The Naked Guy

The Naked Guy
By Katherine Luck

“Will you just write the word already? It’s not dirty, it’s just a body part. Every guy’s got one—nobody’s gonna care what you call it!”
I took the director off of speaker phone five minutes ago. People were starting to come up from the costume shop to stare into my cubicle and snicker.
“No way! I refuse to write anything about the…y’know. The unit. No girth or length or whatever. We can’t even call it ‘the unit!’ It’s probably an obscenity or something, and the theater’ll get fined.”
I’m on the phone with the director of our theatre’s upcoming production of The Naked Guy. I’m three days late placing the casting call for the lead character on the online callboard. I need to find a good-looking guy in his twenties who’s comfortable with full frontal male nudity for the entirety of ninety minutes. For the play.
“Oh come on, Janie! It’s the in-ter-net!” Somehow, he manages to make ‘in-ter-net’ sound sleazy. “You can write anything—there’s freakin’ porn links on that site! Half the actors work as escorts in the off season. And I don’t mean—”
“Forget it! I’ll write ‘athletic build,’ but I’m not going beyond that.”
Toby thrusts his head over the rim of my cubicle. Another interloper from the depths of the costume shop. But he’s not smirking like the others were.
“Janie, Janie—turn on the radio. Your boyfriend’s breaking up with you.”

Rick, said boyfriend, lives in Chicago these days. Rick has dreams of becoming the next Howard Stern. Right before I graduated from college, he moved to Chicago, changed his professional name to Dick Mann, and went to work at a radio station. He’s got the drive-time slot these days. I stopped listening to him when he began using our sexual doings as material for his show. I figure it’s better for our relationship if I don’t know what he’s up to professionally. He sure doesn’t know that I spend my working hours hustling naked Equity actors.
One of the joys of the in-ter-net is the ability to listen to far-off radio stations online. Toby hisses at me until I turn the volume up loud enough for everyone in the office to hear. Somewhere in the windy city, Dick Mann initiates a prerecorded whip sound effect.
“That’s what I’m sayin’! Whipped no more, baby! Me an’ freaky-girl are cashed out! Consider your ass kicked to the curb, yeah!”
I glance up at Toby, who’s hanging over the top of my cubicle like a gargoyle.
“Are you sure he’s breaking up with me?”
I always have a hard time understanding Rick when he’s doing his Dick Mann voice. He affects some kind of Deep South drawl shot through with a jibbering, hysterical hyena cackle that bursts in on every fifth word.
Toby nods and swoops down out of sight. He reappears within my cubicle, perching on the edge of my desk. Toby likes the Dick Mann show. They listen to it down in the costume shop everyday. Toby’s probably the only gay fan Dick Mann will ever have.
“So, here’s the thing, sluts. Dick Mann’s free game. Open season, whores! Come and bag me! And I’ll tell y’all what: the first twenty skanky, super-fine porn stars who call in before we go to break can have a crack at me. On air. Tell me what you’re gonna do to me, and make it nasty!”
Toby shakes his head and grabs my mouse to mute the volume.
“It’s sweeps week. He’s doing it for ratings.”
***
“I’m so massively in debt, it’s not even cute anymore. I actually had to refer myself to this non-profit financial counseling service to get the bill collectors to stop stalking me. I used our agency letterhead and made one of the other social workers put her name down as my caseworker. How sick is that?”
The coffee shop is in the last non-Starbucks establishment in town. It’s in the ghetto, down a couple blocks from the homeless shelter where Sheree works. Sheree gets testy when I call it “the ghetto.” She was an idealist in college.
“It’s all those damned loans for that damned master’s degree. I’m still only making ten bucks an hour, since the agency lost the big federal grant last spring, remember that fiasco? Lucky to still have a job, I guess. This coffee’s costing me half my grocery budget for the week.”
I hope she’s exaggerating. Maybe I should pick up the tab. But I’m broke too.
“I had to record myself as a successful social service referral in my tracking database and turn it in to my boss. She’s probably gonna be pissed off. Wasting agency time and resources. Oh well, whatever. Things should get better once I get the Section 8 voucher. I applied for food stamps last week, too. After they repossessed my car, I got eligible for a lot of low-income programs.”
“Rick broke up with me on national radio today.”
Sheree swirls her cappuccino vigorously to loosen the last bubbles of milk clinging to the sides of the cup.
“I should have become a welder. Or a general contractor. I referred this smack junkie client of mine to an apprentice program about a year ago. Chick’s got no high school diploma, no GED, barely speaks English, and now she’s an apprentice plumber pulling in sixty grand a year. That’s exactly how much my damned Masters cost! How depressing is that?”
***
I haven’t listened to the Dick Mann show since that charmed morning when my nickname at work became “freaky girl.” I turn off my computer and steady myself. I pick up a pen and a blank legal pad. These are just props to disguise my gleeful nerves.
I get to assist in the auditions for The Naked Guy. The auditions, that is, for the Naked Guy himself. There will be fourteen actors trying out for the role today. Young men in their mid-twenties, naked and glorious and athletically-built. All parading around the stage for my benefit.
I never doubted the timeless brilliance of this play. It is art. I will never speak ill of it again.
When Rick and I met in college, I was studying this type of postmodern performance art. He worked for the college radio, and I was getting my degree in dramaturgy, which Rick had never heard of. He thought it was cool that I wanted to sculpt new scripts into works of genius. Help create the next Shakespeare or Ibsen. He was supportive. Rick wanted to discover the next Yngwie Malmsteen, whom I’d never heard of. He used to go to all the open mic nights at every dive bar within thirty miles of the college, searching for talent to showcase on his show. It aired at three a.m. I used to stay up to listen to it every night.
Onstage, an firm-chested, oh-so-naked actor is butchering a monologue from Death of a Salesman. He moves vigorously around the stage, gesturing hard. I’m not leering at him. Really. I’m not.
Maybe Dick Mann is auditioning a girl for the role of slut girlfriend right now. She will be naked, blaring out Willy Loman’s lines at full volume. On the radio. It can’t possibly have as much impact as seeing it live.
I’m really not leering.
***
“I hear his ratings are way up. Some local celebrity stripper called in on Friday. The FCC had to cut the show off half-way through. They’re fining the station for obscenity. They might syndicate his show, put him in a national mid-morning slot in six months.”
Toby and I are in his favorite gay bar, hunkered down over cheap beer. Pabst blue ribbon. So chic.
“Has he called?”
“Nope.”
“Huh. Maybe you should call in. Call his show. He’d put you on the air for sure. You’d get your fifteen minutes.”
“I’ve had my fifteen minutes, thanks.”
The last time I was in this bar with Toby was for the Valentine’s Day drag queen contest. Both of us were broke and needed the prize money. He dressed up as Liza Minelli. I went as Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Toby got third place and twenty-five dollars. I didn’t even make it to the second round. I overheard clusters of queens cattily murmuring, ‘Now, that boy’s got no flair! He couldn’t pass for a girl in a room full of linebackers.’ One of them bought me a pink girlie drink to boost my inadequate femininity. That was my fifteen minutes.
“So, I hear the director wants to get the playwright’s permission to cast a woman in the role of the Naked Guy. He wants a broader appeal. He thinks the donors’ll be put off by having to watch a naked man walk around the stage for an hour and a half.”
“Why? I sure won’t be put off! It’s the only thing that I have to look forward to these days!”
“Oh, same here, honey! But the director wants to increase the attendance of potential donors. Big donors. You know. Going for the straight, forty-year-old doctor and lawyer crowd. Avoid the wage gape and target the big boys who need the tax rideoffs.”
I think that I should have become a welder. Or a general contractor. Then I’d have all the shirtless, firm-chested men I could ever want. Building doorframes and roofs and things. I could holler obscenities at them from the sky-high girders.
“I wonder how the director’ll want to word the casting call this time. I refuse to write anything about the, y’know. The jugs.”