The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  During his senior year, Joe had three or four places he could crash, sometimes as long as a week at a time. But he never wanted to wear out his welcome. For the last few months before he graduated from high school, Joe was the lessee of an apartment that Dad never knew about in a Kalamazoo party complex called Knollwood, where he crashed on the floor with five other guys and was eating loads of acid, even while he was commuting twenty miles one-way to high school. The more Joe told me, the more furious I became: How was Dad so dissociated from his own kid that he didn’t know where he went after school every day? That he didn’t know Joe was flapping back into school every morning still tripping balls? Mom knew, but she didn’t do anything about it. She had evidently visited this unfurnished crash pad on various occasions and dropped off McDonald’s, a lasagna big enough for all the guys, bags of groceries. She knew enough to know Joe was in deep trouble, but she couldn’t call Dad: he blamed her for Joe’s alcoholism and ripped her off during their divorce, paying almost nothing. He even convinced the church to take his side and tried to force her to move out of state. Calling Dad was an invitation for more abuse. So Joe got no help from either one of them. Every sentence Joe uttered was like a punch to the heart.

  He did his best to soften the blows. He wanted to laugh about it all. On the night we sat on the beach, he had just turned nineteen and wore his light brown hair in an unironic Billy Ray Cyrus mullet that curled around his neck. In his T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, he looked like a big, acid-eating, baby-faced redneck.

  “I was out with Tate—you remember him,” he started, “and we were partying and it was like two A.M. and Tate wanted to go home, so we were headed out West Main and I was loaded on acid and I was like, I’m not going home. So I just got out of the car at a traffic light and started walking downtown. Tate didn’t even say anything. The light turned green and he just split.”

  He told me this story as an example of what his nights were like in Kalamazoo. He walked to Brett’s apartment about a half mile away but no one would open the door, and he left in a hail of insults from the other residents. Eventually, the road tipped downward into the broad Kalamazoo River Valley, past the graveyard shrouded in sugar maples that held the remains of the Arctic explorer Edward Israel, and past Kalamazoo College, where I’d gone to school. He skirted Kalamazoo’s black neighborhoods on the north side where the cars bumped N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, which had just come out and was the advent of a more confrontational soundtrack to the hours between dark and dawn. But nobody bothered him. Folks there knew better than to accost an angry-looking redneck talking to himself and possibly sobbing, especially downtown, home to the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital—a giant facility with a medieval Castle Dracula water tower that dominated the city skyline and was formerly known as the Michigan Asylum for the Insane. On the street, Joe looked like just another lunatic.

  “Somehow, after a really long time, I got to the Flamingo Lounge, and I was waling on the door there,” Joe said, sniffing back tears.

  The Pink Flamingo Lounge was a house in the Vine Street Neighborhood, where our old neighbor Dan Paulsen lived with four other guys, friends of both Brett and Joe. The Flamingo threw famous parties at the Knights of Columbus Hall, and many weekends they’d bring the magic home by having keggers in the house itself, and Brett and the guys rode mopeds up and down the inside stairs like D-Day from Animal House.

  “Dan opened the door and said, ‘Oh, man, you look like shit! What the hell are you doing here?’ I was like, ‘Jus’ lookin’ for someone to party with.’ So Dan said, ‘You can crash on the couch if you want.’”

  I started adding up the miles, but Joe wasn’t done.

  “I couldn’t sleep on all that acid, so I decided to walk back to Mom’s.”

  Which, if you’re not taking the shortcut down I-94, is a good seventeen miles. On top of the four he’d already walked. That’s when I started laughing. The sun came up by the time he reached Portage and his feet were hot and wet in his sneakers and developing blisters—Joe’s one of those guys who has big legs and a big body but dainty little sprinter’s ankles, which had both been broken multiple times—and pure dread herded him down the road. He didn’t feel better; he knew he would never feel better.

  “I was looking for that place that I was going to feel okay. ‘Oh, Mom’s house will be good, I’ll go there and feel great.’ Then I’d get there and I didn’t feel any better.”

  Every passing truck blasted the leaves of new corn in the fields. The sun was hot and burned his fair skin and cooked his scalp and his mouth felt full of dirt from the shoulder of the road.

  “I got there and I was just stuck on the couch, still tripping. Mom was there. I knew she had to go to work. She was like, ‘Oh, Joe, honey, are you okay? Do you want a cup of coffee?’”

  Our dear, poor mom.

  “So that’s what been happening,” Joe said, winding it up. “A lot of nights, anyway.”

  The halyards of sailboats clanged against the masts where the river disgorged into Lake Michigan, and stray dogs fought behind the ice-cream shops, and girls and boys chased each other across the sand in the dark. Someone in the marina was playing Journey, and Joe sang along to it, easily reaching the high notes in “Who’s Crying Now.” It was comforting to stare at the lake because its life was bigger than ours. The lake was what the lake had always been: a bottomless, algae-stinking pool of reality. Nightjars swooped over the beach catching insects and crying their ghastly cries. Gulls stood one-legged on the sand and faced west with their eyes closed.

  “Going to the lake always makes me feel more sane,” I said.

  “It’ll get sick of me. Everybody’s sick of me. I’m sick of me,” said Joe.

  “I just think that everybody feels that way some of the time.”

  “Nope,” said Joe. “If people felt like I do, they’d be driving straight into bridge abutments and blowing their brains out all over the place. It’d be like a horror movie out here.”

  “But you felt okay when you were at Cassie’s?”

  “Our whole relationship was based on getting me through the night. We’d get loaded in the trailer at night and laugh and fuck about five times, then I’d be despondent again right after, like, ‘Oh, I’m a big piece of shit,’ but it was enough to get me through. The next day I’d start drinking as soon as I could and just hang on until I could get back to Cassie. At least there was sex, that one thing I could do to make life bearable.”

  Cassie and Joe had met in the clean, orderly hallways of the Mattawan Consolidated Schools when he was thirteen and she was twelve. Her family lived in a mobile home trailer west of Mattawan, over by Paw Paw, and when high school started Joe was hanging out over there and Cassie’s family just sort of adopted him. He didn’t actually live there, because Dad wanted him home at night, but he found ways to stay there a lot. Dad didn’t approve of her because, as he said, she was “from the wrong side of the tracks,” but Joe and Cassie loved each other like crazy. By the time they were sixteen and fifteen they couldn’t function without each other. “Those two are totally codependent,” Dad told me. He read that term in a magazine. “They break up and then they just talk on the phone for hours until they can get back together. She leaves these messages on the home answering machine: ‘Joe, you were supposed to come over and fuck me.’ She has to know that that’s the house phone used by your mother and I.”

  They broke up every couple of weeks but only for a day or two, and then they had a few sips and were back in the sack and it was on again. They were so happy. Cassie’s dad was a bantam little dude with a reputation for violence and pranking, but he liked Joe because they could talk about hunting and fishing together and Joe didn’t judge him despite being half again his size. He never gave the boy any grief. Cassie’s mom once caught Joe and her daughter getting it on in the bathtub and smoking weed, and barked at them to get in the living room “Right NOW!” And when they appeared, hastily dressed and sober with fear, she burned them with a
face of parental scorn as long as she could hold it and then burst out laughing. “I’m just messing with you guys,” she said. There’s no place to hide what goes on in a trailer home. The walls are nothing. Anyway, Cassie’s dad was wound so tight he had a fatal stroke sometime in his forties, but Joe thought he was an all right guy.

  Joe was surprised when school ended and Cassie dumped him.

  “I know I sound like a total fuckin’ pussy, like this girl is God or something, but I can’t figure out how to live without her,” Joe said. “The lack of self, for a better word, or ego or whatever you want to call it—as soon as my significant other disappears, I always get so despondent because I don’t know how to feel okay without that. I have nothing left of myself. I’m just, like, hollowed out.”

  “There’s no sliver of light? You seem good right now,” I said on the beach.

  “That’s ’cause we’re at the lake. I mean, the only time I actually feel good good is when I’m standing in a river.”

  I seized on this. “Then you should stand in a river every day. Why the hell not, if that’s what it takes to live?”

  “Because it’s just running away.”

  “So what? If the alternative is dying.”

  “Right, you say that, but then eventually you’ll be like everyone else and asking why I don’t have a job.”

  Have you ever tried to talk someone out of killing themselves, or at least not driving their pickup out onto the spring ice? The more you talk, the more you realize the whole mess at the end is going to be your fault. My words sounded ridiculous and puny. They splished against that final silence with no more power than a wad of spit hocked at a tornado. Joe was very matter-of-fact about trying to find out how far was too far, and he dared me to refute the logic: like tripping or getting drunk, dying was pain relief that would actually work. I didn’t have anything like that in my bag. I felt helpless, like I could see him fading from the surface of the earth but there was nothing I could do to stop him from going.

  Our family friend Scott, who’d grown up near us on Eagle Lake, told me he and Joe had been given several sheets of free blotter acid from a kid who thought the government was after him. Joe went on dosing even after the other guys left the Knollwood apartment.

  “Joe is scary,” Scott said. “One night he said, ‘I bet I can just beer-bong this entire bottle of vodka.’ It was like a fifth of Smirnoff’s or something. I said, ‘Joe, that’s how you get alcohol poisoning and die.’ He called me a chickenshit and he drank most of it. He drank about a half gallon of orange juice so that would dilute it.

  “Another night he decides that he’s going to go, to get in shape,” Scott added. “So he takes off running around the apartment complex. He’s doing laps around the complex. Well, everyone goes, ‘Oh shit, where’s Joe? Where did Joey go?’ and panicking. It’s always about taking care of fuckin’ Joe. ’Cause if anybody’s going to die it’s going to be him. So the whole fuckin’ party takes off out the door and they’re all running. There’s like twenty people running laps in the middle of the night, yelling, ‘Joe! Joe!’ And then pretty soon he’s sitting on the steps like fuckin’ Road Runner in the cartoons waiting for Wile E. to zoom past. Unbelievable.”

  Joe talked about dying even while he was trying hard to stay alive. The talk about dying was both a desperate attempt to externalize feeling like shit and an equally desperate plea for some project that would make feeling like shit worthwhile. He needed a way to get the inside and the outside in sync. I had all kinds of ideas, most of them dangerous in retrospect. Earlier that same summer, I had left New York for a week or two to write a story about those Arizona Earth First!ers who were infiltrated by the FBI, and I thought their story might light a fire in Joe. It had lit a fire in me.

  They called themselves the Evan Mecham Eco Terrorist International Conspiracy, or EMETIC. No matter how you felt about Mecham, the car dealer turned Republican governor of Arizona who got himself impeached for being at once racist and corrupt, the group’s joke name was funny. They were nonviolent and cheery like the characters in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, and had made a name for themselves when they sabotaged a ski area and some power lines to a nuke plant. They were from the ornery northern mountain towns of Flagstaff and Prescott, and believed that more than enough desert had been paved and turned into Phoenix.

  Mark Davis, one of the guys in EMETIC, assured me that “unless humans begin to show some of the beauty they were born with, our little biological experiment here is ended.” Meaning Homo sapiens. I looked at him in his prison blues in the Maricopa County Jail and at the unbelonging sprawl outside frying in the 112-degree-Fahrenheit heat, and I didn’t see any reason to disagree with him. Davis was a kickboxer and a student of ecology, very intelligent if over-the-top intense, and I needed to know more about where he got all this juice. So the next morning, one of Davis’s fellow activists took me on a hike up a mountain trail near his home in Prescott.

  “He runs this trail all the time,” she told me, as we scuffed through sand washes and up sections of razor rock and cholla cactus that seem to glow with a special sunny menace. “A lot of the time he runs it barefoot.”

  Barefoot. This I understood. Most of my ideas about skiing and running consisted of subtle and powerful feelings in the bottoms of my feet. I memorized mountains and streets through my feet. Feet understand place differently than eyes do. The feet are rarely dazzled. The feet are rarely lost. When Davis ran that mountain, it sent its own ideas up through his feet. I wanted to try it, but I knew I’d be bloody before I could decipher the language of raw rock.

  When I told Joe this story, he said, “Oh, I could get into that. I like when I walk in a river in my wading shoes, because you feel the whole river through the bottoms of your feet.”

  “I think the mountain told him he needed to defend that desert,” I said.

  “Rivers tell me that all the time,” Joe said. “Sometimes I fish up to a bridge somewhere and find a tire in the river, or a refrigerator someone chucked there, and I have to try to fix it. Who thought that throwing a refrigerator in the river is a good idea?”

  Joe knew what I was driving at. Wildness needed defending in Michigan just like it did in Arizona, and there were worse offenders than hillbillies chucking the old Frigidaire. Wouldn’t it be life-affirming to protect those waters? I mean, as opposed to killing himself? There were few limits on what kinds of actions you could take when the alternative was suicide. Like I said, my ideas were more desperate than good.

  “God, that would feel so good to just do those things,” Joe said. “Find a problem, take it out.”

  He laid back on the sand. “Ah, I’d probably get killed immediately.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d take it too far. The secret to getting away with that stuff is knowing when to stop.”

  We had dinner at Dad’s house while I was in town, and Brett came, too. I hadn’t seen him in a year, I guess. He was about the same height as Joe but fifty pounds lighter, and he was rocking the mullet, too, a slightly darker shade of brown. My ponytail went halfway down my back. There was a lot of hair.

  “Christ, it’s like Molly Hatchet came for dinner,” I said.

  We were all half-committed to some kind of goatee or Fu Manchu or lack of shaving and looked like hell. All three of us were living in genuine poverty and wearing worn-out shoes and thrift-store flannels that were moth-eaten compared with Dad’s togs, which were conservative but always bespoke or at least expensive. Even when Bruce was young and broke, he always spent money on clothes. Joe was big like the Molly Hatchet singer Danny Joe Brown and started snarling out, “Ah’m travlin’ down the road ’n’ Ah’m flertin’ with diz-ASS-ter!” When we got together we would sing. Brett was a guitar player and I had been a drummer in a couple of bands. We all joined in: “Got the pedal to the floor ’n’ my lahf is runnin’ faster!”

  Dad laughed at our singing. He was mortified by how we looked and called us “hillwilliam
s,” but he was so excited to have all his boys there for the first time since the divorce; it was heartbreaking. He saw Brett all the time, but having the three of us in the house only emphasized how much time he spent alone. Dad kept talking about how much he liked living there by himself—“The ladies who come out from Molly Maids are so interesting,” he said. Which meant they were the only people in the world he ever talked to. He dashed around the house, fussing over a slab of lake trout sizzling on the grill and some boiled red potatoes and salads he’d bought, still in their containers from the grocery. It was basically camp cooking, but I was starved and happy for a meal.

  The big house was immaculate and soggy as a dishrag with summer humidity. It felt like the place would suck up a million pounds of water every summer and sink a few inches deeper into the hillside. I couldn’t help but feel proud of the house because I had helped build it, a luxurious rustic contemporary with four bedrooms and three baths spread over three floors and organized around a central spiral staircase in black metal. The whole thing was sided in stained cedar that withdrew into the dark of the hickory forest.

  Brett, who claimed he loved this house so much, was nervous as a finch. Only a few years earlier, Dad had beat his ass in it, and in front of all his friends.