Goose Flesh

The sexiest girl I've seen in a solid year was the impossibly Maria Shriver-skinny rail/giraffe in a teeny, weensy white bikini at last year's Action Sports Retailer show.

She was a blonde with big, blue eyes, slender-limbed—seemingly jointless—flat-chested and possessing the flat-tummied, narrow-hipped lower torso that made me wonder if she'd ever be able to carry a fetus full-term. She couldn't have been more than 19, meaning she'd have been born around the time I started my sophomore year of high school, meaning I'm old enough, of course, to be her dad.

I didn't ask her name and I don't recall her face. I also don't remember which company she worked for—and we didn't exchange a single word of conversation. She handed me a sticker, and I took it, wordlessly, in awe. What I do remember is her skin—specifically that, in the air-conditioned splendor that is the San Diego Convention Center, she was a mass of goose flesh.

I was standing virtually up against her, Tokyo subway-style, as I tried to squeeze past—so packed was the booth. My vantage afforded me a disconnected, flea's-eye view of her lithe, young limbs and those gorgeous, puckery, tender, downy young goose bumps. I almost wanted to bite her, to become a one-bite cannibal, so real and visceral was her outer frigidity. Up so close, she was all but a Picasso: these acute, bony angles of flesh making me realize that, as is speculated about California's first lady, she might have an eating disorder of her own.

None of this was verbalized. Our exchange was commodified: she giving the sticker—which I've since misplaced—I accepting.

I'll never see her again, but thanks to her state of undress, I've developed quite a taste for photographers who occasionally capture that same state of aroused epidermis in their work. It's amazing what can be done with properly lit black-and-white film in a properly chilled studio environment. Zowie.