Uncle Mike: The Nudist Babysitter

No crime or indiscretion was beyond the grasp of my ex-step uncle, Mike. He was a rapscallion par excellence. Christmases frequently involved going up to the Kendallville jail to bail him out of some Christmas Eve criminal chicanery. He did it all. Alcohol. Drugs. Pot. Philandering. No female was too young or too old for his lechery. Uncle Mike was Nam-addlepated as was evidenced by his beliefs about what comprise appropriate decorum. He loomed large in his bellbottoms. Like his brother, my stepfather, he was indomitable at six-foot four sporting a scruffy and untamed afro. He was rangy with his ass-crack permanently affixed above the jeans that struggled to hug his slender hips. He perpetually smelled of his beloved weed. He lived life to the fullest. He was going to squeeze all from this life that he could. And for the most part, he succeeded.

Mike, because of these virtues, was the best babysitter. A frequenter of nudist beaches, he was unable to have his film developed at the local Walgreens because Walgreens didn’t develop nude pictures. So, he built a dark room in one of his closets and taught my little brother, Joe, and me how to develop film. We were eight- and six-years-old respectively. Mike would be smoking weed while we were in the darkroom, marveling at what Uncle Mike saw and photographed. We learned early on that nudists are never the people you actually want to see naked. If our efforts satisfied Uncle Mike—and they always did—he would let us feed hamburger to his two piranhas.

On another babysitting escapade, Uncle Mike enlisted us into suitably appointing his Shaggin’ Wagon. I was eleven by now and Joe was 9. Uncle Mike had a brown van that he wanted to use to impress his ladies, or so he explained. With the wisdom of adulthood, “impress” is not the verb I would choose today. He had a reem of padding and faux leather each and many clear, plastic rosettes with tiny nails. He taught us how to staple the padding to the sheets of plywood he somehow managed to attach to the sides and ceiling of the van. After we stapled the padding, we next applied the faux leather. Finally, in staggered rows, at regular intervals, we nailed the rosettes into the leather to create the puffy effect Uncle Mike sought. It was, I had hoped, a valuable life skill. I imagined myself suitably appointing my own Shaggin’ Wagon when I grew up. While my brother and I toiled, Uncle Mike reclined in a lawn chair drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoking a joint while overseeing our labors.

And then came the piece de resistance: the waterbed. Joe and I dutifully slogged the empty waterbed into the van and watched as Uncle Mike drug the hose to the van and began filling what he called his “love pad.” Uncle Mike didn’t take much physics in school, and he didn’t appreciate how heavy waterbeds are when full. At some point, we watched in horror as the van collapsed upon its tires. Uncle Mike was so high he wasn’t even angry. But the Shaggin’ Wagon was not destined to have a waterbed…or suspension it would appear.

 

C. Christine Fair is a Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. She completed her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago. Her creative pieces have appeared in Hyptertext, Lunch Ticket, Bangalore Review, Glassworks, and Existere Journal of Arts, among others in addition to her prodigious scholarly work. She causes trouble in multiple languages: Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. She is a student at the Writers Studio.