Naked

This chapter focuses on Lisa and Sharon’s shared love of detective shows. Together, they also comb through local crime reports in the papers and speculate on the nature of the crimes. David doesn’t share this interest. He finds the detective shows overly simplistic; he thinks his mother and sister’s deductions are facile. He notes, “It’s easy to solve a case when none of the suspects are capable of telling a decent lie. Television took the bite out of crime, leaving the detective as nothing more than a lifestyle” (52). He contrasts their affection for detective shows with his love of The Fugitive, a serial about a falsely accused man on the run. Lisa also likes The Fugitive, but David suspects her interest is shallow.

Sedaris relates this interest in fictional crime to “a series of real crimes” (55) occurring in the Sedaris household: “Someone in our family had taken to wiping his or her ass on the bath towels” (55). This is especially problematic because their bath towels are “fudge-colored,” resulting in numerous unpleasant surprises. Unable to determine who is the culprit, Sharon buys white towels.

After the towel incident, someone steals from Louis’s collection of silver dollars. David’s father ransacks his room in search of them. Upon being falsely accused, David tries to dye his hair with black shoe polish like the main character on The Fugitive, ruining his bed sheets in the process. He disposes of his bedding in the woods and sets out to find the real thief.

David hides in his parents’ room to watch for the thief. His mother enters; she puts on a blonde wig, talks to herself, applies makeup, and takes a nap. Trapped in the room, David “stood for an hour with a head full of shoe polish, a fugitive […] waiting for something to reveal itself” (60). After she leaves, David sneaks out to wash the polish out of his hair, so as not to get in trouble for staining his parents’ things.

Dix Hill is a “common nickname” for the Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, which David refers to as the Dorothea Dix State Sanitarium in his teen years. He describes it as bleak, gothic, and sinister.

Sedaris notes that his maternal grandfather was committed to a psychiatric ward when Sharon was 16. There, he was subjected to extensive bouts of shock treatments: “He had been suffering from the D.T.’s, a painful hallucinatory state marking an advanced stage of alcoholism. My mother visited him every day, and often he had no idea who she was” (61-62). As a teenager, David takes a volunteer job working at Dix Hill. His mother begs him not to go, but he is resolute. He is assigned to work with an orderly named Clarence Poole. They visit the women’s ward first, where all the patients are strapped into cots. They yell for Clarence’s attention, to which he responds only, “Later, baby.” David and Clarence move a nude elderly woman from her cot to a gurney. She bites David’s arm and growls “as if she were a bob-cat or wolverine, some wild creature used to hunting down its meals” (63). Clarence clubs her with his shoe until she lets go.

David’s experience at Dix Hill is revolting and disheartening. He concludes that all people are susceptible to mental illness, and, therefore, all people are at risk of getting stuck in a place like Dix Hill. He continues to work at Dix Hill on a volunteer and part-time basis through high school and into college. The patients’ problems are severe, and they are often physically abused by Dix Hill’s staff. The chapter ends with an anecdote about a friend of David’s who is committed to Dix Hill when they are adults.

This chapter begins with David’s eighth-grade teacher informing her students that racial integration will take place in their school in September. She tells her students that “more than anything in this world, those colored people wish they were white” (67), a claim that David finds dubious. He recalls this teacher’s overt racism in conjunction with her overt distain for gay men. Many of his teachers mock and deride gay men to entertain their students.

Young David is horrified by his own burgeoning homosexuality, revealing, “I had never done anything with another guy and literally prayed that I never would. As much as I fantasized about it, I understood that there could be nothing worse than making it official” (68). He is able to identify his gay classmates, but they never socialize, as that “would have drawn too much attention” (70). Whenever one of his gay classmates gets bullied, David laughs along with his straight classmates to protect himself. When David gets bullied, they react in kind.

That summer, David and Lisa are sent to a summer camp in Greece that caters exclusively to Greek American people. David is hopeful that he will be able to reinvent himself as a heterosexual in Europe. However, staying in gender-segregated dormitories causes his tics to shift “into their highest gear” (71). Meanwhile, Lisa dons a completely new persona by putting on a fake accent, changing her hair, and acting brash.

David becomes friends with his bunkmate, Jason. They bond over mocking their camp counselor’s frequent use of the word “faggot”: “We couldn’t protest the word, as that would have meant acknowledging the truth of it. The most we could do was embrace it as a joke” (74). While alone in their dorm, David and Jason have a sexual encounter. Overcome by guilt and fear, they each begin spreading rumors that the other is gay. This culminates in Jason’s planting a note that says “I LIKE GUYS” under David’s bed. Jason gets a girlfriend, and David resents Jason’s apparent ability to “cure” himself of being gay.

When they return to Raleigh, Lisa sheds her new persona. David’s ninth-grade science teacher is a Black man who uses gay men as a punchline, just like the white teachers do.

David develops an obsession with theater after an actor performs for his school. Inspired by the actor’s humor and skill, David dabbles in mime and Shakespeare, much to his family’s dismay. David and his friend Lois discover that the actor is directing and starring in a local production of Hamlet. They submit auditions. Because they are the youngest and least experienced cast members, David and Lois are given bit parts.

While David “worshipped” the other actors from afar, Lois ingratiates herself to them socially. Interspersing his anecdote with character names from Hamlet, he notes: “Unlike me, she was embraced by the older crowd, attending late-night keg parties with Polonius and Ophelia and driving to the lake with the director while Gertrude and Rosencrantz made out in the backseat” (81). Nearly all David’s lines get cut. With nothing else to do during rehearsals, he is reduced to running errands for the cast and assisting the stagehands with grunt work.

David becomes even more resentful when Lois—who is a weak performer—gets a major role in the director’s next production. David is not even considered for a role. Due to his poor treatment of him, David loses respect for the director. At his mother’s suggestion, he begins pocketing the other actors’ money when they send him on errands.

David’s mother attends his performance and praises his work. She tells him, “You were the best in the whole show […] I mean it, you walked onto that stage and all eyes went right to you” (84). In this moment, David realizes that his mother is actually a fantastic actress.