biblical floods unfolding all around us, and our stupidly choosing to head down Interstate 95 rather than along Interstate 495, where we'd heard there was a huge accident.

What we hadn't heard was roads were being closed for flooding all over the place in the direction we were headed, and there we found ourselves on the Woodrow Wilson bridge in our nation's Capital in a complete standstill for three long bladder-filled hours.

Did I say I had forty-five minutes tops in me? Perhaps that was a somewhat generous exaggeration. After about two hours of not moving on the bridge I whipped out my phone, pulled up Google (my savior!), and typed: "do eighteen-wheelers have bathrooms in their cabs?" This because next to me was a tractor-trailer that looked to have a spacious cab that appeared able to fit a sectional sofa and king-sized bed, it was so huge. Sure enough, I learned they do. So I rolled my window down, gushing downpour spilling into the car, lightning exposing the night sky all around, motioned for the trucker to do the same, and asked if I he did indeed have a bathroom on board.

I sure do, and then some! he boasted, beaming.

Um, any chance my daughter and I could come use it? (I'm not beyond tossing my kid into the conversation for the pity vote).

He looked at me as if I was about to hijack his truck, and politely told me he didn't think he was allowed to, and hoped I'd understand, quickly closing his window to seal the refusal.

But honey, I was in dire need. I was not in the mood to understand, despite my even-keeled husband's impassioned pleas for me to give it a fighting try. I was, in fact, desperate. I threw a less-than-neighborly grimace toward the trucker, and shut the window. Then had a panic-filled temper tantrum, in keeping with my status as a grown-up in the car. All else fails, freak out: that's my motto.

Time ticked by ever so slowly as I gnashed my teeth and commiserated with myself (no one else in the car frankly wanted to hear from me, my company was that unpleasant). Trying to weigh danger versus humiliation versus physical implosion, my choices narrowed down to: do nothing and die from having to go that badly; or hop out of the car on a massive bridge span with hundreds of cars all stopped around me with thunder and lightning and unfathomable amounts of rain pouring down, and drop my drawers, something I truly could not contemplate but seemed fated. I was, sadly, doomed to be an anecdote all those drivers tossed out at their next cocktail party: And then that crazy lady whipped down her pants, exposed her fat ass for all the world to see, right there on the bridge span! But then some forty minutes later came my angel of mercy.

A lady knocked on my window.

Honey? You still want to use the bathroom?

Sweet heaven above, thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Who knew not only do truckers have bathrooms on board, but they even have wives on board? He'd sent his bride as emissary, after getting permission from his boss to allow the mercy mission. Thank you Lord.

So my daughter and I, ten-four, good buddy, hopped aboard that honking truck (three points of your body on the truck at all times, trucker wife warned us) and there we were in a veritable love den: behind his seats up front were a large bed, a wide-screen TV, and — ta-da! — a bathroom that did double duty as a shower!

Now, after my ugly snarl of an hour earlier, I was legitimately humbled and embarrassed to be parking my behind in this fellow's truck. And after relieving about two liters of ingested bottled water, I found myself finally in a state to be more charitable. I could then get that this poor trucker couldn't let any old stranger on board his rig to then hijack a truck full of other peoples' shipments. I appreciated the awkward position I put him in. But God, was I embarrassed to be eating crow (albeit in the dark confines of his unlit loo, with so many things suspended from bags on hooks in the shoebox-sized room that I feared one false move and I'd knock his possessions right on down the commode). My daughter, who'd acted complete mature and adult while I conducted my hissy fits, was far more comfortable checking out the trucker's digs (i.e. spying), and she later reported the details about the large flat-screened TV and such. I was too busy looking down at the carpeted floor feeling like a schmuck.

I was so eternally grateful to our trucker Good Samaritans for saving us, but had no way to thank them adequately. We had a bag of stale cookies in our car, but frankly, stale cookies wouldn't do it. Plus we didn't know how long we'd be imprisoned on that bridge span and food might become a necessary commodity. Truth is, I figured they didn't want our lousy old cookies any more than we did. Plus I think they had a kitchen on board — she was probably gonna whip up a batch herself if trapped much longer. I'd have been smart to give them my remaining water, just to keep me from consuming it and finding myself back in dire straits.

We wished our trucker couple good speed, hoping they'd make it to their Durham destination by dawn. Then we pulled a most illegal maneuver finally after about four hours and turned around, driving the wrong way down the shoulder for several miles till we could cross onto the right direction on the Beltway. We weren't alone in that decision, as a trickle of cars so doing became a steady stream. But our poor trucker wasn't able to manage that maneuver on that bridge. Thank goodness he and the missus could at least remain moderately comfortable, because I knew they were going to be parked there for a good long while.

TSUNAMI WARNINGS

(note: I wrote this many years ago, well before the horrific and deadly tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and more recently in Japan)

On the news recently, I heard that a tsunami warning was issued for the Hawaiian islands, after a powerful earthquake rattled Japan, an ocean away. Hard to believe that something so far away could pose a potential threat to the people of Hawaii. Until recently, I hadn’t thought about tidal waves in many years, but this news triggered memories of my own childhood anxieties over natural disasters.

As a child of the Cold War, I recall living with a vague presence of fear — not something that kept me from conducting my life on a daily basis, mind you, but a nagging sense in the recesses of my mind that danger was lurking, and there was nothing I could do about it.

By the time I was born, in the early Sixties, our country had come to terms with the menace of the Red Scare — society was well-rehearsed in how to handle an A-Bomb attack. We either fled to the nearest bomb shelter, where we would no doubt be safe from radiation poisoning, or we simply ducked below our desks until the coast was clear.

I suppose that even my childish mind knew that the coast wasn’t really clear, and so my fears became manifest in more tangible, if less logical ways.

You see, as scared as I was of a nuclear missile being launched by the Russkies, destined to incinerate the world I knew and loved, this notion was a little beyond my comprehension — it was too big for me to digest.

So after seeing a filmstrip in school on natural disasters, I started to fear more practical things. Like tsunamis and earthquakes, and other happenings of nature that actually affected people far from where I lived.

After all, I was well-entrenched in middle America, living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:  not a shoreline to be found. As crazy as it seemed that I truly thought Pittsburghers were vulnerable to the vagaries of tidal waves, I was vexed by this notion. Earthquakes were a big concern as well. Surely, I reasoned, we could dig back in history and find a devastating earthquake that had wreaked havoc upon the good people of western Pennsylvania.  (as an aside, who'd have ever bet we'd have a powerful earthquake practically in my backyard here in Virginia in 2011, followed by continual aftershocks nearly a year later).

In reality, I should have been more worried about dams giving way in Johnstown, or toxic waste being dumped into the Ohio River by nefarious steel manufacturers. But back then I didn’t know to worry about the orange-yellow tinge to the night sky, the pollution spewing from steel mills. I didn’t know that I should have been concerned about the air I was breathing. I was too busy being afraid of legitimate threats to our well-being: tsunamis and such.

In time, my tidal wave fears gave way to more mundane concerns. After all, the Cold War had ended and there was no longer a big enemy lurking in the shadows, poised to strike. By the time I became a parent, worries about raising my children properly were what consumed me. But then September 11th happened, and our collective sense of security was again undermined.

I hadn’t realized it until now, but that old tsunami feeling has been creeping into the foreground of my mind, reminding me that there are very bad things out there, and that I’m helpless to do anything about them. And I know that a mere ocean away, there are equally bad people who are