Bugle Call
by Pamela Balluck
The men on the nude beach don't notice me because they're gay. Certainly, they do notice me—I'm propped on my forearms, blatantly watching them from the patio—but not the kind of notice men usually send my way with their eyes. And I like this. I can look at them, and they accept it without wanting a thing from me but admiration. I look at them without fear or design, without glasses, because morning sun is at my back. They are beautiful, some. And I want to see an erection. Show me an erection, the more upright—men on their knees or feet—the more amazing. Let me see. What does that feel like, standing at attention in the open air?
Between us, a cool ice-plant pond floats above hot sand, and I consider reaching back, tying my top, flipping right-side-up, rolling off my chaise, slipping my thongs on, and taking the path that cuts through the succulent carpet, then over to the creek and following it to the salt water, which will cool me even more than the creek water, and surely sting my just-shaved legs once it swirls and scours the Johnson's Baby Oil away. Walking in the water's reflection has given my legs an all-around even tan that April, beside me, doesn't get, because she's afraid of seaweed around her ankles and the prick-tickle of burrowing crabs underfoot in wet sand. I anticipate how the water will feel, but for now I lie here next to April, face-up on her lounge, asleep, a big straw hat shading her flaming cheeks and near-burnt nose. I rest my chin on folded arms and watch the men, who, for now, are flaccid or turned away.The nude-beach is de facto gay, and, in fact, de facto nude. Set back in this cove as it is, and protected from PCH by the offshoot road dipping down to the houses, it offers a certain privacy. Every now and then, someone in authority will come along and hand out citations for public nudity, as the beach is private only in little aprons of frontage, like this patio and the ice plant before it, a short rough-wood picket fence and its gate between the two terrains, and between those and the water what April calls the hippieized beach. To the south of the creek are surfers and day-families and restaurants. To the north are surfers and Malibuites and restaurants. Here on the north side of the creek are funkier, shackier beach homes, and surfers, and nude, gay hippies.
From what I can determine, and my theory seems to be generally accepted among the adults, because gay men come here to be nude, straight women feel unthreatened being nude, because straight men are unnerved being nude around homosexuals. I don't know if any of the women are lesbians. Regardless, everyone benefits from the draw. No one bothers us.
April and I do not go nude, not even topless, here on her father's patio, nor up on the deck, nor anywhere out of doors. We sleep down here, off the patio, in the brick-floored, daylight basement (where there's a tiki bar, a pool table, two single beds, and an old sofa before the fireplace). We only visit April's father because he lives at the beach. He is truly an asshole. He denies us and criticizes us, but he sends us into places in our short-shorts, when he thinks that we can get whatever for him faster than he can. He is upstairs right now in do-no-disturb mode, which means the doors from his deck are locked—both the main entrance at the side of the house, next to the kitchen, and the ocean-view French doors off the living room. These are the only entrances from downstairs into the upstairs, here on the outside—which means we have not been able to use the bathroom since last night, after Whit brought home that woman—a woman April and I have not seen, have only heard, and I don't exactly want to talk about that. (April is calling her "trumpet slut," which we have shortened to "strumpet," sight unseen).
We have been using the sandalwood-candle-lit outhouse and the Dr. Bronner's and Herbal Essence scented outdoor shower, where anyone could see us on this side of the creek or approaching from the dirt access road that dips down to the houses from PCH; or anyone walking up from the beach; only the trees along the creek shield us from binocular-strapped men at the rangers' station. We shower in bikinis.
April's father prefers us to walk to the ocean through the creek water rather than cutting a swath through the homosexuals, because he doesn't want us to see their potential erections, which they do get sometimes, not because of our skinny little asses or my oversized tits but I assume because they look at each other, and it can't always be helped. I went years skinny dipping with gay men in our Pacific Palisades pool without seeing an erect penis, two of my mom's best friends, before she left L.A. with her second husband for Montana. They did not flaunt their weenies—would usually get into the water before I did and out after. I saw them kissing, hanging under the diving board and standing in the shallow end. They were—they are—in love. After our parents—mine and my friends'—divorced, still my "uncles" Donald and Jackson are together.
In my fourteen years, I can count on one hand the number of penises I've seen. I have never seen my father's outside his tighty-whities. My first naked-man sighting was my cousin's black boyfriend, when he was sick and sitting naked at the bottom of the stairwell, waiting to be served a bowl of chicken soup, when I was eight. Then Donald and Jackson. Then when my mom and her second husband took me to see Hair at the Aquarius Theater, when I was nine. Then at the Mendocino commune where my cousin lived. Okay, several—but not erect. Yes, I have felt hard-ons, making out with guys, but they were lying or pressing against me, on top of me, or in my hand, not flying free. Standing, that resistance to gravity amazes me. When they have nothing to do with me, I am free to observe.
I do not want to see my father's or April's father's—nobody's father's. April's mother told her after the divorce, tipsy and chatty on martinis, that what attracted her to Whit (April did ask) was that he is good in bed. You can't tell me that! April said. Apparently, because of his size. Whenever Whit shows up with a woman he can't possibly deserve, my dad cocks an eyebrow and slowly moves a down-facing palm upward from his lap to illustrate, like the mercury level rising in a thermometer.
I whiff coffee from upstairs, Herbal Essence from my drying hair, baking, salty sea grapes, and burning marijuana drifting up from the beach. Two guys beyond the gate, beyond the ice plant, sit up on their towels, rise to their knees, facing the sea, their Coppertone Girl butts beaming my way, as if in white Speedos; above and below, skin as dark as tobacco. Now they face each other, momentarily, preparing to flip onto bellies with their heads toward the house, and I see their weenies, standing pert as silhouetted mud-flap chicks' tits. I reach back to tie my top, to sit up for a better look, when the men turn my way with horrified expressions like April now wears, startled from under her hat by Reveille, blasting from the horn of a dark-haired woman in a diaphanous gown at the railing of Whit's deck, a dark upside-down triangle visible through her fabric, brown aureolas and nipples. I am hanging loose when Whit steps to the railing, all dewy eyed and pouchy crotched from the trumpet slut, and says: "Isn't she magnificent?"
Pamela Balluck's fiction, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in, among other publications, The Western Humanities Review as winner of the Competition for Utah Writers, Quarter After Eight as semi-finalist in their genre-blurring Prose Contest, The Southeast Review as finalist in The World's Best Short Short Story Contest, in the first volume of Pank, along with flash fiction as prose poem in Barrow Street. She has fiction forthcoming in the Outrider Press anthology Seasons of Change, and in the 2010 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories anthology. For two years she was Fiction Editor of Quarterly West, before graduating in 2008 with a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She has been awarded a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center as a June 2010 Fellow. "Bugle Call" is an excerpt from The Gammut Bunch, a novel in progress she'll be working on there.