I have exactly .0003 philosophy credits. I listened to 15 minutes of a lecture on it before I realized abstract theory, or at least discussion of it, wasn't for me. As the spiky haired, skinny professor rambled about the noodlings of Kant and Cavell, all I could think was "How can I justify this?" I was already wasting scads of my folks' money taking courses on the History of Cricket and The Noh Play's Impact on Modern Literature. This professor's bleatings, punctuated with wild gesticulations, offered amidst constant pacing back and forth across the front of the classroom, seemed silly, senseless... the sort of screwy riffs that pinball around a skull full of cheap weed and rotgut wine. I had no conscience at this point in my life, but I still couldn't piss away my old man's dough studying what sounded like a Beat reading of random Rush lyrics. Worse, the professor was a tough grader. There were a few cute girls in the class, but at the time, I had a girlfriend. The cost benefit/analysis was easy... I slipped out the side door and signed up for poetry seminar with a crazy dyke professor who handed out "A"s like candy. If you're going to flash fry a stack of money getting a liberal arts degree, it only makes sense to shop your professor by grade leniency. I wrote a 20 page paper comparing "Sympathy for the Devil" to "Paradise Lost." When I made the Dean's List, and my friends who stuck out the philosophy seminar with the wired geek were given "B" minuses and "C"s, I felt pretty smart.

What would I ever use theoretical gibberish for anyway?

I've paid through the nose for that thinking ever since... Law school was all theory, and a fat chunk of my practice has been, as well. Not by choice, of course. I'd choose an enema over theoretical discussion of The Law. I prefer to solve a problem as quickly and simply as possible, please the client, stick his money in my pocket and get back to playing on the internet or writing my career suicide blog, deconstructing Bon Scott and anal lubricants. But as you've guessed by now, I'm not the rule in this legal gig. Most lawyers don't have any work experience or common sense, jaunting straight from a college dorm to a law school classroom, from Sim City marathons into esoteric debates about hypothetical cases which could never occur, flipping one virtual reality for another. From there they vault into tiny white offices, to read endless reams of dense legal rulings and spit out memos guessing how some court, somewhere, someday, might rule on issues beyond obscure - handicapping races that'll never be run, among horses that'll never be born...

...Often betting on the unicorn.

Many lawyers operate under the assumption they can predict all potential adverse events or opposing arguments in a case or a deal and somehow craft an agreement or claim avoiding every one of them. What started as a commercial transaction or dispute becomes a game, with the lawyer's theoretical mind (his only mind in many cases) attempting to land the uber-legal geek's White Whale - a risk free agreement or irrefutable argument. What the lawyers wind up creating is a bloated, Byzantine maze of frequently conflicting provisions or sub-arguments, so enormous and confusing its sheer size and opacity precludes anyone from understanding it.
Maybe that's the lawyer's brilliance? The more complex the thing, the more time he bills explaining or arguing it...

Maybe I'm giving the bastards too much credit... Maybe the real reason lawyers create more problems than they solve is that they just don't understand real life. They're so geared to operating in the abstract that they don't even realize a Rube Goldberg solution that works on paper never works on the street. Or maybe they just don't know what works on the street, never having been there? Whatever the cause of this terminal break from reality, it's generally a harmless malady for the lawyer... so long as his clients don't mind paying for mental masturbation. But there are exceptions. There are times when assuming what works in theory works in real life can be dangerous, where it can place you eye to eye with a loaded gun...

* * *

Among the myriad sexual fetishes I have, I like to see the women I'm with nude in public places. There's no reason to explore the fount of the fetish. The why of it isn't half as interesting as the practice of the thing. It's a terrible fantasy to act out - costly, cumbersome and embarrassing. You might think "Well, all you have to do is join a swingers circle, or a club where one can 'soft swing' (have sex in front of others) or go on vacation to a nudist resort." It's not that easy. The average nudist or swinger is ugly. That's just a fact. People I know who've attended sex clubs have told me horror stories about staring up from a sex act to see five or six middle aged jowly couples, adorned in ambitious piercings, staring down at them, in varying degrees of engorgement. "Hi, name's Phil. Katie and I are charter members. I installed that bed. Nice, eh? By the way, good technique." The sole person I know who's been to a Hedonism resort described it a festival of aged women with stripper implants jerking off accountants in hot tubs while fat greasy men with back hair as thick as their Longeyeland accents sat on lounge chairs watching them, swilling rum runners and attempting to rub themselves discreetly.

I don't know anyone who's been to a nudist colony, but from what I've read, there's no point. Every one takes great pains to explain how non-sexual the place is, noting over and over how anyone making sexual advances is expelled. This never happens, of course, because no one makes any sexual advances, which is easy to understand if you've ever seen a nudist colony. It is exactly what's advertised - people sitting around, nude, drinking coffee, playing badminton, cooking burgers, knocking back mai tais and square dancing. Completely eviscerated of any sexual undertone, public nudity is boring and cruel on the eyes. Nobody wants to slug Baccardi and discuss Iraq with a nude seventy year old woman shifting herself into a Lotus position on a folding chair. Add square dancing and the scene tempts your gag reflex.

So where does this leave a guy who just wants to watch his girlfriend walk around nude outside and maybe take a few pictures of her? The best option is a nude beach. Theoretically, that is...

Gunnison Beach

Gunnison Beach sits at the edge of Sandy Hook, a federal park in the Northeastern tip of New Jersey. The beach is massive and almost always packed on weekends. As you walk onto Gunnison, you see a sign in the distance warning that you are entering a nude beach (as though anyone making the effort to drive to the secluded beach wasn't coming for that exact purpose). Continuing on, you're confronted with numerous spaces of empty sand between collections of bodies, like any other beach. But selecting a space to sit on a crowded nude beach isn't as easy as it is at regular beach. You can't just saunter through the masses, find the first open ground and throw down a towel. You have to select your space based on the people surrounding it. You can't sit too close to the ocean because roving groups of greasy kids in baggy shorts, goatees and gold chains walk slowly by the water ogling any attractive woman. You can't sit near any single man because any single man at a nude beach is there to ogle women, some on the outskirts even bringing binoculars. I've been lucky with women a couple of times in my life and Lisa's the best I've done. Her body's a big part of the reason I like to see her naked outdoors. In fact, you could almost say she caused the fetish. As we walked through the people looking for a space to sit, I noticed two pasty white men near the periphery begin picking up their belongings, ready to move to get an up close view of her. The only way to avoid this 40ish Virgin Voyeur Patrol, roaming the beach with camera phones and personal jellies, is to look for other couples. The Strange seem to hide from collections of couples, which causes perceptive couples to collect together.

Lisa and I settled between a stunning black girl and her boyfriend, a fiftyish frumpy couple and a collection of teenage girls. Fortunately, the smoking hot chick to our right stood up and stretched as I was unpacking our bag. Unfortunately, she started dressing, left with her boyfriend and was replaced by a 30ish bone white man who proceeded to position his half-erection prominently for everyone near us to admire. I turned to avoid watching him apply sunscreen to his testicles only to get a dead on, eye level shot of the wife next to us bending over to move her beach chair. Doomed in both directions, I had an up-close view of either an asshole or a probable pederast fiddling with his junk. To make matters worse, I was stranded, as Lisa had begun walking to the water. And the bottle of water I'd chugged on the way to the beach was coming back to haunt me...

"That's the photo I want... You walking back from the water like that."

"I think it's considered rude to take pictures."

"I could snap one off and nobody'd be wiser."

"I really don't want to get into an altercation here... Uh, what are you looking for?"

"A men's room. The only one I see is all the way back at the entrance."

"Just go in the water." Lisa leaned over, drying her hair, driving the pederast into a frenzy of neck craning and thigh stroking.

"I don't want to do that."

"You shy?"

I sounded absurd. Here we were, all the pissing equipment on display, yet I didn't want to use it in the fucking ocean? "Ok, I'm going to go deal with it. Pack this shit up and let's move to the other side of the lifeguard's chair."

"Why?"

"Would you rather finish off Pee Wee Herman next to us?"

"Ewww. Gotcha."

I waded into the freezing water just high enough to cover what I was doing. I stood there for what felt longer than the average "Star Spangled Banner," barely able to feel anything below my waist. Turning sideways, I looked back toward the beach. Over the shoulder of a heavy seventiesh woman standing with her husband, I could see Lisa in the distance, walking behind the lifeguard stand. As I turned my gaze from Lisa, I locked eyes with the old woman. She had a queer, pained look on her face, as though she'd been stung by one of those huge green beach flies or stepped on a jellyfish.

What's her malfunction?

It was then I realized the problem with using the ocean as a toilet - it ebbs and flows. If you're going to piss in it in front of a crowded beach, naked, you need to give yourself a bigger margin of error than a few inches to a foot above your penis. Watching Lisa, and numb from the cold, I hadn't realized the water receded, and I was left standing there, staring at the old couple, pissing into the water a few feet from them. By the time I looked down and realized what I was doing it was too late. The last of the stream was trickling into the ocean. I was caught red-handed, a deviant who got his rocks off soaking the elderly with secret golden showers. I could see the wheels turning in the old woman's head, imagining me back in my rusted 1983 Pacer, writing in a journal, talking to myself in a Woody Allen voice - "I peed all over them, and they never knew a thing..."

I quickly broke eye contact with the old lady and darted toward the beach to find Lisa, who was scouting for open space to the right side of the lifeguard stand. I reached her just in time to witness a guard screaming at her. "This. Is. The. Clothing. Side." Lisa'd drug our stuff 30 yards, only to be forced to drag it back. "Fuck this," she began lugging the bags back to the other side of the stand. As I helped her do this, I noticed a figure coming into my plane of vision from the right - a man wearing nothing but a t-shirt, his spindly white legs framing a densely forested manhood dangling below the shirt.

"That. Is. Fucking. Disgusting."

"It's just another naked guy."

"It's the t-shirt. That is grossing me out."

"The t-shirt?"

"Yes. A man in just a t-shirt is wrong."

"Worse than naked wearing socks?"

"Much worse."

"How?"

"I can't explain. It just is."

Lisa stopped in her tracks. "Let's just get dressed. The novelty's worn off." We stopped behind the lifeguard chair and began unpacking our suits from the bags. As I turned my head, I saw a man and his wife walking toward the beach with their kids. The man's gaze locked laser-like on Lisa, fiddling with a bikini bra in her hands. "I can't get this untied. Can you help me?" She handed me the bra and started putting on the bottoms. I stood frozen in the death ray stare of the man's wife, pulling her sunglasses down, scowling at us as she tugged on her husband's t-shirt and barked something into his ear. He kept staring, like a dazed mongoloid, until she stopped dead in the sand and yelled, "this way," directing him to the far end of the clothing side.

"You know what, fuck this. Let's go into town and get some beers."

"Fine with me. Why do you want to leave so quickly?"

"I don't know. It's just too much. Too extreme. You have kids playing catch with dad on one side, and freaks jacking off on the other."

Over lunch, I told Lisa about the staring man and his wife. "Whatever... Who sits two inches from a nude beach with his family? He's a perv like you and his wife knows it..."

"I'm a perv?"

"Yes. Are you satisfied?"

"Satisfied?"

"Strangers saw me naked... We could've avoided the drive. I could've just streaked a construction site, or done amateur night at a BYO club..."

"I love you."

Secret Beach

Most "secret" things aren't secret at all. Secret Beach is an exception. It sits at the dead end of a long dirt road, snaking off one of the few main arteries running around Kauai. There are no signs for it and if you ask natives where it is, they'll glare at you, figuring you another twisted hippie or honeymooning degenerate looking to fuck in one of the shady crevices between trees lining the sand. The disgust is warranted. At Secret Beach's entrance, rusted pickup trucks drop off burnt surfers and hippie kids, who bolt down the steep, treacherous muddy path with cases of Busch cans on their shoulders, bottles of cheap whiskey in their free hands and baggies of pills and nuggets of fluffy local weed stuffed into the Velcro pockets of their surf shorts and cargo pants. Pasty mainland tourists gingerly step around huge water filled ruts in the mud road, clicking the electronic keychain locks to their rented Jeeps and Mustang convertibles. One of the prettiest stretches of sand in the state - a staggering physical monument to thousands of years of punishing waves meeting molten rock... now a staging ground for drug orgies and yuppie exhibitionism.

As we made our way to the sand, I could see to my left, out of the corner of my eye, a gaggle of granola chicks flailing nude by the water. They stood in front of a huge rock wall, at the bottom of which was a small cave, enough for ten or so people to huddle underneath, kicking their legs in the air... half-dancing, half running, partly twisted, partly giddy with the permanent buzz or being irredeemably Off the Grid. As 9 out of 10 granola girls tend to be, they weren't terrible attractive, having bought into the hippie-chick ethic that a little extra hair and some ripply cottage cheese on the form was a sign of a truer inner beauty beyond Madison Avenue's hardbody ethic.
"I could live here." The granola girls were playing near the waves, dervishes of breasts and hips spinning in the sunlight. I realized I might as well have been an alien in that scene. In days I'd be on a plane, headed for a desk, a gas bill, a calendar of meetings about projections and discussions of revenues and exciting new cases involving lease contracts. I didn't run away and join the circus, and that never crystallized more...

Fuck that, right? Only a king jackass takes off with the freakshow... They're just delaying the inevitable... Sooner or later, we all meet the black hole gravity of The Grid...

But what if they don't? What if some of them actually escape... if like that old tale about the businessman who retires to a fishing village and meets an old man who asks him "If this is so wonderful, why did you work all those years at something else?" these lost spinning fools knew something I didn't? My gig was the polar opposite of theirs, and extremes are idiot magnets. If their path was doomed, mine was too, just for different reasons... But there's no middle on the Blackberry Circuit... no part time freaks in the Courthouse. Full commitment... the blood oath for the Benz... slide in - another slave shoulder to push the merry-go-round. I stripped off my clothes, sat back in the sand and stared at the Pacific, wondering how it all got so fucking complicated.

Snap out of it, daydreamer. There's a man with a backback asking you a question.

"Hi, I'm Cal. Where are you two visiting from?"

Did I mention the backpack was all Cal was wearing? Did I mention he was about 55? Did I mention he was short, fat, completely shaved and talking about his girlfriend as though she were ball-gagged in a motel, on sale for a crisp $50?

"I wish I had Miriam with me right now. You'd like her. She's part Vietnamese. Olive skinned. Petite, like your girlfriend here. Real athletic..."

The first chance she got, the first moment the motormouthed troll turned his head from us, Lisa grinned at me. I shot back a thin smirk of recognition... "Yes... a swinger." It was hard to look her in the eye, as in my direct plane of vision, as though it were jutting out of the side of Lisa's right temple, was Cal's member, flopped atop his testicles like an Italian sausage on a bun. Real athletic? I took off my sunglasses and chewed one of the arms to stop myself from laughing.

"Yeh, Miriam usually comes down with me. We have some friends, Chuck and Candi, who like to--"

"I think we're going to check the water," I cut him off. We'd been hit on by swingers before. A very queer gig... One of them engages you at the bar (usually a pretty swanky hotel bar) and starts asking you about what you do. It quickly moves into "So how long have you two been together." You get the vibe that the couple has an agenda after about the fourth drink, when you realize they haven't explained why they're in the hotel bar, and haven't met up with any other couple. Forty to fifty year old couples don't just engage, then buy multiple rounds of drinks for, much younger strangers in a hotel bar at 1:00 a.m. There's always a back story - they're coming from a wedding, in town for a conference, or just having a nightcap after dinner in the hotel's restaurant. If there's no back story, you're a mark... meat for a foursome. Your suspicions come to pass about a half hour into the conversation, as you notice your forms are being analyzed in a series of glances. She looks at your hands; he runs his eyes down the line of your girlfriend's hip. But you keep drinking because free drinks are free drinks, and once you know what the swingers want, you control the conversation. Ordering Johnny Walker Gold and tankards of wine older than some of your cousins on these people might seem mean and petty, but that couple, the average decrepit "lifestylers" - a slobbish lawyer with hair pouring out of his nose and an androgynous armpiece with overcollagened balloon lips and a voice deeper than Louie Armstrong... Who wouldn't surf that train wreck into a top shelf buzz? Caveat emptor... And get yourself a nose hair clipper, Melvin.

I knew the only way to ditch Cal was by getting icy with him, quickly. He was fixated on Lisa's tits, running the autopilot "lets get together at my hotel later" pitch he used at his sex club. He had to understand that we weren't "in the lifestyle," asap. I stood up, offered Lisa my hand and pulled her up from the sand. "Nice to meet you, Cal. Have a good vacation." He searched for a response for a second, some way to keep his possible pickup alive... No words came; he got the picture. When we came back up from the water, he was 50 yards down the beach.

The respite was short lived. Before we could finish arranging ourselves on the towels, a shadow came over us. "Excuse me, is this beach 'official' nude?"

Above us was an enormous brown walrus, tanner than greased leather, with barbed wire tattoos around his Michelin Man limbs and a pea-sized head. With the right eyes, he'd have passed for Buddha on a low carb diet. But I was Southern Baptist sober, and from my angle, he was a huge medicine ball gut, sprouting limbs. As he spoke, he pushed his torso forward, pretending to stretch his back, giving Lisa a close up of his package.

Among the myriad injustices heaped on the fat is the little spoken fact that not only do they look bad naked, they also look poorly hung. Fat men appear to have small genitals. And so do fat women. I have scientific proof... My friend Alex was in years past a "volume player;" if it appeared legal and was willing, he'd screw it. No deformity was beyond the rose-coloring power of sour mash whiskey... Alex has sworn for all the years I've known him that the larger the woman, the smaller and tighter she is. I used to argue that it was a trick of the eye - it only appeared that way because the rest of her was so big. I argued the tightness was a symptom of the pressure caused by the weight around the organ - a "diving bell" effect that squeezed your crank linguine flat when you were inside such a woman...

Lisa told me later how wrong I'd been. "Of course small women have bigger 'V's. You didn't know that?"

"No."

"I've been over this with my friends. The smaller girls all need more size."

"Girth?"

"Girth."

"I'll be damned."

That he was hung like a rhesus monkey didn't seem to bother the walrus. He just kept stretching his back, flipping the thing in our faces.

"I have no idea whether it's 'official.' What I know is you're blocking the sun... All of it." The walrus sulked off toward the ocean and flopped himself down in the sand in front of the waves, rolling around on his carriage exactly like the animal he resembled.

I reached for the fling camera in the beach bag. "Not a chance," Lisa laughed.

"Just a few shots... Why not?"

"You need to ask?" She nodded toward the walrus, sunning his D-cups.

"He's not coming back."

"That doesn't matter... I'm not in the sexy posing mood."

"Can't we fix that?"

I followed Lisa's eyes, scanning the beach. In the distance, at about 80 yards, I could see Cal waving to a couple sitting in the sand, trodding along in his backpack. Below us the walrus lurched up and launched himself into a wave.

"It may be terminal..."

To Be Continued...

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 6:16 PM

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