Yes, Mickey still has more of this stuff to say. So, hang onto your shorts, and don’t let the old bird talk you out of them. But he’s gonna try… just like naturists once lobbied him.
And this stuff will probably not be as surprising as it was once or twice before, because you have heard him say it… err, saw him write it… in a previous post. Or two or three of them.
If you are one of those sane people who are not crazy enough to repeatedly read this blog, then you may indeed be surprised by stupid Mickey saying, “It’s good for you to be naked.” So, I should quickly review why Mickey ever needed to think about becoming a nudist at all.
You see, when Mickey was a child of ten, he was sexually assaulted by an older boy. Not a pleasurable thing, mind you, but a bizarre twisting of the private parts under threats of hurting the victim even more if he cried out or called for help. You know, the kind of thing that causes so much trauma that poor Mickey couldn’t allow himself to remember until he was twenty-two when he suddenly relived the entire incident in a PTSD-like flashback.
After the flashback, stupid Mickey decided that on this topic he needed to make himself into a smarter Mickey. He took a sociology class in college on human sexuality. He learned about the sexual abuse of children and the effects it commonly had on its victims. And of the many things he learned, he learned that it is important in the matter of healing to tell somebody. But he had a good, loving family, and he was reluctant to bring a life-spoiling thing like that to their attention. And the Methodist minister who had saved his life as a young teenager had moved away to a distant new congregation. So, who did he tell? His second regular girlfriend, the one who had been previously married and divorced. She had been through some tough things herself and therefore was able to understand.
The relationship between Mickey and Ysandra developed from working together as a teacher and teacher’s aide in a small South Texas school district. Their working relationship grew into a dating sort of thing by 1983, and one of the things that they most liked to do together was visiting Austin for the weekends. It was a long drive, but Mickey’s parents and Ysandra’s sister, and her family lived in the area. Mickey would stay in his parents’ house. And Ysandra would stay with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their baby daughter. They would go to see the sights in Austin, Zilker Park, the stage shows, the movie theaters, the good restaurants, and even the circus when it came to town. But there was one unexpected complication. Ysandra’s sister lived in a clothing-optional apartment house. And real nudists lived there.
Picking up Ysandra meant embarrassment. Mickey had to go up to the door with one of those sliding window things that gangsters use on bootlegger-casino doors, alert the gatekeeper to his presence, and then wait while the naked, hairy guy went and got Ysandra. And she invariably asked Mickey to come in and wait while she finished getting ready. There were lots of things inside there to look at and turn red over. Two young girls, probably sixth graders, were swimming nude in the pool one time, showing off bare butts when they dived. Another time, two beautiful young women with t-shirts and no pants on glared at him the whole time Mickey stood by the pool because, unbeknownst to Mickey, he was staring at them with an open mouth and purple face.
A third time, a boy with blond hair and no clothes on was playing pool at the courtyard pool table.
“Hey, skinny guy!” the boy said to Mickey, “take your clothes off and come play pool with me.”
“Can’t. Waiting for the girlfriend. Going to a movie,” Mickey said nervously.
Ysandra was fine with making fun of Mickey for being constantly embarrassed. She and her friends there enjoyed asking Mickey to go nude while spending time there, which he never did. The ladies got a good laugh when his face turned strange colors. But one of her brother-in-law’s friends took pity on Mickey and told him about the benefits of being naked in nature, nude in the sunshine, and meditating in your birthday suit. He also gave Mickey a book on naturism and an address for where he could get more such books.
And books were Mickey’s fatal weakness. He read and learned a lot about nudism. In his apartment, when he was alone and not expecting visitors, he got comfortable being naked most of the time. Of course, being seen naked by anyone else would start up the PTSD again. It was bad enough to interfere with getting closer and more intimate with Ysandra and eventually forced them apart. And being a school teacher precluded being known to be a nudist for Mickey. Still, the experience would lead to Mickey’s heart being captured by nudism as an ultimate goal.
Whether there will be a part 5 or not depends on a lot of things. For now it is merely a lingering threat.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
Leave a comment
Filed under autobiography, commentary, cowboys, humor, insight, philosophy, politics, Uncategorized
Tagged as autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, Wyatt Earp