Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man

(And she's doing it in her underwear, Mrs. Stratton.)

Or maybe Ellen was a young housewife, her husband waiting in the bedroom to tuck her in on Christmas Eve.

'Sweetie, Santa's almost here.'

'Okay. I just have to let Tim see me naked for a few minutes more. You don't mind, do you?'

'No problem. Take your time.'

What a guy!

Every time I went to Gilbert's house, I'd stare at that picture. I'd walk out of the room and just go right back in. I'd go downstairs into the kitchen, then make up some stupid excuse like I'd left something in my jacket upstairs. I was probably wearing my jacket when I said that. I told you, any excuse.

But I didn't want anybody looking at me looking at her. That was the first sign of hiding my face from God, as they say. I was embarrassed by the heat in my cheeks. Maybe I had a fever? All I knew was that I had to study the picture. I had to honor those stirrings. Hey, they were the first stirrings I'd had. I didn't quite know what was going on. I didn't know what to do about any of it, but I didn't want to take out any time to have anyone explain it right then, either. I just wanted more, because Ellen Stratton was the most wonderful thing I'd ever witnessed in my life.

This was the invention of the H?bomb. This was the discovery of electricity. This was the wheel and fire all rolled into two bosoms.

This was better than blowing up fish at Cherry Creek.

This woman had no top on!

- -

In a way, the picture was both frightening and reassuring. I realized for the first time that, dumb as it sounds, all women are naked under their clothes.

Every women is naked under her clothes! Let me say that again: They're all naked! Of course, that discovery made me instantly distrust all women forever: they're hiding this! They have this power and I didn't even know it. It's just under their clothes! The girls my own age were not of the same species. This picture had nothing to do with them. Nor did I relate Ellen to the girls at school. I related her to the gym teacher, the French teacher, the cafeteria cashier-well, without the hairnet-any woman who was taller than me. It's funny how little boys turn into lecherous lunatics. They get the same glazed?over eyes as strip?bar patrons because they're undressing every woman they see. This was sex, not that I was clear about what sex was. I think I once got so excited about what I'd learned that I said to the girl next to me in class, 'Can you imagine this sex stuff?'

Then I quickly realized, 'Wait a minute! She's one of them!'

The girls I knew wanted Barbie?doll romance and valentines and 'I think I love you's.' The difference between them and Ellen was tremendous. Ellen represented a manly, sexual urge arising in me. I soon discovered it was a sleeping giant. A woman can be naked in National Geographic, but this woman was naked with something in mind. Her nakedness had a power to it, and therein lies the rub-no pun intended.

Of course, Ellen was so casual about decorating in the buff that she acted like she wasn't naked at all.

The husband: 'Santa won't come down the chimney if you're still awake. Is Tim done staring yet?'

Or mom: 'Ellen, grandma's starting to snore. Maybe we should start eating.'

Ellen Stratton will forever be at that odd age that I was somehow never at. She's a young woman put in an older situation. I was always younger than the centerfolds; then older. I never had the feeling I could go out and find anyone my age who looked the way Ellen looked, and relate to her on a person?to?person level. She was always somehow apart from me.

In fact, her whole situation wasn't real. I know, because for much of my life I looked for a woman in that circumstance and found it did not exist. I never knew anyone who hung mistletoe in her underwear. I was never even in the next room while it was going on. . to my knowledge.

I was always at the Christmas table, waiting to eat.

- -

To be honest with you, looking back at how that day changed my life, fm not sure why I didn't just take the picture off the wall and bring it home. After all, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Hell, I'm forty?one years old and I still think about it.

Ellen Stratton is probably sixty by now.

Ellen, wherever you are, you're always in my heart.

- -

Sooner or later it's all about girls and sex. Boys learn about sex, and what girls looked like under their clothes, in many places. In my time it was from Raquel Welch, in One Million Years B.C., standing defiant, wearing a skimpy item from the latest cavegirl collection. I was from the poster, actually; the movie was horrible. It was from Ann?Margret shimmying alone onscreen in a tight blue dress, warbling 'Bye, Bye, Birdie.' It was from sneaking peeks at copies of Argosy and Gent magazines. It was from peeping through the bathroom window at the college coed my parents rented a room to one year. It was from whatever stories we could gather from guys who seemed to know what the unknowable was all about.

Even if they didn't know anything at all. A good line of bullshit goes a long way. Even today.

Once I woke up sexually, I looked at everything differently. It's a change of perspective. I even looked at comic books anew. Suddenly, I half understood what Archie wanted from Veronica. I'm still trying to figure out what Jughead wanted from Reggie.

I had a thing for Veronica. Betty was sexier, but Veronica had the bucks. Betty would have been a better wife, and more Archie's match, but he always liked Veronica's style. Both Betty and Veronica had great tits. I wish I could have told Archie about my great discovery: If you change their heads, it's the same body. Black hair with big tits, blond hair with big tits. Very attractive. Got a little chubby now thinking about Veronica.

Of course, James Bond was my idea of a man's man. I loved Q's gadgets, and the Aston Martin. Eventually I noticed the girls, and soon the worlds of technology and women merged. Bond's movies raised my desires to a fever pitch. Cleavage, strength, maleness, virility, and small shiny things that clicked and exploded. Those films were sex, so much sex that they were primeval. Ellen Stratton, the Playmate, was a woman alone. James Bond, however, showed me how to get the woman and what to do with her when I got her. God, was he smooth and stylish. It seemed pretty damn easy for him, unzipping the beautiful Russian spy's dress, her bounteous flesh spilling over. Or just happening to be on the beach, hiding behind a rock, when Ursula Andress came out of the water in that excuse for a bikini. Talk about lucky timing. For years I thought Bond's way with women was the way. This explains, of course, why I didn't date for quite a while. There was no way I could get girls into a car with a handgun. Come on. Do you know any women named Pussy Galore? My idea of a date was going to the hobby shop and getting a can of gold spray paint.

'Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger? No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.'

- -

Bond flicks only came out once a year. Argosy and Stag magazines were always lying around, mostly at the barbershop. They were full of uncomfortable images like bosomy women draped over carcasses of dead sheep, or guys with guns and women with big breasts in ripped clothing. Your typical story was 'I Ate a Bear After I Killed Him with My Bare Hands.' Everybody in the illustration was angry: the guy was angry at her, she was angry at the guy, the bear was angry at both of them. Maybe the bear and the babe had a secret thing going on, and got surprised by the guy in the forest clearing-which explains why everyone was pissed.

These were men's stories, full of furious, unshaven studs with huge pectoral muscles. If a dick could be a man, that's what it would look like. You could smell the sex and sweat coming off the pages. Of course, I didn't know what these guys did with women. I thought they just rubbed chests.

Isn't that what 'Argosy' means: rubbing chests?

I think these magazines were actually where Hugh Hefner got his idea for Playboy. He saw these illustrated macho rags and he thought, 'Ya know, I bet men would like to see real naked women instead of bears. And pay for it.'

- -

After we'd overdosed on James Bond and other sources of sexual apocrypha, the boys in the clubhouse started coming up with some pretty weird ideas about what you do with girls once you 'get them'-whatever