Couchsurfing.com is a wonderful service that connects intrepid, open-minded travelers willing to host or be hosted in a new city or foreign country. For budget travelers, it is a godsend that saves them the second biggest expense of traveling: lodging (the first, of course, being your bar tab).

But what happens when your host greets you in just a t-shirt? By just a t-shirt, I don’t mean a t-shirt and some sort of underwear. I mean just a t-shirt. My way of thinking is that covering the top half of your body defeats the purpose of clothing if the bottom half is neglected. I assume that when man and woman first walked out of their cave and felt ashamed at being naked their first priority was to throw some fig leaves over the fruit of their loins. Fig leaf t-shirts came later.

These musings are grounded in a recent experience. Here’s the story. (Which I’m writing on my iPhone while walking! God I love the future.)

Homeless, Not Hopeless, In New York 

So, recently I relocated to New York City. Growing up the “Sunscreen Song” became a playbook for how to live and that song said that yeah, I’m supposed to live here once. So, here I am New York. Don’t worry; I’ll leave before it makes me hard.

Initially I had housing set up with a friend of a friend. That fell through. Then I was set to sublet a place in Park Slope. That also fell through. In the meantime I was staying a hostel. Since I was actively looking for a place I was booking my room one day at time. That turned out not to be the best idea when on the third day I went to book another night and was told they were full. I called some other hostels. Everyone was full. Happy birthday, Jesus.

I thought about booking a hotel room, but since hotels in New York City only accept gold bars as payment, and I had forgotten where I’d buried all my bullion, I opted out of that idea.

I hesitate to say I was homeless, because at the time my beard was only marginal and I didn’t smell like cat urine. But it was late in the day and while my stuff had a place to stay in the $5/day lockers in the basement of the hostel, I did not. So I turned to CouchSurfing.com and sent a dozen or so requests to various hosts. The first one to reply was, we’ll call him Dan. In the next paragraph he becomes “Naked” Dan.

Nice, But Naked

Dan was nice enough. He was an older gentleman, 68 to be exact. He also, as it turned out, was a nudist who reveled in walking around his house that way in front of his guests. Eye contact is important when you are speaking to someone who his naked, but it’s also somewhat impossible. Your eyes have a natural tendency to ask, is this for real? Is he really just wearing a t-shirt? And they keep checking, as if awkward glances could cloth someone.

First off, props to Dan. It takes some real balls to do that. I ended up staying with Dan only for one night as I found a place to sublet. Craigslist wasn’t really panning out for me, so I picked a neighborhood, hit the pavement and just started talking to people asking if anyone needed a roommate. Surprisingly, this worked and I moved in yesterday.

But back to Naked Dan. My reaction to his nudity somewhat surprised me. It was, whatevs. You get what you pay for in life, and Couch Surfing is free. If I had been female, I probably would have dialed three digits on my cell phone. Dan even gave me a bracelet (not a euphemism, he makes bracelets).

The incident led me to ask bigger question. It’s one philosophers have been asking for centuries, “Should everyone, at some point in their life, stay with an elderly nudist in Manhattan?” I think the answer might be yes. Maybe they should add a verse to the sunscreen song. . .