How Mooning the Neighborhood Taught Me to Never Give Up
Surviving Hot Kansas Summers with Nudity and Fortitude

My brother and I used to pull our beds up to the windows and sleep naked during the summers. Our house was the only one in the neighborhood without central air. On blistering-hot, depressingly humid August nights — in Kansas, no less — we had to get creative.

Our rooms were next to each other at one end of our ranch-style house, which meant a third of the windows in the front were filled with white asses perfectly squared by tan lines. Sometimes on particularly restless nights, our butts jumped the ledges and were pressing against the window screens. I can only imagine how mortified the neighbors were when they drove by on their way to work in the mornings, but one of them ever said anything to us. They knew the situation.

This was back in the days when neighbors cared about one another and, from time to time, families mixed to watch a movie together or for a cookout. Everyone on our street knew my mom and dad split up years ago and we were barely making it on her secretary’s salary and miniscule child support payments.

The squalor was noticeable from the curb. Our house looked like it could sigh beneath the weight of its own eaves. We lived in the smallest model in an already modest neighborhood. with beige aluminum siding slipping free in places and dark streaks where the roof shingles blew away. My friends lived in three-story and four-story houses with finished basements, while our basement had bare cement walls, floors and a central drain that erupted with feces and toilet tissue twice a month.

When something broke, it stayed broken. My father wasn’t around long enough to teach us how to fix anything. When the shower wall collapsed, we taped a black Glad bag where the tiles used to be. When the faucet wouldn’t turn, we just left a pair of pliers clamped to it permanently.

But even as a kid, I knew this wasn’t going to be my life forever. I didn’t know how or when or what exactly it would look like. I just knew. You have to. Otherwise you’d start thinking trash bag showers and sleeping arrangements that required screened-in-butt were your destiny. You’d start settling for tool-cranked hot water and a rising layer of your own excrement. You’d start to believe it was pure providence the whole place hadn’t slumped into the earth like a wet cardboard box.

I used to lie there in my window, my body sticking to the bedsheets and dream of a house with working ceiling fans in every room and walls thicker than papier-mâché. I’d picture myself walking into a bedroom the size of two closets instead of one. I knew I wasn’t going to be here forever because I refused to believe life was just a long string of duct tape and disappointment.

So yes, our house looked like a pipe bomb exploded, and yes, our butts were practically the welcome sign out front, but we didn’t let it break us. We made it fun. We turned the house crumbling around us into a running joke and survival into something just shy of performance art.

When your life is crumbling around you, sometimes all you can do is moon the world and laugh. You just have to know it’s not forever. When you’ve lived like a zoo exhibit with your ass exposed to the world, the only direction you can go is up.

 

Kevin Kuzma has been writing since he could hold a pencil, filling spiral notebooks with drawings and stories. After a brief career as a journalist, he now earns a living writing press releases, pitching stories to the media and penning absurd stories that make people laugh. He also enjoys hiking, thrift shopping and helping people feel less awkward at parties so he himself can feel more comfortable.