Passion Skank

"You are covered in glitter," Taryn says, grinning.

We do the standard farewell, a triple pat-on-the-back hug.

I'll have to take her word for it about the glitter because I haven't seen a mirror in 63 hours. Which was about three hours before I arrived here. Which also marks the last time I took a shower.

Fifty-nine hours ago, I arrived at the Sunderosa Club—a wholesomely named nudist colony in the backwoods of the American Midwest. Taryn and David had invited me to go "camping." So I zipped up my life and went.

After signing-in through the gated parkland, Barry, who I'll call Mr. Furley because he looks like a close-to-death Don Knotts, hands me a can of beer. The Champagne of Beers, in fact. He also furnishes my wrist with a paper bracelet and tells me to mind my Ps and Qs.

I find Taryn and David setting up two tents. Eventually we move toward the little amphitheater nestled among the trees where the Sunderosa Club holds competitions. About three hundred people surround the stage; most of them are clothed. The first event involves nude young women on their knees using sandpaper to polish the wooden, 12-inch strap-on shlongs of their male partners. Who can stroke all the rough edges off their dongs the fastest?

Then there's: Who can blow up a condom most quickly? Whose lungs are fit enough to pneumatize this latex gourd to an exploding Hindenburg? (Minus all the flames, but replete with all the Humanity.) This contest amused the absolute shit out of me, especially when Contestant Number 3 was the first to pop his prophylactic balloon, pounding his chest victoriously.

Now let's throw a ring on top of your dame's penis-shaped tiara. One guy lands three rings on top of the plastic dick pointing skyward from a dirty blonde's head. He is the winner. And yes, she is dirty.

Then, there's the popsicle contest. Which of you ladies—on your knees, of course—can lick this orange phallus down to its nub most adroitly? Licked and schlobbed they did, suckling the frozen juice to liberate a bare wooden stick. First to cross the finish line is a girl who cannot abide by the rules because she bites off the tip, and is thereby disqualified. "Jenna!" the emcee announces, "NO BITING ALLOWED. Please step off the stage." Jenna pouts her lips, stands. Her other lips are also pouty, I notice.

Taryn and David wander off to go sight-seeing, laughing at the spectacle of naked women surging down a Slip 'N Slide covered in oil and... Cool Whip?

Nothing to do next but get in the saltwater pool and play catch with a rubber football and the al fresco citizenry. Clothes are not permitted in the pool, so I'll do as the Sunderosans do. I toss my trunks over the fence, jump in the water, and observe how buoyant my giblets are in this briny mix. My balls are always bouncing, I sing quietly, to the left and to the right. Then that ancient musical gem is supplanted with another classic—one by The Police. My balls and I feel like we're walking on the moon...

The remainder of the day was relaxed and nondescript—despite being surrounded by a bunch of naked people. That was Saturday... but Sunday was the day of the big event. "Mister and Miss Nude Universe" were at stake, along with other coveted titles in this exhibitionist's microcosm.

In David's borrowed tent, I awake around 3:00 a.m. to an earful of two different couples fucking within ten feet of where I lay. Jesus, I should've brought earplugs. The first couple is relatively quiet and respectful-like. But the second couple... Well, I am inclined to burst into their tent like Hey Kool-Aid, punch the guy in his dick, and then replace it with mine, like it or not, you loudmouth shrieking cunt.

Am able to get back to sleep around maybe four o'clock. At sunrise, I wake to Taryn laughing at something David says in their neighboring tent. I almost regret the calliope of farts that quack out of my asshole as I lay naked on top of my sleeping bag. I hope the neighboring fuck-couple heard that ensemble. Fuck them.

Taryn guffaws at my sphincter music. "Nice!" she shouts.

"Goddamn right," I say. And then I chuckle with pride welling in my throat.

We gather ourselves, go to breakfast. Mr. Furley gives us a thumbs-up and tells us to be safe. On the stroll to the parking lot, we pass a tent quivering with the agitation of a Shake Weight. No noise coming from within, but it is jostling at a commendable clip.

"Maybe it's a coin-operated... vibrating... inflatable mattress," I say.

"Maybe," David says. "If so, I think it's about to pop."

At a greasy spoon café less than a mile away, Taryn and David convince me to register for the Mr. Nude Universe contest. It's not so much peer pressure, but rather that I don't want to disappoint them. So I cave.

"Sure, ok," I say, "I'll sign up for the naked freakshow contest."

Besides, what was there to lose? On entering this environment, you void yourself of any sense of modesty, prudence, and perhaps dignity. Yet I came to find that dignity at the Sunderosa Club is widely expected, and, in fact, respected. I have seen far more undignified things take place in the infield of the Kentucky Derby, for example.

The contest was set for noon, although I wasn't slated to cross the stage until around 2:00 p.m. There was the performance gang going on first. Go-Go dancers, pole dancers. Both male and female professionals cutting a rug in five- or ten-minute acts. I pay very little attention to this.

To soothe my jangled nerves, I ask Taryn for a hit of Aunt Dotie, which she readily provides. And by two o'clock, there we are. A motley tangle of limbs and torsos in the rawest of buffs, packed onto the deck like a gaggle of skinned cats. High as a kite, I do not give a single shred of one turd what happens next. I especially don't care about winning: this is not my thing. But I feel happy and at ease.

In the scrum of tits and ass and cock rings and tattoos in sacred places, all we contestants are chatting merrily while our audience cheers (and occasionally jeers) at the contestants who dare to alight on the catwalk. I am in the queue behind "Penny Lane," whose tattoo of black angel wings spangles her back, her chiseled scapulae. Her long, coal-black hair drapes over her right clavicle; she is an hourglass of flesh. Lucky for me she is shivering. So she turns to ask if I would hug her to warm up. Why of course I would do that. We would not be the only two in the queue conjoining for the sake of warmth, although we were not nearly as conjoined as I would like.

How odd it is, I notice, to have your arms draped around a gorgeous, naked young woman with your penis languidly mashed against her smooth, exquisite butt cheek—and not get an erection. The impulse never even surfaced. As a rule at Sunderosa Club, erections are not permissible. It's bad decorum.

This morning I'd signed my life away on about fifteen waivers meant to exculpate The Club preemptively in case things got especially weird. After that, David enlightened me with a fancy new term.

"A lot of these more competitive guys, like the stripper guys," he said, "are gelking."

"Alright," I tittered, "you got me. What is gelking?"

"It's where they stretch their dongs out, for like several hours a day. You just pull on it, and over a period of time it will eventually extend in length."

"David," I said, "That sounds like a bad life decision."

"Yeah, I mean, there is some damage to erectile tissue, but it makes them look more hung while dancing."

"Hm. The shit people will do for their livelihood," I said. "And these people don't even pay taxes."

"Well, wearing a catheter every day after age 50 doesn't top their list of concerns," he said.

...Now that she's adequately warmed up, Penny Lane is done with me. She isn't rude to me about it; she just abruptly takes a seat next to her crony with double G boobs, ready to go on stage. It is almost zero hour for all of us.

Also on the bench are Zoozle and Champagnia, with Champagnia etching a heart—or maybe a jellyfish—onto Zoozle's ankle with the fattest magic marker I'd ever seen. It was as girthy as a can of Red Bull.

"Hey man," I say to Champagnia, "When you're done there, may I borrow that marker?"

"Of course," he says. "What you wanna do?"

"I don't know. I just feel under... decorated."

Zoozle, with her saucer nipples and beaded dreads and whitewall of jovial teeth, stood up and said, "Can I be your costume designer?"

"Hell yes," I told her. I gave her carte blanche to follow her artistic instincts.

I am not hirsute. So on my chest she had scribed the words CHEST HAIR. Upon my shaved and barren garden area, she knelt down and wrote PUBES. Whilst she was doing that, I wondered if this was the closest a dick's ever been to her face without sucking on said dick. But this moment was an impersonal, clinical one after all, and maybe she's a urologist? No spontaneous dick-sucking occurred and then she told me to turn around, so I did unquestioningly. The girls, Champagnia, and Jack all laugh boisterously at her handiwork.

During registration, among a sea of binding documents, I had met Jack. Blonde, tall/lanky, fit, very personable. A soybean farmer from North Carolina who is now wearing only his eyeglasses, cowboy boots, and a shredded pair of cut-off jeans, out of which he hangs his pud through the open fly. I am only sporting sunglasses, a FitBit, and the most outlandish tan lines in nudist pageant history. Jack is contestant number 214 right behind me. As they call my name to cross, he slaps me on the ass... which somehow seems perfectly acceptable, if not appropriate. Thirty seconds is all you're allotted to go out onto the stubby little catwalk in front of the pool, then you move on. The stage name I used is "Brenner." My friend Brenner would love to be here. He would foam at the mouth, sprout horns. Then his head would swell up like a rutabaga.

And now in the zero hour, I walk out, crouching down on one knee, my right fist planted on the boards, the fingers on my southpaw splayed open flat. I look right, look left, smirking like an idiot. Photographers' machine-gun clicks and lukewarm cheers. I stand up to spin around and show the crowd what Zoozle had graffitied on my back: TRUMP HOLE, with a thick arrow pointing down to my ass crack. This incites enthusiasm. Laughs, applause, cheers... I plant my hands on my hips and move crabwise to stage right, swinging my dong around like a windmill.

Jack follows, ripping off his Velcroed cut-offs in one rehearsed swoop, slinging them into the crowd. More applause. Immediately he runs over to me, giddy as hell.

"Hey man! Wasn't that exhilarating?"

"It was definitely something new," I say.

He pats me on the back. "I liked that superhero landing pose. Nice!"

"Superhero landing?" I shrug. "I didn't know what else to do, Jack."

"Well that was fucking awesome," he says. "The whole thing, I mean. So much fun, right?" He's like a 15-year-old who just took his dad's BMW for a spin.

We sit amid the barnyard of flesh while the winners are announced, to which I am again not paying much attention. I go to throw football in the pool with the crew. Tits jiggling, penis tips afloat like magenta bobbers. I repair to my tent shortly afterward because Aunt Dotie's soporific qualities have a pronounced effect on my metabolism. And now that the adrenaline had worn off, down I went.

But I awake around 10:00 p.m., not to the sounds of shagging but of bassy, bumping disco music. The after-party is happening. Wearing shorts and a t-shirt, I crawl out of David's pup tent and amble barefoot over to the circus tent. I find Taryn and David sitting in lawn chairs, people-watching. Most people are, surprisingly, dressed.

"Hey, you should go ask that girl to sit on your lap," Taryn says.

I glance. "The one with long, pink, cotton candy hair?"

"Yes."

"I'm okay, thanks," I say. "Not sure I'm up to it."

Taryn glares at me. She gets up and walks over to the cotton candy-haired girl. One minute later, the girl with long pink hair is sitting in my lap.

"Hi. I'm Passion," says Passion. She sips from a cup of Fireball, a kind of cinnamon schnapps calling itself whisky.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Brenner."

"Oh, I remember you from earlier!" she says.

"Come here a minute," she says. "Help me stretch."

Then there we are, legs over legs, tugging on each other's wrists, "stretching" each other...

"Pop me," she demands.

I tighten my legs around her ass and tug, hearing several of her vertebrae crackle.

What the fuck am I doing here? I wonder. I'll tell you what I'm doing: I am merely fulfilling the requests of a woman in need. Passion's adroit application of mascara and eyeliner make her pretty in the eyes. I wonder what she looks like without makeup...

"How did you do in the contest?" she asks.

"I have no idea," I tell her, shaking my head.

David chimes in from his camping chair: "You got fourth... Mr. Brenner."

I laugh, digesting his joke. "Fourth!" I exclaim. "Meaning I did not win, place, nor show."

"Oh, nice! I got fifth," she says, stroking my hair. Even in this half-light, her blue irises surround pie-pan pupils, because she is clearly high as fuck on coke.

I wonder if I'm in the one-percentile of men who subconsciously sabotages a clear invite to sex. That is to say: I have zero carnal response to her overtures. But why? Probably this stems from a deep sense of self-preservation. Clutching her svelte body, I can only think of a future moment when I tell Taryn and David that this girl will heretofore be known as Passion Skank.

David leans over. "I'm not joking, Chris. I saw the judge's sheet. You got fourth place."

Passion Skank's pie-pans get even wider. She high-fives me. "Fuck yeah!" she says.

"Well how about them crabapples," I say. Fourth place, and no consolation BJ. Not even a bag of motorized dicks. However, there is now a 20-something year-old stripper massaging my shoulders and whipping her hair around in this breezy July twilight zone.

"I'm working on becoming a yoga instructor," Passion tells me. "And I meditate daily." After more idle yapping and... stretching, she declares, "I have three foster kids. And they don't know what I do for a living. I was a foster kid myself."

"That's about right," I say, looking into her pie-pans.

"And I'm going to get two more," she says, holding up rabbit ear fingers.

She then tells me that she is actually taking home three trophies for categories I didn't understand, or which may have been fabricated. All of this is wonderful news, but I don't believe a word of it. She does not ask me what I do for a living. She asks me if I want to smoke a menthol.

"Sure. I need more carcinogens in my life," I say.

"Great!" she says, patting the back pocket of her cutoff denim shorts. "I don't know where they are. Let me find my assistant," she says, untangling from our bizarre coupled-yoga pose and wandering off.

She returns gripping the wrist of a guy wearing a tucked-in flannel shirt and jeans, and Jesus sandals.

"Hey, this is Martin," she says. Then she remembers her mission. "Oh, do you know where my cigs are?" she asks Martin.

"You left them with Simone at the bar table, Passion," says Martin. "But I do have your cell phone."

"Sweet!" she says. Passion takes her phone and goes bar-ward. I shake hands with Martin and ask, "So you're Passion's... assistant?"

He laughs in my face. Then, "Wait, what? She called me her assistant?"

I hesitate because his bewilderment is palpable. "I'm afraid so, man," I tell him.

He laughs again, the contemptuous laugh of a battered ego. "Oh, boy," he says. He is sore, but not sore at me. He shakes his head, eyeballing the grass as he walks away.

Now reunited with her phone and cigarettes, the Passion Skank returns. She puts two smokes in her mouth and lights them, exhales, handing me one. She asks for my number. I give her a fake number.

"You seem like a deep, intellectual guy," she says, putting her slender arm around my waist. She pulls me to her, gazing into my eyes. Her breath is a mélange of marijuana and cinnamon.

"That's a swell characterization, Passion. But I am also a roué, and an idiot."

This registers for her in no way. Instead, she takes me by the arm and says: "Let's go dance. You're with me tonight."

Beneath the big-top tent, people are grooving heartily to the fellow strumming his guitar and singing through the big PA system. He is the emcee from this morning, I guess? In mid-lyric, he introduces Flava Flav, who materializes through a tent-flap and seats himself at a drum set. Yes, Flava Flav, of the enormous clocks. Today he is clockless, and shirtless, but of course he wears sunglasses even in this dingy light. He nods at his introduction, says nothing, and begins pounding away on the drums with Bonzo's Montreux. Holding hands with Passion Skank, I am mesmerized.

During Flava's rendition of the best drum solo in classic rock, Passion turns to me and says, "Hey, you ready?"

Before I can ask "Ready for what?" she slugs down the last of her Fireball, takes one step back, and does a hand-spring—a perfect flip—expertly planting the backs of her knees over my shoulders, grasping me around the neck as I instinctively collect her buns in my hands. Passion then proceeds to faux-hump my chest, closing her eyes and nodding sky-wise. The proximal crowd laughs, whistles, applauds.

What. The fuck. Just happened?

Humping her crotch into my face, Passion co-opted my skeletal frame is what happened—to showcase her skills. I am contemplating this when she dismounts and plants a fat kiss on my face. She smiles, signaling the end of the show, and sashays back into the undulating fold. I stand with my elbows still locked, palms up, amidst a swarm of whooping, cat-calling buzzards. I blink once, maybe twice. Some guy gives me a high-five. The Passion Skank has exited stage right, with the empathy of a goldfish.

And now I am hypnotized by the sound engineer's mixing console. I sit down next to him to learn the buttons. He is cagey and extremely stoned. Wants nothing to do with me.

"Here man, just drink this," he says impatiently, handing me a blue So-Lo cup. I sniff it; Fireball is making a killing at this place...

Navigating through the tent party, I find the Passion Skank making out with Ron Jeremy. Yes, Ron Jeremy of cult porn infamy and serial rape. Passion is leaning over, hand on his forested ham hock, surrounded by a clutch of other porn-borne sycophants. At this spectacle, I wonder: Who would plant their lips on that hedgehog? But I smile because I am relieved. I don't need the Passion Skank's chemistry set of god-knows-what anywhere near the interior of my pup-tent. I do not want to stick around to see what happens next.

But Flava Flav, in his backward NY Yankees cap, is still pounding the toms, dreads orbiting his head like Medusa, flinging sweat. I am thoroughly stunned to learn that Flava Flav is an actual musician, and with talent to boot. He pounds the last crash cymbal, the crowd going wild.

"Y'all ready to get high up in this bitch?" he spouts into the mic.

Loud applause. Of course we were ready to get high up in this bitch.

"Who up in here is ready to stay high?" asks Mr. Flav.

The ayes are unanimous. Yet in spite of this emphatic response, Flav disappears, repairing to his trailer, or his kennel, or wherever he goes to get and stay high. The emcee fellow with the acoustic guitar assumes his seat.

While Passion is still making out with The Hedgehog, Simone nudges my shoulder.

"Great job today!" she says.

This surprise comes like a boulder falling off a cliff. Great job on what? But I am not about to balk at Simone's open-armed invitation for a hug. She is (legitimately) taking home the trophy for Nude Entertainer of The Year. This delectable creature is the indisputable belle of this wacky ball. The smilingest, most confident, most genuine in conversation. Elegantly clothed now in her long skirt and long-sleeve top, with bangles on her wrists. She strikes me more like a geisha than a stripper. Intelligent, composed, refined. She is together. This Simone is no goldfish.