The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  On the third day, a van arrived. The fat woman in the driver’s seat was all teeth. Tim pulled my bag from a locked closet and passed it to her; I watched this exchange with hawkish intensity. My pills were in there, and my phone.

  There was another boy in there already, sitting in the back-seat of the van. He was shorter than I was, and muscular, broad-featured. He introduced himself as Eric. I shook his hand.

  We talked about what had brought us to Aspen. Eric was from the Jersey Shore, a stoner and a football player who had ingested what he had thought were psychedelic mushrooms—they turned out to be poisonous. He’d nearly died and landed in the hospital for two weeks, and his parents, fed up, told him that the only way they’d release him was if it was to a wilderness program.

  The landscape grew sparser as we drove south past Provo. Hours on the freeway. We stopped at a fast-food restaurant off the highway and I studied the menu as if it were written in a foreign language. Hadn’t it been just a few days earlier that I had been drowning my soft-shell crab in a tangerine cosmopolitan? What had happened?

  Eric devoured a bacon cheeseburger while I effeminately nursed a Diet Coke. I told him stories from the city, about how hard I partied, about seeing celebrities in nightclubs.

  “Dude,” he said. “Sick.”

  Finally, we pulled up to a brick building in a small town called Loa. A wooden sign posted in the yard read: ASPEN ACHIEVEMENT ACADEMY, FIELD OFFICE. Inside, we were weighed and measured. I stood in a dimly lit room until a man entered. He put on plastic gloves with a resounding snap.

  “Strip,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Cavity search.”

  I pulled off my T-shirt, then my pants.

  “Everything,” he said. Shamefully, I tugged my underwear down to my ankles. I felt hideously exposed.

  “Bend over,” he said. I complied. He probed me, checking under my testicles and in my anal cavity.

  “Buy a girl a drink first,” I snarled. “What exactly do you think I’m hiding in there?”

  Satisfied, he pulled off the gloves.

  “You’re good.”

  “It’s not the first time a guy has told me that after putting his fingers in my ass,” I said. He ignored me.

  I dressed and followed him to a long, narrow closet where shelves were lined with stacks of folded clothes—Spartan, military issue. Methodically, he pulled my size in each garment. Two plain blue cotton T-shirts. Two heather-gray crewneck thermals. One pair of cargo shorts. One pair of cargo pants. Two pairs of boxer briefs. A pair of Converse All Star sneakers. A pair of hiking boots. Two pairs of thick gray socks. A black fleece sweater that zipped up. An olive green rain poncho.

  “You’ll want to change,” he said, handing me a blue T-shirt, a pair of underwear, and the cargo shorts. I slipped out of the jeans and gray cashmere hoodie I’d been wearing for the last few days and put on my new uniform. (In fairness, my old uniform had developed a stale, locker-room odor.) He piled the rest of the clothes in his arms, and I trailed him out into a large, open warehouse. On the floor was a rectangular silver tarp, about ten feet by eight feet, on top of which was a snakelike coil of something black and ribbed—seat belt webbing—and a few other odds and ends: a length of bungee cord, some rope, a tan canvas knapsack, a small black bag, a sleeping bag, and my eyeglasses, absurd in their lilac Christian Dior case.

  “What is all this?” I asked.

  “This will be your pack,” he said. “They’ll teach you how to make it later, so I’ll make it for you now.” He deposited the contents of his arms into the center of the tarp, knelt, and began to fold it, making tight creases in the silver material. He folded it into thirds, like a burrito, then folded the top and bottom thirds over the center. Nimbly, he wrapped the bungee cord around the pack, several times in short succession, then tied it longitudinally, too, as though he were tying a ribbon bow onto a wrapped gift. Then, expertly, he threaded two pieces of black seat belt webbing between the bungee cord and the tarp. It only took him about twenty seconds to turn this mass of stuff into something that resembled a backpack—albeit a squishy, bulbous one.

  It was impressive, but it looked more like a cocktail party trick than anything I could ever be expected to do, and I told him so.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” he said, holding up the backpack so I could slip it onto my shoulders. To fasten it to me, he tied the seat belt webbing tight around my belly in an awkward knot. It was heavy on my back, heavier than the agility with which he’d picked it up had suggested. I waddled behind him as he headed back out to the front of the building.

  “You need to use the bathroom?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Think carefully,” he said. “It’s the last time you’ll be able to shit indoors for a while.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Your call.”

  I stepped out the front door, where Eric was waiting by the van, also changed and with a pack of his own. It didn’t fully resonate for me then that it was the last time I’d be indoors for two months.

  We drove another hour out of town, through a hardscrabble landscape that was magnificent in its desolation. A sign on the highway read: WELCOME TO DIXIE NATIONAL FOREST. Eric and I were silent in the backseat.

  Past the perimeter of the park, we wound up a winding, bumpy road that was littered with boulders that jostled us; a few times, it felt as though we might topple over. (That, I thought, would be a blessing.) Finally, we stopped at a plateau where a man and woman with backpacks (real backpacks) stood, unsmiling, against a backdrop of crystalline sky. We stepped out of the van and surveyed the scene. The scope of it was daunting, incomprehensible. An endless panorama of sagebrush and juniper trees, the soil ruddy and thick with clay, interrupted by only the rare riparian area where a dejected creek sputtered across the landscape and the dust sprang forth with a flash of life, then hills to the horizon. More dust, more hills. It was alien and indifferent.

  The sun was going to set soon. The counselors—Rob and Liz—told us that the first step of the program was to not speak for twenty-four hours, so we sat in opposite corners of the camp in silence. I wrote in a stenographer’s pad I’d found in my knapsack, doodling about New York and the friends I missed. Rob built a fire as the summer sun faded away into a night of unprecedented potency. It was getting cold. I ate a bag of peanuts and raisins from my knapsack.

  That night, nestled into a sleeping bag under the dispassionate desert sky, I prayed for the first time I could remember. I begged a God I did not believe in for a hurricane, a coyote attack, a wildfire, a nuclear holocaust—anything that might swallow the state of Utah and everything in it.

  The program combined elements of survivalist training, cognitive behavioral therapy, a boarding school, and a type of New Age spirituality inspired by Native American mythology, which I found odious. Students moved through different phases, starting as a Mouse, then continuing up to Coyote, Buffalo, and finally Eagle. Certain tasks and checkpoints were required to progress to the next level of the program, some as straightforward as successfully building a fire, others as subjective as “accepting responsibility for behavior.”

  I learned later that the typical experience at Aspen was entirely unlike mine: Most students joined groups that were already fully functional as the veteran students graduated and left Aspen. But the program had experienced a recent influx of students—perhaps at the onset of summer, or due to rising popularity (a reality show had been shot at Aspen and broadcast the previous year)—and so they’d had to create new groups and hire more wilderness counselors. Eric and I were the first two students in our group. It would have been easier had we joined an existing group, with students at all phases of the program demonstrating what was required of them, but instead we were starting from scratch, with no one to model how a successful group ran; accordingly, there was more telling than showing.

  The only objective for the Mouse level was to be quiet for
twenty-four hours and resolve my anger about my placement at Aspen; this seemed fairly straightforward. I was given a workbook that asked me leading questions about my past behavior and, dutifully, I answered them dishonestly, writing that my father had sent me to Aspen because I was out of control—although privately I felt that it wasn’t my fault that he didn’t see my drug use as the only way I was able to maintain my control over the chaos of my life.

  The structure of the program seemed suited for kids who had behavioral problems, not active drug addictions, but I reasoned that there was nothing that I could do about it.

  I read the answers to the workbook over the campfire, and Rob and Liz nodded thoughtfully as I read.

  “This is how you become a Coyote,” Rob said. He led us to a rocky cliff a few hundred yards from the campsite, which jutted out over a spectacular vista, and began to howl—high and eerie.

  “You, too,” he said. So Eric and I howled at the moon. It felt stupid, but the ritual still gave me chills, not that I would have admitted that to Rob and Liz.

  That second night, they showed us how to build a shelter using the same silver tarp that served as a pack: Find two trees spaced not much more than ten feet apart and tie a bungee cord a few feet off the ground, then drape the tarp on the cord to make an upside-down V. Place rocks on each of the four corners to secure the tarp in place, providing a makeshift tent.

  At Aspen, there was a lot of talk of “busting,” which had an ejaculatory connotation that I disliked; it was such a vulgar word, I thought. To bust an “I feel” meant to pause the conversation to make an emotional statement, since most patients had a hard time articulating their feelings. (This had never been a struggle for me.) To bust a fifty was to step away from the group to urinate, at a distance of fifty feet; to bust a hundred was to leave to defecate, one hundred feet away from the group. When we were out of sight from the counselors, we had to call our names every few seconds loudly enough that we could still be heard, which meant it was difficult to go far enough to be comfortable, and made actually executing the act near impossible; peeing was easy enough, but I learned quickly it was very difficult to focus on getting relaxed enough to go while shouting at the top of your lungs in the woods.

  To bust a fire was to create flame with a bow drill, the pieces of which I received on the second day. I had assumed that it was possible to create a fire by rubbing two sticks together, as the old cliché went, but at Aspen, the preferred mode of fire lighting was with a bow drill—an ancient kit comprised of two pieces of wood, a bearing block, and a bow formed from a curved branch and some springy cord. I watched as Liz knelt on her right knee, with her left foot holding down the baseboard—a piece of flammable wood, like cedar. Then she wrapped her spindle—a narrow cylinder of wood with one edge rounded and the other one cut into a point, like a pencil—into the bow by twisting the cord around it once, which kept it taut. Placing the point of the spindle into an indentation in the baseboard, she pressed down with her left hand, in which she held a stone, to exert pressure onto the rounded top of the spindle. Then, quickly, she worked the bow back and forth, rotating the spindle in the baseboard; this created friction, which eventually would produce an ember that could be blown into a flame. She made it look effortless, but when I tried it, I found that it was difficult.

  “You have to learn,” Liz said. “This is a skill that you need to survive.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Here. Give me something I can use in the real world.” I fantasized about my vintage Dupont lighter. It was sitting in my duffel bag at base camp.

  On the third day, we began to hike, breaking for a makeshift lunch of foodstuffs from the black nylon bags in our packs—tortillas with lukewarm cheese and leftover rice and beans, dry packets of ramen noodles (when you ate them uncooked, they tasted like crackers), peanut butter on apples. It seemed that we would descend from forested areas, hike downhill through long expanses of high, scrubby desert, then hike back up to greener spots, where we would set up camp in little clearings in the woods not far from water sources. We built our shelters, made a fire, and completed a series of chores—filling up tin cans that we carried tied to our packs with water from a nearby pond, digging a latrine, gathering wood for the fire—and completed the day’s curriculum, which included some light academic components (mostly studying about the flora and fauna of the region; I wasn’t particularly interested in the ecology of Utah) but focused more on a type of structured group therapy.

  It moved slowly.

  We cooked over the fire—often beans and rice, which I ate out of a tin cup—then continued the discussion after the sun went down. We wrote in our journals for an hour each day or so. I mostly wrote about things that had happened in the past, although years later I wished I had better documented what was actually happening, to have left a record sturdier than memory. At night, we set our pants and shoes outside our shelters, and the counselors collected them—to keep us from having the temptation to run, they said. Out in the desert, our only supply of water was from cow ponds, brackish little holes in the ground. We filled up thick Nalgene bottles with that water; then a counselor administered a few drops of iodine into each bottle to render it potable.

  But it wasn’t potable—not really. The water was viscous, gray-green, and coagulated, with clumps of algae floating in it, and even after the iodine it had a bitter chemical taste that reminded me of cocaine. We had to drink four quarts a day to stay hydrated. One afternoon, swallowing a gulp of gritty water, I felt something wriggling in my throat. I choked and reached into my mouth, pulling a brine shrimp through my front teeth.

  After a few days, Rob and Liz were cycled out and replaced with two new counselors, Medeina and JT, who would be with us for the next week. I liked both of them more than I wanted to. Medeina was tough, with long curly hair and a militant affect, but her no-bullshit front masked a motherly kindness. JT spoke with a flat, stretched timbre and his patience was boundless; he looked like a young Mel Gibson, too, which I didn’t mind.

  With them came a week’s worth of food and clean laundry—the decadence of a fresh pair of underwear felt glorious—as well as a psychologist named Kathianne, who sat with each of us for a half hour to talk in more detail about our issues. She was stout and spackled with rosacea, and unlike our counselors, she didn’t seem totally at ease being out in the wilderness; I wondered if she’d been unable to make a living in private practice. I told her about my drug use, my affairs with older men. My fraught relationships with my parents. I tried to make myself sound glamorous and wild, the casualty of a rarefied world that had taken me down.

  “The narcissism and manipulation that have served you in your life so far aren’t going to work here,” Kathianne said. “So you better start getting honest.”

  I fumed over this later as I knelt on the desert floor with my bow drill, rotating it until my hands were chapped and raw, making little jets of steam rise from my baseboard and then drift away.

  She doesn’t know me. How dare she?

  But no matter how intensely I worked the drill, I couldn’t seem to get an ember going, just some charred black dust and a lot of smoke. Frustrated, I threw the bow across the camp.

  “If you can’t bust a fire,” Medeina said, “you can’t have hot food.”

  “I don’t want hot food,” I said. “I don’t want any of this food.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because you’re not getting any.”

  “What if I just don’t eat?” I said. “What if I go on a hunger strike?”

  She laughed. “I can’t force you to eat,” she said. “But you can do that, if that’s what you want. We’ll just send you back to base camp, hook you up to a feeding tube, and then send you back out to start the program over again once you’re healthy.”

  “What happens if I break a leg?” I said.

  “We’ll get you medical attention,” she said, “and then put you back in the field.”

  This was always the response to any hypothetical catastrop
he: the consequence would simply be that the program would take even longer to complete. There was no way out.

  That night, they cooked beans and rice over a fire while I sat on the sidelines, waiting for them to finish. After the food had gone cold, it was served to me in a tin cup. There were no utensils; I picked a twig off the forest floor and used it as a makeshift fork. Most of us did this, figuring that it had to be more hygienic than our fingers, since we had no way of washing our hands.

  At our local water hole, we found a cow standing dumbly at the surface of the water, defecating directly into it—fat green-brown pellets thudding into the murky pond.

  “This is the only water for miles,” Medeina said, more than a little gleefully. “Drink up.”

  With Kathianne that week came documents from our parents: “impact letters,” which described how their lives had been affected by our behavior. We were given them over the campfire and were asked to read them out loud for the first time. I didn’t stumble over my mother’s, which was clear and thoughtful, but my father’s made me blind with rage. He described his concern for me, his mounting fears, his anger over feeling manipulated and used.

  After I finished reading, we sat quietly for a moment. “How did that make you feel, Sam?” Kathianne asked softly. “Do you want to bust an ‘I feel’ statement?”

  “Sure, I’ll bust,” I said, my voice low and quivering. “I feel angry. I was a fifteen-year-old with a drug habit—that he knew about—and he left me alone in New York City with his credit card for two years. He paid for me to fill my prescriptions. He was too busy to give a shit about me. Where does he get off being so self-righteous?”

  “This isn’t about what he did, Sam,” Kathianne said. “This is about your behavior.”

  “So I’m just at fault for everything?” I said bitterly.

  “You wouldn’t have ended up here if your parents hadn’t already done everything they could to try to help you,” Kathianne said.

  “I don’t know if you have my case file handy, but he didn’t do shit,” I said. “In fact, he only noticed that I was in trouble once I was already in a fucking coma.”