by Gabe Durham
PERK
Whenever possible, I make it a point to witness the hypnopompic miracle that is a child waking in an unfamiliar bed. The breathing halts. The hands shoot out of the sleeping bag as if narrowly escaping some brutal troll’s maw then grope at the hard plastic mattress and the wooden frame of the bunk. The eyes stay shut to delay confirmation of this other place. The hands inch back into the bag—here the child attempts to transport herself home by denying her senses of unfamiliarity. But that’s not a satisfying solution, is it? So she slowly, reluctantly squints open an eye. What is this dark room? This elevated bunk? This woman smiling over me is not my mother! Relax, darling. You and Mom are in a trial separation. You begged her for this.
SOMETHING SAGER
When you’re hungry, visit a starving nation and shame your body. Say: “Here I was thinking that a sandwich would be good, not realizing what atrophy could be.” When you’re grieving, stand near someone who has scraped her knee and shame your brain. Say: “I thought I missed the people I loved who died, but here is my skin, intact as all get out.” If the starver and the bleeder are as noble as they claim to be, they will overhear your confession and say something sager than anything I can think of, as I haven’t quite been a hundred percent lately, or ever.
*
Dear Mom,
I’ve learned four times as many knots in half a week at camp as you taught me in a decade!
Love,
Billy
ALL YOU FIRST-TIMERS WITH DEADBEAT DADS
The returners can tell you that camp is catnip to those bastards. It’s just too perfect an opportunity for him to pop back into your life, take you for a drunk backcountry cruise, and defend his absence away from the castrating gaze of you-know-who. When yours shows, you’ll offer a firm handshake and say, “Father, it is good to see you. I appreciate that you’ve driven some miles to visit me, your kin, to whom you wish to demonstrate your love. I cannot, however, accompany you to your truck for a harmless joyride, as each minute of my day here is accounted for and I am, under no circumstances, permitted to leave camp boundaries at any time. Out of concern for your immediate safety, I plead you’ll depart expediently. Chef Grogg has no doubt been alerted to your presence, and he is one dumb deadly animal.” It’s a mouthful, so I had the speech printed up on little cards to keep on your person at all times. Show of hands, who needs one? Come on, hands up. Nothing to be shy about. You’ve all got a leg up on the pussies from unbroken homes. While they mosey into adulthood, expectant in their dumb grins, you’ll have already learned just how hard you can bite without drawing blood.
POWERS
How to explain this? If I felt how I feel now and this was a certain kind of story, I’d burst lasers out my fingertips and a calm man would take me to a secret school and show me how to burst my lasers to fight crime. But every calm man I’ve met in this place has held a paper plateful of Ready Whip behind his back, trying to catch me with my guard down, and I’ve never been told I have a special gift unless the speaker is addressing the whole group and singling me out as an example of someone who you might not think has a special gift. But something has begun to change this year, Sandra: I think I have a real shot at being the kind of girl who’s got it going on. I’ve begun to affect a walk that makes boy counselors’ eyes avert with effort. I’m perfecting a laugh to raise heart rates. I know the subtext behind twelve varieties of hug. I’m recognizing all time spent before a bathroom mirror as investment. I study you for new moves like I’ve never watched anyone older than eighteen, and I’ve begun to wonder if cool does not end at high school graduation as I’d once thought but in fact extends all the way into one’s early twenties. If I have what it takes, I owe it to myself to cultivate that potential. Teach me your secrets, Sandra, and I promise: whenever asked who gifted me my It Factor, I will forever cite you.
CRAFT HUT
Negative portrayals of librarians smother the media. The fat shushing strumpet. The coke-bottle ogre. The lazy-eye Linda. One obvious solution is puppets. Persons who look disinterested when you do dishes or stand in line at the ATM move in closer when puppets take over. A puppet on each arm and you got yourself a love triangle. A puppet on each leg, you got a dance party. If you happen to be bad at it, it’s fine. I will have lived and loved fifty years this June and I’ve found precious few things I can say this about: The appeal of a good puppet compensates for the shortcomings of his operator. You could attach human hair for realism. You could try using puppets to solicit funds for more puppets. You could disappear in all the ways you always planned.
COME ON THE HIKE
Hear the whirr seeming to come from that vent there? It’s the sound of the indoors sucking away at the soul of your childhood. The expedition’s leaving in five and you’re coming with us. You too, shoulder-slumper, outside this instant. Free time’s only free when you use it to staff satisfaction. Open those mouths and inhale deep. Exhale if you must. Let the UVs raise your social stock a little. Remark on the sun. Name the clouds. Learn something from nature trail tree plaques. The breeze’s touch isn’t unseemly if your heart’s cockles say yes. Bring your inhaler if you think it really does something, or just trust my know-how to keep your respiratory in check. You may not have heard, but I’m versed in pastoral instruction: Leaves of three? Let me see. A hairy vine is a friend of mine. Berries white are a rare delight. A raggy rope is nature’s soap. Red leaves in spring are a glorious thing. Side leaves like mittens? Pet them like kittens. If a butterfly lands there, put both your hands there. Doesn’t this feel great? Couldn’t you just die, how pretty all this is? The trick is to tap into the you that already loves all this. To let the bones of your spirit break free.
FUN TREATMENT PEDAGOGIES
Direct: “I’m trying to pay attention to your story, Peter, but your subject is boring and your delivery uninspired.”
Comparison: “Richard, that’s much more interesting than what Peter was just saying.”
Olfactory (All-Male Company Only): “Interesting point, Peter.” Then rip a huge fart to communicate it was not actually an interesting point.
Ethical Appeal: “Peter, your current personality taints the week of everyone you encounter. How do you live with yourself? That is, how do you wake each morning the same Peter when yesterday’s Peter was so unsuccessful?”
Cry for Help: “I’m not ignoring you, Peter, just scouting the oaks for sturdy limbs because the strangled cat timbre of your voice makes me want to hang myself.”
Good Cop: “Let’s call it a day, Peter. Remember—I wouldn’t be putting in the time to mentor you if there wasn’t potential in you somewhere, a flaccid brain muscle begging to get flexed.”
SUGGESTION
Maybe some rule where everybody has to be nice and talk to you and not move away when you sit by them since it is hard and I am trying.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
Meet up in the mess hall. Put your on mask first. Pump your brakes and turn with the spin. Plan ahead where you’ll land the plane, then land it there. Build levies to hold then assume they won’t. Watch, in a windstorm, for cracking branches. When burdened, cut corners. Offer to strip for a search before they can threaten you with one. Consider that ticking bombs are slated to come back in style any season now. Escort the townsfolk one by one into the bomb shelter and turn the wheel until you hear a click. Plant your boots firm in the earth and let the tornado know who’s in control. Dive into the tsunami and swim like hell. In a doorway mid-earthquake, pretend it’s your might shaking everything, your mercy sparing what remains. Pretend to negotiate, then don’t. In peace times, look busy. In drought times, spit like you can spare it. In a fire, retreat deep within yourself. Find me there. I will be the one married to you.
WITHDRAWAL
If you let your TV screen get dusty then make a handprint on it, every sitcom bears your mark. The more decals on the frame, the less likely it is that there’s another out there like yours. On our old remote, you could peel off the buttons to reve
al uglier buttons, then put the outer buttons back on upside down or out of order, turn the remote into a rune. Dad hated it: He didn’t have the same memory for location I did, wasn’t thrilled by the challenge of the puzzle. If he wanted Channel 8, he pressed the 8 button. I get some grief around here for missing the shows I’m missing—it keeps me from surrendering myself to the fun, I’m told—but the TV is the most fun person I know. Every TV personality who gets ripped on is famous and not me and asking for it. Camp jokes are too literal, too physical, too sticky for my taste. Like anything that doesn’t send you to the showers isn’t worth laughing at. And I know what you’re about to say, so don’t bother. All anybody here tells me is that soon I won’t even miss the ole boob tube, the shocks box, the mean screen. As if that’s not the ultimate tragedy.
RICHARD
You’re a brave gal, so focus not on the alcohol swab, but instead on a story that goes like this:
“You, slave, back to work.”
“I’m so tired.”
“That doesn’t matter for me.” He whipped him so hard.
Richard lived in Ancient Egypt as a slave all his life. That night, Betty said, “Richard you’ve got to stop getting whipped. You’ve got to work hard.”
“I hate being a slave,” Richard cried, in a tent.
Richard went out in the night. Can you imagine his life and the suffering? He found the guard. He speared him. Richard never met his own parents. He looked out and upon the full moon, the pyramids in the horizon.
Betty said, “You’ve gone and done it now.” Richard nodded.
They got on a boat and sailed for the Americas. They hoped for freedom and many new opportunities. They got them.
*
Dear Mom,
What do you call everyone who isn’t at Fun Camp right now?
Retarded!
Love,
Billy
TOO FAR
Where were you coming from? Is this part of your normal route? How soon before the prank did you notice the prankster? At what point did you realize you were going to be drenched? What do you think drew the prankster’s attention to you? What did the prankster say? What was your response? Were any props displayed? Did you get a good look at him? Did he have any scars, tattoos, or otherwise appealing characteristics? Did he appear to be a boxer, martial artist, magician, or in any other way more dangerous than a normal prankster? Did the prank seem good-natured in nature? Could you see how it’d be funny had it happened to anybody else but you? Do you think the prankster knew the pig’s blood was pig’s blood? What’ve you been scheming up for the ultimate payback? Do you want to go shower off first or come visit the prank trunk now? I’ve got whoopee cushions, itching powder, diuretics, laxatives, Vagasil, fake knives, fake guns, paintguns, stink bombs. I’d offer you some pig’s blood but a kid nabbed up the last of it this afternoon. Take whatever you need, ma’am, and consider me a resource. This is what I do. My role is to make sure rivalries escalate responsibly. And god—seeing you like this, all nasty, coagulating before me—damned if it doesn’t feel like a vocation.
ICE-BREAKER
Close your eyes and imagine. You’re at school. Remember school? You’ve been struggling through Math class all semester and now it’s the midterm. You studied last night until you passed out from the whiskey. Friday night is the big party. Your mom wants you to go to Notre Dame like her friend did. Your locker is full of love letters from the assistant principal. You sit down with the test, get through the first two problems alright—then you hit a stumper. In front of you sits your best friend, Tina, who has an eating disorder so you can see over her bony shoulders just fine. Three of your Craigslist boyfriends are doing hard time and you haven’t brought yourself to write. Each time you try to focus on the stumper, you think of the pitiful cries of the man you drugged and locked in your bathroom. He’s losing weight and misses his family terribly. He tried to escape and you had to cut him. You used to be such a nice girl, and now here you are, knocked up, addicted to paint thinner, about to sell out your integrity to get a “B” on a math test. I know I’m supposed to come up with a question, but I am so angry with you, I could not possibly.
I KNOW YOUR STING STILL STINGS BUT
I think we’re just stuck in this arrangement with the bees. Look: They’re the only pollinators who’ll let us cart them around, they show flower fidelity, and we need them to live. Besides, if we swat them all down as you suggest, there will be some sad folksy men out there, moving slow through ex-apiary sites for old times’ sake. “What good is a beard without bees?” is one line of thought. Not mine. I’m allergic. But as in any relationship, we’ll have to forgive a checkered past. Just as we once had slavery legalized, bees used to be carnivorous wasps. One theory has the wasps eating insects with pollen on them, acquiring a taste, then cutting out the middleman. Like the Raisinettes fan who eventually discovered she just liked the chocolate. Best to keep the bees at a distance like the sun and the ocean and trees and the sweatshops and my family and all the other things I’m told I need but don’t need close.
AND UNDERSTAND THIS
Kids, there are two kinds of people: Those who naturally love sports and those who learn to love sports. And if there is a third kind of person, nobody worth chatting up wants to hear about it. A man’s perfect spiral is a sort of follow-up to his firm handshake. Your generation—the future—is responsible for making sure this stays true. The worst thing about the age we live in? Any slovenly Howard can crawl out of his chive-chip hovel to meet his female algorithmic dopple for neutral non-threatening coffee to laugh over season two episode six of some bullshit, the one where everyone at the space station gets a free case of Sprite and poor deaf Ronnie finds a dollar. And to each other they say, “How’d people even meet before the blessed holy internet?” Well Nintendo Power, I’ll tell you. They locked beery eyes from across the bar, palpitated wildly, jostled their way past flying darts and poking cues until one stood only a couple feet from the other, close enough for smell to factor in, and then—without even knowing what the other thought of Woody Allen—they sacked up, leaned in, and said, simultaneously: “Hi.”
THE TWO COMEDIANS
A bunch of us were dangling our legs off the Girls Cabin 1 porch in Gap teen tableaux. On one end, Tad chatted with Becca and Sheree, demonstrating an advanced backrub technique or cataloguing his world travels on the map of Sheree’s back, or both. On the other end, Devon and Brian made up a funny guitar song about girls’ butts and loving them big while the rest of us spectated, glancing occasionally at Tad, wishing he’d laugh with us. The song culminated in a full-voice Hey Jude-style sing-along that ended just shy of the eleven-minute mark, and in the wake of cheers, Phillip Burger—who knew Phillip was even there?—made some easy little Family Guy reference and Tad impossibly began to laugh. At first we assumed the laugh was at Phillip, but then Tad said, “I love that line.”
Devon, the brains behind the butt song, couldn’t believe it. “Tad,” he said. “You don’t so much as crack a smile at our song, yet home-schooled Phillip’s little reference warrants both a laugh and a comment?” I kind of agreed, but would never have said so.
Tad continued rubbing Sheree’s shoulders for a moment, then faced Devon, keeping a hand on the small of Sheree’s back as he spoke. “Two comedians audition to open for Bill Cosby,” Tad said. “The first is attractive and charming, but his jokes are overdone and he messes up a lot. The second is squat and nervous, but his jokes are sharp and original, his act tightly rehearsed. Which comedian should open for Cosby?”
“The second, I guess,” Devon said quietly.
“You’ve got talent, Devon,” Tad said, “but songs about big butts are done to death. Phillip’s Stewie voice is the best I’ve ever heard. You can tell he practiced. And at least Phillip knows when his material’s borrowed.” Tad told Phillip to say the line again, and he recited it perfectly. Tad nodded at Devon and said, “Go in peace.” A few of us had to laugh a little at Tad’s stilted bos
siness, but we did depart, one by one, and I did—I must admit—feel a sort of peace.
THE NORTH GOURD
You know what the Big Dipper is, Britney? See, I knew you were going to say constellation but the word for it is asterism because it hasn’t been authorized by those bores with perfect circles permanently indented around their eyes who hand out crooked “name a star” certificates to grand gesture types. An astronomer would tell you that the dipper’s officially part of the Ursa Major constellation, the big supposed bear, the astronomer not getting that we all love the dipper because it’s one of the few star patterns that actually looks like what it claims to be: a ladle ready for Marimba to scoop deep into a big pot and come up with a goldmine of steak and noodles and carrots and onions, and hey, what’s up with the lack of a nighttime snack around here? We have dinner at six and don’t eat our next meal for another fourteen and a half hours? It’s unlawful. If camp was an employer, our union would have Dave n’ Holly’s co-ass. Sometimes I think they want our defenses down so they can—Wow, your skin looks great in starlight. What was I … ? Yeah, constellations are for astronomers, and you know what? Dudes can have them. The asterism belongs to the people: an evolving language that gets re-jolted every time a young man looks into the eyes of his sweetie, points up at the night sky, and begins to speak before he knows what he’ll say.