Naked

David walks to a local movie theater to see a Planet of the Apes marathon. When the marathon ends, it starts to rain. His mother is busy, and his father won’t pick him up, so David hitches a ride home. His father regularly picks up hitchhikers, so David expects to be picked up by a man like his father. Instead, he is picked up by an elderly woman who cautions him about the dangers of hitchhiking. Regardless, David starts hitchhiking on a regular basis, always making up outlandish stories about himself.

In college, David befriends a girl named Veronica, “whose life resembled one of the stories I’d invented […] She was adventurous and independent in a way I’d never known” (100). They frequently hitchhike across state lines together to go sightseeing. Veronica moves to San Francisco and invites David to join her. David goes with a fellow student, a self-styled beatnik named Randolph. They catch a ride with two men who break laws, steal, drive erratically, and identify themselves as Starsky and Hutch (the names of the two title characters in a popular 1970s TV show). David and Randolph are terrified, which amuses “Starsky and Hutch.” David and Randolph flee at the first opportunity.

Randolph and David hitchhike all the way to San Francisco, where they meet Veronica. Randolph leaves after 10 days, and David remains for three months, after which he and Veronica move up and down the West Coast and then across the country again. He realizes that this experience “was the realization of my high-school fantasy, except that Veronica bore little resemblance to a proboscis monkey” (104). They part ways before they reach Raleigh so that David can delay returning home and visit college friends in Ohio. He expects his friends to find him worldly and enchanting after his experiences on the road.

David hitches a ride to Kent State with a truck driver named T.W. Although he initially seems friendly and naïve, T.W. turns violent and threatens David with a gun. David decides to “jump and roll” (137) out of the truck as he often saw detectives do on TV, but T.W. parks on the side of the road and pursues him into the woods. David hides until T.W. gives up and drives away. He hitches a ride with a group of college students who are unsympathetic to the frightening situation he just escaped and use an anti-gay slur to make fun of him when he tells them about T.W.

David continues to hitchhike after this experience, but he loses his trust in other people. His newfound suspicion of others is a “beacon” that attracts unsavory drivers. While hitchhiking, David is frequently propositioned for sex, which he finds unpleasant.

Sedaris ends the chapter by stating that he’s still never learned to drive.

David fantasizes about attending Ivy League universities. He covets the upper-class lifestyle, but his poor grades prohibit him from attending. Instead, he enrolls at Kent State “because people had been killed there” (115). The school covers his room and board because he volunteers to room with a disabled student. His assigned roommate, Peg, is an “incomplete quadriplegic” with a degenerative nerve condition.

Peg enrolled at Kent State to “escape her parents,” religious fanatics who fail to care for her and discourage her from complaining about her condition (116). As her roommate, David helps Peg with the basic tasks she can’t complete alone, such as getting to the toilet and feeding herself.

David notices that Peg’s condition renders her “invisible” in society. Others are unable to understand her slurred speech and habitually patronize her or look away pointedly. David and Peg use this invisibility as a smokescreen to shoplift.

David and Peg hitchhike to the Sedaris household for the holidays. They pose as a plucky newlywed couple, and “churchy couples” and good Samaritans offer them rides, food, and free accommodations. Peg and David fancy themselves con artists and find the acts of charity amusing. However, Peg’s dependence on David begins to wear on his nerves.

After David joins Veronica in San Francisco, Peg arrives unannounced and moves in with him. Life with Peg in San Francisco is much harder than it was in college: “Leaving the building involved carrying Peg up and down five flights of stairs before returning for her wheelchair. […] I lost my job when Peg fell against the bathtub, taking five stitches in her head” (120). When David and Veronica leave California, Peg moves to Berkeley. She has a volunteer caretaker visit her apartment regularly and ignores her parents’ phone calls. Within a year, however, her condition progresses, and she moves in with her parents.

Before dying in 1979, Peg undergoes a “religious transformation” and writes her memoirs. She shares her manuscript with David, in which she praises “all those wonderful people” (120) who helped her and David on their hitchhiking trip. He reminds her that they used to mock those people, but he ends the essay by noting that Peg had a greater understanding, long before he did, of kindness.

“C.O.G.” opens on an unpleasant bus ride to Odell, Oregon. David finds his traveling companions small-minded and coarse. This is his second trip to the Hood River Valley. The previous summer, Veronica decided they should be migrant laborers and work in an orchard: “It was her habit to speak for the both of us, and I rarely minded as it kept me from having to make any decisions of my own” (127). They envision a rustic and “heroic” life on a farm. Instead, they perform thankless labor under poor conditions, and they idealize the experience as a rough pioneer lifestyle.

They return home and make plans to go back to Hobbs’s orchard the following summer. When the time comes, however, Veronica backs out because she has a boyfriend. David is furious and goes alone, “convinced that if I never spoke to another human being for the rest of my life, it would be too soon” (129). He returns to Hobbs’s farm and lives in a trailer, but work on the orchard is crushingly lonely without Veronica. He writes letters to his friends and family but gets no responses. David considers returning home but decides against it: “What was there to return to? How had I ever considered those people to be my friends when they were too lazy to pick up a pencil and write a letter? Surely, they missed me. Perhaps the best strategy was to see that they missed me even more” (132).

After picking season ends, David takes work at a local packing plant, where he sorts apples on a conveyor belt. He tries to charm his coworkers, but everyone except a large man named Curly dislikes him. David describes Curly as “hokey” and “a loser” but accepts his friendship out of necessity. Curly takes David back to his trailer, which he shares with his elderly mother. David recoils: “While I might stay in a trailer, it was clear that Curly actually lived in one; and it horrified me that he might have mistaken me for one of his own” (139). Curly makes several insistent sexual advances on David, who jumps out the bathroom window and spends the night sleeping in a ditch. He decides to stop going to the plant.

The next day, David hitches a ride with “Jonathan Combs, C.O.G.,” a religious fanatic with two prosthetic legs. He says that “C.O.G.” stands for “child of God” and insists that David will help him produce jade clocks shaped like Oregon. With nothing else to do, David agrees.

Jon is part of a community of devout Christians. Although his community members are kind, Jon is avaricious and cruel. He is obsessed with selling clocks and frequently berates David for being stupid, clumsy, and ungrateful. Jon teaches David to cut and polish jade. David becomes immersed in Jon’s community and considers becoming a Christian himself. As fall turns to winter, the weather gets colder. David’s trailer is unheated, so he spends more and more time in Jon’s workshop. He starts sleeping there and makes jade stash boxes out of scrap in his spare time, returning only occasionally to his trailer.

Around Christmas, Hobbs delivers six letters to David’s trailer; they’re from Veronica, Lisa, Sharon, and two of David’s friends from school. Moved, he admits, “I read each one again and again, tracing my fingers over the word love until I could see each of them clearly, sitting at their desks and kitchen tables” (152).

Curly arrives at David’s trailer unannounced and sexually assaults him. David is able to chase him away only by proclaiming that he is a Christian. Curly leaves. The next day, David tells Jon what happened. Jon responds with disgust and pity: “‘The guy was a homo, right? […] But you’re that way, too, aren’t you? […] You are, aren’t you? You’re sick.’ He said it with concern, the way you might address a friend with tubes running from his nose” (154). Jon makes David renounce being gay, and David halfheartedly flubs his way through the process to appease him.

David and Jon sell their clocks and boxes at a marketplace in Portland. David sells all his jade boxes; Jon sells nothing. On the drive home, Jon pulls over on the highway and kicks David out of the car. He berates David for being a “user” and drives away. David resolves to return home to Raleigh.