Fun Camp

by Gabe Durham

  Because I’ve cajoled barroom stories from mirthy Jacks who’ll up and leave a bar at the sound of the German language.

  Because I could tell you about Kansas and Kant, Ken Starr and cover letters.

  Because I know tricks for keeping myself from crying.

  Because I’d kick each of your asses at The Price is Right.

  Because I memorized the verbal fallacies and blow this whistle whenever I hear one.

  Because I’ve raised brows by wit alone.

  Because I can tell you why certain movies are good with words you’d use wrong.

  Because I registered your sense of wonder and factored it into the way I regard you.

  Because I could trick even the savviest among you, and have already. And will.

  Because the sting of failure has humbled me without my say so.

  Because I annually get worse at lying to myself and better at avoiding bare truths.

  Because the worry my birthday causes me points to a big fact I’m beginning to allow myself to acknowledge.

  Because I’d do alright in the wild for a time.

  Because I could kill each of you with both arms bound.

  Because I know just when to kill a joke.

  I KNOW WE’RE TRAMPLING HISTORY BUT

  If you think back far enough, what wasn’t built on an Indian burial ground? Was I the ghost of a native, I bet I’d be pretty understanding about where my conquerors build their resorts. The sacred’s got a clock like anything. Me, I’d like my grave marked and mowed for a solid century, long enough for everyone who could’ve ever loved me to join me. After that, they’re free to erect a fresh Dillard’s on my once-marked bones. I owe a shot at discounts to the not yet dead.

  GROGG CORNERS A CAMPER

  Feel this knot. Yes, touch it. Post-veto, I was told my back would’ve been practed and kneeded had I narrated that my paindaggers had come on sudden in the a.m. Gander at a man’s leased camp shack, then ask me how long I’ll keep up the ole wince-and-grit for. Death, to thems, is the pickle you ask for none of, please. You might still get served a briny cuke in and on and beside your tray—it may yes happen—but some pimply shluck is gonna get the shitcan for it. That there is some blood-weary optimism in my spectation. Surprised for me, colt? This is worth leaping a parisian fence for, kiddo, unless your constituency cuts his own checks. A prior history is a costly flopping redundancy. My nightly prayers, in order of downward likeness: one is for said-mentioned outfromers to pod me in for a medicinal autotuning, two is for a blonde-bosomed young Montrealite staffer to arrive one summer, burned and beautiful, who’ll hitch me to her wagon and socialize me. Scram in case of either.

  WE LOVE FUN CAMP, YES WE DO

  Damned if those kids don’t take some of the cock out of my walk, though. Delightful isolated moments, you bet, but after morning counselor meetings I get that pit-level dread, mouthing soundless expletives. Dread where the heart beats faster and the body deflates. Dread where they can smell that you don’t want to say hey or lead line-up cheers louder than the other cabins. They pick up on more than you think, yet they never pick up on that particular thing you’re so sure they know. Once-over a she-counselor and you feel a guilt the Catholics keep trying to claim for themselves, a guilt that goes, “If my kids only knew this heart, hoo-boy.” And if they did? They’re all spies ready to sell you out for an attaboy, new zeal smoothing their faces to bland mush. By the end of the week, I can’t tell my own boys apart. I cover it, addressing each of them with a “Cabin 3, what,” which they’ve come to respond to more than their own names anyway.

  THE MAGIC OF SUMMER

  I want us all to do an experiment together. Ready? [Pause ten seconds.] In the last ten seconds, each of you has forgotten just a tiny fraction of the math skills you picked up in school last year. Isn’t that wonderful? They can learn you up with whatever they want mid-August through early June, but in the interim, if you choose not to use it? [Clap hands free of unwanted math.] Gone for months. And that’s adulthood, kids: an endless string of summers full of sweet choice. It’s as fun as it sounds, and it’s never terrifying, not if you’re smart about it.

  HELLO CLONE, I WILL SAY

  Myself having a religious background can understand your point. Sometimes I too wonder if identical twins have souls or only half-souls. Until cloning has been fully researched, no one knows if clones will live productive lives as human beings. As humans, however, we have placed ourselves on top of a ladder, God’s power in our hands, and with time and research, any bumps and risks can be smoothed just like anything in the middle of being discovered. After school some days, I picture me in a clone sisterhood where we gang up on the prime-numbered sisters, good-naturedly, though I am not a prime number in the scenario. Seeing versions of ourselves everywhere is cautionary, and we exercise like madwomen then strip down to our underwear in full-length mirrors to compare. We all kiss different clones of the same boy and mix ourselves up, sometimes on purpose, in case it tastes somehow different. We get old and pass kidneys around and get mad at Dad together. All our birthdays fall on the same day and that day is my birthday.

  COMPLAINT

  This is going to give me away but, whatever. Can you, Holly, an adult, presumably knowledgeable in the world’s rubbytouchy ways, tell me in good conscience that it’s my mind caught in the gutter when I lose my composure while singing, “Cool and creamy / We like cool and creamy / Cool and creamy / We like it a lot. // Do you like it in your face? / Yes I like it in my face. / In your face? / In my face! / In our face!” One go-through I could handle, but three? When in the second verse, we sing, “Do you like it in your ears?” And in the third, “hair?” Can you honesty tell me the song was not written with the intent of making naïve children sing about ejaculate? That an earlier draft was not instead called “Hot and Creamy” but that the author’s buddy got the bong out of his mouth long enough to suggest the author cover his tracks just a little? The truth is: You pulled me from morning cheers because I get the joke. The truth is: You barely got through your own scold with a straight face.

  *

  Dear Mom,

  How often have you asked me what I would do without you? Five days apart, and we seem to have our answer: I would live, Mother. I live.

  Billy Matthews

  HARD YEAR FOR EVERYBODY

  This game is Counselors-Only and begins on brooms. Fanciful, the way we like it, based on a movie my friend made when he saw a book a pretty girl was reading in the contemporary cinematic facelift of The Crucible. You drink and ride and drink and span the blacktop until you fall over. We rush around you and say what you’ll be, based on how you’re lying. Like one girl was spread-eagle so she became a patriotic ornithologist. One girl was dead so she became a ticket dispenser on I-90. One girl never fell so we cursed her children’s blood. It’s just fun, Holly. If you’ve got a better way of discovering God’s plan for my postgraduate life, scrawl it on a donut receipt, find some bored talons to stick it in, then tape up the bird and mail it wherever my soft body crumbled.

  COMPLAINT

  What’s so fun about Water Pong? Since when is hydration a penalty?

  CANTEEN BUCK CAPER

  It’s come to the staff’s attention that a traitor among you has started her own canteen buck mint. This camper would need access to a Xerox machine, the yesteryear restraint to keep from spending her last canteen buck, pale green cardstock paper, the moral bankruptcy not to care, and the brains to pull it off, so already that rules out most of you, including all first-timers and all inner city scholarship kids. A part of me just wants to shut down camp early over this mint—I am serious as a broken pact here—a mint whose counterfeit product is realistic enough to fool even myself, having surveyed thousands of spent bucks in search of the mark of the fake. It’s the fact that I can use the word thousands that tipped us off, our week-end sales usually hitting the mid to high hundreds. That and the tummy troubles evident among a certain contingent of Cabin 2 girls. And the series
of increasingly elaborate disguises said girls donned to purchase well past their camper daily health limit, a disguising that was permitted at the time for its ingenuity, for the “This is what camp is all about” feeling it gave on-duty staffers. And a Twix supply that ran out on day two, Twix being the fluke corporate item our townie vendor vends us, meaning our supplies are down to such complaint card name-checked perennials as Miss Marie’s Chewbarb Taffy and Mishima Confectionary’s Mangoflave Gingercakes, and so there will be no cause for fold-up chair-kicking outbursts when I pronounce the canteen closed until the culprits come forward and Stop. Ruining. Everything. Did I mention that each cabin is currently being searched, starting with Girls Cabin 2? Confess in the next thirty seconds and there’s a fresh hot cola in it for you, brewed personally by Ole Maud, a sweet blind townie whose story’ll just break your heart if you let her tell it.

  TESTIMONY

  Last year, I didn’t do like I said. I said I was going to change and for awhile I did change but then I went back. I went back to what I was before I changed without even realizing I’d gone back. Sometimes I would remember I had changed and would try to change back to how I had changed and then I would change again. But my friends would not see the change, or else they would see the change but they wouldn’t like the change because we had made friends before the change, and they would try to change me back. So I would change back. Now being back here has reminded me that I really do want to change, and what I want this time is to change for good. And I want you all to hold me accountable and in exchange I will hold you accountable. I feel really bad that I didn’t change before. Really, really bad. Thank you.

  SNOW DAY

  In half a year, the Caucasians among you will be more so. On the front end of winter, we’ll spend Christmas nursing our generosity, New Years kissing it goodbye. On the back end, we coast through Ash Wednesday fine if we notice it at all, spend Easter wearing the colors we’ve painted our eggs. It’s between the first snow and the last time Dad runs his salty white car through the wash that you won’t believe there was ever a summer, ever an us here together now. As the arc of your relationship to snow begins to mirror that of the romances the facially symmetrical among you are cooking up now, you’ll have to try to float on those perennial comforts: Friends who wait outside your house so they can shock you with something wet, stinging shops whose temperature regulators overcompensate for what the outside is up to, satellite electronics, parents at jobs, oversleeping, sugar drinks, the taste of fruits whose vacillating prices you won’t notice until the day it’s you doing the buying. I say this not to ease the shock of winter but to ease the shock over the shock. The sooner you realize winter is annual, the sooner you’ll buckle down on those grades and start dreaming of a college in the never-fading sun of some golden country.

  WARM FUZZY

  I hate you, Tad. You don’t just introduce yourself to a girl on the dock and chat her up about the little podunks you’re both from, discover how much you’ve got in common, sit real close, get the crazy idea you and her ought to run off the dock in all your clothes, jump hand in hand in the lake, together invent new swim-stokes, laugh lots, thank the girl for the swim, and then go ask some slut like Helena Johnson on the Midnight Hike. As if you didn’t feel that once-in-a-campweek connection with the girl on the dock! As if you had a realer talk with Helena Johnson! Did you know that until last month she had a boyfriend three years older than her and that they did about everything you can do together that isn’t technically sex? She told me the first night here. So it’s not just that you’re picking her over me, it’s that you’re willing to risk contracting some sexually nasty infections by just kissing her. And yet what kills me is I know you won’t. You’re untouchable. You’re Tad Gunnick. As I write this, you and a semi-circle of hangers-on are headed for the pool with Bee Gees on repeat in all your heads, so sure you’re God’s gift to strutting. And she’s Helena Johnson, spilling out of cups two letters down the alphabet from mine. And then there’s me, scrawling notes in a hot craft hut, sure to be rewarded for my abstinence with opportunities for more abstinence. Watch as it starts to look less like a choice.

  *

  Dear Mom,

  Forget me. When the time comes, I will send for Johannes.

  Billy Matthews, Cabin 3

  PEAKED AT FOURTEEN

  We hit dinner in a daze, you and I, after a lively session of getting told what. Some girls cried, and we almost did too. We’d chased and caught the ecstatic moment, mistook it for a house to live in. It felt like shivers and coffee and God’s favor. The meal tasted good, pork chops and peas with rolls and red punch. And when you were made to sing a song for having elbows up on the table, you laughed and you sang—something mockable, Journey or Styx. On the verge of some big thing, we asked Dave himself if we could skip campfire so we could work out the terms of our new selves, and he said that he respected that but still felt campfire was where we needed to be. We understood and poured gravy on Doreen, who was a sport and later got us back big. At the fire, we knew Dave had been right and sang “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” and “Brown Eyed Girl” and my only earnest “Kumbaya” to date. After most had scattered, we huddled and squirted water to sizzle on the embers, too beat to talk. That was my best night, my best self, and that was three whole camps ago. What have we been doing wrong, Amber? What broke in us?

  FROM A FIELD ON A MOUNTAIN

  Look, everybody: We rolled out the stars for you tonight. We softened the grass. We briskened the air just enough that you’d need each other. I want so much for you as a gaggle of campers, but as individuals I can barely keep your faces in focus. As I look out on the field of you now, huddling up in your sleeping bags, I see selves feeding selves feeding selves. I see, “What do these people think of me?” and “Am I unique?” and “Am I funny?” and “Am I worthy of love?” And to all those questions, I offer a hearty resounding shrug, and I implore you, when you go home tomorrow, to watch an entire serious dramatic film on fast forward. I’m trying to do for delusion what Clark Gable did for the undershirt. There’s a confidence chemical that suddenly gets produced like crazy in puberty that explains why five-sixths of you think you know so much. Even now, as you scoff out into the night, that’s the chemical at work, and knowing about the chemical makes it no less potent. The goal is to harness that chemical and to run with it as far as you can so that when doubt catches up, you’ll be surrounded by people who angle their bodies toward you and nod brightly when you speak. I’ve got more to say—I’ve always got more to say—but for now I’m out of lozenges. Be sure and wave at me tomorrow morning before you go. I’ll keep walking, but I will see you.

  SUNDAY MORNING

  THAT’S IT?

  Yeah, Sunday pulls the rug out from everyone. When we wake, there’s always some group from far-off already gone, goodbyes unsaid. We treat Sunday like a full day in our heads all week, but then it comes and it’s just a morning—a morning spent packing. All these suddenly-concerned boys run around looking for plastic bags to keep the moldy wet clothes that’ve been balled under the bed all week from infecting their less-moldy dry clothes. We approach each other, newly sheepish, holding copies of the group photo and sharpies, saying, “Are you going to the Fun Retreat weekend in October? I think I’m going, are you going?” We mop and squint and sing a last song. Then parents start showing up, smiling like they belong. Like they have a clue what went on here. Like they’ve ever felt a thing in their lives.

  *

  Dear Mom,

  For much of the week, I’d forgotten how slow regular mail is. By the time you get this, I’ll have already been home for three days or so. Please disregard the last few letters. They were hasty. If my room is still available, I’d like to stay. I do ask, however, that you take a look at your schedule so we may set aside an evening when I’ll outline the changes I’d like to see our family implement in the coming quarter, such as you learning to make cornbread and us eating on the porch when it’s nice out and us getting
a pool and playing kickball and having food fights and you letting me pick on Deirdre when it’s in a funny way. I look forward to returning to my room, my toys, a bathroom with a lock, and of course, Johannes. I hope you have shown him my pictures as I asked.

  With affection,

  William

  BEST FRIENDS SHOULD BE TOGETHER

  We’ll get a pair of those half-heart necklaces so every ask n’ point reminds us we are one glued duo. We’ll send real letters like our grandparents did, handwritten in smart cursive curls. We’ll extend cell plans and chat through favorite shows like a commentary track just for each other. We’ll get our braces off on the same day, chew whole packs of gum. We’ll nab some serious studs but tell each other everything. Double-date at a roadside diner exactly halfway between our homes. Cry on shoulders when our boys fail us. We’ll room together at State, cover the walls floor-to-ceiling with incense posters of pop dweebs gone wry. See how beer feels. Be those funny cute girls everybody’s got an eye on. We’ll have a secret code for hot boys in passing. A secret dog named Freshman Fifteen we’ll have to hide in the rafters during inspection. Follow some jam band one summer, grooving on lawns, refusing drugs usually. Get tattoos that only spell something when we stand together. I’ll be maid of honor in your wedding and you’ll be co-maid with my sister but only cause she’d disown me if I didn’t let her. We’ll start a store selling just what we like. We’ll name our firstborn daughters after one another, and if our husbands don’t like it, tough. Lifespans being what they are, we’ll be there for each other when our men have passed, and all the friends who come to visit our assisted living condo will be dazzled by what fun we still have together. We’ll be the kind of besties who make outsiders wonder if they’ve ever known true friendship, but we won’t even notice how sad it makes them and they won’t bring it up because you and I will be so caught up in the fun, us marveling at how not-good it never was.