The Naked Remedy

Chapter 1 I’ve seen a lot of naked guys online. Don’t believe me? Look at the facts. I’m a twenty-six year-old closeted gay man with undiagnosed social anxieties who still lives at home. I do have a job, though. I’m not that pathetic. I’m a sonographer at the hospital which actually pays well enough for me to rent a place of my own if I wasn’t so nervous about breaking out of my comfort zone. So looking at naked men on my laptop? That’s been the model of my dating life for the past seven years. But when I saw him…he might as well have been the first. I stared. A lot. I didn’t back out or click forward or scroll down or do anything that would erase him from my screen. It was like I had only just discovered how beautiful the male body could be. He stood in roiling surf, the pinking sky behind him announcing the coming dawn. His sturdy body faced the horizon, arms thrown out in welcome, the smile he threw over his broad shoulder at the photographer radiating joy, but just as compelling as that were the scars that snaked down his right hip and thigh. Though brown hair furred his legs, arms, and even the robust curve of his ass, the twisting scars were devoid of any texture but the badge of long-healed skin. The right calf was noticeably smaller than its mate, more evidence of whatever tragedy had caused the scars in the first place. I felt like a voyeur, staring at the imperfections, but I dismissed my unease. He obviously knew he was being photographed. He’d even stripped down for it. This was a man who wanted to be seen. No text accompanied the picture. It wasn’t a surprise. People shared other people’s pics all the time, and this one in particular hadn’t merited more than a few hundred likes when I stumbled across it. When I scrolled down through the list, however, an anonymous fan added a link with its note. The dude from the Naked Remedy. He rocks. The Naked Remedy. I’d never heard of that. A guick Google search brought it up first, though, so I clicked on it to get more information. I’m not sure if my world changed when I saw the blog or when I first saw his picture. I suppose in the end it doesn’t really matter which was responsible. The important part was that nothing was the same after that. The picture I’d seen was one of dozens of the Naked Remedy’s owner. According to his About page, his name was Fisher Almonte, and he lived in Orlando. By day, he worked in PR for one of the theme parks—he refused to name which one—while off-hours, he indulged in his modeling/photography. Contrary to the way it looked, it wasn’t a lark. He had very specific goals in mind by doing it. I didn’t start out in PR. I come from a family of firefighters, and as soon as I graduated high school, I started doing what was necessary to follow in my dad’s and big brothers’ footsteps. It didn’t take long. I knew what I was doing. I worked hard. It all paid off. The picture he posted of his firefighting days showed a slimmer version of the Fisher I’d first seen, caught in a headlock by somebody who was obviously an older brother. His grin was wild and carefree, his love of life emanating from every pore. As attractive as he was, I found myself wishing I knew this person in real life. He’d be fun to hang out with, always ready with a joke or a kind word. The kind of person this world needed a lot more of, frankly. I’d been working full-time when I got caught out in a fire at a warehouse. I wish I could say I was stuck inside because I did something heroic, but that would be a lie. But don’t think I was there because I was an i***t, either. It was just one of those fluke accidents, where the fire decides it needs to remind mankind that it’s a beast not to be taken for granted. I got pinned under a burning wall until one of my buddies could get me out. I stared at the photo of the skeletal building with rising horror. Hardly anything remained. How had he survived? I was in the hospital for weeks. At first, there was talk about me losing the leg. That was the last thing I wanted. I still had hopes of getting back to the job, so I busted my ass in physical therapy, doing everything I was told and then some to save it. Winning was a double-edged sword, though. I had surgeries galore over the next year. Whatever it took to keep it and minimize the pain. At the end, I had my leg, but I lost my career, and with it, all sense of purpose that I ever had. While I was recovering, I did some speaking gigs around the area about fire safety. Nothing like the poster boy for what can go wrong to scare the s**t out of people, right? I didn’t really like it—it made blocking out the nightmares that could still sneak up on me harder—but it turned out, I was good at it. I needed that. I needed to be successful at something, you know? One day, I was at an elementary school, and this boy asked if he could see my leg. I stepped out from behind the podium to show him, and the teacher in charge immediately cut me off. “You don’t want to embarrass Mr. Almonte, now do you?” she said to the kid. I tried to say it wasn’t a big deal, but she was firm. After they went out for recess, she explained she didn’t want to scare the other kids. Like my leg was some creature from a horror film they needed to be protected from. I didn’t argue with her, but I couldn’t get what she said out of my head. So what if my leg looked different than theirs? It’s a part of me, and I had no reason to be ashamed of it. But I realized something else, too. I hadn’t fought to show them because deep down, I was embarrassed by it. It was the sign I’d screwed up. I was using it as an excuse for a lot of things. Not looking for a new passion to make my career. Not going out with friends. Not dating. The Naked Remedy is the record of how I’m trying to change that. I read on, absolutely enamored with the path he’d chosen. Because of the incident at the school, Fisher decided to bare his leg with pride at least once a week. He chose an outdoor location, found an adequate time to get a nude photograph without garnering negative attention, then posted the pictures on Monday mornings. The rest of the week, he talked about his recovery and his personal life with such intimate detail, it felt like I was taking part in a group confessional. No ads, no product pushing, nothing but Fisher and his life and his insecurities and everything that he decided made his life great. By the time I clicked back to his main page, I was more than a little jealous. Crushing on him, too. How could I not? He was cute, he was open, and he was living a life I could only dream about. I dared to click on the link to leave a comment and wrote it out before I lost the nerve. You might be the bravest person I’ve ever seen. Thank you. “Noah! Come set the table!” With a sigh, I closed my laptop and clambered off the bed to carry it to the chipped corner desk I’d had since junior high. I hated sitting at the thing. I was eleven inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than when Dad caved on my begging for a desk of my own in seventh grade. Since I had the smallest room in the house, he got a pressboard one from Target that tucked away in the corner. I didn’t have the space to replace it, so I used it as a charging station and did all my gaming and surfing stretched out on my bed instead. I wandered out to the kitchen to find my mother bent over in front of the stove, pulling out the chicken tetrazzini we always had on Wednesday night. According to her, it was her good luck dish. It was what she’d made for my dad the night he proposed to her, and what they’d been eating when her water broke when she was pregnant with my oldest brother Seth. She always made it on the SuperLotto Plus drawing nights. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her it couldn’t be very lucky if she’d never won the big prize. She gave me a wan smile when she straightened, pushing a sweaty strand of thin gray hair off her forehead. “Jackpot’s up to thirty-two million tonight. Think of what we could do with that much money!” I wanted to say, “We’d never have to eat chicken tetrazzini again,” but that would just be mean. Mom had very few vices. She didn’t smoke, she only drank on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and she never indulged in overpriced lattes at the sole coffee shop in town. Instead, she spent ten dollars a week on the California SuperLotto Plus, five tickets for Wednesday night’s drawing, five more for Saturday’s. Whining about the rituals that came with it would only make her feel bad, and what place did I have to do that? Besides, just because she’d never won the big prize didn’t mean it was a complete waste of time. Once every few months, she got the mega and at least one other number, and about once a year, she managed to snag fifty or sixty dollars with a win. It was enough to keep her motivated to keep playing, and we got to go to the Chinese buffet in town to celebrate. What was the harm? So instead of whining, I played along. “A new car,” I said. I placed the rainbow melamine plates around the table and went to the silverware drawer. I’d bought the new dishes for Mom last Christmas when I was debating coming out, but then Seth and Lisa had used the holiday to tell her she was going to be a grandmother for the first time. I couldn’t say anything then, because I’d have to live forever with the reminders about how I’d spoiled the announcement for everyone. “I thought you got your brake lights fixed,” Mom said. “I did. Someone dinged me in the hospital parking lot. I’ve got white paint smears along the passenger side in the front.” “Did you report it?” “To who? I don’t know who did it.” “You look for the white car with black paint marks on it,” my dad said as he entered. He went straight to the counter where Mom was sprinkling more fake parmesan cheese across the top of the casserole and stuck his nose in the rising steam. “Mmmmm, that smells good. So what are the rest of you eating?” Mom laughed—as she always did—and Dad poured drinks for everyone as I finished with the table setting. My life was one big dance where everybody always made the same steps, to the same music, to the same mediocre score at the end of the night. We’d altered our rhythms every time another one of my brothers moved out—I had two in total—but it had been the three of us for almost six years now. We pretty much had it perfected. While we ate, Dad bitched about the i***t mechanic they’d hired at the station, while Mom told stories about what had happened at Safeway during her morning shift. When it came to be my turn, I blocked out what had been the most exciting thing I’d seen—the blog—and talked about the young couple who’d come into the ER convinced they were losing their baby. I’d shown up with my equipment to get sonograms of the little boy—they were calling him Homer after a grandfather who’d just passed away, they said, and I didn’t have the heart to ask them why they would saddle the kid with “Doh!” jokes for the rest of his life—to find out everything would be okay. “It’s a sign,” Mom said at the end of my story. Dad scooped another spoonful of tetrazzini onto his plate. I love my parents to death, but I have no idea how Dad could still enjoy it with such gusto after eating so much of it in his lifetime. “Of what?” he asked. “We’re going to win tonight.” “Because new parents were overreacting about Braxton Hicks?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” “Everything’s aligned for good things to happen,” she argued. “I got to leave work early, they got the news about their Homer, and Dad has someone at work to help him with those transmissions he hates doing.” “Helping me is a very generous way of putting it,” Dad said. “You’re not going to change my mind.” Rising, Mom took her sink to the plate to rinse it off. “Today’s the day that will change the rest of our lives. Just you wait.” I didn’t bother trying to change her mind as we carried our usual dessert—bowls of Jell-O with fruit cocktail—out to the living room. Mom grabbed her purse along the way, while Dad had a battered copy of a Tom Clancy novel to read. Me, I got to choose what we watched while we waited for the lottery results to get posted. They didn’t televise them anymore. Mom hated that she couldn’t see it live, complaining in the beginning that the lottery people could fix the numbers if nobody was watching, but it was a relief not to have to sit through it. I could just put Wheel of Fortune on, and as a family, we could spend the whole half hour mocking how stupid the contestants were by not knowing the event B_C_Y_R_ _U_U was BACKYARD LUAU. I mean, come on. What else was that second word going to be? At eight, I pulled out my phone to check the numbers. “Ready?” Mom had her ticket in hand, dark eyes so much like mine bright with anticipation. “Ready.” Slowly, I started reading them out. By the third number, her quivering excitement had started to fade, and she caught the corner of her lip between her teeth as she stared at the lottery ticket. I finished with the Mega number. “Twenty-six.” “Oh!” Her gasp startled both me and Dad, and I looked up from my phone to find her beaming at me. “Two plus the Mega. That’s not too shabby.” Actually, that was likely to only be around ten dollars, but for Mom, a win was a win. “So what kind of car are you going to buy me?” I joked. “Can you even get a Matchbox car for that these days?” Dad grumbled, turning back to his book. “Not a car, but you should treat yourself and go out with it this weekend,” Mom said. “I was kidding. It’s your winnings.” “Won because of you. Why do you think I picked twenty-six for my Mega number?” She held out the ticket until I had no choice but to take it. “You cash it in. I told you it was going to be your lucky day.” A lucky day was a far cry from changing my life, but it was pointless to argue. We settled in to watch CSI reruns, like it was any other Wednesday night. My eyes were bleary when I went to bed. The low murmur of my parents’ voices down the hall disappeared when I shut the door. Pulling my shirt over my head, I tossed it on top of my hamper as I crossed to my desk. The lottery winnings could pay for a movie this weekend. If something good was opening, I might be able to convince someone from work to go with me. I made a shortlist of who I might be able to sell on the idea, but as I started to close my laptop, I noticed the number on my sss tab. I had a new message in my inbox. Though it was probably spam, I clicked over to check it. It wasn’t spam. It was a response to the comment I’d left on the Naked Remedy blog. I stared at the subject header. Nobody ever responded to me on the rare occasions I thought of something worthwhile to say. The email didn’t contain the text of the comment, just the link that would lead me straight to it. My gasp when I saw who it was from rivaled the one Mom had made when I read off the Mega number. Fisher Almonte. What he said was even better. You just reached out to a total stranger on the web. That sounds like bravery to me. Kudos to both of us.