Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito Page A

would make herself a pariah to every human resources manager. She would get a tattoo on her face.
    It was a bold move, and an even bolder tattoo. On her forehead, directly on her third eye, she tattooed a nine-pointed star with a backward number nine within its center. Whenever she was asked why she tattooed a backward number nine, Elizabeth explained that it was so she would see the number nine
whenever she looked in the mirror. The tattoo, in other words, was for her, and for no one else. Elizabeth enjoyed explaining this to people, and it amused her that no one ever thought to ask the further question: Why number nine?
    Truth be told, Elizabeth had no particular reason for creating this design other than that number nine was her favorite number, but it nevertheless benefited her in a manner she had not anticipated. For though she had long and lustrous bronze hair; shining green eyes; strong, lithe limbs; and a smile that could flummox a Minotaur, all these features went unnoticed behind the irrepressible grandeur of her breasts, arcing before the rest of her body like sails swollen on the sighs of Mother Earth. But that is not a descriptive that Elizabeth would have chosen. Grotesque slabs of flab, that was how Elizabeth thought of her breasts. Her tattoo at last gave her a feature more commanding, and the backward number nine made that feature hers and hers alone.
    But let us not dawdle and gawk insensitive and rude. Elizabeth had big breasts, yes, yes indeed. But for everyone she had known since grade school, she didn’t just have big breasts. She
was
big breasts, only big breasts, all object and no subject, her boobs riling every restricted impulse and blinding all to anything but their own lust and lechery.
    Let us not be so cruel as that.
    Â 
    36 M OST PEOPLE don’t know what a cremaster is. Elizabeth Wildhack does. Elizabeth learned all about the cremaster in a biology class she once attended. There are two definitions: one having to do with butterflies and the other having to do
with testicles. In entomology, the cremaster refers to the little hook by which a chrysalis attaches to a twig. In anatomy, the cremaster refers to the muscle from which the testicles dangle.
    â€œA muscle is defined as a tissue that produces movement in the body.” Elizabeth was explaining all of this to her best friend and fellow dancer, Diana, backstage at Red’s Cabaret, the high-class gentleman’s club where they both worked. “So do you know how the cremaster moves?”
    â€œNo,” Diana dutifully replied, carefully rolling a joint. “But I’m really not sure I want to find out.”
    â€œWell, you’re about to anyway, and there’s really no way to put it delicately, so here it is uncensored: When the cremaster contracts, men wag their balls.”
    â€˜Diana stopped rolling her joint and wrinkled her nose. “What?”
    â€œI know!” Elizabeth laughed. “I was surprised when I heard about this too, but I learned about it in a biology class. They call it testicular pendulation, and it exists as a sort of secondary sexual response, like nipple erections.”
    â€œTesticular pendulation?” Diana repeated thoughtfully as she lit her joint.
    â€œIn fact,” Elizabeth continued, “the word scrotum originally derives from the Latin
scrautum
, for quiver. Imagine that, a quivering scrotum.”
    â€œI’d really rather not,” Diana interrupted, passing the joint to Elizabeth. “I hate the word scrotum.”
    â€œI know, it’s yucko. But most men are so repressed in their sexuality that they’ve suppressed their quivering scrotums without even realizing it. Studies even suggest that this pent-up
resistance to their own testicular pendulation is a factor both in impotence and premature ejaculation.” Elizabeth nodded and took a drag off the joint, then grinned enormously. “I’m just kidding,” she confessed,