Wyld Nakd Deud

“The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” Thoreau

I started kindergarten at the age of five wearing Red Ball Jets sneakers. With these shoes I could run faster, climb higher, and jump farther. Nothing was impossible, which I set out to prove early one morning on the very first day of what would become 13 years of schooling.

With my entire class as my captive audience, I decided to jump from table to table all across the room. The more enthusiastic my classmates became the faster I ran and the more I jumped. The laughter quickly became a crescendo until the whole performance came to an abrupt halt when our teacher shouted my name.

David Hudson, what do you think you’re doing? Get down off that table!

I really didn’t know what I was doing or why. To this day I cannot think of what could possibly have impelled me to become a spectacle in front of strangers. All I remember was that it felt good to be nonconforming, individualistic, uncommon, unexpected - to be obviously and proudly different.

I had to break the rules and be willing to be branded a rebel to feel that pleasure.

It’s both amazing and illuminating that this exploit is one of my earliest memories. I wasn’t too much older when I started my first robber’s club with my neighborhood buddies. I wanted to be a thief cast in the mold of urbane criminals on television, the kind who wear suits and never get dirty, injured, or caught.

Unfortunately, when only nine years old, I convinced the only two other members of the club to join me in vandalizing a local business. One dropped out before the idiocy could get beyond discussion and into execution. When the police arrived at my house I ran upstairs and hid under my bed. My twin brother hoped I would go to prison so he could be famous from having lived with a thug.

When the club was forced to disband, I took up smoking my mother’s cigarettes with my girlfriend under a highway bridge. After I tired of the taste of smoke in my mouth, my male friends and I turned to skinny dipping.

Looking back, I see a pattern. I was born for the edge. Fog the frame. Ravage the rules. Beat the box. Lose the limits. Move the margins. Bury the boundaries. Find the frontier. Rinse and repeat.

As a boy I was captivated by the wonder of the unknown and terrified of the triviality of the mundane. My daydreams were all about escaping from home with only a backpack and a compass, traversing the Rockies, befriending wolves, becoming a cowboy, and living on the back of a horse. Or, becoming a renegade entrepreneur who designs and builds against every convention and expectation. Or, rising from obscurity to become a politician who stakes out all the issues and still savors the hazard of meeting his most oppositional constituents.

As I grew up I tended to groan periodically from the weight of the behaviors expected from me through the labels I wore. Methodist, Republican, Evangelical, Son of a Lawyer, Grandson of a Judge, Conservative, Affluent, Christian. These markers aimed to severely constrict that deep-rooted wild and naked life-force inside me.

I’ve had the opportunity to participate in several men’s retreats and getaways, all of faith except one. On one occasion the men of the church decided to camp out under the stars in early November. Naturally, the availability of junk food would practically guarantee a large number of registrants, and the promise of a roaring fire would inject the kind of testosterone roast all men crave. However, despite the bait, only five men signed up. Further complicating the logistics of the excursion, the campsite was in a pasture over three hours north from where we all lived.

We made the trek, but since we embarked about 6 pm, we didn’t arrive at the campsite until nearly 10 pm. Not one to complain, and with sights on the junk food, I got out of the pickup only to collide with staggeringly frigid air. Yet, with the fire just ahead, I knew the glacial greeting I had received would soon melt.

An hour later all five of us were sitting around the fire talking about everything and nothing. In the midst of this monotony, my wild and naked life-force sparked an idea that I was certain would be judged as inappropriate given the nature of our group. I turned to Evan, the youngest among us, and dared him to strip and dance naked around the fire, and then added that he would never take the dare. To my amazement, he said he’d strip if I striped.

I told him arrogantly that I was not afraid to strip and dance, but he most definitely was. No, he told me, he would go through with it if I did.I agreed, thinking this dare wouldn’t go far enough to singe one hair on my body. I stood up and took off my baseball cap. And he did the same. Next came my parka, and then his.

At this point I realized the heat from our fire in this polar encampment did not radiate more than 24 inches from the fire’s edge. One step back from that heat ring and the world became instantly frigid and hostile. Regardless, I continued disrobing, confident that once we got our shirts off we would stop the stupidity.

With our shirts off, Evan didn’t look like he intended to slow down. He was gunning now for the prize while taunting me to follow or forfeit. I had no choice but to stay in the race. T-shirt, pants, underwear, shoes, and socks.

We were buck naked dancing around the fire.

We urged the other three to join us in this intemperate, indecent, full-frontal assault on the code of conduct governing evangelical men’s retreats, but they refused. They only wanted to watch two naked men navigate the heat ring, doing their best to dodge sparks and avoid freezer burn.

I have loved to dance since my first school dance in seventh grade when I was 12 years old. I’m not referring to the garden variety dancing that requires an instruction manual and paper shoeprints taped to the floor, but the uncommon kind fired by the ecstasy that comes from unbounded freedom.

I was tornadic on the dance floor; gyrating and whirling, and requiring an eight-foot diameter clearance. In no other space could I uncage my inner wild man so completely as I could on a dance floor glazed with strobe lights and oxygenated with ear-shattering music. I could spin myself into a trance where everything around me became blurry and irrelevant.

When the music started at the keggers in my fraternity, I would scan the room to find any woman who looked alive enough to dance. If she said no, I went on to the next one. I was desperate for the dance floor so I didn’t care who said yes. I may even have settled for our house mother, who was in her 70s. All the woman had to do was just be on the dance floor. She didn’t actually have to dance; she just needed to stay out of my way.

Even later in life, after I was married with children, I seized the chance to go to a rave from 2-6 a.m. in an old downtown warehouse. We were all nameless in a strange place that was crowded, hot, and soaked with energy; all of us reaching for the moment when the passion for untethered expression finally breaks free from the terror of being unmistakably unusual and wide open vulnerable.

Inside every man lives a wild man who wants to dance in daylight but can’t because he’s hidden, repressed, or denied by the agreements a man makes with himself about how he should act in a man’s world. That wild man is the grownup version of the little boy who jumped from table to table with his brand-new sneakers. The boy didn’t know he should be intimidated or inhibited. He just saw an opportunity to come alive in a new way and he took it.

The wild man is the essence of the soul, the imprint of God that makes a man unique. When he lives in obscurity because of the tags men use to define themselves, that life-infusing spirit, which is a native drive in every man, becomes detached from the man’s individuality. The man becomes less than he could be, or was meant to be. Since the wild man cannot be revealed, expressed, or accepted, he retreats into darkness to remain in an unnatural state of dormancy living a life of quiet desperation awaiting his awakening or his death.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the dance, said he…

Music: Brand New by Ben Rector