How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  “Goddamn,” I said, and Christopher—all six feet of him—turned around and crumpled in Rumil’s arms. “I’m leaving now,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure any of them had heard me. But it didn’t matter. I took off in the direction of the parking garage, down the same piece of sidewalk the boy had used. A block away, Larry appeared, jogging up beside me.

  “Please, Will,” he said. “Think about all the good we can do. I’ve changed—we all have. Can you honestly tell me that you are the same person you were at Camp Levi?”

  “Probably more than I’d like to admit.”

  “Please—I’ll pay. Whatever you want. I’ve got my checkbook on me.”

  We reached Beale Street, and he kept following me as I crossed over to the other side. I was looking for landmarks to guide me back to the garage: the W. C. Handy statue, the little courtyard where the man had played the steel guitar. Nothing was familiar, and Larry wouldn’t shut up and let me think long enough to get my bearings. “It’s no use,” I blurted out. I told him how I hadn’t spoken to my father in almost five years. “And I chickened out the day before yesterday, okay? I walked right up to his door and just looked in—that’s how fucked up I am, Larry. If you want the Neck so bad, go to his house yourself and ask for it. I’ll give you the address. But as for me and my life, I am through.” I walked farther down a side street. I thought I had found the way, but I hadn’t, so I turned around and came back up to where Larry still stood, acting dumbstruck, like what I had told him was news. “My God. It’s like I can never leave it, Larry.” I waved my arms at him. And then he was walking away, so I called after him. “Like I will always be stuck at camp, praying and hoping and striving for God to take away my abiding love to suck cock!”

  I was pacing in front of the park bench Ray Boy had picked to finish his peach-flavored snow cone. “You fags,” he said, laughing. “Lord, God. Y’all fucking nuts.”

  —

  I drove.

  I’d paid an exorbitant amount for parking Doll in the garage for more than twenty-four hours, and once on the road, I looked for the fastest way out of the city. That meant driving south, then east, then south some more. I got tired of the interstate and decided to hit the Natchez Trace Parkway in Tupelo, traveling an hour and a half out of my way. The Trace snaked through historic portions of Mississippi and Tennessee and promised more scenery than the concrete embankments and gas stations of the interstate.

  As I put some distance between myself and that mess in Memphis, a peculiar notion crept up on me. I imagined I’d died. The highway spread out, a ribbon of asphalt unfurling before and behind me. A cloudless sky, the color of the ocean, expanding on and on. An empty planet. Only it wasn’t the emptiness but the distance that made me feel dead. I was so far from everyone who mattered. The people I knew were still going on without me, still living: By now, Christopher and Rumil were probably taking Larry out to a late lunch to discuss what to do about the camp since I had refused to help them; Bevy would be in a library studying for the bar; my father would be lazing in the backyard with his family; and Zeus would be—well, I imagined sunlight wherever Zeus was, the kind of light that gleamed but gave off no heat whatsoever. I had gone too far to return to any of them, and not a damn thing in this world seemed real to me but the feel of the steering wheel in my hand.

  Somewhere along the way, Doll’s air-conditioning went kaput. I rolled down the windows. The flurry of air caused a stir inside my car. Loose papers and empty soda bottles flew about, rattling and fluttering, as if gravity were losing its grip on smaller objects. Time shrank: A whole hour collapsed, and before I knew it, I was at the Natchez Trace Parkway. I parked at the rest stop and used the bathroom without ever seeing a single fellow traveler. And still the sense of my own death lingered. You had to be an optimist to believe in ghosts or any version of an afterlife. To persist in the notion that connection with others was possible after death. I had never been one to think seriously of suicide. Rick chose it, and bully for him. I hadn’t asked Larry how, either, but I had wondered. I suppose it’s natural to be curious about the mechanics. Pills, a gun, a blade. As if the means gave some final clue to the person. For years, I’d wanted God to work his magic on me and transform my spirit—a kind of self-obliteration in itself—and when that didn’t work, I had wanted him to stop time and hit reverse. He’s the Almighty, after all, so why couldn’t he? I wanted him to go to the point in the world’s timeline just before my father’s sperm met my mother’s egg and use his holy finger to block the fertilization. That had been a foolish, self-pitying notion to indulge, I know. But no more foolish than, say, my years after camp: sleepwalking my days away, pretending that summer didn’t happen, going further and further into myself until I no longer knew my way out.

  The Natchez Trace was 444 miles of two-lane highway that stretched from Nashville to Natchez, and somewhere in between, not thirty miles from the Trace, there was the Neck. And in the Neck there was the camp, slowly dilapidating and forgotten by everyone except for those of us who couldn’t forget. A little piece of nowhere, and nowhere sounded good to me.

  Sunlight bored through the windshield, hitting me right in the face. I rolled down all the windows again, and the debris once more came alive, dancing. I was passing the exit for Pontotoc, headed southward, when I felt my cell phone vibrate in my pants. It was Zeus calling, as if he knew I was going the wrong way and wanted to stop me. With one hand steady on the wheel, I used my free one to hold the phone out the window. The wind rushed by, pulling my arm backward. It took less than a second; then the cell phone was gone.

  PART TWO

  ■

  THE SONS OF LEVI

  ■

  And see how the flesh grows back

  across a wound, with a great vehemence,

  more strong

  than the simple, untested surface before.

  There’s a name for it on horses,

  when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

  as all flesh,

  is proud of its wounds, wears them

  as honors given out after battle,

  small triumphs pinned to the chest—

  —JANE HIRSHFIELD,

  “For What Binds Us”

  SIX

  ■

  ORIENTATION

  At dusk we followed Mother Maude to Lake John.

  Behind the two cabins, a footpath cut across a clearing, running by the Sweat Shack and then eventually beside an abandoned house. I had never set eyes on it until that very moment—my mother’s childhood home. I didn’t react. Shingles and Sheetrock lay in dusty piles around the front porch like dead skin sloughed off; its windows were busted out. Just a house. A few yards more and we angled past the lime-green husk of a refrigerator and a warped metal bed frame half-sunk in red clay. Relics from another decade, from my mother’s time at the Neck. I denied these objects their history, their traceable connection to me. I was just another camper, no one in particular, and that was just a house and these were just things. Soon we entered the woods. Skinny scrub pines arcing out of thickets of weeds and piss-colored honeysuckle. Daylight was seeping away. Shadows abounded all around us. Insects hummed and wheezed in the growing darkness, a thousand baby rattles in tandem. “They’re just saying hello!” Mother Maude called over her shoulder. “Thisaway!”

  The counselors, Rick and Larry, had encouraged us to be orderly, to walk single file, but our line had turned sloppy. Christopher led the charge, and Dale tarried far behind. In between them, Rumil and Sparse and I shuffled along in a cluster, side by side, speculating about the nighttime activity by the lake. No one had told us what to expect, and we were left to wonder about it like a trio of old men pondering this season’s prospects of our favorite baseball team. Rumil guessed a baptism. Which, Sparse and I admitted, made the most sense. Water was involved, and Father Drake and Mother Maude claimed to be an offshoot of Baptists, advocates of total immersion. But if we were
getting rebaptized—for all three of us had admitted to being, as Sparse put it, “already dunked”—then certain other details didn’t make much sense. For one, the large mirror Mother Maude toted. For another, the way Rick and Larry were outfitted in coveralls, rain boots, and work gloves. The sort of clothing you wore to do yardwork maybe, not lead five teenage boys down to the waters to wash their sins away. Sparse wagered a commitment ceremony. “You know,” he was saying, as we sidestepped a large bed of fire ants. “You admit what a mighty fortress is our God and kaboom! You is saved, son. Go and lust no more.”

  Whatever it was, I warned them, would likely be brutal. Hadn’t they looked over the brochures? “My God,” I said, not telling them how my father had helped Mother Maude and Father Drake with the wording of the camp’s literature. Nor did I tell them how I’d been privy to the release forms their parents were required to sign. I felt like an interloper. A mole. But, above all, I was—I told myself—a true believer who wanted more than anything for these four weeks to work on me and them. I worried any slip of the tongue would ruin the rehabilitation for everyone. “A delicate process,” Mother Maude had told me on the rainy afternoon she and Father Drake had shown up in my life out of nowhere: “It must happen just so, especially at the beginning.” They were so careful around me during the months they’d stayed in Hawshaw preparing for the summer. I knew some details, but not enough to know what specifically to expect. Once at dinner, I’d overheard Father Drake brag to my father that they had discovered the water’s “attributes” by accident before Mother Maude hushed him. She reminded him, as she often reminded me when I asked too many questions, that it would be a great disservice to my “healing” if I knew more than the other boys did. Father Drake glanced over in my direction, which always seemed to pain him, and said he suspected I knew too much for my own good already.

  I wanted to impress on Rumil and Sparse that the camp was serious without showing my hand. So I repeated my father’s sentences from the brochure. This was the only way I knew how to warn them and keep my relationship to the camp a secret: harp on what we all knew. The baby-blue brochures utilized clip art Mother Maude had cut and pasted from the word-processing program on a public-access computer in the library at Hawshaw: the sketch of a cross, a stock photo of some boy around my age with wavy brown hair staring pensively into the camera as if he were thinking really hard about not being gay anymore. Cheaply done but effective. In addition to asking for donations, the brochures quoted the infamous verse in Leviticus about homosexuals and explained—in vague details—how the camp worked, how it was different from other therapies that treated this “unnatural affliction.” I had helped Mother Maude trifold these brochures and shove them in envelopes to be mailed out to various churches in her address book. While I was doing this with her, two sentences from those pages were burned into my brain. Surely the other boys had read them, too. “At Camp Levi,” I recited to Rumil and Sparse, “we use extreme practices and revolutionary tactics to treat the body and the soul. Your son must be broken before he can be healed.”

  Sparse tittered. “Oh, baby,” he said. “Don’t you know they just say that shit? This my third time at one of these places and they just want to fuck with you a little at first.”

  Christopher jerked around. He nodded toward Mother Maude in front of him and mouthed, Shut. Up.

  Earlier that day, after Dale’s spectacular meltdown, Larry had warned us about our behavior. They were watching us closely, he said, to make sure our conduct was acceptable. Our words were just as important as our actions and even our thoughts. All would be scrutinized. If ever we were found lacking—and sooner or later we all would be because, well, that was the point—they’d send us to the Sweat Shack, a little hovel of concrete blocks that once served as a pump house and was now a thorny nest for dirt daubers and wasps. As with the activity down by the lake, he didn’t go into particulars about the punishment. He finished by telling us Dale would not be sent there this time, and we should use this little dustup as a warning. “You’re on notice,” Larry said, smiling. “From now until July.” Luckily for Sparse, Mother Maude hadn’t heard him say “shit” and “fuck” just now as we were huffing it to the lake or if she had, she ignored it. She never stopped moving at her breakneck pace. Now she was yards ahead, seemingly determined to have us lakeside by sundown. And Rick and Larry weren’t paying much mind to us, either. They had their hands full with Dale. He was lagging even farther behind than when I last checked. We couldn’t see him anymore because of the trees; we could only hear his high-pitched wailing. Like the keening of some exotic bird.

  —

  Our rehabilitation began on Sunday, June 13, and was supposed to end on Sunday, July 4. Mother Maude and Father Drake had planned on milking the holiday for all it was worth. On our last day, we were to celebrate not only our nation’s independence but also our own freedom from the tyranny of homosexuality in a ceremony that included the handing out of certificates, the delivering of testimonials in front of our parents, the singing of patriotic tunes, and the shooting off of fireworks. Our families were encouraged to arrive no earlier than sundown. During great explosions in the sky, Mother Maude was set to perform a rousing rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” But we, of course, never made it to the Fourth. Camp was cut short three days before the scheduled festivities because of what happened to Dale.

  My first day at Camp Levi stands out as the longest. A trick of memory, since it was barely half a day. Though much of my experience at camp has returned to me, the days leading up to it and the days right after remain shrouded in fog. I don’t remember my father driving me to camp, for instance, though he must have. We probably left that Sunday morning of the first day and took I-55 in his Chevy. (He would have had no patience for the Natchez Trace and its strictly enforced speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour.) We probably didn’t talk, as was our custom. Our agreement had been struck months before, while Mother Maude and Father Drake were still in town. The deal was simple. I had been accepted to the Mississippi School for Science and Mathematics in Jackson, and he would sign off on my attending the magnet school if I gave my aunt and uncle’s camp a fair shot and came back rehabilitated. My father’s words were something like this: “You have to come back, Rooster,” he said, “as the person you were meant to be.” His voice quavered. He had not used my nickname since our confrontation in the sanctuary. The idea of the camp must have quickened the flame of hope inside him because he suddenly seemed to believe again that I was a person worth saving. What my father didn’t realize was that I didn’t need a bargain to get me to attend. I wanted the camp as much as he did. Maybe more. Mother Maude’s promises that I could be changed had awakened a little hope in me, too. Hope that I could be my father’s Rooster after all.

  After camp, the rest of July and most of August are as much a mystery to me as the three-hour drive into the Neck. Not a blur precisely. More like a great blank that lasts until August 23, when I started attending tenth grade at the magnet school in Jackson. The reason for my father fulfilling his end of the bargain was never made clear to me. Or if it was, I have forgotten. By all accounts, the camp had been a dismal failure. For many years after, I believed he sent me away because he had, in essence, washed his hands of fatherhood. My memory, however, sharpens for the remaining years of high school when he was no longer in my life that much. I can remember with great clarity the smell of wax on the shiny polished hallway floors that led me from one class to another. The squeak of sneakers and the hoots and ballyhoos from my classmates as we dashed between bells, a great mass of adolescents who had all tested in the ninetieth percentile on standardized academic achievement tests and were hungry, almost desperate, for knowledge. I lived in the dorms with boys who didn’t know one whit about me. I could tell them anything about myself and they would buy it. This newfound anonymity gave me the courage to come out during my second semester, and I joined a roving pack of like-minded queers. We s
tudied and bickered and fucked with wild abandon. All the while, our teachers, our academic counselors, our administrators spoke exclusively of the future: the people we would become, the fantastic lives we would lead in the metropolis. Away. Like Suzette. Like anybody who wanted to make something of himself. I learned there was no good reason to look back. Why bother? I never questioned this until the movie came along. Then I learned the past is not the past, a lump of time you can quarantine and forget about, but a reel of film in your brain that keeps on rolling, spooling and unspooling itself regardless of whether or not you are watching it.

  —

  I’d thought I would have been relieved to get away from my father—he had been acting nervous around Mother Maude and Father Drake, uncomfortable in pretending he didn’t know them, and he was making me nervous with his stilted behavior, with the way he shook their hands for too long and how he couldn’t seem to meet anyone’s eyes, even mine. He was a man whose body didn’t know how to hold a secret. The other campers said their good-byes to their families with hugs and solemn looks and tearful whispers. There was no sadness in our farewell. I gave him a wave, and he returned it with a funny little salute that was almost whimsical and completely out of character for him.

  As our parents spoke to Father Drake and Mother Maude about any lingering questions they might have had about the program, the counselors took us behind the Chapel Cabin to a pair of wooden picnic tables. The tables appeared to be designed for children, much smaller than regular-size ones, and looked rickety, as if assembled by the wind. Dale sat by himself, his bulk barely able to fit in the space provided. The rest of us squeezed into the benches around the other one. Rick and Larry doled out paper plates crammed with hot dogs and salt-and-vinegar potato chips, followed by—as if it were the Lord’s supper—Dixie cups filled with lukewarm grape soda. While they darted about us, Larry, the talkative one, took the opportunity to introduce themselves to us. He said they were seminary students from New Orleans. Mother Maude and Father Drake had never mentioned them in front of me, so their presence at the camp was certainly news. They had been here, Larry told us, for nearly a month already, getting everything in order. “But there is still much to do,” he said, and Rick nodded in agreement. We were going to help them finish getting the place ready for the years to come, for the boys who would follow us on this journey, Larry added. “Oh, the plans,” he said, beaming, “we have for you!”