Swish

by Joel Derfner

  So if that’s how I feel about the moments that have lingered in my memory, what about the moments I’ve forgotten? Who among my former acquaintance is at this moment recalling the day in high school when I turned halfway around in my seat and inadvertently pierced every pretense he had constructed that he wasn’t an unhappy alien? In whose face did I slam the gate?

  Dinner on the first night of Camp Camp was not the only meal I found stressful. Throughout the week, no matter who I sat with, inside of thirty seconds I looked up and saw other people sitting elsewhere who I thought were cooler. No matter that if I’d sat with them to begin with I would have looked up at the people I was sitting with now and thought they were cooler; I was incapable of choosing correctly. At lunch on Tuesday I found a seat across from two men I had met in the stained-glass studio whose names were almost certainly David and Steve. As I lifted my glass of fruit punch to my lips, I saw Kerry and James—both in Barney Frank with me—sitting a few tables over. I knew that if I abandoned David and Steve for them, they would envelop me in the radiance of their coolness and make me belong and I would be happy, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurt David’s and Steve’s feelings, so I resigned myself to being miserable but polite until I died. At another table I saw two men who were less cool than I—the haircuts alone would have been enough—and it occurred to me that I could go over and envelop them in the radiance of what little coolness I had at my disposal. But then I realized that this would take me even further away from the truly cool people, who would think even less of me than I knew they already did.

  When I walked into the main lodge that night for the Karaoke Lounge, however, I brimmed with hope. I intended to scan the tables, find the coolest people I knew, and cling to them as fiercely as Kate Winslet clings to the splintered piece of flotsam in Titanic while Leonardo DiCaprio dies of hypothermia. I would not feel comfortable, certainly; all the same, at least I would have a moment of respite from the unceasing struggle not to drown.

  But it was not to be. Every cool person was already engaged in conversation with another cool person, and I saw no way to breach the walls those conversations had erected. So I made my way to an empty bench at the side of the room. Better I should spend the evening in lonely isolation than that I should be surrounded by people with no one but myself for company.

  Then the karaoke started. Vickers, the head lifeguard, sang “I Write the Songs (That Make the Whole World Sing).” She was dressed in a bright orange shirt and overall shorts; she didn’t move and her eyes never left the karaoke screen, yet she sang so proudly that I couldn’t help loving her. When she got to the key change the audience burst into applause. Then she finished and I remembered that I was alone.

  I saw Ryan the cute lifeguard and stood up to go sit with him but when I got closer I saw that Kerry was sitting right behind him, arms around him and chin in the crook of his neck. I veered away, cringing at my desire to belong and wanting to strike myself, and walked back to my empty bench. I hated them both and myself most of all.

  Then Bill Cole, who had founded Camp nine years earlier, came onstage in excruciating drag. On our first day in Maine, Bill had told us about the birth of Camp Camp. “I came out to my wife when I was forty-nine,” he said, “and she put me on a bus to Provincetown. The people I saw there were beautiful and handsome, and I was like, I don’t belong here. So I wanted to make a place where everybody could feel like they belonged.” That afternoon I had looked around the room and wondered how many people there thought of themselves as beautiful and handsome. I wondered whether there were people in the room who thought of me as beautiful and handsome. I wondered how many beautiful and handsome people actually felt like they belonged.

  Tonight, for the Karaoke Lounge, Bill had donned a purple A-line skirt, a glittery black top with two shawls—one peach, one silver—and a tangled ratty gray wig. He sang “Build Me Up, Buttercup” like an adorable lunatic. He had no conception of how to sing or move, and he got lost every line. “He does that every year,” James told me afterward. “He knows it doesn’t work, but he can’t figure out why.”

  After the karaoke finally ended, I found myself talking with Bill about our childhoods. “When I was a little boy,” he said, “there was this older guy, and he spent a lot of time at our house—I think he had a crush on my dad. He was very flamboyant, but I have no idea where he got it from. The town was tiny, there certainly weren’t any models for him to follow. Did he just make it up out of nowhere? He had a really hairy chest and a gold chain. He played piano like Liberace and I was terrified of him. Eventually some kids bludgeoned him to death with a baseball bat.” Bill was very matter-of-fact as he related this. “Even now, I’m not attracted to guys who are flamboyant, and I just know it’s because of him.”

  And I thought, that’s what has always happened to people who try to fit in where they’re told they don’t belong, isn’t it? The baseball bat, the rope and the tree, the gas.

  When I was in seventh grade, a sign appeared one day in an empty window on Charleston’s main shopping street that read OPENING SOON: CACAO’S HANDMADE CHOCOLATES. Since I understood even at the tender age of thirteen that chocolate was the elixir of life, I rushed to the store after school the day it opened and bubbled at the proprietors, Mark and Rob, until they were forced to show me around. The shop was filled with what could only have been alchemical equipment, and the odors heavy in the air worked an enchantment on me more powerful than any spell Circe ever wrought. Even the words Mark and Rob used to describe what they did sounded magical: couverture, conching, theobroma.

  Over the next two years I spent many of my free hours at Cacao’s, and for the first time in a long while I knew something of what it felt like to be understood. Since my peers and I did not seek out one another’s company, I was drawn to my teachers, and many of them found me amusing, but even if they regarded me as anything but a precocious child, the constraints of professionalism prevented them from more than a friendly acquaintance. Here in Cacao’s, however, for the first time, I met adults who seemed to want to be my friends. They answered my questions without condescension or comment about my age and they listened to my opinions with what appeared to be respect. Rob was straight but Mark, I came to learn, was gay, as were many of the men and women who might be found chatting with him of an afternoon, and they welcomed me into their company (though I didn’t yet understand how much we had in common). No tinge of sexuality ever colored our interactions; these people simply talked about interesting things and declined to patronize me when I chimed in. They were older than I, and their concerns were different, but the way they treated me revealed a glimpse of the camaraderie my future might hold.

  Oddly, in Charleston my biggest problem fitting in wasn’t being gay; it was being smart. Ever since well-educated carpetbaggers came south after the Civil War and hoodwinked former Confederates out of their land and their money and their political power, many Southerners have felt they have good reason to be suspicious of education. That’s why states below the Mason-Dixon Line spend less money on schools and have lower literacy rates than the rest of the country: a citizenry so raised may or may not be undereducated, but at least it will be less likely to swindle you when you are desperate.

  Of course, many Charlestonians would have found my civil-rights-worker parents untrustworthy even without the benefit of education. One afternoon when I was five I came home from playing with my across-the-street neighbor Betsy and asked my father, “Daddy, what’s a nigger-loving kike?” When he recovered from the apoplectic fit into which this had sent him and asked me why I wanted to know, I said, “Because Betsy says that her daddy says that you are one.”

  Betsy’s daddy also published a white-supremacist newsletter, though I didn’t know that at the time. But I did know I was unlikely to join the ranks of the Good Ol’ Boys. My mother’s ancestors had settled the city and we were white, so most of our neighbors welcomed us heartily enough, but something in me still felt out of place bobbing for apples a
t the block Hallowe’en parties.

  The one part of Charleston in which education found an enthusiastic home was the Jewish community, which is large, Charleston having been home to the first Reform congregation in America. But here too there was a problem; to wit, my mother was Christian. According to Jewish law, therefore, even though I was being raised Jewish, I was not considered a Jew by birth. I rectified this state of affairs at the age of seven by converting to Judaism. Nevertheless I lacked the strong points of reference that the other synagogue kids took for granted in their culturally Jewish homes.

  Oh, my mother tried, but she exposed herself time and again, like when her mother-in-law tasted her matzo-ball soup and said, her Polish accent unsoftened by forty years in America, “This is good, Mary Frances, but you need to work on your matzo balls. They’re too fluffy. They should be heavy, like a rock.” I felt certain no one had ever had to say this to Randy Kurtz’s mother. How could I feel at home among people whose uncles were named Irving and Sol when mine was named Bubba?

  And so, ill at ease with both the Southerners and the Jews, I found a group of like-minded people in a chocolate store; with the onset of puberty, as my sexual impulses blossomed, I realized just how like-minded we were. Finally one day in the preparation room a couple of Mark’s friends kissed each other on the mouth, something I had never seen two men do before. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. Three days later I stopped by the store after school, as usual, and hung out while Mark enrobed things and unmolded other things and was jolly. And I waited and waited and waited to get up the courage to say what I wanted to say and I finally did but I was so scared I couldn’t do it in English so I used French. “J’ai peur que je suis gay,” I said, failing in my nervousness to use the subjunctive. I’m scared that I’m gay.

  Mark cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “Let’s sit down,” he said, and we did. “If you made love to a man, what would be the best part?”

  “Um…lying together afterward.”

  “And when you saw those two kissing the other day, what did you think?”

  I wasn’t brave enough to tell him I wished it had been me, so I just said, “I liked it.”

  We talked a little more, and he said, “Yes, you’re gay,” and I was flooded with a sense of homecoming. It is obvious to me in retrospect that he had understood this about me from the moment we met, but I appreciate his pretense of open-minded investigation. And thank God he didn’t feed me any claptrap about how being attracted to boys didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or another and as I grew older I would feel a lot of different things and I didn’t need to make any decisions about who I was right away and blah blah blah because if he had said those things I would have felt more estranged from the world than ever and God knows what would have become of me by now.

  As I mounted my bike to go home, Mark stood in front of the store and reached a hand toward me in benediction. “May Zeus be forever by your throne and Zephyr at your heels,” he called, and I pedaled off, humming and grinning a huge grin.

  For a while it looked like we in Barney Frank would emerge victorious from the Camp Camp Gay Gaymes. Unfortunately, when the Dildo Joust degenerated into hand-to-hand dildo combat, our champion David proved no match for the lipstick lesbian from the Bronx. After the judges declared at the end of the evening that Walt Whitman had won, Kerry, James, Steve, and I stared dejectedly at our feet, unsure of our course in life now that we were losers. Then Kerry proposed a panty raid on the women in Martina Navratilova.

  We snuck up to the cabin like gay white ninjas, able by some miracle to keep from giggling, and then James leapt up and took two quick photographs through the window. The women in Martina screamed and we ran in, prancing around and shrieking, “Panty raid! Panty raid!” Cheryl said, “No, guys, for a panty raid you’re supposed to take panties, not bring them.” She and Sue, who had gotten engaged the night before, put on matching pairs of funny cardboard glasses and James took more pictures. Sue grabbed the camera and photographed us boys as we posed, smirking, behind the neon sign they had put up that said GIRLS RULE! James looked at the sign, curled his lip disdainfully, and said, “But we don’t really believe that.” I replied, “We totally do,” and we all dissolved into laughter.

  It wasn’t that this repartee was incomparably witty. But our expansive mood made everything seem funnier and funnier, until we could barely breathe and I fell down. Michael from Oscar Wilde stopped by the cabin. “Okay,” he said, “Joel is crawling on the floor. That can’t be a good sign.” The girls invited us to have a sleepover. Eden explained their nightly rituals. “First we talk about our highs and lows of the day, and then we do guided masturbation.” I had not laughed this hard in years. Char added, “We begin by saying, take your left hand or your right.” We tried not to be noisy, since it was officially Quiet Time—a stricture imposed upon all of us because Ru-Paul had been keeping the surrounding cabins up till all hours of the night with its partying—but the giddiness bubbling up in us refused to be tamped down.

  And the next morning a curious thing happened: at breakfast, my chest wasn’t tight. I still felt frightened and alone—these feelings are as much a part of me as my kidneys—but after the panty raid I felt that I belonged somewhere, so feeling frightened and alone was bearable. The people I was eating with had not been involved in the panty raid, yet I felt a kinship with them all the same; I felt connected to them because I felt connected to someone. When I saw some cool people sitting at a different table I did not have the impulse to leap up from my seat and attach myself to them, because I did not fear that my only other choice was the horror of being in the middle of a crowd alone with myself. I was content as I was, where I was. It was a strange sensation.

  One evening near the end of Camp, Bill Cole announced that the next night would be movie night and that we had three candidates from among which to choose: Queer Duck, Grease, and All About Eve. All About Eve lost the vote, appallingly, to Queer Duck; outraged, three lesbians and I instantly began planning to subvert the stupid will of the stupid majority and steal Queer Duck from the office, leaving in its place a copy of D.E.B.S., the 2004 comedy about two teenage lesbian archenemy spies in love. Queer Duck was not in the office, however. Apparently it belonged to an individual camper, Joey, so we broke into his cabin, kidnapped the DVD, and left him a note saying it would be returned safe and sound.

  We were unable to keep completely silent about our exploit, so it didn’t take Michael long to find me the next day to report that Joey was really upset. Joey had been having a difficult time at Camp, said Michael, had felt both friendless and left out, and this violation of his space was the last straw; he had decided to leave Camp the next day.

  I spent the afternoon in the art studio breaking sheets of stained glass. Had I really evolved so little since high school? Was I so desperate to be part of the social fabric of a community that I would tread on anybody whose position was more precarious than mine?

  All right, we had intended our prank in the spirit of fun, and maybe Joey had reacted more extremely than necessary, but I had considered the possibility that we might hurt him and chosen to disregard it. If the same thing had happened to me my second day here, before the panty raid, how would I not have crumbled? I had entered a society in which I felt I had no place—Bill Cole’s speech notwithstanding—and if I had discovered I was being used in a game whose players could have made me happy by talking to me for five minutes, I don’t know that I would have decided to leave Camp, but I certainly would have had to work very hard not to cry.

  I apologized to Joey and gave him back Queer Duck, and he stayed at Camp; Bill ended up screening But I’m a Cheerleader, a comedy about a girl whose parents send her to an ex-gay camp, where she becomes a lesbian. Joey wrote me a nice note that ended, “Next time, involve me in what you’re planning, and I’ll gladly go along.”

  Next time, involve me in what you’re planning. How had I gone so easily from feeling excluded to doing the excludi
ng? Did I dislike the reminder that I hadn’t always been on the inside looking out? Was I so relieved to be there that I didn’t notice the people who still wanted desperately to be invited in? Had I learned that the only way to be part of a society was to shun its outcasts?

  I wrote my high school valedictory speech at four in the morning on the day of my graduation, an event I almost missed because we couldn’t figure out how to get my mother’s wheelchair down our front steps. “Last night I went to the best party I’ve ever been to in my entire life,” my speech began, and it was true. Matthew Gibson had thrown another party and I had gone to this one and I still didn’t belong but since we were all about to escape we were united in the knowledge that, no matter where we belonged, it wasn’t here. My speech the next day was about how our class would make a difference in the world not because we were particularly smart or kind or wise but because we knew how to have fun. I quoted Hesse and Auntie Mame; I closed with the first Dorothy Parker poem I had ever encountered, at age eleven, written in my mother’s careful script on the frontispiece of her tattered high school copy of Castarède’s Complete Treatise on the Conjugation of French Verbs. I looked out at my fellow graduates as I read the opening lines of “Observation,” in praise of good behavior, and smiled as I continued reading, cataloguing the felicities of a life lived virtuously. “But I shall stay the way I am,” Dorothy and I finished, “Because I do not give a damn.”